Translating educational jargon
And why bothering to do it can help build your confidence as an educating parent
I used to feel confused and insecure when coming across terms I didn’t understand in technical writing. All professions and trades use jargon to communicate efficiently within them. A state or national curriculum document, and some teachers’ manuals, are written in this manner too, although I’ve come across enough teachers who struggle along with the rest of us to understand them.
Years ago I forced myself to wade through a section of the Level 1 Victorian Essential Learning Standards. I've always made a point of reading school curricula: it helps to know what schools are thinking about how learning happens.
It was heavy going as I had to translate the jargon as I read. I wanted to be able to confidently talk about the content and needed to understand what it meant to be able to do that. So I grabbed a pen and wrote down the words where their meaning seemed obscure or dense and sat for a moment thinking about the word’s definition, and especially in respect to the context of the sentence and paragraph. I wrote what I thought they meant next to each word.
In effect, I made my own glossary:
product: output of human activity in form of an artefact
technological product: artefact created to meet an identified need or want;
sensory perception: seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, smelling... that is, experiencing life via the senses;
technological process/technique: human activity (eg cutting, digging, shaping, usually carried out using tools);
skills, techniques and processes: ways and methods of using and handling just about anything;
manipulate: handle;
realise (ideas/goals/effects/outcomes): achieve them;
outcome: result, usually expressed as a desired result (goal);
objective: what we hope to achieve;
range of processes: use various methods;
document: write, tape, film, take photos, etc what happened;
multimedia resources: anything that includes words, images and sound; eg DVDs, internet, computer programs;
media: can be anything one uses to create something as well as the way information is conveyed to others. Arts media - paper, canvas, paints, body (eg dance), clay, etc. Information media - books, television, internet, newspapers, etc;
investigations: opportunity to create and ask questions and then work out ways to answer them;
materials: anything that can be used to make into something else;
information product: something that tells/shows others what you know using analog or digital technology;
graphic/visual organiser: a way of showing on paper how different parts relate to each other or link together - map, flowchart, graph, time-line, etc;
design brief: a statement that tells why, how, where, when and just about anything else that is necessary to help solve a problem;
design: a map that shows how we transform ideas into action and results/products.
If you come across a word in a teacher's manual, article or curriculum framework that you don't understand and can't work it out from the context look it up in a dictionary. I’ve done that dozens of times. A thesaurus might help too. Once we become familiar with the meaning of educational jargon we remove its power to dent our confidence as educating parents.
