"Fairness" and "Unevenness"

Was talking to a friend and she was describing the opportunities that the school has created for teachers to present papers or attend conferences overseas. As she was highlighting the names of teachers who have been overseas this year, a couple of names were surfaced several times, because the areas they presented were on the areas they 'specialised' in.

1 key essential question was surfaced:

Why such unevenness in the opportunities amongst the staff?

Well, we managed to rationalise an answer from one perspective but not the other...

Unevenness? There isn't such a thing call "Fairness", in the first place. However, how do we manage such unevenness in a reasonably fair way to ensure the project thriuvesand to encourage the spirit of capacity building instead of "sole properitorship"?

• To individuals, it's seen as oppoortunities for professional development
• To the organisation, it's creating platforms to reach out to the bigger (world) community, to share the success stories, to create footholds at the international level

(The following questions help to scaffold the thinking process...)

Then, the next question is, why the same person, over and over again? (So, more questions in at next level...)

• In the first place, how is this person being identified?
• Naturally, it's someone who possesses the expertise and more often than not, he/she is the who spearheads the project. There is no doubt, the pioneer 'expert' in the area.
• Next question is, what is the scale and influence of this project?
• If it's always the same person (eg. NNN) sharing the project, there's only one thing that I could infer: This is NNN's PROJECT... and therefore, my further inference is, the impact is limited to the students that he/she could reach out to (probably during formal curriculum, or what we say, time-tabled time.) In other words, only students taught by this teacher have the opportunity to use it? This leads to the other questions like, the scalability and sustainability of the project.
• Scalability - are other teachers also involved in this project, and what's their role? Just user of the applications? or as a fellow faculty member, they are also involved in the research or development work, which is part of their professional development and engagement?
• Sustainability - logically, based on today's context, it's hardly that someone would stay in the job forever. Then, what's the implication when the 'expert' leaves the organisation? Two things could possibly happen: The project implementation remains stagnant and hardly make any new progress... and eventually die a natural death? (Hm... the 不在乎天长地久，只在乎曾经拥有mindset?). Another thing that's likely to happen is, NNN when moves on to other organisation, will "bring along" the project with him/her and talk about it, etc... This indeed happens very often. Look around amongst us, do we recall hearing colleagues talking and sharing what good works they did in previous schools and started bringing the ideas in? So, all these projects/experiences somehow cling to the individuals. What would their previous context think? I wonder... especially there isn't any successor to the project/programme...

It seems like these issues are other people's issues - however, look back at our current context... as the organisation moves into research work, capacity building, sharing and establishing footholds, aren't the above going to happen in the near future? I'm sure it will... how are we going to handle this? Of course, I think we'll need to establish some kind of common understanding as we craft and execute the approach...

As my friend put it across, "1 X 10" is not equal to "10 X 1".

• Mathematically, based on commutative law of multiplication, 1 X 10 = 10 X 1
• However, if we re-visit the concept, "1 group of 10" is different from "10 groups of 1". Similarly, put in the context, 1 teacher with 10 opportunities is not equal to 10 teachers each given 1 opportunity.

Then she further suggested, since there's no such thing as being fair, how about considering

• "2 X 5" or "5 X 2"?

This is almost the similar to the idea we proposed in another project "Train the Trainer" approach (see it in a more generic sense) or just like what all organisations always have in mind - developing/ building capacity of the 2nd-liners... as we are always reminded, "No one is indispensible in an organsiation", actually, to qualify that, should add in the condition, "if the organisation has a sound structure to build its 2nd liner"...