Student Teachers, the Morale Curve & Reconciling Theory and Practice

Featured image courtesy of Alan Levine.  “I can tell you with confidence when these dips in the morale curve will occur: six weeks, twelve weeks, six months, twelve months…”  Kris Magnusson, paraphrased Of oughts and ises Six weeks into our yearlong teacher-education program, our student teachers have enjoyed a month’s honeymoon and visioning process on […]

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Teaching as an Act of Resistence

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user Farruquitown. We’ve been fortunate in our Playworks module to be working with SFU professor Charles Bingham, who has joined us twice weekly to guide our student teachers in developing a theoretical approach to education that will help them in this formative stage of their careers. Charles – who goes by […]

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On being with Student Teachers

…the very act of seeking recognition from significant others, or even depending passively on others for that recognition, may be an act of submission to those who are recognizing, thus creating a set of unequal relations that undercut the initial gesture toward egalitarianism. Just as I have pointed out earlier with regard to the political […]

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An Impossible Acknowledgement

I share these thoughts as a settler living on the unceded territories of the Squamish and the Musqueam peoples in Port Moody, British Columbia.  Acknowledging Hypocrisy A recent article in the New Yorker helps articulate the difficulty in conceiving of what it might mean to move beyond merely acknowledging traditional, unceded territories. In his essay, “Canada’s Impossible […]

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On Reconciling Epistemic Enclosures

Democracy depends on the negotiation of common ground I’ve spent most of my life as a connector. I’ve always been something of a bridge-builder. Someone who can ‘see both sides’ (sometimes to a fault). I’m forgiving, even when I might vehemently disagree with someone, and am generally able to admit that my way of perceiving […]

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Teaching to Resist

Where did everybody go? Is it just me, or has it been a minute? Did we turn a corner? Or have we ascended some ultimate peak to only be careening out of control these last how many months? Did things online not seem to move so fast, previously? Or were they just less likely to […]

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Singing Taylor Swift Songs

Introductions, Gender, and Amplification Every year in #introguitar (an open online guitar class I teach at my school, and which you should totally enrol in as a non-credit participant) I ask my students and our open learners to introduce themselves and their intentions to the group in a brief video. And rather than rehash a […]

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