Featured image courtesy of Christopher Allen on Flickr. It is a common sentiment that schools ought be apolitical spaces, despite the fact that in policy, curriculum, and objectives they cannot help but exist in political reality. In the resultant power dynamic that confronts us as professionals, even reluctant teachers engage in a struggle for agency […]
Read more "School Politics"This is the sort of thing that might otherwise be relegated to an aggregated Storify or series of screenshots. But as this afternoon’s series of Tweets was intended to partially sketch out the main ideas in what will be a much larger – Master’s thesis-sized – work, expanding on some of these points seems well-suited […]
Read more "Lit Review Twitter Essay"Even as we might strive to discuss Herstory and the silencing of minority voices in our curriculum, it is startlingly easy to perpetuate and recreate the same inequalities we strive to combat in our work as educators. While we may have the best of intentions in our explicit messages about the nature of equality and justice in […]
Read more "Teaching in the Patriarchy"Education for Global Citizenship “…increasing calls for educational provision to develop a more global orientation.” Mark Priestly, Gert Biesta, Gren Mannion and Hamish Ross (2010) introduce a network of policy drivers in the UK including departments of education, NGOs and political groups calling for schools to “equip children and young people with the knowledge, skills, and […]
Read more "Citizenship in Global Space: Convergences and Departures"In an essay collected in Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, Derek Rasmussen introduces Paulo Freire and those who would introduce his critical praxis to victims of oppression in foreign countries as “rescuers” attempting “to ameliorate the conditions of the oppressed.” This is, Rasmussen admits, “certainly a worthy aim.” However, the blind spot in this well-intentioned […]
Read more "Pedagogy for the Oppressor: Cease to do Evil, then Learn to do Good"A theme in liberal democracy which presents a challenge for citizenship education is the tension created between recognizing difference and diversity in society alongside the development of a shared cultural foundation. This tension has been highlighted on numerous occasions on this blog in the citing of work by Deborah Osberg and Gert Biesta, who note […]
Read more "Education for Citizenship as Shared Fate"In a facilitator’s guide for Collaborative Inquiry for Educators, Jenni Donohoo presents the formation of professional learning communities as a means of addressing “adaptive challenges,” or those “for which the necessary knowledge to solve the problem do not yet exist” (Vander Ark, 2006 p 10). Many aspects of professional development seeks to approach these types […]
Read more "Why Collaborative Inquiry?"Identifying a research problem consists of specifying an issue to study, developing a justification for studying it, and suggesting the importance of the study for select audiences that will read the report. John W. Creswell While it acknowledges that “Participating in elections is the essential starting point of any democratic system,” Elections Canada’s own working paper […]
Read more "Identifying a Research Problem"Following the acrimony of our recent job action in BC schools, I’m inclined to take stock of what may be considered ‘wins’ in an otherwise defeating series of events. Having seen the government come to the terms that it did in the end, it’s hard not to feel that the major motivation Peter Fassbender and Christy […]
Read more "Professional Autonomy and Development"What a hoot tonight to come share in a blitz of ideas with a room full of #bced folks, convened around food and drink, rallying around a call from Dean Shareski to talk about our passion projects. The atmosphere was loud and fun, thoughtful and provocative, and I’m glad to have dusted off at least […]
Read more "An Ignite Talk: No handbook for Transcendence"