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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Two weeks in

I am now two weeks into this new experience as a Faculty Associate at SFU, having marked a transition to a new type of work, and yet also an extension of the type of work I have always done. A new community has been established, new relationships formed, and new students to arrive in another […]

Teaching to the (Limit) Situation

This post is part of a serialized collection of chapters composing my recently completed Master’s of Education degree at the University of Victoria. You can access the other chapters on this site here, and access a pdf of the completed paper on the University of Victoria library space here. This preoccupation with transcendence has been further nurtured […]

On Teaching and Learning

A few of us from the #Tiegrad group met up on Sunday morning to talk about all sorts of things: project updates, questions, and frustrations, the nature of personalized learning and education in the ‘open,’ and the unique moment each of us finds ourselves in: presently at the intersection between teacher and learner. Even Valerie Irvine, […]

Eminent Person Study: Documenting Transformative Learning

We began talking about Eminent Person the other day by discussing Gardner Campbell’s quoting of Gregory Bateson’s work, and the idea of: “…breaches in the weave of contextual structure.” As I’ve mentioned here many times in the past, many experiential aspects of the TALONS program, and authentic learning wherever it happens for that matter, seek […]

Limit Situations, Double Binds & Transformative Learning

Something familiar struck me about a passage I crossed in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed the other day: Humans, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world—because they are conscious beings—exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from the world, […]

Simplicity of Cause

Musings on Modern Learning