I took the above picture near the peak of Eagle Mountain, in Coquitlam, on my last day of employment at Simon Fraser University. On the last day of our contract with SFU’s Faculty of Education, supervising Faculty Associates are given an administrative day to clean out offices, submit expenses, and otherwise transition between our work […]
Read more "Teaching on Call, Temporary Contracts, and Transitions"While I have been quietly exploring the possibilities of entering the ranks of my district’s pool of administrators since the winter, I am pleased to announce this week that as of July 1st, 2019 I will begin working as a Vice Principal at Centennial Secondary School, in Coquitlam, BC. Doubt There is an often (though […]
Read more "On Leaping: Administration, Doubt, and Educational Leadership"Isn’t it always that we think these new steps we take, new eras that we enter, will last forever? Or even, if we are attempting to be realistic, that their ends are so far off that, when newly undertaken, we don’t consider that we might not always enjoy them? So it has been for me […]
Read more "Homecoming"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 […]
Read more "Student Teachers, the Morale Curve & Reconciling Theory and Practice"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 […]
Read more "Teaching as an Act of Resistence"…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 […]
Read more "On being with Student Teachers"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 […]
Read more "An Impossible Acknowledgement"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 […]
Read more "Two weeks in"I share these thoughts as a settler of living on the unceded territories of the Squamish and the Musqueam peoples in Port Moody, British Columbia. This year, a number of teachers at Gleneagle, and around the Coquitlam District, began to demonstrate a more public acknowledgement of the traditional territories where we live and teach and learn. I […]
Read more "Beyond a Formal Acknowledgement of Unceded Traditional Territory"We left from work on Friday afternoon, June 30th. It was the last day of school – my last day at Gleneagle after almost ten years – and the beginning of a new summer, a summer of transition. Transformation. It seemed only fitting to mark the onset of the season with an epic adventure with […]
Read more "Out of Dodge"