A Unit Plan of One’s Own: Recommendations

 

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 project has allowed me to make the following recommendations to others who might consider conducting a similar course of study or practice. In each, the common thread is an emphasis on striving to better realize our collective democratic potential in our own learning as teachers, and looking to provide the same experiences for our students.

Structure with Space

In striving to create emergent possibilities, it is important to cultivate space wherein the unexpected can occur. Democracy itself is a framework to produce outcomes much more than it is an outcome itself; and once it becomes concerned with replication and the preservation of stasis, the ends it is intended to produce slip out of grasp. In the pursuit of emergence, both in democracy and in our classrooms, it is important to create the opportunity – and in doing so the habits of mind in young people – for grassroots expression and experience in collective meaning-making. In considering the adoption of the unit framework provided here, or work conceived in a similar spirit, look to present students with the opportunity to populate the educational space with their own expressions and explorations.

Everything is a Prototype

To engage in authentic learning of this kind, teachers and students must work toward viewing potential setbacks and failures as opportunities to reflect and move forward in their work as individuals and in groups. Central to the notion of learning as an ongoing process is that nothing is a final iteration, and that “everything is a prototype,” 1

 and as such is an opportunity to learn from and integrate into future growth and success. While educators may be quick to encourage our students toward this realization, we can be less forgiving of our own struggles toward an integration of our theory and practice in pedagogy, and it is important for us to model this willingness to adapt, act, and reflect if we wish for these attributes to be acquired by the young people in our classrooms.

In all things, Be open

Wherever teaching and learning takes you, one recommendation above all else is to compel those who are interested in this and other similar learning to work diligently and vigilantly to share it all. Make your process and learning transparent, both in your own emergent view of pedagogy and curriculum, as well as your life as a citizen and educator. Seek out practices which make the act of opening, and allowing others to view, engage, and participate with your investigations a part of your daily work. Delivering upon the promise of the digital age relies on this ability to share and construct our shared spaces, physically as well as online, and educators are central in this struggle to reclaim innovation, as well as the public sphere.

References

  1. Zack Dowell used this expression in an interview with some of my students in 2011.