Citizenship in Global Space: Convergences and Departures

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 […]

Pedagogy for the Oppressor: Cease to do Evil, then Learn to do Good

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 […]

Education for Citizenship as Shared Fate

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 […]

Why Collaborative Inquiry?

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 […]

Identifying a Research Problem

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 […]

Blog as Prologue

Upon completing my undergraduate education, I toyed briefly with the idea of heading directly into my Master’s, though at the time it would have likely been in American literature or an MFA program in fiction writing than the course I’m currently following. Then again during my course work to obtain my teaching certificate, I […]

Rising to meet the Eminent Speech

Almost without fail, the Eminent Person Speech reigns supreme as the element of the annual project that produces – in the estimation of teachers, peers, and self-assessment – the highest quality work. While there are inevitably remarkable pieces of work contributed to various aspects of the study, whether in Night of the Notables learning centers, […]

Reflection, Self-Explanation & Citizenship

Reflection vs. Self-Explanation One of the questions asked by a #TieGrad classmate during my presentation on the Self-Explanation principle was whether there was all-too-much difference between the practice of self-explaining and a more general reflective process. And while I might be more inclined to leave the definitive boundary-setting to those more versed in the theory, something that […]

Reclaim TALONS

While I attempted to introduce the new academic year in a blog post that wound up meandering into too many of my thoughts and feelings on the culmination of BC teachers’ recent strike action, here I intend to share my initial guiding interests and projects setting out into the 2014-15 school year. As I alluded […]

The Digital Age and Curriculum in British Columbia

I: The Digital Shock & Curricular Reinvention “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capacity in the history of the human race,” declared Clay Shirky in his 2008 tome Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (Shirky, 2008). In the intervening years we have continued to see an […]

Simplicity of Cause

Musings on Modern Learning

Literature