This semester’s Socials 9 curriculum was conceived with an intention to cultivate critical literacy, which I have come to define more and more as an ability to develop a praxis of reflection and action to continually discover and define meaning in an increasingly complex system. In learning from curricula, relationships or experience, individuals and societies […]
Read more "Assessment for Critical Literacy"Recently returned from a two-week odyssey around my girlfriend’s native land of Barbados, I’ve been tasked as part of our first module in EDCI 335: Learning Design with introducing myself and my intentions in the course. I’ll admit that it’s something that – this far into the ongoing learning project of this blog – strikes […]
Read more "EDCI335: Introduction to Learning Design"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, […]
Read more "On Teaching and Learning"Given the way my own learning had unfolded this semester, it’s not surprising, perhaps, that I would be coming to identify (and experiment) with the idea of emergence in my classrooms and the extra-curricular projects I’ve undertaken. My goals of a month ago talked about my intentions: “to create […] space to reflect on this year’s […]
Read more "Social Media and Personalized Learning Project(s) Update"In the last few years, I’ve had occasion to put together presentations on a variety of topics – social media as a learning tool/support, digital storytelling in the classroom and as professional development, songwriting – and it is a medium for sharing connections and ideas that I am drawn to as a new challenge of […]
Read more "Presentations"There is at the surface infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. Ralph Waldo Emerson For ten years (2007-2017) I taught a group of gifted students in the Coquitlam School District, in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia. You can check out the work they do on their site. I’ve also taught open online […]
Read more "A Little Background"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"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"