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"Just back from a whirlwind six-day sojourn in New York City, I’ve been thinking about the thread that runs the breadth of the learning I have been fortunate to join in on the road. In the British Columbia backcountry, Cuban fine arts classrooms, backstage tours of Disneyland, weekends at local ski resorts, and now the Big Apple, I’ve shared a […]
Read more "Learning On the Road: NYC Edition"Featured image courtesy of Christopher Allen on Flickr. It is a common sentiment that schools ought be apolitical spaces, despite the fact that in policy, curriculum, and objectives they cannot help but exist in political reality. In the resultant power dynamic that confronts us as professionals, even reluctant teachers engage in a struggle for agency […]
Read more "School Politics"Something the Philosophy 12 group experimented with in last year’s cohort was the idea of holding teacherless discussions. As research and work in my own graduate studies took me further into notions of citizenship education and a confrontation with contemporary political apathy, I began to look at the structure of classroom activities as a means […]
Read more "Teacherless Discussion"Simpleton, British Columbia lyrics and chords. We aren’t on strike because we’re losing or we’ve lost. We’re on strike because we still might win.
Read more "Picket Anthems: The Ballad of Simpleton, British Columbia"Melanie Stokes is a colleague of mine who forwarded me this letter that she submitted to the Vancouver Sun to share here. As teachers are now in their second week of full job action, it may be important to consider the reasons why this situation is happening now. Over the last thirty years, society […]
Read more "Guest Post: Letter from a Colleague"As I’ve explored at some length here, I think of schools today as guided by our mission statements and legal mandates to pursue an ageless ideal of education along the lines of how John Dewey characterized schooling as the act of “preparing students for the adult vocations needed for society to continue to exist.” The question […]
Read more "On 21st Century Schools"Organizing Inquiry Topics These last few weeks, the TALONS have taken their study of Socials 10 west, from the fledgling union of Confederation to Hudson’s Bay, Manitoba, and the resistance that unfolds along the Red River Valley. In seeking out the story of Louis Riel, and how his execution – as well as the subsequent relationship between the government and the Metis, Inuit and other First Nations of the Northwest […]
Read more "Inquiry into the Northwest"An audio gem from Saturday’s campus fire at Sea to Sky this past weekend, Owl leads the TALONS in a audience-participation version of Solar Power Blues, which he explains in the clip.
Read more "Solar Power Blues"Fall Retreat Photoset on Flickr A quick post this Monday morning to offer thanks and a massive shout-out to our TALONS friends at Sea to Sky Outdoor School, in Gibsons, British Columbia. We’re just back from our third annual fall retreat with Wings, Owl, Moondust, River, Chinook and Goose, an invigorating experiential study in leadership, […]
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