Student Teachers, the Morale Curve & Reconciling Theory and Practice

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 […]

Teaching as an Act of Resistence

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 […]

Discussion: Personal, Professional, and Practical Implications

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. Summary This project presents a unit framework for […]

Critical Citizenship for the Digital Age

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 […]

Course Design and Narrative Discovery

Now at the mid-point of my third pass at our open online Philosophy 12 course, I am finding different ways to bring about the salient outcomes which have arisen in the last few years. This is both a result of having observed and noted the successes and difficulty senior students have had with various concepts […]

EDCI591: Self-Explanation Principle, Remixed

I was having trouble exporting this with sound for a while but seem to have it figured out finally. As I introduce in the video above, I selected my remix chapter for EDCI 591 (Multimedia Learning) based on the hunch that the principle aligned with my own views about critical reflection and learning, that the simple […]

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

critical pedagogy