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 […]

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An Impossible Acknowledgement

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 […]

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Teaching to the (Limit) Situation

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 preoccupation with transcendence has been further nurtured […]

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Lit Review Twitter Essay

This is the sort of thing that might otherwise be relegated to an aggregated Storify or series of screenshots. But as this afternoon’s series of Tweets was intended to partially sketch out the main ideas in what will be a much larger – Master’s thesis-sized – work, expanding on some of these points seems well-suited […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Teacherless Discussion

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 […]

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