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 Resist

Where did everybody go? Is it just me, or has it been a minute? Did we turn a corner? Or have we ascended some ultimate peak to only be careening out of control these last how many months? Did things online not seem to move so fast, previously? Or were they just less likely to […]

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Teaching in the Patriarchy

Even as we might strive to discuss Herstory and the silencing of minority voices in our curriculum, it is startlingly easy to perpetuate and recreate the same inequalities we strive to combat in our work as educators. While we may have the best of intentions in our explicit messages about the nature of equality and justice in […]

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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 […]

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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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Generative Themes, Emerging Subjectivity & the Discussable Object

“To investigate the generative theme is to investigate the people’s thinking about reality an people’s action upon reality, which is their praxis. For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-investigators. The more active an attitude men […]

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