Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Building on the experience of EDUC 252, prospective educators will continue to develop their reflective practice. Various educational issues related to the caring for learners and the creation of learning communities will be explored. Students will spend time in educational settings exploring the importance of connected educational experiences for learners. Students with credit for EDUC 401 or holding a teaching certificate may not take this course for credit Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course is focused on exploring world, place and ecology, through cultivating and refining reflective fieldwork and writing practices. Students will read texts that inform approaches to reflective practice and fieldwork, and then try out and cultivate their own reflective writing and fieldwork practices, through both class and small-group inquiries at places throughout the lower-mainland. We will explore historical, social, cultural, and the experiential/storied landscapes of the places where we live, and reflect on implications for teaching, learning and schooling. Some classes will be held outdoors at particular locations off campus (e.g. the surrounding forest, Chinatown). As this course involves off-campus adventures in teaching and learning, please feel free to contact the instructor if you have questions about whether this course is right for you.  All these practices and explorations will eventually lead to each students crafting their own pedagogical creeds as short essays articulating what you value about life, learning, teaching, and education.

The main assignments are a Reflective Writing Portfolio (detailing the student’s fieldwork and reflective writing work through the class), and a Personal Pedagogical Creed (a short essay articulating what student’s value about life, learning, teaching, and education), both submitted near the end of the course. There are a few low-stakes assignments, including a journal/fieldwork sample and the crafting of Positioning Statements.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

While our approach to assessment is not one of 'ticking boxes', it is still useful to have 'big picture' learning/educational goals in mind to orient all involved along the journey through the course and the assignments.

• Becoming a deeply reflective person, thereby being capable of creating not only a reflective life for oneself but also reflective moments, practices, contexts, settings, and institutions that can contribute to establishing and sustaining a culture of civility, care, compassion, creativity, integrity, and healing.
•  Exploring and discovering what matters—what is meaningful—in one’s life as student, educator, professional, parent, sibling, partner, friend, etc., and most of all, as a human being. As well, integrating what is meaningful in all these various dimensions of our lives so that one lives and acts as a whole person.
• Crafting a pedagogical creed as well as living curriculum resources, articulating what you value about life, learning, teaching, and education.
• Integrating one’s personal ‘life creed’ with their pedagogical creed – the aim being a move toward holistic integration of the personal, professional, and academic in one’s life and reflective practice.
• Exploring and cultivating a diversity of reflective writing and field-work practices that support your work as a reflective person, educator and researcher, including creative, arts-based and multimodal forms of communication.
• Becoming practiced at working with one’s consciousness, emotions, and embodied states in a way that supports reflection.
• Caring about and understanding the importance of place, land and environment as sites of reflective practice and pedagogy.
• Understanding and appreciating the interconnections and continuities between teaching, research and place-based fieldwork practices.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: