Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Provides opportunities for prospective educators to begin their development as reflective practitioners. Through readings, classroom activities and discussions, and interactions with students and practicing teachers, students will be exposed to various educational issues and questions. They will be given time to explore their own values and beliefs about education and teaching. Time may be spent observing in a selection of educational settings, and there may be opportunities to work with learners individually, and in small and large groups. Students enrolled in or with credit for EDUC 401, 402, 403 or holding a teaching certificate may not take this course for credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

This online course introduces students to the art of reflective practice that can be applied to and enacted in educational settings of wide varieties and venues. Reflective practice as theorized and practiced in this course rests on three foundational orientations:

• Existential inquiry: Reflection starts with, and returns to, the self’s existential condition, questions, and quest in one’s real-world contexts.
• Contemplative inquiry: Reflection is vitally supported and facilitated by contemplative inquires and practices, for which the self taps into different states of consciousness through engaging in contemplative (body-mind) practices.
• World-centred learning: A reflective practitioner engages in world-centred educational practices and activities in which students encounter and explore real places, situations and environments and come to reflect on themselves in-relation to the world and all its dynamic, indeterminacy.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

This course is structured in such a way that theory and practice go hand-in-hand, and curriculum content and pedagogical process are integrated. Weekly learning activities include:

• Creating (multimodal) reflective-entries in response to published articles from reflective practice and philosophy of education and video materials that inquire into and explore the phenomenology of reflection and related practices;
• forming a community of practice through canvas dialogue with peers and instructor, and;
• undertaking a series of guided, reflective exercises drawn from the three foundational orientations (existential inquiry, contemplative inquiry, and world-centred learning).

These exercises and practices are deliberately capacity- and skills-building, and thus relevant to students and people interested in reflective practice across a broad range of domains and fields (from artists to health and care-practitioners). Course participants are invited to engage in daily reflective practice, applying what they are learning each week.

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