Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis.

COURSE DETAILS:

There are three aspects to this course.

Firstly, it might best be described as an exploration of this line from Roethke’s poem. Reflecting on the fulsome journey from Diploma through to M Ed, engaging in various forms of inquiry as you have, we might think of these three sets of questions as guides to this exploration:

• where did I set out to go?
• where has the journey taken me (or, where have I actually gone)? and,
• what have I learned & how have I learned it?

Secondly, the course is also oriented to helping you identify, describe, and represent the stories, the vignettes, the narratives, that demonstrate, as Dianne Bruner offers, “a way of knowing that we know something, and that we have the right to know.” We might then ask ourselves:

• so, what is the story to be told?

And, finally, drawing on Paulo Freire (among others, significantly, bell hooks), with their emphasis on “education as a vocation always rooted in hopefulness:”

• how do we sustain a dream, that is, a vision for ourselves and our practice that is grounded in hope?

More specifically, we are asking ourselves…

• what have I learned through the program, and from conducting my inquiry, about myself, my setting, and my practice?
• what key ideas, concepts, theories, thinkers, approaches, and philosophies have had an impact on me?
• how have these ideas (concepts, etc) influenced, confirmed, challenged, and/or transformed my thinking and my practice?
• how do I now situate myself in the wider community of scholarship, and in my community of practice?
• how will I now take these ideas into my practice and into my community?
• how do I want to demonstrate and represent what I have learned, and where I hope to go from here?
• how do I keep hope alive, nurtured, sustained?

In more concrete terms, the course is an opportunity to pull together your ideas and experiences toward the creation of the two Comprehensive Exam components, that is, the Written project and the Oral presentation.

Thinking of this time together more as a series of workshops rather than a ‘course’ per se, each weekend session we will be working in our ‘studio’ towards our Master Pieces (ah, there is a very relevant history to this turn of phrase, which we’ll discuss!), where our key tools will be activities and conversations, and our main materials are your fieldnotes/inquiry journals, reflections on your experiences, pertinent literature and writers, and any other elements that have been significant to your journey.

There are no books nor set articles for this course, any readings that we might do will be accessed through the SFU Library Online System or will be posted to Canvas.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING NOTES: