Building on the myriad foundations, ideas, readings, thinkings, discussions, practices, encounters, and experiences that you have engaged with in previous semesters, this course is designed to further enhance teacher-learners’ capacities for enacting practitioner inquiry with a view towards completion of the rising spiral of the M.Ed. E.P. process. Participants will be asked to further their inquiry project during this term, engaging in spirals of action and reflection, often in collaboration with community members (including, potentially, the natural world), to extend, enrich and theorize their own professional practice. As a community of inquirers, we will support each other in making meaning of teaching and learning within our specific contexts through diverse methods. Our goal is to critically and creatively investigate our practice as teachers, imagine relations that go beyond normative categories, and reconfigure lives in schools and maybe even schools themselves. At the same time building out portfolios of ways to present, represent, and give meaning to our learnings in rich, integrity-filled, and compelling ways.

Instructor Note: This course is always an interesting, fascinating, and, at times, challenging course to teach. I am joining a process already in motion and want to add to it while at the same time supporting the work that is already happening. So, I sense that it is good to think of this course as having two arcs with the hope being that they are able to interact -- challenge, support and dialogue -- with each other. The first arc involves the furthering of your particular chosen inquiry project. Tracing that flow from problem/question/interest through finding “method” and gathering “data” and on towards interpretation, integration, and offering back and out … all while constantly considering practice and educational implications. The second arc I hope to offer is more philosophical in nature. It will step back and think about education writ large through the lens of engaging with and including the natural world. But the goal isn’t to do a “nature” course so much as to engage with that conversation so we can talk about and think into questions of justice (ecological and social), knowledge (what and where is it? How does it grow?), founding stories (assumptions that float culture), and being (of self, teacher, and human) and who teacher might be and become in all of this.