Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Book Review- Biesta, Gert J.J. (2014). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
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Maker pedagogy and science teacher education
Get PDFMaking is a process that people engage in to design, create, and develop things that are of value and use to them personally or for their community. The recent popular (and sometimes commercial) Maker Movement is rooted in making and traces its lineage from a variety of historical precedents, including ancient traditions of arts and crafts fairs, tinkering and inventing using analog technologies, and hacking and programing with digital technologies. So-called “Maker Spaces” often function as co-ops that allow people to come together to build things, share expensive tools, and learn skills from one another. In this article, we will use the maker movement as a catalyst to reveal both some perennial challenges of and potential ways forward for curriculum studies of science and technology teacher education. In particular, we suggest that maker pedagogy, an approach to working with teacher candidates drawing from principles in the maker movement represents a potentially useful way forward in engaging teacher candidates in thinking about curriculum and working with students
Reimagining Teacher Education through Design Thinking Principles: Curriculum in the Key of Life
Get PDFInspired by Arendt’s (2009) “task of renewing a common world” (p. 193), a team of ten instructors took on the challenge of reimagining a teacher preparation course entitled Curriculum II - Arts & Humanities. Through the dominant discourses of management, accountability and technique-driven preparation, the act of teaching is interpreted as a “service rendered” (Pinar, 2012, p. 36), measured “objectively” by demonstrable deliverables and pre-determined outcomes. Our team provoked these discourses by asserting that human beings are inherently attuned to deeper learning through wonderment, interpretation, ideation and experimentation (Whitehead, 1929). The principles of design thinking – a problem-based process which, through curiosity, empathy and interdisciplinary thinking, generates playful and collaborative creative experimentation – offered a space within which to open up deeper educational conversations with pre-service teachers.
Invoking the metaphor of a choral performance, this series of miniature musical movements “in the key of life” express the challenging, enlivening and multivocal nature of curriculum and pedagogy enacted through Design Thinking principles. From contemplating the power of self-reflection and collective action, to meeting challenges and resistance with courage, to listening with heart to people and places, and to responding with joy and hope in the face of our place and circumstances, each individual movement gives voice to the echoes that linger long after the official coursework is complete. Together, these voices join together in a chorus of authentic and responsive curriculum renewal
Teacher education and drama: possibilities, promise, potential.
Get PDFContemporary discussions about curricula, whether for schools or for higher education, come with demands for change to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability, and 21st century challenge. Core notions however of curriculum as structure for providing access to knowledge (Young, 2014), or a set of teaching and learning prescriptions (Scott, 2014) are hard to shift, yet questions of what knowledge and how is it formed are ones which should be critical for teacher education, where, as a site of higher education, decisions about that knowledge are contested (Barnett, 2015). The prospective teacher continues to negotiate tensions between knowledge of content and of curriculum, pedagogical knowledge and generic teaching skill, knowing as process and knowing in performative terms, and between shaping a role as teacher and as educator for the 21st century. This paper makes a case for the potential that an arts oriented course, specifically drama, holds for helping student teachers to conceptualise their own learning experiences within a teacher education curriculum, to better understand the facilitation of learning experiences within school and classroom curricula, and to begin to shape their teacher identity
Collaborative Writing as an Exercise of Poetic Resistance in Teacher Education
Get PDFOver the last decade we have strived through a collaborative writing project to open a polyvocal and layered conversation on critical contemporary issues in teacher education, even as our program faced its demise. Our writing inquiries began as a critical thinking-through of the qualities of lived experiences as instructors within an innovative and now defunct teacher education program. The context for our work was a radically construed approach to teacher education that—in its language, form, and curriculum—challenged prevailing norms of practice. In our collaborative writing we confront the difficult work of teacher education, addressing specific challenges, complex demands, and forms of resistance that are prevalent in faculties of education everywhere. Such challenges include how we narrate alternative visions of teacher education, attend to issues of ethics and recognition, deal with the complexities of learning professional practice and take into account the larger, historical project of teacher education. As a provocative example of self-study research, our collaborative method of inquiry illustrates the richness and productivity of poetic, practice-based research, oriented to critical issues in teacher education. The intentional effort to make our work public and politically provocative is an attempt by the authors to reveal the importance of these critical conversations in advancing our work. Specifically, what makes such conversations important includes questions about how we should enact our responsibilities for teacher education and also how we give account for enacting those responsibilities. We intend our conversations and thinking-through about practices in teacher education to remain open-ended and responsive to a plurality of thought and experience. Collaborative writing serves for us as a kind of resistance, reclaiming, re-storying, and historical accounting through encounters with others
THINK IT THROUGH: FOSTERING AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES TO RAISE INTEREST IN LITERATURE AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL
Get PDFFrench Quebec literature has always served as a cultural reference for the Quebec curriculum, and is still the means through which French language skills are most often taught in secondary 5 (grade 11) Quebec classrooms. In this paper, I suggest an interactive teaching of the Quebec play Incendies in three secondary 5 classrooms. Students’ meaning making responses, as elicited by qualitative data, provide an understanding of directions a teacher might take to increase interest in reading. These patterns of reactions further equip teachers with concrete tools to guide students in their reading. The purpose of this mixed methods study, in which quantitative data supported qualitative findings, was to see whether an intervention using personal maps (i.e., aesthetigrams) would increase interest in French Quebec literature. To this end, pre-tests, a map making intervention, and post-tests were given to 71 female high school participants in response to scene 37 of Incendies. The researcher pre-identified four main categories that guided students in their response process to literature. This process allowed students to reflect on their personal values and develop their agency in their learning. The following article informs researchers and practitioners alike of the effectiveness of aesthetigrams in literature pedagogy
