Homecoming

Isn’t it always that we think these new steps we take, new eras that we enter, will last forever? Or even, if we are attempting to be realistic, that their ends are so far off that, when newly undertaken, we don’t consider that we might not always enjoy them? So it has been for me […]

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Student Teachers, the Morale Curve & Reconciling Theory and Practice

Featured image courtesy of Alan Levine.  “I can tell you with confidence when these dips in the morale curve will occur: six weeks, twelve weeks, six months, twelve months…”  Kris Magnusson, paraphrased Of oughts and ises Six weeks into our yearlong teacher-education program, our student teachers have enjoyed a month’s honeymoon and visioning process on […]

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Teaching as an Act of Resistence

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user Farruquitown. We’ve been fortunate in our Playworks module to be working with SFU professor Charles Bingham, who has joined us twice weekly to guide our student teachers in developing a theoretical approach to education that will help them in this formative stage of their careers. Charles – who goes by […]

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On being with Student Teachers

…the very act of seeking recognition from significant others, or even depending passively on others for that recognition, may be an act of submission to those who are recognizing, thus creating a set of unequal relations that undercut the initial gesture toward egalitarianism. Just as I have pointed out earlier with regard to the political […]

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An Impossible Acknowledgement

I share these thoughts as a settler living on the unceded territories of the Squamish and the Musqueam peoples in Port Moody, British Columbia.  Acknowledging Hypocrisy A recent article in the New Yorker helps articulate the difficulty in conceiving of what it might mean to move beyond merely acknowledging traditional, unceded territories. In his essay, “Canada’s Impossible […]

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Two weeks in

I am now two weeks into this new experience as a Faculty Associate at SFU, having marked a transition to a new type of work, and yet also an extension of the type of work I have always done. A new community has been established, new relationships formed, and new students to arrive in another […]

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Out of Dodge

We left from work on Friday afternoon, June 30th. It was the last day of school – my last day at Gleneagle after almost ten years – and the beginning of a new summer, a summer of transition. Transformation. It seemed only fitting to mark the onset of the season with an epic adventure with […]

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