WORKSHOP PREPARATION

Thursday, April 22nd will be dedicated to developing your own pedagogical ideas.  To prepare for this workshop, please review your (1) reading notes, (2) workshop notes, and (3) blog posts with these questions in mind:

• How have my ideas about learning and education — what they are, how they are achieved, and why they matter — changed through our work in this course?

• Which readings most affected me and how might these inform my own pedagogical theory?

• What key questions do I believe a pedagogical theory should answer?

Please select five or so specific passages from our readings to have to hand as you brainstorm and develop your project.

Bring your notes from this preparatory work to class, ideally in a form that you would be able and willing to share with one or two colleagues.

WORKSHOP: BRAINSTORMING, DELIBERATION, & CHOICE

1 hour & 40 minutes

For this workshop, you will be organized in a Breakout Room with one colleague (possibly two).

PART ONE: CENTRAL THEMES

1. Begin by checking-in for 5 minutes.

2. Please take 20-minutes now to work independently. Look over the notes that you prepared for today.  Brainstorm — write freely and without over-thinking your ideas — to generate THREE KEY THEMES that you might center in your own pedagogical theory.

3. Reconvene with your partner and engage in dialogue about each person’s brainstorming, one at a time, for 20 minutes each (so 40-minutes total for this part of the workshop).  If helpful, share out your preparatory notes with one another.  Do your best to narrow down to ONE THEME of the three.

Take a 15-minute break now.

PART TWO: IMPLEMENTATION OF THE THEORY

1. Work independently for another 20-minutes.  This time, use brainstorming to generate three concrete ideas for how you might implement your selected theme.

2. Take turns engaging in dialogue for 20 minutes about the three ideas that you generated during your brainstorming session.  Do your best, working together, to select the best of the three.

At the conclusion of this workshop, you should have a central theoretical topic or theme and a specific idea for implementation of your idea.  From here, you are well-positioned to develop your final project.  Details of that project are:

Your final project will be an articulation of your own pedagogical philosophy, in essay, video, podcast, Storymap, Timeline, or other multi-media format, posted to your blog and published in our course Pressbook “Out of the Cave 2021.”  This project may be collaborative.  You may choose to work with one or more colleagues.  For this project, please choose one specific location — e.g. a public hight school or an after-school program aimed at middle-schoolers — in order to to answer the question “What are the aims of an education?” and to propose a means for achieving those aims within your selected site.  In the development of your proposal, please consider the various components of a theory of education, including ideas about human nature, how people learn, what people need in order to learn, and what impedes meaningful education.  The project should be ca. 8 pages double-spaced or ca. 15 minutes of audio or video content.  Other multi-media formats should aim to convey approximately this same amount of content.  Jody will upload your projects into the Pressbook — reaching out to you for help/collaboration as needed.