It's the Questions that Bring us Together

Well, i'm well into a new season of teaching and work and, of course, baby-raising (Oy!). And this year, in addition to the Popular Education for Social Change graduate class that i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University i am also teaching an undergraduate class called Perspectives in Environmental Studies. It's a very popular class that my colleague Peter Timmerman has been teaching for several years and is currently on what i'm sure is a well-earned sabbatical (thus the contract work for me).

I design and write and/or c0-write a syllabus every year that i produce as a 'zine. This year i collaborated on the syllabuzine with Tina Lopes, an educator with whom i worked in the Doris Marshall Institue for Education and Action. Unfortunately, the enrollment numbers were unusually low this year and FES had to cancel the section that Tina would have taught. Alas. Tina and i decided that this year's theme would be "The Arts of the Self in Culture, Classroom and Community" and i had looked forward to exploring the many meanings that this could have with Tina. Now i'm on my own with it - albeit accompanied by 22 graduate students. You can download of PDF (2.6 megs) of the syllabus here: http://www.web.net/~story/RC/syllabuzine6150-2008.pdf (send it to your printer for double-sided copying and you should end up with a foldable booklet.veb

As for the undergrad class, one huge challenge for me is how to practice some of the ideals of popular education in an environment that is designed both in form (line-of-sight lecture hall, 500 students, one weekly two-hour lecture plus a one-hour tutorial) and expectation (of the 500 learners) to practice authoritarian pedagogy. Ouch! Not that i haven't got a lot to say that is worth listening to. But i wonder skeptically about the quality of learning in such circumstances. Thus i have discussed with the TAs how we can design an asignment that pushes students to learn to think critically, creatively and transformatively. We've come up with an assignment based on questioning. Not unlike this wee tale that i posted her a while back.

One of the course TAs found this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet:

Try to love the questions themselves, as if they were lock rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don´t search for the answer, which couldn´t be given to you now, because you wouldn´t be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer

Ahhhh....

And i found a translated edition of Letters to a Young Poet here. I highly recommend this work - one of the great (and modest) 20th Century works on creativity and writing.

Manuals on Human Rights and Facilitation

I just learned about more on-line manuals for human rights and facilitation:

• Action for the Rights of Children (ARC) Reach Out Training Kit: Facilitator's Toolkit (also available here as Word docs and in Spanish, French and Arabic)
  

• People's Watch in India - a great collection of curricula
  

Elections, elections everywhere and democracy is still hard to find

"You know, I think when ordinary, working people come home, turn on the TV and see … a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up, I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people." Of course, what counts as an "ordinary" Canadian to Harper and his ilk is a rather disturbing, if fictional. Mind you, as this video implies, perhaps Harper and the Tories will be successful in creating the very "ordinariness" they seem to crave.

A new life for the world

A few things have changed in my life. A new life in this house. Meet our wee mister.

The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy

There are some excellent articles in this publication from the McGill University-based Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy. A couple of the articles i'll be reading include: "But What Can I Do?": Fifteen Things Education Students Can Do to Transform Themselves In/Through/With Education by Paul R. Carr and Notes from a Fan: Paulo Freire Comes to Idaho by Dale T. Graden