Our meeting on Friday is an important one as we need to use that time to begin to plan our work for the fall.During the course of the semester some themes and topics have emerged in our discussions that we should now plan to investigate in more depth.
During Friday's meeting we would like to form 3-5 interest/working groups around the topics you would like to investigate.
The idea is that during the fall semester the groups will work on developing pedagogical research projects (around their topics) that they can investigate in their classes the spring semester.
We will try to plan the guest speakers for the fall seminar in relation to the topics you choose and we will provide support for research project design and for preparing an IRB proposal. We will ask each group to do some background research on their topic that will serve as a lit-review for their project and to share what they learned with the seminar group, sometime during the fall semester.
All projects should be designed with the intention that they will result in a publication (or publications for the group members.) Since Ron Scapp, who visited our seminar last time is editing book series for SUNY press and encouraged us to consider proposing an edited volume for this book series, that is one venue we will pursue.
We really want everyone to work in groups because part of the purpose of the seminar is community building and your research projects will be more interesting and will yield more useful and valid data if they include larger samples and diverse input from your various areas of expertise. Some projects may be discipline focused, but some may include cross-disciplinary groups.
Here is a list of some possible topics for research/exploration. These are based on our seminar discussions and in most cases I tried to preserve the language that was used when we talked and wrote about them (though there are lots of ways to discuss and describe these issues and many of them are overlapping and intertwined.) Please read through them and begin to think about ideas for a project. If you have others that you would like included in the list please email them to me if possible (and/or they can be added on the day of the seminar.) These topics are intentionally broad/general to allow room for a range of ideas and with the idea that you will develop your specific interests in relation to them.
- Assessment, "Audits of Learning," "Visible and Invisible Learning"
- Student Preparation and "coverage vs. depth"
- Addressing remedial needs while engaging students in higher order and critical thinking
- Affect and learning
- Language and Culture in the Classroom
- Preparing students for the workforce vs. other conceptions of education and other teaching and learning goals
- Students as agents of history (&/or student agency in general)
I look forward to seeing you!
Belle
About pedagogical freedom, and the difference between it and academic freedom, (which we were talking about on Friday) here's an interesting link:
http://www.progressive.org/mag_mc051007
It seems that a history teacher in Nebraska essentially got fired for showing a documentary about the Iraq war in a high school class. I'd say that was an issue of academic freedom. But he also got in trouble for his innovative method of teaching history backwards (which I've always wanted to try) and that seems like an issue of pedagogical freedom.
Posted by: Megan | May 13, 2007 at 11:00 AM