Friday, March 2, 2012

Welcome to Spring 2012 Critical Pedagogies

This blog will be my running record of our Critical Pedagogies class this semester. I will be posting materials, reflections, potential lesson plan ideas, links, video clips, and/or whatever else seems relevant or partially relevant. My hope is that this course takes all of us in new directions as teachers- myself included. This blog will be a partial record of what I learn and think about this semester as an instructor and hopefully it will serve as a resource and a reflective tool for all class participants.
Please feel free to comment on any of my posts, past or present. There are many posts from last year's class that contain links to helpful websites, resources, and various articles that might be interest in this course and in your own teaching practices.
I'm looking forward to working with you all.

Curt

2 comments:

  1. Critical Pedagogies?
    It is awkward to me,I thought Lanuage education is not teaching ,literature,any concepts(philosophy)but just skill.I'm not an expert and don't have any degree related with teaching.
    In my practical experiences teaching and learnig lanuage is a skill in my knowledge.But this course changed my mind. I have big expectation from your teaching and this course...

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  2. Thanks for your comment Youngmoon. I think many people approach language instruction as a skill. So your former beliefs were not wrong. But I do agree that there are bigger questions that we should think about when teaching. I like to make a distinction between a "language teacher / language trainer" and an "educator". Training people to use certain phrases and remember certain grammatical forms or vocabulary terms may be necessary in some cases. And I like to think of this as a kind of training. The bigger questions we're going to be talking about this semester, however, are aimed more at the question of what it means to "educate". I'm not sure I have a good answer for that, but I think it's useful to think about the question deeply. I'm looking forward to working with you this semester and learning about your unique experiences and perspectives on these issues.

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