EDST 403/4 Blended Course Development West Kootenay Teacher Education Program
The following are 4 selections (there are 13 in total) from an online course I developed for UBCs Faculty of Education Rural Education program. This course is taught as a blended learning course, and as an online course. The course is developed in a way that allows for each module to build on the other; the modules can also function discretely as stand-alone lessons, making the course highly adaptable to term length and individual instructors.
Ideas about curriculum and pedagogy cannot be disconnected from ideas about knowledge, truth and ethics. After all, who would argue that teachers should teach their students false ideas rather than true ones, and things they merely believe or guess rather than things they “know”? And yet, as soon as we begin to talk about “knowledge” and “truth,” questions arise: Can teachers teach anything that is absolutely true, or only that which has not been yet proven false or that which is both true and false? How do we determine what counts as “true”? What is ethical? And how does our notion of “ethical” change based upon the actors or circumstance? How do we help students think critically about “truth” and “knowledge in relation to what they learn,” and to be “ethical” in their thoughts and actions?
This is the first week of our course and in this lesson you will be introduced to the works of Michel Foucault and the concepts of truth, knowledge, power, pedagogy and curriculum. As educators we think we know what is meant by curriculum and pedagogy; however this often means that curriculum is thought of as the official documents of teaching. And pedagogy is the way we teach curriculum. Over this brief course we will explore how concepts of power, truth and knowledge upset the more static understandings of curriculum and pedagogy. This week we begin to explore the work of Michel Foucault on truth claims, regimes of truth and knowledge and read the work of Lusted who complicates how pedagogy functions in educative spaces.
What is truth? What are the “truths” of disciplinary spaces? Public spaces? Cultural Spaces? This week we will be examining the production of knowledge in both formal and informal environments; the truths we tell ourselves about the world around us; the spaces that curriculum and pedagogy occupy; and equally, the spaces they create and foreclose in the name of knowledge and education. From scientific positivism to popular culture and public space we will explore the various “truths’ of knowledge production and its implications for educators.
This lesson asks you, as educators, to engage with the impacts and erasures of Indigenous knowledge systems in curriculum. The educational significance of what is included and excluded, and what is silenced within curriculum and knowledge production more gernally are of critical significance to Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
Many would argue that teacher education is key in rethinking the role of curriculum, power, and knowledge in teaching and learning. It is not as simple as what should be taught in teacher education programmes or how teacher education programmes should be organized. In this week, we will explore how knowledge is thought of in teacher education, which knowledge matters, and even “what might be the matter with knowledge” (Britzman, 2000).