Exploring Assessment in Education
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc This is our second exploration in a series of theme-based new pathways in educational change. Rich with insight and story, this sequence is based around curated conversations that explore the theme of assessment in education. The product of collaborative video inquiry, where participants were invited to share in the process of […]
Exploring Assessment 1 – The Contexts and Scope of Assessment
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc In this initial instalment of the Exploring Assessment Pathway series, we may begin to see in the statements of leaders in (rural) education various forms of engagement with the historical thinking that informs what has been given as assessment in contemporary education in this part of the (broadly European-derived) world. Here […]
Exploring Assessment 2: The Difficulty and Challenge of Assessment
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Ok, so it looks like we’re on our way! In this step, we ourselves are on the journey of inquiry the educational leaders introduced in the first step of this pathway. So, where do we find ourselves? In questions of the difficulty, its presence and its absence, in assessment in education. A […]
Exploring Assessment 3: Educators Reengaging Assessment
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Here things get tricky! Already, so close to the very outset, our pathway’s mode of (ethical) engagement in education – inquiry – is itself is called into question. Suddenly, the very way we are seeking to re-encounter assessment in education, as something we would wish for students, becomes itself a problem, and a […]
Exploring Assessment 4: Assessment’s “Mysteries” Made Visible
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Inquiry is often spiral, it returns to itself anew. The politics of assessment makes its entry onto this pathway here, as four school principals, and one each of a teacher, a school trustee and a superintendent of schools contribute to our inquiry as it turns outward…outward in place, and outward in time. Some questions to […]
Exploring Assessment 5: The Assessment “Machine” vs “Huge Possibility”
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Moving right along…we’re nearing the end (for now). Here assessment has spilled right out of curriculum altogether, and into questions of teacher and program assessment. Then, after considering assessment and teacher identity and assessment regimes beyond this jurisdiction and their contrast to British Columbia’s, we return to conclude with structural and […]
Exploring Assessment 6 – Coda: On Inexpert Multidisciplinary Assessment Development
Posted on January 27, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Obviously, the smallest step on this pathway needed the biggest name… So here we come to an end of many beginnings, with a coda of a few statements and reflections we could not bear to omit – with regard for some of the commitments to assessment that were shared with us […]
Exploring Engagement in Education
Posted on February 12, 2016 by grahamgilesubc This is our inaugural or pilot exploration in a series of theme-based new pathways in educational change. Rich with insight and story, this sequence is based around curated conversations that explore the theme of engagement in education. The product of collaborative video inquiry, where participants were invited to share in the […]
Exploring Engagement 1 – The “Epidemic of Disengagement”
Posted on February 11, 2016 by grahamgilesubc This startling phrase was a part of the submission for Growing Innovation grant support by the Project Based Learning initiative in British Columbia School District #59 (Dawson Creek). In this first New Pathways instalment of the Exploring Engagement series, we may see in the statements of some of the students, educators […]
Exploring Engagement 2 – Approaches: “We are Fighting for Engagement”
Posted on February 10, 2016 by grahamgilesubc We begin to hear from educators and educational leaders why and how they come to the question of engagement, what approaches they feel it is necessary to take toward it and why. This video presents a diversity of approaches to the question of engagement, each with their own particular implicit views […]
Exploring Engagement 3 – Methods: “Finding Engagement in Education”
Posted on February 9, 2016 by grahamgilesubc This segment of our sequence depicts ways in which engagement is described as found, gained or won. “Finding Engagement” presents a rich diversity of ideas about engagement within descriptions of how engagement is ‘found’ in education. Try to enumerate all the ways “finding engagement” takes place in the accounts of the […]
Exploring Engagement 4 – What is Engagement? “A Powerful Thing has Emerged…”
Posted on February 8, 2016 by grahamgilesubc This video presents educational thought – through the efforts of language of educators, administrators and students – in the process of trying to articulate and identify ‘engagement’ in education. In many ways this is the heart of this particular “Exploring New Pathways…” sequence, for here we see the thing itself, ‘engagement,’ […]
Exploring Engagement 5 – Teacher Engagement: “I didn’t realize what more there was…”
Posted on February 7, 2016 by grahamgilesubc Talk of engagement in Growing Innovation was so abundant that one could not help but notice the artificiality of the division among educators and educated. So often the question of engagement blurred this distinction that the question of teacher engagement itself deserves its own discussion. How do educators and educational leaders […]
Exploring Engagement 6: What Does Engagement Create?
Posted on February 6, 2016 by grahamgilesubc It may seem obvious, or self- evident: Engagement results in learning. But, as it seems from the conversations with an among the participants in the video excerpts presented in this segment, much more may be at stake, perhaps even such that elements of the educational adventure may be subsumed by the […]
Exploring Engagement 7 – Listening to Students
Posted on February 5, 2016 by grahamgilesubc How do students describe engagement? What do students want school to be? What do they not want from school? How is school important to them, and what does this say about them and how we should be with them? What do they say they need, and how does that agree with, […]
Extensions: Pedagogy & Selected Bibliography
Posted on February 4, 2016 by grahamgilesubc Engaging Engagement in Pedagogy and Curriculum Inquiry Here we conclude for now this “Pathway” with the question of engagement about engagement. How can teachers, beginning teachers and student teachers, as well as other educational leaders, perhaps inspired by the voices in the sequence at the heart of this pathway, engage in […]
Exploring Curriculum 1 – Rural Education: A Place of Curriculum in Tension
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Spatial and temporal tensions come to the fore in rural education where the artifice of contemporary education comes more into view—and is more stark in the absence of the urban ubiquity of institutional and administered life. In rural places, educators are seen less able to conform education to its predicates (‘curriculum’ […]
Exploring Curriculum 2 – Curriculum in Place: The Place of Curriculum
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Here we begin see curriculum as something views about which are ‘changing dramatically.’ Something radical is coming into view as educational leaders articulate their work as a kind of dislodging of the authority of ‘Curriculum,’ sometimes in quite stark and even dramatic terms! Educational leaders speak in bold terms that are […]
Exploring Curriculum 3 – Curricular Change: The What and the How
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Sometimes what something is (especially something as complex as curriculum) can come more into focus by attending to how it changes, how its smooth understanding falters, slips and shifts when its authorities become visible, and thus more plastic or malleable. The means by which such transformation is engaged is discourse, or the surfacing what […]
Exploring Curriculum 4 – Responsive Curriculum & Curricular Sacrifice
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Here we move further into the question that has presented itself through this documentation pathway so far: Is there a general orientation toward curriculum being articulated and, if so, what should we call it, and what are its terms? Variously participants articulate here the stakes of curricular innovation in education, on […]
Exploring Curriculum 5 – Accountability, Curriculum & Indetermination
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Since risk (of sacrifice, or some deviation from norms) has stolen into the conversation, we deviate the investigation straight into its important questions. This is necessary especially because so often a reactive moment of rejection (on many grounds) can be sufficient to derail or arrest the first flickers of the impetus to change. […]
Exploring Curriculum 6 – Curricular Innovation & Pedagogy
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Fortunately, the politics of accountability in this case lead us into richer areas of inquiry—often about inquiry itself—as educational leaders undergo the wages of the changes they have touched off, welcomed and defended. Inquiry has been a central pillar of Growing Innovation, and here we see it playing out in diverse, […]
Exploring Curriculum 7 – Teachers Visualizing Curriculum
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Here educators consider what has come of their putting curriculum in question, their setting it aside in favour of generative engagements with the ideas that underwrite it, and their standing for something else or other with their students, colleagues and communities. Limitation, expertise, wellbeing, provisionality, being ‘caught up’ in outcomes or ‘handcuffed’ […]
Exploring Curriculum 8 – Approaches to Curriculum (as Innovation)
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc Affirmation comes thick here: Of curriculum itself as a site of collaborative inquiry – among teachers, with communities and often in the leadership of students. Clarifying this commitment becomes more important as – as we have seen throughout this pathway – the stakes of not doing so are asserted, often as […]
Exploring Curriculum: Gratias & Finis
Posted on July 26, 2018 by grahamgilesubc We are fortunate that conversation about/as curriculum is a wide and deep river in education at present. In the words of those contributing to this documentation’s conversations, it is crucially connected to what educators, students and communities can be with and through education. Transformation certainly appears in deliberate and shared processes, though also […]
