Short read
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A reflective piece from Fr Colin. From 2012 to 2016 I was privileged to be a parish priest in NZ. Our three children attended school there, and on the wall of my son’s class – front and centre – his teacher had placed a mere. The mere is a short, broad-bladed weapon used to strike an…
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This article was written by Femi Adeniran. You can hear more from Femi on the popular podcast, Beyond Good, available via all major streaming platforms. The modelling phases of a lesson are my favourite. We can talk endlessly about retrieving previous knowledge through quizzing, no hands-up policies, and think-pair-share strategies, but ultimately, the success of…
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“One challenge facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. We must address education’s role in encouraging students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of…
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Knowledge trickled down to us from the West and we paid respectful homage to every printed word that bore a Western name. When we did not understand something— and there was a lot that did not make sense— we blamed ourselves for our lack of knowledge. Thus a canon made mostly of ahistorical and apolitical…
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This article was written by Aled Hanson The cultural phenomena of ‘memes’ is relatively recent. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ‘The Selfish Gene’ in order to describe a unit of cultural information spread by imitation. Even Dawkins couldn’t have predicted the significance this term would take on decades later,…
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Assuming that education should be emancipatory rather than dogmatic and dictatorial, below I present a case for why rebelling against yourself and the status quo is pedagogically valuable to both students and the teaching profession. What I say by the way of providing context may seem oversimplified and perhaps even radical in tone. Such is…
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A reflective piece from Megan Hamilton Any person who’s spent time with a young person knows that they are temperamental and emotional bottles of hormones and insecurities. Now imagine that you’re a temperamental and emotional bottle of hormones and insecurities and your entire life is screaming at you that being straight and cisgender is the…
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In a recent post I described critical literacy as ‘a radically interrogatory, disruptive approach to reading and listening’ and explored James Damico’s (2012) suggested methodology of reading with and against a risky stories to promote it. Though, it would be remiss of me to imply that Damico’s methodology alone functions to this end. Below I…
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“[E]ducation is not about filling a bucket but about lighting a fire.” Gert Biesta paraphrasing W.B. Yeats. Freire’s call for teachers to engage their students in a process of conscientização— of awakening their ‘critical consciousness’ so that they might confront and react to the socio-political realities of themselves and others, the injustices in which they…
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Being warm/strict as a teacher is part of a methodology which, if executed correctly, makes clear to students the expected classroom culture, behaviours and etiquette, and holds them to those expectations unwaveringly. This isn’t ‘strictness’ in the sense that one must be or pose as a dominator. No. Severus Snape was way out of line.…
Megapedagogy 