Like many students, I'm not granted the luxury of time free from all commitments after the spring classes finish up. I work in two roles pretty much all year round, and so I worked as usual in the week after finals. Still, I got a great chance to catch up on stuff I've been putting off to survive finals week. What about you? Are you enjoying a summer back home? Are you going somewhere interesting, maybe an internship or a job? Perhaps like me you are taking summer courses here at MSU.
This summer I'm taking TE 302, "Learners and Learning in Contexts" as described by the scheduling tool. While I'm at it, here's the full description of the course from that website.
Role of social context and sociocultural background in learning at the secondary level (7-12). Natural and socially constructed differences among learners. Relationship among subject-specific knowledge, teaching and learning that subject, and the institutional and communal context. Multiple literacies.I'm definitely curious about what kind of course this will be. I've been reading a book called Transforming Teacher Education, which I would recommend that every MSU TE student pick up at some point. The book describes many of the processes and struggles of changing MSU's Teacher Preparation program in the last 15 years, and some of the lessons learnt by those changing it. Specifically though it refers to the efforts of Team One, one of the faculty/staff teams designed to assist a group of preservice elementary teachers. According to the MSU TE website, it looks like those teams have now been revised or streamlined such that maybe there's one elementary team for the Lansing area, a Detroit area elementary team, and the secondary team.
Anyway, the book describes TE 301 as a course for learning about individual learners and trying to get inside their heads; I figured TE 302 would be the same thing, but swapping in older kids. Well, perhaps that was a bad assumption. Yesterday I picked up the books for the course, and one of the two books I found on the shelf is The Dreamkeepers by Gloria Ladson-Billings. We read a few different things by Ladson-Billings in TE 250, and I had even bookmarked The Dreamkeepers on the fantastic NetLibrary service (login through MSU Library electronic resources) to take a look at at some point. The subtitle of the book is "Successful Teachers of African American Children." So maybe I'm wrong about this idea of the course that I had. From what I understand, Ladson-Billings argues for culturally relevant pedagogy, which situates high expectations in culturally-relative contexts. Perhaps, then, TE 302 will be in some ways an extension of TE 250. I'll try and report back, once I'm into the course a little. I do hope that the time I spent reading Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum essay today will be fruitful given the emphasis that the Transforming Teacher Education book places on it; in any case it was certainly an interesting read, and I am left wondering if in addition to Hegelian dialectic Dewey was fond of Aristotelian ethics. We shall see!
One last note before summer classes begin: the first assignment for TE 302 is a presentation on why I am en route to teaching, a subject I do return to now and then. As a debate coach of many years now I will be presenting in simple oral format. While searching for TE 302 information on Google prior to this post, I came across this ultra-charming video on YouTube that from the date seems to be an end-of-semester retrospective on the subject.
I hope to see you around this summer!
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