Last week I was given an assignment in my Fourth year French course: give a multi-media presentation on anything dealing with the Beur subculture, anything which will then be the basis of your other two summative assessments. This assignment seems great right? You can be creative, inquiry driven and be guided by passion, interest. Yet, I have been uninspired, unable to come up with a topic, not really knowing where to start.
It seems that I have been stumped by the traditional model of education, a model that endorses teacher-directed learning that is rooted within a prescribed curriculum. I am so used to fitting into perimeters and memorizing directed knowledge (also known as the banking model of eduation), that I have fallen into the category of a strategic learner--one who completes educational tasks and engages in learning with the goal of academic success--lacking the ability to search for knowledge based on my intrinsic desire to learn, to question.
Readcwbooks.com
As a prospective teacher, this truth both saddens and upsets me. Current literature and educational trends propose a shift in the classroom paradigm to student-directed, inquiry-based learning, in which students are engaged in the learning process by learning about what interests them. Students are to be encouraged to question, to formulate the desire to learn based on individual passions. The "Be's" of education and desired twenty-first century skills emphasize creativity and creative thought, yet this is something that my traditional education has not equipped me to intrinsically exert.
corsame.com
I want my future students to be deep learners, learners who care about learning to feed a desire to learn. But how can a modern breed of teachers inspire something that they themselves have not learnt through their educational endeavours? This is an issue that troubles me, but I am glad that I am able to confront these issues and reflect upon them now, giving myself time to refine my teaching pedagogy before entering the classroom. I know now, that an important facet of my teaching pedagogy will be inspiring creativity and self-regulated thought in the classroom: I want my students to be motivated and engaged to learn when they are given a self-directed project, not lost and flustered like I currently find myself to be in my endeavour. In order to do this, I need to implement activities that frame the student in the middle of the classroom paradigm, encouraging student-directed, inquiry-based learning, something simple like allowing students to choose their essay topic for English class as opposed to merely prescribing it is a way to implement this paradigm, allowing students to be guided by their own questions. This, too, underscores the importance that teachers are never a master, but are always a student: it is important that teachers accommodate new literature and educational pedagogies that were not available or applied in the contemporary classroom in order to engage in a progressive form of education.
One activity that I plan to use in my future classroom to promote student-driven, inquiry-based education that I have learnt about in my teacher-education courses is Genius Hour, a creative place where students create work based on their own ponderings, an activity that engages in the twenty-first century "Be" of creativity:
Kesler, Chris. What is Genius Hour? An Introduction to Genius Hour in the Classroom. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQUtHsWhc.
No comments:
Post a Comment