1. Educational Philosophy:
What do YOU believe?
Inspiration Clip
Imagine: Playing for Change
Julie Machnaik, ECS100, Fall 2014

2. Journey for Today
To reflect on how we learn & respect how others may learn differently
To explore our educational philosophy
To see how beliefs are connected to own experience, own way of knowing
To begin to build “I BELIEVE…” statements (for portfolio)
To understand educational philosophy orientations
To link educational philosophy to upcoming field experience (where beliefs may be challenged, validated, strengthened, weakened)
To reflect on messages from educational philosophers
To understand educational philosophy as a journey of looking back…looking here…looking between and looking within…

3. I Believe... On a blank piece of paper, write the words I Believe...
2. As you listen to today’s lecture, reflect on your own experiences and beliefs about teaching and learning.
3. Jot down words, phrases that resonate with you.
Your beliefs are emerging...
Continue adding to your “I Believe” page throughout semester – page for your Professional Portfolio

4. educational philosophy?
What do I believe about teaching and learning?
What do I believe about students?
How do I view knowledge?
What do I think should be taught?
What knowledge is worth knowing?
What IS my
educational philosophy?
Julie Anne Park, UofR, First year field experience, 1999

5. “We cannot understand schools today without a look at what they were yesterday.”
Becoming a Teacher, 2012, p. 60

6. Annie Kinghorn, Grandmother Attended Normal School in 1916
Go to her house after school, play school on the Writing desk
She told me that someday that desk would be mine - it is in my living room
Always told me I had a gift - to teach
Aoki views teaching as a calling and speaks of the voices of teaching - my presentation is about the voices of teaching and seeking to understand the ‘live’ in lived experiences of teaching
Annie Kinghorn, Grandmother
Attended Normal School in 1916
Regina, Saskatchewan
One-room Schoolhouse:
Rocanville, Saskatchewan

7. Essential characteristics of the teacher:
instructional efficiency
technical knowledge and skills (with well thought out lesson plans)
physical efficiency (all teachers should be beautiful with no physical abnormalities or weaknesses)
efficiency in control (because disorder means idleness and good discipline is the foundation of moral training)
social quality (to know how to act and who to socialize with in the community)
professional spirit and enthusiasm
high personal character
mechanical proficiency where the "ability to stand at the blackboard and impress instruction by illustrative drawing is always a source of power in the teacher”
Normal School, School Management (1912) textbook

8. 1924 Classroom - 3 uncles sitting in back
I realized that I had been influenced by professional women in my family - aunts, grandmother, piano teacher (aunt) This was a career that I could do.
Foucault - Prisons and
Panoptican gaze
1924 Classroom - 3 uncles sitting in back

9. Birtle Residential School Video Clip
Residential Schools YouTube
Note: Youtube video links at top
Laurene Harrison (mother), Residential School Cook, Birtle, Manitoba,

10. Julie Anne Park
Grade One
1964

11. Community of Learners: My Best Teachers
We have to use imagination to see inbetween spaces - this is the productive possibility
Huebner says, we must surpass technical foundations of education - requires historical awareness of where we once were, sensitivity to present problems, resistances and binds and openness to future possibilities
Community of Learners: My Best Teachers

12. University of Regina, Faculty of Education 3rd Year Pre-interns, Fall 2009

13. Northern Experiences in Nunavut

15. So what would this LOOK like?
Photo
Gallery

16. The Fun Theory
Piano Steps

17. Different Learners…Different Needs…
Who are you as ‘learner’?

18. Different Learners…Different Needs… Who are you as ‘learner’?
Beachball
Clipboard
Microscope
Puppy

19. What do I believe about teaching and learning?
What do I believe about students?
How do I view knowledge?
What do I think should be taught? What knowledge is worth knowing?
What IS my educational philosophy?

20. What is an Educational Philosophy?
Educational philosophy is:
a way not only of looking at ideas, but also of learning how to use ideas in better ways. (Ozman & Craver, 1999)
a set of beliefs about how human beings learn and grow and what one should learn in order to follow a successful path

21. Turn n’ Talk: What Do YOU Think
Turn n’ Talk: What Do YOU Think? What determines your educational philosophy?
Some teachers believe that philosophical reflections have nothing to contribute to the actual set of teaching…what do YOU think?
Some teachers feel that teaching, because it is concerned with what ought to be, is an essentially philosophical enterprise…what do YOU think?
Your behavior as a teacher is strongly connected to your personal values and your beliefs about teaching and learning, students, knowledge and what is worth knowing…hmm…teacher 24 hours a day on the outside and inside??

22. What do YOU believe? Learning experiences? About teaching
and learning?
About what knowledge is worth knowing?
Learning environment?
Purpose of schools and schooling?
About Students?
Teacher role?
This Is The Classroom (STF)
View “A Day in the Life” videos

23. 5 Philosophical Orientations to Teaching
Perennialism
Essentialism
Progressivism
Existentialism
Social Reconstructionism

24. Perennialism Views truth as constant (or perennial)
Aim of education is to ensure students acquire specific knowledge
Stresses arts and sciences
Learn about laws of motion rather than build a model
Focuses on significant works created rather than real world events or student interest

25. Essentialism Conservative philosophy
Believes in a core of common knowledge to be transmitted in a disciplined manner
Focuses on the basics
Schooling should be practical, focus on order
Schools should NOT try to challenge social policies
Little possibility of change

26. Progressivism Education focuses on the child, not the subject
John Dewey (1920’s and 30’s) father of progressive education, “Learning is doing”
Content derived from students’ interests
Integrating thinking, feeling, and doing
Learning is active, not passive
Solve problems by reflecting on own experiences
Teachers begin where students are at
Teacher serves as a guide, a facilitator

27. Existentialism Focuses on the experiences of the individual
Offers students a way of thinking about own life
Emphasizes creative choice
Maxine Greene (1995), “We have to know about our lives, clarify our situations, if we are to understand the world from our shared standpoints”
Requires students to ask own questions, to conduct own inquiries, to draw own conclusions.

28. Social Reconstructionism
Schools should take the lead to reconstruct society primary
Ties to progressive philosophy
Believe in bringing the community into the classroom
Learning experiences involve opportunities to interact with people beyond the four walls (field trips, community-based projects)
Critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire) – students must question and challenge ‘common’ beliefs & practices (Banking metaphor=School)

29. How can Educational Philosophers guide our journey?
Inukshuk in Pangnirtung, Nunavut (or Pang, also ᐸᖕᓂᖅᑑᖅ)

30. Huebner’s Messages: We must surpass technical foundations of education
We require historical awareness of:
where we once were
sensitivity to present problems, resistances and binds
and openness to future possibilities
Dwayne E. Huebner’s ( ) Philosopher of education and curriculum theorist

31. What are/should be the purposes of education?
Poses Questions:
What are/should be the purposes of education?
Who does/should control education?
What do/should children learn?
What relationship do/should schools play with respect to society and justice?
Banking education to problem-posing education
Critical pedagogy
Freire's revolutionary pedagogy starts from a deep love for, and humility before, poor and oppressed people and a respect for their "common sense," which constitutes a knowledge no less important than the scientific knowledge of the professional. This humility makes possible a condition of reciprocal trust and communication between the educator, who also learns, and the student, who also teaches. Thus, education becomes a "communion" between participants in a dialogue characterized by a reflexive, reciprocal, and socially relevant exchange, rather than the unilateral action of one individual agent for the benefit of the other. Nevertheless, this does not amount to a celebration of the untrammeled core of consciousness of the oppressed, in which the educator recedes into the background as a mere facilitator. Freire conceived of authentic teaching as enacting a clear authority, rather than being authoritarian. The teacher, in his conception, is not neutral, but intervenes in the educational situation in order to help the student to overcome those aspects of his or her social constructs that are paralyzing, and to learn to think critically. In a similar fashion, Freire validated and affirmed the experiences of the oppressed without automatically legitimizing or validating their content. All experiences–including those of the teacher–had to be interrogated in order to lay bare their ideological assumptions and presuppositions. The benchmark that Freire used for evaluating experiences grew out of a Christianized Marxist humanism. From this position, Freire urged both students and teachers to unlearn their race, class, and gender privileges and to engage in a dialogue with those whose experiences are very different from their own. Thus, he did not uncritically affirm student or teacher experiences but provided the conceptual tools with which to critically interrogate them so as to minimize their politically domesticating influences.
Banking education. Freire criticized prevailing forms of education as reducing students to the status of passive objects to be acted upon by the teacher. In this traditional form of education it is the job of the teacher to deposit in the minds of the students, considered to be empty in an absolute ignorance, the bits of information that constitute knowledge. Freire called this banking education. The goal of banking education is to immobilize the people within existing frameworks of power by conditioning them to accept that meaning and historical agency are the sole property of the oppressor. Educators within the dominant culture and class fractions often characterize the oppressed as marginal, pathological, and helpless. In the banking model, knowledge is taken to be a gift that is bestowed upon the student by the teacher. Freire viewed this false generosity on the part of the oppressor–which ostensibly aims to incorporate and improve the oppressed–as a crucial means of domination by the capitalist class. The indispensable soil of good teaching consists of creating the pedagogical conditions for genuine dialogue, which maintains that teachers should not impose their views on students, but neither should they camouflage them nor drain them of political and ethical import.
Conceptual Tools
Problem-posing method. Against the banking model, Freire proposed a dialogical problem-posing method of education. In this model, the teacher and student become co-investigators of knowledge and of the world. Instead of suggesting to students that their situation in society has been transcendentally fixed by nature or reason, as the banking model does, Freire's problem-posing education invites the oppressed to explore their reality as a "problem" to be transformed. The content of this education cannot be determined necessarily in advance, through the expertise of the educator, but must instead arise from the lived experiences or reality of the students. It is not the task of the educator to provide the answer to the problems that these situations present, but to help students to achieve a form of critical thinking (or conscientization) that will make possible an awareness of society as mutable and potentially open to transformation. Once they are able to see the world as a transformable situation, rather than an unthinkable and inescapable stasis, it becomes possible for students to imagine a new and different reality.
In order, however, to undertake this process, the oppressed must challenge their own internalization of the oppressor. The oppressed are accustomed to thinking of themselves as "less than." They have been conditioned to view as complete and human only the dominating practices of the oppressor, so that to fully become human means to simulate these practices. Against a "fear of freedom" that protects them from a cataclysmic reorganization of their being, the oppressed in dialogue engage in an existential process of dis-identifying with "the oppressor housed within." This dis-identification allows them to begin the process of imagining a new being and a new life as subjects of their own history.
Culture circle. The concrete basis for Freire's dialogical system of education is the culture circle, in which students and coordinator together discuss generative themes that have significance within the context of students' lives. These themes, which are related to nature, culture, work, and relationships, are discovered through the cooperative research of educators and students. They express, in an open rather than propagandistic fashion, the principle contradictions that confront the students in their world. These themes are then represented in the form of codifications (usually visual representations) that are taken as the basis for dialogue within the circle. As students decode these representations, they recognize them as situations in which they themselves are involved as subjects. The process of critical consciousness formation is initiated when students learn to read the codifications in their situationality, rather than simply experiencing them, and this makes possible the intervention by students in society. As the culture circle comes to recognize the need for print literacy, the visual codifications are accompanied by words to which they correspond. Students learn to read these words in the process of reading the aspects of the world with which they are linked.
Although this system of codifications has been very successful in promoting print literacy among adult students, Freire always emphasized that it should not be approached mechanically, but rather as a process of creation and awakening of consciousness. For Freire, it is a mistake to speak of reading as solely the decoding of text. Rather, reading is a process of apprehending power and causality in society and one's location in it. Awareness of the historicity of social life makes it possible for students to imagine its re-creation. Literacy is thus a "self-transformation producing a stance of intervention" (Freire 1988, p. 404). Literacy programs that appropriate parts of Freire's method while ignoring the essential politicization of the process of reading the world as a limit situation to be overcome distort and subvert the process of literacy education. For Freire, authentic education is always a "practice of freedom" rather than an alienating inculcation of skills.
Read more: Paulo Freire (1921–1997) - Conceptual Tools, Philosophy of Education, Criticism - Students, Social, World, and Process - StateUniversity.com
Paulo Freire ( )
Critical Pedagogy
Shortly before his death, Paulo Freire is reported to have said: “I could never think of education without love and that is why I think I am an educator, first of all because I feel love.”

32. Father of Progressive Education
John Dewey
Truth as process of discovery
Education and learning are social & interactive
Hands-on, experiential learning
School is a social institution where social reform can and should take place
Project Based Learning (PBL) students as active researchers...“Learning is doing”
“We need to prepare our students for their future, not our present or our past”
“Give students something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results!”
John Dewey: His Life and Work
Today, scholars, educators and activists are rediscovering Dewey’s work and exploring its relevance to a “postmodern” age, an age of global capitalism and breathtaking cultural change, and an age in which the ecological health of the planet itself is seriously threatened. We are finding that although Dewey wrote a century ago, his insights into democratic culture and meaningful education suggest hopeful alternatives to the regime of standardization and mechanization that more than ever dominate our schools.
(1859 – 1952)
Father of Progressive Education

33. Maxine Greene Experiential learning Imagination Arts Making meaning
“We can't separate imagination from the ethical, the political, the social...it is our opening to what is not yet, what might be, new possibilities...“
Experiential learning
Imagination
Arts
Making meaning
A way of making sense of the world
Ask questions, take action
Inside the Academy:
Maxine Greene
(Maxine Greene, )
Educational philosopher, author, social activist and teacher
Releasing the Imagination (1995) by Maxine Greene
Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change

34. Nel Noddings
Known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care.
Makes distinction between natural caring and ethical caring
Educating the ‘whole’ child
Centred around happiness
Build community of learners
Books:
The Challenge to Care in Schools (1992)
Happiness & Education (2003)
Educating Citizens for Global Awareness (2005)
Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach. (2006)
When I care for someone because "I want" to care, say I hug a friend who needs hugging in an act of love, Noddings claims that I am engaged in natural caring.
When I care for someone because "I must" care, say I hug an acquaintance who needs hugging in spite of my desire to escape that person's pain, according to Noddings, I am engaged in ethical caring.
Ethical caring occurs when a person acts caringly out of a belief that caring is the appropriate way of relating to people.
( )
American feminist, educationalist & philosopher
Nel Noddings YouTube

35. Reflections...Revisit…Rethink…Respond
Why do you want to become a teacher?
What is the importance of self-knowledge?
How does self-knowledge inform what we believe about teaching and learning?
How do our school experiences shape what we believe?
What do our own life stories have to tell us about who we are today and who we may become as ‘teacher’
What is YOUR story?