DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Practice of Practicum:

  • Experienced teachers study theories and practices of working with diverse student populations and apply their own expertise in their practices of teaching and curriculum development.
  • Writing is conceived of as "epistemological experience" rather than "instrumental skill" (Mountz et al p. 1241)
  • I like challenge my students with diverse readings that focus on a central issue or theme that challenges how they view the world and how they can write about it. The key focus is to remember that what they are doing is art and how we can use the questions we have to help investigate the art of what we do.
    • Investigation of history and storytelling

      • We read Kant’s “Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective” to frame our discussion of teleological, straight time/history and Walter Benjamin’s “Theses Concerning the Philosophy of History” and “The Storyteller” to complicate how we experience time, encounter history, and what transformations happen to both when we recount these experiences.

    • Power of dreams and dreamvisions

      • Used a collection of spiritual and psychological conceptions of dreams in order to create our own theory of them and their importance for understanding and interpreting our reality. The culminating project was for students to write their own dreamvisions where they must estrange us from common concepts that we hold in order to really think about them. We used Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies as a guide to help write our own dream visions.

    • The Promise of Happiness

      • We used Sara Ahmed’s book The Promise of Happiness to explore what happiness means. The final project was to critically engage with a chapter in Ahmed's book to explain her understanding of happiness and to challenge or expand on it.
    • Hauntology

        • This class focuses on Derrida’s theory about being haunted where specters live both in the past and future and affect how we interpret our present and how we envision the future. The goal of the course is to use hauntology as a frame with which to read The Castle of Otronto and write our own ghost stories where we are haunted by something in the world.
    • Meghan Kelsey's assignment

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.