Inquiry Opps: a week of curriculum learning

This week I’ve been taking my ELA accreditation. I came in expecting to be challenged. I also came in uncertain what we’d actually be doing. I’m moving schools in the fall. This week, Miranda, the senior Math/Science teacher, is taking her accreditation as well. This morning we had an activity to plan an inquiry unit – Yah, I know. The… (read more)

Opening Doors

Stories Matter. Lately I’ve been studying the work of Thomas King. He asserts, and I agree with him, that once a story is heard, it cannot be unheard. Yet there is more to the ‘cannot be unheard-conversation.’ Certainly, in King’s work he digs deeper. In classrooms, however, though stories are heard, they are often made silent or kept hidden. I… (read more)

Greg’s How? – A Guest Post

Friday was my last bus trip with the senior basketball team. Greg, the grade 3, 4, & 5 teacher at the school, is the coach; I just kinda tag along because, although we are a ‘senior boys’ team made of two schools and many kids, hence the ‘need’ for both a male and female supervisor.  I’ve miss coaching basketball this… (read more)

Verb? Chatting with Zac

Stories are complex; “They are beautiful” (Lugones, 1987). Recently I was chatting with Zac Chase. During our conversation for #LearningGrounds he asked a few questions. I stammered while I answered some questions, yet others I answered well enough. However, when we were done chatting, I had the feeling that I had sounded like a text book. I don’t like jargon,… (read more)

Stories Need Attending

A month ago I wrote about a poem I had previously shared with my grad-writing group and had received little feedback. Later, an instructor, suggested, “It is an interrupted narrative that metacommunicates about its own limits and explodes conventions of pedagogy by falling silent at the very moment a conclusion is expected” (Ellsworth, 2005). Though I feel she was being… (read more)

Conversations: A Curriculum of Lives

Last week was exam week. I teach students in the senior English Language Arts. I don’t assign traditional final exams. Around here, we have conversations. Don’t get me wrong. Students in my classes still learn the necessary skills. They know how to write essays, craft solid topic sentences and weave together persuasive arguments. These are skills. We practice skills often… (read more)

Stories to Live By (Stories to Leave By)

Every other Tuesday I attend a writing/story group. Attendance isn’t a requirement of my graduate work, but yet I feel it is a useful space to share stories with other grad students who tend to have a relational narrative way of living and being with the world. Along with my instructor, there are six of us. Everyone shares.   Last Tuesday… (read more)

Indifference to Stories

A couple days ago I asked my online network to push back and wonder along with me about the “insistence in schooling spaces to choose only to listen to the easy, accessible and gentle stories.” None of you replied. Sure. Perhaps it’s because I’ve a rather small blog following, but I don’t think that’s the only reason. I tweeted the… (read more)

Attending to the Messy Ones

“[W]hen the words form I am merely retelling the same story in different patterns,” (King,  2003, p. 2). This past year I’ve been thinking deeply about story; this is what my Dad calls ‘storying’ – the process of living with narratives and attending to the lives of those we love  – and storying is messy. And I’m tired too. Storying… (read more)

Cinema Stories

It’s nearing close on winter break. I have been reading my twitter feed. Often, this time of year I have read about peoples’ tensions about businesses staying open. But it was open movie cinemas and late-night coffee shops that were family to my Dad while he was in his teens. It was these places that mattered during the long days… (read more)
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