Guess what I ate!

I got the key to my office today, then met with Dr. Ollie-Pekka Moisio regarding our joint interests in critical pedagogy.   Dr. Moisio has written extensively on the topic; the focus of our talk was about how to implement CP.  Too often the role of critical pedagogy is limited to analysis and complaint, but often fails to suggest means to speak to power; to engage students in humane ways that facilitate transformative learning. We shared our means for engaging students. Dr. Moisio advocates use of “student circles” which are very similar to the sort of plan my son, Ian, uses in teaching his philosophy classes. Herein, groups are formed, and roles assigned to entail responsibility (recorder,  timer, monitor, etc.), questions provided to lead students to perspectives and insights, presentation of ideas).  I talked about my extensive use of contracts or task choices in my courses to facilitate personal interest and engagement.

We spent time discussing my efforts to develop a third dimension of “culture / discipline”  drawn from the literature as it broadly speaks to explorations of what constitutes a “discipline” or “intellectual clan”; the languages of such groups and the function of those languages to accomplishing tasks or limiting membership and staking out locations of power.  This third dimension will shift analysis of instructional design from a plane plotting framing and classification decisions to a more complex analysis grounding those decisions guided by disciplinary habitus.  Click here to see a rudimentary visual version of the model.

Lunch was extraordinarily delicious and unique (for me).  Check your guess by clicking here.  Is that what you were thinking?  The dish was “Game soup” of meat, potato, carrot, onion, peppercorn, and some herbs; the soup was accompanied with homemade Finnish rye bread.  Extremely simple and  delicious.  I’m still thinking about it!