Dispositional Tuning: Reflecting the Change
Presented by: Dr. Vandy Britton (Program Coordinator) & Jonathan Vervaet (Faculty Associate)
WestCAST 2014 – February 20th, 2014
What characteristics of mind / thought are most
valuable in effective teachers?
Four Guiding Dipositions of Professional Programs
at Simon Fraser University (Smith, 2004)
Pedagogical Sensitivity – understanding the primacy of the adult/child
relationship, its ethical underpinnings, and its institutional forms.
Other Directedness – understanding the community basis to
learning, the service orientation to teaching, and the requisite openness
to diversity, difference, or otherness in education.
Reflective Capacity – understanding the ways and means of grasping the significance of teaching situations and events.
Critical Mindedness – understanding the problematic nature of teaching practice.
Pedagogical Sensitivity Other Directedness Reflective Capacity
Critical Mindedness
Student Teacher Admissions&
Hiring Faculty Associates
Multiple Perspectives:
A Reflection on Experiences in the
Professional Development Program
Interwoven Experiences
Student Teachers & Faculty Associates
Personal Reflection and Reflexivity
Learning about, learning with, learning from.
Cognitive Dissonance: Disrupting the Integrity of Taken for Granted Assumptions.
The Ripple Effect of Helping New Teachers Become Proficient in the Dispositions
…in terms of the orientation of the PDP, "[r]eflection is seen as central...being viewed not as a
generic disposition but as a primary organizing principle in
the program's renewal.”
Peter Grimmett (1995) "Inquiring into teacher education" in Collaborative research in teacher education: the SFU
experience (pg. 165)
Developing the Critically Reflective Capacity in the Maple Ridge /
Mission Module
The habit of critical reflection is crucial for teacher’s survival.
- Stephen Brookfield (1995)
Research QuestionHow will modeling critical mindedness and critical reflection lead me to a deeper awareness of my own educational assumptions, and support beginning teachers in making connections between a critical examination of theoretically informed, evidence based teaching practices and their own pedagogical understandings and emerging teaching paradigms?
A critical self
awareness of our
pedagogical
assumptions…
Critical reflection compels us to bring our previous experiences to the uncovering of new
truths.
What lies below the surface, effects the
surface.
Personal Reflection
and Reflexivity by All Members
of the PDP Community
Recursive Nature of Inquiry and
Critical Reflection
"Already we are disposed towards inquiry. It is all about cultivating mindfulness in the
work we do. Certainly there is no point promoting a form of inquiry that merely
places additional demands upon people's time and commitment; rather our intention
should be to press beyond a reflective agenda that adds to the busywork of teachers and to encourage a bodily
reflection that strives to articulate the meanings of the practices in which we are engaged, and in that articulation, further
inform those practices.”
- Stephen Smith Bearing of Inquiry...
“(t)hrough the development of the critical reflective capacity student
teachers will be able to clearly articulate their teaching philosophies
and begin to understand how an informed examination of practice can, and should be, a normative condition
of teaching.”
- Jonathan Vervaet
…in the face of educational change
me.
"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We learn by going where we have to go.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Through a continuing reconstruction of self through a variety of experiences with our medium and ourselves, we can come to understand ourselves,
our motivations.
I was with it down there… but I just couldn’t see
it.
“For the moment when something collapses it is intensely disappointing… each time, though, I got to know the stone a little more. It got higher each time. So it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone… and that is one of the things my art is trying to do. I obviously don’t understand it well enough… yet.”
- Andy Goldsworthy
Failure, reiteration, recursion are all fundamentally
important to my work as Faculty
Associate as they are to my research and my discovery
of self.
Just as a performer receives feedback from the audience, the reactions of those I am in performance with provide me
feedback about how I am defining and performing my role as teacher, as a person.
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals who can go it alone.
- M. Wheatley
Reflection in and of itself is not enough; it
must always be linked to how the world can be changed” (Brookfield,
1995)
Be the change
you want to
see in the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi
How might reflecting on the dispositions, and
using them as springboards to critically
examine our own practices as educators,
develop our actual capacity in them as
educators and human beings?
How do we begin to define or shape our personal and
professional identities through contemplating
these dispositions?
In what ways do these dispositions play a role in how one defines what it
means to ‘be teacher?’
Choose one of the dispositions that you connect with on a personal or
professional level.
Reflect on how this disposition might impact your personal or professional
identity.
Pedagogical Sensitivity Other Directedness Reflective Capacity
Critical Mindedness
Ticket Out the Door: An idea I want to inquire into /
reflect on further is…
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