Meeting+Summary+Jan+27

**Wednesday, January 27, 2010**
Our first meeting was an opportunity for us both to organize ourselves for the task facing us and to get to know one another through an exploration of our personal views on key concepts related to our work.

We asked ourselves:

What is theory?

What is curriculum?

What is pedagogy?

Not surprisingly our discussions led us into a sharing and comparing of what is happening in our own classrooms and how we experience these three key concepts. And this, of course, led to further questions. For example, we wondered how theory has come to be seen as impractical or not related to reality. "Theory is seen as 'too out there.'" We wondered how we build connections between theory and practice.

Our discussion of curriculum was particularly lively. It began with one of us commenting that curriculum "is a rock around my neck." This led us to discuss different ways of conceptualizing curriculum. We talked about emergent curriculum and wondered if " we need a broader view of curriculum? Shouldn't we understand curriculum as something broader than a checklist of expectations? how can we transform our ideas about curriculum?" We referred to the BSS graduate profile and wondered about its relationship to curriculum.

Regarding pedagogy, we noted that sometimes the word is associated with "the ivory tower" and that the notion of pedagogy is often not viewed as either practical nor pragmatic. We wondered if we need a more straightforward definition of pedagogy that sees pedagogy as "a way of doing things" and "knowledge of the child."

We planned out our first steps. We will begin by reading and discussing the work of some of the key theorists and educational researchers. We are all undertaking a reading from The Hundred Languages of Children (see What we're reading) and individual members have volunteered to lead presentations and discussions on Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky.