Who, what & why

 My Final Vision: the audience

Who is the audience? Where will it live? Why am I doing it?

A quick reminder for those keeping track at home, I was originally planning to splash out with some fancy final artifact around artificial intelligence and tech when we first started constructing our learning in this course. Oh, how the aged have fallen! This is how I felt when I started diving into these topics:

And while I think I look pretty cute in that outfit, I knew that this was not how I wanted to feel as I created meaning from my learning. I can acknowledge that I am not yet ready to create an inspirational video or reel or other high tech, social media based final product as I had intended. I decided to go back to my roots and create something that has meaning for me. After all, we are building our own understanding and the final artifact needs to represent that, in an intentional form that can be used and not just sit on a shelf and look pretty (hello Masters Thesis!)

To that end, I am collaborating with my teacher-librarian to create a novel study/inquiry project based on the creationist model. I am still very much a classroom teacher and I need to be using my own learning to help and improve the learning and development of students in my classroom. I am creating a unit that focuses on the content of my department along with the resources of the Learning Commons. I greatly value collaboration and the educational impact it has on professional development so this is an ideal final artifact for me and my skills. 

Why this method? Because I need my learning to have classroom value and meaning at this point. I'm a busy working mom and everything I engage in has to do double duty. So a project of this magnitude and time needs to have classroom potential.  And I think that collaboration and supporting teachers like me to ease into new ways of teaching and thinking will be what I spend the majority of my time doing once I get my own learning commons.  

Who is it For? and what is it good for?  

This artifact is largely for me but since I like to share, it will be available for my department and other teachers in the school through the TL Teams page and my own department Teams page. And since I will be posting it here, I guess it's for anyone interested enough to search this blog out. 

Ideally, it will be an opportunity for teachers who are looking for change to find a ready made option that will help them out of their comfort zone and into something a bit different. Maybe a little newer, a with a hint more technology and out of the box skill development. When we allow people to take baby steps of change, they are more likely to stay on the path to a new developed understanding or improved way of doing something. To create a ridiculous allusion that offers the opportunity for a little chuckle: 

If you want someone to get on the bus, you gotta stop the bus and let them on. Not everyone is Keanu Reeves, willing to jump onto what they perceive is a runaway bus with a bomb on it. 

Oh, and it's for students. Them too. Here's what I've written so far as my rationale:

This unit is being created to use in conjunction with grade 11 and 12 ELA and EFP courses. These courses are composed of a wide range of students whose skills, interests and engagement capacities are diverse and require differentiation and adaptation. These are required courses for graduation, so the class expectations have been described as needing “low floors and high ceilings”. The foundation of inquiry intended here will be one of a creationist perspective that will allow for the inclusion of non-colonizer learning models, with a direct relation to the First People’s Principles of Learning and puts the student in charge of their own learning. A constructionist perspective aligns closely with Indigenous ways of knowing in that both stand on the premise that people build knowledge from what they already know, learning is both a social and active process that is defined by the learner and their environment. For this inquiry unit, students will be creating their own learning by accessing the unit’s curated text set/bin offerings, engaging in social discourse regarding the materials and ultimately designing their own artifact or project that reflects their learning and new understanding. Ziegelman (2018) argues that, “constructivism “encourages the construction of a social context in which collaboration creates a sense of community, and that teachers and students are active participants in the learning process” (Tam, 2000, p.51). Students learn through interacting with peers and sharing their knowledge.”

Fancy pedagogical jargon that really says to support students' learning where they are and in a social way that allows them to construct their own knowledge. 

And now, back to artifact creation!

References

https://www.wgu.edu/blog/what-constructivism2005.html#close

Donham, J. (2013). Text sets, deep learning, and the Common Core. School Library Monthly 29(6): 5-7

“EFP 12.” Area of Learning: EFP 12, Ministry of Education, 2018, www.curriculum.gov.bc.ca/.

Tam, M. (2000). Constructivism, instructional design, and technology: Implications for transforming distance learning. Educational Technology & Society, 3(2), 50-60.

Zigelman, Ilana. “Chapter 1: Learning Theories and Models.” TECHNOLOGY AND THE CURRICULUM: SUMMER 2018, Power Learning Solutions, 2018, https://pressbooks.pub/techandcurriculum/front-matter/introduction/.