EDUC.F25

In this course, we will practice learning directly from being with young people and educators in their schools by engaging with presence, through connection and by the light of the knowledge and questions emerging through them. We will build skills and resources for interaction and imagination that help us disconnect from limiting frameworks and draw on enabling ones. In this process, we will examine how to move past idealized, decontextualized images of individual success that can readily (re)produce stress, division, and disengagement and instead cultivate ways - ideas and skills – to foster, protect, and celebrate what Machada de Oliveira calls “relational rigor” in learning through community.

Each week you will visit SLA Beeber or Davenport Elementary. You will also be in a mentoring relationship with a student from another Education course. These two aspects of field work will be central in the course.

We will read 5 books, with associated materials, and you will complete one main project during each month of the course, with smaller assignments along the way.

Class meetings will encompass field-focused, study-focused, and project-focused work with ongoing attention to sustaining a generative, challenging, and supportive learning course community.