Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. – John Dewey
I believe that the educational experience of the curriculum is both lived (currere; Pinar, 1975; 2015) and living (agency; Bandura, 1986; 2006). I use the term education here in the broadest sense – as an enlightening experience necessarily unbundled from schooling – expanding its meaning to include all aspects of life experience. Thus, my interdisciplinary philosophy of education forms the foundation of all aspects of my scholarship, encompassing my approach to research, teaching, and community service. My approach to teaching emerges from the principles of lived experience and personal, social and collective agency in learning. As such, I value and place a particular emphasis on pedagogical approaches to:
- Learner agency and choice, particularly as it relates to the learning context, subject content, and assessment strategies;
- Co-creation of learning from and through lived experiences;
- Media literacy and the democratization of knowledge structures through learning technology;
- Learning environments and the psychosocial impact across physical and virtual spaces; and
- Critical application of technology in applied design, STEM, health, and medical education.
As a reflexive capability, individuals as agents consciously choose to influence and reflect on their actions to change a course of action intentionally. Empowering individuals to engage in the learning process actively makes my courses, my mentorship, my community engagement a lived experience, and is thus more responsive, reflexive, dynamic, and collaborative. As a teacher-educator, I collaborate with my students as they transition from the mindset of a student to one as an educator. Together we engage in a cycle of inquiry in which they bring their own lived experiences. As they engage with topics within the broader teacher education program, I help them uncover what they value in their practice. I approach my work with them as a mentor and colleague, providing leadership and guidance as they discover what they value and how they hope to develop as future teachers. As a graduate educator, I similarly engage with my graduate mentees, coaching them through their program of studies, encouraging them to consider a range of competencies in research methodologies and ways of knowing through which they develop as future scholars. As a community educator, I endeavour to share with a broad audience my lived experience as a researcher, educator, woman, and person with a medical disability. I aim to engage in complicated conversations around the status quo, especially when it comes to the representation of women and people with medical disabilities in the domains of applied design, STEM, health, and medical education.
My scholarship of teaching and learning includes projects such as Factors affecting student success in online learning environments and Technology education during emergency remote teaching. The recent project examines factors that enabling or inhibit the development of self-efficacy and student agency in online learning contexts. My article, “Academic success online: Mediating the effects of personality and self-efficacy in online learning,” will appear in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal on E-Learning. The latter project aims to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the teaching experiences and self-efficacy of technology educators in the secondary setting. The first article from this project, “Pandemic designs for the future: Perspectives of technology education teachers during COVID-19” is scheduled for publication in a special issue of Information and Learning Science in the summer of 2020.
References
Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, A. (2006). Towards a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol 1 No 2, pp.164-180.
Pinar, W. (1975). The method of currere. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC.
Pinar, W. (2015). Educational experience as lived: Knowledge, history, alterity. Routledge, New York, NY.
