EDU640 Fall 2005

My Reflection on CTEs and Students' Course Reflections

Before the semester started, I shared my draft syllabus with Dr. Andrea LaChance, who kindly reviewed it and provided me with her comments. I called my major advisor in University of Georgia, panicked. He advised me just to be able to keep myself one foot ahead of my students. I managed to do that, but I found myself preparing for the weekly instruction materials all the time.

I used a variety of resources for this course. Textbooks, journal articles, videos, and online articles provide students with a wide range of topics. I also consulted with Dr. Thomas Lickona before the semester started about how to make the syllabus better and make the instruction more effective. The reading assignments certainly presented to students controversies and conflicts in social education, but I felt that I didn't really present at least two viewpoints to each topic. Dr. Lickona shared that concern. Most of the textbooks and articles we read in this course criticized the current educational practices to be too conservative. The authors we discussed were most of them advocates for progressive education, challenging the status quo of the education system in the United States. It is not a bad thing, but I realized that for a discussion of controversies in social education to be going well without stifling opposing views, at least two points of views should be presented and discussed. Multiple perspectives of the same issue should be explored and analyzed before decisions were made.

Ongoing discussion with students and midterm evaluations on my own showed me that students did not like to be challenged by thoughts and ideas in criitical pedagogy. Perhaps the textbook I used for critical pedagogy was written by a controversial writer Peter McLaren. Some students reported that he was arrogant and too anti-American. But most students did learn a lot from his descriptions of working in an inner-city school.

The adjusted mean for this course is 4.75. I wish they left more comments and suggestions in the CTE forms.

So for this semester, fall of 2006, when I get a chance to teach this course again, I chose a new textbook "Critical Issues in Social Education: Dialogues and Dialectics". Hopefully the readings and discussions will open up the minds of students and encourage sharing of multiple perspectives. Critical thinking for controversial issues is required. We will define critical thinking, which involves reasoned dialogue and dialectic reasoning for issues in education. Besides discussion, I make sure each class students will have hands-on experiences of how to teach controversial issues.