. Introduction: 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbntWU7pG8&feature=related 2.

Stop at 1minute 40 when Alice, says, Well, I cant remember things as I used to or the part where she actually storms off 3.14) 3. Open to my webpage at http://ninapagtakhan.weebly.com/) (password: wonderland) 4. I start speaking: And everything was confusing and sometimes frustrating. Everything that I had known before like the lessons I had drawn up, the teaching and assessment methods I had used before were no longer seen from the same lens. In Egans words, we were Getting it wrong from the beginning and the very realization that our beliefs about learning, development and the curriculum were based on ideas that were flawed, made the IE program more imperative for me. Dr. Judson was the first of my caterpillars to ask me the hard questions: 1) What is education for and 2) What does it mean to be educated? And this was on this first day of school of a new program! Throughout Education 823, she was relentless with these questions, presenting us with a number of theorists and perspectives from John Dewey to David Orr. What I realize more vividly now is that Dr. Judson was asking me to revisit my values, to put them up for me to see again, because after some years in teaching, they can become clouded or even forgotten. After reading the work of David Orr, did I realize that I was perpetuating several myths about what education was about. Go to Educ 823 tab on top bar and scroll to Becoming David Orr http://ninapagtakhan.weebly.com/becoming-david-orr.html. It was Orr illuminated for me the extent to which a traditional education had failed to yeild a more globally conscious person. He goes through 6 myths in education which I will only quickly scroll through here. But if you have your laptop with you, you are welcome to go to the site by typing in the URL I have projected on the screen. Basically all these myths: that ignorance is a solvable problem, that our knowledge allows us to manage the earth and that that same knowledge allows us to behave more compassionately are false. As a human race, we know a great number of things but unfortunately, we havent always used that knowledge compassionately, ethically, or responsibly. It was Orr who then offered new ways for me to rethink education that the goal of education is not the master of subject matter, but of ones person but also to connect that person to their communities. My journey and purpose would begin by making education, enviornmental education in the sense that I would hope to educate for the purposes of connecting students to other people, and communities. Its environmental because to me an educated person is awareness and loyalty to a person and place with its living things and systems. Educating students would mean showing real, meaningful relationships between them and the things around them that would later compell them to defend those things if they were in danger. Egans theory of IE claimed to be able to do this, by engaging students at their emotions. In a nutshell if you approached curriculum from students hopes, fears, passions, you would enable them to humanize the content. Subject matter is not then some remote thing, separated

from the student, but something real that lives and is important and deserves their attention. How they attend to that will be up to them. I mean the ultimate aim would be to have an active environmental steward changing current ways of doing things. So it seemed I just had to connect the academic content to some larger narrative which included their local communties and/or environment. And this is where the planning frameworks were of particular help for me. If you peruse the site youll come across some lessons under tab Education 823 and 816 tabs. Each has a pull down menu where youll see a tab that says IE units. Please feel free to browse the sample lessons there. But what Id like to emphasize is that the narrative is was that piece that made reaching my goal of teaching to make connections to the larger community possible. As a Social Studies teacher, you might think that a narrative is part of every history lesson, but actually it can become overlooked or used in a limited way. In some cases the narratives in textbooks are too short and are used as hooks but are never carried out in its entirety. Sometimes, because students know many of the stories already such as Anne Frank during the Holocaust, theyre emotions are not as invested as they could be. And in even more cases, the stories do not draw in the heroic qualities or binary opposites within the narrative which actually means it bypasses an opportunity at meaning making for students. The story as we already know, aims to situate the learner within a context that is accessible to them. And it is accessible to them because it uses their emotions as the access point for all understandings thereafter. (click at Educ 710 tab) Youll notice that now Im at Education 710 and face to face with the Head Caterpillar, Kieran Egan who was the instructor for the course. It was he who asked even more challenging questions about the workings of the imagination, its central features and the implications of different understandings of imagination on curriculum design and implementation. It was in this class that I was sold to the real power of story in accessing the imaginative thinking capacity of students.(go to http://ninapagtakhan.weebly.com/ted-hughes-myth--education.html under Education 710 tab its the powerpoint slide). This is captured in a quote from theorist, Ted Hughes when he says, Stories think for themselves, once we know themThey attract and light up everything relevant in our own experience; they are also in continual private mediation, as it were, on their own implications. They are little factories of understanding. New revelations of meaning open out of their images and patterns continually, stirred into reach by or own growth and changing circumstances. (p. 34) It was in Dr. Egans class did I truly realize the power of story as a meaning making devise. That, once learned, it could grow unto itself to make richer and deeper associations. For instance, the word cross or Jesus contains with it his journey, crusade, belief systems all in that one word. Then as we teach students and they see the multiple other ways crosses or jesus is viewed in society, that adds to their meaning and enriches it. So what was my plan, 1) make meaning in the classrom by ysing story 2) have that story connect to the environment in some way 3) engage them physically in some action that has them interacting with the environment. At the end of the class I had an idea for my AR which was to have students take care of a plant as part of the human geo component of the course, they would hopefully develop some affective ties to that plant. Each week I would provide them with a journal promt to connect their plant to some aspect of the curriculum. I know I know it sounds haphazard and forced. I know that now. But it was way into the program and like Alice, Id seen and heard a bunch of new things and wanted

to run with most eveyrthign that was meaningful to me. And thats the nature of change and this program, its fast, your learning curve is steep and you really have to find something that grounds you as you go through it. So mys students started this in september, they journaled each week and it was good up to a point. Tehre are my plants. There. I go through Dr. Gs class and she completely stretched my understandings about mediation and pushign students outward to their ZPD and gave me tangible techniques speicifc to teaching history.

But it was finally in Mark Fettes class did all of this learning come together. It was Mark put it to me poitn blank, it seems forced Nina. The spider plants are Africa so you could draw connections about colonialism/imperialsm but you cycle through the curriclum so quickly in this plan of yours that students dont really have time to see the deeper understandings between how colonialism has shown complete disregard for the environment. And this was true. SS11 is a ministry examinable course with PLOs that are 8 or 9 pages long in 10 font times new roman. So we reworked to work specifically without the plants, but to continue to journal. Now I would be using the cogntive tool of vivid mental imagery to connect students to the environemtn and the curricular concwepts. So for instance in teaching about the changes Canada went through during the post war period/cold war era, focusing on immigration, the baby boom, urbanization and a growing consumer culture, I would show images of those as they impacted landscape of Canada and then they would journal about it given a particular prompt. In our peacekeepign unit when talking about the rwandan genocide we looked at the impact of mass graves and casualties to the ground water and overall water systems because so many of the bodies were left floating in the river (name of river). (Show journal prompt under Educ 904, research desgin, journal prompts for students: But let me cycle back to you research design and schedule, youll notice that units/topics just fly by in Socials 11. Stories begin and end and then we move to separate topics like what is show here on my design schedule. (Show research design timeline). My students responses were quite unemotional to the prompts related to ee. Enviornmental ed to them is quite a boring topic, that is clich and so the images were only perpetuating their existing feelings of apathy. Theyre journal responses are on there if you feel like viewing the apathy for yourslef (under appendix D) of the written report So you might be wondering whats happeing to these plants, well the plants and caring for that plant on the window sill became quite an apt metaphor for their rote, preprogrammed behaviours about EE. They cared for their plant, but did they care about their plant. No. They watered it on Friday, before they wrote in their journals. It was routine. Just like they recycle because the bin is there and its become quite commonplace to put things in a recycling bin before a garbage bin because the bin is there. But in no way did they see that they were being

loyal to the planet in doing so. I think in caring for their plant, they were acting out of obligation to the programming their teacher put forward moreso than anything else. How was I going to deal with this, I didnt know at that point. Wed moved on to the next topic like I said and we were on the developing national idenity of Canada and I decided to approach the content from the story of John Diefenbaker who was negatively stereotyped for his inactino during the Cuban Missile crisis, in direct difiance to JFK who wanted to place missile-ready stations on canadian soil. From that I was going meet the PLOs by covering all the PMs and the legislation associated with each in the same fashion the story of these men as people who had values and who believed so firmly in them that they were part of laws to engrain those values in other people. And thats where the root of the problem made itself known to me. They were fillign out a graphic organizer or tool of the literate eye and it was clear that they did nto have the language or vocabulary to articulate values. (show PM values chart at appendicies D slide 44). After filling in all the scientific concepts, all the things behaviours, legislation that these people were involved in, they had signnificant problems deducing what that said about him/her as a person with values, beliefs etc So there was the disconnect, my students didnt see the greater meaning behind the behaviours what they stood for. Behaviour was different and separate from beliefs. Getting drunk at a party and then driving home doesnt say anything in particular about me and who I am. Its a poor choice, but it doesnt necessarily point to me being disrepectful of other people on the road, or poitn to any view I have about human lives. And then it became clear, that recyclng and environmental awarenss was just something that one did, because thats what we do now its common. It doesnt necessarily mean I value the enviornment and sustainable practices. Its just a commonplace action. So I identified the disconnect, but I also identified the fact that they did not know any value vocabulary. What was I going to do now while mulling that over and tryign to redesign lessons to equip them with stories that highlighted values, March 9th hits and the Kony 2012 movemetn goes viral. The Kony 2012 video was a story of a boy named Jacob. A story. A powerful story they could relate to because Jacob was their age. The actiosn that spurred out of that day and the vocabulary that came out of that day reminded about the real power of the narrative. Narratives have to be carefully chosen, personal with some aspect of unfinished business that the student would like a part in finishing. Only then could they seee they conneciton between their actions and what that meant for their value systems. How did I get this way? Rigidity of practice, striving at those myths that David Orr talked about and a clouding of my own value systems. If I truly believed in EE, ti should not have been a scheduled affair, a Friday journaling prompt. It should be seemless as narratives are seemless. The turn that Kony 2012 took was rather interesting because it presented anomolies within it and the greater metanarrative that the approach was similar to The White Mans burden approach tha Kipling wrote about. That the movement was really western paternalism and condesension on the 21st century all over again. So it reminded me that if you choose a good narrative, it should really carry the deeper philosphic and ironic tools you wish to draw from your student. They cant be short lived and narratives of people who are too far removed from the culture or type of people you have in yoru classroom. Going back to my diefenbaker narrative, it was good in that hes later seen as a hero,

today because he separates us from a rather different foregin policy than the US and thats been the story of our lvies. But again, that worked one year, last year with the particular group I had. This year ,because we had the challagne of the inability to name values, I needed a narrative that would help draw those out better. Where does this take me now, finding narratives and building narratives that are powerful. Using narratives yes to draw out the content, but more so to draw out philosophical modes of understanding, to draw out meta narratives, when presenting studetns with anomolies, how would that change their values? I learned that I got lost in curriculum, in minute particulars and the ministry exam at the end and learned that if we are to truly create people who care about one another, the things aorund them, then you have to have them access their emotions, help them articulate their affective responses as values they may have about whatever you are teachign them.