Written by How might schools better serve and support students, especially during this time of great destabilization?
Dr. Simon is an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at The University of Toronto in the department of Curriculum Teaching and Learning. I asked Rob on the show to speak about the Addressing Injustices project: in this conversation, get into how the Addressing Injustices team use Youth Participatory Action Research to affect change, but we also explore teacher education, the field of multi-literacies, this concept of “productive discomfort” which I honestly had not really considered before this interview.
I copied out many many quotes while listening to this episode when I was editing it, so this might be one that you have a pen and paper handy as you are listening. Dr. Simon is a generous, thoughtful, and deeply collaborative thinker in education that will gently nudge you towards thinking about education in a different way.
Let’s get right into it with Dr. Rob Simon.
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I’m taking away a few key points from this episode:
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- Curriculum is a living, breathing, and malleable thing. It’s not just something that I do to my students. I love this idea of taking the stance of a co-learner with my students–especially right now when everything about hybrid, pandemic learning for me feels so new and unfamiliar
- Ask myself what is the purpose of engaging with literature…what is your end goal? LITERATE BEHAVIOR! I need to keep asking myself this question with any reading task that happens in my classroom.
- “I don’t think that what we had before was so perfect, so as we mourn the loss of being in classroom spaces together–which we should–we also shouldn’t think that we had it solved and now the pandemic is the problem.” What might be the opportunities of this moment?
For those of you that are inspired and want to read more about Rob and his research he just published a book, Teaching Literature to Adolescents. Listeners of the show get 30% of this title and you can get the link to that very sweet deal right here:
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That’s all the time for today folks, keep trying to take an inquiry stance, and remember we are teaching tomorrow.