Reimagining Classroom Management as Curriculum

This course aims to help teachers rethink classroom management as a means of leadership and curriculum, emphasizing the cultivation of humane classrooms that promote self-expression, agency in learning, questioning, reflection, creativity, play, and imagination, while exploring key distinctions between imposed control and emergent control through experiential learning.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will:

• be able to identify and critically reflect on educational aims in relation to leadership (management) and curriculum from historical, sociological, political, and philosophical perspectives and consider how, “Learning takes patience and time” and “Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors” (FNESC First Peoples Principles of Learning).
• deepen their understandings of the moral, political, and economic contexts of education, and their impacts on students, gaining greater conscientiousness about inequalities that arise from social class, race, gender and sexual orientation differences and social stratification.
• identify what humane classrooms look, sound, and feel like and develop a deeper understanding of the role of freedom and agency in learning. Students will develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the experience of the subjective self in relation to the everydayness of classrooms, schools, and communities.
• critically examine the notion of control, including key distinctions between imposed control and emergent control.
• be able to identify key attributes of schools and classrooms in a democratic society and begin to develop a language for their practice grounded in these aims.