
Once the traditional knife-tossing game and steak dinner are out of the way, we have an ambitious agenda.
This year we will explore design aesthetics for courses under the new curriculum. What elements of design should guide us as we put the new BC Social Studies curriculum through its paces? What kind of frameworks can we use to make sense of the swirling mass of competencies, skills, and content? Is it that easy to pick and choose from among the (vast) content areas (now even vaster with the curriculum re-org) in order to address competence, or is SS more like Math in that there is some core content that is necessary for students to encounter in sequence? Can we map this out using the "juggernaut" of the new SS9 as a test case? What's the difference between history and SS? What if we used a geographic framework to understand our role as SS teachers, or sociological, philosophical, ecological, anthropological for that matter? What does the new focus on Aboriginal content actually mean when it comes to course design? How do we broach the subject of historical revisionism as we look to a post-colonial curriculum and pedagogy?
When that whole business devolves into a cage match, we have a practical topic to go to -- an evaluation of the teaching resources posted at http://historyskills.jimdo.com/ including a document on written essays.