Pedagogy

I thought that the exercise in 603 to draw our teaching pedagogy was really very interesting. It was nice to see and hear that most people are still in the middle of trying to find their own specific pedagogy to adhear to, and that I'm not the only one "peeking" into different pedagogical stances and stealing little bits of morsels here and there, wherever I find them to be useful. As simple as most people assumed their drawing were (mainly because almost none of us consider ourselves artist in the literal sense of drawing/painting), everyone had a very succinct reason, it seemed, for every little detail included on their picture.

And, as was pointed out in class, I found it funny that most of the drawings were theorists-centered (myself included) rather than student-centered. But I have a theory on that as well: I figure that with most of us GA's being first-year teachers at any level, let alone at the level of a State University, we are put in a position where we feel that we have to 'know' everything about the subject, as well as the act of teaching, before we feel that we can effectively teach our students. And one way of attaining this information is to really look at and apply some of the things were hear from theorists and the approaches that they tend to profess at us. So, at the earliest stage of becoming a teacher/professor, we are trying to gather as much information as possible from all different angles so we can, hopefully, be ready to handle, or have an answer for, any given situation. And until we utilize this approach enough in our classrooms to become comfortable with our own teaching, we will continue to run through theorist after theorist, asking "Am I critical or progressive? Do I believe in error reduction or error elimination?" and so on and so forth. It seems like a logical, healthy way of discovering who we are as teachers by imitating and learning from the teachings of those that came before us.