I am feeling rather silly right now. Therefore, I wrote a woe is me blog/rant.

I’m enjoying both my courses (532 & 565) in this summer term, but I am finding them to be in conflict at the outset. I imagine this is going to change as we move forward through the term as the term ‘dovetail’ continues to make an appearance, but as of today the philosophy of one course is interfering with the academic work in my other course.

in 532, we’ve been questioning what curriculum is. Who writes curriculum? What is it really for? What should be in curriculum? Should it be about the self, or society? How do we evaluate it? These are all very interesting questions, and it has been helpful to open up the B.C. Curriculum and dissect it as we answer these questions. The more we discuss these questions in my cohort, the more I look at our provincial curricular documents and find them to be…restrictive? I’m not really sure what word to use. But I know that I feel as if the curriculum is someone else’s baby, I have trouble relating with it. I find there are things I want to add and other things I want to remove in the curriculum the more we think about the above questions.

In 565, we’re engaged in an experiential learning project which is to create a web page that pivots our status quo curriculum towards outcomes that are relevant and applicable to our new way of being in the pandemic. While I wholly agree with the spirit of the project, the content we are producing is an exercise in duplicity. I feel as if I am now replicating the language of the existing curriculum to generate new content; I’m just stepping into the shoes of whoever wrote the B.C. curriculum. Not only am I feeling treacherous putting aside all the meta questions so I can get my work done, but I also feel like an impostor.

Now, I know it will be put forward that I can do both things at once: write curriculum while considering all the meta questions….I could start from the ground-up and write something entirely sound for both courses! While I agree I could do that, I haven’t figured out how yet. The timing is difficult…I don’t think I’ll end up ‘refining’ the outcomes I create in these early days of 565. Rather, I think they’ll have to be trashed and re-written by the end of 532.