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Simon Fraser University

Fall 2007 Semester

Education 100: "Take Your Education Back"

E100

Instructor: Charles Bingham (e: cwb@sfu.ca )

Venue: EDB 8620F

Time:

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3:30-5:20 Tuesday & Thursday

This course will explore the ways that educational institutions actually 'educate'.

Or whether they do at all. We will read various radical accounts of education in order to

discern how education might operate differently than the way it does currently in North

America at the beginning of the 21" Century.

We will examine our own educational experiences, asking how those experiences have

shaped us for better or worse. Through doing so, students will be asked to make a change

in their own personal understandings of educational institutions. The title, 'Take Your

Education Back,' is an invitation to empowerment, both with respect to the education that

you will experience in the future, but also with respect to the education you might have

experienced in the past.

The course is writing intensive. Thus students will be asked to use writing as a way to

explore the texts we read as well as the educational experiences that we examine.

The texts we read will be:

1)

A.S. Neil!. 'Sunimerhill School: A New View of Childhood' Griffin, 1995.

ISBN-10: 0312141378

2)

Rebeka Nathan. 'My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a

Student' Penguin 2006, ISBN-10: 0143037471

3)

Jacques Rancière.. 'The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual

Emancipation' Stanford UP, 1991,

ISBN-10: 0804719691

4)

Richard Rodriguez. 'Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez'

Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2004, ISBN-10 0553382519

5)

Paulo Freire

Pedagogy

of

the Oppressed.

Continuum 2000

ISBN: 0826412769

Various shorter readings will also be handed out in class.

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Marks will be as follows:

Written work/Assignments: 80 %

Individual presentations:

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20%

Written Work/Assignments: Each week, a written piece of approximately 1000 words

will be required. The nature of these written pieces will vary—from academic essays, to

letters, to reading summaries, to reflective joumaling. Writing will often be based on out-

of-class assignments.

Group presentations: The topics of groups presentations will be decided as the course

unfolds.

Individual presentation: Students will be asked to contribute to the content of the course

through individual presentations of approximately 10 minutes each.

Attendance is a must, in order to honor what is spoken by others in class.