EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES AS LIVED: SELECTED TEACHING COURSES

Educational Experiences as Lived

At the core of Dr. Liu Baergen's teaching philosophy lies her belief in a curriculum realm where teachers and students live(d) experiences, intellectual traditions, and cultures interplay. Dr. Liu Baergen believes that personhood and live(d) experiences of both educators and students are not just innocuous educational experiences but are crucial places of contact in engaging a complicated conversation for educational questions and intercultural relations.

In turn, it is important for her, as an educator, to create a learning environment where students can critically reflect on their own situated intellectual and/or professional interests. More specifically, learning/research for students as an inquiry into the field of their studies through a critical-reflective process, she believes, is essential in higher education. To facilitate this, her pedagogical approach draws from the critical pedagogy and existential-phenomenology traditions that build on the method of narrative inquiry, which, she believes, encourages students to ask critical questions, to reflect upon their live(d) experiences, (dis)beliefs and their own practices. Through the phenomenological ethos, learning/research becomes a mode of inquiry that allows students to embrace the investigation and description of phenomena as experience(d). Learning/research, as putting forth an inquiry to question and reflect upon students’ own live(d) experiences, understandings, actions and practices, is a fundamental value of Dr. Liu Baergen's teaching philosophy.

Teaching, she has realized, is not merely a skillful act but an embodiment of a moment in the classroom where teachers’ and students’ life experiences live in one sense of time. Teaching and curriculum become multiple intimate learnable moments that transcend the inner world (lived curriculum) and outer world (planned curriculum) and dwell in an in-between place, as a way of being and becoming. However, the place in-between is often full of tensions and dilemmas. Therefore, life writing and/or auto/biographical inquiry through the critical pedagogy tradition can contribute to students’ and teachers’ awareness of the tensions and dilemmas as a place of foreignness to provoke their thinking. Teaching as “letting-learn,” as described by Heidegger (1951), becomes an inspirited journey toward understanding through reflection on significant external events and turning inward to personal consciousness, to the is-ness of live(d) experiences, especially on/to the possibility of dwelling in-between the juxtaposition of the lived moments that happened inside/outside the classroom, professional/personal traditions and tensionality/openness.

Dr. Liu Baergen believes teaching through a critical-reflective style of approach allows not only the teachers, but also the students, to speak the subject of study in multiple ways. More so, dwelling in the tensionality of the place in-between becomes a generative tensionality that merges teachers' and students’ intellectual works that emanate from their life history. Tensionality serves, too, as a generative intellectual provocation for them. Ultimately, I

she hopes her teaching philosophy and pedagogical approach invite students to engage in learning/research that contributes to an understanding of the field of their own studies in all its particularity.

EDUC 5280 Capstone Seminar

Capstone Seminar is a final graduate study course. This course provides the students with the opportunity to grapple with complex ideas and issues, to reflect deeply on what they have learned and to write a synthesis paper on their learning in the Master of Education degree program.

This course provides weekly themes to assist students in delving deeply into a research topic in education that they are passionate about and creating a research paper. The weekly themes are designed to assist students to:

Synthesize different theoretical knowledge brought forth from students’ previous coursework;
Analyze the contributions of theoretical knowledge to educational practice; and
Integrate a critical analysis and synthesis of differing contributions and gaps of differing theoretical knowledge.

EDUC 5030 Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

In this course, students are introduced to life writing and autobiographical inquiry as a research methodology within the broader field of educational research and, more specifically, the field of Canadian Curriculum Studies. In the course assignment, students are encouraged to draw on the readings and class discussions to write a place-based storied account of their autobiography. Part of life writing / autobiographical research is developing a capacity to draw on educational research to critically analyze and then synthesize how students lived curriculum has worked to shape their understanding of the world and others. Life writing /autobiographical writing brings students awareness to consider the questions: What have been your lived experiences within the context of formal education and in relation to the school curriculum (i.e., public, private, homeschooling, or university)?

This is a formative writing assignment. However, students are encouraged to take risks with

their academic writing.

EDUC 5020 History, Philosophy of Education

In this course, grounded in Dr. Liu Baergen's philosophical and pedagogical belief in existential phenomenology, she created weekly themes to assist students in investigating various historical and contemporary philosophical theories. To further assist students in critically examining the implications of these theories within the educational context and to analyze the philosophical, socio-cultural, and ideological perspectives underlying various educational movements, in her lectures and reading materials, she emphasizes not only the theories of the educational philosophers but also the life of the educational philosopher. Dr. Liu Baergen attunes students to the influences of the philosophers' socio-political and cultural situatedness and their works, and vice versa. In class discussions and Intellectual Autobiography written assignments, she probes students to critically engage with the self-reflective interpretation of their own educational experiences (their own situatedness) in relation to various philosophies and ideologies. By sharing and examining their own lived educational experiences and philosophy inside/outside the classroom, at the end of the course for their final essay, she asks students to re/construct a vision and philosophical grounding(s) from the juxtaposition of their autobiographical educational meanings and contextual knowledge.

Drawing from the phenomenological belief in “experience,” I

she built this course on the premise of looking into the life and works of philosophers, students, and teachers (herself). Based on the course evaluation, most students appreciate this approach for a “preconceived boring” philosophy course. Also, students find that the study of the life and works of a philosopher can help them better understand the possible groundings for their ideologies. Lastly, by sharing students' and teachers' own lived educational experiences in relation to the various educational philosophy in discussions where teachers and students live(d) experiences, intellectual traditions, and cultures interplay, students, express that this approach helped them not only in making these theories and ideologies “relevant” to them but also, at times, deconstructing/provoking their existing perceptions by listening to the stories of "others."