This course will offer you an opportunity to reflect about what it means to teach or educate “Christianly.” It will situate a Reformational understanding of Christian education within two distinct types of “context”: first, the “spirits of the age” that are at work influencing our shared modern, Canadian society; and second, the local context of the school you work at. The ‘spiritual’ context will help us see Christian education as an alternative, not simply to “secular” education, but to other patterns of spiritual formation, like consumerist education or workaholic education. The ‘local’ context will then allow us to discuss how Christian education can be ‘put to work’ in your day-to-day activities as a teacher or administrator. The goal is to give you time, space, and resources to develop a clearer understanding of how faith impacts education in general, and how your faith shapes what you do as an educator more specifically.
29 November 2024
What's Christian About Christian Education?: Reformational Philosophy
Called to Teach: Formation and Learning
Called to Teach is designed to inspire and support K-12 educators in their personal and professional journey of teaching and learning. Through this course, participants will explore their vocation as educators, reflecting on their teaching practice in the context of faith and spiritual disciplines. This inner journey invites educators to seek refreshment and renewal in their work while considering the formation and learning of their students.
The course aims to address these key questions:
- What is my calling as an educator?
- How can I intentionally live out my calling in teaching and leadership?
Lead From Where You Are: Making a Difference in the Face of Tough Problems, Big Questions, and Organizational Politics
Leadership is not about personality, authority, position, influence, or power as such. Leadership is an art, a craft, a practice, to which everyone is called sometime or other, in widely different situations. Leadership can be practiced with varying degrees of authority, from any position, at varying scales of influence, and with varying access to different sources of power. Leadership is the work of motivating a group of people to act in certain ways as they shape what they share.
In this course we will explore how to contribute leadership when we have a particular, recognized position of authority in a group, and also regardless of our position in a group. We will learn how to contribute leadership when our group has clear, commonly agreed-upon procedures and goals, and when there are not (or not yet) clear, commonly agreed-upon procedures and goals (so that we must practice imaginative discernment). We will learn how to contribute leadership both to make beneficial change happen and to ensure needed maintenance.