Honors 394
Created: 2015-03-15
Status: notes; belief: possible
Contents
This is my course review and assignments for Honors 394: Teaching to Transgress. I took the course in winter 2015 with Frances McCue.
Review
Most of the work for this course is in doing the assigned readings (something like 50–200 pages for each session, depending on the day; the class only meets twice a week though so it’s not as bad as it seems as long as you space it out) and participating in the in-class discussions. The assigned books were (in the order that we read them):
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
- How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
- The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley
- The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
- Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green
I didn’t think the in-class discussions were all that useful or high-quality (which is about as much as I expected), especially compared to the quality of discussions I regularly encounter on Facebook, Quora, and LessWrong (even with those places you have to find the good discussions though).
I think the greatest benefit I got from the course was the ability to spend some time researching unschooling as part of the final project (which ended up also being useful for my Cause Prioritization Wiki)1.
Assignments
Here are links to the major assignments of the course:
Teaching puzzles
Midterm
My midterm was a bit sassy, but you can read it here: “Some Pitfalls When Discussing Education”. It is an analysis of Paulo Freire and Paul Tough.
Ironically, though, the final project ended up not being liked by the instructor and consequently brought my grade down.↩
Tags: University of Washington, University of Washington course review, University of Washington honors program.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.