From the Texas 2012 Republican Party Platform:
Knowledge based education: “We oppose the teaching of higher order thinking skills (HOTS), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of outcome based education (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
On Friday, we heard from Susan Dion, an Aborigingal from Canada. She talked about Aboriginal and Canadian relationships. She said, in Canadian schools students are taught mostly pre contact and a little bit contact history with Aboriginals. Aboriginals in Canada are either First Nations, Inuit, or Metis. She talked about the reserve system and the history of Aboriginal schooling in Canada. It was interesting. she spoke for about an hour. The rest of the day was spent finalizing our project for Saturday.
On Saturday we presented our final project.
Afterwards, as I boarded public transit to the airport, I reflected on my time at the HTP. It was amazing. We had amazing conversations in our large and small groups. Ontario is incorporating the concepts in their curriculum in the fall and other provinces are also adding them in (some informally). It made me sad that I could not make a presentation to my faculty as we are literacy and do not deal with social studies in our curriculum at USF. However, it got me thinking about the blurb about the HTP: promoting critical historical literacy for the 21st century.could I hold a workshop on the concepts? I'd love to.
Anyway, that's it in a nutshell. When my friend Ian posts the ppt he created about the week, I'll post it for all to see. It was a week I'll never forget.
Steph
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