Teaching Transformations

Articles, Essays, Interviews & Memoir

Graduate Goddard Institute • January 2017

Rigor, the Ridiculous, and Radical Resonance: Transitory Community and the Construction of History

Teaching Transformation: Progressive Education in Action shares vibrant stories of how students in the Goddard Graduate Institute’s Individualized MA, Social Innovation and Sustainability, and Health Arts and Sciences programs find and enact their vision, make and keep community, and foster enduring social change and ecological stewardship.

Reviews & Excerpts

 

It comes to me again that knowing, feeling, thinking are intrinsically moral, and political: they concern how we relate, or fail to. This is also why acting and making, during which we are more used to being attentive to social and material possibilities and effects, can be invaluable in learning. ~ Elizabeth K. Minnich, Introduction to Teaching Transformation

We don’t offer a packaged curriculum where someone else has decided what constitutes knowledge, has organized that knowledge, has weeded out what they deem unimportant, and has emphasized what makes most sense to them. Our students don’t sit in classes and receive ideas. They don’t reproduce what already exists. Instead, Goddard students participate in shaping knowledge; they enter the collective conversation and move it in new directions. They are not satisfied with given meanings and comfortable practices. They are co-creating something that doesn’t always fit those givens. They are deciding what is important to them. Like the thawing of springtime, Goddard students take what has been frozen in place and they melt it and rework it, and in so doing they rebirth the world in their vision – their vision of justice, their vision of love, their vision of wellbeing and wholeness. ~ Sarah Van Hoy, “Undiagnosed Visionaries”

Teaching Transformation, crafted by visionaries dedicated to the preservation and reconceptualization of progressive, experimental education, provides us with the blueprints for teaching at the edges of what is known, and points the way toward an embodied, enchanted interdisciplinarity. ~ Kathleen Kesson, Professor of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership at LIU-Brooklyn

Discover, through writing by students, faculty, and alumni, how Goddard College transforms learning and provides students the tools they need most in dealing with all the complex issues facing their communities. ~ Sebastian Marino, delegate, Palau National Congress; Goddard Graduate

“Goddard changed my life” is a popular phrase at graduations.Teaching Transformation is a gold mine of ideas written by those on the front-lines of progressive educational about ethical, moral and political nature of education; the culture conditioning on learning; the need for “seeing the world through new eyes”; and developing capacities of awareness, receptivity, deep listening, and response. ~ Richard Schramm, former faculty at Goddard, Columbia, Cornell, Tufts, and MIT.

READ THE BOOK ONLINE

Listen to an interview on “The Magical Mystery Tour” with several contributors to the book — Lise Weil, Sarah Van Hoy, Katt Lissard, Lori Wynters, and Karen Campbell — on WDGR.