ETEC 532: Technology in the Arts & Humanities Classroom
Informing and transforming; the power of critical inquiry.
Good writers not only inform, they weave words together in powerful ways that leave you transformed. Whether it be a scholarly article, a poem, or a novel, a piece of writing that challenges you and changes your thinking in some way is a profound and powerful thing. In this course, I truly learned the power of transformative learning. More than in any other course, I was greatly impacted by our topics of study. Being moved to the point of tears was not something that I expected to have happen in a MET course. My beliefs were challenged, my heart was touched and I was transformed both as an educator and as a human being. It is interesting how a course title and description can create certain notions in your mind ahead of time, and when you experience the course in reality it is vastly different than the idea that you had predetermined in your own mind. That was exactly what this course was like for me. I went into ETEC 532 thinking that I was going to learn about the role that technology can play in the fine arts classroom, as well as in the humanities (literature, social studies, human culture, philosophy etc.) and although there were elements of this, much of what we focused upon was not what I expected at all. I was expecting to learn about online tools, devices and practical classroom applications based on sound learning theory. What I discovered was a course that pushed the boundaries with unexpected examples of media and humanities content that really forced me to dig deeply into the core of these examples to unpack them and transform them to fit into my own teaching situation. The learning was incredibly valuable, I just did not take the route that I thought that I was going to take to get there.
Much of the media that we were exposed to was unlike other media that I engaged with in my other MET courses. Everything from electrode muscle stimulation ‘art work’ to vignettes that brought up controversial topics, challenged me to make learning connections. After a rollercoaster ride of learning experiences, I came to realize the power of harnessing technology myself as an educator, but also in empowering my students by providing them with opportunities to be contributors and producers too.
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