Dean’s Message
Welcoming Remarks to the Class of 2008/2009
Dean Rosa Bruno-Jofré
2 September 2008
In my capacity as Dean of the Faculty of Education, I welcome you personally and on behalf of the Faculty to the new academic year. Today you are taking the first step in a life-long journey, a formative journey that I believe we are undertaking together, for I hope that you will view the Faculty of Education at Queen’s, as your professional home throughout your career. As a professional educator you are expected to cultivate a degree of autonomy, participate in the affairs of the profession, and generate new knowledge through your pursuit of practical wisdom.
The process of becoming a professional educator demands that you develop an ethically defensible vision of education and related educational aims. These are, as Noddings writes, our ideals guiding us in the construction of goals and objectives in the enactment of our pedagogical approaches. An ethically defensible view of education of necessity includes an understanding of what is desirable and good in education. Within this context, I would like you to reflect during your preparation as teachers on, "What are the conditions for a pedagogy that would lead to wonder and imagination?".
As a way to illustrate my call to you, I take the case of drama education. I don’t assume that drama in the classroom will necessarily lead to an educative experience. As a medium, it needs to be integrated in a vision of education and related educational aims. One of the conditions for a creative drama pedagogy is the need to discuss those aims, if we wish to move beyond the superficiality of happy interaction and vacuous objectives. Education is not a neutral practice and our own notion of education is an integral component of our understanding of the issues of justice, the good life, our vision of the humane, and our overall political ideals. Drama as a pedagogical tool is the means par excellence to relate the personal in the life of the students with the public, the particular with the universal, the intimate core of personal experience of the child with the collective memory. It has a profoundly educational function and along with other pedagogical means, it plays a role in the construction of what philosopher Charles Taylor has called a social imaginary, a background picture of the characteristics of people and their relations that feed social life, politics, and speech as well as identity construction.
Another condition for a pedagogy of wonder and imagination is the achievement in the classroom or in the group of a psychological state that leads to openness and criticism in construing an understanding of reality. In Dewey’s view, debate fails as a form of reasoning because it is confrontational, and it may not be democratic enough. In his thinking, persuasion also becomes problematic because it aims at gaining adherence to a view and may not require a process of systematic inquiry. I submit as a working idea that drama pedagogy can become an enabling means to generate reflective, inquisitive, constructivist processes that lead to openness and reciprocal critical understandings. In this way, the educational experience involves a fully-developed civic function. In our pursuit of inter-culturality and human rights, we can use drama to explore how our identities are sustained and developed through our understanding of gendered, class-biased, and racialized ways of being. Finally, I cannot stress enough the need to engage in meaningful professional reflection that in the end casts the pedagogical practice as a civic means in the constant creation and re-creation of a hospitable democratic country. What Derrida said of democracy can serve as a point for reflection. He extended the concept of democracy – and he is not the only one – beyond the nation-state and citizenship and wrote that “if we dissociate democracy from the name of a regime we can then give this name ‘democracy’ to any kind of experience in which there is equality, justice, equity, and respect for singularity of the other at work.”[1] Of course, this statement opens doors to a number of philosophical questions that would have implications for our pedagogical practice. Again we need to go back to the need to think of our vision of education and our educational aims to integrate the elements of our pedagogical discourse.
I am sure that you have already begun to think about the attributes, dispositions, habits of mind, and virtues that will make you a good educator. Of particular relevance are one’s disposition to learn and one’s ability to cultivate humility, a virtue understood as openness to revise and transform oneself. This is particularly relevant in light of your ethical commitment to work creatively across difference, question the impact of the culture of whiteness on the common good, and walk the steps towards a moral democracy.
Once you graduate, we hope that you will become proud and active alumni, and that you will remain in touch with us to continue renewing and building the Queen’s educational community. The Alumni Group is enthusiastic and active. In past years, the Faculty’s homecomings have been extremely successful. This year, we are planning a presentation of “Rulers” by the Limestone Teachers Theatre Company. The homecoming dinner, to which your leadership will be invited, will be held on September 26th and will feature a presentation by Mr. Gordon Pitts, Queen’s graduate, senior writer and reporter for The Globe and Mail. His talk is entitled “The Teacher as Journalist”. Ms. Rhonda Kimberley-Young, a graduate from our own Faculty, secretary and treasurer of the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, past president of the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers’ Federation, and advocate for public education, will receive the Outstanding Service Award.
I would like to close by reiterating what I have said in previous years regarding the teaching profession. You have decided to enter the most precious of professions, one that gives you the possibility of filling an inspiring role in the lives of many. But as Paulo Freire said education is a political act. Let me share with you that I strongly believe that courage is a fundamental virtue that defines the life of an educator: courage to question, courage to build a democratic community in our schools, courage to imagine the future, and courage to love our students in the uniqueness of their life situations.
As your Dean, personally, and on behalf of the members of the Faculty of Education, I wish you success in all your endeavors, and I look forward to working for and with you. I promise for all of us that we will do our best to meet your expectations and your needs.
1 “Politics and friendship: A discussion with Jacques Derrida,” Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex, 1 December 1997. Cited in Aletta J. Norval, Aversive Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.149.