Everyone's Blog

Might as well put this as a post just to make transitioning between blogs easier

Susanne's Blog

Allison's Blog

Kat's Blog

"Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it"

Having just finished reading Enhancing Canadian Teacher Education Using a Story Framework by Susan Drake, I found that there were many traces of previous topics I had encountered in previous courses.  The idea behind stories is that they are filtered through various perspectives such as personal, cultural, global and universal.  From these various perspectives, one must look at both the past and present story, while also looking towards creating a new future story.  This could be in two forms as there is a realistic direction that the present story transitions to, which contrasts with the necessary direction.  Both directions lead to an eventual new story and action taken.

I have come across topics similar to this as individual's should reflect on how their pedagogical processes are shaped by their experiences around them, as well as the powers and structures that restrict them.  The stories model encompasses this entire idea as it looks at the personal, cultural and global perspectives.  It is imperative that one looks to the past when dealing with the present as they should understand how they got to where they are now.  Without understanding what we have done in the past and how our stories have unfolded then we may be doomed to repeat as we will make the same mistakes. 

When looking at our present story it is important to look to the past to see what we have done but we also want to look forward into the future to see where we are headed so that we can plan accordingly.  This follows the idea of backwards design where we set a goal of where we want to be or what we want to end up learning and then work backwards to determine how to reach that goal.

The idea of a story framework brings to mind George Santayana's quote "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it".  This would account for only a portion of the story framework however the message is still clear and implies the importance of looking to the past.  Based on the story framework, we must not only remember about the past but imagine about the future or else we are doomed to stay in the present.