Title of Session:

Passionate Pedagogy: The Power of Teaching and Learning with Love

Description of Session:

The purpose of this interactive session is to create a safe environment in which participants can critically reflect on their own experiences with the power of love in learning and teaching. Please bring blank journals and your heart.

Type of Presentation Group Interaction

Grade Level All

Concepts to Be Presented

"Education is radically about love," a quote from Paulo Freire will be central to this session. The presenters will begin with a brief pedagogical overview of how we have been traditionally "schooled" to think that love, learning, and life are separate spheres of life.

Love Trumps Methods

Pedagogy is the interactive, subtle (and, not so subtle) processes that inform teaching and learning. The United States comes from a shared national history of pedagogy, which often separates the knowledge of schools, from the knowledge of life; which often separates who we are as professionals, from who we are as people. Many are now reconsidering some of these long-held assumptions. We plan to rethink, retell, and rewrite our own histories as we suggest that love and passion are integral parts of complex pedagogical processes. Love and passion are a part of who we are as professionals, in addition to who we are as people. We will encourage participants to deconstruct this "myth" based on their own lived experiences

Specific Questions to Be Addressed:

What does love look like in a classroom?
When were you profoundly affected by love in the classroom?
When were you profoundly affected by the lack of love in the classroom?
How do the interests and passions in your life outside of the classroom influence your life inside the classroom?

Activities and Possible Outcomes

Participants will be asked to reflect critically on their own living, learning, and loving. We invite all to reflect with us and to examine historical and personal approaches to teaching and learning. We will encourage participants to think wildly and freely about their own utopias for teaching and learning. Ideas generated will help guide participants to create their own Personal Plan for Passionate Pedagogy.

Our goal is for the participants to leave the session with a renewed sense of energy and passion for teaching and learning and their own personal action plan.

Toast and Roast

Throughout the session, it is anticipated that we will generate examples of when love enhanced learning, and on the contrary, when the lack of love hindered learning. We will chart the generated examples under two categories: Let the Magic Begin and Stupid Human Tricks.

As this is TAWL, we anticipate that we are among like-minded soul mates, it is inevitable, that we will have fun as we toast the many ways of bringing magic into the classroom, and as we roast the purveyors of stupid human tricks.

AV equipment: None needed.