Cultural Foundations of Education
Across Hudson’s cultural foundations of education courses, students create written, audio, or video journals to share their observations, questions, and reflections related to course concepts and class discussions. In addition to a synthesis of course readings, she asks students to pose a question in response to the readings that might spark class discussion; select a quote from the readings that is interesting, informative, confusing, or troubling that we can explore together; or share their own mix of related news articles, texts, videos, music, and visual arts to build a living archive connecting to our contemporary moments. Rather than reproducing what already exists, students can create a classroom experience that will never exist in the same way again. Through this work, her aim is to engage with the complexity and ambiguity of teaching in a dynamic classroom about a complex world that requires flexible responsiveness to events that unfold and an openness to allow for the unexpected to occur and unplanned possibilities to emerge anew each semester.
Hudson is particularly interested in students engaging with artifacts, both contemporary and historical, through a mapping history with primary sources project she designed in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Libraries, Archives, and Weatherspoon Art Museum. Using art as text, students practice skills of close observation, slow reading, open-ended inquiry, and contextualization of images and objects to develop skills necessary for reading diverse texts throughout the course. Working in the archives, students choose themes or concepts from the course to investigate by way of a primary source from a specific time in the history of education. They document their reflexive, relational conversation with the source as a way to map past, present, and potential futures of education.
Students expand on this historical foundation by envisioning schools and schooling. Students, both independently and collaboratively, consider the philosophy of education on which their ideal school is built, the mission of the school, the accessibility of its physical structure, its curriculum, how learning will be assessed, and other intersecting factors. This assignment reveals the tensions of the diverse perspectives students have about teaching and learning and the challenges of negotiating these differences. It also brings an awareness of historical foundations of education that impact the present state of schools. Ultimately, Hudson want students to see themselves as having agency to envision and shape the future of education while exploring their own philosophy and how their ideas differ from and converge with others.