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| CONTACT
You
can contact Don Bergland at:
redjello@shaw.ca
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The
future of education is embroiled in creative renovation.
Established traditions, structures, and values
are being challenged and reshaped by the forces
of new media and technology. In the 21st century,
accepted concepts of literacy will change dramatically
as students learn to express and communicate ideas
through a multiplicity of easily-available media
formats. They will both access knowledge and information
in new ways and will communicate it freely through
unmediated and unrestricted delivery and broadcast
systems. With such comprehensive sensory involvements
as Virtual Reality and nanotechnology on the horizon,
educational experience will achieve a power and
dynamism never before imagined.
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| TEACHING
PHILOSOPHY |
Don’s
primary goal as an educator is to empower students with
the ability to express and communicate ideas in effective
and creatively rewarding ways. As a teacher of creative
and technical processes, he focuses his objectives on
the learning of contextual frameworks, fundamental concepts,
essential skills, development techniques, critical thinking,
problem-solving strategies, and project structures.
He believes that creative and artistic abilities can be
learned by all people, and that these can be acquired
through effective training and instruction. In service
to this belief, he tempts his students to become eccentric
thinkers and take imaginative risks. He lures them into
their own inner worlds and helps them invent tools and
mechanisms for personal expression. He seeks to instill
the sense of confidence and self-esteem that result when
students discover they can actually create. He wants them
to be able to generate ideas and be in possession of strategies
whereby they can communicate and express those ideas effectively.
The most important thing students take away from his classes
is the solid sense of personal empowerment that results
when they know they can create and express their own ideas
in artistic ways. |
| SOME
POINTS |
| 1. |
Don's
teaching attempts to embrace the future. He seeks proficiency
in the new media tools of communication and expression
and tries to understand the rapidly changing conditions
under which new learning is occurring. He invites his
students to be part of this process. |
| 2. |
The
knowledge he teaches is informed by actual practise. Because
he brings cutting-edge ideas and theories to his students,
he maintains a direct working alliance with industry.
This alliance offers an easily recognized classroom integration
of the theoretical with real-world activity. |
| 3. |
He
attempts to empower students with the ability to problem-solve,
design, create new structures, and invent solutions. Students
are provided with specific techniques for understanding
these objectives and all classroom instruction provides
hands-on opportunities for achieving them. |
| 4. |
His
teaching frameworks are purely deductive. They begin with
motivation through contextual understanding, move to the
communication of specific ideas, concepts, skills, and
techniques, and then provide clear opportunities for actual
practise and production. |
| 5. |
He
believes that effective teaching is accompanied by exemplary
resource material. All his class sessions provide detailed
materials outlining and summarizing each stage of expected
learning. |
| 6. |
Don
remains committed to modeling his understanding of excellence
in both the actual act of teaching and the thinking processes
and practices associated with his content areas. |
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