CHAPTER 4: The Importance of A Personalized Syllabus in Coteaching A Course on Meaning-Making

What follows is the primary content of a syllabus that I and Jennifer J. J. Jang distribute to our graduate and undergraduate students in a College of Education and Social Services course called Philosophy of Education as Meaning Making. For our purposes in this chapter, we will intentionally omit the specific dates, bibliographies, and weekly assignments (as these are constantly changing) that we include in our usual syllabus. We choose to write our syllabus each semester as a personal letter from each of us to our students in order to set the tone for the entire course as well as to model the kind of writing we want them to do. We also want them to see us as partners (even though we represent different professional roles) in the quest to make meaning.