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Reflection

I absolutely loved this class and only made me more excited to become a teacher. I was challenged to think about teaching than the traditional method I was taught in so commonly and it makes me feel like I have some beginner skills to truly make a difference wherever I end up teaching. All these methods of teaching not only have the power to change schools globally for the better, but to change the world. How we teach the younger generations, and what we fail to teach them (which is A LOT when we follow standard curriculum using the banking method), is what we are sending out into the world. We have the power to create thoughtful, careful, kind human beings which we lack so much in this day and age. This course definitely pushed me outside my comfort zones and taught me how to respond to challenging material that other people may have a different opinion on. My favorite activity was when we wrote response in the google doc and had people comment on everyones. This was a fantastic way to allow people to give criticism without feeling attacked in front of the class as commonly happens when oral discussions get heated, and its little methods like this that you taught us, that I hope will stick with me in 3.5 years when I have my first class of students. I got more comfortable with using different methods of technology (and everything that can be classified as technology) which I would not have done if not required, but now that I’m comfortable with them, will definitely use them to my advantage for other projects down the line. 

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Peaceful Schools Pedagogy

Teaching people how to be kind again. I think this unit ties in perfectly with where we started this semester. The message behind progressive pedagogy was ultimately creating responsible citizens not just learners. Creating responsible citizens also means that kids must know how to interact responsibly and respectfully no matter what situation their in. Peaceful school pedagogy strives to do just that. People are from all different backgrounds and are undergoing stresses outside of school that some of us could never even imagine. In the TED talk we watched for this unit, the teacher asked her students how many of them had been bullied and how many have bullied someone else. Everyone raised hands for both questions. Now think about instead of trying to be funny with your friends and making fun of how someone smells (maybe they had water cut off because their parents were unable to pay the bill), just simply smiling and waving. Instead of feeling isolated in that moment, it put a smile on their face whether it was brief or not. Little acts of kindness go along way, and we hear people say that phrase all the time but do we actually hold people accountable to ever follow through with it? Think about all the bullies that bully someone else because it happened to them. Think about all the future instances we could prevent if instead of bullying someone you made friends with them. We can create a cascade of bullying or we can create a cascade of kindness that ends bullying in schools. Bullying in schools and throughout ones lifetime sticks with people until the day they die. It is scarily closely connected to mass murders, relationship violence, suicides, you name it. Such a simple thing could have stopped Columbine, could have stopped a man from murdering his wife, could have stopped a young girl being excluded in school, yet why is it so hard to get people to just be nice. If we make it the culture of our schools in the United States, it would make a huge difference in schools and in life. This is something that from the TED talk, we know took little to no effort, but went a huge way. Think about the number of students this would positively impact if just the 20 something students in our EDUC 614 class vowed to implement a year long program like this in each of our future classrooms every year?

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This is an image of an elementary class performing their own “die-in” in response to police brutality.

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Service Learning Pedagogy

Community service and service learning are often times mistaken as the same thing. Service learning not only aims to help a group of people but to additionally provide an educational perspective on the community you are engaging with and why your work was meaningful. Community service is not bad but does not provide the necessary critical reflection, which can lead to an issue we see commonly for example, with white upper-class church groups and their “white savior complexes”. In order to avoid this from happening, the work should be mutually beneficial for both groups in the context of service learning pedagogy. One cannot simply have a learned experience without reflection on why they just acted in the way they did and for what reason. I think planning service learning activities for teachers can be difficult. A lot of kids have probably had experience either doing community service or being served by community service depending on the different backgrounds you have in your classroom, but that doesn’t mean service learning cannot happen, its about how you do it. I think an interesting way that I have been thinking about would be to come up with a semester long project, for example possibly building a drip-irrigation system in a community garden and learning about the engineering behind the system as well as food insecurity globally and in your own community. Days where you are out working with community partners could be followed by reflection and days that are spent in the classroom could include discussion and research based learning to prepare for implementing the final product.

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School-children in China doing hands-on work planting and helping construct a sustainable farm for a low-income rural community. After this experience (in order to be a service learning pedagogy), students should have learned about the community they were working in, and what the importance of the work they just did is, as well as what the students themselves learning about farming, etc.

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Arts Integration

Arts Integration is a culturally responsible method of teachers used to incorporate life experiences that all students can either relate or empathize with. it encourages students to recognize that everyone in their class has gone through different experiences in life, and also allows them to relate to art that they can find a story of themselves in. It requires thoughtful question asking, observation, but much more of a deep and meaningful learning experience than traditional learning methods. I loved having the TDS teacher discuss one activity she did with arts integration. I think the majority of out education class was shocked when she shared the image of the white officers with swastikas on their arm bands escorting Ruby Bridges to school. Although many of us have seen this image before, I think a large portion of the population would respond no to whether they thought it was appropriate to share with students in elementary school. The reality is however, that students have often times seen content on the news, or heard from other kids at school, controversial material that they are thinking about but often times don’t vocalize. We miss a huge learning opportunity as educators if fail to recognize this and then address the content in the classroom. Arts integration can be an incredibly useful tool for doing exactly this as we were shown. Many of the students in our EDUC 614 class have asked throughout the year where the line should be drawn in terms of political material in the classroom. I hope to work in a school where I am allowed to incorporate socially relevant and challenging material into my curriculum and encourage students to reflect on historical images, artwork and statues such as Silent Sam, for example, that hold hugely powerful messages our society is openly portraying and promoting, and need to be questioned and discussed. Creating culturally aware citizens can only improve the current state of our society.

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Arts integration can create new and meaningful connections to lesson content, expand student's understanding of other cultures, and help promote the development of healthy cultural identities

Windows, Bridges, and Mirrors

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Place and Community Based Pedagogy

Recognizing a commonality all your students share can be key in developing interest in the curriculum. There is a massive variety of backgrounds that students bring into a classroom. Where they were born, race, heritage, socioeconomic status, family structure, etc. are just a few common ones. One thing that they all have in common is the community that surrounds your school. In such a diverse class, it can be difficult for teachers to incorporate activities that include all students. Place and Community based pedagogy does just that. It provides students with something they are all familiar with even though their degree of familiarity may vary. Students who have lived in the area longer can teach other students about history, how the place has changed, what it means to them, etc. Being that all the students live in the same general community, it provides them all something they can strike up compassion towards. It allows students to get excited with the work they are doing because it relates to them in some way. As the picture I uploaded below shows, it is a group of students interacting with a piece of artwork on a common walkway in their city. This specific instance also combines arts integration with place and community based pedagogies which is why I found it so interesting. I have enjoyed seeing how all the different modes of teaching overlap and interact throughout this semester. In Chapel Hill specifically, when I was going through grade school, I never noticed hardly any of the murals, or discussed the content of them, until I was walking around leisurely on the weekends with friends. Since coming to college, I have interacted with several of them for class but I find it interesting that none of my history classes over the years ever involved looking at the artwork or building structures in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, since it holds so much meaningful artwork and is a very historical place. I’ve always wanted to teach in Chapel Hill, and if the opportunity arose, I would love to be able to take a group of kids into Carrboro and analyze the many many murals on the sides of buildings. I thoroughly enjoyed our class’ trips to the Ackland and how it teaches one to interact with art, and I could definitely see myself using these techniques to encourage my students to get deeper into the work rather than holding onto a first glance impression.

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Interacting with the culture of your students’ community.

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For more than half a century, schools have been seen as the key vehicle for developing a society's human capital

Smith and Sobel

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Critical Pedagogy

Challenging power structures. This is my main take away from Friere. He consistently stressed the importance of asking questions about everything-something that is often times shamed in school by their “superiors”. Why do teachers have the power in the classroom? We structure all our classroom around this notion that teachers will stand at the front and teach, and students will face the front and listen. We don’t encourage any sort of questioning, we are simply filling students with useless knowledge they can rarely retain. The material we are filling our students with is of concern as well. It is packed full of oppressive ideals and by continuing to teach it, we are fostering the cycle. Students should have the opportunity to ask questions to teachers and classmates without being reprimanded or beaten down for it. Silencing voices with power is nothing but ineffective and oppressive. As a student I was never one to talk in class because I was scared of being wrong. It took me a long time to initially process questions I was being asked, and then by them time I came up with something I was confident with, we had moved on. In my classroom I would like to give students the chance to discuss with someone else or reflect in a private journal. Writing my thoughts was always easier than speaking them out loud, and I have always wanted to recognize the possibility that other students are the same way in respects to reflection on meaningful content. If a student doesn’t feel their work is being shared with the class, they will be more likely to meaningfully and intentionally write their thoughts out if they know I am the only one reading their work. Practicing the skill of reflection will be something my classroom practices often.

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Through the restless, impatient, continuing hopeful  inquiry human beings pursue

Friere

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Knowledge only emerges through invention and re-invention

Friere