When I began this course, I saw it as more of required hoop to jump through rather than concepts pertaining to my future as a teacher. However, as I began to construct a project with my peers, I found that plants had everything to do with education. I discovered an educational phenomena known as Garden-based Learning or GBL which is an instructional approach to science that incorporates a physical environment beyond the classroom. Students are able to engage in hands-on learning through real-life practices as well as independent exploration beyond the classroom instruction. After completing this project, my eyes were open to the value of all my courses, not just my education ones, in helping be become the most effective educator I can be.
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This class was my first real introduction into the importance of literacy in every single content area. Before I had only thought about literacy in the context of reading, but in reality, it spans all forms of communicating knowledge including reading, writing, speaking, and listening. As an educator, it is important to put as much emphasis on learning the mathematical vocabulary about a concept as the actual mathematical computation itself.
For this project, I spent five weeks volunteering with an organization called The Northwest Project, a part of the Drew Lewis Foundation, at a place called The Fairbanks. This organization seeks to help families living in poverty learn life skills to not just move themselves and their family out of poverty but to maintain a life of long-term success. A typical night volunteering would start with setup for and serving a community dinner for all the families. Then, the parents would go to a class and the volunteers would assist with childcare. During this time, I worked to build relationships with the children as to gain an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in the areas of literacy. As the weeks progressed, I explored the idea of play and how it could be incorporated with literacy to create engaging and meaningful lessons for students. On my last day, I taught my own lesson to the children as seen attached. |
Honors Reading Seminar In this course, we read and discussed different books centered around music. As an avid music lover, I was excited to academically study something which brings me so much enjoyment. We discussed at length the impact of technology on music and the way we listen to music as it has shifted to a more individual experience rather than as a community. My favorite book we read was about the history of hip-hop. It was called Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement by S. Craig Watkins. My eyes were really opened up to the significance of hip-hop in our world and the events that led to it becoming a sort of movement. I understood the bond some feel towards the hip-hop community and how not just its sound, but its message and ideals differ from the modern rap music.
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In this course, we discussed the connection between the different communities we lead in and the communities which impact us. We explored the various areas which impact the formation of communities such as art, politics, economics, and education. We examined different strategies for leading in different areas of communities and how-to merge ideas in order to benefit a larger community. We also interviewed important leaders in our community. I interviewed Kelly Roe, the Director of Youth Programming for the Northwest Project.
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Honors Reading Seminar This reading seminar course focused on created worlds. We examined this idea through three different facets: science fiction, war and propaganda, and equality, and the different interconnection between personal and societal worlds in each of these facets. My personal favorite book we read was a collection of poems titled Preparing My Daughter for Rain by Key Ballah. This piece of work centered on the themes of race, love, and what it means to be a woman in the 21st century. I appreciated the way Ballah constructed her poems and the fierce yet fair approach she took to judging elements of life. In this postmodernism time, we can often be cynical about love, especially when it is tarnished by abuse and toxicity. I appreciated the way Ballah spoke of love with a lightness, despite the dark moments she has gone through, an optimist for the prevail of love in all forms.
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