Around, Here

[My original teaching/educational philosophy draft from EDHD 5300 can be found here .] Within the above document we can see the beginnings of my educational philosophy take place. This assignment largely had me extrapolate some aspects of my K-12 academic career for my own analysis with my current lens and perspective. As I move forward in my teacher prep program I have come to the understanding that my teaching philosophy absolutely has to be grounded in theory. Period. It is one thing for me to have these grandiose ideas of being a fun, engaging, and inclusive teacher, but if these ideas are not clearly grounded in theory then the points may as well be moot. It is the theory that is the foundation of our desires to be the optimal teacher(s). Keeping this in mind, I realize that my teaching philosophy must include this in order to articulate my opinions regarding classroom assessment, technology integration, lesson differentiation, and classroom ecology. Of course, with assessment...

The podcast I looked at is from a series called Overdue, and this particular episode talks about the book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. This is, more or less, a children's novel that I read when I was about ten years old. The book outlines the story of Milo, a boy who goes through this magical gate (which is the Tollbooth, for all intents and purposes) and embarks on an adventure like no other. The book is rife with wordplay and fun life lessons that are worked into the plot of the story - The Phantom Tollbooth was one of my favorites growing up and I was happy to find a podcast that talked about the book. As for the podcast itself, finding Overdue came on a bit of a stroke of luck. While I was looking for a podcast to listen to for this assignment I just went to one of the home pages on Spotify and this pod was one of the first that came up. I had never heard of it, and the concept sounded interesting. Basically what Overdue does is take a book that the two hosts ha...

If I were to pick out a passage from these two readings that resonated with me, I would likely start with the one that reads as follows: “One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse.” This passage comes after the author talks about the “ideals” that are typically expressed within classic American literature, a genre that is dominated by white male authors. Specifically, this chapter talks about the omission of African literature and ideals from the common American culture and focus - these perspectives have been silenced and evaded. This, while perhaps common knowledge for those of us who have been extensively studying educational theory for the past six months straight, is important to reiterate as we work towards creating an inclusive and diverse multimodal curriculum for our students moving forward. We must talk about these values and many of t...