Deep learning and some reflections

It would be short-sighted of me to say that anything and everything that has ever happened to me did not and does not have an influence on who I am within the classroom. From my recent experience as a personal childcare provider, my years as an educational assistant, my prior career as a support worker in a group home for those with dual-diagnosis developmental exceptionalities, my educational background in International Development and Gender Studies, these parts of my history all converge into my current pedagogical approach. My personal ethos as a teacher has been informed by my experiences as a person who grew up within the public school system in Ontario and how I now feel I can best equip today’s students with the knowledge they will need to navigate the world in a way that benefits them and the people around them. I am looking to help create thinkers, people who will ask questions and self-advocate. I want to be a part of molding citizenship and modelling what it means to fight for social justice. I hope to bring intersectionality, empathy, and self-reflexivity into my practice and engage with students where they’re at while also trying to give them opportunities to surprise me and themselves. I want to be a part of creating a school community in which teachers, support staff, administration and volunteers feel better when they come to work because they know that someone there has their best interests in mind. I am a proponent of taking care of ourselves as educators and I make an effort to do just that. Though it is a tired trope, my experience thus far within practicum during first year and this year has further helped me to realize that we, as educators, must put on our own metaphorical oxygen mask prior to assisting others; we must take care of ourselves emotionally before we can successfully cultivate a space of safety, community and learning.

Deep learning, the very idea of it, connects with me and so much of what I hope to accomplish as an educator. With my background being in social sciences, particularly those that engage with intersectionality, class issues, and social determinants of health, I’m interested in creating classroom communities that are places of learning in every sense of the word. I’m interested in finding ways to get students to find purpose for themselves and consider social justice and enterprise as global citizens. I’m hoping to use poetry units to delve into the use of spoken word and the cadence of public speakers as tools of resistance. I want to find ways for students to innovate ideas that look into existing inventions dealing with noise and light pollution and find gaps that need to be addressed. I want students to be able to look at poverty and homelessness, not with blind pity, but with comprehension and empathy. As educators, we strive to create transformative learning environments for students, places where students take responsibility for their own learning and inquire about the world around them, where struggle, failure, and resilience are a part of the educational process. It is incredibly important for students to learn these concepts but it is equally important for students to be able to use what they’ve learned in a way that benefits themselves, the world around them and in ways that provides students with an opportunity to re-contextualize elements from their local, living environments in new, exciting ways.

My approach to education is holistic and aims to concern itself with all aspects of child development. I approach children through a lens of empathy and looking at them as more than the sum of their parts, as more than their behaviour within the classroom. I view student behaviour as a means of communication and it is up to me and other supporting educators and administration to figure out what that student is trying to tell us. I’m constantly wondering about students Are they hungry? Tired? Sick? Can they see properly? Hear properly? Is their infighting at home or is there something going on socially?

I have done some personal research that focused on child development and success as it relates to autonomy and agency. My research specifically focused on the work of Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson regarding choice theory, long-term success of children as they move into adulthood and what it looks like to be able to provide a space for kids in which they learn the skills they need to be independent, resilient, critically-thinking and empathetic. One of the most important pieces of what I read focused on the idea of choice and how lack of choice has an extremely negative effect on both children and adults. It results in a feeling of lack of control over our own existence and that can have consequences that, for children and adults, can manifest in dangerously destructive ways. I think that one of my personal imperatives for creating a classroom community is to create opportunities to show students that I can trust them to make good choices for themselves and for their learning. By asking students to be a part of their educational process we are telling them that they can feel confident in having a say in their own lives. I also used the work of Brené Brown, as her work informs how I live my life in a holistic sense and absolutely informs how I teach. Her research focuses on shame and vulnerability and how those two parts of life and ourselves inform everything we do. She utilizes an empathetic approach and choice-theory in her own parenting and offers many strategies for doing this in our everyday lives as well.

My practicum this year at Regina Street Alternative School has been a wonderful surprise. Each week I have been impressed and appreciative of the level of empathy and aptitude that my associate teacher displays with respect to her students and peer colleagues. I was fortunate to be able to attend an overnight trip as a volunteer supervisor with two other teachers and a retired teacher also from Regina Street. This was a new and unique experience for me as I was meeting the grade 6 students on the trip for the first time but not in the classroom. Upon reflection, it was great to be able to meet these students outside of a traditional academic setting, where the stakes were lower, and the students were more relaxed. Being in an environment such as the woods allowed the students to relate to each other differently and talk to us as teachers in a different capacity. One of the highlights of this trip was being able to teach a few of the students how to play cribbage. I loved seeing students be able to interact and engage with the curriculum in a literal and tangible way. This was an experience I’ll always look back on a reference in my own teaching practice.

I believe that students should, whenever possible, learn by doing. Learning about biodiversity while standing in a swamp is such an enriching experience that is seldom replicated within the classroom. I believe that creating communities of inquiry within the classroom is an important factor in student engagement. Within that, I believe that we need to be responsible for also creating communities of inquiry amongst teaching staff as well for, if we stay curious and excited about learning, most students will be able to absorb that fervour. I feel confirmed in my belief that educators have a duty to meet students where they’re at and provide them with a classroom that can act as a refuge away from the problems they may or may not experience on the other side of the door, but that we also need to be taking care of ourselves holistically in order to do this effectively.