First day of traveling here we go! Surprisingly enough traveling wasn’t too bad. I woke up the morning of the 26th of June anxiously waiting for our flight at 4:00 pm, naturally getting there 3 hours early out of nervousness and excitement. My friend Kassidy and I booked our flights together and grabbed one last beer at Stone in the San Diego airport before our first flight to LAX (only 21 minutes in the air). We had a short layover before we hopped onto our next 10 hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany. We landed safely and ran straight for empty chairs to take a quick nap before finding A GOLD MINE. A shower in the airport for only $8. The shower from the gods definitely made the 7 hour layover, time change, and next and final flight to Johannesburg so much more doable.
After 28 hours of traveling we finally landed in Johannesburg. It finally hit us when we were reunited with our cohort, we’re in South Africa so ready to begin this incredible journey together.
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With only a few days left before I depart on this amazing journey in South Africa with my classmates I reflected upon the information I’ve gained through our readings, through our email groups and discussions we’ve had as a class. I feel like I have a much better understanding of how the education system in South Africa is set up as well as more about how the apartheid affected their communities. Which is something I really felt I needed to get a better understanding of and my group was able to show me that. In my email group I was paired with a group of people who come from all different types of backgrounds and even then, we found out that our views are very alike. The passion that we all share for bettering the education system and for creating a safe place of support for all of our students and future students is very apparent. I have learned so much from them already and I can’t wait until we are able to work together in person. I’m confident that we will able to produce something that can help each of us as educators and hopefully help those around us. With that…t-minus 2 days!
Our main points this week were how to incorporate inclusive practices in our own classroom, how trauma and language can affect learning and how to individualize learning for students. I believe of all of the pieces that we should incorporate in our classroom as an educator, these are definitely of the most important.
Making all of our students feel welcome and celebrated in the classroom is so incredibly necessary for their learning and for the classroom environment in general. If a student doesn’t feel as though you care about them as a whole person their learning will suffer. Inclusion could be giving many different options for projects or creating different stations for different learning styles, incorporating more than one culture in the classroom so that each student is represented, or even using phrases throughout the day or week in different languages of students in your classrooms. There are so many options that can help students and yourself learn more about each other and ensure a welcoming classroom. After connecting with other educators from the United States as well as South Africa, even though we live in completely different communities, I’ve realized that we all have one goal in mind: to create a better education system for future students than the one we grew up in. One of my group members discussed the issue of teacher-centered schooling where the focus is all on the teacher. In this type of classroom, the students sit back and are talked to when the best way for them to learn would be for the teacher to be the facilitator of their learning.
This week we also researched and discussed how important it is a general educator to support students with an IEP or who may possibly need one. It really is a team effort and there has to be a lot of communication involved on all sides. Each student is different, so that means that the support for each child must be individualized, monitored, and continuously re-evaluated. The main idea I took away from my readings was well stated by Weatherly: “We don’t wait for them to fail, before we start giving them support”. It is our job as educators to support our students and always monitor their progress to help them grow in the present and in the future. This week and in our class session as a group, we discussed the 13 different types of disabilities and ways that we can help support students with those disabilities in the classroom. There are so many small things that we can do in the classroom to support these students and that also can help engage the class as a whole. For example, for a student with TBI or traumatic brain injury may have memory difficulties both short term and long term, problems following directions, taking tests, problems concentrating, and more. For this student it might be helpful to give them extra time completing a test, break down complex directions and even help them start a daily planner to keep track of their assignments and schedules so that they can stay organized and reduce any confusion.
In our readings from “Can We Talk About Race?” it discussed residential segregation. I did have some knowledge of this before, but in this reading, it opened my eyes to another factor that comes with residential segregation. With the desegregation process, African American teachers began to be dismissed and dominantly Black schools were being shut down. With the loss of African American teachers, African American students lost role models in academics and in life. Dr. Tatum states that as teachers we “need to be willing to learn deeply about the lives of their students in their full cultural, socio-economic, and sociopolitical contexts in order to affirm their identities authentically—with identity stories of hope and empowerment”. |
Study AbroadThis June I have gotten the opportunity to travel to South Africa to observe policies and practices of the education systems. I will be working with students and educators from the U.S. and South Africa on a Changemaker Project. Our hope is to bring awareness to the different types of diverse learners in the U.S., South Africa and all over. Archives
August 2018
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