The Next Five Years
I’m looking to anticipate change in several areas. The main one is that I strongly feel that an urban garden is extremely beneficial to the kids and to the community as a whole. I have been working closely with the Minnesota Monarch Lab for about two years now. It is a partnership with the US Forest Preserve and the University of Minnesota. They have been tremendously generous with providing funding for professional developments, fieldtrips and grants for the garden. The garden is utilized for science lessons and as a place to go to and decompress, mostly. Although the garden does not belong to the Chicago Public Schools, I decided to partner with the Holy Cross church across the street because the goal is to work towards the betterment of our neighborhood as a whole. Not only have I been extremely fortunate to work with a wonderful group of community activists who work endlessly to improve the state of our neighborhood but our class is also involved in the Global Garden Exchange where our students have pen pals with a middle school in Burkina Faso, Africa. This communication and partnerships will continue for as long as possible, continuously bring resources to our garden and community.
My work with the Yale National Initiative is something that I just began to work with. It is an amazing opportunity to work with Yale professors on becoming experts on content knowledge that we teach. Many times our curriculum planning is based on pedagogy and we just simply run out of time to do actual deep research on the material we are teaching. The person whom I am working with is a biomedical engineer. He will lead an intense seminar in the summer where he will teach and assist us in research. I will take his guidance and build a unit related to the field. This is a long term commitment considering we are on a committee that is in the process of bringing the Yale Initiative program here to Chicago. This type of learning is an investment in the communities of Chicago.
Currently, we have a teacher who is working towards teaching media studies next year, and while he needs a new set of IPads, it is his missional goal at the school that I am looking forward to exploring. Our school is titled as a Communication Arts Academy, yet our students continue to lag behind when it comes to communicating, verbally or technologically. I am looking forward to working closely with him on this endeavor. In the book, Stuck in the Shallow End, the author writes about students of color who are not fully proficient in computer science and only take the basic classes, even when they attend a more affluent school. Programs such the one my colleague is trying to establish bring more computer literacy to our school. Other programs, such as Latina Girls Code have been sprouting because of the lack of students of color entering the computer science field. Events around the city take place several times a year, I plan to continue to bring this information back to our students.
The diversity measure of my network is extensive but obviously there is always room for diversifying and extending it. Being fortunate to currently work with two other universities and their professors, along with teachers from all over the country, has allowed me built an amazing network with different perspectives and beliefs. My family, includes five educators. They are another group in my network. It is difficult to go to Thanksgiving dinner and not talk about school when a large percentage of the family is in the field. These connections influence my world of teaching because I get the privilege to hear people’s perspectives from all over the country, and sometimes, world. In the next five years, I do want to continue to make more global connections.
Blenderspace and Pinterest provide a fun and engaging was to have an organization system of resources. While I have begun organize in a much more traditional sense by using hard copies of lessons in file folders in cabinets, this works very well also. As far as social media is concerned, I am extremely comfortable with Facebook and feel that I have great connections there, but Twitter continues to make me uncomfortable. While I understand that learning should be made public, I struggle with the idea of continually posting student learning on the site. This is something I have to overcome in the next five years, especially if I want to continue to make global connections.
Am I ready to change? I believe this is the toughest question of all. It is extremely difficult to abandon the past. How do I do that? Where do I begin? I have always seen myself as someone who builds on past experiences, learns from them makes the changes necessary to keep moving forward, but to abandon the past, I’m stuck. I will definitely need a hand in that. In her TED talk, Torres, makes a comment about how we should abandon the past even when something is working for you. I don’t understand why we would want to abandon something that is working for us. I am a bit stubborn and set in my ways but If it has to be done, it has to be done. Here’s to continuous change! Evolution. Science.
I’m looking to anticipate change in several areas. The main one is that I strongly feel that an urban garden is extremely beneficial to the kids and to the community as a whole. I have been working closely with the Minnesota Monarch Lab for about two years now. It is a partnership with the US Forest Preserve and the University of Minnesota. They have been tremendously generous with providing funding for professional developments, fieldtrips and grants for the garden. The garden is utilized for science lessons and as a place to go to and decompress, mostly. Although the garden does not belong to the Chicago Public Schools, I decided to partner with the Holy Cross church across the street because the goal is to work towards the betterment of our neighborhood as a whole. Not only have I been extremely fortunate to work with a wonderful group of community activists who work endlessly to improve the state of our neighborhood but our class is also involved in the Global Garden Exchange where our students have pen pals with a middle school in Burkina Faso, Africa. This communication and partnerships will continue for as long as possible, continuously bring resources to our garden and community.
My work with the Yale National Initiative is something that I just began to work with. It is an amazing opportunity to work with Yale professors on becoming experts on content knowledge that we teach. Many times our curriculum planning is based on pedagogy and we just simply run out of time to do actual deep research on the material we are teaching. The person whom I am working with is a biomedical engineer. He will lead an intense seminar in the summer where he will teach and assist us in research. I will take his guidance and build a unit related to the field. This is a long term commitment considering we are on a committee that is in the process of bringing the Yale Initiative program here to Chicago. This type of learning is an investment in the communities of Chicago.
Currently, we have a teacher who is working towards teaching media studies next year, and while he needs a new set of IPads, it is his missional goal at the school that I am looking forward to exploring. Our school is titled as a Communication Arts Academy, yet our students continue to lag behind when it comes to communicating, verbally or technologically. I am looking forward to working closely with him on this endeavor. In the book, Stuck in the Shallow End, the author writes about students of color who are not fully proficient in computer science and only take the basic classes, even when they attend a more affluent school. Programs such the one my colleague is trying to establish bring more computer literacy to our school. Other programs, such as Latina Girls Code have been sprouting because of the lack of students of color entering the computer science field. Events around the city take place several times a year, I plan to continue to bring this information back to our students.
The diversity measure of my network is extensive but obviously there is always room for diversifying and extending it. Being fortunate to currently work with two other universities and their professors, along with teachers from all over the country, has allowed me built an amazing network with different perspectives and beliefs. My family, includes five educators. They are another group in my network. It is difficult to go to Thanksgiving dinner and not talk about school when a large percentage of the family is in the field. These connections influence my world of teaching because I get the privilege to hear people’s perspectives from all over the country, and sometimes, world. In the next five years, I do want to continue to make more global connections.
Blenderspace and Pinterest provide a fun and engaging was to have an organization system of resources. While I have begun organize in a much more traditional sense by using hard copies of lessons in file folders in cabinets, this works very well also. As far as social media is concerned, I am extremely comfortable with Facebook and feel that I have great connections there, but Twitter continues to make me uncomfortable. While I understand that learning should be made public, I struggle with the idea of continually posting student learning on the site. This is something I have to overcome in the next five years, especially if I want to continue to make global connections.
Am I ready to change? I believe this is the toughest question of all. It is extremely difficult to abandon the past. How do I do that? Where do I begin? I have always seen myself as someone who builds on past experiences, learns from them makes the changes necessary to keep moving forward, but to abandon the past, I’m stuck. I will definitely need a hand in that. In her TED talk, Torres, makes a comment about how we should abandon the past even when something is working for you. I don’t understand why we would want to abandon something that is working for us. I am a bit stubborn and set in my ways but If it has to be done, it has to be done. Here’s to continuous change! Evolution. Science.