What Makes Great Teaching?

 

    To be a great teacher you must be consciously aware of the impact you have on others. This is not only limited to our identity as teachers, but it must transfer to all aspects of our lives. In other words, it doesn't make sense to be a teacher without also fighting for social justice. The problems of our children are the problems of our communities. We cannot serve our students until we wrap our arms around the greater struggles of society, such as poverty, racism, and sexism just to name a few. In order to be adequate teachers for these kids we must construct culturally responsive pedagogy, and serve them lessons that not only take their history into account, but place it at the forefront of what is important. We have to find ways to reflect on the ingrained ideologies that have constructed the triggers that we act on within our classrooms, and our social lives. This class has offered a myriad of assignments that helped me accomplish deep reflection on my own predispositions and how to work past these triggers as I aim to help my students be culturally competent and accepting of differences. 

    The first assignment that helped me gain a deeper insight on my own ingrained ideologies was the text-to-world connections with Empathy Limiting Mistakes.  We all have to realize we are guilty of each of the mistakes that were discussed throughout the semester. This activity forced us to come to terms with that by identifying a specific event in our lives where we made empathy-limiting mistakes. We had to be critical of our past behaviors and reflect how we have changed from them. If we can’t be critical of ourselves, we will never listen when others try to give us constructive feedback.

    The following week we completed the Golden Lines Found Poem. To complete this assignment, we had to critically examine a collection of texts and employ our note taking skills to decipher which lines were the most important ones to be recorded. From there we had to deduce the overall meaning of the texts as a whole entity and exercise our creativity to assemble the most important lines into a poem with as many highlighted/omitted terms as we pleased. The powerful lines that were created as a result of this poem served as a personal reminder that we all are suffering through some sort of battle. It reinforced the previous week's lesson about having empathy, instead of judging people for struggles you can't relate to.

    An assignment that we completed much later in the semester was very similar to the found poem discussed in the previous passage, known as the Blackout Poem. We had to draw relations from a small passage of text to connect back to the overall nuances of the module assignments by highlighting and omitting pieces of a text to create a poem. Where this task varied from the prior is that the poem had to be constructed from a pre-selected passage rather than quotes that we chose and arranged ourselves. This required a greater level of creativity as we had to draw connections from texts that were already written, and cross analyze separate materials.

    My favorite assignment from the semester was the One Pager. For this task we were allowed to select a few items from a list of tiny projects to construct a one-page artwork which reflects the overall module. I accidentally did all of the tiny projects because I did not carefully read the instructions. I thought this was beneficial nonetheless because we had to look at the texts from a different perspective depending on the project. After I reviewed the text in about 6 different ways, I had a much deeper understanding of the module and how it can be applied to my career. Portions of the texts that were analyzed also brought back vivid memories from my childhood and the ideas that were pushed on to me as elements of my own culture which were actually ripped off from some one else's. 

    The longest spanning project that we completed, which I found the utmost beneficial for the goal of reaching an understanding of people who aren't the exact same as ourselves was the social media assignment. We were required to create and post on blog pages throughout the semester. We had to learn how to engage in effective and productive discourse with our peers while maintaining dignity and respect. I think this task was also beneficial to us because it can be seen by future employers and peers, like a portfolio. We may also choose to continue posting on it, and hosting discussions to further our understanding of unfamiliar topics and issues.