EDUC441 has one of the longest course names I’ve ever seen – Innovative Community-Based Approaches. That’s a bit of a tough one to decipher off the name (and I didn’t really get it for a while too). Near the end of this course I was able to do a lot of reflection and realised that I hadn’t given it the amount of time it deserved. The ironic thing here was that I felt that the reflection and work I did to catch up in this course by the end helped me to understand what the purpose of being there was. Especially in the last couple of weeks, we focused heavily on story and how relevant it is to education. There was an interesting progression of thought that I went through while going through this course when it comes to story. It went something like this:
It was hard to see how useful this course could be, especially in the middle of the summertime when I honestly had limited levels of energy to put towards school. I was pretty tired overall and since I had more intense work in other courses I started to shelve some things. Now, I’m not saying that ignoring this course work was the best thing, as obviously if I had been engaged all the way through, I would’ve gotten even more from the course. What I believe is that the lesson I learned through my approach to this course is also very valuable going forward.
I tried to figure out why things only started to click engagement-wise so late in the block, and one of the main things was that I hadn’t really inserted myself into it until the end. I was approaching the course as “something I had to do”, instead of doing things for myself. When you do things for a teacher/educator then it’ll always be not as engaged, and this is a problem I’d had many times before at all levels of education. I tended to work harder in courses only because I didn’t want to disappoint the educator. The first 4 weeks of EDUC441 I worked for the educator, but in the last week I worked for myself. That work I did for myself was infinitely more engaging and important than the rest. This is my story, and I think through this I best represent myself as a teacher, and the message of this course.
