Minami Powers (they/them) - EDUC450

My main curiosity from the article is about the third point: that a campus garden should be involved in teaching the curriculum, not just as decoration or food, or else it is easily discarded.  I am curious as to specifically in high schools, what sort of teaching would be done such that an administration wouldn't simply tell them to switch it up and go back to what they were doing before in the same way that they could for a food garden.  I would guess it would be something like long term projects in biology that would build a strong enough argument for keeping the garden for schooling purposes.  Or are there stricter rules around what administration is allowed to do when something is used for education purposes that means that the garden's staying power is stronger? In regards to teaching math in a garden, a few ideas come to mind to begin— planning a garden necessitates talk about perimeter and area, gardens could be used for data collection for graphing/statistics, th...

Sit spots were introduced to me first through the CFE last spring and I did a lot of sitting and observing nature during that period, taking in my surroundings and slowing down to think.  I think it can be incredibly valuable not just as a tool to incorporate the environment in our teaching— for example with observing what math students could find in nature, etc— but also as a method for helping students regulate themselves.  School and life can often be so busy that we don't have time to take a moment to reset.  I found that during our sit spot in class, not only was I engaged with drawing, I didn't look at my phone and I didn't realized how much time had passed until we were called back.  I've had a teacher do a "mindful minute" at the start of class before and it gives a similar sort of reset period, something that I'd like to take into my own teaching.   We also discussed in our small group in class about Frank McCourt's thoughts of sharing ourselv...

The first thing that jumped out to me was the thought that whether or not you are reflective as a teacher, you are conveying certain ideas about society to your students: there are no neutral educational activities.  I agree strongly that we are always projecting a message to our students and therefore if we want to control the message, we need to think about what our actions will actually mean and question what we are taught.  This concept actually seems even more relevant to our program as we are constantly discussing that we teach who we are.  I often think that having a non-traditional gender already places me as someone who cannot be neutral in the classroom and have had to examine what I want to convey to students who don't yet understand the concept.  In actuality, it is every action we take that says something and that we can examine. The article posed many questions for teacher candidates to consider as they start their teaching journey and encourages them t...

The idea of Frank McCourt's philosophy that stuck out to me the most was the concept of being completely open to who you are with the students.  We've heard a lot in the past week about "teaching who you are" and it's a concept that I strongly believe in.  In my personal experience with TAing in college and volunteering in a high school, the students really enjoy getting to know you (the teacher) as a person.  I think being open with who you are making it so much simpler to build relationships with students which in turn makes it easier to help them.  Part of this philosophy has to come from the fact that I am nonbinary and use pronouns that generally have to be introduced and explained— I can't not be open about my identity or else I won't be referred to correctly. It was brought up briefly in class that it can be scary to be open with who we are because we might influence our students in some way.  I agree it can be scary, but I would argue that this is ...