Concluding Post: An Open Letter to my Students

           Our lives are stories, journeys, or taken from the Latin basis of the word curriculum “running” or “a race”.   In this race of life, learning, and accounting for what is the curriculum of my life, I want to say thank you to all my students.  Thank you for being part of my learning path, and thank you for all that you have taught me.  When I think back over the course of my teaching career, even though the title of this blog is “In the Blur”, the memories of the lessons from my students distill into discrete and beautiful memories.  Jean McNiff (2012) states, “My story is, however, a story of stories” (p.3).  Personally, I can’t think of any truer words to account for a life.  So, for my past, present, and future students, think of this letter as my story to you of how I recount and explain my living educational theory to you, and in service of your learning. 

Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.”  I believe wholeheartedly that when mapping out the curriculum for my students, the most important thing I must consider is my aims of education. What do I want my students to take away from my class?  What is the learning that I value?  To me, the curriculum that I try to teach is to embrace life, embrace learning, and to model the building of strong relationships. It is my belief that as a teacher I have a responsibly to maintain a dynamic relationship with curriculum by constantly interrogating my personal aims of education and how I can best support my students’ learning.  I want my students to embrace learning openly and with engagement for their whole life.   Ultimately, I as a teacher want to be a stepping stone in my student’s life path.  Like Dewey, I believe in experiential learning and in student directed learning.  I believe that students learn best when they can engage personally and directly with the curriculum, when their interests can motivate or drive subject matter instruction, and when they are convinced or recognize the relevance/need in learning the material. Learner centered instruction is not the easiest path to take in the classroom, knowing that students reside in different development phases across their physical, mental, and socio-emotional states, and then responding to students “where they are” is much different than the teacher centered approach or a standardized take on curriculum.  To my past, present, and future students, while this is a strongly held belief of mine, the implementation of and responding to meeting every student in their current knowledge is an area of constant, continuous (although incremental) growth for me as both an educator and human.  

What is my educational history with my students?  Well, I began my teaching career with kindergarten students. My goal was to capture the starry-eyed rapture with which they approached life and learning and to nurture it into a lifelong quest for more knowledge. I clearly take the “dream big” philosophy literally. In our class we learned mostly through play but group learning, centers, and cooperation were also major themes.  My favorite memories of this time are of various thematic units through which I taught and the learning they encompassed on the students’ part. I still have sample projects from those days and it was 17 years ago. My original kindergartners are college students now! The list of my favorites from that time would include the Laura Numeroff unit where all the students published their own “If…Then…” story, our “give back” unit where we did service projects in the community, and all the science units where we made science come alive (literally – planting, harvesting, working with animals, visiting farms, dissecting, etc.). These students taught me what teaching meant.  I grew and learned right alongside them as they taught what student/teacher roles, responsibilities, and relationships truly meant.  

The next step in my journey is ongoing.  I didn’t teach kindergarten long (just my student teaching actually) as I left the formal educational world to be a stay at home mom to our five kids for 10 years.  I did some substitute teaching here and there (mostly in my children’s schools) and went back to work at MSU (from home, on a part-time basis) when my youngest was a toddler.  Being a parent has given me a completely different perspective on education and school.  I believe that education and school can be two different things.  I have learned the good, the bad, and the ugly about myself through being a parent.  Luckily, the kids have also taught me about grace, humility, and forgiveness as well as their essentialism as a curricular component.  Most of this has not been direct learning on my part but a product of relationship building, reflection, and a commitment to growing and continuing to learn on my march through life.  Personal values and respecting my students as individuals becomes a larger component of my curriculum as I grow older myself.

Currently and futuristically, my parental educational journey includes elementary, high school, and a college student (in the upcoming fall anyway).  My formal students are now grown-ups too, as I am teaching field instruction courses and working on the Chinese Language Teacher Certification Program.  I sort of feel like my living educational theory is truly making the racetrack pattern through curriculum now.  I started by teaching young children, had my own children and am raising them (going to have one to adulthood in a few short months), while also now teaching adults to teach a foreign language here in the US across the k-12 spectrum.  The circular fashion of learning in my life is becoming hard to ignore.  Whew! One of my favorite quotes (although I’ve never managed to find the source) is, “the days are long but the years are short.”  I can viscerally feel the effects of this quote when I think of my educational journey.  I think of this quote when contemplating my time with all my students, be they past or present.  What does it mean for my students stretching into the future?  I love working with international students, we mutually push and extend our knowledge about curriculum, cultural norms, and hegemonic influences.  Confronting all these issues in such an intertwined fashion has really reinforced to me the need for experiential and self-directed learning.  

In contemplating my living educational theory, I think of telling stories with action research in mind. McNiff (2012) states, “Narrative forms can transform value-based commitments into their lived articulation in the form of practitioner researchers’ networks, thus eradicating the artificial divides of them and us” (p. 18). I am committed to reflective practices and I am committed to coming to terms with and to learning the reality of integrating practice and theory.  In the past, I’ve held the opinion that to a certain extent it was practice vs. theory.  As I progress as an educator, I am working on viewing practice and theory as interwoven and interworking, rather than as competing forces.  This creates some tension in my practice as for how I will measure my effectiveness and accountability.  Again, I have no direct protocol to give you other than a commitment that I value holding myself accountable and striving to continue to learn best practices as an educator and to try to reproduce growth mindset in myself as an educator as well as in my students.  

I believe that reflection and relationship building are two hallmarks of the best educators and are two practices that should drive my curriculum and instruction.  The natural world and the “natural” curriculum are important to me and I am working to integrate these components more into my teaching practice.  Now that I work with adults, these components of curriculum have fallen a bit by the wayside but I am determined to bring them forward in the future. In an earlier blog post, I wrote, I think that pondering understanding and implementation of a natural curriculum into school and life highlights the integration necessary between student engagement, interest, and motivation to learn.  Learning (and life) needs to be considered holistically, not compartmentalized into tidy boxes of curriculum and subject matter. As an educator, I need to work to highlight and reflect on the intertwined narrative between all my stories. My relationship to the world, to teaching practices, to people in general, shape our classroom community and need to recognized as the force that they are so that the influence of these sources can be utilized in our teaching and learning.  

 In thinking about my teaching (internship courses), I would like to bring in more reflective practices, both in working directly with my students but also to help model for my students, how they can interact with their own students.  We juggle tension regarding cultural norms in my present teaching.  I teach international teacher interns who are learning how to teach here in the US.  There is a vast and complicated web of implicit and explicit social conditioning at play within our teaching and learning environment.  In my life, I usually seek to avoid conflict but going forward, I am hoping to lean into the uncomfortable and learn to be a better sounding board for my interns as they navigate the convoluted situations they find themselves thrust into.  I value and respect each of my students for who they are now and who they will become in the future. Teaching diverse populations with integrity and sincerity is something that I value.  This work also comes with a steep learning curve and I vow to continue to learn more about how to represent every student and all components of their identities within my classroom.  I want every student to feel heard, seen, valued and affirmed in my classroom, no matter if it is an online learning environment or a traditional face-to-face classroom.  This is another facet of relationship building and reflection that I commit to, now and in the future.  

Perhaps one should only look to positive influences and the “best of the best” when attempting to elucidate their living educational theory.  However, I’m a realist, and the real world  I live in is not all sunshine and roses.  Neither is teaching.  It is messy, humbling, and at times upsetting work. The following poem by Billy Collins (2001) has always spoken to me of the teacher I don’t want to be.  It’s a reminder to me of the easier path, the warm-up racetrack if you will, and of what happens if I don’t continuously lean into growing and learning with passion and openness.  

            

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students’ innocence

he told them the Ice Age was really just

the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age

named after the long driveways of the time. 

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more

than an outbreak of questions such as

“How far is it from here to Madrid?”

“What do you call a matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom

on Japan. 

The children would leave his classroom 

for the playground to torment the weak 

and the smart,

mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home

past the flower beds and white picket fences,

wondering if they would believe that soldiers 

in the Boer War told long, rambling stories

designed to make the enemy nod off. 

            A living educational theory is living, breathing, and ever evolving. Just as we change and grow as people, I want my teaching practice to thrive and grow to help all my students to embrace learning and to embrace themselves.  I never want to become that history teacher, dealing in small or twisted versions of the truth.  For me curriculum is a journey, the metaphorical race course,  it continues for our entire lives and I want my teaching practice to model this type of life. I want the learning cycle to go around and around, in depth, in experience, in truth, and with deeper understanding and growth for all.  Ultimately, our curriculum will be the sum total of our life experiences, both as teacher and as student.  I strive to live my life with an open mind and an open heart. I want my students to know and feel my openness.  This is the story of my living educational theory; may it continue to expand and not stagnant. 

References:

McNiff, J. (2012). My Story is My Living Educational Theory. Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology, 308–329. doi: 10.4135/9781452226552.n12

Collins, B. (2001). Sailing alone around the room: New and selected poems. New York: Random House.