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West Philadelphia Elementary School, Kindergarten

*Pseudonyms were used in this entry.

Guided Individual Reflection Protocol (McEntee, et al., p. 52):

Step 1. Collect Stories: During my lunch break today I jotted down some notes about events/situations that had occurred.  This was so that I could my full attention to my students while they were in the room, and so that I wouldn’t forget any event, even ordinary events, that had occurred. 

Step 2. What happened? During the journaling activity today Samuel decided that he wasn’t pleased with the situation.  Instead of voicing this clearly, the crumpled up his piece of paper that he was supposed to write on.  He blatantly crumpled up the piece of paper in front of me, while I was directing him not to, because he would have to use it anyway.  He continued to crumple up the piece of paper, and then asked for a new one.  I stated that I had clearly told him that that was his only piece of paper, and that he still had to use it to write his journal entry.

I finally started by placement today at a private school not far from the college campus of this course, to be called The Boatley School. I will be with the lower school's music teacher to known as Ms. Presley, who is in her first year teaching here after some work at public schools. (She says that Boatley students are uniquely comfortable speaking up and asking questions compared to her past teaching experience, which she says can be good and bad. I hypothesize may be a socio-economic class issue.) I feel grateful that a new teacher was willing to take on a student to do fieldwork in her class, although she seems to prefer I mainly observe at first. She will also try to arrange for me to visit the band director and the middle/upper school music teacher a couple times each for a period or two. Because the school runs on a rotating schedule, I will see different students every week, which will make it a challenge for me to get to know them. That said, I think it will be interesting as a contrast to past field placements in music.

Lucy Carreno-Roca

February 19, 2013

Paper 2

An Insider looking Within: Analysis of Lareau’s Theoretical Approach

In Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, she associates class, race, and gender as the key to a child’s educational experience and what they learn in the course of their life as they grow up to become citizens of the society that defined their learning and educational experiences. Through the information gathered in her research team’s field work, Lareau develops two constructs in which theoretically all middle and lower class fall into: a concerted cultivation experience or an accomplishment of natural growth experience. This either-or approach has many flaws but has helped lay some sort of ground work that can be built upon in future field work research that could potentially benefit the children of the United States in the long run. While reading this text, I felt as though there were many fundamental concepts that needed to be defined before truly diving into the field placement research. For example, the definition of lower class versus working class versus middle class is ambiguously established as this concept that defines a child’s potential and learning experience.

“I am a ‘conditioned’ being, capable of going beyond my own conditioning”

There were many times while I was reading The Pedagogy of Freedom, where I was nodding in agreement to many of the theoretical concepts discussed by Paulo Freire. The book may have seemed a bit excessive in really “hammering” the main points repeatedly, and some of the concepts could have benefited from more relatable examples to help the readers who struggled with abstractness of his thinking. However, personally I felt that the book really encompassed my perspectives on the pedagogy, duty and the responsibility of what it means to be a teacher.

A couple weeks ago in class, we discussed the idea of "threshold concepts" and the ways these moments of clarity function in the classroom. Esteniolla described her definition of these moments and added that one of her partners in the project studies the occurance of these moments in the classroom, but puts less emphasis on theshold moments outside of the classroom. My natural interest tends to lead me in the other direction. Since this class, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on "aha-moments" that I have had, and although it is possible to pinpoint a few instances in the classroom, I am even more fascinated by the threshold concepts that I have mastered outside of the walls of the classroom. At the end of my past season, I was elected captain of the Haverford field hockey team, and although I was honored, I have also been anxious and struggling to understand what kind of leader I should be. Last week, I attended a leadership seminar, along with the other Haverford College teams’ sophomores. The topic of this seminar was core values. Each attendee was given a list of twenty values and we were asked to number our top ten in order. After we had each done so, we began to discuss our choices, and the leaders of the seminar began to evaluate “Integrity” as a value. I had noticed integrity on the list, but I had not put it in my top ten. Perhaps this was because I did not fully understand its meaning. They defined integrity of being the person you say you are, and eliminated dissonance between what you say and what you do.

Here goes!

February 19th, 2013 

ideas from our papers… 

-we all want to respect other ways of being literate, appropriateness of language depending on where you are 

-the dominant discourses changes based on location 

-this assignment places a value on experiences and we can gain ideas from other's experiences--creating a porous classroom (Freire) 

-confronting a teacher around power, she didn't understand that the student was making a choice.

-is there place for negotiation in the classroom?

-should we sacrifice ideas for "correct writing" "academic writing" 

-can slang or conversation writing be accepted in the classroom? 

-writer based to reader based prose as a delicate dance 

-literacy as "static" vs. "dynamic"--literacy as a space to evolve 

-how do we build literacy as a place for negotiation if we are taught not to use certain words in our writing but as we grow older exceptions are allowed …

-does the technical at the beginning of our learning cut off options for later learning because students don't engage 

-if you had more language for challenging the teacher could you break out with a earlier age?