Self Evaluation and Reflection

Silvi Shameti

Schools in American Cities

Final Reflection

Spring 2015

As someone who both has experienced city schooling in my own schooling career and who hopes to become a city school teacher themselves, this class has been very important to my orientation as a potential future educator.

I began this semester hoping to have a space to discuss and listen to ideas about what multicultural education meant. As the semester began, I was fresh out of my 360 on Global Health, missing the educational perspective on the issues we had been discussing the entirety of the fall semester, such as neoliberalism, imperialism, and globalization.

            I knew at the beginning of this semester that I would learn a great deal from this course. I had just received a job offer to work in Washington D.C. with Urban Teachers Center, a program that puts me in a host class for a year, where I learn from a master teacher. During this time, I will take graduate classes in elementary education. By my second year, I will be a teacher and will have my own classroom to run and will finish my graduate degree. This class has prepared me for the realities of an urban classroom in America. Before taking this class, I had only a couple of interactions with public schools, and I did not know the ins and outs of an urban classroom.

Sarah Friesen-Johnson

May 5, 2015

EDUC 266, P. Cohen

Reflection

This class has expanded and informed my thinking about the field of education in more ways than one. I’ve appreciated it for it’s in depth focus on the American school system and I’ve enjoyed learning all the different angles within that subject. Most importantly, this course has allowed me to think critically about education and the work done on education more than any other classes.

When I first came into Esem I was not sure about it at all. I remember many upperclassman telling me that Esem will help you decide if Bryn Mawr is the school for you. To be honest I had only previously heard about Jody Cohen and seen amazing reviews for her on Rate my Professor. I was not sure what to expect from Anne Dalke at all. But as cheesy as this sounds, Esem did really set the stage for me for the rest of my time at Bryn Mawr. I really did enjoy this class.

This class has been my favortie class this entire semester. I truly looked forward to the discussions especially when there was a reading that I didn't quite understand. The people in my class helped a lot with my growth as an intellectual as well as you, Anne, and I felt like I wouldn't have grown as much as I did without this class. As far as myself, I feel like I've grown a lot. My writing in the beginning was a bit rough, I wasnt throughly formulating my ideas, wasn't putting a thesis, etc. I would say the whole thesis process is still a task that I haven completely accomplished, but I do believe that my writing as a whole has grown. I'm becoming a little bit more aware of my repetitiveness when I write and I try to stop that as much as possible.

This semester in praxis taught me a lot about myself as a student and as a learner. Each class I was meet with personal challenges that i had to either confront in class, or with myself later afterwards. This was the first time that I was prompted to think about what my educational experience was like and how it may have impacted my identity as a learner/student. The class provided me with an opportunity to think about how my identity may have aided or hindered my access to education and other privileges in society. And the process of working at a cite in the city allowed me to see how these privileges and setbacks actually manifest in the American Education system. 

            I am most proud of how my writing has changed throughout the course of the semester. When I began, I wrote essays that did not progress, but generally began the same way they ended. At the start of the semester, I took on topics that I was personally interested in, but the way I discussed and interpreted them did not necessarily make difficult and complex claims. With this last revision, I have completely restructured the way I write a paper, and the beginning is ambiguous, but the thesis and main idea of my paper become clearer as I explain what the “mindset of the oppressed” means. I think I started by simply placing quotes into papers that though related to my topics were not effectively connected to the ideas that proceeded and came after.