Welcome to my course portfolio. Here you will find 3 essays, postcards, field notes, and a reflection on the book group project.
In approaching the final paper it may be hard for you to really dig in as a reader. I wrote the final paper as letters, or journal entries, for myself and thus they may be different to get through. I purposely changed the pronouns that I used when talking to myself between the second and third letters. Both the past and present letters refer to myself as I, while the future letter refers to myself a ‘you’. One of the reasons that I did this is because I wrote the third letter as my current self talking to my future self. I also wrote the third letter using ‘you’ because I have not yet experienced the future version of myself.
In approaching the field notes I think it is important to keep in mind that I still felt like an outsider in the classroom up until my last day. So, when reading these fieldnotes, in a sense you reading them as an outsider may match my feeling on being an outside in that classroom. I was left with a lot of questions leaving that placement and a lot of confusions. While I had managed to adapt to the style of the teachers in the classroom, the ways in which I interacted with the kids (especially compared to the way that I typically interact with kids) left me feeling out-of-place and sometimes disembodied.
In approaching the postcards, many of the postcards have personal connections, ranging from my coping with the loss of my great-grandmother, to driving in the treacherous Cleveland snow. Some images are hand-drawn while another image is a screenshot from a message I sent, while another was created on the computer using paint. I think that the writing on each postcard stands for itself.
In approaching the first two papers I ask readers to understand and not be critical of the frustration that is presented in both papers. The first paper is incomplete. As I was writing this paper, my frustration with the topic and what I was writing about grew and at some point I stopped and forgot to finish the paper. I am comfortable leaving the paper in an unfinished state and as a reader it is okay to be unsettled or wanting for more, however that ‘more’ will not come. In the second paper, I talked about grading. In this paper, I came to a head with all of my mounting frustrations with the world of academia. While the frustration may not be as evident in this paper, I grapple with my understanding of grading, the purpose of grading, and the evaluation of learning. One of the most important aspects of the second essay to keep in mind is summarized by this excerpt, “I also want to acknowledge that there are as many complexities in offering a class as credit/no credit as there are in offering the class as gradeless, or assigning numerical grades. I’m not necessarily arguing that grades should not be apart of a classroom but rather urging us (as a community) to think about learning as an experience that is unique to the individual and only truly measurable by the person who is doing the learning.”
I’m not sure if I gained any new insights in developing this portfolio. In the final paper, I made more connections to course content, however, the way in which my definitions of what it means to be an empowered learner would have been the same, I would have just used a different vocabulary to describe similar concepts and understandings. Leaving this course, I am left wondering about the field placement choices because I often found it hard to map my field placement experiences onto the course, especially the ways in which I found myself relating to the course. I’m also left wondering if there is room for this course to break free of academia in the sense that I feel like as we went through this course we were still bound by requirements. It seems as though as much as we tried to push the boundaries of education, we were still in some ways bound by the more formal aspects on college education like a set classroom, grading, etc.