Sara McManus
School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 393: Foundations of Education
Melanie Baerg, M.Ed. – Lecturer
November 16, 2021
It has been over one month since my last Cross-Curricular Reflective Writing assignment and submission. My days are long and filled from early in the morning to late at night about education in one form or another. I feel like an exhausted, giant sponge. As much as I am overwhelmed by adding this new learning experience into my life, I also enjoy and appreciate the majority of the content of my courses. I see evidence of my learning in my practice in the classroom and elsewhere in my life. In this reflection, I would like to address the impacts of our EDUC 393 Foundations of Educations lecture on Social Justice on October 25, 2021 (Baerg, 2021) and the video conference BCTF Workshop on Professional Boundary Issues held on November 8, 2021 (Baerg, 2021).
On my drive to the campus on October 25, 2021, I chatted with a person close to me who lives in another community. Her daughter is one and a half years old right now and has an exponentially developing vocabulary. This baby was born during the start of the pandemic, and I was one of the few visitors in the first six months of the little girl’s life. I was incredibly proud of the Mom for naturally speaking with an adult voice and verbalizing everything she did with her new baby. In our call, the Mom inquired about reading to her toddler. Her spouse had been applying pressure to read more regularly to help their daughter become an avid reader when she grows up. Being the Mom’s virtual support person, she was eager to hear my opinion on the subject. I shared with her some tidbits of information Melanie Baerg had shared throughout our classes about the advances in neuroscience, and from what I had learned in my readings, I told her that I would know more about it soon. I could not listen close enough to the YouTube presentation of The Brain Prize Presents: Stanislas Dehaene (The Brain Prize, 2016). After our class, I was able to call her back with a wealth of information! I was able to explain to the Mom that her gut instinct was right. She just needs to continue to have conversations with her daughter, as she has since day one. I told her – of course, she should have books in the house. She should encourage her daughter to touch, look and play with books. When she reads books to her daughter, the focus should be on the story, the language, and the pronunciation of the words, not necessarily teaching her to read. I explained to her how there are twenty-six letters and 44 sounds in the English language and how it takes four different parts of the brain to read. I loved providing her with the process and phenological awareness and decoding steps, which leads to orthographic mapping. It was empowering to share what I had learned in our EDUC 393 class from our focus on Literacy as a Social Justice issue (Baerg, 2021) in an unexpected area of my life. The Mom appreciated it too!
Another tie to the October 25, 2021 lecture on Social Justice (Baerg, 2021) occurred during a video from our EDUC 390 Observational course (Baerg, 2021) when Tom Schimmer said, “Think of assessment as relationship building, as a way to drive inclusivity, as a focus on how we nurture a culture of learning in an environment where students feel supported, they feel motivated, and they feel engaged” (Schimmer, 2018). I appreciated this statement because I philosophically agree with its sentiment. In one of my practicums, I shared feedback with the classroom teacher on what she had done well throughout the day. (i.e., excellent use of formative assessment, great circulation of the classroom, etc.) (Curle, 2021 ). A few minutes into our conversation, she mentioned that sometimes teaching is so natural that you don’t even recognize what you are doing until you step back and take a moment to reflect. She noted that she hadn’t been conscious of using formative assessment or the other things I mentioned, but that was precisely what she was doing. Being inclusive is a big part of my version of “we teach who we are” (Palmer, 1997). Although to me it seems natural to include everyone, especially youth in my care, it has not been without its challenges. Until now, I have not had any formal training in diversity, equity and inclusion, such as special needs education. I have depended on observation from developing relationships and intuition to guide my action with youth. During my two years of teaching at the alternate high school, no one told me that I had to open my classroom doors; I just knew that the only way I would reach those students to help them achieve their graduation goals was to develop a strong relationship with them. When they really knew I cared about them and that I would be with them every step of the way – they would really open themselves up to learning. I can feel it already at the high school. The students who talk to me are learning from me; those who are mad, that their previous teacher is absent, are stuck. I am literally watching their grades drop by the day. My mind is filled with ideas on how to reach them before another week is wasted.
When I reflect on applying my learning into practice in my classroom, I see it every day in so many ways. One way is how I love to wear my microphone now to help my two hearing disabled students. Whenever my students ask me questions about the microphone, I can respond confidently, normalizing the microphone without specifying any particular students. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that as easily in the past. I also experienced an extremely steep learning curve in practice this past two weeks. In my TTOC position, I had the daunting task of reporting on one hundred plus high school students whom I had known for less than three weeks. I was tremendously grateful that I spent so much time learning their names and working with them during our classroom blocks in the first two weeks. Developing these new relationships allowed me to provide feedback to their parents regarding their work habits to accompany their previous teacher’s summative evidence. During this process, I learned the designations of my students. It was incredibly frustrating to find out the particulars of these students halfway through a six-week placement. There is a fine line between figuring out the students on your own and what you need to know when you go into a classroom for more than a one-day on-call placement. In-hind sight, I wish I had known where to find the information a lot sooner. (Lesson learned. Now, I know that each CSS classroom has a student services binder.)
The final subject area that I have chosen to reflect on is the personal boundaries between teachers and students. After attending the BCTF Professional Boundary Issues Workshop on November 8, 2021 (Balfour, 2021), I can now say that I have widened my scope of understanding regarding the professional boundaries between teachers and students. I especially appreciated the legal background knowledge, especially the Shewan case. I am sincerely able to look back and reflect on my first Cross-Curricular Reflective Writing and now see the special position that I held as a Resource Teacher at the alternate school. However, I did find that Shelley Belfour tended to generalize her presentation primarily towards classroom teachers to reach the widest audience. Listening to the workshop, I felt like I had already broken many of the rules in my first two years of teaching. (Really, I stopped counting how many when it went over one hand’s worth of fingers!) When I came home that night, I had to reflect on what the difference was. One of the first things that Shelley Balfour talked about was how it is the responsibility of all teachers to support each other through the BCTF Code of Ethics #5 by addressing colleagues directly of any criticism or work-related issue like professionalism. (BC Teacher’s Federation, 2021). Looking back at the colleagues I was surrounded by and the Administration that supervised me during my two years of teaching, I know that they all take their commitment to the BC Educator Standards and the BCTF Code of Ethics very seriously. I taught under two very different Principals. One was slightly older than I am, and the other was highly experienced and had come out of retirement to provide coverage. Both were mentors to me, and both were involved in overseeing everything that I did in the small alternate environment. The second of the two is one of the most moral and ethical persons I have ever met. I know, without a doubt, that she would have taken me aside and let me know if she felt like I was breaching any professional boundaries; instead, she wrote my reference letter to UNBC and has made future predictions on me becoming a Principal in less than ten years.
Now that I have been back in many more general classrooms, I can easily say that I am not drawn to open my personal life up to them in the same way as my alternate students. I know there are many vulnerable students in the general classroom population, but they are different somehow as a whole. Age will undoubtedly factor into play. I have no desire to tell a Kindergarten class much more about me than that I have two dogs named Rosie and Iris. My high school students, on the other hand, all know that I’m a student teacher, that I have a son named Duncan in Grade 10, and anyone at school last week now knows that I take every third Thursday off work to go to the hospital for Breast Cancer Treatment, so I genuinely do appreciate it when they wear their masks in my classroom. However, there must be other factors as well, like how other schools have designated Resource Teachers and procedurally operate differently. The size and composition of the classroom would also be factored in. My alternate classroom only had a maximum limit of 15 students per block; often, I had fewer in a class which allowed me time and physical space to have in-depth conversations with students if they could not focus on their work.
I like that my alternate students will keep a special place in my life that other students will not have. They needed me at that time to see them for who they were, and I did that by saying, this is who I am – an open book. I was available and made time for them. I was safe because I allowed them to speak freely with me. Without knowing it, I was opening a space to develop a sense of belonging using the Circle of Courage (Brokenleg, 2015). Individuals, couples, and groups of students would find their way to my classroom. I couldn’t imagine what my two years would have been like had I closed myself off to them. I don’t know how I would have ever learned so much or how I would have been able to teach them as much as I did. I am, however, excited to bravely enter a world filled with all these professional boundaries with a newfound understanding of their implications for educators today.
References
Baerg, M. (2021, October 25). EDUC 393 – Foundations of Education. Social Justice, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [Lecture]. South-Central Campus, Quesnel, BC, Canada: University of Northern British Columbia, School of Education.
Baerg, M. (2021, November 08). EDUC 393 – Foundations of Education. BCTF Workshop: Professional Boundary Issues. South-Central Campus, Quesnel, BC, Canada: University of Northern British Columbia, School of Education.
Baerg, M. (2021, November 16). Observational Practicum. South-Central Campus, Quesnel, BC, Canada: University of Northern British Columbia, School of Education.
Balfour, S. (2021, November 08). Professional Boundary Issues: Teacher/Student Relationships. ([. Conference], Ed.) BCTF.
BC Teacher’s Federation. (2021). BCTF Code of Ethics. Retrieved November 16, 2021, from https://www.bctf.ca/about-bctf/bctf-ethics
Brokenleg, M. (2015, October 26). First Nations Principles of Learning. [Video}. Retrieved October 10, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PgrfCVCt_A
Curle, A. (2021 , November 9). Lakeview Elementary School. Quesnel, BC, Canada.
Palmer, P. J. (1997, Nov. – Dec.). The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching. Vol. 29(No. 6.), pp. 14-21. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/40165413
Schimmer, T. (2018, Septemeber 14). Assesment Literacy in BC. Province of BC. [YouTube]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7C20alZElI&t=5s
The Brain Prize. (2016, November 01). The Brain Prize Presents: Stanislas Dahaene. BrainFog.org. [YouTube]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYZBi_07vk