MIDTERM REFLECTION

Time to assess where we have ben and where we are going, hopefully together, in our LLSS 315 course. Our course beagn with ourselves and is working outward: I AM POEMS, culture crests, and reading of Part I & IV in our texts.

Snowdays and testing days delayed our work with Apache students in Mrs. Bradshaw's classroom but it provided us opportunity to refine our own Chautauqua characters.

Confidence & Independence is the goal for us to rely on our own expertise, experience and emerging knowledge base, through course text, peers, outside research/reading, other people, and other courses, from which to consider issues, questions, situations presented in authentic situations. Experiences in your practicum work, class discussions, and reading will contribute to exploring our conceptual thinking,

Chautauqua, literature circles, writing workshop-process writing are strategies emphasized and practiced during this semester in practical ways. If you experience these and gain familiarity with them, they will transfer into your own teaching practice. This is my intention.

We have not really explored the text formally yet, although individually Parts I & IV have been assigned. Hopefully working with children directly at Apache school will help put some of these concepts and ideas into perspective froma more practical application. Then we will have more to talk about. We will engage in literature circles to discuss the text and book anthologies with your peers. Practicum experience with the 4th graders provide us with an authentic learning setting to apply theory and apply it in an actual learning setting.

Our course blog is a reference point and a resource tool for you and myself. Please explore it for it is an ongoing work in progress with new links being added all the time.

Your web pages are your own design and considered your intellectual property. In this way, I hope you will take charge of your own learning as it documents your own learning.

The stories you bring and the knowledge base from other courses is respected and acknowledged. We recognize this also when working in our Chautuaqua project with 4th graders. We are honoring their stories, which become the conent and context of improving their reading and writing.

Reflection is a pedagogical tool of our profession. In this particular course we will scratch the surface of what it is like working with diverse children. Since language is not neutral, by association it begs us to consider politics, culture, social controls, privilege, class, race issues, all of which are initially uneasy to talk about in our society. However, they are a loud reality in our schools. As educationalists, we must begin to enter this discussion and become more informed ourselves in the dialogue and consider our perspective as well as those who are contributing also to this discussion so we do not shy away from it but approach it with open and searching minds.

Your weekly reflections will capture how the process is working for the students and how you will plan next steps leading them to the eventual performance.

Thank you for trusting me in the process of your Chautauqua storytelling process, for it is a creative process. Hopefully it will become a process that is energizing and rewarding for you and your 4th grade students. My goal is to experience with you some of the course content in authentic and meaningful ways together.

Laura has experience working with diverse populations and cultural sensitivity; Vicki is a communication specialist teaching deaf students in Bloomfield.