Wednesday 21 May 2014

Week 22 (12/03/14)

Okay Okay.. So today's class was about THE LAST BIG ESSAY!!!! (so glad i attended this lesson) which is due in on the 22nd of May eeeek! I am absolutely terrified about this assignment in case I do it wrong or something horrible like that, but I am kind of happy to do it to because it will mean that I have completed my first year of university :). I think this essay will be okay because its more of a reflection which consists of your opinion and also other references so it shouldn't be that bad right?

Right lets get started: The essay question for this is ............ (drum role pleaseeee)

'To what extent has the module 'Becoming an Educationalist' prepared you for the reality of becoming an educationalist? Justify your answer with reference to at least three aspects of or activities on the course.'

Riiiiight! So to begin I will upload below my very handy notes that I did for this which will hopefully help me pass ;)


WARNING BRIGHT BRAINSTORM BELOW!!!!! haha



My Rough notes 
My VERY VERY BRIGHT handy brainstorm




















These notes are what I accumulated during the lecture which enabled me to break everything down and almost make more questions of the 'big essay question'. at first i was confused as to why we was making more questions for the question but then i understood it was so that we get our brains active and use these broken down questions to answer the essay.

 From a previous weeks lecture and seminar i was taught to make my brainstorm look bright and colourful hence the reason why the brainstorm above is extremely colourful (hope i don't hurt you eyes guys). It actually helped me because it made me want to look more at the notes i had made. Usually i don't go back on notes i just read the assignment guide on weblearn. However this really helped me out and it made things easier.

I wasn't able to get pictures of the notes from the board because my phone died (story of my life) but what we did was as a group we all made and added to the notes Sandra had been writing down. The notes consisted of issues that individual people in the class had so for example my issue was this essay informal or formal? all these questions were being answered and slowly the class and i began understanding the question which was great.


As the class went on many students had questions about issues they had on academic language and we were all introduced to a really good website which is http://www.phrasebank.manchester.as.uk. This website is also on the becoming an educationalist blog http://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/w22-becomingeducational-the-essay-our-essay/. This really helps with assignments as some of my class members had used it already for a previous assignment. It has headings of what your looking for eg 'Being Critical' it has a lot of content which can help, so go check it out guys!

Unfortunately I had to miss the seminar because I had to go to the doctors (personal reasons LOL) but I did go on and check the class blog and I was able to catch up which is great. 

That will be all for today!

Thanks for reading xx 
















Friday 8 November 2013

Week 3 (16/10/13)

Week 3 was pretty interesting for me and it was practical too which was really exciting. It is always a mystery coming in to this lesson because I do not know what to expect.

First Part of the Lesson:
So this week we continued with the apocalypse; and was put in groups of five to plan and create an education system but also keep in mind how to feed, house, keep warm and keep these people healthy. There was three time periods of when we have to create a new education system for, 1. Just emerged from bunkers 2. Five years after the war & 3. Ten years after the war. I was in the group that had to recreate an education system Five years after the war; we had twenty minutes to discuss within our groups of how we want it to be and then pitch it to the judges which made me get super anxious. Within our group there was five roles, they were 1. A survivor who was extremely wealthy 2. An entrepreneur 3. A Trade unionist 4. A Teacher's assistant & 5. An individual who reads a lot of Freire. I had taken the role of the Teacher's assistant and my group members took the rest of the roles.
My brainstorm
Why?
I think we done the apocalypse scenario to realise that everyone in the class had different view points of how they would create an education system. Although people had diverse opinions I believe that there was a lot of similar opinions amongst my group; For example in my group we thought that there should be a classless education for all because when it does come down to the important factors of failing in education it does tend to show that the 'working class' fail. However if we did have a classless society we thought that, it would bring equality, fairness and a good education system for the future generations. For me it was really intriguing to hear all the different opinions because I didn't even think of them ideas myself; so it was really great to just discuss and hear new ways of improvement people want for the education system. Another thing that I loved about this discussion was that me and my group got personal and deep with our opinions and even talked about experiences that we faced either in a positive or a negative light in school or college.

What did I learn?
This lesson really helped me understand the education system a bit more because it allowed me to research on it in my own time and it showed me how I can as a future teacher help my students to go further in life and be more positive towards them because if you are constantly negative, from my own experience I know that you end up fulfilling the prophecy. I actually now know what sort of teacher I want to become and evolve to and also work with what we have at the time, referring back to the post bunker.

Second part of lesson:
This lesson got more and more exciting to me because at this point we had moved on from the apocalypse and on to making a collage. So a collage is like making a new whole by adding bits and pieces together to create new meanings and memories. There are a lot of ways to make a collage for example cubomania which is cutting pictures into squares which then resemble together some how also photomontage is also another way of making a collage.

I decided to research on the DaDa movement and also Hannah Hoch further to get some inspiration on how I want my collage to be like.

DaDa means "Hobby Horse" in French.

DaDa was an artistic movement in Europe during the World War 1. They were so angry about the War that they formed this movement in a way to escape and be against everything that made the War occur; they even went to the extent to even call themselves non-artist because they thought nothing in the world had any meaning at that point in time. DaDa had the intention to provoke a personal reaction from the audience (shock or offend). Info I got about the DaDa movement


 
 
Here is a picture that the DaDa movement received their provoking reactions at, as its the famous Mona Lisa. Marcel Duchamp had drawn a moustache.
Hannah Hoch was apart of the DaDa movement and was one of the first creators of photomontage. She considered herself as apart of the women's group in 1920. The image on the right is one that Hoch had created by combining women and men features together in a sense of equality. Info I got about Hannah Hoch

Towards the end of this lesson I got together with my peer mentor and shared why I put my collage together the way I did. The reason is because  I really fell in love with the picture that Hannah Hoch put together because it inspired me to make one just like it so I can show that social class in the education system between students and teachers are equal and everyone gets treated the same because to me the way you get treated in school, college or university almost determines the grade you achieve. I used newspaper and also magazines to create my collage to brighten it up and make it look interesting. I hoped that my audience saw my collage and thought it was stimulating n a way because at the end of the day I believe that the education system is lacking equality.

Tuesday 5 November 2013

Week 2 (09/10/13)

So OMG! I finally met Tom and my god is he a character or what? This was my first time meeting him as I wasn't in the previous lesson and I was honestly shocked IN A GOOD WAY. I love his accent and his dress sense because that makes him very memorable and everything he says I can literally remember it because I learn in a weird way.

Anyway.. In the beginning of this lesson Tom had recapped the introduction again (Thank god) which enabled me to catch up to the rest of the class. The introduction included very important information such as the deadlines for the assignments, also SOCCER which can be a key to success, about the class blog which is on word press or any other blogging sites and becoming an educationalist and what that meant.

Moving on to the activity side of this lesson (MY FAV PART MIGHT I ADD) we had to imagine an apocalypse was coming,  and we had ten different people but only three could stay in the bunker and it was up to us as a group to choose which three could stay. All ten people had different qualities to them so this made it hard to think of which three to keep. After this we drew tools on how to be a good educationalist in groups of twos. We then swiftly moved on to mediated dialogues which included talking about topics such as 'Education is all about fitting in - knowing your place, accepting your lot in life. Some are bred for success - as for the rest - at best it bores us - at worst it teaches us just how valueless we are.' after the discussion in twos we had to draw a representation and then discuss our portraits to the class.

We was then given an article to read by Paulo Freire; so we can identify the main points he includes on becoming a good educationalist and also a good student.


Class work
My failed attempt on drawing

















 
Why?
The bunker activity was really fun because I was the Atheist doctor so I felt valued and very important more than any other bunker. So after I had justified my points my group began to draw up the pros and cons of every bunker in our group and decided to keep gay scientist because he can invent things for the other two bunkers, army officer as he would be good at rationing and single pregnant woman with a five year old because she can reproduce. Once we had explained our reasons for choosing these three bunkers we soon realised that as a group we did not think outside the box because we was being very literal and thinking the worst for example one of the bunkers were disabled so straight away my group cancelled them out  however we didn't acknowledge how seriously disabled this person was, as far as we knew they could of broken a finger and be classified disabled. This showed us that we looked purely at skills and talent and automatically put the bunkers in a hierarchy of ability. I guess in a way the bunker activity showed me that as a student we are so use to being in a education system that puts us in bands of ability; without thinking twice we did the same to the bunkers.

The mediated dialogue was a way to question if the education system was either good for students or bad for them. This is debatable because in one way education IS the way forward because it teaches you the information you need to know for the career your heading to for example to become a surgeon you need to be taught how to operate, and learn where the body parts are and so forth. However you can then say that the education system is terrible in terms of social class because working class people are always no doubt labelled which makes them fail as teachers are middle class so they don't understand.

Freire's article on 'Education is being taken over by the mega rich' is focussed on Critical Pedagogy - which means that the educational movement is ushered by two things, passion and principle. These two things help students establish a consciousness of freedom and connect knowledge and truth to power, and learn to read both the word and world in a more broad way. Once I had understood the context of this article I soon realised that Freire understood how hard it can be to be working class and be a good student for example in the article it mentions "higher education - once conceptualized as a fundamental public good - has been reduced to a private good, now available almost exclusively to those with the financial means." It also amused me that Freire saw education very political because it offered students self- reflection. He later explained that pedagogy connected learning to social change as it challenged students to engage with the world, he also mentions that pedagogy does not involve training techniques and methods or political indoctrination but explains that education does provide knowledge, skills and social relations for students. Freire didn't seem biased to just his opinion on one theory in one place he tried to go all over to see if the education system is the same.

What did I learn?
I learnt to think outside the box and be more open minded; although the bunker activity was just for fun it actually opened my eyes a little about the education system, questioning the idea of are we being indoctrinated because we easily made a hierarchy of ability about the bunkers. Also Freire in a way taught me that knowledge and experience is power.

What was my reaction?
To be honest this lesson was a lot to take in. However I did enjoy knowing that different people see education differently whether that be in a good way or a bad way. Also the debated that took place in the class room gave me a better insight to other opinions of the topic.

Friday 25 October 2013

Week 1 (02/10/13)


So, Unfortunately I had missed my very first lesson with the delightful Mr Tom Burns because I had to attend a physio appointment. 
The reason why I have to go physio is because when I was a child I was involved in a road traffic accident. What happened was, I was with my sister and I wanted to go to the ice cream van so my sister said "quick run across the road there are no cars" so i did. However! a big jeep came out of no where and pushed my hip forcing me to fall on the floor, once i was on the floor the jeep had run over my left arm. I now have to attend physio all the time which is super boring but has to be done because I broke my wrist and three fingers, split open the middle of my index finger and thumb and a chunk of skin from my arm was torn off.
Below are before and after pictures of my arm :)


2013
2001
As I missed my first session of Becoming an Educationalist: Reading, Writing and Enquiry I had to do the introduction to the subject on my own by going on Weblearn and going through the slides. 

I found it extremely useful that the presentation was short and contained valuable information on it because it was easy to read and also I was able to digest everything once I had read it; I suffer from dyslexia and sometimes seeing a lot of words on a slide makes me feel overwhelmed. 

 What really interested me was the guidelines/pointers to good grades! SOCCER was really interesting to read individually and made a lot of sense. 

Study techniques: Managing time; making short notes and getting a reading habit. 

Overview: viewing something either a book or module before you start 

Creativity: Being original and bright with notes by brainstorming or making pattern notes 

Communicate: Writing a lot and being clear on your work load

Emotions: Prepare yourself for assignments or even lectures and seminars by going over work 

Review: Revise what you have learnt otherwise you will forget!!!! 

And YES I have embraced all of the above :) 

For me the most beneficial part of  the week one overview was the deadlines and how many percent the assignments would be because I am not gonna lie i didn't have a clue. From what i understood there will be three assignments for this part of the subject:

1. Reflective learning which is 30% includes the blog ( deadline week 30) 

2. Research project which is also 30% include three parts
Proposal- 1000 words 10% (deadline week 19)
Report- 1000 words 20% (deadline week 30) 
Artefact- Discuss the process and product in your blogs as it will get you marks!

3. Final Essay is 40% which consists of 1500 words (deadline week 30)
'To what extent has the module 'Becoming an educationalist' prepared you for the reality of becoming an educationalist'