Michaela_Andrews ~ Brown_MAT_Program ~ Student_Teaching_Portfolio ~ 2005
Michaela Andrews
The Standards
Standard Seven: Engagement with Subject Matter
Overview and Evidence
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Overview:
The worst teachers I've ever had were those who seemed to have lost their enthusiasm for learning. They were no longer engaged with their subjects, never expressed any excitement or joy in the beauty of what they taught, and their lack of interest did little more than to communicate the message that the subject they taught was without importance or relevance but needed to be studied anyway. By the same token, a teacher's enthusiasm is often contagious, fueling the desire to dig deep into a subject and explore all of its little nooks and crannies. Enthusiasm, for me, is also inspired by understanding the conceptual framework and underlying principles of a subject and exploring how they are connected to other fields as well as the principles that guide my own beliefs and actions. All of this suggests to me that some of the main components of being a successful teacher are conveying both expertise and enthusiasm, balancing skills and content, and teaching students that the practices of reading, writing, discussing, and thinking critically about literature (or anything) are processes of making meaning and, thus, inherently creative and transformative acts.
Reflection of Overview during Student Teaching at Community Prep:
I hope that the excitement I feel about teaching each day at Community Prep never diminishes throughout my career as a teacher. If I can always feel as engaged with the people and subject matter that I am teaching as I do now, I will consider myself a very lucky person. I hope that my students sense this enthusiasm (I think they do) and that it inspires them to get more out of what we are studying together. Sometimes I tell them flat out that I am excited about what we are studying, such as when I introduced Out of the Dust by saying that it was one of my new favorite books or when I explained why I think Hesse's use of personification in Out of the Dust is so beautiful and adds a layer of richness and newness to the way that I see the world. More often though, I think I just show my enthusiasm for what we are studying by my general demeanor and positive attitude in the class.
While I am very happy with the level of my enthusiasm and engagement with English literature and the art of teaching, I would like to dramatically increase my level of expertise. It's not that I don't feel I am qualified to teach. I do, because I know that I will work hard to learn whatever I don't know before I teach it and I believe that great teachers don't have to be experts about everything they teach. Nevertheless, I would like to be an expert and I know I have a long way to go to reach that goal. I have forgotten much of the English classes that I took as an undergrad. I could take those same classes again and get so much more out of them now with the thought of teaching them in mind. There are so many genres that I have barely explored, such as YA literature which I mentioned earlier, and also drama, poetry, and literary theory. I'm not worried about these weak spots though. I know I'll continue to learn throughout my life and become closer and closer to the expert I want to be. My main goal is to continually remind myself to consider the significance of what I'm studying and teaching and to make sure that my students know why they are learning what they are learning. As Jonathan taught me to do over the summer, I need to remember to script the nugget into each lesson so that my students are clear on the point of what we are doing together.
Overview of the courses I took during my academic semester:
During my last semester of study, I carefully selected courses which I thought would best supplement my previous education as an English major and fill the gaps I perceived in my knowledge base. I also chose my courses based on how relevant I thought they would be to my future career as a middle or high school teacher. For that reason, I took an introductory course on nine of Shakespeare's plays, a course on immigrant novelists of the 20th century, a course in the Comparative Literature department spanning classic works of literature (plays, novels, and poetry) from antiquity to today, and an education course based on the ArtsLiteracy Project which explores ways of using performative arts to help adolescents develop their literacy skills.
Class Descriptions:
ED 169: Literacy, Community, and the Arts
Course Syllabus
Final Project: Lessons from ArtsLit
This course is based on the theory/methodology of the ArtsLiteracy Project, a project which provides opportunties for community artists and teachers to combine their expertise by co-teaching several classes using theater-based, kinesthetic activities to engage students with texts on a multisensory level. ED 169 serves as an introduction to the ArtsLiteracy Project and a training ground for potential educators who are interested in learning how they can use the performing arts as tools in adolescent literacy development. During almost every class meeting, we participated in workshops which covered some portion or all of the ArtsLiteracy Performance Cycle, shown below.
These workshops, centered on Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, culminated in group performances of the text which incorporated creative writing and various performance techniques. In groups of 4-5, we also developed and co-taught a 2-2.5 hour ArtsLiteracy workshop in a local middle or high school. Throughout the course, we balanced our hands-on activites with discussions about theory and research on cognition, literacy development, and arts integration. To see the course syllabus, click here. To read my final paper, in which I explore the many lessons I took from ED 169, click here.
EL 30: Introduction to Shakespeare
Course Syllabus
Final Project: A Midsummer Night's Dream Unit Plan
Since I had not read a Shakespeare play since my days in high school, and since I expect to be teaching at least one of Shakespeare's plays in the near future, I was very excited to take this course. This course met three times a week, with lectures every Monday and Wednesday and a discussion section on Fridays. Lectures emphasized historical context, stressing the importance of acknowledging the many ways in which Shakespeare's culture and thus the problems explored in his plays are different from the cultural assumptions and problems of interest today. To look at the course syllabus, click here. To see the four-week unit plan which I developed for a middle school curriculum using A Midsummer Night's Dream as the main text, click here.
CO 81: Civilization and Its Discontents
Course Syllabus
Final Project: Blake, Whitman, and Dickinson Unit Plan
In this course I revisited many of the works I read in high school (Oedipus Rex, Jane Eyre, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Leaves of Grass, Dickinson's poems), thinking about them this second time around from the perspective of how I would go about teaching them. The course met twice a week, for an hour and half long lecture on Tuesdays and an hour and a half long discussion section on Thursdays. The reading list covered an extensive selection of great works, all of which I enjoyed, and lectures fueled my interest in the literature further. To see the syllabus, click here. Throughout the course I wrote four short analytical essays and, as a final project, I created a four-week, middle school Language Arts unit plan centering on the poetry of Blake, Whitman, and Dickinson. To see my unit plan, click here.
AC 161 SO 8: Immigrant Ethnic Novelists of the Twentieth Century
Course Syllabus
Final Project (10-page take-home exam of three essays covering six novels)
In this small seminar class, we explored eleven novels by first and second generation immigrants from many different countries, including Japan, Russia, China, Mexico, Norway, Italy, the Philippines, and Barbados. The professor used a historicist approach to reading literature, focusing on the cultural and literary discourses within which each novel engaged. Throughout extensive reading and writing assignments (five short essays and a lengthy midterm and final exam), we explored the defining characteristics of the immigrant novel as a genre, its origins, permutations, and major themes/issues. To see the course syllabus, click here.