Annie Canfield

When I think about my own education, I remember a mix of exciting discoveries, mundane worksheets, engaging books, embarrassing yet entertaining skits, memorization of study guides before tests, and lengthy but enjoyable projects. These memories indicate that my experience in elementary and high school was a blend of many philosophies of education, including administrative progressivism, child-centered progressivism, critical pedagogy, essentialism, and more. This is not surprising, considering I had a mix of teachers who came from varied backgrounds.

 

This helps me understand that, as a teacher, I will not be the sole force impacting a student’s life. My students will be experiencing education from many different teachers, and they will also be gaining knowledge about the world through other media, like television, computers, their parents, experiences with their friends, and the daily events of their lives in general. It is because of this variety of factors in students’ lives that I am a believer in pragmatism.

 

I feel that if I am a teacher who models a belief in interacting with information and learning from and adapting to each new situation, I will be equipping my students to live the lives of lifelong learners. To me, the role of the teacher is not just to impart content knowledge to his or her students, but also to equip those students with the tools to use knowledge in meaningful ways.  The role of the student, therefore, is to interact with education. By interact, I mean more than memorizing information and regurgitating it on tests. I want my students to be able to find personal connections with the information I teach them, to internalize new knowledge, and to understand how it can be relevant to their own lives.

 

To do this, I will need to follow a curriculum that emphasizes an educational purpose that goes beyond, “you need to graduate from high school to get into college, and you need to go to college so that you can find a good job, and you need to find a good job so that you can be a productive member of society and live a “good” life.” To me, the “good” life is a life in which materialistic rewards such as making money and moving up in society come second to appreciating all of the mysteries and experiences the world has to offer. I want to follow a curriculum that tells students they are free to explore and learn about subjects that interest them, because being a lifelong learner who appreciates the world requires an ability to explore. I’m not saying that a standard curriculum that emphasizes basic skills such as reading and math is bad. However, I want to teach these essential skills in a way that shows students their real-world application.

 

I want my students to come out of my class with the feeling that education does not just mean going to school, but that education is what happens every single day when their brains process the sights, sounds, and other experiences with which they are interacting. 

Goals

• To instill a love of learning in each of my students
   

• To be a role model who values humor, kindness, and curiosity
   

• To teach my students to learn about themselves and others
   

• To teach ESL to my students in a way that values their own language and culture and helps them understand a new language and culture
   

• To teach all other subject areas in a way that helps my students understand the interdisciplinary nature of learning and gives them the tools to explore their own interests.