Below is the first draft of the latest incarnation of my educational philosophy. I encourage and appreciate your thoughts:
Dewey writes that, "education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself". In my view the primary objective of education is to enrich lives by preparing students for empowered participation in the conversations and decisions of the local community, the greater society and in an increasingly global and interconnected world. I believe students already posses an essential and innate ability to make meaning from their experiences. Teachers, however, play a critical role in how students develop and hone those abilities.
To prepare our students to those ends, I create learning opportunities that meet the essential goal of education. These opportunities are centered around developing, encouraging and promoting literacy. Regardless of context educational or otherwise, the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed, written and electronic materials, is tantamount to achieving the ends of education. I believe that the keys to unlocking the physical, emotional, economic and creative doors of potential for each and every one of my students are best obtained in a variety of literary pursuits.
I am driven to design instruction with an interactive approach that reflects the ongoing interactive discussions that take place in our communities. I incorporate methods such as Think-Pair-Share, Cooperative Learning, Structured Academic controversy and Jigsaw into my lesson plans. With this type of instruction learning can only take place in a warm, safe, honest and communicative classroom community where both teacher and learner take responsibility for managing their personal conduct.
I have a strong interest in the use of technology to transform literacy. When applied with the same rigor that goes into instructional design, technology will transform our relationships with the community, greater society and our interconnected global world. Web 2.0 or new media technologies decentralize media production away from a privileged elite and give the power of multimedia storytelling to our students. Modern digital tools make it easy and affordable for classrooms to produce media rich compositions. I am influenced by the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework and a social constructivist approach to technology integration. This theoretical tilt lends itself to promoting literacy across a variety of media and across all content areas.
Paulo Friere notes, "The future is something to be constructed through trial and error rather than an inexorable vice that determines all our actions." I believe, literacy or the construction of meaning is the tool that prepares our students for the world they are negotiating to inherit. Our future will be determined through our students ability to communicate the meanings they gather from their lived experience.
