Hello, I am Mehdi Hajar. Welcome to my ELA Portfolio!
Intro
In this portfolio I have displayed my work over the summer session of my teaching credential. You will find reflections on my readings, an introduction to the literacy journey of one of my peers, two lesson plans I developed for different purposes, and a Padlet book review I developed alongside three of my peers. All of these assignments aim to answer some essential questions. How do we experience literacy on an individual level? How do we create ELA classrooms that foster literacy that is in the best interest of each individual as opposed to what might be societally valued? What are the needs of students in the ELA classroom? How can we best cater to each indivdual’s needs when they are potentially vastly different?
My readings posed different theories and methods to consider as we attempt to create an ELA classroom. As I read these texts, I tried to practice the reflection which is so necessary in the profession of teaching. I reflected on how these theories and methods played a part in my own ELA education and literacy journey. I also reflected on how thier implimentation might have effected me in my journey, for better or worse. Furthermore, I meditated on how these methods and approches might effect my own teaching, and which of them I may want to adopt in order to be productive. This required me to apply them to my approach at my placement, and I either saw or assumed how they would effect my classes.
Creating the Professional Book Club Padlet led me to similar reflections. I thought about how moments where “adventurous thinking” took place in my own education. I found that these moments were deeply memorable to me, for they had a profound impact on my understanding of myself and the world. This ended up playing a role in my teaching placement as well, for I was posed with a challenge to adventurous thinking in the form of a parent attempting to censor the literature with which their child comes into contact. I was able to not only know the importance of being exposed to difficult subjects by way of my own experience but I actually knew, having read this book, both legal and societal precedent for this importance.
Lastly, I have my interview with my peer, Annie Breger. This interview process was deeply illuminating for me, for it allowed for a necessary portion of education and learning: contextualization. By talking with Annie, I was able to contextualize the importance of literacy, the different ways it occurs and is learned by different individuals, and how different literacy journeys can be depending on family circumstance and educational support. Making these realizations allowed me to reflect on how my own experiences might bias my teaching, an awareness that will healthily affect my approach to people, for not everyone is me. Annie is not me, she had a completely different circumstance and reception of her education. We experience literacy differently, our journeys are different, and yet neither is right or wrong or better or worse. This diversity in experience but underlying commonality is something that I hope to act in accordance with in my own teaching.
Enjoy!
Click Here to See My Work ———>
Reflection
During the duration of this course, EDU 292A, I have found that, although a portion of my job is to impart knowledge onto my students, the bulk of my responsibility is to usher students into discovery. My mindset towards the teaching profession has shifted such that I no longer feel it is completely accurate to describe my desired profession as being an “Educator,” per se. I see the work I will be doing, instead, as that of a helping hand and an encouraging guide. Perhaps even a provider of sorts, for my job will be to give students the tools, skills, and confidence to be able to come to new, productive, illuminating knowledge by way themselves. I will have the opportunity to witness the development of capable minds, and the evolution of intelligent, functional people.
As we learned new methods in this course to be those productive ushers, I always had to keep in mind why and how these methods will apply to students’ lives; how they will help prepare them to exist in this ever-complex world. Applicability to real, inevitable, often deeply difficult life—this is what helped me make sense of what we have learned thus far about English Language Arts education. This constant contextualization, connecting each concept about the English Language Arts classroom to its purpose for students whose lives extend so far past the time we have with them, has been vital to my understanding. We learned tools help students read. Why are these tools necessary to these people whose lives are likely going to have very little to do with academic literary analysis? I have seen in this class that these reading tools must apply to each student in a way that allows them to go forward better equipped to disseminate information, to make sense of ideas that can superficially seem beyond our capacity to understand. We learned tools to help students write. Why are these tools necessary to people whose lives are likely going to have very little to do with academic writing? The concepts of teaching writing in this course proved to me that learning the skill and process of writing is to learn to be able to process thoughts, and to be able to express them to others in a way that is simultaneously true to themselves and understandable to others. These new understandings are what I hope to help students come to by way of independent discovery. My job, then, is to provide them with a curriculum that fosters that discovery. If I am able to do so, they may be able to walk out of the door just a little bit more capable to cope with the lives that they live, have lived up to that point, and will continue to live each following day.
As I have learned a multitude of tools during this course that will help me be the best support in the English Language Arts classroom that I can be, I am still eager to supply myself with more in-depth methods to be as effective as possible. An English classroom inevitably has the responsibility to discuss and examine the human condition, whether it be that which we are so privileged to find in literature, or that which students may explore about themselves in their own writing and discussion. Creating a forum for dealing with these issues is a task that seems to me to be endlessly complex, for not only is it a demanding endeavor to try to better understand humanity through narratives, but it also takes a level of vulnerability to engage in such strenuous self-exploration. I maintain an eager curiosity about how I might best create an environment in my classroom where students feel safe to do this daunting work, but also where students of different levels of comfort may each have an opportunity to accomplish this emotional investigation in a way that is nonthreatening and comfortable for them. It seems like an impossible task to accommodate each student fully when you are dealing with such large groups at a time, yet I would like to find ways to come as close as possible to doing so. While the instruction in this course has been vital to understanding how to manage a group, I desperately want to understand how to best be a support to each individual.