EDUC 3100

Final Paper

17 April 2018

Final Paper

            Looking back on spring 2018 semester in EDUC 3100 ‘An Investigation of Careers and Interdisplinarity in BIS HLD through Problem-Based Learning,’ it feels as though the semester started and ended in a blink of an eye, yet an enormous amount of information was shared with me. Going into the Interdisciplinary degree path, I had no clue what “Interdisplinary” even meant. That sounds crazy, right? I chose a major that I wasn’t even sure the meaning of. All I knew was that it was in the human learning and development department and that I would get to pick two disciplines so it caught my eye and I did it. I declared my major as just that! Early in the semester, I was presented with information to help me understand just what interdisciplinary is and how it is used. 

I am thankful for Nissani because I learned that instead of having a bunch of whole fruits, a fancy smoothie sounds much better. Nassani created an Interdisciplinarity Richness Scale in 1995 to help explain what Interdisciplinarity is. In terms of interdisciplinarity, a fancy smoothie is the highest form of interdisciplinarity because it is the alliance of different components, or disciplines, in order to create new exciting innovations, where a bunch of whole fruits in terms of interdisciplinarity really has no components being integrated to find new exciting innovations. The integration of different disciplines to create new outcomes, which can be problem solving, is what interdisciplinarity is all about. 

Understanding interdisciplinarity as a whole was important when starting the research and problem solving project that went on throughout the semester. I am not one to talk because I had no idea what interdisciplinarity meant when choosing it as my major, but to my surprise, a lot of people that work in programs and situations that  involve a lot of interdisciplinarity don’t know the meaning either. That’s kind of scary to think about. For our group project we all thought of something that was an issue to us and we addressed it. Our main idea was centralized on daycares. When I took my initial visit to a daycare, the director literally looked at me like I had ten heads when I used the term interdisciplinarity. Luckily, we had just dug deep into an article and Nissanis richness scale in our previous class periods so I had a lot of information to explain interdisciplinarity to her.  My team and I thought thoroughly to figure out what our problem was as a whole and then took the time to think about what different components can be integrated in order to address our problem and how to help solve it. That was a really important step in the research process. Figuring out which components, or disciplines can be tricky, but luckily we were provided in class with a guide to help our thoughts get going and really coming up with good ideas for what can work. Aside from that part of the research process, finding articles that could support or maybe have a different view than us was just as important. Finding the different research studies and scholarly journals helped us as a group to keep formulating different ideas and discovering different outcomes for our problem.

In my opinion the most important aspect of our semester long interdisciplinarity project was that it was not set in stone. It was flexible, as it should be. My group and I found ourselves in different steps of the project realizing that maybe we need to go back and look at our previous steps and tweak them a little bit to better explain what we are trying to achieve and give a good view at the different angles we are taking towards our problem. It was an ever changing problem and that was okay. I find that so important. To know that there isn’t one solution to a problem and to know that when integrating different components, the problem is bound to change a little bit and that is also okay, in fact it is supposed to happen. 

The problem my group formulated doesn’t just stop because our project and our semester has come to an end. It is a significant problem to me and one that before I even knew what interdisciplinarity meant, I wanted to work on. So this project really opened my eyes even more and gave me a better understanding of how I need to address the problem in the years to come.

Before this class I had my two disciplines chosen, but thankfully this class gave me the opportunity to realize that I indeed picked the right disciplines for me. I chose child growth and development and behavior and learning disabilities as my disciplines. I think they will aid me in my interdisciplinary practices and goals as I move onto my internship and later onto my career because I do think they can integrate and be used to find new solutions. They also are important to my group and I’s original problem in our research project that we did all semester, which is a problem I want to continue to work on throughout my career. 

My goal is to open my own daycare. A lot of people think of daycare as just people sitting in a room watching different ages of toddlers run around from the time they get dropped off to the time they get picked up. If there are babies, then chances are someone is just rocking them in their cribs or rockers, right? Well, some places in fact do take that approach to child care, but that isn’t my goal. My goal is to open a daycare that practices interdisciplinarity in its class rooms. I will strive for the children to be educated because as I explained before, many daycares lack that. Children in daycares are in the most sensitive period of their life and they are ready to learn. It is so important to promote their learning through interdisciplinarity practices such as the child growth and development discipline and behavior and learning disabilities because it will not only take one source to provide knowledge to these children. Many different things go on in the first few years of a child life and it takes different sources to be integrated in order to result in the articulation of something meaningful and new. 

Another goal I have is similar to my previous goal, but I also want to open a preschool which would be attached to my daycare. I think learning is so important in the early years of a child’s life because through researching articles I learned that, that experience really does set the standard for children as they become school age. It will be great to use the interdisciplinary practices I have learned for my daycare, but then what happens when the children go off to preschool? They need to continue on that journey and just as important as I think it is for the children to be a part of this, I think it is equally as important for the teachers to be informed. A teacher leads their classroom in the right direction, so teachers need to be aware of how to make these fancy smoothies in their classrooms and not just have a bunch of whole fruits in their teachings.

Choosing the disciplines child growth and development and behavior and learning disabilities will definitely aid me in my internship, EDUC 4670. I have chosen to do it where I also took my visit in the beginning of our semester at the very start of our research project. It is a daycare that ranges from six week olds to three year olds. Their development depends a lot on their education believe it or not. That was a hot topic in the research my group and I did throughout our research process. Also, children are so new to everything at this point in their life and a lot of children in daycares have behavior or learning disabilities which are discovered in daycares through the learning and educating process. The daycare I have chosen is not a bad place, but it is not yet a fancy smoothie. I come with ideas such as integrating a lot of reading, art work, languages, and more to create this learning atmosphere that young children can strive in. I think it is so important to create that atmosphere and it takes many different components to do so.

Look ahead at course schedule:

Summer 2018

·         CPS 3400

·         ECE 3500

·         ECE 3550

·         EDUC 2120

·         EPY 2050

·         EXC 4020

Fall 2018:

·         BRFV 4370

·         EPRS 4900

·         EPY 3010

·         EXC 4350

·         LT 2010

·         PSYC 4040

Spring 2019:

·         EDUC 4670

·         ECE 3010

•importance of speaking another language 

•advantages of speaking another language 

•overall about languages 

•a little intro of my whole paper 

Body 1 

•reasons why students don’t study 

•including research that i found 

Body 2

•how people behave and express their feelings when they talk another language 

Body 3

•since I am an international I will talk about me and my experience when I started learning,studying,speaking in another language and my experience as a non native speaker 

Body 4

•how professors teach kids to handle another language (my experience as well)

•how students feel from their side when they teach them 

•every country teaches it differently 

Body 5

•how non native speakers handle when they come to another country 

Conclusion 

•going to give maybe advice or something that’s would give students more motivation to study another language

•tell my opinion about languages overall

•looking back (what I knew it)

•looking forward (what I learned throughout this research)

TO be honest I have never heard of interdisciplinarity before I entered this course. I had no Idea what it was, until we learned it’s the melding of two or more subjects into one study. That’s what the BIS major is al about combining two studies in the educational field, into one major to better service students with the skills that outweigh the individual study. As a pre-education History major I was very observant to the new skills at hand. One of my favorite studies was the counseling play posit video. I found it quite fascinating in my own vision for the future as a future educator. Not only did I find the counseling playposit interesting, but I also found the deaf studies playposit equally as fascinating. In my academic career I was able to gain a tiny insight into the Deaf community through a peer’s oral history project focused on the community in Atlanta. 

Through this course I found the best way to understand interdisciplinarity is to study it. Through our team projects on interdisciplinarity I was able to dissect interdisciplinarity for what it truly is. In each step of the project we broke down the key elements that make up interdisciplinarity. My partner and I tackled a problem dear to us regarding foreign language in the modern American classroom. From this simple question we were able to understand what sort of disciplines would feed into the question: educational psychology, history, sociology, etc.  

From there we could draw a conceptual map discussing how each discipline fit into the question like a puzzle. Not only did they relate to the initial question, but they also melded together in many places discussing the aspects of study the question addresses. Finally, we were able to find a few resources that could help our research in the many fields that our question can fit into. I know that if our research was extended we could find many more resource to help understand our initial question, but the five we did find were a great start to understanding the problem. 

Interdisciplinarity is not only a purely theoretical ability, it has real world context as well. Through my own site visit I was able to see how interdisciplinarity helps students grow. At Wesley International Academy, interdisciplinarity plays a large role in the running of everyday life. Wesley International Academy is also an International Baccalaureate school, which focuses on Mandarin in the context of an international mindset. As a school that advocates the learning of Mandarin as the core of its being, its important for the other aspects of its curriculum to reflect this. Mandarin teachers interact with regular education teachers to create lessons that better impact student’s Mandarin practice. 

This heightened interaction between teachers, also afforded by the close quarters the school, helps to create the “Wesley Way.” A school mindset that tries to affect the children’s everyday lives.  Therefore, I chose Wesley International Academy as my site to investigate and observe. They are doing something that few schools in the entire country do, which is combine a traditional academic curriculum with a world language. By meshing together, a traditional curriculum, Mandarin, and an International Baccalaureate focus; Wesley International Academy is a veritable smorgasbord of interdisciplinarity.  

 

As much as I learned from this course over the past semester cannot deny the fact that it has little grasp over my future as a history major. As I stated before I’m graduating this may with a degree in history. However, this doesn’t spell the end for my academic career. I am graduating with a degree in history and a concentration in pre-education, also through Fortuna’s divine wheel I have been accepted in to the Social Studies Education M.A.T. Program in the College of Education. This is where my future will be thrown into the crucible to make me a well-prepared educator. It has always been my dream to teach history at a high school setting, one of my passions is to engage students with history apart from the textbook, which more often than not drives students to deplore the study. 

My first goal was to be accepted into the program. I already have been accepted, but there was a long process. It took me a semester of carefully crafting and worrying over my application. Gathering the materials necessary to meet the requirements of the application. I needed two letters of recommendation; test scores; ethics certification; and a goal statement. Out of all of the requirements I found that the goal statement was the most difficult. Only needing to be two-three pages in length, I found it daunting to express my feelings about my goals I wanted to accomplish as a history teacher. It was so daunting that it took me a week of drafting, revising, and crying on the inside to accomplish three pages that I felt best explained why I should be admitted into the program. 

My second goal is to register for my prerequisite classes. Before the College of Education can send me out into the high schools as a student teacher, I have to first take classes that will prepare me to understand the intricate nature of education. These classes will be critical takes on history, educational psychology, critical pedagogy, the list continues on. Not only will these courses qualify for me to begin my Practicum in the Fall, but they will give me a better insight into the need si will need to fill as a teacher. 

My third goal in the future is to complete my practicum and to find a job.