Socially Responsible Citizenship within the Classroom
The following artifacts reflect my ability to make positive changes within the immediate learning evironment to help my students inside and outside of the classroom as learners, individuals, human beings, and citizens. My chosen artifacts also reflect my ability to recognize equity issues within educational institutions today that must be resolved in an effort to educate all students regardless of their gender, enthnicity, background, culture, or socioeconomic status.
Positive Change Advocate
The artifact that I have chosen that best represents my understanding and ability to be a positive change advocate in the immediate learning environment is my Softchalk lesson on Digital Citizenship. In this lesson, I address the various aspects concerning digital citizenship, such as digital literacy and rights and responsibilities among various other issues of note, in an effort to educate my future students on how to use digital resources appropriately. By providing students with positive explanations and examples of how one should conduct themselves in digital environments, students should be able to use these resources in a respectful manner that could even influence positive changes in their face-to-face interactions as well.
The artifact I have chosen that reflects my awareness of areas of improvement for English Language Arts instruction is my teacher research project on Fiction vs. Non-Fiction completed in my methods course. By distributing a survey to a small portion of English teachers in a county school system, I was able to learn about students' reading preferences and how these preferences were or were not met in the classroom. As a result of my research, it appears that students would benefit from additional non-fiction selections; furthermore, students expressed an interest in choosing their own readings in the classroom rather than being forced to read the teacher's selections. Based on my findings, I plan to not only give students choice in classroom readings, but also split my required readings between both genres to satisify the interests of all my learners.