Educational Philosophy

Quoted above is an excerpt from the statement of intent that I submitted to the Education department before I could officially declare a minor in Education and begin pursuing my teaching certification. In this statement, I made clear that I had strong intentions to follow the minor track completely to certification. My greatest goal at the start of my career in teaching was to gain exposure to as many aspects of education as possible in the following three years. I also had a clear idea that I will never truly be done learning how to teach, work in schools, or work with students. I knew from my own experience and from the stories I had heard from classmates and observed in classrooms thus far that education was ever evolving. My goal for my future within the department was to learn how to better prepare myself and accommodate my skills to the ever-changing field rather than to master any specific skill or knowledge.

Since I have written this statement of intent, I have taken several more education courses and worked with a wider variety of students in my field placements. My intentions remain the same, but I think I now have a clearer understanding of my emerging educational philosophy. In simplest terms, my philosophy is to always focus my pedagogy on students – their lives, their needs, and their interests. As a future teacher, it is my duty to guide students as they grow their minds and expand their ways of thinking. I want to always emphasize the importance and power of applying our learning and work to the world outside of the classroom. I have seen how school can burn out students or make them believe they aren’t “smart” enough to do well in school. In a paper entitled "Curriculum as Window and Mirror," Emily Style writes, "a balanced education should be [a] knowledge of both self and others, [and] clarification of the known and illumination of the unknown" (1988, 5). All students need to be exposed to reflections of themselves and of those different from them in order to develop a comprehensive knowledge of themselves and their world. As a teacher, it will be my responsibility to grant students the opportunity to see a more complete picture of the world outside the classroom.

My hope is that I will never let a student feel that way and will always provide them a safe and comfortable place to grow, learn, and succeed. I am committed to students above anything else. I know it can be hard to pursue more student-based curriculum in conventional school settings that rely on standardized testing and grades, but as I stated in my initial statement of intent, I hope my work will assist in the gradual systematic change of those norms. Learning is something that has continuously brought me great joy, and I want to share that joy with students.

My philosophy draws from pedagogical theories we have studied in classes, my own experiences as a student, and, most crucially, my interactions with students in my fields of work and study. I do not think that any teacher preparation would truly be successful without interaction with and input from actual students. For instance, I have read extensively about Gloria Ladson Billings' Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (1995) and have come to understand its plethora of benefits by watching it in action and observing students' responses. I would not feel nearly as confident about my goals as an educator without having the empirical evidence I now have. In addition, I carry with me into every classroom the pedagogical philosophies of Paulo Freire: to treat education as a source of liberation, to focus on students, and to always apply learning to the cultural, social, and political contexts in which it is occurring (1968). These elements of education keep me aware of my own growing philosophy and how my work is fulfilling my goals as a teacher.