Artifact 1: Reflection

When attempting to think back to my first courses in the Education Department — which feel much more distant from the present than they truly are — I found myself immediately pulled back to the memory of compiling my first education portfolio, which I completed at the end of “Critical Issues in Education.” Because of the profound personal and academic metamorphoses that I have undergone in my study of education since the creation of this initial portfolio, I thought it more productive and thought-provoking to simply look back on the whole of the website itself as an artifact, rather than to attempt to modify it in an effort to even partially reflect my new perspectives and beliefs.

What I find most compelling about this first artifact is its ability to speak directly to both my earliest convictions concerning the purpose of education, which I arrived in the program believing, and to the initial changes that this preliminary belief underwent during my first courses in the department. Though I was confident while creating this first portfolio, that this newfound perspective would not remain fixed and would only continue to grow through my continued studies, I am shocked to look back now and see how narrow and personal my initial notions were.

As my first post in this portfolio indicates, my earliest beliefs concerning the purpose of education were informed almost entirely by my lived experiences as a low-income student who, because of education, was able to attend college and hopefully break out of the cycle of poverty. Before taking “Critical Issues in Education” (in tandem with “Schools in American Cities”), this positionality led me to believe education to be necessary primarily for the access and opportunity that it seemed to bring to students of all backgrounds. In taking these two courses, however, I was able to more deeply consider how intimately education is tied to identity and how this fact can often render education an extension of the systematic injustices suffered by marginalized communities. The final post in this portfolio speaks with mild success to this developing perspective. However, it remains altogether overly rooted in my personal aspirations and fails to challenge the forces of oppression that manifest in educational structures and practices.

While my beliefs on education, now, at the end of my time within the Education Department, remain centered on the importance of identity, they are simultaneously more directly focused on the subversive nature and potential of education. Rather than seeking to merely affirm students’ identities through pedagogical methods and empathy-informed practices (though this remains crucial), pieces by authors such as Baldwin and Love have pushed me to highlight teaching students how to think about oppressive structures and using education as a point of political disruption and personal liberation. Such beliefs about the fundamentally radical, transformative nature of education are then able to couple with beliefs about identity in a way that allow focusing more directly on the potential for troubling the current distribution of power and privilege present in education.