Class Reflection

Wow! What a journey we have been on! Looking back I cannot believe all that we have covered and all that I have grown and changed. This class has been such a great experience that I wish it wasn't ending here. Reflecting back upon the course goals outlined in the syllabus makes me see clearly what we have accomplished.

I do have a much more in-depth appreciation of diverse children's literature and am still formulating all the ways in which to incorporate this important piece of a complete curriculum for my students. My awareness of what is "good" and what is "not-so-good" has grown exponentially through this semester. I had experiences outside of this class that I was able to directly use my learning in this class on. It helped me to think about why certain things stood out and bothered and what I could do about them. I was able to see, rather hear, an example of the power of literature. We listened in another class to how devastating inappropriate literature can be on a family. I wish I could remember the name of the NPR clip that we listened to so that I could share it with everyone. The program featured a family that had to completely changed their lives after 9/11 because the school they were in distributed a very negative and harsh book that blamed the culture of their family for the tragedy that had happened. The book was distributed district wide and a mandated use of it was implemented. When the daughter brought the book home, hurt by its contents, her mother protested the school board and received no support for her or her family once the teasing and brutality against the children in the school began. I was appalled by the way the school allowed this awful piece of literature into their classrooms and allowed the devastation and trauma to happen to a family as the result. I hope that by having this class I will be able to help prevent such things from happening in the future, even if I can be in only one place at a time. I will now be able to help others see the appropriateness of the literature and help them to think about the impact of using such works.

In consideration to the other outlined goals, I do continue to recognize the power of images and their impact on youth especially. I have become acquainted with a great variety of professional resources that I will be sure to keep track for my future work. I learned a lot about the new technologies of blogging this semester and see how they can be beneficial to a class. I feel that I need much more experience with this technology before I begin to implement it into my classroom. Additionally, my ability to read texts as basic literary tools and as a forum for discussing issues of diversity has been enhanced. I feel that I can now more critically analyze texts on the aforementioned merits, though I am not yet perfect. I do know where to look when I have questions about this though, which will be helpful in my teaching career.

One of my favorite parts to this class was the discussion of and focus on the idea of a window and a mirror in literature. Through the readings in this class, I was able to explore numerous windows but also find mirrors in places I thought unlikely. This is something that will stay with forever and I will try eagerly to give this same understanding to my students and colleagues.

I am so appreciative that my classmates were willing to open up and share their ideas. I wish that we had more discussion time in this class. Perhaps the class could become a two-day a week class to allow for these discussions. We would get so wrapped up in the issues and follow the tangents into so many other issues of diversity that we hadn't started the conversation with. These were usually very illuminating. I was so happy to see that others were as confused as I was, but that we were able to learn from each other and grow together and overcome our confusion.

I am going to miss everyone and I would like to sincerely thank each and every one of you for accompanying me on this journey!