Cultural Studies of Technology for Education |
There are certain moments in one’s life which, upon reflection and retrospection, you can point to as a key stage in shaping identity and forming purpose. For myself, I’ve known I wanted to be a teacher since grade one; however, I did not discover what that title truly meant, or the endless opportunities it can present until my grade seven year. I can remember specific lessons from over 10 years ago because of how they shaped me as both learner and future educator. My teacher opened up doors to me that had remained closed up until that time. He had us choose news articles weekly, utilizing them to not only summarize, but to also critically engage with them. I can still remember writing letters to my local MP regarding the potential Pit-Bull ban about to become law in Ontario at that time. I can vividly remember not just watching documentaries like Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Cost and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth , but engaging, questioning, and researching the ideas presented within them, and forming my own opinions from that research. He fostered a multimodal learning environment that allowed me to begin to connect poetry to music, history to art, math to language. He diversified my learning to reach further than the walls of my classroom and even my country. I went from stressing about my next math test to being worried that I wouldn’t raise enough money to help our new social justice committee provide water to small villages in Haiti. Technology was utilized to broaden our horizons, expand our knowledge, bridge gaps between subjects, and since then it has not only shaped my approach to teaching while fostering a multimodal learning environment, but reminds me that the diversity of opportunity to inspire positive change not only in our communities, our world, and most importantly our individual students, remains at the heart and core of all that I do.
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