These questions are hard for me because unlike all of you, I have yet to be a teacher. I’ve been a paraprofessional and I’ve been a teachers assistant in college, but I don’t have the same qualifications. I’m on my own road trip beginnings. It’s hard because even though I have this degree, many jobs expect us to already be 1/3 of the trip in as far as our job experiences go. How can I get from point A to point C without having gone through B? While I haven’t gone through a professional teachers job, I would like to do some freelance work with teaching cooking online through stories. Food is my passion and I will continue to go back into it.
If I were to get hired to teach in my bachelor degree program “Food Studies’ in my alma mater online, I would be so happy. That would be my dream as it is my ideal end destination. So for example, if I taught “Food & Place’, I could make it into somewhat of a story. If we are exploring a recipe perhaps I would have each student choose an ingredient and give us a brief history of that ingredient, then another student can do a brief history of that recipe. As we all tie our stories together it can make for constructive collaborative activities.
Another way I’ve seen storytelling incorporated into a class was with a debate as a pedagogical strategy. The professor had us debate different food issues using background stories. For example, one of the debates we had was how the U.S. gives food aid and whether it should be food or money and we use background stories to defend our position. I think in courses like this, digital storytelling can be very powerful. Even though in the end, I never made a decision because food is so complex, storytelling is what is used to convince people such as many debate methods like lawyers presenting a case to the jury.
My mind gets distracted so easily which I think has a lot to do with how the digital world has shaped many of us.
Like Kat mentioned, I am also a hard listener. I’m working on that for the past couple of months. I especially see this in children movies I watch with my older son like “Wreck it Ralph’. Their stories are so high energy and a lot going on every 5 seconds as if that is the modern attention span. Since listening is difficult for me, I would foster stories in a classroom to be in different formats to consider what other challenges students might have.
The advice I would have for future students is to set personal goals of staying at a “pit stop’ (late on work) of no more than 4 days. It can be very difficult to stay on the same trip as everyone else if you take that break then start falling behind on the road trip. Also, give it all in your assignments. For example, I was really committed to the infographic assignment and it turned out to be useful in our small community of Sitka. Even yesterday when I went to change my phone plan at AT&T the sales clerk thanked me for the infographic. Assignments here can be useful in the long run.
Thank you for this experience.
“The advice I would have for future students is to set personal goals of staying at a “pit stop†(late on work) of no more than 4 days.” — keeping this advice, as well as the “pit stop” metaphor for future students. So pleased that the infographic has made you a local celeb!