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Relationships and an Ethic of Care
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Education is an Opportunity to Leave an Imprint
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Learning is a Process of Construction
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Relationship building is important to me as an educator as it creates a foundation of trust for knowledge construction to be able to form. Relationships are not just important to me but essential, as education is relation and thus teaching accomplishes what it does through relations. The teacher’s own personality and knowledge are revealed through relations setting an example to the students, in addition to relation being essential in order to see what a student is trying to do and become, only then can a teacher guide a student appropriately. Such relation and connection are established through dialogue which is a requirement
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for children to properly grow. I also nurture the attitude of an ethic of care from a feminist philosophical perspective. As such, I nurture the motive of caring as an intrinsically natural and human revelation. Moreover, we can all relate this ethic to our own experiences of being cared for and loved and that humans are universally connected through the process of life and death and our fundamental needs for love and care. Therefore, we focus both on ourselves as carers and as cared for and the needs of carers and those cared for. I will nurture the acknowledgement of our own needs and seek to bring out the best in one another as we depend on one another as a class, and in turn as a society.
Education is an opportunity to leave an imprint on our world and society. I believe that education’s purpose should be to create a better society for all by highlighting inequalities and preparing students for a new social order and capacity to shift unjust institutions: for society to shift, change, or grow, teaching and learning would be a process of inquiry where a student invents and reinvents the world as an active participant, rather than learning being a passive acceptance of knowledge. Teaching, then, is a creation of an environment, conditions, and activities for students to learn, which is questioning and discovery of information
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and applications-the construction of knowledge. Knowledge is constructed on the basis of a student’s lived experience, the information provided, and environment; rather than a knowing of facts and information, it is an application of information to the real world and its problems. Curriculum, then, would reflect this process of construction by inviting inquiry questions and highlighting real-world problems for the age group at hand to explore, puzzle, analyze, research, and start to answer. Education and schooling are not synonyms; however, schooling can provide an education, which based on a reconstructionist lens, is the provision of an environment to learn through the construction of knowledge. Education is not only dependent on relationship but is a culmination of relations; as it will not and should not produce the same outcomes for every student but should provide choice and responsibility for inquiry with equal opportunity to be successful. Epistemology is, therefore, the ability to prove the construction of knowledge by using it in a real-life situation or application through critical thinking and is summatively measured as such.
Social constructivism argues for the construction, not the inheritance, of knowledge and therefore students must be active in their own learning as argued by Piaget. Vygotsky’s emphasis on social aspects of constructivism is also essential so that coming to know is an adaptive process of organizing experiences and information and is never separated from our own experiences and lives. For instance, we can never separate our own lived experiences from applications of knowledge, and therefore each students’ applications of knowledge will be unique, however with proved understanding and evidence is not invalid. Such an adaptive and evolving process of learning through construction of knowledge, existentialism provides a focus on stories and narration for the account of the human struggle for meaning, they provide guidance and inferences of meaning. As such we have no static human nature and we participate in our development and learning through the gathering of
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information and reflection and application of such information to our own lives. Therefore, in my teaching practice, stories would be an essential way in order to provide an opportunity for reflection, application, and growth through the construction of meaning and knowledge. Under existentialism also follows Mary Greene’s ideas of freedom as the continual empowerment to choose ourselves, to create our identities within a plurality and to make promises and have the freedom to fulfil them as a community. Therefore, in my classroom, students would be able to use their freedom to construct their own identities.