A reflection on the past and a look towards the future...

Hello! My name is Amy Bourque and I am twenty-one years old. I have just entered my fourth year of Concurrent Education at Brock University, continuously preparing for my final year to commence next September. I am majoring in English and my second teachable is French. Therefore, I am a bit of a language enthusiast (among other things like photography and music).  

One may ask "why teaching?". Although that is a complicated question to answer in one blog post, as there are many reasons, there are some more basic explanations and considerations as to why I have chosen this career path and way of life.

I recall in the third grade, for an art activity, being asked to draw myself in the environment that I pictured myself working in one day. By the end of the class, there was an abundance of pictures of firefighters and veterinarians, but I drew myself in a classroom next to a chalkboard with juicy red apple on my desk, which was my clichéd representation of a teacher at the time. I now know that teaching encompasses a lot more than that. At the age of nine I had an idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up and I have not had any doubts about my choice since and that has lead me to where and who I am today as a person, a student and as a prospective teacher.

As I have grown older and closer to my family, I have come to believe that my passion for teaching may have initially been passed on somehow from my Uncle, who unfortunately passed away when I was only a few months old. I have been told that a lot of my traits resemble his and lately my fascination has grown as to how and why that could be. I have also been told that it was not only his reputation as a teacher that made him so memorable in his teaching community, but his dedication to the profession and his students. Perhaps unknowingly I take after him and I certainly hope to take something from his success as an educator.

Also, simply put, as a teacher I want to inspire others the way that I have been inspired throughout my educational journey, both inside and outside of the classroom.

As previously stated, French is a subject that I would like to teach. I am one of the only grandchildren/great-children in my family that did not attend a completely French school, but rather learned the language gradually through the Catholic education system. I felt an obligation, of sorts, to my family, to carry on with French, but I did not always have a desire to do so. With each passing school year, however, my interest in the language grew and learning French was no longer just a way for me to fit into my large family and share a commonality with them, but something that I was genuinely interested in.

One of my grade twelve teachers is responsible for my increased engagement with the language from his use of what I now know to be holistic curriculum. Rather than  just choosing to directly instruct his students, storytelling was an important part of his teachings. By doing so, the teacher modified instruction, or individualized curriculum, in order to meet the needs of a greater variety of learners, still with the goal of ensuring maximum comprehension in mind. The teacher made additional attempts to draw pictures in order to help convey his stories. This choice appealed to more visual learners, like myself.

Personalization or personalized learning is also apparent in the teacher's methods as us students had the option to take notes or just observe and listen. There was no test on the material nor was there an assessment of learning (AoL) in the form of a number or letter grade. Unknowingly at the time, my classmates and I were assessing and reflecting on our own learning as we monitored our own understanding of the French language, verb tenses and sentence structure. We could take what we wanted from the stories with the teacher as our guide on the path to improvement.  

An added bonus is that by sharing some of his personal memories with us and his own French background, the teacher created a bond between himself and my classmates and I that was built on trust and respect and he became more approachable.

This same French class took place in a rundown portable. It was not a very motivational or productive atmosphere, but it was the only space available that could accommodate our unusually large class size for an upper year French course. Therefore, on various occasions, my teacher took advantage of the bleachers that were right outside of our portable and held some of his lessons outside. This gave us a break from our strict alphabetical seating arrangement in the classroom. At first there were some distractions, but the teacher eventually encouraged us to observe our surroundings and incorporated that into our learning and building of French vocabulary. That is not to say that my teacher did not employ traditional methods and did not expect us to memorize grammar rules and verb conjugations in order to get right answers, but he did incorporate more innovative and constructivist ways of learning, most of which I had never encountered in a French classroom before, or other classes for that matter.

I can say that both of the aforementioned Old Story and New or Emerging Story approaches were beneficial to my own learning and continuation in French studies. The blend added dimension to my learning experience and allowed me to discover my own learning preferences, but now as we enter a digital age I suspect that how I learn best, and definitely my perspective of teaching, will evolve.