Issues in Education Introduction
The world of education is constantly addressing new concerns. Three issues that I have addressed in my education studies at Hamilton College are special education, technology in education, and motivation in the classroom. To display my work in these areas I have included my special education debate portfolio from Issues in Education where I defend inclusion as opposed to mainstreaming, a speech I gave in a rhetorical act course introducing new uses of social media technology in education as adopted by schools in Singapore, and my ethnography of learning environments paper for the Ethnography of Learning Environments course where I address overarching student goals and motivation and teacher pedagogy in alternative education settings. The special education debate was the first time I really studied the different strategies used such as inclusion vs. mainstreaming. I was on the pro- inclusion team, which is when I became really intrigued by the topic, leading me to take Intro. to Disability studies the following year. Although my speech was assigned in order to asses my public speaking abilities, I chose to speak on what I’m passionate about: education. My ethnography is more focused on the best way to teach a given group of alternative education students. I got to assess various learning environments first hand and learn effective (and ineffective) ways that teachers can use the students’ motivation and goals in their daily pedagogy in order to establish a focused and successful classroom, something that I hope I can accomplish in the future. Finally, and most recently, I presented a lead on Bullying- how to integrate anti-bulling lessons into the classroom as well as how to deal with a situation in which a student(s) is suffering from being bullied. In order to do this, I broke the class up into three groups, an elementary level group, a middle school group, and a high school group, and asked each group to brainstorm, then act out, ways to appropriately incorporate bulling lessons into their assigned schools as well as how to address bullies and victims of bullying.