ID 601 BLOG

My Education Foundation was Teacher Centered! Sterehe High School students during an exam. Education in Kenya, especially at primary and high school levels, is mainly teacher centered and exam oriented. The teacher is the central figure of authority in the classroom. For instance, the teacher is responsible of the entire learning process, designing classroom policy, and the sole decision maker regarding classroom activities. Furthermore, the teacher is to be respected, even feared, and cannot be challenged. There are less classroom activities that require students’ direct participation, and lessons are designed in such a way that all students do is listen to lectures and take down lesson notes dictated by the teacher or from a textbook. In high school, some learner centered practices such as group discussions are encouraged; however, the teacher remains the know-it-all-can’t-be-challenged figure that the students are often afraid of. Basically, the role of the teacher is more ...

First Impression. I was very nervous on the first day of class this semester. I knew I was only going to observe a class and not teach but I still was extremely nervous. I had arrived in Muncie from Kenya a few days before. After spending more than 24 hours travelling, I was immensely jetlagged and completely disoriented. I was tired and confused and my body betrayed me. I came to class a few minutes late (after missing the bus from my apartment and having no internet access on my phone, I had no idea how otherwise to get to school) and the moment I stepped in class I couldn’t help but notice how I stuck out. I was the only international student in class and more so the only African. I was obviously different from everyone else. But what did I expect anyway? This is of course, what I expected to find and yet the reality still unsettled me, I felt I wasn’t prepared enough for this. When my mentor introduced me, I was extremely aware of the scrutiny. I could tell most of the studen...

Multimodality in The Composition Classroom As a student, I did not have much interaction with multimodality. Communication was mainly through reading and writing about the same. The resources available to me were pen and paper and the computer where I would type essays as required by the course and submit hard copies to the professor. My experience with multimodality was towards the end of my undergraduate study where one of my professors required the use of PowerPoint presentations in class. These had to incorporate a variety of media including video, sound, still images and graphics to communicate our understanding of various topics we had learnt in class. This was by far my favorite class. Multimodality in the classroom proved to be an important way of interpreting texts and creating meaning in ways I had not experienced before. I am observing ENG 103: Rhetoric and Writing class. On the first day of lessons, the professor drew a simple two-dimensional structure on the wh...

Understanding and Application of Threshold Concept 4: ‘All Writers Have More to Learn’ to First Year Composition. My professor in Creative Writing would almost always leave a comment that went something like “You have got one more thing to work on” on my assignments.  However much I worked on the ‘one thing’, there was always ‘one thing’ to work on on every submission I gave. Though I took this course for just a semester,  at that time, I felt like writing was the hardest class to take since it appeared that I could never excel in it to the extend I desired. Looking at threshold concept 4 “Writers have more to learn” in Naming What We Know by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, my professor’s comments make much sense to me now. Writing cannot be perfected at one go, it is got to be learnt patiently, which calls for time and effort; meaningful effort. The misconception that there are people who are “born writers” has influenced the...

In my junior year as an undergraduate, I did my Teaching Practice (Internship) at a girls school in rural Kenya. I was extremely nervous on my first day of teaching. Though I had undergone three years of pedagogy training, I still felt inadequate. There were about fifty students in the classroom and I could tell from their looks that they were eager to learn. The fact that I knew something that they did not know and that it was my responsibility to deliver it to them was my chief motivation. At the end of the three months of teaching English, I was impressed at the progress each one of them had made no matter how little. The fact that we all had expectations which were fulfilled in one way or another was satisfying. I will always remember the gratitude of the girls’ as I said goodbye to them at the end of my internship. At that moment, I confirmed that this is what I wanted to be; a teacher. It had never felt so right. Upon my graduation, I got a teaching job at a small private ...