Save Our Schools Seminar and Education Reform Symposium
The spring semester of 2015 presented me with an exciting opportunity to partake in an honors seminar titled, “Save Our Schools! Education Controversy and Change,” and taught by Professor Sarah Stitzlein. The course itself was only about 15 students, and it was a once-a-week seminar that allowed us to discover and tackle a different issue in education each week. We were charged to enter the community during our Educational Support Agencies project, develop and defend a position during a film review paper, perform teacher and panel interviews and, ultimately, present a semester’s worth of research to three state legislators at the year’s end education reform symposium.
With a strong interest in education as a whole, and having taken both Educational Psychology and Introduction to Education in previous semesters, this course seemed like the perfect honors semester for me. And it was. I enjoyed the course so much because in addition to the expected and necessary readings on controversial topics in education, Professor Stitzlein arranged for the class to speak with a representative that dealt with each topic firsthand, on a daily basis. We spoke with educators of all types, community members, and others interested in education reform. Separate from this course, I had a chance to travel to the Statehouse in March to meet with state legislators to discuss issues in higher education today. That experience, coupled with the chance to research, design and present a proposal for education reform to three state legislators at our semester-end symposium, taught me a great deal about how government and education work together. But they also gave me an experience in public speaking and presentation that was quite unique to any I had experienced before. I was very fortunate to be given these opportunities to grow. This course was one of my favorite ones taken thus far in college, and I believe that, regardless of its subject matter, it gave me opportunities and experiences that I will value for quite a long time. And if I ever teach any courses of my own, I will surely use this course and its experiential learning components as a model. Our Presentation Slides |
Legislative One-PagerOn the day of our symposium, it was recommended we bring a one-page document to give to the legislators that outlined our presentation that they may use as future reference. This was an opportunity, in addition to the presentation itself, for me to utilize my design background and construct a document that I believe was both rich in content and aesthetically pleasing.
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