This Thanksgiving, I want to take a moment to give thanks to the many educators who have positively shaped my thinking, learning, and teaching at various stages of my life. I would not have had the courage or the motivation to pursue a profession in education, were it not for my own teachers. They ignited in me a love of learning and cultivated the right environment for me to experience growth. Thus, I devote this essay to my teachers and to my colleagues who are teachers.
Read moreWriting in Graduate School: Reflecting on the Art of Teaching
This is me, sharing one of my last papers written during my first year of graduate school at Teachers College, writing as Catherine Cheng. Here, I reflect on the tendency of teacher preparation programs to overemphasize practice rather than to provide a rich education that supports teachers in recognizing the aesthetics of teaching. I argue for a recognition of and, perhaps, a return to an “art” of teaching that takes into account the affective dimension and emotional labor of working with students.
Read moreThe Production of Differences in Schools and How Educators Can Disrupt Them
I’m sharing another original piece of academic writing for a course I took at Teachers College. As part of this course on gender, difference, and curriculum, we read a diverse set of books, articles on theory, as well as articles of empirical studies. My essay is an integrative one, in which I tried to draw on a wide range of theorists and practitioners to describe how differences are produced via school curricula, ideas of “normal”, and structures/traditions…
Read moreA Curricular Project: Queering Science Education
I’m sharing with you a curricular project titled “Queering Science Education” that I pursued as part of my coursework for a gender, difference and curriculum course at Teachers College. For this project, I am using concepts from Queer Theory to begin to re-imagine and re-conceptualize science education to make it more interdisciplinary, more inclusive, more accessible, and outside the bounds of “standard” or “normal” traditional science education….
Read moreTaking Academic Risks in Graduate School: A Second Doctoral Paper
I’m devoting this blog entry to the process of writing an academic paper—a process that involves risk-taking, which is not comfortable, but is valuable. It is a process that pushes you and actually allows you to achieve a state of clarity at the end. I look back on this paper now and I smile. I have many, many other papers to write, which feels daunting at the present moment; however, I know I can do it, because I have done it before, and it will only get easier and more comfortable because I already went through the initial stage of discomfort… In the end, I told myself that the grade would not matter, because I persevered and I learned…
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