It Funny the places you will end up going that you never had imagined you would. I have two stories like this, I don’t fully remember the context of this one but, a teacher was yelling at me about something…. and said something to the effect of “I hope you are a teacher one day so that you have to deal with shit kids like you!” To which I responded with “Ewww No, I never want to be a teacher what a horrible job!” And fully believing that I would never pursue such a stuck up and stuffy type of job. Little did I know what would come down my path and be so embraced. (I have never had to deal with any “shit” kids its probably a perspective thing)
Reflection is a tool that was embedded heavily in my undergraduate education program. At the time It felt silly however, as I have worked through my first years of my teaching experience reflection has become a critical part of my practice. As I start this program I am reflecting on how I got here, and what role that will play in the direction I believe I will pursue… we will see where I end up in a few years. Over the years it has been a bit of a series of unforeseen events, projects, programs and adventures that have really helped to shape my experience towards where I am today. These experiences have helped shape my views and built my impressions on how I believe education, learning, and teaching should be approached.
This journey will begin when I was attending Mount Royal university, during a time where I was feeling quite lost. I was starting a journey in understanding how my ADHD worked. I had just finished reading a book on addiction, a book that my past experience would have told me was far beyond what I could finish in a few hours, let alone finish reading. In the past and for most of my educational years, I grew up believing I was not very intelligent, school was not a place I thrived and reading took far longer for me than anyone else. But I had just finished a book in a few hours, one that should have taken a few weeks…. Why? At this same time I was beginning to read up on and begin figuring out how my ADHD worked. In this process I began to read about the brain and how it worked. This would mark a fundamental shift in my perspective towards learning and how I viewed education and learning specifically.
The Aha Moment:
What I learned that day in a short summary was that brains where susceptible to addiction and craved Dopamine. More specifically what I learned was my brain was lacking sufficient quantities of dopamine, either production, release or binding, but that how my ADHD was being treated was with stimulant medication, a medication that let me focus. When I think back about this I thought it was an article but I am beginning to wonder if it was a book because I can not find the article anywhere currently, but a few adjacent ones.
The concept showed that a brain that had been exposed to a hit of cocaine, when imaged look almost identical to a brain that just experience an Aha or Eureka moment. That moment of learning where you finally put all the pieces of the puzzle, the question, the inquiry, together and you just get it! I get excited thing about those times those moments and the fact that understanding this was one of those moments for me. What this told me and impressed upon me was, That the process of learning released dopamine, and If I was able to learn, discover, explore and find out new things, then learning could be addictive. The follow up question I would pose for myself and explore for the next few years would be: If learning is addictive, Why does everyone hate going to to school? And why didn’t I do well at school? If I have a lack of dopamine and learning released dopamine, then why was school not a place where I could focus and do well.
The following two links provide information on the “Aha Moment” as we see it in the brain. However they are not the one I was reading that day!
This insight would lead me to learn that I had a passion for learning and research. I loved setting out a question and going to find the research that had been done about it, confirming ideas and following concepts. Over the following months my marks would grow from low and failing grades to A and B’s ( a place I had never been before) to a new perspective that I could go learn anything I wanted to. I took some time to ponder what I really found interesting, but kept coming back to the brain, how it worked, its locations, fundamentals and differences, injuries and lesions, and all the while knowing that I will never in my entire life be able to learn it all. This meant that as a person with ADHD, I would not get bored of this when I learned what I needed to as was the case with many of past endeavours. I set forth to pursue an undergrad in neuroscience, at the University of Lethbridge.
My time at the UofL would be very exciting and would help me redefine what a learning space, learning experience and what the impact of learning could be. This time from the onset would be composed beyond my classes into 3 main parts, research done in the lab, my time in iGEM and my time Setting up and running the first Canadian High School iGEM program.
Engaging in research during my freetime was a wonderful experience. In both the neuroscience lab and the biochemistry lab I was able to learn and develop skills and apply knowledge around the subjects that I was taking in my classes. This made my classes so much easier to understand and take in. From the first semester of my time at the UofL I was part of a program called iGEM. It was an international competition of primarily undergraduate students who were using engineering principles applied to genetics to build novel applications of genetic material for unique and impressive outcomes. The iGEM competition stood for International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition. This experience taught me a few things, a great amount of lab skills, but most importantly was that being immersed in and applying the subject matter made a big difference in how well I understood and was able to recall the information. Additionally this immersion made understanding big concepts much easier as there was tangible knowledge/experience to work with and also there was a place to practise and work with those concepts in a real environment.
The High School iGEM program
In the years that followed, and a few competition seasons later, A colleague and I came together and began to conceptualize and design what a high school iGEM team would look like. We had a challenge on our hands, how do we teach 20ish high school students 4 years of university biochemistry and molecular biology skills in 3 months. So we built a volunteer based after school program hosted out of the UofL’s iGEM Lab space and Dr. HJ Wieden’s biochemistry lab.
The model was simple. The students would come to the university after school and we would teach them a little bit of information on a molecular biology concept and then take them up to the lab to learn how to do it in person and repeat. It did not see that novel of a teaching method, besides give or take that’s how we trained rats for an experiment in our other labs. This worked tremendously well at developing a self motivated group of students who engaged in research and were curious about their project they were developing. This project would later be presented by the students at a conference in the little town of Greenfield Indiana, where the students met other students on teams from across the United States. The students on the way home with a trophy for best presentation, would start their journey for the next years competition. In the following year, strong with self motivation, the team tackled a bigger project, please check out the links to see it(the students made this website as part of the competition to demonstrate their learning, mine is not going to be this shiny). During this time as a team advisor I would make a few important observations.
- The students held the vision, and could articulate it to their peers
- The students displayed ownership, Leadership and were having Fun
- The students were Reflecting on their experience
Now the biggest impact on my career and journey to becoming a teacher was the third one, student self reflection. They would come to me and ask, “Why do I learn more in the 3 hours after school playing in the lab than I do all semester at school everyday?” This sentiment would be voiced by other students over the months of the project. For me though, it was a question of Why…? The answer I would give them was: Because we are having Fun! I would go on to pursue an additional degree in education, and I used this experience as the framework to fit all the theories to. Some didn’t fit but I learned about constructivist theory and felt how well it resonated with this experience, and how I saw learning happening most effectively. Now as I work towards my Masters Degree, this experience continues to sit with me as an example of a model for learning, that feels like it steps in the way of so much of what has traditionally been said about how learning should happen and what that should look like.
The outcome of this impact has been that I now have a teaching philosphy that I share with my students from day one: If you are not having fun, you are probably not learning anything.