When I approach my own philosophy of teaching I come at it from three angles; fostering community, promoting collaboration and encouraging explorative inquiry. During my undergraduate degree, I was introduced to Bell Hooks. While reading her book Teaching Community- A Pedagogy of Hope, I became aware of the importance of teaching community as educators. She describes teaching community beautifully, “Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. “This is especially important for me, as up until my early twenties I had experienced a loss of the feeling of community, not just the loss of closeness among those that I work and studied, but also the loss of a feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the institution. It wasn’t until I moved to a rural town in Thailand that I felt what it was like to be a part of a community and to share the feeling of closeness with those that I worked and lived. I believe that it is an important aspect of life that is quickly fading in today’s world. If you teach community, then you teach acceptance and with acceptance comes empathy and love. To build community in my classroom, I plan to begin my classes with a circle at the start of the year and to develop it every day at the start of class. Other ways that you can easily build community in the classroom is to get the class to write a song/poem together, pair students up with others that they would not normally work with and have a class blog or website.

 

            Buddhist monk Thich Nhat kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” To have collaboration and open dialogue you need to be the team leader and to be the team leader, you need to be liked by everyone!Nanh wrote about collaboration in a way that particularly resonates with me and why I think collaboration is important in the classroom. He writes, “In a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change. We must appreciate that truth can be received from outside of- not only within- our own group… We have to believe that by engaging in dialogue with another person, we have the possibility of making change within ourselves, that we can become deeper.” I truly believe that a classroom should be a space for open ended conversation that brings together everyone’s perspective. An educator can achieve a classroom like this by building trust and to build trust, you need to be consistent, approachable and interested! Teacher Rita Pierson once said, “

         

            I firmly believe that children need to be given the opportunity to expand their learning outside the walls of the institution. Scholars Randy White and Vicki L. Stoecklin wrote, “to be effective and engage children based upon their developmental abilities and ways of learning, their hands-on sensory experiences need to be immersive and open-ended rather than structured and scripted.” There is no better place for children to explore hands-on, interactive play than outdoors. There is a huge decline in children’s engagement with nature and this is in part due to parents’ irrational fear of the outdoors/strangers, structuring of children’s playtime and the criminalization of natural play. The danger in this is that if children lose contact with nature then they won’t fight for it. Those that fight for nature are those that were immersed in it in their childhood. From my own experiences, I have time after time found that my most meaningful and memorable memories are from my time spent in nature and being given the opportunity to explore inquiry. To be an ongoinginquiry based teacher you need to be flexible, a facilitator, engage students in multiple and diverse means of investigation and have assessment. I plan to take into question every curriculum activity and ask myself, how can I do this differently and how can I make this as engaging as possible.