Module 4 Summary and Reflection

Since I'm doing this well after the fact, it's easier now to see how far I've come in constructing my own personal learning theory. However, I'm not sure I would say that I've constructed the theory so much as I have discovered into which theory my style fits.

I am strongly a proponent of the constructionist theory, both educational and social. I believe that we learn best -- and I know that I learn best -- when I am allowed to construct my learning based on what I already know, then adding more construction to my foundation as I gain new knowledge and insight. I have to be able to relate the knowledge I'm gaining to the knowledge I already have in some way -- my style of learning is to perceive relationships between past knowledge and current information, so that I can fit the current information into my existing framework of knowledge, or adjust the framework in order to accommodate the new information.

I would say that the greatest impact on my own personal learning theory has been the research I've done with regard to the synthesis paper. When I started this course (and the other one I'm in, EdTEch 561), I thought I knew what my thesis would be, what area interested me for research. As the course progressed, I changed my focus a bit, and started looking at constructionism in general, but I was still floundering when it came time to submit the learning theories assignment. The articles I found were interesting and informative, but not particularly useful in some respects, so I started to dig deeper into constructionism, trying to find some relevance for myself. I found it in the article by Catherine Veninga, "Fitting in: the embodied politics of race in Seattle’s desegregated schools". It struck a chord in me, mostly because I was one of the students whose experiences Veninga was researching. I wasn't one of the kids who was bused; rather, my parents had moved to the South End of Seattle when I was 6, and I had grown up in the ethnically diverse schools in that area. I was one of the "white kids" Veninga spoke about who were radically different from my North End counterparts -- and it was most interesting to read her theories as to why we were so different. Ethnically, we were white -- but culturally, we weren't. We had been raised in such a strong multicultural environment that culturally we were no longer "white".

Because of this paper, and because of the further research I did on multicultural education, my thesis direction has completely altered. I am now becoming increasingly interested in the progress (or lack thereof, actually) of multicultural education, and in researching solutions that will enable us to finally educate our students appropriately to not only accept or tolerate diversity, but to embrace it and value it.