Portfolio Reflection

Flipped upside-down.  That is the easiest way for me to describe what happened to my viewpoints as this class progressed.  Often as I got to class, I would feel frustrated and confused about what was happening to my views, but then as I continued through the course that frustration and confusion was able to turn into an open heart and mind.

When we started the portfolio assignments, my mindset was completely different from where it is now. As I created my imagined classroom, my biggest goal was to describe a cute environment that others would be impressed with.  I wasn’t thinking about what would make my students the most comfortable or how I could help encompass the culture of my students in the way I set up the classroom and taught.  As the semester progressed, my mindset changed and I realized the importance of others in my classroom over myself.  When it comes to teaching, I’m not going to be comfortable all the time, but my goal is to make sure that my students are.

The personal cultural artifacts portfolio was a struggle for me.  It took me three tries before I really figured out what I was supposed to learn from that portfolio.  When I first created it, I just found 20 or so items that I felt represented myself.  It was completely self focused and didn’t really represent my community or culture.  As I met with Bailey, I was able to understand how the items that represented me could represent things in American and Mormon culture.  It was interesting to see how my culture differed from other people in the class, even though in general, I think we’re pretty much all LDS, similar age, and similar SES.  What we value is very specific to what we know.  It made me ponder on the importance of making sure all the students in my future classroom have something they can connect from their own culture within the classroom.

The experiences we took outside the classroom helped me to expand my perspective.  When I went to the Utah symphony, I got to experience a little taste of what it would feel like to be someone from a lower SES.  Being around people who had so much more than I did was hard.  It made me think of the video we watched with the family who lived in the motel.  The girl who was going to school must have struggled as she sat surrounded by those who had no idea what need even was, while she lived in poverty.

While the “Can I Kiss You” seminar wasn’t similar to the concert at all, it was also eye opening.  One of the things that was talked about that really tied in to our class was the idea of gender roles in society.  I’ve always seen gender rolls very stereotypically. Men are masculine and strong and women are the weaker helpless ones.  As I thought about our lesson on gender rolls and remembered the video we watched on “tough guys,” it made me think about how society forces specific rolls on specific genders.  When we don’t fit into those stereotypes, we are considered outcasts.

This class has expanded my view immensely.  When I began this class, I didn’t have strong opinions on most controversial issues, I just claimed to have the same ideas as the church.  This class pushed my comfort levels and disrupted my viewpoints.  There were many times when I struggled trying to decide if my religious values could coincide with what we were learning.  It would seem like everyone else had accepted a certain idea and I was stuck trying to figure out if it was something I needed/wanted to support.  An example of this is the issues regarding transgender people.  As I watched the video of the girl talking about how she became a girl and the process she went through, I felt bad and wanted her to fit in, but something inside me still holds back when talking about supporting people to change genders.  I feel strongly that gender is an eternal principle, so choosing what gender you want still causes some contention in my mind.  As I tried to figure out what the church’s standpoint was on this issue I came up with almost nothing.  There are a few articles where general authorities are quoted saying to love everyone, but I couldn’t find specific church doctrine.  It was ideas like these where I didn’t have specific church doctrine to back up my opinions, yet my opinions weren’t as open minded as I wanted them to be, where I struggled.  While there are still these area of struggle for me, the change in my views over the course of the semester has been immense.