Jessica Livingston
ESE 325
Standards Paper
Standards Paper
Standard 1, subject matter.
A teacher
must understand the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the
disciplines taught and be able to create learning experiences that make these aspects
of subject matter meaningful for students.
Standards, a way to try and insure
that all students in the United States are getting a quality education. When
looking at the code of ethics I found something similar in the language of the
materials. General and broad, a way to encompass as much potential good while
expelling as much potential bad as possible. Subject matter in my specific
content area is rather broad, History, Economics, Anthropology, Physical
Geography, Political Science and Sociology, possibly psychology also. Do I
understand central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of all six of
these disciplines? Of course.
When working in the humanities, an
understanding of how people work, how they function is a basis for our passion.
To extent that even further, not only are we interested in a subset of the
humanities, we are also interested in relaying this information to other
humans, as teachers. We have been in training for years, some of us for decades
to prepare for this. From the minute kindergarten starts we begin absorbing
teaching styles, concepts, processes, frameworks and knowledge. Then eventually
we get to a point where we all find out that this knowledge is filled with
misconceptions and assumptions and we work through setting them right. We begin
to notice the flaws in now only our past k-12 teachers, but our current
professors in college. I am an undergraduate that has its positive attributes
and negative attributes. I remember high school much more clearly, and I am currently
working on mastering my content, which is helpful. I am also less learned
socially, and I am less sure of my career path. With that known, I have a
youthful curiosity about extending my knowledge in all of the tiny parts that
make up this grand, overarching standard. Over the last three years I have
gathered a bank of content area information that dispels assumptions, debates
topics, inquiries about unknown truths and I still have not come to understand
the correct ways of knowing that are central to my discipline. I have realized
that to gain a concept of ways of knowing a discipline a student must fail
forward to find a path that they can continue to use. I had a student write a
paper on Martin Luther King last week that cited MartinLutherKing.org, it is a
.org and it has MLK’s name in it, so it should work right? I had to sit down
with the student and explore the website with them to find out together that it
was a White Supremacist page. "Anyone can buy a URL", I can tell my students that
time and time again but learning the skill of how to know things that are
central to the discipline is a personal, learned experience, not 5 words that I constantly repeat. In history whether
we are supporting assumptions or dispelling them, we are supporting a narrative
that students are forming in their minds. Was Woodrow Wilson a racist or a
great president in the history of America? Maybe he was both? How can someone
be great and racist at the same time? How do we have intellectual conversation about
this? And lastly, do we even care? Should we inquire further?
I have the capabilities to uphold
this standard, and I also have the capability to question it. To utilize it to
my students advantages, and provide them with a space where they can grow with
me while working out how to meet these standards.
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