Thank you for your post Hana, it is really interesting to know about the differences in education and training from the Korean cultural point of view. In India too an educator is held in high regard. There is a story that you may appreciate – a student is asked that if God and their teacher were both standing in front of them who would the person acknowledge with respect (by touching their feet) first. The student answers – I would touch my teachers feet first. When asked why he stated that it was because the teacher taught him who God was and what was His importance. I’ve always found that story really cool. However, the world is ever changing and incorporating new ideas and strategies into long held beliefs and practices can be both a struggle and also an exciting process. Let’s see where we end up.

It is definitely worthy of exploring. Thank you for your thoughts, I particularly appreciate how you point out the learning within a community feel to all of it. And the community is not just the classroom anymore, it can be anyone across the planet who has a decent internet connection.

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Some valid thoughts Bailey. In a counselorly fashion I will say that it really does depend – whether we assess success of an educator by the number of articles they publish or how talked about they are in the academic world, how many people cited an article versus do the students in their class learn, are they excited about learning, do they respect their professor, do they have a connection with them, did they learn something about life in the professors class. By no means am I saying that these are either-or dichotomies, time is always short and will be…it depends on how and which way we want to be recognized as educators. I am sure there is a happy medium somewhere – I do believe however that nothing is as clear cut and concrete as a simple yes-no answer. We may have to ponder a little more on this…may a semester or so… ?

Brittany, I totally get what you are saying about the securing your future, publishing, politics, and the rest of the chaos that comes along with the higher education setting. Sometimes it does get out of hand and feels overwhelming. Sometimes what helps me to going back to thinking about why I came into academia…that helps on good days and then some days that too falls short. However, I will say that learning and passion for learning if facilitated well can open up a whole new world. I saw you write about openess in academia and slowly things are changing. Maybe the next generation of educators (us) can bring about a complete change…maybe?!

The beginning of your blog reminds me of the Pink Floyd song – you know which one! Dewey was considered to be pretty radical in his thoughts on education, I think his ideas may have been a little too intimidating for that generation of educators. Maybe his ideas will finally make sense to people who make the rules regarding education and therein lies the issue too – who makes those rules and do they actually understand learning…?! I know I am not providing any answers right now, maybe just more questions. Hopefully as we undertake this GEDI journey things will become clearer…

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Some valid points Britton. I think every new innovative idea comes with its own set of pushback, right?! Sometimes the pushback is momentary and sometimes it takes a while to figure out the glitches. This semester I hope to provide some perspective and ways in which these strategies can be worked on, suited for a variety of fields. Fingers crossed

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You bring up some good points Erin. Systemically something is not working and has not worked for a while in the grade school educational system. Somehow we tend to like organizing human beings, learners, little people into categories and this becomes almost like an obsession in grade school – to categorize and for that we need a system, and rules for success and failure, and we need numbers, and the list goes on. Learning however, like you pointed out can be made interesting, it can be made “fun” and it also gets a little difficult right there – we get conditioned to the system and when something new is presented we don’t know what to do. Hopefully some educators can help break that cycle.

That is cool analogy to use for blogging. I agree with you and hope that you do find a rhythm. What helped me a few semesters ago was that I wrote even though it was not required, it helped put things into perspective and bring it all together later. If I read my blogs even now I know what I was thinking at the time. Its pretty neat actually.

I agree that students need freedom to blog freely while connecting their writings to course material. I think by offering students the opportunity for open-prompts it makes it a bit easier for them to develop their writing and communication skills.

I appreciate your candor and I think it is great that you are stepping outside of your comfort zone. I hope you find something out of this course that you can share with your peers.

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