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It’s Time For a Change!

I do not own any of the clips used to make this collage, all credits go to its respective owners.

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, finally! As many of you may know, I had the amazing opportunity of working in Barcelona as a teachers assistant. The school that I worked at taught kids from 3 years old up until 18. In my first year there, I began thinking that they did things differently then we do here in Canada. It really hit me when it came to learning foreign languages. They had these little 3 year olds learning Chinese! why? Well because they had figured out that kids who begin learning foreign languages from an earlier age, demonstrate certain cognitive advantages, such as, increased problem solving skills and creativity. Their goal wasn’t for these kids to become fluent in Chinese, they just wanted their brains to create these pathways and become open to learning foreign languages. As they grew older, they began studying English and once they hit grade 6, they had the option of studying German as well. Let’s also not forget that Barcelona is part of the Catalan region, and so kids born there are practically bilingual from birth, instantly learning Spanish and Catalan. That’s a lot of languages! I’m sure scientists would love to take a look inside their brains! Around this point I started thinking back to my own education, I remembered being introduced to French in grade 6, why hadn’t we started earlier??? In highschool we only had two options, French or Chinese, and in one of the years they almost cancelled French because apparently you need more than twelve students for it to be an actual class! For the sake of an argument, let’s make an excuse and say that i went to a not so great highschool, ok that’s fine, but I would like to present you all with another example, Physical Education, PE, or as its now known Physical and Health Education. If you take a look online at BC’s New Curriculum, you will find that they explain things beautifully, they cover every single base when it comes to being physically literate. They aren’t just focusing on the “physical” part, they also teach healthy habits, like having a healthy diet and good hygiene habits, so, for some of my tutorials, I set up times to go into a couple of elementary schools and observe their PE classes. I was surprised to find that from kindergarten to grade 5, PE class is only 30 min long…..let me put that into perspective for you, it took us five minutes to get the kids ready and heading over to the gym, two minutes for warm-up, which was just running around the gym, three minutes for the explanation plus set up of the game we would be playing, fifteen minutes of actual game time, three minutes for clean-up, and two minutes for getting ready to head back to class. They did this twice a week. Once they got past grade five, their PE time increased by another fifteen minutes. As I was doing my observations, it became quite clear to me which teachers had actually studied physical education and which teachers hadn’t. So in a way, when it comes to PE in elementary schools, you could say that it’s the luck of the draw, you could get a really good PE teacher or you could just become really good at dodgeball……Now keeping all that in mind, I would like to take you back to that school in Spain, PE classes were two hours long. The first half hour was for getting kids from class to the changerooms, changing into PE clothes, and heading over to the gym. They then had a full hour to do attendance, explanation and set up of skill, performing the skill, clean-up, and heading back to the changerooms. The last half hour was for showering and changing into clean clothes, and this part was mandatory! Here’s the kicker, this routine started as soon as age five, because how else are you going to learn healthy habits if not from a early age. Also all PE classes were held in english, because what better way to learn a foreign language, than when you are moving around and having fun. I’m pretty sure that by this point you’re thinking, “ok, but there’s no way this is a public school” and you’re right. The school that I worked at in Spain is a semi-private school, meaning that it receives funding from the government but also from the parents. Now that we’ve cleared that up, I would like to ask you two very important questions, Why should it matter what type of school it is? Why is it that our education has become a commodity?

The point of my project is not to compare our education system to others, the point is to help people realize that every school system would benefit from focusing more on multi-level cognition, that includes sensorial, artistin, and creative learning, rather then scoring good grades on academic courses and standardized tests. I truly believe that by placing the same importance on arts, languages, and sports, as we do with math and other academic courses, we will facilitate, rather than hinder, the development of creativity, and it will lead students to a harmonious, physical, intellectual, and moral development.

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Research Folio on Student Success Resources at CapU

Here is a PDF link to my folio: Student-Success-Resources-at-CapUDownload

After graduating from the Human Kinetics program and being one step away from achieving a degree in Liberal Studies, I learned that success in college/university is a synergy between human behavior, and the learning environment. Devoting the right amount of time to studying and accessing campus resources (libraries, classrooms, counsellors, workshops, and consulting teachers) we are more likely to be successful.
This research paper focuses on resources  available for students of Capilano University to succeed in their higher education.


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Reflection #2 – LBST 201

We were asked to provide responses to each of the following questions:

1.      How has the way you conceive of a scientist changed through completing this course?

2.      What are some strengths and limitations associated with the use of applying quantitative methods to investigating a research question?

3.      Which approach to doing research, qualitative or quantitative, do you feel is a better fit for you as a researcher and why?

4.      What three main learning points about doing research will you take with you from this course?

My first encounter with quantitative research was during my Human Kinetics diploma program at Capilano. In the class HKIN151, I learned about qualitative and quantitative analysis of human movement. A few years later, while enrolled in the LBST program, I had access to additional quantitative research courses such as PHIL 110, ABA 312 and LBST 330. By taking these courses I had the opportunity to see the broader aspects of the quantitative research and to learn about different procedures and issues related to the single and multiple subject design, implantation and analysis of single and multiple subject research, and about applications of statistical procedures to single subject and time series data.   Because I am not great at math and statistics, I had to work hard to earn my grades in all these Quantitative/Analytical courses. At the beginning of this term I thought that LBST 201 would be incredibly difficult for me. Throughout the course, Janet and Mashid made it seem not only easy to understand, but also logical. Through their detailed explanations I understood when and how to perform the quantitative research.

LBST 201 made me understand  that quantitative methods have the advantage of producing valid and reliable results which could be generalizable to a larger population. On the other hand, in the LBST201 course studies I learned about the inability to control the environment while doing quantitative research. The quantitative methods could be expensive and time consuming and/or could produce improper representation of the target population.  

Although in my profession as an educator and swimming coach I deal mostly with qualitative research which focuses on words rather than numbers, depth rather than breadth, the LBST 201 studies made me aware that there might be times when I must conduct objective testing to see if a certain course curriculum or a planned training lesson produce better results than other curriculum, and in which quantitative research is more appropriate to be conducted.

This being said it is fair to conclude that quantitative research is conclusive in its purpose, as it tries to quantify a problem and understand how prevalent it is by looking for projectable results to a larger population while qualitative research seeks to unearth the opinions, thoughts and feelings of it’s respondents.  

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LBST 201 Reflection # 1

           I am glad that we were asked to write a reflection about one chapter of Hans Rosling et al book “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” It was the first time I heard about this book and the fact that I had to write a reflection about one chapter, gave me the opportunity to read through it and focus my attention on misconceptions. Once I had the chance to read it, this book made me reconsider my perspective about what I know about the world. It also made me understand how my way of perceiving the world around me is based on negative things I learned in school or read in the press. By reading the book I became aware that we tend to fall for a dramatic biased misrepresented view of the world. Generally speaking, the image, we have about the world is altered due to our tendency to over dramatize the world as we see it.

             In chapter one “The gap instinct” Rosling talks about our inclination to separate things into two distinct groups with an imaginary gap in between them. The author introduces us to his experience about world misconceptions. In October 1995, while teaching his class he asked his students a question about the child mortality rate . His students responded with different numbers from different countries, all associated with what they knew about those countries. At that point Rosling made remarks about the Mega Misconception about the world, and people’s tendency to assume that news stories in the media, about rich people in developed countries, reflect the most representative life experiences. “The gap instinct” makes us think that in developed countries every person owns a house or a yacht, has access to good education and health insurance, this is not true. Most people’s lives, in the world, are somewhere in the middle, no matter if you live in a developing or developed country. Rosling suggests that due to differences in lifestyle within a country, to label a state as ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ is wrong and deceptive. In order to avoid misconceptions of the world around us, Rosling shows us new ways to see beyond statistics and to build opinions on strong supporting facts. To prove his point Rosling presents us with a set of questionaries’ about standards of life such as: education, income, and utilities, and proposes a way of evaluating and comparing such standards. Additionally, he underlines the importance of comparisons and makes us aware of the limits of compression of averages and extremes. Rosling suggests that comparing “the averages we risk misleading ourselves even more by focusing on the gap between those two single numbers, and missing the overlapping spreads, the overlapping ranges of numbers, that make up each average. That is, we see gaps that are not really there.” On the other hand, comparison of extremes also has its limits. “These stories of opposites are engaging and provocative and tempting—and very effective for triggering our gap instinct—but they rarely help understanding. There will always be the richest and the poorest, there will always be the worst regimes and the best.”

Works cited MLA (7th ed)

Rosling, Hans, Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna R. Rönnlund. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. London: Sceptre, 2019. Print.

List of 5 Misconceptions

Doing research to produce a list of 5 misconceptions, I came across of this site Centre for climate and Energy solution at :

https://c2es.org/site/assets/uploads/2017/03/misconceptions-realities-climate-science-06-2012.pdf

As Climate change is a top subject of news headlines, I found it interesting to use the list of 5 misconceptions regarding climate change, form the referred site.

Misconception #1: Recent global warming is caused by the sun.

Misconception #2: The climate is always changing, or it has changed many times in the past before and those change occurred naturally.

Misconception #3: The world has been cooling for the past decade; or, Global warming stopped in 1998 or 2002

Misconception #4: There is no scientific consensus on the existence or causes of global climate change.

Misconception #5: Scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s. Since they were wrong about that, there is no reason to believe they are right about global warming.

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LBST 200 Reflection #2

LBST 200 was a great journey which helped me to understand the multiple paradigms and facets of research. The previous research  course I took at Capilano gave be the basic understanding of how to conduct a multilevel research and how to implement it in my academic studies .Whith LBST 200 I learned a more detailed approche on how to conduct a research, how to do interviews and how to use all methods to interpret resources I investigate. While working on Reflection #1, I understood that doing research is a complex task, which involves critic analyses and subjective interpretation. At the time when I completeted my tutorials I found it that research was a daunting task. Now with all I learned in LBST 200 I have all tools and a better understanding on how I have to conduct a research. LBST 200 made me step out of my comfort zone, and made me push myself to a better understanding of research. While working on Module 4 – Mining the past I developed an interest in the historical past of North Shore of 1900’s. Before this assignment I never knew I would be interested in archival material and studying the way our cities looked in early times. LBST 200 helped me to develope a research plan and to complete my graduation project. I am thankful to my teachers who guided my learning during LBST 200 classes and I am confident that the knowledge I gained this semester will stick with me and allow me to engage in even more intreasting research projects in the future.

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Self-Submission

My LBST 490 self-submission

After spending some time working abroad, I thought I knew what my grad project would end up being. I knew that it would have something to do with schools, sports, and foreign languages. What I did not know, is that on my journey of finding a correlation between these three areas, I would actually end up scratching the surface of a very widespread, profound, and perplexing subject. Our school system.

Although my grad project turned out to be different than what I thought it would be, I do consider myself lucky since I had loosely worked out what the topic would be quite early on. I knew the subjects of all three of my tutorials before I even took them. The first one would be about my experience as a teacher’s assistant in Barcelona, and focusing on what methods were used to help kids learn English. The second tutorial was about the role that foreign languages play in schools, and my third tutorial was about the importance of physical education in our curriculums.

Somewhere down the road my loose topic about physical education and foreign languages, began to morph into a full-scale critique of the Canadian education system. With each passing tutorial I would have new questions in my mind and much more research about how education systems in Canada and the US seemed to be failing. So with a much more concrete topic, I set about beginning my long awaited grad project. It is here, now, that I would like to thank my extraordinary grad project advisor, Professor Josema Zamorano, whose guidance and enthusiastic support of my topic helped me not only bring to light some of the problems that our education system faces, but also helped me do so creatively and artistically, the later being a rare quality that I believe all teachers should share with their students.

My goal for my project is that hopefully it will inspire others to begin to ask their own questions, I truly believe that it is time for a change in our education system and the only way to bring it about is by putting it out there and letting people know there is a problem, but, that there is also a solution.

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LBST 200

Reflection # 1

As an emerging researcher, the paradigm that I feel most strongly affiliated with is the interpretive paradigm. My studies at Capilano University are comprised of many psychology, education and ABA courses that focus on applying learning theories to improve socially significant behavior and bring about positive change.

While learning about techniques of behavioural intervention for children, I realized that social reality is not singular or objective, but is rather shaped by human experiences and social contexts (ontology). Upon reflection, I came to the realization that the interpretive paradigm is the one that I use most frequently, and is therefore best studied within its social context by reconciling the subjective interpretations of its various participants (epistemology).

As an emerging interpretive researcher, I am tempted to assume that the research subjects’ reality is rooted in their social setting, and therefore reality should be interpreted though a sense-making process rather than a hypothesis testing process.

 For the last two semesters, I’ve conducted interviews with students and teachers in Spanish and Canadian elementary schools, for my LBST tutorials focusing on the role of sports and languages in children development. Through my research, I realised that the interpretive paradigm can be used in the majority of research cases alongside the scientific paradigm especially in specific cases where psychology, science and quantitative information is necessary to formulate a conclusion.

Outside of my academic work, I am a swimming coach for a competitive team, and I am aware that in sports research there are cases where the exercise of interpretive paradigm is not sufficient and application of the scientific and the critical paradigms work out very well and provide an ontological position of positivism.

Although I recognize the benefits of the scientific and critical paradigms for some instances, I am still a supporter of the interpretive paradigm, based on the argument that each individual is different and rooted to his own social context.

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LBST 391 – Self-submission

 

 

 

AN INVESTIGATION ON THE LEARNING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN SCHOOLS IN CATALONIA/SPAIN AND BC/CANADA: The Art of Teaching Foreign Languages

 

I have always been interested in languages, sports and education. Taking the liberal studies program gave me the opportunity to make meaningful connections between my areas of interest.

For the last 3 years I had the opportunity of travelling to Spain and working as an ESL instructor in an elementary school in Catalonia. Considering my experiences in teaching and my natural inclination towards languages and pedagogy, I decided to begin writing about the similarities and differences between educational systems in Spain and Canada. My graduation project will explore and compare the Spanish and Canadian education systems while focusing on bilingualism and physical education.

After I completed my first tutorial exploring the Spanish educational system from the perspective of an ESL instructor in an elementary school in Catalonia, for my second tutorial I decided to complete a deeper analysis of comparative aspects of methodological strategies, curricula and lesson plans of teaching languages in Spain and Canada.

Additionally, my tutorial outlines the perceptions of foreign language teachers and the multimodal and inspirational teaching of languages. The tutorial also summarizes the differences of pedagogical approaches of teaching English/French in Spain and Canada and the particularities of teaching languages as experienced at the school level.

One of the unanticipated learning outcomes of this tutorial was the overlap between the attention teachers allocated to multimodal and inspirational learning strategies in Spanish and Canadian elementary schools.

The research methods I used for this tutorial were: literature review, direct observation, and interviews with language teachers at Llor and Lord Roberts Elementary School. Through literature review and discussions with teachers, I got a better understanding of the pedagogical perspective and methodologies of teaching foreign languages in two different educational systems.

This tutorial preambles the upcoming tutorial in which I will explore the role and inclusion of physical education in school curricula and its connections with learning a foreign language. The present and forthcoming tutorial will help me shape the comparison of the Spanish and Canadian education system, with a focus on foreign languages and physical education.

 

I am thankful to my advisor, Annabella Cant for her guidance, and her enthusiastic support through the course of shaping this tutorial. Her knowledge and creative pedagogical ideas have been the source of inspiration for me throughout this tutorial.

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LBST 330 – Final Assignment

Summary of The Assignment

 

Here is a PDF link to my Final Assignment.

Based on the assigned readings and in class activities, I was asked to produce a paper in which I explore relevant literature related to the topic of investigation set out in my recently approved LBST 392 tutorial. This paper should contain a preliminary literature review and the following required elements:

  • Tutorial Information
  • Proposed Topic of Investigation
  • Resources and Methodology
  • Proposed Learning Outcomes
  • Literature Review
  • Next steps Tutorial/Project(s)
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LBST 100 – Intellectual Biography

Never stop learning because life never stops teaching

I am Bianca and I was born in 1992 in Bucharest, Romania. I was three years old when my parents decided to move to Canada. I grew up and went to school in Vancouver, and ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a famous singer. The dream is still alive and even though I have taken many different paths along the way, singing is something that I am always working on. Here is my story, who knows maybe one day I will turn it into a song.

In 2004, my little brother was born and my parents decided to spend a whole year in Romania. We bought a little house in a small village on the outskirts of Bucharest. I was enrolled in the local school for grade 6. This was exactly how I would imagine living on the countryside would be. Life here was so different from the life that I had in Vancouver. The street that we lived on was not paved it was just a dirt road and in the fall when it would rain it would get all muddy, later on the mud would dry in crater like forms because of the cars that had passed through in the rain. Life there was adventurous, I would go to school in the morning and I would come back in the afternoon. I would meet up with the kids on my street and we would play hide and seek, play with toy cars, and run down the muddy road until the sun went down. School there was very different than school in Vancouver. The Romanian school curriculum was more complicated than the one in my elementary school in Vancouver. I was not used to having to do physics in grade 6 but this was normal in Romania. Physics and math were, and still are, my hardest classes. Geography was my favourite, and English class was the best, I was the most popular in English often helping my classmates with difficult questions. Overall, doing grade six in Romania was one of my favourite experiences and I think back to those times fondly.

A year passed quickly and next thing I knew we were back in Canada. Instead of going into grade 7, I skipped it and went directly into high school at King George Secondary. Being in high school was definitely different from grade 6 in Romania. Nobody took their toy cars outside or stayed out until 11 playing hide and seek, but I was back with my friends and glad that I would not have to worry about physics for a year or two.

My high school career went by smoothly. I was more of a sporty person rather than an academic one, many evenings were spent on the soccer pitch and many classes were skipped for more soccer. Being on the soccer team was one of the best things that ever happened to me I love the feeling of being part of something and knowing that as a team, we’re all working towards the same goal.

The summer after grade 11, my parents decided to give Romania another go. This time we lived in the city and I went to a high school that was super far from our home. I remember dreading waking up to take the metro and then a bus to get to school. Grade 12 in Romania was not like grade 6, all the kids were much older than I was, and I often found that I had nothing in common with them. Although I did not have to worry about physics, I now had grade 12 Latin on my plate, but with the help of my classmates, I survived Latin as well. This time around, I did not enjoy the experience as much and really wanted to get back to Vancouver and graduate with my actual friends. In February, my dream came true and we moved back to Canada. I was once again on my old stomping grounds and reunited with my friends.

Even though I did not enjoy it as much, I am thankful for the experience, I had in Romanian high school. It has given me a bigger view of the world we live in. It made me see and understand how cultures can differ from one another. The experience I gained by travelling and moving from one place to another, had a big influence on how I chose my career and over my formation as a professional sports coach and English educator. It has also inspired me to remember that are different modalities of learning and the fact that we are constantly learning all our lives.

I graduated high school in 2010 and I was accepted into Capilano University for human kinetics program. I still was not much of an academic person and suffered greatly with the workload of University. I successfully finished the program after three years and decided to go into liberal studies, which enabled me to approach a much broader field of interdisciplinary studies. I was still not quite sure what exactly I wanted to do once I was out of school and felt that liberal studies was the right way to go in order to test things out. I dabbled in many English courses, psychology courses, and language courses. I was obsessed with Spanish and anything to do with the Spanish culture. In 2015 I signed up for a program called CAPs which sent me to Barcelona to work as an English assistant, in a school and live with a Spanish family for nine months. I loved it, and after the program ended, I decided to remain there. I spent almost 3 years living in Barcelona working as a physical education and English teacher.

The experience of having to take care of myself on my own was eye opening. Until then I had never been apart from my parents and never had to worry about paying bills, cooking or doing laundry. In a sense, I finally grew up. Now I am back at Capilano and am currently working towards graduating from the liberal studies program. I am glad that my program it has allowed me to combine two of the subjects that I love the most, sports and languages, and to make me understand how they are connected. I am working on my graduate project, which I think is going to be quite special and unique, but of course on my down time I am going to continue working on becoming a popstar.