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.