Sarah Gullion

I really enjoyed the Signature Assignment for this course and it was honestly the thing I was looking forward to the most off the syllabus. It was a huge learning experience for me because while I felt like I had a good grasp on the big concepts during the coursework, actually applying them to the development of an educational workshop was a completely different set of skills and I could easily have spent three times as long as I did on filling out the content.  That was my first big takeaway, but it ties into my second:

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 I came into the course expecting to go through the coursework without really learning anything I didn’t already know. But what I was already aware of were just the big picture concepts and I’d never dug into how those concepts impacted my actions with such granularity before. As much as I don’t particularly like “See one, Do one, Teach one” as an education tactic, in this context it applied because I went through the process of reviewing the big concepts, doing the work to dig out how my own actions support and undermine these concepts, and then turning around and digging even deeper to find a way I could teach or stimulate the type of perspective shift I experienced.

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My biggest takeaway from the course was that in every educational encounter, we need to focus more on how we can structure what we do to push for equity in our industry. If we, as educators, are always aware of the imbalance then we can orient our actions to mitigate that imbalance as much as we can. If we’re all pushing towards the same goal, we’ll keep getting closer.

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In my work, I want to take this thought with me. I want to pay more attention to inequities in my industry and in my own interactions so that I can start pushing and creating little waves of change in all I do. If I keep working on myself, and in turn work on all the people I encounter to educate them on what they’re doing, I feel like these thoughts and intentions will spread and grow with each new perspective. Then I will grow, too.