Week 11 Professional

During this week we had no scheduled classes but we were given the opportunity to attend extra workshops that would add ECTS to our overall mark for Erasmus.  The workshops were taught by international lecturers from St. Patricks College (Dublin), Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey and Georgia State University in Atlanta.  We had to choose two out of the tree workshops to attend which looked at the topics of Bullying, Educational Disadvantage and Drama. The workshops that we choose to attend were Educational Disadvantage and Bullying which were presented by the lecturers from Ireland and the USA.

On Tuesday we went to the first of three lectures based on Educational Disadvantage.  We were then told that this workshop would look at how The Arts can be used as a technique to help tackle educational disadvantage in primary schools.  The breakdown of the course enabled us to explore the status of The Arts in the different countries and it allowed us to begin to talk about why The Arts may have such a high status in some countries and not in others.  We then talked about how harnessing multiple intelligence profiles can aid in tackling the fear of failure in children.  We were told that by preparing lessons that suits a child’s intelligence profile allows them to succeed in every way.  CCEA (2007, p. 27) states that in Foundation Stage ‘Children’s creative, expressive and physical development is closely linked with all aspects of their learning’ we got to see this when we were showed how children can become creative agents in their own learning as they take full control of their learning in The Arts.  CCEA (2007, p.69) also states that at Key Stage 1 and 2 ‘Art and Design, Drama and Music provide rich opportunities for developing creativity, allowing children to express their ideas, feelings and interpretations of the world in diverse ways”. This was backed up when the lecture gave us information on a recent study that she had completed. Children in her study were presented with the task of designing their dream school and all children were able to come up with an individual idea and present it to the rest of the class. 

The bullying workshop got us to look at the problems of bullying in schools in America and to think about if we have seen any bullying happening during all our different placements.  NVPEP (2009) states that ‘more than 160,000 US students stay home from school each day from fear of being bullied’. We were given a survey to fill in that asked questions about if schools in our home countries had bullying policies and it was very interesting to find that most other countries do not have a bullying policy. The NIABF (2013) states that ‘43% of primary school children perceive that they have been bullied at least once’. After we discussed what bullying means our lectures then gave us a case study on bullying in which we had to work in groups to come up with different solutions to combat the  issue of bullying using Direct and Indirect Punitive responses and Direct and Indirect constructive responses.  The lecture’s finished off by showing us a 7 week scheme of work that address the issue of bulling which enables the teacher to find out places that the children think are safe and unsafe in the school grounds.  This was very interesting to see as the lectures said that by using this map of the school both students and teachers were able to work together to make the school a safer environment for all students.    

This week was very interesting and made me think about my professional career and the different topics and issues that I will have to combat once I become a qualified teacher.

References

CCEA (2007) Northern Ireland Curriculum, Belfast, CCEA.

NevadaPEP (NVPEP) (2009) Bullying Statistics Did you know? Available at: http://www.nvpep.org/bullying/bullyingstatistics.html (accessed 22/04/13)

Northern Ireland Anti-Bullying Forum (NIABF) (2013) About Bullying available at:  http://niabf.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=5&Itemid=29 (accessed 22/04/13)