Final Version May 5 07

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Despite my experience in high school, when I looked to my future, I still wanted
to be a teacher. Teaching was a known entity, it was something I thought I could do, and
it was something I had wanted to do as a young child. I applied to the concurrent
education program at our local university and was accepted. Since I chose to study
history because of my fascination with social history, I studied movements related to the
empowerment of the disenfranchised. For me, history recreated the struggles of others.
When I was practice teaching, I looked for active ways for my students to engage
in learning. I recall a lesson on the suffragette movement where we held gender-biased
elections and discussed the impact of being voiceless on one’s sense of self. As I saw a
connection between what I was teaching and the students I was teaching, there was a
sudden, unexpected shift of focus in my teaching from the teacher to the learner. This
experience was riveting and vibrant; it became profoundly transformational and created
in me a passion to teach, confirming my career choice. I could see that maintaining my
position of power, as a teacher did not have to diminish the power of the students.
Family influence.
Having had the call to teach at such an early age, why did I choose to teach when
almost all of my experiences with learning, with the exception of one memorable
empowering experience in grade five, were at the least, forgettable and at the most
extremely negative? Why has teaching become my life’s passion and the focus of my
academic study? The spirit to teach remained alive and strong, despite largely negative
experiences as a student because new avenues of expression continually opened that
positively reinforced my desire to teach? By examining past teaching and learning
experiences these pathways have been revealed.