Woohoo & things I need to do

This is not bragging, but I just did incredibly well on my Issues and Institutions midterm. The reason I am sharing this is that I am in shock. The midterm was on the main paradigms of education development; functionalism, Marxism and neo-Marxism, and post-modernism. I used phrases like "meta-narratives," and discussed role differentiation and social solidarity vs. deconstructing social narratives and self regulation. Who am I? I've never felt so in graduate school in my entire life. I turned this paper in feeling very unsure of myself and really nervous, I had nightmares and everything, so I am pretty floored that I not only understood the concepts but actually made sense when writing about them!

My next paper for I&I will be on Israel's education reforms towards a decentralized ministry of education. The idea is that when Israel was first established, the education was centralized (same standards nation wide with the same curriculum) because they were focused on creating a "New Jew" and wanted Jewish immigrants from around the world to blend together to this new identity. After the rise in minority rights coupled with significant immigration, as well as conflict between internal Israeli communities (secular vs. religious, Arabs vs. Jews, minority ethnicity vs. majority, etc.) the ministry saw the need to become decentralized and put the curriculum and testing into the hands of individual communities. I might even go so far as to say that decentralization in Israel should be used as a case study for other nations with diverse communities, but I have not completed my research yet (or hardly started).

In Emergency Education, which began a few weeks ago, I'm completely overwhelmed. It is supposed to be a very practical course (very much focused on skills and not theory, as many of my classes are) and I want that but I am intimidated at the same time. The main grade will be a large project I'm working on in a group with three other women. We have to create an NGO and a program that can be instituted for community education with a focus on gender equality in Afghanistan.

In Human and Social Dimensions (Peace Ed) I have several projects I have to work on. One is reading Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Peace Ed's Bible) and writing a review. The thing is that although Freire created literacy programs for poor laborers in South America, his style of writing is for the most elite ivory tower, pedagogy-concerned, academics in the world, i.e. way over my head. The other criteria are a learning assessment and teaching unit on peace education in Israel (I have not worked on these much yet, at all).

In Multicultural Approaches to Teaching Young Children I have been doing a lot of fun hands-on activities. This has included a presentation on a material that addresses multicultural issues in the classroom, in which I discussed "The Boy and the Wall" which I was introduced to by Kareem when I visited him at the Lajee Centre in the Aida refugee camp outside Bethlehem. I also did Alerta activities in which I got my I-House dorm mates together and we discussed childhood games and cold remedies and I later reported back to the class. I also had to do two interviews on culture, one with a family member and one with a classmate, which was reminiscent of my old course with Dr. Leichter. Now all I have to do is a final paper, which I'm not yet sure of, and an artistic representation of a social justice issue.

April is going to be a ridiculously busy month.