My Journey of Hope

My journey? Do I dare to answer this series of questions honestly? This journey has been one of hope – hope that I would eventually, actually get to information/skills/techniques that helped to fulfill my responsibility in workforce development as a teacher. The class description was particularly intriguing as I had thought it would be the capstone to my classwork and provide some needed insights/skills/techniques that would be directly applicable to my research project.

That is, what are my responsibilities as a teacher attempting to guide a class drawn from a population that is:
· Increasingly diverse in its ethnicities and cultures
· Respectful of the continuing progress of women in the workplace
· Respectful of language considerations
· Respectful of religious considerations?

I’m pretty sure that hope was not fully realized. Feeling that I had not done my "due diligence," I went back and read the entire catalog entry for the course this morning. In retrospect, I guess the entry should have warned me otherwise. Certainly, Becky went out of her way to provide alternate assignments for the pre-secondary classmates. That was definitely appreciated and valuable.

Perhaps it's always been a question of definition and certainly "workforce development" has been a social and political football since the phrase was first used. Indeed, Wisconsin government used the phrase as its "cloak" for welfare reform in the middle 90's. I did a cursory search on the Internet and it seems the phrase is nearly exclusively used in terms of adult employees and skills/attitudes required in the workplace. Conversely, I did not get a single "hit" that linked "workforce development" with elementary grades.

I am also not conscious of a particular "process" in my use of time, my use of Stout resources, or interaction with Becky and the rest of the class. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this journey has been without value. This course has been a fine review of skills and techniques that I had previously had exposure to. The interaction with a fascinating and diverse group of people has been especially valuable.

In particular, I have kept and will apply the "outcomes" from Module 3 - Rigorous and Relevant Questions and Module Four: Team-based Problem Solving & Inquiry. These two modules had the most pointed and directly applicable skills/techniques that I can apply to teaching adults. As I indicated for Module 3, questions are my professional life and any means of increasing my ability (and hence my students' ability) to ask incisive questions and get incisive answers is a benefit.