Educators as Learners
I have graduated from high ranked Universities in the UK and I have studied many theories around education. Actually, I thought I knew most of the basic things around the literature covering Educational Leadership.
I was wrong!
Now, after finishing the MAED program at MSU I found that I was trapped in a box of certain traditional well-developed theories and practices without the educational system let me explore outside that box. I learnt theories, instructional strategies and many more that I did not even know of their existence. The things that I have learnt up until now from the MAED program determined my future plan and goal. More precisely, I am attending a PhD program around Education, which has pretty much, enhanced and shaped by MAED. Additionally, the online format gave me the opportunity to expose myself to a whole new world of digitalization and gain master of those digital tools (Google+, Weebly, D2l etc.).
My focus on my PhD program will be on ways to promote international mindedness in first year Undergraduate students within a local University. Searching and researching for a unique and well-agreed definition of international mindedness is hard to realize. Literature keeps using interchangeably the term international mindedness with ‘globally minded’ ‘intercultural understanding’ or ‘global citizenship’ (Cause L.: 2).
The concept of international mindedness has been linked frequently with international education. Hill considers the former to be the key concept associated with the latter (Plotkin W.: 1). Mainly, international mindedness came as a term serving the need to prepare students of today to develop behaviors and attributes that cultivate ethical and inclusive intercultural relations. What this thesis aims is not to find a singular way to teach international mindedness. As Haywood suggested; there is no one correct way to understand or teach international mindedness. The actual aim of the research is to propose multiple ways to encourage a general predisposition to international mindedness. Those ways should leave enough space to students to develop their own realization of international mindedness. Furthermore, what appears to be happening in some of this literature is a developing ‘acceptance’ that international mindedness is too complex to describe.
BUT the most important thing that stood out of myself as a learner is that I did not acknowledge mere solid knowledge but rather I have learnt through my experiences and future teaching goals. For example, I have been taught certain courses who required the exploration of our cases in our teaching practice settings in order to fulfill the course’s goals.
I personally saw my learning process as a cyclical process or, in other words, a life- long process. In day- to- day activities, the outcomes from one learning experience affected the next experience and so on. Another worth noting issue that should be discussed in this paper is what precisely constitutes a successful learner and what does not. My personal goal is to graduate successfully from my PhD program and continue an academic career within Universities all over the world. In my opinion, the successfulness of the adult learner is primarily determined by his motivation to learn. MAED provided with such motivation. Human beings infrequently act in a mindless way. They mostly seek to satisfy their desires and needs. Consequently, a successful learner is the one that among his/her desires learning is included. Motivation and the desire to learn more in adulthood, no matter the scope and the reason of doing so, determines whether the learning would be successful.
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