| Second Goals Statement - October 2006 |
When I wrote my first goal statement in December of 2004 for my application to the Literacy Ph.D. program at George Mason University, I was sure that I knew exactly what I wanted to study. I was going to look for a better way to identify processing problems that affect reading abilities, because I felt that too many children were identified with reading disabilities when really they just may have had an instructional mismatch. Two years later I still believe that to be the case, but changes in the identification process of learning disabilities, experiences at work, and information learned in my classes have triggered a shift in my primary area of interest.
Although I have worked in schools with children of low socio-economic status since before I received my undergraduate degree, experiences both at work and in my graduate program during the last school year have driven me to a profound interest in educating students from poverty. As a school psychologist, I often have the opportunity to work with children and families that have a variety of needs. When I was an intern at a school for children with emotional difficulties, I was often overwhelmed by the amount of needs that students had, not only in counseling but also in just the basic items needed for daily living. This astonishment grew when I was assigned my first year of practice to three elementary schools, two of which served high numbers of children from families with low socio-economic status. While I continued to be surprised by the amount of need in my buildings, I was also pleasantly shocked at the generosity of the school professionals and the community. To the best of their ability, these individuals attempted to meet as many of the needs of the children as possible.
Last fall, however, I started to notice a trend in one of my schools. Often, students from families with economic difficulties were referred to child study for help with academic problems. Sometimes it even appeared that the child might have a learning disability, however when we looked deeper at the issue, we found that circumstances outside of school were making it difficult for the child to be available for learning. I was fortunate to spend the year working closely with a family who were struggling in every sense of the word. This experience showed me the importance of strong support systems and the increased need to address the academic needs of preschool and kindergarten students as early as possible.
So how does this all relate to literacy? From reading and listening to discussions in my classes at GMU, especially Ways of Knowing, I started to develop a strong interest in learning how early literacy skills, such as reading picture books and engaging in early writing activities, could be used to encourage motivation for learning in young students who have come from impoverished backgrounds. I also became interested in using these types of literacy activities to build multicultural awareness and community in the classroom setting. I have used variations of these ideas for several papers in my courses and have begun to research these topics more extensively. From my literacy course this semester, I have been able to add emergent literacy as another area of interest. Although I realize that most research at this time in literacy is geared toward reading achievement, I feel that looking at the social aspects of literacy could tap into skills that are sorely needed if we as a county are genuinely committed to trying to close the achievement gap in our schools. At this time, I am still collecting information on these topics and exploring the current and past research for ideas for the development of a study. I am also looking into a way to add a self-study or action research component to my ideas, because I now have a greater appreciation of the importance of looking into yourself as an educator and understanding how your own lenses affect the way you perceive your work. By my next portfolio review in 2007, I hope to have a clearer vision of how I can combine all of these interests into a manageable and practical study for my dissertation proposal.