For Portfolio 2

Achieving my academic goal of attaining a doctoral degree in international education will afford me the opportunity to affect positive change in the lives of others.  The unique educational opportunities provided through the Ph.D. in Education Program at George Mason University will allow me to move to the next level of my career, either in program management, curriculum, or program evaluation.

My career as an educator began 15 years ago in Jersey City, New Jersey, at St. Anthony High School, teaching religion and human sexuality to an extremely diverse student population.  The two years I spent at St. Anthony’s taught me a lot about making do with very little as I watched my students come to school after not having a stable environment to spend the night in or someone that they can trust to talk to at home.  Working at St. Anthony’s also taught me about access as these students had no library, no gym, and no computers but did have the number one high school basketball team in the United States.  The administration counted how many students received scholarships to college but never considered (or wondered?) how many students finished college.  This was the first time I thought about pursuing a doctoral degree.

After two years and obtaining my Master’s degree in teaching, I left St. Anthony’s.  I taught for five more years before leaving New Jersey for Virginia. On the way to Virginia, I taught in Manville and Freehold Township, New Jersey, as well as in a college classroom at Brookdale Community College.  In addition to teaching in a secondary English environment, (at Manville and Freehold, I taught every possible iteration of English including remediation and yearbook), I taught developmental writing and research writing classes at Brookdale as well as community development courses and Elder College courses in literature.  I found I liked teaching college students, many of whom had come from other countries and were in developmental writing courses because they had not passed the college's English language test.  The research class, on the other hand, was the final writing course required by Brookdale and was a mix of regular and returning student learners because of the time I was teaching the course (7-10 in the evening).

Besides teaching in New Jersey and Virginia, I also widened my scope by volunteering to teach for a summer in Ternopil, Ukraine. Although I was still teaching English, this experience was valuable because again I was presented with the idea of access.  Some of my students came from a local orphanage and they were there either because of their parents could not afford to care for them or because their parents had too many medical issues due to Chernobyl years earlier and could not care for them. 

My current teaching placement is with Thomas A. Edison High School in Alexandria, Virginia as an IB English A1 HL and a remediation teacher.  I am also the IB English team leader.  I have been at Edison for eight years and during that time have served on the school’s attendance policy revision committee as well as the SACS accreditation committee.  I have worked on one IB five-year review committee and am currently working on our second five-year review as the representative for Language A1. In addition, I worked on Fairfax County’s curriculum revision committee for the Reasoning Skills (SAT preparation) course.  With our students, I am the faculty advisor for People to People International's Alexandria Chapter and have been the advisor since a chapter was initiated at the school four years ago.  The chapter completes community service projects with an international focus and pairs well with the fact that our school is an IB World School.  We currently have 22 active members.

The myriad experiences I have had throughout my career have prompted me to pursue a doctoral degree in international education.  As a classroom teacher, my work with the IB Programme has given me a special insight into this area of international education and I am eager to learn more about this organization.  The knowledge I have gained allows me to look at the world with an open mind and with the knowledge that I have to be careful of bias.  My varied teaching experiences in New Jersey, Ukraine, and Virginia have allowed me to see how different students experience the world and how all students bring their rich cultures into the classroom.

The opportunity to grow from a professional perspective is a key reason why I enrolled in a Ph.D. in Education program.  I believe the coursework required of me will help me achieve this end but I also think that further growth can be accomplished by attending and presenting at professional conferences.  Currently, I am a member of the following organizations: National Council of Teachers of English, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Comparative and International Education Society, American Educational Research Association, and The Arthur Miller Society. As of this writing, I have had a paper proposal accepted for presentation at Phi Beta Delta’s annual conference in April 2010.  Also in April 2010, I will be a Peace and Human Rights Facilitator at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference at the University of Miami. In addition to these endeavors, I also serve as a student reviewer for the International Journal of Educational Policy and Leadership and have been doing this since 2008. I like this activity because it brings me back to my former life before education as a writer and editor and I am finding that I miss those activities.  

Update for Portfolio 3

In April, as noted above, I was a Peace and Human Rights Facilitator at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference at the University of Miami and presented a paper at Phi Beta Delta’s annual conference in Philadelphia.  The longer paper, on the potential to initiate Bologna-inspired tuning processes in the United States, has also been requested for publication with Phi Beta Delta and is due in January.  At the end of June, I left Thomas Edison High School and Fairfax County Public Schools.  The decision to leave FCPS was a weighty one for me as I had not been happy for more than a year but it never had to do with neither many of the people in my department or the students themselves.  In many ways I had outgrown FCPS and needed new challenges.  All I can say is that I am much happier now and realize that I would not have been offered the chance to do what I am currently doing if I had still been in the classroom.

During the summer I arranged that I would be a graduate research assistant this fall while I took my last two courses and in addition to that I became involved with the Mid-Atlantic Association of IB World Schools, also known as IB-MA.  I had actually been working with them since January when I starting sitting on a task force to get legislation passed in Virginia that would make colleges and universities modify their university recognition policies to give IB and AP (Advanced Placement) equal status.  In April, the legislation passed and now Virginia has Code of Virginia § 23-9.2:3.8. Course credit; International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement courses. I have started to consult for IB-MA on college credit issues because of my doctoral work and because the colleges in Virginia have now been ordered by SCHEV to comply with the new legislation by May 31, 2011, I am now working with IB-MA to reach out to the public colleges and universities to educate them about IB, especially in the area of standard level examinations, differences in IB and AP, and components of the Diploma Programme.  Because I know a lot about policies and recognition around the country and around the world and not just in this immediate area, I have expertise that is valuable and working with IB-MA in Virginia also allows me to gauge the climate in Virginia for working with various colleges on some of the questions that I used on my pilot study.  When I did the pilot study, I specifically stayed out of Virginia because the issue of compliance with the new law had not yet been decided and I wasn’t sure how I would deal with the question of the legislation yet for a study; right now, I am seeing firsthand how the Virginia institutions are dealing with it and some are dealing better than others.  In addition to the professional benefits of consulting, I am getting the research benefits because I get to observe the Virginia colleges in action right now and that is helping me to try to figure out which institution(s) I might want to approach for a possible dissertation study.

As far as professional plans go, I am not completely sure at this point what I would like to do once I complete my doctoral studies. For the immediate future, I am happy with what I am doing.  With IB moving their Global Centre to Bethesda, Maryland, that presents possible job opportunities for me in the future and I do periodically look at their website to see what is on offer.  I am also in contact with various people at IB and have made it known that I would be interested to working there in my research area there if such an opportunity presented itself.  In addition, I am definitely keen to get back into the classroom and would be interested in teaching opportunities but I think I am probably done teaching secondary students and would like to move to higher education where I might be able to work on research projects as well.  I have noticed that when I write many of my papers for courses and think about what I would like to work on in the future, I am often left with many ideas for additional research.  I keep notebooks and have running lists of projects that I would like to get to, would like to tackle later, next steps after a paper has been written but I don’t have the pages to pursue at the current time and often think that a faculty position with the ability to conduct research might also be a good option for me. 

When I was preparing for Portfolio 2, I developed a list of competencies for which additional preparation was needed.  I needed to take the qualitative methods research course and I needed to review IB polices and look at possible schools to target for a possible dissertation study.  I took qualitative methods with Dr. Maxwell in summer 2010 and did actually complete a pilot study.  I think this was extremely important for me to do as it helped me frame questions and work out some possible issues that could come up during a dissertation study.  It also helped me test out the climate for interviewing university officials in the United States about IB so that I would not be doing this for the first time during my dissertation.  I am thankful for this first run and the data that I did get.