Dear Jody,

I wanted to create a global sex education book because I was curious about how children in other countries learned about sex education.  My hypothesis for my research was that other countries were more conservative when it came to sex education.  I now understand that this was a naive "America is the greatest nation in the world" assumption.  I was surprised to find that sex education in other countries was more informative than I had presumed.  From this I took that complete, or close to complete sex education was available in more more countries around the world than what I previously thought.

I never really understood the term “Ecology” outside of a science context. I think the biggest lesson I’ve gathered from a semester of this class, is the usefulness of the ecological thought and how we approach the world. I’ve learned how the critical thought and analysis in the humanities are just as important as the critical thought and analysis done in the sciences. Combining the two is necessary in order for solutions to world problems to reach all avenues of understanding, not just simply emotional or scientific understandings. I really appreciated the section “Invitation into the world beyond Ourselves,” in Elizabeth Callaway’s  presentation, A Space for Justice.

David White

Multicultural Education

When I enrolled in Multicultural Education, my one major thought was that “hopefully this class will teach me how to interact with (and subsequently teach) a diverse group of individuals.”  I saw multicultural in the title and I immediately thought we were going be told how to teach other students who were different than us.  I was so naive.

Ecological Imaginings is a Bryn Mawr English class like none other, at least that is what I have surmised after having taken English classes on this campus for four semesters now. In this class I have learned about the importance of the class as a team. It may be true that we are individuals who all ended up having to work together because we all signed up for the course, not necessarily the people, but even still, I have come to realize that, to an extent, we are responsible for one another’s education as well as our own.

I started the class thinking on my own multicultural educative experiences as a bilingual student and my own struggle to be a “successful” student. Having a good understanding on what multiculturalism meant in my life coming into the class, the exposure to the different ways multiculturalism appear in and out of the classroom has broadened my understanding of what it means to be multicultural. Specifically dealing with student teacher-interactions, I think I gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of the role of the teacher in multicultural education through both the readings we had in class, visiting my Praxis field placement, and volunteering at Puentes de Salud.

My placement was at the GingerBread Women’s Prison located in the greater Chocodelphia area.  Every Friday from 11:45am until 3:30pm or 4:00pm myself, seven other students, and two professors made our way to the GingerBread Prison, about a 45 minute drive from campus, to participate in a book club with the women there.  I remember before our first visit going and speaking with my professor about how I could very well be the only male in the room, either genetically or emotionally.  We talked about how this might be an issue, and what we should/could do to make my presence in the classroom comfortable for everyone.  In the end we realized that there was nothing we could really do but feel out the situation.

Attached.

When I began this class, I wasn’t quite sure where it was headed or where I was headed. I’m still not quite sure, but as someone aims to be a life-long learner and a responsible citizen, and who sees very shortly the day when she’ll have to start figuring out her own career and professional goals, this class has offered a lot of tools to approach that future. Some aspects gave me words to describe something that I already had a sense of, like the interconnectedness of everything. In other ways, this class definitely pushed me--for example, just looking at environment, and what that word means. Before, I had only really used it to refer to the ‘natural’ environment, locations away from urban and suburban areas.