For the inquiry project, I'd love to look at sexual education across different cultures and countries. I would look at sexual education in the USA and then maybe Japan, France, China, Brazil, and Tunisia.   This would culminate with a creation of a curriculim for sexual education that will hopefully bridge the different cultural embodiments of sexual education from these countries 

This summer I will be working with the National Park Service in the North Cascades, and one of the things I talked with my supervisor about possibly doing while I'm there is helping to start a diversity Junior Ranger program at the park. For my inquiry project, I want to draw connections between what we are doing in this class and what I will be doing this summer - I plan to look at ways to make Junior Ranger programs more inclusive and multicultural, by talking about how our identities relate to and influence our experiences of nature and the outdoors. The age range for this program would probably be roughly 6-11, but open to kids of all ages.

I'm interested in looking at how expecting students to bring themselves into the classroom is empowering and destabilizing (causing "crisis" in the Kirashimo sense). I've found that the most influential classes ask me to bring my outside passions and experiences into the classroom. This has the potential for being really growthful but could also go terribly wrong. I want to look at how to do that effectively at the college level in different disciplines to help students who may feel disempowered in a subject to explore their voices in different ways. This feels like a big topic, but I also want it to be useful in the bico context because I feel like this could be really helpful for our classrooms especially since we have so much student voice.

            For this project, I plan to investigate, critique, and compare the effects of restorative and punitive practices on adolescents. There are many instances of cultural and racial disparities in the way administrations deal with students. Awareness of these issues is a necessary tool for a multicultural educator as subconscious rather than overt bias is often the driving force in inequality. In this project, I expect to examine the school to prison pipeline as well as the effects of reinforcement of behavior. Though my placement isn’t at the Prison, I’m wondering if there is any way I could observe/ask questions for a day. 

*Disclaimer: I recognize that this is a difficult and broad topic, but it's incredibly interesting to me and I hope that I can narrow it down and cultivate it through more discussion and research*

For my inquiry project, I'd like to focus on the educational system in juvenile detention centers. I have organized my proposal through a series of questions. Learners and teachers and more fundamental aspects of my research, while effectiveness and potential will be my main areas of inquiry. I realize that some of these questions will have to be eliminated since they are so vast and complicated, but this is just the beginning so I assume my research will narrow the more I learn. 

The mud from the soft ground added character to my green Nike running shoes as I walked towards a yellow note hanging from a tree branch with my name written on it. I decided to interact with my site differently today by standing under the branches. I excitingly opened the plastic ziplock bag and took out the note. The note read:

"As I walk in the labyrinth - circling, doubling back, looking at where I once was and where I am now, retracing steps and memory, feeling like the raw winter chill seep through my coat gently, like so many cold hands on my skin - I'm reminded of a poem by Ramer Maira Rilke, enclosed here."

The poems left for me were:

Wachsenden Ringen von Rainer Maria Rilke

For this project, I would like to focus on a theme that we explored when reading Boler, which is emotional literacy. I would like to explore the intersection between the ideas of emotional literacy curricula, conflict-resolution education, and how the two can be both problematic and beneficial. I'm interested in the topic of conflict-resolution because of how much I feel like it was a part of my life in high school, and how in this class we were able to look at it through a lens of multicultural education.

I keep going back and forth between two topics that I am interested in studying more in depth. The first is high education why do we split it off? How do people who teach in these offset fields feel about not being not part of the mainstream teaching? I was thinking specifically about African American studies, Asian studies, gender and sexuality, how they are destiny separated out from departments like history. And how we call one ‘history’ and the other is offer just viewed as a side subject, why are they not taught in more intersection. My other ideais in erasures in history, and how when we erase a certain group of people (specifically my focus would be women) from history and how it creates problems.

Throughout this course, we have talked a lot about the ways in which multiculuralism plays a role in the classroom through systemic issues like racism, classism, ablism, etc. However, I think it would be useful to look specifically at how these ideas and discussions can be introduced into math classrooms. There has been a lot of research done on the idea of "math anxiety," and especially how it comes up frequently in low-income students, female students, and Black and Latinx students.