Today, instead of our normally scheduled class time, we as a group, were expected to participate in professional development. I participated in the PSA day Classrooms to Communities conference with my colleague Emily Payne. Due to Covid-19, the entire conference was held online to promote safe learning and, of course, social distancing. However, because it was a Zoom conference, Emily and I did not expect the sessions to fill up so quickly and have a maximum capacity. This limited our options for the types of seminars we attended and therefore we ended up in a session surrounding early childhood education and one surrounding ocean literacy.
The session about early childhood education was very interesting, although I did not find that the knowledge was very applicable to us as elementary educators. It was not clear from the session title that it was a seminar about preparing children to enter the school system. Had we known of the content, we may have chosen a different session, although it was done very well and was very interesting.
Over the lunch break, Emily and myself found ourselves discussing assessment and the areas in which we, as educators, need to grow. For both of us, we discussed the struggles we face when assessing mathematics in an inclusive way. We find it difficult for the older grades because with math there is typically only one right answer. So, we asked ourselves the questions “how do we as educators assess math equitably when it is such a right or wrong discipline?” We pondered this and felt like mathematics in the younger grades is much easier to assess, but still found it difficult to answer our original question. We decided that further research and practical experience may be a good idea.
Our second session was one that discussed the topic of ocean literacy. We went into breakout rooms and discussed the question “what does ocean literacy mean to you?” and had some very thoughtful conversations surrounding connection, interconnectedness and holistic understanding of the ocean. We discussed how we are interdependent of nature and without it we are disconnected and lose our overall understanding. This is super important in education and is why we need to utilize place-based and experiential learning within our classrooms. Overall, I really enjoyed this session, although I did find it quite difficult to relate as it was all ocean based. Emily and I discussed how we could take the coastal ideas of ocean literacy and bring it to the classroom by connecting it to rivers. Since PG resides on the ancestral lands of the Lheidli T’enneh (meaning “The People from the Confluence of the River”) it would make a lot of sense to use the ideas of David Zandvliet’s ocean literacy seminar and utilize it in a way that would make sense inland. Emily and I really enjoyed bouncing these ideas off of each other in order to gain new insight on these ideas that we do not necessarily relate to.
Today was a fantastic day of learning in the PSA day. I am so thankful for the opportunity and plan to use the knowledge gained to better myself professionally and personally. #PSAday2020
