Remember I said that maybe an undergraduate dissertation was not going to be tough or long enough to feel like walking through a desert? Well, guess what, I was wrong!!
It's a good thing I wrote about how happy I was with how things were coming out and how hard I had worked over Christmas on Thursday morning, because I turned upside down that very same afternoon, after I received a message from my trainee placement supervisor telling me that I was missing some fundamental points and sending me some relevant literature which made my knees tremble, because the minute I read the abstracts I knew they were those kind of articles where I can only get a grasp of maybe 20% of what is being said.
That takes me to an interesting point as a teacher trainee, as I got to experience myself the kind of feeling that children can sometimes have if you don't plan your lessons properly: plain stupidity. I don't mean ignorance, which is ok. Knowing yourself ignorant is normal; there are so many things to learn in the world and in life that nobody can be expected to know them all, and if you walk out of your comfort zone you are bound to feel ignorant. As a teacher, you can help students use this self-consciousness about ignorance as a pole to learn, instead of a spade to dig their self-esteem in deep hole.
But feeling stupid is quite something else; that's the kind of feeling you get when you are put in a position where what you are expected to understand or to learn is way ahead of you, when the gap between what you already know and what you intend to learn is simply too big and you don't find enough help around you to bridge it. During the degree we have learnt the technical terms related to these questions (zone of proximal development, scaffolding), as well as some of their deeper implications, but the basic idea can be explained in plain words.
During the degree, I have come to realise that teachers know a bit about many fields (psychology, sociology, linguistics etc.) and they apply that knowledge to real situations of learning and teaching in a school. Knowing just a bit about those subjects means that they can only go so far into the details of each field, or they need to take some time to study them in more depth before going any further. That is where the readings that help bridge the gap come in so handy, otherwise you just get caught up in jargon.
Coming back to my roller-coaster of emotions related to the dissertation, it has given me an opportunity to laugh at myself a bit and to reflect on what will most probably happen when I defend my dissertation in front of the committee in some months. My work will be read by (I think) three of our lecturers, who are experts in their fields, and they are bound to ask questions and make remarks based on their knowledge, which I lack. So, I'll have to bear in mind that the purpose of the whole thing will be for me to know what I know about and what I am ignorant about, just that.
And one last thing about this final idea: I have seen that in some other universities, the poster sessions on undergraduate dissertations are held weeks before the written report is to be submitted. In my opinion, that makes a lot of sense, especially from the point of view of assessment. Having the oral defense and poster session in the end, weeks after the written report has been handed in actually turns these two tasks into final assessment tools, whereas if the poster session is held during the process of producing the dissertation, it fits much better in the continuous assessment we are supposed to have. That would also help improve our work, as we would get very useful feedback on our work in a moment when we can actually still change things.
iruzkinik ez:
Argitaratu iruzkina