Learnings and appreciations from Methods and approaches course

This text is going to present some learnings I have acquired thanks to the proposed topics from the #MATLUPB course and some points that caught my attention during the semester because of the meaning those things have had for me. Furthermore, this text is a way to take a review of done activities seen along the course that has had an impact not only on our professional formative process but on our personal growth process.

Firstly, I must say that I did not have too many expectations with this course during the first weeks. It looked like was going to be quite demanding because of the several activities each unit included, but time passed out and my thoughts changed. Each activity was thought to make us aware of many things we probably have not thought about before and it is a feature to highlight from this course. In that sense, I started to be interested in the proposed activities and the subject matters because I understood the weight those aspects have in terms of education to my learning process as well as my personal growth process.

Now, I found it interesting how the teacher tried to make the class dynamic by implementing different activities during the course, such as the Demo Friday and the slam poetry festival. The first one mentioned, invited us to explore various topics as well as we were listening to other teaching voices. The meeting I remember the most, at least how it was, is the one in which the invited person based his lessons on raps. That time I was shocked to hear that because precisely at that time I was beginning a new musical project with a cousin. Thus, to hear that a person who teaches languages is mixing the music composition with the language learning was totally amazing for me. I believe that proposal has a strong engagement possibility and students would find their voices throughout making this kind of exercise.

The other one I mentioned, the slam poetry festival, was one of my favorite activities during the course because of its freedom feature. It allows us to express ourselves through a video. Furthermore, it was a way to know our classmates’ feelings, likeness, etc.… So, it permits the interaction among us and the possibility of doing something that transcends not just in our formative process as teachers, but in our own recognition and self-exploration about what things could we express throughout a video that is not necessarily about us, however, we get those possibilities into a proper challenge or even a channel to be who we are.

Another topic I must mention in this text is multimodal literacy, because of the weight it has on our teaching-learning process. It makes us too much conscious about how to use the technological tools not only for learning but for teaching. I learned from that unity that we must be quite aware of who we are going to work with and how we are going to make the lessons interesting to achieve the proposed objectives. It helps me to notice the transcendence of digital resources in educative environments. It is quite pertinent to language classes because of the possibility to integrate skills, I mean, through a digital resource you can make your students practice the communicative competence while they are learning L2.

To finish, I would say that this course was very interesting, and I have learned more than I thought in the first two weeks of the semester. In addition, there are several methods I could implement in my future life as teacher, such as multimodality and integrating skills to design more creative lessons and engage students with the subject matters. Furthermore, it is evidence of how diverse a course in terms of theory and practice could be.