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Analytic Personal and Professional Essay

Through this essay, I would like to show how the suggestions given by my committee

faculty guided me and what could be my future actions for my academic career. Therefore, I

constructed this essay with two parts—Addressing and Filling the Gaps, and Intellectual and

Professional Goals.

Addressing and Filling the Gaps

Preparing my first and second Portfolios and reviewing them with my committee

members were valuable experience per se. It is because I could see myself more clearly by

means of reflecting about my past foot-steps and eventually finding my epistemology and

positionality. In the process of completing Portfolios I and II, I tried to present who I was,

what the purposes of my study were and why I desired to fulfill them. My committee

faculty guided me to see where to go in order to be well prepared for being a researcher as

well as a teacher educator. During the Portfolio II review, my advisors suggested doing an

internship for developing the professional knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are

necessary to become a teacher educator. In addition, they advised me to take EDRS 882

for advancing my understanding regarding the academic field of second language

acquisition (SLA), and to do independent study for broadening and deepening my

knowledge about intercultural competence that I am interested in for my dissertation.

Thus, reflecting on the recommendations that my advisors gave me, I spent a semester

making a commitment for professional development as a prospective teacher educator and

novice researcher through three courses: EDUC 994, 882, and 897.

The internship aligned well with my professional goals of teaching students at the

graduate level in a teacher education program. By working with Dr. Mattix Foster, I was
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allowed to investigate the process of designing and managing the online course from a

course provider’s perspective. Moreover, when I performed the Wrapper roles in DB

interaction, I could contribute from knowledge that I had acquired from my previous

experiences as a language teacher and from my doctoral study in Teacher Education and

Multilingual/Multicultural Education specializations to the summaries of module

discussions. I attempted to make a module summary synthesis a reflective tool. After the

course finishes, students and the instructor can refer back to what was discussed, and the

records will be resources on a particular theme. In the future, I might run my own online

course. Then, I would like to adapt the strategy of Wrapper in order to promote rich

discussion activities. By the end of the internship, Dr. Mattix Foster offered me a part of

her work with regard to evaluating students’ outcomes. Thanks to her good modeling, I

was also able to learn how to assess students’ learning and progress and evaluate their

performances in the course based upon the syllabus expectations. For the successful

completion of this course, the instructor’s expectations were clearly presented on the

syllabus with detailed rubrics and the instructor sincerely complied with them. Also, I

reaffirmed from my supervisor’s example that rich feedback provided from a facilitator

could be a great learning resource for students.

The course 882, Second Language Acquisition: Theory, Research, and Practice,

contributed to increasing my understanding on the theoretical foundations of the SLA field.

Throughout the course, I could read a great deal of research and book chapters on educating

culturally, linguistically, and cognitively diverse students. In particular, anthropological and

sociological works such as Provenzo’s (2006) Critical issues in education: An anthology of

readings and Dyches & Boyd’s (2017) Foregrounding equity in teacher education: Toward a
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model of social justice pedagogical and content knowledge relieved my thirst that was caused by

my intellectual curiosity about education systems and social inequality. Given that schools could

be sites that perpetuate and reproduce social inequality, schools might not be fulfilling their roles

as institutions for social justice. Therefore, schools should envisage squarely social injustices

such as heteronormativity, xenophobia, racism, classism, ableism, and sexism. In addition,

teachers should not only recognize inequities, but also address those discriminations within their

classrooms (Dyches & Boyd, 2017). By doing so, they could democratize education by

advocating poor students’ rights to access to high quality and elite public education.

Through the independent study, I had reviewed plenty of articles and books with regard

to intercultural competence. My purposes were to explore the concept of intercultural

competence, to compare and synthesize the models and theories of intercultural competence, to

develop the existing theories of intercultural competence in relation to the power of culture and

post-colonial perspective on English language learning, and to produce a literature review so as

to situate the preliminary research question about the teachers’ intercultural competence in

English language education field. In general, my independent study resulted in broadening my

understanding the dimensions and models of IC so that I could conceptualize IC more clearly.

Intellectual and Professional Goals

As my next intellectual steps, I would like to become a PhD candidate. Around the end of

2019 Spring semester, I might present my dissertation proposal in a faculty meeting to receive

approval of the proposal. In order to complete the complicated and challenging process well, I

am going to take EDUC 998 Dissertation Proposal Seminar. I expect that the course will assist

me in preparing my dissertation proposal by means of helping me define problem statement,

review research literature, and find a research methodology that will be employed to address the
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research question. EDUC 825 Advanced Research Methods in Self-Study of Professional

Practice will be my last methodology class. I am excited to take this course from a well known

scholar in the field of this research method, Dr. Anastasia P. Samaras. I believe that knowledge

and practical applications of self-study methodology the will be developed through this course

will be useful in preparing my future student teachers.

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References

Dyches, J., & Boyd, A. (2017). Foregrounding equity in teacher education: Toward a model of

social justice pedagogical and content knowledge. Journal of Teacher Education, 68(5),

476-490.

Provenzo, E. (Ed.) (2006). Critical issues in education: An anthology of readings. Thousand Oaks,

CA: Sage Publications. ISBN: 1-4129-0477-3.