This class at the University of Oregon has been one of my favorite classes at the University. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why this has been for most of the term. I couldn’t tell if it was because finally all the concepts I have learned throughout my time at the University were finally applied to something I am passionate about or if it was the new subject matter. I haven’t been in school for the past year and have been learning through my experiences. When I came back this term, I felt as though I had outgrown school. I wasn’t ready to sit in a classroom and analyze some reading that has nothing to do with me.

With the overarching theme and question “what is education,” I became a little wary of answering this within a class, in a university. I did not feel as though it was right to prescribe a definition to something that every person experiences differently. Yet, through this class I am beginning to learn what education means to me.

I had felt pigeonholed into this version of education, something that I knew was important and necessary toward my future career but I had outgrown this model of traditional western education. Now I feel as though learning through my experiences is more important, these are the things that are going to shape me.

This class’s openness to choose what we are interested in, to apply different concepts to these topics made this so interesting. And it wasn’t just me because each person’s passions and interests in their topic and their own experiences with education added to the excitement of the class. By creating our own course schedule and allowing there to be a dialogue about what we felt was important to our own education. We have all come to the point in our lives where we know how we learn best and we were able to create this environment in this class. “Learning is the process of ‘unknowing’ what one thinks one knows” [1].  In this class we did this, now I can examine and understand the mistakes and successes of global and local education as well as my own education experiences. I will always be learning and always be questioning what and how I have learned.

[1]] Shields, Robin. Globalization and International Education. 2013.