An Account of My Educational Experience Research Paper (Essay Sample)

An Account of My Educational Experience
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An Account of My Educational Experience
Gender
Learning in Dargaville primary school is what one may consider as the best experience. This is due to the fact that one meets people from different ethnic backgrounds. There are girls and boys from almost all races. There are Maori, who make the biggest percentage of the population in school, Indian, Kiwis, and Chinese and South African students. One relates differently with them owing to the fact that people have different viewpoints of life. It was difficult to form friendship with students of the opposite sex from a different ethnic background. Racial prejudice existed to some extent. Those who greatly feel the impact are African students due their color. Teachers had to teach in Maori language and translate to English. For instance, hangi is taught. Hangi is a traditional cooking style for New Zealand Maori in which pits are dug on the ground and stones are heated in those pits. Food to be cooked is then placed in the pits and the pits are covered for some time. Once the food is ready, the pits are uncovered and the food is served. It was fun engaging with students who spoke Maori. Maori’s life had to become part of us as it was the majority group in the institution. The stay in Dargaville primary school was short. After barely two years, I was transferred to another neighboring school. It was sad parting with the friends I had amassed during my stay. At Panmure District School, a new lease of life had to begin. There, students from Samoa, Tonga, Cook Island, China, Korea, South Africa, and India were present. Familiar with people from most of the above nations, it took short time before adapting to the way of life in the new school. There were times my spirits were high and sometimes low. It was fun interacting with people from other different cultural backgrounds.
The curriculum of New Zealand was specific to gender in two ways. First, there was a formal inclusion of disciplines, which were specific to gender. It was mandatory for girls to take sewing and needlework. This happened before the inception of cheap fabrics. Women made and maintained many items of essential clothing. The other way was through the informal practice whereby some teachers and inspectors assessed boys more viciously than they assessed girls in subjects such as arithmetic. The 1912 Royal Commission reflected how a fundamental body of opinion to the extent that a lot of academic work could physically harm girls. In spite of this, girls still performed better as contrasted to boys in proficiency tests (Kramsch, 1998).
A body of research was formed by feminist, and touched on the discourses of educational critique. These researches generated terminology such as “gender stereotype” and “sexism” just to name and explain two mechanisms through which gender disadvantage occurred. These showed how girls’ choice of curriculum greatly reduced their chances of getting certain employment opportunities. It was because they lacked the requisite skills and qualifications for those roles. O’Neill (1990) showed that while the girls got inclined to subjects such as home economics, sewing and biology, the boys tended to dominate in mathematics and science. Their failure to study the so-called male disciplines, a gendered form of pattern, resulted in the students’ leaving school. Feminists did not put their blame on girls’ poor choice of subjects but the structure of the curriculum.
Gender is an extremely important trait in comprehending schooling experience because it inheres implicitly and explicitly within processes and structures of schooling. The structuring is evidenced by how boys’ and girl’s toilets are separated, the bodies of pupils who put on different gender uniforms, to implicit expectations contained within the day to day practices stipulating boys and girls line up separately. Schooling achievement should be perceived wider than the grades that students obtain. Schools are complex in nature and constitute a culture through many practices. These cultural practices influence the success of students in education. Theorists bring out schools as masculine agencies, which carve out and reward form of masculinity through various structures and practices, in their nature.
Class
Education systems are usually set up to achieve equality of opportunity and outcome. Social positions indicate that places of people in the society are determined by their parents’ position in the society, gender, ethnicity or any other factor over which they have no control. To achieve a position based on efforts, abilities and education dominate peoples’ lives. People want to achieve the “place” in a society based on merit rather than inheritance. Education can be availed to all so that all can partake in society on a fair basis, and all positions are open for achievement. All should participate in education so as to establish the foundation of a unified society. The most important in recent times, is that education’s role is to assure human capital by identifying and nurturing talent, on which the country’s survival is pegged. The link between occupational success, social class, and educational achievement is tenacious, strong, and widespread. This does not imply that it takes the same for everywhere. All the main elements of the relationships-education systems, family patterns, labor markets, and occupational structures- vary in different countries, and the New Zealand approach is distinct (Dale, 2012). The relationship between social class and education was brought well by a survey that was conducted by Christchurch school leavers. It involved the collection and analyses of data on the measured academic ability, occupation destination of 2500 Christchurch school leavers in 1982, and success in examinations. Researchers collected information on the students’ socio-economic background using the scale of Socio-Economic Status (SES). It ranks the status of occupational success based on earnings and educational levels related to those occupations. The occupations were placed in six groups: professional, managerial, office, sales, technical, skilled trade’s semi-skilled jobs, and unskilled jobs. The first three were made up of people in non-manual occupations, while the rest were made of those in manual occupations.
A society embraces equality of educational chances if the number of people from different economic, social, and ethic classes, at all levels and in all types of education is proportional to these people in population at large. The goal should not be liberal equality of access but equality of outcome for the average member of each non-educational group (Connell, 2009). The average rural dweller, or Negro, or proletarian, or woman must possess the same level of educational achievement as the average white collar, subordinate, white, male. If this does not occur, then there must be unfairness. Social capital can be defined as an aggregate of the actual resources, which are connected to possession of a less durable work of more institutionalized relationships, of recognition and mutual acquaintance. This provides each of its members with the backing of community owned capital, a trait that entitles them to credit, in various sectors of the globe. Educability is defined on the background characteristic of those pupils who perform well in school. Those pupils whose backgrounds are different are likely to have many difficulties in doing well at school. The manner in which the idea is perceived makes it hard for other forms of educational failures to be fully considered. Secondly, cultural deprivation suggests that judgments of comparison should be made between different groups in terms of virtues that are contained in the mainstream or middle-class culture (Barnes & Eicher, 1993).
Middle-class parents, especially those from the professional side, are providing their kids with a form of literacy focused socialization. They do so with the power to structuring the developing brain in configurations greatly fitted to certain forms of literacy and abstract related to cognitive reasoning. This form of socialization goes a long way toward ensuring that these kids develop mentally. The broadness in this essence captures the fact that antisocial literacy makes pupils rote memorize concepts rather than internalizing them and putting them to normal life. It helps students see the commonalities between education and the real world. Educational achievement, in this form of teaching, is very effective as students have little difficulties when linking the theoretical teachings in class with their applications in the real world (Allan, 2010).
Culture
Cook (2003) suggests that ethnicity is a way of grouping people based on their cultural backgrounds. An ethnic group comprises of people who share a common cultural and historical heritage and a sense of belongingness and identity. New Zealand is a multicultural, multiethnic, pluralistic society in which Maori have a special status (Thomas, 1815). Before European assimilation, the meaning of the word Maori was Normal. There was nothing to do with Maori in cultural similarities. Instead, the variable features, which differentiated groups, were linked to tribal identities and natural environment. In that perspective, ethnicity reflected geographical, social, and historical characteristics. Durie (1998) suggests that the exact contrast between the culture of newcomers and the culture of iwi gave the importance of emphasizing similarities across tribal groups rather than stressing their commonly known uniqueness. The meaning of uniqueness brings the logic of identity. A group occupies the position of norm, against which all the others are measured. The attem...