The Perks of Being a European Traveler : Welcome to the University of Aberdeen!

Table of Contents:

Part one: Weekly Journalling for Class

Part Two: First Week in Aberdeen including pictures

Part One

Well, per usual, it's on to the next adventure when we land from the Orkney Islands to the college town of Aberdeen, Scotland. Our whole group of 15, plus one professor, will be in Aberdeen for 2 1/2 weeks studying and taking the Intro to Emotional Behavior Disorders class.

After the first week of class, I can honestly say that I am very happy to have done this program. Having very little knowledge of Special Education will not do me very good when going out into the real world of teaching (PS: cross your fingers that I hear about some jobs that I applied to! Thanks!). So much can be learned from Special Education that will benefit me in my general education classroom. During the intensive 2 1/2 week class we have readings, articles, presentations, and guest speakers. I have been enjoying the conversations that we have been having in class where I get to learn more strategies and new information about causes and interventions for EBD.

One of the things that I have found to be very benefical is the guest speakers that we have had. Through these speakers, we have learned more about the Scottish Education System and the curriculum that they have. Scotland has a unique relationship with England where they control some things about their government (even have their own parliament with represenators) but they still depend on Englad for a lot. There is an election in a little over a year to vote and decide if they want to be completely independent or not. Anyway, Scotland has control over their education system. They recently adopted a new curriculum called the "Curriculum for Excellence". I have touched on this curriculum before, so I'm just going to go over some new things that I learned from our speakers so far. This curriculum follows the Social Model instead of the Medical Model. This means that they believe we as a society are not meeting the needs of the child, not the child having something wrong with them. It is a very wonderful frame of mind that gets tied into the different concept models for EBD. Speaking of special needs, Scotland no longer calls it special education, but instead Additional Support for Learning. I love this term and think that it is very descriptive of the services being offered--everyone needs some support in learning throughout their entire life.

Scotland also has a Framework for Inclusion. They have a wonderful interactive website for teachers, parents, community members where they can go on and look up different strategies for including all learners in education. In the school realm, they believe that it is the teacher's job to include the students and to constantly assess the environment to make sure it's working for the students. I absolutely love this way of thinking and I think that it is so important to all educators no matter where you are teaching to keep this in mind. I feel that is a big difference between the Scottish Education System and the American one; teachers in America are spending too much time thinking about the academics and passing requirements that they don't focus on the student and how they can change the environment to get results.

One thing however that is different from Scotland that is bad (my personal opinion) is that the teachers are not trained or certified in Special Education. They go through their undergraduate career learning a lot about general education and then could get placed in a Special Education classroom without any prior experience. In order to get that experience, they have to take extra professional development classes after graduation. I feel that this model hinders teachers from being as experienced and knowledgable as possible and then in turn hinders the students who need that extra special attention. We saw it at our placement school in Orkney, there was a teacher who got placed in a Assistive classroom and you could tell that she had no idea how to help these children succeed and it was mostly babysitting all day.

I am definitely learning a lot and applying the knowledge that I have learned throughout my time here. The girls are awesome and still very inclusive of me and help me out with understanding the material that I don't have a lot of prior knowledge in. It's nice to be surrounded by them and funny/helpful to have discussions about what we are learning when we are outside the classroom: i.e. "Defensive mechanism!" "You're not weird, it's not to a marked degree different from your peers."

Part Two

The University of Aberdeen is a great college area. They have a lot of historic buildings and are about an hour walk from the downtown area. On our first day here we got an introduction to the university and a tour around the main buildings. They also put on a royal show for us--not really, we just had great timing. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall was being appointed as the first female chancellor of the university that day. They have only had about five chancellors since the 1800's so this was a big deal.

Every week day morning, I wake up at 6:30am and go for a run with two other girls in preparation for the Color Run when I get back home. Our residence halls are a 30 minute walk from our classroom building, but offer a nice scenic view of a garden/park area so it makes it worth the time spent. In the afternoons we have been going on five + mile walks with our professor that are super enjoyable and fun. We went down to the North Sea and saw some dolphins one day! We have also been shopping around and exploring the area more. Since we are a group of 15, we have split off into smaller groups of three and we rotate cooking dinner Sunday through Thursday.

There is more about our fun-packed weeked in the other blog so check it out! :) But before you do, check out the pictures!