The Courage to Begin, Again
Throughout my early teens and until the end of my high school years, I belonged to a Vietnamese Buddhist temple youth group. It wasn’t just a religious group, it was a place to belong and to preserve our culture and our language. As I grew older there were always suggestions that I become a group leader instead of just being a member. I resisted because it seemed like I would not be able to make the obligations and time commitment. Throughout college I volunteered in other Vietnamese based community groups, where the intent was either to teach and provide language skills or bridging the Vietnamese subculture to the wider mainstream culture. These groups have more involvement in the community and because they were social groups, we also garnered media attention and had a more professional presence than the temple group. The same scenario would play out in these groups, and later well into my early years working in a professional capacity. I have always been more than competent at whatever I do, but I would not take the initiative to apply to supervisory or other administrative roles despite prompts from my leaders. After graduation, I had immediately started working in a professional capacity, in a career track with a government agency. I became a representative of the Department of Corrections for Washington State, and I soon learned that my actions and inactions are weighed by not just myself but by the agency I work for and the community and people I serve.
There was always one thing I knew I loved, and that was being in a classroom, happy in both learning or teaching capacities. I grew up equating learning with good grades, but as I worked, learned from and eventually trained others at work, I realized that the goal was not to get a perfect score because real life is rather messy and complicated. At work, our goal is to serve the community, keep it and ourselves and our offenders safe, but the implicit golden goal is to come home safe at the end of our shifts. There is no curriculum perfect enough to cover all the scenarios of all the things that could and would go wrong, and so we train, we brief, debrief, we learn, we make mistakes, and learn some more. To assume that we know all that there was to know about the job is to invite disaster, but I was getting complacent. There came a point when it was almost painful to just do the everyday aspects of the job, and I felt myself atrophying with inaction. Then one day, a young man ten years my junior was hired and I was assigned as his lead. He had his Master’s, and one of the first thing he said was his degree gave him the edge for the job. The proverbial scales fell from my eyes and I knew I needed to act before I became outdated and unessential.
“When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current
that will carry him to places he has never dreamed of
when he first made the decision.” - Paulo Coelho
It was serendipitous that my first two courses for graduate studies were EAD-801 Leadership & Organization Development, and CEP-802 Developing Positive Attitudes toward Learning. No matter how much I enjoyed learning, it was difficult to get back into the swing of learning in an academic setting. These first two classes simultaneously taught me to reflect upon my own positions as a student and as a professional, in order to learn how to be a better teacher and leader. Having no formal teaching background meant I had to work on a hypothetical basis on some projects. On other projects and assignments, I had to find analogs of the scenarios required within my own field. I was fortunate that motivation and leadership both are issues connective to real life situations, and in completing these courses I was able to learn both their applications to the classrooms and higher education settings, as well as to my current line of work and my own agency. Understanding youth and adult motivation within the context of education helped me see the ways I could improve on interactions with the clients I supervised on my caseload, as well as improving techniques for training new staff. Even though I have a background in Motivational Interviewing techniques, being able to delve deeper into the theories and methods and strategies helped me understand what I was already doing in a better light.
Learning to recognize challenges within organizational systems impacted me in a profound way. I finally started to understand the reasons behind the frustrations and burnout rate that was happening within my own unit, and to see how that related to the bigger scale of my even more intricate agency with its interwoven systems. What was most valuable was that by the end of the class, I could recognize and take ownership of my particular contributions to what worked and what didn’t work, and with everything I learned, there was a beginning of a goal and commitment to being a part of the solution. I learned to have a deeper understanding of what it means to be a leader within the context of an organization. To explore ourselves and our potentials we must confront our own biases, our professor had us participated in Project Implicit and report back to the class discussion. For me, this was one of the most eye opening process about my biases and my own shortcomings throughout my whole program. The combination of these two courses made me realized anew how important education is a part of my life, and how much more I could contribute to my environment, whether at home or at work or in the community, if I continue to expand my own knowledge base. By the end of this first semester, I could feel a renewed appreciation for the work I already do as a professional, and a desire to see what else the program had in store.
I have always realized that working in the criminal justice system meant giving up some social aspects of my life due to safety reasons. It could be an isolating experience, one where networking meant I had to stay within the criminal justice circle, and so the next two classes really allowed me to connect with professionals in a less inhibited way. Both the EAD-866 Teaching in Postsecondary Education and EAD-863 Training & Professional Development courses had assignments that required interviewing other teachers and trainers. I got in touch with a local community college and observed a teacher and class in progress, which was an exciting process (very different than being there as a student!). It was also a beneficial networking experience. Professional development is part of my agency’s commitment to its employee, and to see the theories and reasoning behind pushing for trained and professionally developed staff is informative. I also connected with other trainers within my department for a course assignment, and being able to have that discourse outside of work context allowed us to talk easier and have more deeper exploration of what our roles meant, and what impacts we leave on others and on our department itself. These exercises made me realized that I can reach out and make these connections without having to use my graduate program as a context, and the ideas and practical knowledge I’ve learned will allow me to have educative and meaningful discourses about my current and future educational and professional endeavors.
As we grow older, different motivation and barriers to learning and participation in learning opportunities present themselves. The EAD-861 Adult Learning course allowed me to examine cognitive, emotional, developmental, and socio-cultural processes that affect adult learners. The overarching idea I got from this class is that learning is a lifelong endeavor, and a mindset open to learning is an important qualification to the optimal learning experience. As a returning adult student, the knowledge I gained from this course was invaluable, resulting in a much deeper understanding of my barriers and what I could do to help myself overcome them easier. Understanding the differences among adult learners’ motivation and the diversity of their circumstances gave me extra tools to be a better trainer at work, and simply a better lead for my unit. EAD-860 Concept of Learning Society complemented the adult learning course neatly, as it examines learning on a much more global scale. Learning society came to have different meanings within different nations, and this class explored prevalent theories nationally. Throughout the course, I examined the contributions of the learning society within historical, economic and cultural contexts, and looked at prominent views regarding the learning society as its meaning evolved over time. We learn at work, we learn at home, and we learn in our encounters with places and people that are different than our fundamental knowledge base. We learn in formal classrooms, as they still dominate our view of traditional method of gaining knowledge. Most recent and rapidly becoming ever-present is our learning online, to recognize the rapid transformation of learning via the new information and communications technologies. In examining the role of technology and its evolution throughout the ages and its deep impact as a conduit to learning, I was able to appreciate that this course was operated and taught as a hypermedia web. Starting with clicking on the ubiquitous hyperlink, to making good use of and understanding the nature of the links in a hypermedia text, we take it upon ourselves to be critical and selective readers in this hypermedia age. I have no doubt that what I have learned from these two courses will continue to follow me throughout my life, both personal and professional.
One of my favorite books is “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. I read it for the first time when I was in my early twenties and was going through what I thought, at the time, was the worst period of my life. I had left behind a toxic and abusive relationship, and though I came out physically unscathed, my spirit was battered and bruised. What the book said to me was that life seems to have a way of throwing the biggest challenges at you before it gets better, and if you really want something, you must persevere and take the chances that come your way, even if it means surrendering yourself to the unknown. It was difficult for me to realize and accept that being afraid of what was coming my way was more crippling than the nature of the tasks I needed to tackle to reach my goals. I am now at the end of my graduate program, where it felt like life has thrown so many obstacles at me during the last two years that I am amazed to be at the cusp of graduation. This is what it is like to be an adult student, to return to the academic life after so long, and with so much more competing commitment and responsibilities. I have gained more insight about myself, about my classmates and instructors, my colleagues and peers, and the world I live in. There is a lens of perspective that this graduate experience has granted me, one I have and will continue to treasure. It is never too late to begin again, and when it seems like the going is the hardest, there is the most to gain.