Values Driven Individual
My values are important and aligned with what is important in my life. They are the guidelines to how I live my life and engage my community. My values are building authentic relationships through the acceptance of all individuals through affirmation and inclusiveness, engendering positivity through encouragement and support, development of exploration with team members to help them advance their professional goals, and through shared responsibility and a strong work ethic success is be achieved by me and my cohort members.
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The relationships I have forge as a result of the APCE program and been result my ability to accept my cohorts for who they are, respect their views and beliefs, honor the skills, knowledge and abilities, and trust and value their contribution to the practice. When I think of coins and dollar bills, individually they are different, and each represent a specific value. When added or put together the value increases and the coin and dollar is magnified. Both are used to accomplished more together. I believe the same can be said in describing a diverse collective group of people from various cultures, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, who possess a wide variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities. This would include myself, cohort members, and adult educators in the APCE program.
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Learning and utilizing the Teaching, Research, And Collaboration System (TRACS, collaborative learning environment at Texas State University) provided a different way for me to learn with and from others. The academic environment whether online or in classroom gave me a different way to learn from my cohort members and helped me to conceptualize the learning process and better understand other peoples’ experiences. TRACS taught me the art of communication, an alternate way of displaying social presence, building relationships, and working together.
Academically, I understand the importance critical thinking and analytical skills in creating academic writing products within an academic framework while being consistently mindful of their potential for real world application. As demonstrated in the great work and collaborative efforts of my cohort members in the Pecha Kucha author’s statement. The Pecha Kucha project shows how the method of structuralism serves to demonstrate the social construct in which language used by dominate culture validates the power, privilege, and force of dehumanizing language in the form of “othering.”
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My coursework helped me to gain a new approach to academic writing and scholarly reading. Though I had engaged these skills before, the graduate level exposure pushed me cognitively in ways I had not yet considered. The Postmodern article analysis demonstrates my ability to apply an epistemology in the analysis of a scholarly article. Also, there is a clear understanding the rules of academic writing as outlined in the American Publishing Association handbook which helped me to develop the skill necessary to write a comprehensive essay with the appropriate scholarly citations.
My values are not only aligned with what is important in my life, but also displayed in my academic work.