Post 5

I think the relationship between community service and research is very strong and they both play off of each other. My experiences in the community helped to clarify and focus my research for out major paper. Using personal testimony also strengthened my arguments in the major paper and in my letter to Mayor Fenty. I also felt I was better able to relate to arguments Kozol and Cashin were making. I also had a pool of experience from which pull critical views of what the Kozol, Cashin, and the other students in the class were saying about education.

My focus in school is sociology and education studies. I plan to be working with education issues for my career, so my experiences I have had with M.O.M.I.E.S. TLC and Turing the Page, and the volunteer experiences I will have in the future, are a valuable part of the knowledge base I will need to serve education organizations. The research I did for the course has also helped me highlight some of the key issues in education. Personally I think it is a great experience to work with kids and adults that have very different backgrounds that what I had experienced growing up in semi-rural Wisconsin. I think I will always be more conscious of the different lenses people may have as I work with people.