The night before my meeting with my professor this week, she emailed me a New York Times article about social psychologist Amy Cuddy who, among other things, gave one of the most well known TED Talks on the power of body language and “power posing” (you can watch the TED Talk here.)  When her findings were questioned, she faced incredible, and arguably uncalled for, backlash attacking her reputation as a scholar and researcher. The article shed a lot of light on what it’s like being a woman in the male-dominated world of research, and how important respecting the ethics of research is, something that we should and do take into consideration.
In my attempt to finish the last, lengthy interview, there was the question brought up of whether or not the teachers should tell the students about Universal Design for Learning, what it is and how the students might not even realize it’s being used. Personally, I think that it would be really cool to know the “secrets” of your teachers, especially in middle and high school, almost like they’re a magician giving away their tricks.
Also different about this week, in addition to the Amy Cuddy article, I got a special opportunity to expand my knowledge of UDL and look at it with a different perspective, as Professor offered to let me observe one of her graduate courses at Harvard, based around UDL.
The first thing I noticed was the incredibly large and diverse class, something I probably should’ve expected, but shocked me nonetheless. Regardless, it was really interesting to me seeing how they approached the subject considering the variety of students and fields in the class (everything from third-world public education to app development to neuroscience), and I was sad I couldn’t stay for the full three hours and 15 minutes (the length being another thing I probably should have expected but didn’t).
I love the fact that this position as a research assistant has given me so many opportunities and has exposed me to lots of great resources. I would definitely say I’m in the groove of this research, and as we approach the end of the cleaning phase of the research and into the analysis stage, I’m more excited than ever.
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