Hello everyone! I have had a fantastically busy summer taking my first quantitative methods course! I was given the financial opportunity to have a summer course covered, so I’m taking advantage of freeing up my 2024-25 academic year by taking it now! It’s my first ever statistical methods course. I’m still at the beginning of the course and we’re working through it. I’m learning how to use SPSS. My instructor has been really helpful in our lab portions, which I’m very thankful for!
Going back to a previous point, let’s talk about what freeing up my upcoming academic year has done for me: I’ve been offered two adjuncting positions by two separate universities in the area for the fall!
First, my student feedback results from my Child Development course were so high from U.B that I was offered to teach LAI 474 online in the fall, which is their general “introduction to the exceptional student” special education course for general education preservice teachers. I’m looking forward to trying out an online, asynchronous course. Fingers crossed it works, though—the online platform that we used for my Child Development course really struggled to function well towards the end of the semester.
Second, I was invited to teach at Fredonia! This one I am very much excited for, as not only is it my alma mater, but it’s also a different institution that I can gain experience from as an instructor. I’ll be teaching EDU 221/222, the Introduction to Early Childhood Education course and its associated fieldwork. I’m very much excited to help Fredonia at this time, as the current early childhood education professor is going on sabbatical. This is going to be so weird and fun for me to actually teach this course, when a little over a decade ago, I was in it as a student!
And finally, the conference proceedings for both the 2024 meetings of AERA and ISLS have been published. Thus, I have two new publications! Since they are conference proceedings, you can find them on my Presentation page. The DOI URLs are still fairly new, so if one hasn’t been registered yet and you’d like to read my papers, I’ve included both PDF publications on my Research Gate page.
I’m probably going to be quite for a bit as I’m taking this course, so if anything exciting comes up, I’ll post about it!
Samantha Didrichsen, MSED. 