Lauren Kuney’s Electronic Portfolio

About Me

The journey that my life has taken me on has strongly impacted my beliefs, and why I became interested in teaching and in particular, second language learning.  I have moved a total of 10 times (and counting), and I have lived in 4 different countries (US, Australia, China, and England).  Much of the overseas moving happened when I was very young, but the move that impacted me the most was the move to England when I was sixteen.  I was in culture shock for about 6 months, and very angry with my parents, until I realized what a wonderful opportunity lay before me.  My parents and my school provided me the means to travel extensively.  I found that with my new experiences came new perspectives on culture and language and how I thought about the world.

 

Moving and traveling opened my mind and my heart to other cultures and languages, and they became something very intriguing to me.  In the US, it is easy to be self-consumed- we are the biggest, most powerful, and most successful country in the world- we don’t need to learn any new language because everyone else learns ours.  I understand why we can be lazy, but I do not understand how this became the acceptable standard.  It would be more logical to me that most people in the US were bilingual or multilingual due to the “melting pot” that America is often described as.

 

Coming to college, I wanted to do something with people and something about culture, but I did not know what.  So I picked cultural anthropology, but after a year of doing this I decided it was not really what I wanted to pursue.  I did not want to simply study others; I wanted to make a difference in others’ lives.  So I moved to education, and looked for opportunities to explore my interests in multicultural education.  Luckily for me, these issues are all hot topics in education today, so I have been able to learn a lot about my interests.