Education Students Find Their Passions in Classrooms, Specialized Programs
It’s not every day you can find a child who loves school so much they want to spend the rest of their lives in a classroom. Many count the minutes down until it’s time to leave.
Not so for Miranda Pollard and J.T. Cornelius. They knew a classroom is where they wanted to be.
Cornelius is a first-generation student who just graduated from Rockhurst with a degree in Biology, minoring in Educational Studies. Pollard will be a junior at RU in the fall in the School of Education, majoring in Elementary Education with a minor in Psychology and a concentration in Special Education.
“I've always loved school,” Cornelius said. “Since I was a kid I've always enjoyed going to school. I always try and do the most and get the full experience out of it.”
“From the moment I stepped foot in a classroom, I was like, this is where I want to be forever,” Pollard said. “And I just always looked up to my teachers a lot. And then throughout high school was when I started really cementing that and knowing I definitely wanted to be a teacher.”
The Rockhurst classrooms on their way to leading classrooms of their own is all part of their plan to help shape the lives of the next generation.
For Rockhurst education students, that starts their first year and throughout their time in Kansas City.
“As soon as I got here, I was immediately put in a classroom to observe and see, like, is teaching really for me,” Pollard said. “And I was like, wow, that's incredible. Because you don't get that in a lot of other programs. It’s a really strong education program. And I love that.”
“I wasn't sure if I wanted to go straight into education or look at it later,” Cornelius said. “I was more the pre-med research route. And then I had a couple friends take Intro to Ed with Dr. [Elizabeth] Walter and they were like, ‘You need to take this class. You'd really enjoy it.’ So I took it my junior year and I've been taking classes every semester since. I've observed high school biology classes; every level of high school. And this semester, Dr. [Hilary] Logan still wanted us to get more experience because Elementary Science is the course I was in. She wanted us to get outside of the classroom and see how science is important in the Kansas City community in education.”
To that end, Cornelius served as an instructor at an afterschool girls club at St. Agnes Catholic School.
“It’s basically learning how to code and learning how to kind of emphasize the STEAM portion of their education,” he said. “It’s integrating coding with art and all the creativity they want to do. And student-wise, we just observe and help them however we can. I have no background in coding, so I just let them go. But it's the educational element of talking with the students and having them work through it and seeing these little science brains start to expand is what I like to see.”
Pollard has also observed science classes and through the Rockhurst STEAM Studio went to International Academy, close to campus.
“It was incredible,” she said. “They had three hours [after school] with a lot of different areas set up. Different tables that students and their parents could just rotate through. And one of those was the STEAM Studio, and so I facilitated that for them. We did a dissection at that table, but we also had a lot of other things like create your own stress balls, some little robots, and some microscopes. It was a really cool time.”
Pollard is considering being a coach at the Rockhurst STEAM Studio next year after working in it or observing students several times this last semester. She appreciates the new approach to learning incorporated in the studio.
“I think it's just a really cool approach – they use the engineering design,” she said. “It's a lot different than how I was raised going to school. A lot of times when I was in school, it was, here's the problem, here's what you do to solve it. I'm going to model it; now you go. And so they just completely flipped it to here's the problem, and the question. What do you think? What can I get you for you to do your own procedure and figure this out on your own? I think that is a really fun way to learn and a really engaging way to help students build their knowledge in a more authentic way. And in a way that will apply it to the real world really well.”
While Pollard has her sights set on more classrooms and the STEAM Studio next year, Cornelius will be pursuing his doctorate at the University of Indiana for anatomy education. After that, he already knows what he’d like to do.
“I want to come back and teach at a Jesuit institution,” he said. “I bonded with every single professor I've had in some form. That's what I'm really passionate about in education – small, close-knit classrooms where you're creating the experience. And that's what I want to do for my future is give the same experience as I've had with other educators.”
