Retrospective Essay

I am an emerging professional in the educational world who has a passion for child advocacy as well as a love for the arts (specifically of the literary variety). During my time as an undergraduate at IU Indianapolis, I was in the Honors College. There, I worked on giving back to my community, honing in on my craft as a writer and an educator, and created culturally relevant and engaging curriculum for my students at the high school level. The Honors College pushed me to dig deeper and think bigger in places where my non-honors peers did not, and it truly shaped a large part of my college experience.

Community

The Honors College does its best to foster community with its students. For me, this started out as living in the Residential Based Learning Community (RBLC) of University Tower Floor Eight as a freshman; this gave us a space where we could adapt to the ins and outs of adulthood surrounded my like-minded individuals who were committed to academic excellence. From there, we also engaged with HON-200. HON-200 was a pilot program that started with my class (enrolled 2022 and onwards) to have honors students track their growth and use reflection to see how being an honors scholar enhanced their experience. Part of that was creating statements of intention and journey maps.

When looking at mine, I was very self-centered. Despite being surrounded by these opportunities for community, I struggled to engage and belly flopped quite hard at the beginning of my second semester at college. When creating my intention statements and journey maps as a freshman, I couldn't see the end goal. Upon reviewal, I think it is quite evident in my wording that I missed the point. Going back as a senior who is currently working full-time as a pre-school teacher to give a more mature perspective on my teenaged musings, it is clear to see that being pushed to engage in these community building parts of college truly helped me grow.

As an honors scholar, we have to do volunteer work to maintain our scholarship as well as complete our goals of engaged learning experiences including service work. I chose to engage with Domestic Abuse Prevention Student Organization (DAPSO) to complete my goal. While it was not an honors specific student organization (and there are many honors specific organizations and societies on campus), it felt most like home to me. I ended up becoming the external president of DAPSO and spent my time educating about DV, advocating for survivors, and creating safe places on and off campus for survivors to have and to hold. It was the most wonderful thing and brought me friendships that are going to last a life-time. It might have started out as just a means to an end, but it became something that I am most proud of and shows the impact I made while on campus. My biggest accomplishment was Take Back the Night we helped organize with Pan-Hellenic, the Intra-Fraternity Council, CAPS, and more on/off campus organizations. We also got one of our local DV shelters, Coburn Place, to help us create a sign for the march around campus. Sexual assault and domestic violence go hand in hand; being able to advocate for survivors at the intersection of this was such a fufiling experience, and to have students reach out to me afterwards and say how my speech moved them/inspired them to get help is something that I am always going to carry with me.

Writing and Educating

The Honors College at IU Indianapolis also expects its scholars to obtain a minimum of twenty-four honors credits with at least one credit taken per semester (not counting summer semesters) in order to graduate with an honors notation. Since I was not one of the lucky STEM majors who have more opportunities to take classes that are offered as an honors option, I spent the majority of my time doing honors contracts. Honors contracts are a means to satisfy the honors credits needed for the semester. Contracts gave me the opportunity to dig deeper into the course material and truly understand what the professor is trying to get us to take away from the course. Additionally, they prove that participate in engaged learning experiences such as experiential/applied learning. While it was frustrating to have to create a contract proposal before the class truly started and bank a lot of my spare time and educational resources towards the project, I did also have a lot of freedom and creativity with the contract.

As long as the professor approves of it, you are given free rein to do whatever makes your heart content.

For my Issues in Teaching Writing class with Professor Steven Fox, I wanted to go into a subject I didn't have a lot of experience with. While being an aficionado about writing and other creative endeavors, I hadn't actually spent much time in the realm of theatre. A lot of my friends in high school seemed to truly enjoy drama and what it could offer to them in terms of a creative outlet/means of story telling, but moving to Indianapolis and being surrounded by this arts scene was intriguing and enticing. For my honors contract, I proposed to Dr. Fox that he let me investigate the Indy Fringe scene. I knew a local playwright, Mary Karty, and she has had multiple plays shown at the Indy Fringe Fest that happens annually downtown. Dr. Fox implored me to use this as an opportunity to learn more about theatre and the editorial writing process (another realm I lacked experience in).

After seeing her play and getting to go to the afterparty with all of the cast and crew, I interviewed the director and writer of the play Three 2 One. It's a coming of age comedy that looks at a young woman as she tries to find a balance between her different wants in life. It's funny. It's sassy. It's authentic. And, it's even better on stage. Talking with Karty about her process and getting to see more the behind the scenes aspects of theatre which aren't broadcast to the public was fascinating as a bystander. As an educator, this was something truly valuable I was able to bring back to my students when they asked me about "actually" having a shot in pursing the arts.

The time I spent on this was invaluable and completed my IUI Honors goal of being able to apply my learned skills to different contexts. If you are interested in seeing the interview (or just some of the highlights), please go here to view the project in its entirety. It was my favorite honors contract to do and only deepened my love of the arts.

Teaching and Creating

The Honors College also let me use my student teaching as a means to obtain honors credit. From August 11th to December 5th of 2025, I spent my time student teaching in northwestern Indiana for 10th grade English covering sections 10A and 10B. For my School of Education professors, I used the materials and the student work from this time period to create a portfolio I can show to administrators looking to hire educators for their school. For this, I had to provide my lesson plans in the UDL format, formative and summative assessments, student population demographics, the rages of my students performance, and sit down for a mock interview where I demonstrated how my students grew as learners under my instruction.

It was a public high school that services a majority Black and Hispanic student body with a majority white staff. As per their mission statement, they are dedicated to equity, literacy, creativity, and critical thinking while providing high quality education founded on rapport, experiences, and opportunities to empower students and prepare them for their future an everchanging world. During my time there, I proved myself as an educator focusing in English, specifically through how I taught narratives and supported my students through all stages of the process.

Over the span of six weeks, we covered narratives in literature with my English 10 A class. In preparation for their midterm essay, I used the week we had before the essay to see what they know about writing a narrative, used a mentor text to guide them with their essays, included hands-on experiential learning opportunities, and worked with them in class with specific and targeted feedback to help them craft their narrative essays and the final grade in the six-week grading period.

The mentor text was a short story and that I coupled with music to dive deeper into the characters in preparation for our essays. This also gave me a good read over what they did and didn't understand about crafting a narrative. For examples of the materials I created and student work, please go here.

For the writer's workshop, we used whole group learning/team collaboration to determine what goes into creating and narrative as well as practicing those narrative crafting skills on a smaller scale before we got to the summative assessment. For examples of the materials I modified and created in addition to the student samples, please go here.

The final part of the unit, or the summative assessment, was the creation of the narrative essay. The students had two in-class prewriting days and three in-class narrative writing days to complete their essay. All the work was to be done in class specifically with the only expectations being allowed to those with accommodations due to 504 plans. IEPs, ILPs, or extenuating circumstances. This was a policy I was made to carry out via my school in an attempt to combat the rise of Chat GPT use among high schoolers. A huge part of our English Department meetings was dedicated to teachers reporting different methods they have use to deter the use of AI in the classrooms. Much of this consisted with mainly paper assignments, but with the SATs being moved to a completely digital format, it does not set our students up for success to have them hand write all of their assignments/essays. After the in-class writing was done, students were to turn in their Google Document to the assignment posted on Google Classroom where I locked it. This showed me if students attempted to access their document outside of class time. For the prewriting materials, the examples I created, examples of feedback given to students during their writing process, and different levels of student work, please go here.

My student teaching experience had a lot of different moving parts which made it nonconventional, but what I had learned from the honors college and the various things I experienced through the honors college worked in tandem with something the principal of the high school would say over the speakers everyday.

"You have the choice to decide what kind of day it's going to be. Make it a great one."

Through the ups and down of teaching in the public school system, this stuck with me and got me through a lot of the rough patches. The determination and tools I had gotten from my education brought me to this point in my academic career, but I was put into an awful situation with my placement. While I was doing my best to be the teacher my kids needed me to be, I was struggling with one of the security officers sexually harassing me at my placement. And, I didn't feel like I had the support of my mentoring educators or building administrators to speak up. It only got reported because I mentioned the experience in one of my reflective journals I submitted weekly to my professor in the School of Liberal Arts. She went through the university to report the matter, and I was pulled from my placement to go into a digital "alternative" student teaching placement to end my semester. But, I wasn't able to see the the end of the grading period with my students. My portfolio was complete because it focused around their midterm, but I was in the middle of getting my students ready for their synthesis essays when this all went down. It wrecked me, but I had the choice to decide how this was going to affect me. I had the choice to make on whether this was going to ruin it all for me, or if I could manage to make a meaningful experience out of this situation. I ended up working with my School of Education professors to get my alternative placement to be at my current job. I spent the day of my termination applying to teaching positions and fought tooth and nail to be one of the only people in Indiana to say they were paid to student teach.

It was a long and rocky road to get here, but I think it shows that having a growth mindset and reflecting on your experiences (like the honors college is trying to instill in its scholars) makes a huge impact on if you are able to succeed or not. There were multiple barriers in the way between my education and me, but I refused to let my circumstances get the best of me. It is my toughest pill to swallow but the biggest truth of my college experience.