Career

I am currently a freshman studying special education at the Ohio State University. Throughout all four years of high school, I was a student aid in my school’s Mild-Moderate Multiple Disabilities classroom, where I worked with a variety of students on academics, life skills, and social skills. Then, in my senior year, I took a class classed Teacher Academy, which taught me about what it is like to be a teacher, and gave me field experience in middle and elementary school classrooms. There, I worked in a Mild-Moderate class at the middle school and a Mild-Moderate class at the elementary school. I also began working as a respite provider through the Delaware County Board of Developmental Disabilities, working with a seventh grader with autism, and I did some work as a tutor with a high school student with Angleman’s Syndrome. In my freshman year of college, I became a virtual tutor with one of the intervention education classes at Metro Middle school. There, I learned a lot about what teaching during a pandemic looks like, and I got to experience working with students in a virtual setting.

Artifacts

My first artifact is the link to my ACES Film Project: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QdPm25NyYReJdeiwWjLjvn4T5J-hjTte7V2KmI1WKdE/edit?usp=sharing

For this project, my group watched a documentary called The Homestretch, which followed three teens facing homelessness in Chicago. Throughout this project, we analyzed the film, discussed the issues it presented, and searched for examples of community, service, positive social change, and many other important things. We also had a long, in depth discussion on homelessness, and how it can be presented and perceived in many different ways. Homelessness is a very serious issue all over the country, and it is really important that it is addressed.

 

For my second artifact, I chose my work in the middle and elementary schools in my school district through the class Teacher Academy. The pictures below depict the kindergarten class that I worked with on crazy hair day (left), a seventh grader that I worked with on a trip to Petland (center), and the gift bags I handed out to my elementary class on my last day (right). This class taught me so much about teaching and students, and even though it was cut short due to COVID-19, it was still one of the best experiences I got to have.

About Me

Hello! My name is Julia Burns and I am a freshman at the Ohio State University. I am a special education major, and I am very excited to one day get in the classroom. I love working with kids and I have known that I wanted to be an intervention specialist since my freshman year of high school when I volunteered in my school’s Multiple Disabilities Intervention class. I fell in love with the work, and have been excited about a career in special education ever since.

I wanted to be a part of ACES because I want to learn more about how to be a better community member, and a better person in general. I had done a lot of service in high school and I loved it, but I didn’t know much about advocacy or how to make a large-scale positive social change, nor had I really been an avid member of my community. I was really excited to be a part of ACES because I knew that it would help me become a more well rounded person, and one day, a better teacher.

Year in Review

[ “Year in Review”  is where you should reflect on the past year and show how you have evolved as a person and as a student.  You may want to focus on your growth in a particular area (as a leader, scholar, researcher, etc.) or you may want to talk about your overall experience over the past year.  For more guidance on using your ePortfolio, including questions and prompts that will help you get started, please visit the Honors & Scholars ePortfolio course in Carmen. To get answers to specific questions, please email eportfolio@osu.edu. Delete these instructions and add your own post.]

G.O.A.L.S.

The first G.O.A.L that I would like to talk about is Service Engagement, which I am currently working on right now, and plan to continue throughout the rest of my college experience. Due to COVID-19, volunteering is a lot more difficult because many in person activities have been cancelled or shut down. Most people prefer to do hands on volunteer work in person, so of course this has been a little bit disappointing. However, I still managed to volunteer this semester as a virtual tutor with Metro Middle School, which has been a really great experience. I am working with an Intervention Class, which means that all of the students have IEPs to work on in addition to their regular classes. Because IEPs are confidential, the teacher that I work with has a lot of trouble working on them with students on them in office hours because they need to be one on one, so she could only work with one student at a time. As a virtual tutor, she puts me in a break out room with a couple students, and I help them keep up with their class work in other classes, that way the teacher and work with students on IEP goals in private settings. This volunteer experience has been really insightful and helped me get a better idea as to what teachers are dealing with right now through online or hybrid learning. I have been a virtual student for what feels like forever now, but for the first time, I got to see what it was like for the teachers. I was able to experience what it is like teaching to a blank screen and students who refuse to use their microphones and only type in the chat, and I also got to experience the excitement of working with a student who actually turns their camera on and seems to be engaged in the work. I’ve worked with students who just left in the middle of office hours with no explanation and never came back, and I also worked with students who were very sweet and polite, and always thanked me whenever I helped them with anything. Overall, it has been a really great experience and I hope to continue it though the next couple of years- if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to tutor in person eventually.

The second G.O.A.L that I would like to talk about is one that I haven’t exactly started working on, but one that I am very interested in and hope to learn more about in the coming semesters. As a teacher, Leadership Development is extremely important, because in order to work with a class full of kids, especially kids with learning disabilities, you need to know how to have the right balance between toughness and kindness. Essentially, you need to be a leader, both to the students and the teacher aids that you work with. This is something that makes me somewhat uncomfortable because I’m used to people telling me what to do- even in situations where I work with students, the actual teacher is always giving me instructions and telling me what I should be working on. I think that I need to work on being the one in control so that when I become a real teacher, I will know what to do. In the fall semester, I’m taking a class called FEEP, which will give me field experience working with students. I’m hoping to use this time to practice my leadership skills, and test out what type of teacher I want to be. I would also like to take a public speaking class before I graduate, because I think it would be extremely beneficial for me to get better at that before I really get into a classroom. Over all, I am going to try to look for more places where I can practice leadership- whether that’s taking the reins in a group project, answering teacher’s questions when there’s a very awkward silence during a Zoom class, or getting more experience working with kids.