Academic to Public Translation Reflection

For this project we had to take an article from our discourse community and translate it so

that people outside of the middle grades education community would be able to understand it. I

choose to make a pamphlet. Many people in my class choose to translate facts and data but I

wanted to take a different approach. I found an article that interviewed middle grades teachers

about their experiences as teachers. These interviews answer the question, why teachers teach. I

was inspired to do this after writing the Discourse Analysis paper and explaining why an outsider

is an outsider.

I gave my reason for wanting to be a middle grades education teacher, in the section Why

We Do What We Do. I think it was important to give my reason to be a teacher in the pamphlet,

because I, as an inexperienced teacher, gives a different view than people who have been

teaching for 20+ years. Teachers perspective can change over the years and are different in many

different generations.

On the back of the pamphlet I gave quotes from the article, then explained them in my

own words. One was a reason a teacher decided that she/he wanted to teach. Many teachers can

relate to this one because a lot of do not become teachers to change the world but to change to

life of one student. This was very important to put because outsiders need to understand that

every teacher was once a kid who was just looking for attention.

The other example was a teacher explains the problems of being a teacher. Teachers do

not get much say when it comes to what kind of materials are being taught. Curriculums are

made by people who have spent little time in a classroom. Each year more and more is added,

and teaching techniques are changed. This leaves little room for teachers to teach anything else.

It was very important to add this to the pamphlet, because people need to understand that

teachers get no say in what or even how they teach.