Hello, my name is Catherine Wilcox. I’m a proud lit and history geek with an emphasis in all things BBC. If it’s a Friday night and everyone is hitting up the bars, I’m usually down to Downton Abbey. 

My story and identity is very much situated in settings of schooling and learning since education has defined and impacted my life in a different way than, I believe, it does for most people.

From kindergarten to 2nd grade, I was homeschooled. In 2nd grade, my parents sent me to this super small private school. When I say small, I mean 19 kids (at the school’s peak enrollment) from kindergarten to highschool, all learning together in one room with one teacher. We sat together in large, group desks according to grade and age. There was one other girl in my grade.

I went to this school for 4 1/2 years (2nd-6th grade). This unique learning environment impacted me tremendously because I was able to eavesdrop on the lessons of both younger and older kids, giving me review of past things I’d learned while also giving me a glimpse of more advanced material and allowing me to connect both perspectives to what I was learning in my own classes. It was a rather poor school, so there wasn’t much playground equipment. Instead, my friends and I would take the things we were learning in our classes and make games out of them. We set up businesses selling toys we didn’t want anymore for nickles and pennies, applying our newly gained math skills. When playing hide and seek, we’d count to twenty in Latin. We organized into “nations” and reenacted episodes we’d learned about in our history classes. None of these activities was suggested by adults. Each “game” was an example of how learning can “transform the social structure in which it takes place” (Werner, 2000). For example, learning was a social event because we carried the lessons outside of the classroom and made them an integral part of our lives and social norms. We learned and enjoyed learning because we were able to situate the knowledge and skills within our lives, even if only through play. 

In seventh grade, for financial and educational reasons, my parents decided to again homeschool my brothers and I. Suddenly being isolated from the friends and tight-knit community that had defined most of my remembered existence was not easy. Still, there were undeniable benefits to it. I became a very independent learner. I relied on reading, watching videos, and googling explanations. Although the copious amounts of free time often felt more like solitary confinement than a recess, they allowed me to progress at my own pace in each subject and graduate a year early. The six years of homeschooling are mostly a blurry, monotonous void in my memory, yet they showed me that students are capable of learning on their own if they are given the tools to do so. Because of this, I see teachers less as givers of knowledge and more as guides to knowledge.

The first time I ever sat in a real classroom complete with tiny desks, a professor, and students whose names I did not know was when I was 18 and enrolled in my first class (English 1A) at Yuba Community College. I remember being SO EXCITED when the professor handed out the syllabus and I got to pass the papers backwards down my row. I’d only ever seen that done in movies! The novelty soon wore off. After two years of the purgatory that is community college, I transferred to Chico state, majoring in English Ed. and minoring communication studies. As wonderful as Chico is, I decided I’d lived in the Nor Cal bubble too long, so I spread my wings and flew away to England where I studied abroad for a year. There’s no better way to experience and understand situated learning than taking a Shakespeare class in England and then bouncing over to London to watch one of his plays at the Globe theatre. Now, with fresh perspectives and an open mind, I’m back at Chico state to finish my B.A. and head towards a Master’s Degree in English with an emphasis on Literacy.