PIDP 3260 My Professional Identity

For this blog post (Week 2's assignment), we are required to do a brief autobiography and a reflection on our professional identity. Prompts for defining our professional identity are: what personal and professional values guide you as an instructor, and what truths of teaching do we have (based on Stephen D Brookfield's The Skillful Teacher pg. 9)

Brief Autobiography

According to my carefully crafted LinkedIn profile I am a:

"creative generalist with a strong design background and over 20 years of experience in administration in private, public and not-for-profit organizations. I am a results driven and hardworking individual with excellent time management skills. I specialize in creating engaging, logical and attractive systems suited for training programs and implementing change, and I enjoy the challenge of new experiences."

- Amy Keryluik

I've also gone ahead and listed some of the areas I am interested in, which I hope means to everyone else reading it that I'm actually interested in taking on work in these areas (and by extension, less excited about doing other stuff)

• Training and Education
• Recruitment
• Policies and Procedures
• Engagement
• Advertising/Marketing
• Creative Administrative Services

Values

My values, based on Brene Brown's List of Values, are joy, being helpful, creativity, harmony, self care, family, health and being competent. My biggest value is joy because it underpins everything I do (the rest just fits in under "what makes me happy" category) I've heard people at work environments say I look happy or I am singing/humming, so I guess it shows. I have to be mindful about my workload and the joy I have in my professional life, because burnout can strike those faster that are enjoying their job.

In one of my previous courses, I identified my personal mission statement as:

“I inspire bravery, by creatively exploring new things for strangers looking for adventure.”

- Amy Keryluik

Given that I've been witness to people participating, learning and even changing their career paths, I think that this is a guiding principle of my professional identity.

Teaching Truths

A few of the truths I know to be true about teaching (or any professional adventure) is that:

1) it's never going to be the same from day to day

2) imposter syndrome happens

3) letting people know the expectations allows for them to meet your expectations

4) not everyone is going to like you

References

Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead. Vermilion.

Brookfield, S (2015) The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust and Responsiveness in the Classroom. Jossey-Bass.