Master of Education (by coursework & dissertation) — Curriculum Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every year my Grade 11 Geography class meets the same mapwork exercise: calculate the gradient between two spot heights on a 1:50 000 topographic sheet of a farming district none of them has visited. The sheet is accurate and the skill is examinable, but I noticed that my learners, most of whom live within walking distance of the school in Delft, treated it as a puzzle about somewhere else. Two years ago I asked them to repeat the calculation using a printed map of the route they walk to school, and to compare it with how tired they felt on the steepest stretch. The marks on the next test did not change dramatically, but the questions did. Learners began asking why the official map left out the paths they actually used. That shift is what I want to understand properly, and it is why I am applying for a Master of Education in Curriculum Studies.

I have taught Geography to Grades 10 to 12 at a public secondary school in the Western Cape for five years. I work within CAPS, and I respect what a clear national curriculum offers a school like mine: new teachers know what to cover, and learners who move schools mid-year are not lost. I also see its limits in daily practice. The pacing schedule assumes resources we share between three classes, and the content often presents places as finished facts rather than as things people continue to shape. I want to study how those choices are made, rather than only how to work around them.

This question began during my BEd. My final-year project examined how three approved Geography textbooks represented informal settlements. I coded captions, photographs and activity instructions, and found that settlements appeared almost entirely in sections on problems such as flooding and service delivery, rarely in sections on economic activity or community organisation. It was a small study and I would design it differently now, with clearer criteria and a second coder, but it taught me to read a textbook as an argument as well as a resource. Since then I have read Michael Young's Bringing Knowledge Back In, which challenged my instinct that making content locally relevant is always the answer. His argument that schools should give access to powerful knowledge learners cannot gain elsewhere made me reconsider my walking-route exercise: its value lay not in replacing the topographic sheet but in helping learners see why the abstract skill matters. I would like to investigate that relationship between everyday and disciplinary knowledge systematically, possibly through a dissertation on how Geography teachers mediate CAPS content for learners in township schools.

Outside the classroom I coach our under-14 soccer team two afternoons a week, which has taught me patience with planning that rarely survives contact with a muddy field and twenty boys who all want to be strikers. On Saturdays I help my grandmother with stock-taking at her spaza shop in Mfuleni. Ordering bread and paraffin around the month-end grant cycle has given me a practical sense of how households budget, and I have used a simplified version of her order book in lessons on informal economies, with her permission and every name removed.

I also contribute to my school's subject team. Last year I helped redesign our Grade 10 common assessment so the same skills were tested with contexts closer to learners' experience, and I led two short sessions sharing the approach with colleagues. Those discussions showed me how differently experienced teachers interpret the same curriculum document, and how little time we have to reflect on why.

I am a careful, practical teacher who wants a stronger theoretical foundation for questions I already meet in my work. I expect postgraduate study to make me more critical of my own assumptions, and I hope to return to my school, and to wider subject discussions, able to argue for curriculum decisions with evidence rather than instinct alone.