My name is Safa’a Hassan and welcome to my journey. In this ePertfolio I will be taking you along my journey of becoming a future educators, showing all my experiences and what has influenced me through this time. Here you will find information about myself and who I am as a person and watch me grow into becoming the best version of an educator I can be. hope you enjoy.
I am half Swiss and half Sudanese. I moved to Canada at the age of 12. Moving to Canada as a pre-teen was definitely not easy, everything I knew now meant nothing. Having to figure myself out in a whole new environment while others where trying to figure me out too was definitely alienating. However, if it wasn’t for my parents brining me and my siblings here, I would of never had the opportunity to have the education and life that I have now, and life itself got easier once people started to get to know me.
I am the youngest of four. When we still lived in the UAE, my family and I would spend every summer in Sudan with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Most of the time in Sudan my siblings, cousins and I would lay down mattresses all over the upstairs living room and have a big sleepover. Whenever we did that we would all wake up early in the morning, get dressed and run downstairs to collect limes. My grandparents have a big lime tree in their back yard, and all of us kids would run downstairs grab a bucket and see who can collect the most limes. On Sunday mornings my grandmother would be outside gardening on a specific side of the garden us kids where not allowed on (so we wont mess it up). Sometimes she would let us help and tell us about gardening, about how the soil should be, when to water, how to cut off dead or dying leaves.
Fast forward to me now at the age of 20 having my own little collection of house plants in my room, it took me a while to realize that my grandmother is the one who influenced me love of plants. To me plats are not just plants, they provided me comfort and showed me how to modify things like watering and light to help them grow, in more ways than one they remind me of how much I am growing as well.
I have gotten a lot of privileges having fair skin. However, that all stopped once people heard my Arab name and knew of my half African ethnicity. Through schooling I was always put into different criteria’s because of my mixed ethnicity, for instance back in Abu Dhabi I was automatically told that I will never accomplish anything good, because I was African which to them meant that I was just dumb and lazy. Throughout elementary and high school when I came here I could just be me. But that changed when I got into University. Having educators tell me that I need to do better than anyone els in my class, and I need to excel more just because I am mixed and might have people look up to me in the future. What I never understood is why dose my ethnicity matter when it comes to being a student, how come I am being judged and held to higher standards just because of where I am from?. The reality is, getting told what I am or should be just because of my ethnicity is draining, dehumanizing, and simply sad in many ways; because while others have the opportunity to just be, I am getting robbed of being me. One of my biggest goals as a future educator is to get rid of the stigma that ones ethnicity defines how they should be, because every child deserved the right and the opportunity to be who they want to be without any expectations.
I have build a great love for plants, fashion, music, photography, travelling, watching sun sets, learning about new cultures and religions, trying out new restaurants/ cafes.