7/10: Pecha Kucha

The link to my Pecha Kucha on engaging students with culturally-responsive teaching can be found here. 

When I started my undergraduate degree at Bucknell University, I wanted to study literature and psychology. But when I went to register for my first semester of classes, all of the psychology classes were full. In a desperate attempt to learn something about psychology, I registered for a class called Educational Psychology. Because the course was within the Education Department, I figured I might as well see what other classes the department had to offer. And thus, the following semester, I found myself registering for a course called Social Foundations of Education. Before the course started hardly knew what to expect. What’s social about education? It wasn’t like I was going to be a teacher anyway, I just loved school and wanted to learn how it worked. Needless to say, that class changed me in a million ways. It opened my eyes to the vast inequities that exist within our country’s public school system and set me on a path to become a teacher. 

Social Foundations of Education made me furious. That class and the ideas we talked about consumed my entire semester, and I knew I needed to be a part of changing the system that hurt and disadvantaged so many of our kids. I didn’t even know what privilege was before that class, let alone that I had (almost) all of it. I knew I needed to teach in a community that needed me: how else would I help change a broken system? Just as Sinek describes as the core of his Golden Circle, I knew I had found my "why."

Fast-forward to my senior year: student teaching at the local high school, where I taught eleventh- and twelfth grade ELA (AP Language & Composition and an elective course, to be more specific). The experience was entirely overwhelming. I had a great support team and cooperating teacher, and there were some days when I felt competent, but for the most part, I felt like I was experimenting with those students’ education. They were my guinea pigs and their learning would suffer because of me. What did I know about teaching? I was still a student myself. After one exhausting day, completely overwhelmed with this incredible truth, I cried to one of the professors I respected most. In response to my stress, she gave me some of the best advice about teaching I’ve ever received. She told me to be calm, that teaching was a two-way street. Just as I give and take from the student, the student gives and takes from me. “Haven’t you ever had a bad teacher? Didn’t you still learn? Being a surgeon, for example, is most definitely not a two-way street. The surgeon has to be perfect, because the patient is completely passive in the whole ordeal. Students are not passive. You’re learning. Be patient.”

As so I was, and shortly after I graduated with a B.A. in Literary Studies and my secondary education certification. My next stop was San Francisco, where I worked with an organization called 826 Valencia as a creative writing teacher at a summer camp in an underserved community within the city. The students I met lived and went to school in exactly the type of community I wanted to work with: bright, energetic, but systematically disadvantaged. My experience in the Mission District of SF taught me a lot about checking my privilege and being a more culturally-responsive teacher. I brought those ideas with me to DelSesto Middle School, where I now find myself, and try to be as culturally responsible and responsive as possible. However, this past year, I found that the curriculum proved pretty inflexible, and there were many instances in which I thought of ways to adapt lessons but was told I could not. With such an inflexible curriculum, it was no wonder teachers gave up on adapting it.

We read texts in class that were inaccessible and alienating to many of our students: The Giver, The Crucible, and many of the required poems from the poetry unit among them. Who was writing these unit plans? They certainly weren’t writing them for my kids. Wesch teaches us that in order for learning to happen, lessons and assignments need to be engaging. Relevant, significant work is what will allow our students to become critical thinkers, asking questions that help them grow and learn. I want to make learning English and learning to read critically and write well fun, relevant, and engaging so that they can gain the education they need to escape the cycle of poverty, gang violence, and crime I learned about in Social Foundations of Education. If I make my classrooms bilingual, incorporate culturally-responsive texts, current events, and games in my lessons, I can make the content valuable to them. We're all "digital natives," as Boyd would describe us, which will make integrating these resources a lot more seamless. This is my goal as I move forward into the next school year, and I am determined to make these changes for them so that they understand the importance of their education and learn to make the most of it.

I cannot sit back and fail my level one ELLs because they can’t read The Crucible in English. There is still so much injustice in this country, which reminds me of how much I need to continue to work for the kids who are a product of that injustice. They are intrinsically motivated in many ways for many reasons; as Wesch reminds us, I need to figure out what engages them so that I can give them opportunities to be a part of those topics. I believe students learn best when they feel valued and safe, I believe students need to find content relevant and valuable so that they can become critical thinkers, and I believe it is my responsibility as their teacher to create a classroom and a curriculum for them that do just that.