Looking Deeper

I went on my community walk visiting my new teaching placement at National Teachers Academy and the surrounding community. Do to school work, I was unable to visit the location with the Masters of Teaching crew I have been placed with. To be honest, I was disappointed. I was looking forward to getting to know this new groups outside of my cohort. I saw my peers posting lively, happy pictures of themselves on Facebook, and beautiful pictures of the school building. 

My experience was different. I am thoroughly excited to be placed in the building of NTA. When visiting I can already see the great community effort happening. There was a summer camp happening with parent volunteers dishing out hot dogs and sides, and kids running around the gym. There are posters all around the area advertising local happenings, and upcoming after school programs. The actual school grounds are kept beautifully, and there are large spaces for kid activities.

 If you only view the building with that lens though, you completely miss out on what is happening in the area. Now, granted, I only had a two and half hour time period where I walked around but when I was filtering in this visual information compared to what I was reading about in my school statistics and information, I was a little perplexed. National Teachers Academy is located directly next to China Town. You walk underneath the Metra Bridge and you’re moments away from the square. My school population is made up of 91.5% African-American Students. In the time I spent, the only African American’s I saw were homeless people. In fact, just to the right of school there were five African American homeless people sleeping next to the school’s fence. 

When walking to the left of the school there are giant vacant lots of land and abandoned businesses. The school is lucky in that it is located directly in front of a giant park. The park though, is completely loaded with trash. It is like that in much of the surrounding neighborhood lots and sidewalks. When I exited the train stop, there was a large piece of graffiti that depicted four men. One was holding a gun, one was being hung, and the other were standing. In the corner of the picture said “See you around”. For me this was very powerful. The picture’s location was subtle, but gave off so much sadness and violence all at the same time. 

I did venture into the actual China Town and was blown away by the beauty and culture. I walked into many shops and restaurants experiencing the authentic Asian cultures. Particularly I was pumped to find an entire store dedicated to Sanrio’s Hello Kitty. Within the community I saw four different Christian or charter schools specific to Asian culture or the community. I guess I am wondering if that is where Asian students are choosing to send their students. I am looking forward to spending more time adventuring in the area. 

My point it all of this, is that we need to view our building’s culture further than what our building’s aesthetic or playground looks like. So in this instance, you have this beautiful school located with one side filled with China town and the other barren vacant lots. I believe there is much going on there than what meets the eye. When learning how to be culturally responsive teachers, we talked about how an individual’s culture is much like an iceberg, buried beneath the ocean. I believe not only is this same with individual culture, but also about the building as a whole. 

We watched the TED talk, A Single Story by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who explains it perfectly by saying “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” I want to start the year by understanding that we need to dig deeper, pay better attention and ask questions in order to not only understand the school building and community, but have a better idea of where our students are coming from with their own stories.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en

My Journey to Here

            The question “Why do you want to teach in an urban school?” has been asked to me so many times. By now if I do not have confident answer, I might as well hang it up and go home. My reasoning, I believe, will just be the foundation that I will keep building and reflecting on.

          In order to explain how I ended up here, I have to back track a bit and explain myself. I am the oldest child of a two parent, six kid household.  My mom is a stay at home mom, and my dad a UPS driver. Overall though, we lived the basic middle class situation of living pay check to pay check. I grew up in house set in the middle of a 16 acre wooded lot, and my village growing up, only had about five hundred residents. In terms of diversity, the most you could ever expect was the handful of Hispanic exchange students we would get each year in our high school. Otherwise, general attitudes and sharp stereotypes believed by village residents discouraged any possible chance of diversity.

 For my entire life I have always wanted to be some sort of teacher. I spent many days bossing around my youngest siblings, making them do different activities and outdoor tasks. My parents took us to the library each week, and encouraged us in our individual interests. In my elementary years, I was in love with my teachers. I was the kid who cried on the last day of school.

Fast forwarding a decade found me at Grand Valley State University, smack dab in the bible belt of West Michigan. I was in a state of transition. For personal reasons I had just bailed out of the music education program, switching into language arts, and was in a bit of a mental funk. I was ready for change. My drive to teach in an urban school came that year in Susan Carson’s Cultural Education course. That class sparked a bit of magic for me. Dr. Carson’s class took place in the library of Coit Creative Arts Elementary, an urban Grand Rapid’s Public School. The school had nearly an all-black population, with a low socio-economic status. Here we worked with students twice a week doing math and reading tutoring. We also worked with members of the community completing service projects like local food trucks, and student outings. Between our experiences within the school, Dr. Carson’s personal stories of teaching in severely impoverished areas, and serious class discussion, I begin to view education with a whole new perspective and as a whole different purpose.

 We learned from reading LisaDelpitt about how to be a warm demander, meaning that we need to hold our students to high expectations and standards, while also caring and encouraging our students to bring out the best potential.

* A great Lisa Delpitt read* 

http://www.amazon.com/Multiplication-Is-White-People-Expectations/dp/1595588981

 I learned how a neighborhood school works, and how important it is to create strong relationships with community members and outside resources. I began understand the value of relationships in education, and how understanding others’ perspectives can evoke the best solutions for our students. I learned how developing a strong classroom community can make or break your teaching year. I saw poverty through a new lens. I thought I grew up struggling, but I felt like an idiot when I began to process that there is a huge difference in not being able to afford mall style clothes, shopping at Save-a-lots, not having second car or soccer camp, and worrying about the next time you would eat during the week. I had, and still have, so much to learn about the different components of poverty and systematic inequalities. I began to examine my own bias, and although I personally think I am one of the most open minded thinkers to come out of my small town, the reality is we do not always see what is embedded deep down within.  What these students struggle with every day is something that I can only try to understand and do my best to help them reach their fullest potential. These experiences changed me forever. After that I knew there was no way I could accept the idea of teaching in a suburban or close minded classroom. I found my passion for teaching in urban in education.           

That still does not answer how I ended up in the AUSL residency. When my class with Dr. Carlson ended, I spent much time working with the at-risk, particularly Hispanic, urban population of Grand Rapids. This past year, bring me to my application to AUSL. Last year I worked as a behavioral interventionist for Parkview Elementary, the highest at risk/behaviorally challenged elementary school in our district. My job was essentially a cheaper knock off of a second social worker for my building. I was qualified because at the time I was obtaining my Masters in Special Education with an emphasis in Behavioral Disorders. Through the high-highs and low-lows, I loved my job immensely. A handful things kept eating at me.

. In our district we were seeing changes in our school population. With each year our ELL population keeps rising, along with the poverty level and need for outside student services also matching that trend. Teachers are doing their best to keep up, but the education and burn out rate is also matching that rise. My building has truly dedicated teachers, but the handful of teachers who had the clock in-clock out mentality, dragged our school down. Teachers did not have the strategies, and often energy, to try different things to reach students. Sometimes there was not even enough momentum to share ideas on what was working within the staff.

While working, I was in school full time. My hope, along with learning how to teach diverse learners, was that I would be receiving teaching that was specific to urban education. That these “expertise” professors of the field would be able to help fill in these knowledge gaps of what to do differently. I found overall this was not the case. My behavior disorder professor, Mark King was wonderful. He gave fantastic strategies, and stories of experience, discussed the importance of building relationships, and most importantly not being afraid to fail and pull yourself up and try again. My other class content though was not reaching my needs. I would ask questions about issues in my building, and they could not answer my questions. Everything was based off of the perfect white suburban classroom. I would have class days where tech materials, culturally biased texts, and classroom strategies were presented by the professor. In my district these would not work because of lack of funds, resources, space etc. When I would ask for ideas on how to differentiate these to a setting similar to my building I would either get an eye roll, or a brush off conversation. I hit early winter and I was angry. I was sick of the lack of motivation make change, and university education that could not keep up with the surrounding population or provide me with needed answers.

 That is how I ended up in my AUSL residency. I found it attractive in that it had a master’s program specifically with the content I have so badly sought after, while also giving us the hands on experiences from a turn around school.

In my last little bit I want to wrap up with the challenges I think I will face. I first and foremost know in my head I will nag myself wondering if I made the right decision to be in a program that is so data driven. Many of the strategies we are being taught are almost identical to behavior management in my behavior disorder program. I will face the challenge of going down that rabbit hole in my head of whether I think it is fantastic because I know these approaches work with behavioral challenged kids, or whether I should be unsure about that used as a whole based approach With poverty and culture being so multifaceted, I think every school will have different kinds of problems. I am excited to be able to learn from my peers who will face different and similar challenges that I will. I think a challenge will be to keep my bias in check, as well as building trust with my students and staff.  Above all, especially being in a program like AUSL, I think we will be challenged to prove we are not the white knight wannabe trying to save the day, but teachers who truly are devoted to making a difference in education.