I don’t want to be a social justice teacher, I just want to be a teacher.
Those were some of the first words I said to my classmates. Section 27953 of EDUC 671: Context for Educational Equity, Access and Agency met for the first time was exactly one week before my 30th birthday.
I turned 30 the day of our class’ second meeting. By the end of that class, my mentality had shifted and my naiveté was obvious.
After this semester as student in USC Rossier School of Education’s Master of the Arts in Teaching program I have come to consider those words the foundation of my growth and consciousness.
What follows are several moments over the course of the semester that have been crucial moments of change, growth, reflection, and realization for me personally and professionally that (I hope) have prepared me for my student teaching.
I’m still naive by the way. Now I can cite why.
Go ahead white man, tell us of your suffering…
When I sat down to write my first Grad. School essay, an Auto-ethnography, I realized that white men have a new brand of code switching. The switch is initiated in conversations involving equity, orientation, race, or gender. During such conversations, white men quickly turn inwards in search of shareable and relatable flaws - something, anything - that allows us to say “Hey, I’m a minority too!”
By engaging in critical cultural story telling, listening, and discussing, teachers can normalize empathetic communication in the classroom. (Camangian, 2010)
Within this context, I am lucky - I actually am a minority!
I’m a Ukrainian born Jewish immigrant. My family and I were eagerly embraced by Mother Liberty - as seen in the front page editorial announcing my (adorable) arrival to the quintessentially American sounding Midwest city of Springfield, Illinois.
Auto-ethnography is a method of learning about and understanding lived experience in order to benefit self, society, community, and culture (Camangian, 2010)
My facetiousness gave way to consternation at the realization of my privilege. How many immigrants aren’t afforded the same opportunity as me and my family? Further, how many American born people of color aren’t afforded the same opportunity?
Again, within this context, I am ‘lucky’ enough to have been made aware.
I titled my auto-ethnography: ‘Privileged Marginalization’.
“After years of my own internal socio-cultural wandering, I hope to foster a community of caring that allows students to fluidly explore a wide variety of perspectives on history and social sciences as they construct and identify their own opinions and identities. I consider it my duty to share the American dream so generously bestowed upon my family. I aim to build agency in my students to identify and address the inequities they may or may not experience in their daily lives; to envision and strive to accomplish their own version of their American dream.”
Facilitating Cultural Exploration through Group Investigation
“I’m looking for Latin heroes and Latin contributions, and I’m looking from cover to cover and there’s nothing about us, nada culo, d***,” he says while flipping through the pages of his son’s textbook. “Not one chapter, not a mention, not a single g*******d name — like we were absent all these centuries.”
Latinxs are woefully underrepresented in textbooks and public school curriculum. In my group investigation (GI) lesson plan in 670: Introduction to Curriculum and Pedagogy in Urban Schools I aimed to facilitate cultural exploration with the study of The Aztec Sun Stone. In the activity, students are presented with the image to the right. Students ask questions and pursue their own interests in small-group research.
As summative assessment for the lesson, students work in groups to create a museum caption for the artifact based on and cited with their research.
It was my goal to to provide an opportunity for Latinx students to find and explore the incredibly rich history of their ancestry.
The subject matter alone is a tacit attempt at cultural relevancy. However, when used in context of the Group Investigation model, the Aztec Sun Stone serves as a mere jumping off point for each student's’ intrigue to find their own path of curios engagement.
One of the main reasons that I want to be a history teacher is my insatiable curiosity. Each and every student has a story to tell from their own history. I hope to inspire the same discovery that John Leguizamo summed up in his son’s middle school graduation speech:
Leguizamo says, imitating his son Buddy. “But the biggest thing that I learned this past year while I was failing out of school was one thing my fellow classmates said to me: ‘You’re the king of nothing.’ But if the Mayans invented the concept of zero, then nothing is not nothing. If they can make something out of nothing, then my hero is me.”
How do I know that I’m teaching?
I know I can talk. At this point in the semester, so do you. What has changed over the course of the semester is my ability to measure if my talking - dare I substitute talking for teaching - is effective. Even as I gained real intention behind my teaching through studying theory and writing lessons plans, my biggest concern was how to measure my efficacy.
I never thought I would be writing these words: the reading that spoke to me most this semester was about tests.
Chapter 7 of Teaching to Change the World’s title grabbed me, "Measuring What Matters.” In this chapter Oakes et. al. discuss the history, methods, and implications of assessment.
“Assessment is an important part of the science, craft, and art of teaching. It is also a politically charged topic that is subject to the interests and biases of the larger culture.”
““Intelligence” is an abstract idea cemented in popular understanding, and it can’t easily shake off the myths and baggage of past centuries.”
“When teachers ask students questions like, “What do you think of that?,” “What will you do next?,” “Why did you do it that way?,” and “How did you figure that out?,” teachers get as close as they can to the heart of students’ learning. ”
Everything really came together for me when this was combined with unit 3 in 671 on assessment. As my SDG group was tasked with presenting on the unit, we were also required to become experts in the content by proxy. I’m particularly proud of our presentation on unit 3 regarding assessment.
Translating a lifetime of creative work into differentiation.
“A teacher who seeks answers to them is something like a jazz musician. The teacher uses many elements and approaches—sometimes planned and sometimes improvisational—to convey the message of the melody. It takes practice to be a good jazz musician. From the practice grows knowledge of music theory, a good ear for what is going on around the musician, a sense of timing, sensitivity to the meanings of the music, a tolerance for ambiguity, and creativity. The jazz musician never loses the melody but expresses it in many ways.”
I’m completely new to education. I’ve spent most of my life working with film and video as a creative storyteller.
April 13th, 2016 was the day that my entire life changed. A few weeks prior, aerospace company SpaceX had successfully landed the first stage their Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. This was a historic and game-changing moment for aerospace engineering with the first practical and reusable rocket. SpaceX had managed to accomplish this feat, from design to conception, in less than 4 years - a true testament to human ingenuity. It was a story that needed to be told. Over the course of a week I spent dawn to dusk compiling, editing, and annotating the Story of the Falcon 9 Rocket. I was incredibly proud of the work. As I left for a 3 week long vacation, I posted it on YouTube and tweeted out on twitter, tagging Elon Musk, the eccentric founder of SpaceX (and Tesla). The video is 4 minutes long. 5 minutes after posting the tweet, Elon Musk retweeted it.
To this day the video has amassed 1.1 million views. This was my first inspiration for becoming a teacher.
“I believe that I was able to distill rocket science into a relatable, evocative, and educational story.”
Between my creative experience and a lifetime of translating for relatives, differentiating for language instruction felt second nature to me. Over the course of study in 672: Integrated Language Development Across Curriculum, I gained countless strategies and theoretical frameworks for differentiation. I hope to further my knowledge of differentiation by pursuing a Certificate of Gifted Education later in my studies at USC. For our final project, I was grouped with fellow secondary social science teachers to create an Integrated ELD Lesson Plan. In it, we highlight many examples of differentiated instruction built into the original lesson plan (a Gradual Release of Responsibility lesson I created for 670) and add several specifically designed elements, such as a supplemental sentence frame and keyword hand for English Learners. For the individual portion of the assignment, I added differentiated instruction for a higher English language proficiency. Click here to read the integrated ELD lesson plan.
Classroom Management: Differentiation in Socratic Seminar
“Socrates had no school and did not even regard
himself as a teacher. He did not lecture, and in fact distrusted speeches or
lectures, for they sailed too far and fast on rhetoric and evaded the closer
scrutiny of their cargo of ideas.”
The third model of teaching that we studied in my 670 class was Socratic Seminar. Late into the semester, I immediately recognized the potential for differentiated instruction and assessment, both formative and summative. In this lesson plan students will be placed in a fish bowl orientation – speakers in the middle surrounded by coaches in the following roles: comment counter, academic transition tracker, quote tracker, and minutes keeper. During half-time, big board students go over big ideas and points in the discussion thus far and each type of coach gives a brief comment about the discussion. The speakers will then be instructed to spend a few minutes with a group of coaches (at least one of each kind). Coaches will offer constructive feedback to the speakers.
This model engages a wide variety of students in differentiated tasks. My intention would be to repeat such a seminar to study text several times over the semester, giving each student an opportunity to take part in each role, building a multitude of creative, social, and thinking skills.