Final Narrative & Pecha Kucha

My first year of teaching amidst COVID has been quite the eye opener. I entered the school year excited for new possibilities and brimming with beliefs about education ready to be put into action. All summer I had spent training with Teach for America to empower students and be the best educator I could be! But as the year began and the pandemic raged both within and outside of my seventh grade classroom, one by one the lofty ideas I had for myself and my students were changed. We the teachers moved from class to class acting as invaders to whatever organization was already established. Students were six feet apart, unable to do group work or see their friends in other pods (Providence, Rhode Island stayed open the entire 2020-2021 school year, leading to a multitude of issues). However, the curriculum was the center of every staff discussion. How will they get through all the material? How will we ever catch up? How will we keep up standardized test scores? To use the ideas of Simon Sinek and his Golden Circle theory, we were focusing on the “what” of education, not the “why.” 

My ‘why’ starting the school year centered around my experiences mentoring girls in the Cleveland Metro School District’s Big Brothers Big Sisters program. I saw the inequities between their education versus the education students less than one mile away were receiving in the city. My little sister opened my eyes to the glaring issues our system of public education has, and motivated me to begin working towards being an educator myself. You’ll notice that my why then had nothing to do with what instructional methods I use, or what my specific role as an educator in the field of science entails. My initial ‘why’ rests in pure instinct that I knew I could make a difference in education and that I would do everything in my power to do just that. 

Now, my ‘why’ I teach statement could be many things. I teach because I want my students to feel valued and seen in the school building. I teach because I know every student deserves a great education. I teach because I value what I can learn from young people. Or even, I teach because I want to make a difference doing something meaningful. But why I really teach, is because I love my students. 

My students deserve an education that as Sir Ken Robinson puts it, is grounded in their collective diversity, curiosity, and creativity. Each individual student brings something unique and important to the classroom and deserves to feel this importance and relevance in the school building. I believe that students learn best when they feel that their identities are acknowledged and valued in the classroom. 

But, with COVID-19 we have all been left feeling a little isolated. Every day as I look at my students navigating middle school and see them turning to technology to connect with other people, I feel as though they are missing out on so much and that I am failing them as their teacher. How can I implement my ‘I believe’ statement, when Turkle’s notions of alone but together clearly hold true? Our constant relationship with technology has facilitated an ability to be in contact with each other like never before, and yet, feel completely isolated at the same time. This is our kids’ reality, their virtual community, and we cannot ignore it. Instead, looking forward to the next school year, we should work on building up their in person classroom communities too! 

What I know to be true about my students is that by the end of the year with each other in the same pod, in the same room, all day, every other day, they were comfortable with each other, and I mean comfy! They had group chats, Instagram DM chains, followed each other on Snapchat, and had all been in each other’s Tik Toks -- heck they almost got me to be in one! They had made their own social media based community. But what I came to find out was that these communities were only surface level. 

On the last day of school this year, one of my students came up to me to tell me that her ‘best friend’ at school, someone who she had spent every in person day with since September, would not hang out with her during the summer because she was not good for her social media image. My student qualified this statement saying: “It’s okay miss, she doesn’t really know me or my life outside of school anyways.” 

This is what is missing from my classroom communities: a sense of who each other are when we leave the school building. Who are Fallou, Jael, or Ambar when they go home? What systems help them succeed or fail? How do their primary identities inform how they act and how others interact with them? This lack of true deep connection is what I need to change in my classroom. This need to build community, this is my change project.

The question is how? I have had discussions with my students at length about stereotypes in science, mostly to do with gender and race. I have made them draw their stereotypical thoughts of what a scientist looks like, and then draw themselves as scientists. For Black History Month I had every student research a famous black scientist and create a presentation to give to the class on this famous black scientist. In each instance, though we discussed the importance of the work they were doing there was still a disconnect. So I began to talk about important scientists who were from minority communities as they pertained to space and physics, but still there was a lack of real understanding behind these lessons. I just know that I could be doing so much more, with so much more intentionality behind the learning. 

When thinking about how I want to implement anti-racism teaching I want to be careful to let the students have freedom to explore these topics themselves and take learning into their own hands. So, following the unit on genetics which wraps up in October, I will use the Fred Hutch mini-unit titled “Race, Racism, and Genetics” to guide my students through the realities of race and DNA, and the health disparities that arise through the belief that race is genetic. Every day will be discussion based, and will have a free write at the end of each class for students to reflect on learning inspired by the work of Lisa Espinosa and her seventh graders. 

The culmination of this learning will be a group podcast project where students seek out the intersections between race, identity, and science. They can focus on racism, sexual orientation, gender identity, or class, as long as they find how it relates to science along the way. My goal is for students to be able to explore different parts of their own identities and realize how they relate to science. The outcome will be a podcast, but the important part is the journey students take to creating this podcast. The students are in the driver's seat!

This past school year has forced me to move out of my techno-traditionalist comfort zone and into a techno-constructivist place of instruction, and this project poses an opportunity for students to do the same. Using the application Soundtrap, students will be able to explore how science is truly relevant to how society treats and perceives race and identity. Possible topics include how race and Covid relate, how social class relates to access to healthcare, how gender helps or hinders scientific careers, or they could look into a specific phenomenon like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I want to give students the opportunity to make their own connections between science, race, and identity because I know how important student driven learning is to real engagement in the classroom. With these projects, they will be teaching me as well as teaching their peers! They will be writing, speaking, listening to others, and reading research materials to include in their podcasts. My goal is to give the students a different type of immersive experience where they have more autonomy and a platform to be innovative on. To quote Wesch, my job is simply to “encourage students to join me on the quest.” 

By using a platform such as Soundtrap, students will be techno-constructivists who are living into the idea of being digital natives and creating rather than just consuming. Harkening back to Robinson, this project relies on a diversity of experience and thought, curiosity in the intersection of science and identity, and creativity in construction. Listening to these projects as a class will give us an insight into each group’s beliefs about how science and identity are connected, and will bring awareness to the various identities we all associate with. As students embark on this journey to discover the numerous connections between race, racism, and genetics I am left in Sugata Mitra’s role of the grandmother. I am there to ask probing questions, brag about their work to the community, listen intently to their podcasts, and watch proudly as my students take learning into their own hands. 

HERE is my self-assessment rubric.