The flatlands of Oakland — where most of my students live — have often been described as a war zone. Nearly every student of mine has lost at least one family member, classmate or friend to gun violence. My students face discrimination for their race, gender, country of origin, religion, immigration status, and usually a combination of these. I have students who are refugees and immigrants from Yemen and Iraq, Burma and Vietnam, Guatemala and El Salvador. Additionally, because of the pervasiveness of gun violence, racism, poverty, and grief in our city, experts estimate that 30 percent or more of Oakland children suffer from PTSD, my immigrant students are now in a state of heightened uncertainty and fear with deportations on the rise. What’s more, my students belong to a generation that is increasingly suffering from tech addiction.

It’s not hard to see why I designed my Fund for Teachers fellowship around the need for more mindfulness, social-emotional learning and focus-building activities in our school. My two-week fellowship at the Penland School of Craft mixed the arts, writing, and mindfulness with an innovative movement program in the peaceful Blue Ridge Mountains. My time spent there also allowed me to build my own practice of slowing down to live more fully and intentionally so that I can help my students do the same.

Why Penland and not a more standard mindfulness program that attracts many Fund for Teachers Fellows? Why not Thailand or Japan? I was more interested in going to Penland because it combines mindfulness with the arts and writing. I also believe we need to build bridges between rural America and urban America, between a red state and a blue state. Another benefit of this particular workshop is the way Penland embraces the word “craft.” This was clear when I read the school director explain why his institution changed its name from “Penland School of Handicrafts” to “Penland School of Craft” in a recent blog post.

[minti_blockquote]”The word craft,”he wrote, “suggests process, skill, commitment, and perfected attention.” The director added that those values are what the school promotes for the world. “They suggest an ideal, not something specific.” Penland’s values are the same I hope to instill in my students. My time at the rural artist community helps me do that.[/minti_blockquote]

My days were spent immersed in a clay workshop and evenings I participated in “movement” courses. I also conducted field research by talking to artists and other educators about the creative process, even those who are in different workshops than mine. Most of my action research, however, took place in Catherine White’s “Woodfiring & the Expressive Hand” course. In that intensive course, I made all types of pottery and discussed the creative process. It is here that I experienced one of my most profound lessons. “That badness becomes part of your goodness,” was a quote from my teacher that I inscribed in the foot of a bowl that I’d apparently “ruined.” Instead of throwing it out, I looked at the unintended grooves and found a way to accentuate them because they looked like the Penland mountains. I want my teaching to evolve like my learning. I want to be more daring with my lessons, turning them into something good — even better — if they fail to go as expected. I want students to also learn this way.

Now, with distance learning, the way that my FFT fellowship helped me with mindfulness is even more important. I am partnering with several teachers to provide mindful literature lessons to my students. Just this week, we did a nice lesson on embodiment. We did a full body scan to focus our awareness on our own body. We then wrote poetry based on Elizabeth Acevedo’s poem “Afro-Latina” in which we explored how she came to love parts of her body and identity that originally caused her shame and learned to love her mixed heritage. The partnership with the ceramics teacher is on hold due to distance learning! However, I am using ceramics in my own life to continue to center myself so that I can be more present with my students.

This fellowship allowed me to be a “newcomer,” which is what my most recently enrolled students are called in my English Language Development class. I was a newcomer in the ceramics studio and to a special vocabulary that wood firers share. All but one of my classmates had had years of experience with clay. My teaching is consequently transformed because I felt the need to create safe spaces for students to question and make mistakes in an environment similar to the one I experienced on my fellowship. Lucy Morgan, who founded Penland in the 1920s, said this about her school: “I’ve never known a place where one experiences such a feeling of liberation, of a taking for granted that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process; of tolerant acceptance of people as they are, yet faith in their desire and ability to grow.” We must build similar environments for all learners, especially English learners.

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This was Lisa’s third FFT fellowship. With her first grant in 2008, Lisa traveled to Japan to research its high schools, teenagers and media; in 2015, she studied multiculturalism in Australia, New Zealand and Tonga, where she explored with a journalist Sydney’s minority populations with multimedia storytelling. You can read more about that experience here.

Lisa Shafer is passionate about delivering an equitable education to all students and giving them the opportunity to voice their opinions through journalism, debate and public speaking. Armed with a Master’s degree in journalism from the University of Michigan, Lisa currently teaches English at Skyline High School in Oakland, CA. Prior to that, she taught journalism at Oakland’s Media Academy of Fremont High School and worked as a professional journalist at several newspapers, including the Toledo Blade, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Contra Costa Times. She started teaching in 2001. 

 

Circles are a powerful metaphor for our Fund for Teachers learning experiences.  If you imagine a group of people standing in a circle, the shape itself is an equalizing force – no one person is in front or behind.  Instead, everyone stands on equal footing.  Fellows will take the lead, facilitating the circle and sharing practice.  Each Fellow is valued for the expertise they bring, and their presence is necessary to keep the circle whole.

In a recent survey, Fellows shared that engaging students (virtually, hybrid and even in person) is a top priority. This Circle is an opportunity to join other Fund for Teachers Fellows as you dig into student engagement and identify and test powerful strategies that can amplify your impact in your virtual classroom.  You will have the opportunity to define specific problems of practice and find solutions that work in your classroom.  Reflection, collaboration and risk taking will be integral elements of this professional learning experience.

This learning opportunity is free for Fellows in good standing who meet the following additional criteria:

1. Driven to find solutions to problems you are struggling with;
2. Willing to take risks and test possible solutions in your virtual classroom;
3. Seeking a collaborative learning experience that won’t include conference-style ‘sage on the stage’ lectures; and,
4. Can commit to actively engaging in all meetings (6-7:30 CT) on Zoom:

• • October 1
  • October 15
  • October 29
  • November 12
  • December 3
  • December 17

We are looking for Fellows experienced in virtual teaching/learning to lead this Circle. If you are interested in the opportunity, which comes with a stipend, email liza@fundforteachers.org.

Chris Toomey‘s school was implementing a new learning model called 21st Century Learning based on foundational principles called The 5 C’s: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, Critical Thinking, and Citizenship/Citizen of the World. The problem: His elementary students didn’t have the emotional and behavioral skills to pull it off. The school offered professional development about implementing 21st Century Learning, but not in equipping young students with skills needed to succeed with that model. He designed a Fund for Teachers grant to attend the Institute For Social and Emotional Learning summer program in San Mateo, CA, then complete coaching sessions on play-based strategies at Proponent of Play in Storrs, CT, to incorporate playfulness and social emotional learning (SEL) with students at Vinton Elementary in Mansfield Center, CT.

Chris’ fellowship goals were to:

• Research how Social and Emotional Competencies better prepare students for the Five C’s paradigm;
• Learn how to make SEL an underlying, cohesive component of the classroom experience; and,
• Discover how playfulness and play-based strategies help facilitate the teaching and learning of Social and Emotional Competencies.

“Our school had embarked on a journey to make SEL a more integral piece of our students’ school experience, but had only examined it at a macro level, or “from 30,000 feet,” said Chris, a 25-year teaching veteran. “The experiences of attending the IFSEL Summer Institute and working with Jeff at Proponent of Play (POP) provided me with many concrete, experiential activities to make SEL engaging and meaningful to my students.”

At the summer institute, Chris participated in workshops including Developmentally Appropriate SEL for Grades K-2; Peace Building, Conflict Resolution, and Play; Getting Kids Out In Nature; and Practices Promoting Self-Regulation and Resiliency. A side benefit was building an international cohort of teachers committed to equipping students with life skills supported by SEL. Afterwards, Chris had four one-on-one coaching sessions with Jeff Smithson, founder of Proponent of Play.

“My fellowship has equipped me to teach SEL actively and explicitly, rather than by simply talking about it or reading about it with my students,” said Chris. “It has also opened me up to take more risks myself, to put myself out there with my students, so they see me practicing and learning alongside of them. Through the process of active engagement followed by debriefing/reflection, my students will learn social and emotional competencies more deeply. I believe these competencies will stick with them.”

Chris’ second-graders now participate in daily experiential activities in SEL from from his fellowship at IFSEL and POP. The activities increase in complexity and challenge as the year progresses. The carry-over is that students recognize and manage their emotions independently, recognize emotions in their classmates and respond accordingly/appropriately, work more effectively in groups, and resolve conflicts with peers independently.

“Our students are being asked, more and more, to work collaboratively in a project-based model. To do this successfully, students – particularly young students like mine – need to have a strong foundation of Social and Emotional Competencies and skills,” said Chris. “Being able to focus specifically on these competencies/skills in an experiential and reflective approach equips them with the tools they need to be creative, flexible, and ultimately successful collaborators.”

Since we got married, we have spent our lives together working with children in our community, other communities and in our school. We are driven by our desire to make a difference in the lives of children. We met in Arizona and assisted with the Grandma/Grandpa Corp, which was a community based program to help children in need. We later helped indigenous kids both in Mexico and Guatemala. When we came back to Connecticut, we became active members at  our church and with Children’s Community School because they are driven by parental involvement and exist only because of community involvement. We are deeply passionate about developing social emotional skills, creating experiential learning curriculum and making community and family connections. Since reading about the SOS Children’s Village programs in Europe, we have wanted to learn more about how this works and how we can bring this back to our schools, so we designed a fellowship to observe social emotional/experiential learning and family strengthening programs in some of Austria and Italy’s SOS Children’s Villages and Reggio Emilia schools to replicate the proven social emotional learning practices in classrooms, small group instruction and community collaborations.

Our students are faced with difficult academic, social, and emotional demands daily.They lack coping skills and often require assistance to manage their stressors and difficult home life. SOS operates in 135 countries, making it possible to drive impact on key issues that are similar to our school district. In spite of the fact that all children in Europe have access to good quality, free education, those from families with lower incomes are less likely to succeed educationally. This inequality is reflected in the type of school they attend: about 80 percent of children living at risk of poverty go to a general secondary school and only 20 percent to a more academic secondary school. In addition, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, there are significant differences between the performance of children with a migrant background and that of native students. Poor educational achievement affects their chances of finding future employment. This is similar to our district. Our fellowship will help us learn techniques to apply social emotional skills, experiential learning, improve community involvement and better family collaboration.

SOS Children’s Villages has been supporting unaccompanied refugee children for over 15 years. In 2015, and in response to the refugee crisis, they provided individual care for children and young adults who arrived alone in Austria. They live in SOS families or are cared for in small group homes throughout the country. SOS Children’s Villages are very active in Austria, adapting its work to the needs of children and families. In addition to the SOS Children’s Villages, where children who have lost parental care can be looked after by the SOS mothers, there are a number of programs working with families and young people in the community. Young children can attend the SOS Kindergartens while their parents go to work or receive training. Family strengthening programs are an important component of the work carried out. We will tour, observe and meet with directors at SOS Villages in Imst and Vorarlberg, and Dornbirn/Vorarlberg, Austria; and Mantua, Ostuni and Rome, Italy. We will also stop in Reggio Emilio, Italy, where the Reggio Emilia approach to education was founded on the belief that every child is full of intelligence, curiosity and wonder. The basis for development in the early years is a child’s ability to use The Hundred Languages available to him or her. These hundred languages a child might use go beyond speech and include “languages” for expression such as drawing, music and dramatic play.

Our guiding questions for this fellowship are:

1. How can we apply what they are doing to meet the social and emotional needs of their students in our district?
2. What social emotional techniques, community involvement strategies and family collaboration ideas can we apply to our existing curriculum and supports?
3. What is the sustainability of the program they run in relation to student learning? And,
4. Does this sustainability equate to quantitative and qualitative data that demonstrates improvement in the school community?

Young students struggling with hardships is a familiar theme for Donnie. One of five children, his mother died in a car accident when he was 12 and he was raised by his grandparents. Read more about Donnie’s story and path to becoming a teacher here.

Social Emotional Learning includes instruction in recognizing and managing emotions, solving problems effectively, and establishing positive relationships with others. We believe family strengthening programs, community collaboration and experiential learning schools will give us the ability to develop programs at both the elementary and high school levels to dramatically elevate SEL across our district. For us, community collaboration will be key. We plan to forge partnerships with:

• The Women and Families Center which fosters empowerment for children and families
• Robyn’s House which provides short term housing to young people and assisting with independent living.
• Open DOHR which focuses on developing opportunities in human resources employment and training
  programs, and,
• Goodwin College nearby, which supports the Reggia philosophy.

We plan on having the high school students help teach some of the lesson plans and work collaboratively with Kindergartners across the district. We will differentiate based on grade level and areas of concern (absences, behaviors, referrals and overall school performance). Students meeting with success after completion of a developed plan will eventually be able to plan, implement and assist other students meet with success. When taught daily embedded social emotional learning skills, we believe students will be able to practice these skills in a
safe setting and feel confident applying them in the moment throughout their school day and at home. The students will also work with community partnerships to bring 6 to 8 week programs from Woman and Families and Goodwin College to our schools. School community will benefit by the discussions about developing a school wide curriculum to build and maintain social emotions skills and improved relationships. Authentic learning and problem solving will be acquired through collaboration with staff, parents and community partnerships.

Short term plans also include utilizing lessons from units taken from our districts new social emotional learning curriculum and the curriculum from Reggia Emilia and SOS schools to enhance student learning. Our ultimate long range goal is to collaborate with our home based school colleagues so that they understand that relationship building is something that can shape the school culture and climate.

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Teaching is Donnie Dupree‘s third career. After several years in the Army and several years in the technology field, he earned his teaching degree at the age of 35 and currently teaches kindergarten at Israel Putnam Elementary School. Mikki Dupree is a school psychologist at Orville H. Platt High School. They share the same philosophy that it is their job to teach and guide children to be successful in all areas of life.

In 2018, the team of Cynde Ciesla, Erika Gilbert & Monica Fitzgerald (Gillette Road Middle School – Cicero, NY) used their Fund for Teachers grant to attend the Model Schools Conference in Orlando, FL, to create an academic setting that is inclusive, focused on response to intervention, integrates standards-based learning, and provides students with social-emotional support. “One of my most important takes from the Model Schools Conference is the idea that culture drives everything, in the classroom, school, and district at large,” said Erika. “If students and teachers feel that they are welcomed, appreciated, and valued within the walls of their classroom and school, they will grow much more as learners and teachers.”

We reached out to this exemplary teacher team to get their tips for building relationships and community during such a different back-to-school season and we’re so appreciative of the learning they shared!

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We believe this year, more than ever, that the importance of building relationships needs to be at the forefront of all that we do in our schools.  Yes, content is equally necessary and we believe once students begin trusting the adults around them, the academics will fall into place.  We need to build relationships first.  Students have been out of school for a significant period of time and all will have different feelings about COVID-19, being out of school and away from teachers and friends. Here are some ways to start the year on a positive note whether remotely or fact to face:

Day to Day Conversations

We know that sometimes the best relationships are formed out of conversations we have with students as they enter the room or during our lessons.

Greet all Students

Greet students in the hallway, at the door, as they enter the classroom or in a virtual setting as they enter a zoom meeting/google meet up session. Saying students names allow for connections to be made.  It creates a personal connection.

Provide a sense of Safety and Hope

How we feel is contagious and if students see that we have hope it sends a positive message. Right now students have a range of feelings and need to share those feelings, but they also need to hear about HOPE.  Hope trumps fear.

Be Available

Let your students know that you are there for them – have a conversation with students about what they are feeling and why and share that you are there for them. It’s not always about an activity, but authentic conversations to really get to know students.

Sharing Time for Students

Start small!  Students share easier in partners or small groups at the beginning of the year.  This builds trust.  Then, as students feel safe, it’s easier to share in larger groups.   There is a level of trust that needs to be established to share in a large group around emotions and vulnerability.

Roses and Thorns

Share one rose (a positive/happy/exciting thing that either already has happened or that the student is anticipating). Share one thorn (something that was not pleasant, or that the student is worried/sad/nervous about or not looking forward to).  Prior to this activity, provide students with some time to reflect on their own.

Three Stars and a Wish

Students can write down three things that they are excited about and one wish for the future OR they can write down three things they are good at or like and one thing they would like to learn more about. This activity can be used in a variety of ways.

Mini Responses

Students can respond to a question or prompt individually and then partner up to share.

Feelings Share

Use emojis with feelings or a chart that has feelings that students can identify with. This will give teachers a glimpse into what the group is feeling and individual students.

Hopes and Dreams

Students write their hopes and dreams for the school year in class or within a google slide if students are learning in a virtual setting.

Surveys

Sometimes we think of surveys as a way to gather information at the beginning of the year, but what about a bell ringer question that students can answer and share throughout the year? This provides insights and allows peers the chance to get to know one another.  Virtually this could be accomplished by raising a hand to share or using an app such as MentiMeter or IdeaBoardz.

Mindfulness Activities

This will allow students to calm their mind and body. This has shown to reduce stress, improve well being and mental health.  A few examples are breathing exercises, body scan and guided meditation. Again, this can be used in the classroom or a virtual setting.

Anecdotal Notes

It’s often difficult to remember when a student shares a sport or favorite movie and jotting down some things may help plan for activities that are a match for students’ likes and it will also show those that you may not know much about. This would be a cue to gather more information.

10 by 2 Activity

Take the time to connect with 2 students a day for 10 minutes.  This time allows for better conversations and a system where you have the chance to catch up with each and every student.

Communication

With some schools remote only and some in a hybrid model it’s important to keep the doors of communication open.

This year things will be different and we have to get creative with how we connect with students in an ongoing way.  There are many ways to connect with students in school and connect remote students with the “live classroom”.  This can be accomplished in a variety of ways:

• Send notes, letters, cards and emails
• Make phone calls home for positives
• Newsletters once a week
• Create Videos (Tutorials or Screencastify) so students and parents/guardians can see you when teaching Asynchronously.

As we enter this school year we have to think about the needs of our students and meet them where they are at.  Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” During this time of uncertainty, our students will need our support more than ever. Building relationships in an ongoing manner is essential as we work through this extraordinary time together.

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P.S. We have stayed connected to the Senior Leaders at The Model Schools Conference (International Center for Leadership in Education ICLE) and they have coached us every step of the way.  We have expanded our Mentor Program [which they started after their fellowship] to the Junior High School.  In fact, they are meeting this week to get organized for the year and assign Mentors.  The best news yet, we received a grant for this coming school year to add materials for Mentors to use with Mentees as they build relationships.  It was funded through the North Syracuse Education Foundation (NSEF).  We are working on how it will look this year with COVID but happy nonetheless.  Our work from three years ago has expanded and continues!

 

HYGGE: ˈh(y)o͞oɡə,ˈho͝oɡə/noun/ a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture).

Danes’ battle the angst of isolation and environmental factors (i.e. long, dark winters) with “hygge” and FFT Fellows Meredith Hart and Leigh Cirasuolo (Haley Pilot School K-8 in Boston) believe the same technique could work for building community in the classroom. They designed a fellowship to explore how relationship building is consciously developed and cultivated in Denmark schools to promote balanced young people who are able to unplug, connect, and thrive socially, emotionally and academically. Their goal is to learn how teachers specifically teach empathy to create classroom community experiences that create student to student and student to teacher connections in order for them to become happier, healthier, and more successful students in a combined general/special education setting.

“Through research, we have learned that schools in Denmark have been utilizing practices that focus on empathy and relationship building for many years and have yielded individuals who consistently rate as some of the happiest worldwide,” said Leigh. “As long-time sixth grade teachers, we are acutely aware of how challenging the transition from fifth to sixth grade is and we feel this transition is an essential touchpoint in their development and thus one ripe to implement the Danish philosophies and routines.”

In their grant proposal, Leigh and Meredith acknowledged that Denmark has consistently ranked among the three happiest countries globally since 2012 (according to the UN’s World Happiness report) and that empathy education has been a required part of the Danish school curriculum since 1993. The teachers arranged to meet with school leaders implementing these strategies and also interview the students themselves. Meredith and Leigh are especially interested in the concept of Klassens tid (class time), which is the application of the Danish hygge (well-being) philosophy. Klassen tid lessons are aimed at creating student to student and student to teacher connections in the classroom that lead to more confident, self-reliant young people.

“Our goal from this fellowship is to merge our burgeoning student participation in Restorative Justice circles with what we learn about empathy education in Denmark. This fellowship will build our professional capacity for social-emotional instructional practices,” said Meredith. “We will learn to create schedules and classroom structures for community time that focus on student voice and agency around social-emotional development. Observing Danish Klassen tid lessons will prepare us to envision how we will put these intentional strategies into practice.”

The teachers have already obtained approval from administrators at Haley Pilot K-8 School to restructure the daily forty minute seminar block currently used for a variety of sixth grade activities to include components of hygge, such as helping students build connections and empathy with each other so that they are not as reliant on adult interventions.  The school has also committed to applying the hygge philosophy to address student stress stemming from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), Boston’s sixth grade exam that determines placement into selective programs and the transition to middle school. To involve families in the goal for increased social-emotional learning, Meredith and Leigh will run workshops on hygge philosophy and Klassens tid objectives at Curriculum Night and School Parent Council meetings.

“As our students transition from our sixth grade classroom to various seventh grades across the district, these lessons of empathy and social-emotional awareness will travel with them,” said the veteran co-teachers. “The broader community of Boston will benefit from our students who are better equipped to succeed socially and academically because of this fellowship.”

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Learn more about the Danish approach to education, as well as the hygge philosophy, from these resources:

• 4:52 min video | Scandinavian Hygge Lifestyle Taking The World By Storm
• NEA Today article | Hygge: The Classroom Design Word That Means Calm
• We Are Teachers blog post | 13 Ways to Bring Hygge to Your Classroom
• Education Week Teacher blog post | Why We Need Hygge Classrooms in America
• Article: Empathy? In Denmark, They’re Learning It In School
• MyMorningMet post| Schools in Denmark Have Mandatory Empathy Classes as Part of the Official Curriculum
  

Last summer, Jenn Nekolny and Christine Halblander (Jefferson Junio High School – Naperville, IL) used their Fund for Teachers grant to explore physical and societal divisions in historical and contemporary Poland, Czechia, Austria and Germany to supplement Social Studies and Language Arts curricula and enhance students’ interest in human rights, migration and refugees. To wind up our monthly focus on immigration, we checked back in with “Team Mending Fences” to see how their fellowship impacted students. 

Learn more about Jenn and Christine’s learning by reading their post-fellowship report here and accessing the Facebook page they made for students and families to follow.

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Our fellowship allowed us to look at forced movement of targeted groups in Krakow and Warsaw and the ghettos and camps that swallowed once peaceful lives. Museums and cultural centers in former East and West Germany allowed us to trace the lives of individuals and families. We then met today’s refugees and NGOs who work with them in Vienna and Berlin. Finally, we stayed with Jenn’s host parents and explored how small towns are welcoming asylum seekers.

It was very important for us to share our Fund for Teachers experiences with our students and school community. We were able to speak genuinely about the places we visited. When we shared our interviews and work with asylees, NGOs and individuals who are helping refugees, we spoke of them like they are true friends. Our students felt included in our FFT experience from the beginning; this enabled us to encourage even the most reluctant readers to read Refugee and create an Open House event for our community. 

Our Open House was a great success! Each character/ time period/ journey of the novel Refugee, had a room with student-driven projects, maps, activities, and a food item that represented the culture. We were even able to expand the learning with a graphic novel, Illegal, and mini research boards that gave a refugee. migrant, or internally displaced person a personalized story.

As guests entered the main entrance of our school, they were greeted by one of our School Board members who explained the reason for our event and the passport. As guests visited each of the four themed rooms, they earned a stamp in their passport for trying an activity, sampling a food item, or participating in a learning experience. After visiting all four rooms, completed passports were entered into a drawing to win gift cards to a local bookshop. Parents and kids had a great time with a little friendly competition to see who could earn their stamps!

To add to our theme of learning about refugees, we collected school supplies to be donated to our local World Relief organization. Binders, backpacks, pencils, notebooks and folders were dropped off by families attending our event and will be given to newly- arrived school-aged children who need them.

Our entrance lobby was full of activity! This is where guests picked up and dropped off their passports, and also where our 8th grade students held a bake sale. Families donated baked goods and student volunteers were there to receive them, price them, and tell people about BikeyGees, an NGO that teaches refugee (and other women) how to ride bikes in order for them to have more freedom. BikeyGees is located in Berlin, Germany, and we were fortunate to work with them on our fellowship. We had a large poster explaining their mission, including photos taken while volunteering there. It was important for students (and families) to see where their donations of effort, time and money were going.

Our lobby was also the location for our one-of-a-kind bracelets. Each bracelet had a hand-stamped message (like HOPE or JOURNEY or our school mascot, PATRIOTS) and hand-tied strings. Students worked during lunch periods to create them and then asked for donations and talked with guests about the mission of BikeyGees and what is being done to assist refugees and asylees in other parts of the world. 

Things were a little quieter in our focus rooms. Students spent weeks reading, discussing and organizing their work based on a character in the novel Refugee. Here are some scenes from Josef’s room (Nazi Germany, 1939). A poster asked “What’s in the family’s suitcase?” and the packed items chosen by students were labeled with detailed notes about a party dress that Josef’s mother might have worn, a Torah that Josef needed for his Bar Mitzvah, a stuffed bear for Josef’s little sister, Ruth, and a shawl for covering heads and shoulders for religious activities. Students practiced research and writing as they worked together on this, then guided guests in Josef’s journey. Staying in the heart of Kazimierz and visiting Auschwitz- Birkenau allowed us to discuss some of the connected historical events. Next to the suitcase, visitors use Post-its to write something they would take if they suddenly had to leave home.

Mahmoud’s room (Syria, 2015) welcomed visitors with a summary of his story and the “official” flag of Syria and “rebel” flag of Syria. Students explained the symbols on a poster and students sewed the flags with fabric and felt, guided by our Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS) teacher. Here, students and one of our EL teachers get the room ready for guests. Students designed the room as if guests were following Mahmoud’s journey on land and sea. Chapter highlights explained where he went and why with maps, photographs, and research. The tension of his journey built as each station was reached by visitors. Students learned how to make hummus in their FACS classes and paired it with vegetables for guests to enjoy. Each plate is divided into fourths, with the name of each country written on one fourth of the plate. This helped us to cut down on waste and allowed guests to start in any room and travel “around the world” with their plates and passports.

We met several Syrian refugees on our fellowship–a car mechanic, a dentist, a student, a mother–all had such a love for their country and a desire to help others. We were able to show students that a country might have issues with politics and war, but the individuals each have a story that isn’t what’s portrayed on the news.

In Isabel’s room (Cuba, 1994), students wanted to mimic the sights, sounds and tastes of Cuba so guests would feel a little of the island on our cold February Open House night. There was a selfie station with a “wet foot/ dry foot” beach theme to represent Isabel’s goal of taking the boat to “El Norte” (the United States). Students used bright colors as a tablecloth for the pineapple and mango skewers dusted with Tajin fruit spice. They did a great job encouraging people to try the Tajin! Our population of families from Mexico and the Caribbean were happy to taste something familiar to their culture.

The entry to Isabel’s room included a game of chance (after all, that’s what we saw over and over in our fellowship) that directed guests to different experiences, including a station with QR codes that linked to videos that taught the rhythm of the clave. Our music teachers worked with students to create short videos at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels and provided the clave percussion instruments to try. 

To enhance our learning, we added the graphic novel Illegal, by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin. Families were introduced to the story of Ebo, a Ghanian boy who leaves his village in search of his brother and sister, who had led before him. Ebo must travel by land and sea, across lonely deserts and through huge cities, always alone. The people he meets along his journey help to guide him as he learns about his own strength. We were able to connect the idea of the “helpers” in his fiction story with what we had learned from Mohammad, Bahar, Tarik and Mo, asylum seekers we had met in Vienna, Berlin, Puchenstuben, and Leipzig. As students read Ebo’s story in Language Arts, we were also talking about cocoa farming and labor practices in Social Studies. As we researched, students found that the Lindt chocolate company had made significant changes to their practices and their cocoa harvesting. Because of this, students chose Lindt chocolate as the snack to represent Ghana (and families were very happy to have this sweet treat at the end of their passport tours through the rooms!).

In addition to reading the novels, students had a unique opportunity to design a complete experience for our Open House guests. From designing the room layouts to determining who would greet guests, explain stops in the rooms, and take care of set up and clean up, students worked together to create something to be proud of! Originally, we had planned to work with 7th grade Language Arts and our EL teachers and students, but as our project was building, many other staff and students became part of the event. Our FACS teacher worked with students to design and sew the Syrian flags and to make the hummus, our band and chorus teachers volunteered to teach students the clave rhythm and how to use the percussion instruments, our library staff offered a selection of books that went along with our theme and 8th grade students provided book reviews to encourage others to read them, the families of our 8th graders made goodies to be sold at the bake sale, a School Board member volunteered to work with World Relief to collect school items and greet guests in the lobby, and countless others offered support to our students for our event.

In Social Studies, students selected a photo from #everydayrefugees and did further research on the reasons why that particular person or group would flee their country. They then added an enhanced caption and a map to show the refugee as an individual and not just a statistic. Students in our Dual Language Spanish classes practiced their reading and writing in the target language of Spanish with the same activity.                

The 8th grade students read connected fiction books and wrote reviews of them to encourage further reading. These were the students who helped with the idea of our fellowship last year as 7th graders; it was very special to have them as part of the Open House, too.

FFT granted us the opportunity to be students and explore the world in a unique way together. We asked a question and designed a plan to answer it. We wondered and through the journey learned about a global challenge and what other countries are doing to help. Our professional perspective changed because we are a team committed to creating a welcoming school community where we model and teach others to open our minds and hearts to the world and all it has to offer.

Her American name is Kim Elizabeth DeMarco. The name given by her Vietnamese mother and American father, a soldier, is Hoang Thi Thanh. Nuns who found her as an infant covered with mud and hay in a bombed village named her Marie Noel. On her Fund for Teachers fellowship, Kim returned to Vietnam with teammate Amanda Miser to research personal histories and genetic blueprints while experiencing the culture, history and schools across Vietnam to bridge the gap between students of diverse cultures and encourage a celebration of difference while enhancing discourse.

On the website created for students at Franklin H. Mayberry Elementary School in East Hartford, CT, Kim shares her harrowing adoption story.

“Sister Marie Angela brought me to the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Da Nang, which was run by an organization called Friends of Vietnam and where American doctors and French nuns took care of me. Sister Mari Angela was in constant communication with my soon to be adopted parents [in Fairfield, CT]. When the communists came up north, the orphanage had to be quickly abandoned. My soon to be adopted parents thought they had lost me, since there was no contact with the nuns for months. I was supposed to come to the United States at the age of three months old, I was now going onto the age of one and a half and still in Vietnam.

…The nuns moved me from Sacred Heart Orphanage to Kim-Long Orphanage, then to another orphanage called AM Nursery. From there I was moved again to Allambie Orphanage in Ho Chi Mingh City (Saigon). I stayed there until it was my time to depart to the states. I was one of the last planes to leave from Saigon before the war became really bad. I was escorted from Vietnam by Frank and Evelyn Zember. I first flew to France with the other orphans and then on to the United States and JFK airport.

It took a very long time to assimilate into a new country and family. I cried all of the time and did not know how to speak any English. My parents did not know what to feed me and, therefore, fed me rice and then gradually fed me American food. My adopted mom would tell me stories about how she would find food hidden in my crib, and how she would constantly try to explain to me how there always will be food for me. I would eat off of everyone else’s plates even every last morsel. Having an abundant amount of food was very rare for me. I had many fears such as starvation, sleeping in the dark and staying in a crib. When I would hear the sound of thunder I would scream and cry, which my parents believes was a reminder of the war.”

Read Kim’s entire account here.

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On their fellowship Kim and Amanda visited the Allambie Orphanage where Kim lived for one year. Warmly welcomed by the orphanage’s founder, Suzanne, the teachers spent the night with the children, who left a lasting mark on Kim’s heart. They shared about the emotional day on their blog:

“Suzanne had a whole day planned for us…from lunch to dropping us at the Vietnam War Memorial to finally visiting the orphanage we’ve waited months to see with this woman who Kim has so many connections to.

Visiting the Memorial was unexpected. Suzanne strongly recommended we go here so we could understand more about the circumstances surrounding Kim’s birth. Bottom line: Kim is lucky to be alive…she is lucky that her life turned out the way that it did. So many children died in the Vietnam war. Just because they were children didn’t mean that their lives were spared. This made it that much harder to realize that Kim was a child of war. Who knows what could have happened to her. So much happened during the Vietnam war and I don’t think Kim nor I had a handle on what the American relationship with Vietnam was during the war.

The end of the night was the best. We got an opportunity to spend the night with the children of the orphanage. Kim and I used rice paper to make our own spring rolls, sat with a family that shows more love that we have ever seen, and played a new card game that Americans wouldn’t understand. Immediately we felt a part of this home… we wished we could stay longer when we left. The children embraced us. The night was full of laughter and games and culture.

The orphanage is a home we couldn’t imagine experiencing. Suzanne, the founder, is an amazing influence in the lives of these children. As teachers, one can only hope a child loves them this much outside of their biological parents. Kim cried leaving. The kids told her this was a “see you later,” not a “goodbye.” They are one of the biggest reasons we are here and cannot wait to share [the experience] with our students.”

This fall, both Kim and Amanda will lead students’ personal research projects modeled after this fellowship.

“We will use this fellowship to inspire our students to have a strong sense of self and to celebrate and appreciate different cultures, religions and customs of others,” wrote Amanda and Kim in their grant proposal. “Through this research, students will understand their heritage through geography units; we will also embed a heritage lesson for students to understand how heritage shapes who we are.”

Additionally, the teachers plan to continue student fundraising efforts begun last year to benefit the Allambie Orphanage, and instigate pen pal relationships between children living there and students. For a community-wide multi-cultural night, families will be invited to share traditions and food from their cultures.

“Heritage is important,” said Kim, “because it is the basis for who we are, the choices that we make and the connections we have with other people. Together in the classroom, we will focus on my cultural background as a lens to understand the diverse backgrounds of each other.”

Follow their fellowship on the Facebook page created for their students and their complete fellowship report here.

On the final day of their fellowship, Alice Laramore and Kat Atkins-Pattenson shared with us their reflection on a four-week, 9,000 mile road trip along the United States/Mexico border exploring language arts, visual arts, immigration and identity. Thank you, Team Paredes Que Hablan (or Walls That Speak) for sharing your experiences and hope for future students.

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Our students cross borders every day. They switch from home language to school language and back again.Their warm presence, giggles, and questions invite new families inside our school buildings. And, everywhere they go, our students carry the imprint of their family members who came to Boston for refuge, for freedom, for opportunity. Every time these young people change spaces, they reconcile their identities and pasts with their presents and futures.

We know that for students to truly succeed academically, they must see mirrors of themselves in our curricula – art, media, and text – and validation of their identities in our classroom spaces. While we can empathize with our students, as white female teachers, we do not truly understand the depth of our students’ experiences. To effectively understand our students’ experiences, we need to cross borders ourselves and experience the displacement our students have experienced traversing these borders.

Today, the last day of our trip, we are energized by the Borders and Identity Unit that we have built and will use to launch the year with our students. We are flooded with all that we’ve seen in our seven cities. We are entrenched in the creative part of teaching, the part that involves being an interesting, engaged individual to better support the interesting, engaged individuals in our classrooms. The part that means we learn something new in order to teach something new. The experience of being a learner better prepares a teacher to teach, and this summer was an opportunity for us to authentically learn about murals on different borders, to confront not knowing and to investigate, to use art as a lens into community.

Watch in this video the artistic expression Kat and Alice captured in three countries and seven cities to help students answer the question: “How do we show other people the depth of our past and the strength of our future?”

This month, we immersed ourselves in adult project-based learning. We’ve tried lots of new things, from food to cloud-mountain hiking to driving to places we’d never been (while blogging) to talking about art from sunrise to sunset. And we’ve done the whole thing together. Often, in our classrooms, we create groups that we believe will benefit from the individuality of each member. We build in scaffolds meant to allow the group to discover each individual’s strengths and to make empathy a non-negotiable. Though we embarked with empathy and respect already in place, our twenty-six days together have illuminated the strengths and areas of growth (thanks, BPS, for the language) of our partnership. We both value efficiency, and, in the face of less-than-such (e.g., when the internet goes as turtle-pace, when people get motion sick, when you walk up the wrong side of the mountain, etc.), we have learned much about each other. That knowledge has made us better collaborators and better friends.

In San Francisco, where we started our trip, we were oriented to the idea of looking. This was not just because there was so much to look at in The Mission, but also because we did our first day with a guide, who was able to re-frame what we had seen and interpreted in the context of history and community. Carla made us cognizant of how much we needed other people’s knowledge and understanding to build our own. The Pacoima (L.A.) murals added a layer of “looking around corners” to that concept. On the hottest day of our trip, we spent the majority of it seeking out art on the walls of automotive dealerships and in the parking lots of community centers. It wasn’t always going to be all in one alley. In San Diego, a park once occupied by people and now occupied by art, had us looking for four hours and not seeing enough. We returned home those nights googling Aztec symbols and stories, trying to learn enough to know something.

Tucson and Dr. Acosta gave us yet another frame through which to experience our learning. Freedom of education does not mean freedom to learn about the American Revolution and the Civil War through a lens of whiteness. Precious Knowledge, to our generation of “urban baby teachers,” is a reflection of our intentions. Though we (the generation of “urban baby teachers”) are in no way united in our vision or our understanding of social justice, the power of conviction in ideas, history, and lifting stories and voices drove us into the work of education. We wonder if Dr. Acosta knows how many teachers who are only five or six years in are tracking his legal battle and celebrating his victories, most recently the repeal of Arizona’s ban on ethic studies which a district court deemed racist and targeting of Mexican Americans.

In Santa Fe, we absorbed the International Folk Art Market, how artists envision and reimagine, how tradition can morph modern and can accommodate the present day without reneging its roots. This mirrors the murals we’ve seen and the art of Frida Kahlo, taking symbols from the past and bringing them to life in the now. In Mexico City, we saw so much. Teotihuacan, Frida, Diego, the Anthropology Museum, street art, the culinary art of Pujol, the stained glass and craters of Toluca. With American eyes and feet, we navigated the city, and learned all that we still had to learn.

It is hard to classify this experience, and even harder to know all that it will bring to our classrooms. It falls somewhere in the vicinity of sabbatical – an intentional, purposeful break that brings new insight – but also touches the realm of professional development, continuing education, and a creative project. We envision a unit with three parts. First, with our students, we will read several memoirs that broadly address the topic of borders and walls, thinking with our students about potential barriers and how to scale them. Second, we will all generate and share memoirs from our own lives on the same topic. The author of each memoir will formulate his or her own theme about the topic, communicating a piece of knowledge gained from navigating–either adeptly or crudely–a border. Finally, after examining many primary sources collected on our trip and within Boston, students will co-construct a mural combining the themes of their memoirs to create a community creation.

The idea of “insider and outsider” has been, in many ways, the crux of our travels. We asked questions and navigated our identity as visitor, as white visitor, as American, as woman. In our classrooms we are often the the outsiders to the communities in which we teach. However our ethnicities and upbringing reflect the dominant histories and tools that are demanded from dominant culture. In this unit, we hope to illuminate these walls, supporting students to name them, scale them, and ultimately paint them. As humanities teachers, we believe that providing students vocabulary and time to think and discuss the world and its issues leads to a brighter, more creative, and smarter future than the two of us can imagine. Solutions lie in the writing, in the art, in the conversations, and in the relationships that students create. Just as we wrote in our FFT proposal, students must see themselves reflected in curriculum, in physical space, and in pedagogy in order to be successful. Because we do not physically reflect our students’ identities, we think constantly about how to make all other facets of our teaching affirming. This unit and this project will be a launching point for discussions about personal identity, community, and what comes next.

In Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson and Santa Fe, this fellowship made space for us to be learners. After the twelfth grade, those opportunities almost always come with one (or many) literal costs. And Fund for Teachers (along with the school year calendar) gave us the time, space and finances to learn more in a way that will support our students, but also in a way that sustains us as teachers, professionals, and individuals. It made it possible for us to end the trip feeling rejuvenated rather than depleted. There is a constant push for teachers to continue professional development; it is indeed essential. But driving this profession development experience (and literally driving more than 900 miles) meant that we could pace our learning and reflection, and that we could intentionally choose meaningful experiences that hit our “zone of proximal development.”

If you’d like to know more about our trip, we’ve been writing the whole time. Read our blog at www.writingisthinking.org

In Solidarity,
Kat + Alice

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Alice is a 7th grade Humanities/Special Education teacher at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, MA. She infuses arts into her Humanities classes, most recently taking students to do pop-up Shakespearean theater in several Boston Public libraries. She works on a cross curricular team of teachers who study the intersection of English Language Learning and Special Education to build inclusive writing experiences in all contents.        

Kat is a 7th grade Humanities teacher at Gardner Pilot Academy K-8 School, a Pilot School in the Boston Public Schools. Katharine was a 2012-13 Donovan Urban Teaching Scholar at Boston College where she earned her Master’s in Secondary Education. Prior to becoming a teacher, Katharine built a college access program in rural Pennsylvania that continues to help first generation and undocumented students find the appropriate post-secondary fit while developing college and financial literacy
within the community.

Thank you to 2020 FFT Fellow Angie Hubbard for this Fourth of July post. Angie is an 8th grade teacher in a self-contained classroom at Elkton Charter School in Elkton, OR, where she has been for 10 years. She has taught a variety of subjects and especially loves teaching United States History and Geography. Angie holds an undergraduate degree in Early Childhood Education, a Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction, and endorsements for Legacy Middle Level, Foundational Social Studies and English Language Arts, as well as English to Speakers of Other Languages. 

In the fall of 2016, and each year since, our school has enlisted the help of The Institute for Research and Reform in Education (IRRE). This nonprofit group specializes in creating data-driven plans to benefit students attending schools in underserved areas. Through student surveys conducted by IRRE, we discovered that while teachers and staff felt highly engaged, our students did not. As a result of the outcome of these surveys, our school immediately formed a professional development program district-wide to focus on engagement
strategies and lessons, bringing in experts from a variety of educational settings and backgrounds for staff development.

In my district, I am the only one teaching 8th grade history. In order to find meaningful, creative, engaging lessons I must collaborate with 8th grade history teachers outside my school in other districts who are teaching what I am or research lessons online. By attending the National Social Studies Conference in Louisiana, I met teachers who were teaching the same subjects I am and some even came from self-contained classrooms just as I do and met a teacher who taught the Declaration of Independence as a “break-up” letter between two people where the language of the original Declaration has been modified to sound like a typical middle school note between a teenage couple going through a “break-up.” I decided to give this unorthodox approach a try. The first time I surprised my students with this “break-up letter” I  had “found on the floor” I couldn’t believe their reactions. I had finally discovered how to “hook” them, at least for this one lesson. For over an hour, students tried to figure out who’s initials were on the letter and which two students were breaking up. When they finally uncovered the truth, a student raised his hand and told me “this is epic!”

This experience helped me create my learning goal: to make United States History more meaningful to my students by creating engaging lessons. And this learning goal is the foundation of my Fund for Teachers fellowship: to embark on a driving tour of the east coast of the United States, with stops in Philadelphia, Boston, Williamsburg, Charleston and Birmingham, to create video hooks for engaging lessons supporting U.S. History, Revolutionary War, Civil War and Civil Rights curriculums.

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This fellowship will have a 42-day itinerary. This may sound like a long fellowship, but as a single parent, I have waited 23 years to have such an educational experience! I will begin in the East Coast, where major battles of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought, then head south.  Originally, I was planned my fellowship around the two wars; however, I could not ignore that I would be missing so much of the Civil Rights History if I exclusively focused on the two wars. I decided to incorporate significant historical sites of the Civil Rights Movement to learn about the people who gave up their lives so that we would be free from British control and those who gave up theirs to hold this nation together and free the victims of slavery and racism.

It will be a lot of driving, but AAA of Oregon helped me plan the trip and I’m used to a 2 1/2 hour commute every day for the past ten years!

Click here for Angie’s complete road trip itinerary.

The vision of our school is to recognize that exceptional education can be achieved through a small rural community while empowering our students to be active participants in a global society. This fellowship means I will be able to share my first-hand experiences and the knowledge I gain from it. I expect that with a deeper knowledge of the Revolutionary War, Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, gained through this fellowship, I will be able to increase students’ engagement and interest of key historical events. Ultimately, this will lead to their success in history class and more importantly, help to develop citizens who are more empathetic to the needs of others by encouraging them to get out of their usual environments, cultivating a sense of curiosity, encouraging them to challenge their own biases and to explore
and ask questions.

It is my hope that the enthusiasm and energy I deliver to my students will also encourage my peers, parents and other community members to actively support their children in becoming lifelong learners and venture outside our own community to engage with those who are different than us, to support young peoples’ curiosity, to ask questions, seek answers, examine their own biases and explore this country. In doing so, the community will support our school’s mission statement that students in a small rural community can be empowered to become  active participants in a global society.

The national spotlight will focus on Tulsa this Saturday when President Trump hosts his first campaign rally since the outbreak of COVID-19. Originally scheduled for Juneteenth, the day celebrated by African Americans commemorating the end of slavery, organizers shifted the event to Saturday, when Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt hopes the President and Vice President Pence will tour with him Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the site of one of America’s worst race massacres.

Watch this 60 Minutes piece on the Massacre.

Ninety-one years later, Kyle Peaden designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship in which he explored the culture and history of South Africa to develop a curriculum that compares/contrasts Apartheid with Tulsa’s Race Massacre to cultivate a zero-tolerance view of racism at Tulsa’s Patrick Henry Elementary, six miles away from Greenwood District. We are grateful and proud to share his insights…

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In 2012, I wrote in my grant proposal:

I see history repeating itself. I see that my students do not know or comprehend of the hate and bigotry that violated our city in the early 20th century in what is regarded as one of the most destructive race riots in the 20th century. While my students may not be involved in the repulsive actions of racist groups of individuals in the past, I can see hints of the same distance from understanding. Students are letting bullying and anger fill the voids where communication, discussion, and understanding should be. I hope to bring about understanding of racism, hate, and intolerance by contrasting the history of South Africa to the history of our city. By visiting South Africa to show the history and recent developments in Apartheid and segregation I can bring students to look closer at their own local history. This quiet city holds scars and wounds from one of the largest race riots in America and it remains a difficult subject to face. These wounds are ignored, and the impact of the race riots still linger. By bringing students to my experiences in South Africa I believe they will be able to use an unbiased process of examination to the history of South Africa and eventually to our history.

Sometimes it is too difficult for a child to think that something so awful could have happened in their home town. A sense of favoritism holds strong in their heart that would leave them less willing to hear or realize what happened here not too long ago in their own backyard. It is my hope to go to South Africa to learn firsthand why one person can do terrible things to another and how the goodness in humanity can prevail. I hope to bring a community of students closer to understanding what did happen, what can happen, and what we can do to make sure none of that will happen here ever again. By looking at examples of strength, ignorance, and hope abroad in South Africa and right here in our own back yard these students will work through questions dealing with morality and morality that can help their own understanding of such subjects.

My exploration started at home in Tulsa. I wondered how a city could recognize and reconcile the immense tragedy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. This question took me on a journey over 8,700 miles away to South Africa. South Africa is a country that exemplifies the evils of racism and the hope that can bring a society from those dark times. I wanted to study the culture of South Africa, its art, food, and people, so that I could gather a greater understanding of what happened and how the country has adjusted from Apartheid.

My journey began near Johannesburg where I spent a week in Soweto, the largest and arguably most influential townships during the resistance against Apartheid. During my stay I met the most welcoming people during my whole stay in Africa. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to teach a lesson at a local art school as soon as I found one and my work with Emilia Potenza, the curator at the National Apartheid Museum, gave me a greater background understanding to the reasons and history behind Apartheid. Not far from this epicenter of struggle I visited the Cradle of Humankind where the fossilized remains of our direct ancestors are found. From Johannesburg I traveled through Kruger National Park driving amongst natures most raw surroundings to the Drakensberg Mountains. The Drakensberg site is home to thousands of Bushmen paintings throughout the mountain ranges. After hiking and documenting these ancient works of art I continued south toward the Cape of Good Hope.

In Cape Town I visited the many cultural and historical sites that represent so much of this diverse country. The blend and recognition of cultures reminded me so much of the country I grew up. I started to understand and recognize the steps towards reconciliation in South Africa and a small step to what might be needed at home. The art and history of this wonderful country helped me to see what steps my students and I can take to repair and resolve our troubled past. While my journey is a personal one, I know that the impact of my steps and my efforts will help students to further their own passage through the difficult topics of race, racism, hate, and hope. In my exploration our dark history nearly broke my heart, the people of South Africa filled it with joy, and my students carry it forward with hope.

I stayed in Tulsa teaching for another two years and my wife and I moved to Wisconsin. I ended up working with the Title I program at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction because I felt like much of what I learned is the systems and structures established during Apartheid had some of the deepest impacts on South Africa and the black community of Tulsa. I wanted to work on addressing those policies and by working at the state level I could work towards a more equitable education system.

My Fund for Teachers experience has helped to inform the decision making and policies in programs I work with. By acknowledging the impacts of multiple landscapes and their relationships with race I am more prepared for the injustices that our youth face. Wisconsin has some of the largest gaps for students of color and our state agency has made the work of closing those gaps one of our highest priorities. Personally, I work not only with Title I-A but in programs that support incarcerated students, students that are placed in foster care/out-of-home care, and I am a part of some of the equity work occurring in our agency. I’ve worked on teams that developed and train all staff in our agency on equity to build a foundational experience for our work. I think it is from the experiences in South Africa, learning from the Apartheid museum, the cradle of humanity, Soweto, and the people (most importantly the people!) that could tell their story that helped me build an understanding of how I can listen and work towards a more equitable education system for all our students.

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Kyle recommends the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation as a starting point for those wanting to know more about the Tulsa Race Massacre. He also encourages us all to reframe language you might here this week referring to the event as the Tulsa Race Riots. “I’ve learned since my fellowship that the word riot incorrectly places blame on Tulsa’s Black community, which acted in response to an unlawful arrest and subsequent rounding up of 6-8,000 Black Tulsans – many for up to eight days,” he said.

In one week, many will commemorate Juneteenth, the day the Emancipation Proclamation – issued on January 1, 1863 – was read to enslaved African Americans in Texas. Today’s Fellow Friday highlights Chris Dolgos (Genesee Community Charter School – Rochester, NY): the inspiration for his 2020 fellowship researching Frederick Douglass’s UK speaking tour, and resources you can use in your own classroom.

Chris is a veteran teacher within EL Education, an innovative network of schools across the nation dedicated to equal emphasis on students’ mastery of knowledge and skills, high-quality work and character. The school’s unique approach to curriculum divides the school year into distinct, cross-curricular “expeditions” culminating in a final products. The inspiration for Chris’ 2020 fellowship focusing on Frederick Douglass was catalyzed by such a product that, interestingly, had its roots in Chris’ 2015 fellowship research on how Romans constructed public works projects (such as Hadrian’s Wall) to divide, as well as unite, people in a multicultural society.

Chris’ sixth graders’ AdobeSpark presentation Whose Renaissance Is It? led to a grant from Teaching Tolerance for a collaboration with community-based artists, to four murals the painted across Rochester. And just last week, the students presented this final presentation to the Genessee Comunity Charter School board of directors via Zoom. The board immediately motioned to revise the school’s code of conduct based o the recommendations of students’ work.

“After a year like this – it was satisfying and timely to see the students’ work received so warmly,” Chris said.

Read about the Teaching Tolerance grant and watch this video about the mural project. #ROCBeliever

We asked Chris how he arrived at this particular fellowship (his previous ones focused on Hadrian’s Wall, bird migration and Neanderthals – what can we say, there’s a reason why he’s one of 5 four-time FFT Fellows). Chris’ response mirrored his path toward becoming the the anti-racist and abolitionist teacher he wants to be.

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“Working with amazing  Shawn Dunwoody, our kids helped paint four murals across the four quadrants of Rochester. It was the first time we’d engaged the class to see neighborhoods beyond their own and see our city as a whole – flaws and all and it was a powerful moment for all of us,” Chris said. “It also laid bare just how much work there is to do in understanding the inequity in our city. Seeing it through my students’ eyes forced me to see the systemic barriers and my own role in upholding them.”

Chris dug into Layla Saad‘s “Me and White Supremacy” workbook, which launched months of facing up to “biases, classism and even racism that had no doubt seeped into my interactions with kids.”

[minti_blockquote]”I picked up the work and with other white people, dug in. I wrestled with my prejudice and sat with the guilt of not doing enough – or even worse – just enough. I cycle back through that workbook every few months. A few weeks later came the news that a Frederick Douglass statue – one of many celebrating the bicentennial of his birth – had been vandalized. I don’t really know why that hit me as hard as it did, but I was furious.”[/minti_blockquote]

“We talked about it as a teaching team and with the class (now a new group of students) and posed the question – what do we do?” said Chris. “Naturally, the kids had the answer : ‘We show up.’ So we did – we alerted parents that we’d be taking a walk to the site where the vandals struck on the day a new statue took its place to show that hate and ignorance has no place in our community. Highlight of the day? Seeing Margaret Finch, my mentor from my first year of teaching (20 years ago!) thanking me for making time in the day to have our students be a part of this. That day was really the day I knew I needed to commit to becoming and anti-racist teacher and anti-racist human being. I had started with baby steps, head down making sure I didn’t trip over my words and actions and now was ready to look up and fail forward, as often happens when taking risks.”

“That year our students were examining food justice and the need for a food policy council in our city. A lot of our work was around the intersection of race and class. The data told the story of systems of oppression and discrimination towards people of color. Diminished health outcomes, food deserts and nutritionally empty foods in black and brown communities, poverty and time constraints that limit food choices – the kids learned about all of it. It was a privilege check time and I realized I still had more to do and more to learn.”

“For the 2019-20 school year, Alexis and I were approached by our school leader and members of our board to examine our school’s code of conduct and have the kids help us reframe the rules through the lens of restorative justice. That was eye-opening work and we’re just about ready  to share those recommendations with our board.  That and lots of reading and reflection of the past few years’ projects helped bring into focus my 2020 FFT Fellowship – to explore what it means to be an anti-racist educator and abolitionist teacher.”

Chris’ reading list included: Dr. Ibram Kendi (How to Be an Anti-Racist) and Bettina Love (We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist  Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom). His other inspiration was local hero Frederick Douglass.

Read about Frederick Douglass’ deep connection with Rochester here.

“Douglass’ travels to Great Britain, where he spoke to white people to reject and dismantle slavery and join the abolitionist cause, were unfamilar to me. It was on these trips that enough money was collected and donated that would allow him to purchase his freedom and buy the printing presses that gave birth to his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star.  I made contact with professor Hannah Murray in the UK who had done the research on Douglass in Great Britain that shaped the itinerary I proposed,” Chris said.

“And then came COVID. Schools closed. Travel was suspended. Fear and anger raged as the death toll climbed. FFT made the wise decision to postpone all fellowships until summer 2021. And then Breonna Taylor was murdered. Then came Ahmad Aubrey. Then came George Floyd. Then came the righteous anger of hundreds of thousands of Americans, followed by many more thousands around the world. A lot of folks were in the shallow end of anti-racist work when this tidal wave hit. Being only a few years into this work myself with any real sense of commitment, I struggled with how to best serve my students – but our team opted to simply listen and let them share and process through a listening circle. It was a start and a conversation that is hard to maximize through the tiny boxes of a Zoom meeting. And with the year drawing to a close, we want the kids to know they should keep speaking and keep listening and be active in questioning the status quo. Several went to the protests. Others joined in the clean up of the looting and vandalism that followed. I keep thinking, “Man, I could REALLY use that fellowship this summer!” but a lot of the work that needs to be done in my classroom needs to be done internally, by me.

• Listening more.
• Revisiting my reflections on Layla Saad’s workbook.
• Working with other white educators to check our bias and challenge the assumptions we have of our students.
• Decolonize our curriculum and make sure the policies and systems within our schools are culturally affirming so when we say Black Lives Matter, the students believe it.Taking a virtual abolitionist walking tour in London with Dr. Murray later this month. And,
• Participating in a Gilder Lehrman Institute online course about the History of American Protest.

“While it’s no substitute for my fellowship, current events and these activities are already conspiring to shape the direction we’ll be taking with next year’s sixth graders. And in June of 2021, as I begin to follow in Frederick Douglass’ steps in the UK, I will already be one step closer to becoming the anti-racist and abolitionsit teacher I want to be.”

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Chris is a sixth-grade teacher at Genesee Community Charter School in Rochester, NY and is a three-time Fund For Teachers Fellow. History and geography are two passions he brings to life in his classroom, through field work, guest experts and product-driven Learning Expeditions. Chris has contributed to EL Education publications and Common Core curricular efforts, was awarded EL Education’s Top Teacher Honor for the nation, and is a NY Educator Voice Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at CJDTeaches.

I am a Black woman in America. I am a Board-Certified teacher in America. I am fighting for America.

Like many Black Americans, I have experienced racism my entire life. I have been followed while casually browsing in stores. My brothers have been thrown to the ground by police and by white neighbors. I have been denied entry to restaurants. These humiliating and painful moments are etched on my soul. The nonstop cadence of violence against Black people in America makes clear that the bigotry I have known since my childhood continues uninterrupted.

Last week, a man casually put his knee on the neck of another man. It was so casual that he kept his hand in his pocket. He let him die without a care in the world, bolstered by his whiteness and privilege and by a system he expected would not hold him to account.

The murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have brought us to a righteous boiling point, but the anguish and pain have been with us for centuries, simmering in the daily injustices we suffer. These senseless killings, and related incidents like the encounter in Central Park, upset me not only as an empathetic human, but also because they are needless, painful reminders of indignities that I face daily. When I’m with people who know me, I’m a respected colleague, board member, friend, volunteer, neighbor, and more. But once outside of those insulated bubbles, I’m an anonymous Black woman subject to diminished respect and trust. It is absolutely exhausting.

We know the statistics on the disproportionate impact that racism has had on Black Americans. Black Americans are two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be killed by police. We are two-and-a-half times more likely to live below the poverty line. We are more likely to attend high-poverty schools — nearly half attend schools in which 75% qualify for free and reduced lunch. We are disproportionately punished. Black people make up 24% of the public school population but comprise 48% of students suspended. We are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white people. In this pandemic, at three times the rate of White Americans, we are dying.

When will we take the actions truly required to eliminate these racial inequities?

As a Black woman, I have fought my entire life against the poisonous narrative that I am less than — and deserve less than — because of my skin.

As a teacher, I have dedicated my life to writing a different narrative for all our country’s young people, helping them work toward success and power regardless of race or economic background. But I can tell you with grave certainty and sincere horror that it is harder for black and brown people to succeed because of racist systems in which we live; systems that tell us, over and over again, that we cannot.

As a Black woman, I am indignant. I am outraged at a system that allows and supports  the casual destruction of black and brown bodies, lives, and families.

As a teacher, ultimately, I am hopeful. I know I am a part of the solution. Since I stepped into my first classroom 43 years ago, every day – in my actions and by my very existence – I disrupt and hold accountable an education system that owes its black and brown students so much more than what they are told to expect. Black students deserve a safe school environment. Black students deserve high-quality teachers. Black students deserve Black teachers. Black students deserve a supportive system that enables them to succeed in school and give them a fair shot in life. Quite simply, Black students deserve to live.

At the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I have the privilege to work towards a future where every student in every school has access to an accomplished teacher every day. Board-certified teachers are equipped to support the next generation, to advocate for those whose voices are silenced, and to rally against the bias and stereotypes that discourage the dreams and paralyze the potential of young people. Board-certified teachers educate students to the profession’s highest standards. We endlessly strive to uncover, interrogate, and address the prejudices plaguing our social systems. We fight misunderstanding, bullying, discrimination, dehumanization, and violence. We work to ensure students feel entitled to the pride they have in their roots, their personal identities, and their communities. Board-certified teachers are committed to social justice, to instilling in students the power and agency to claim control of their lives. We develop in our students a celebration of diversity in the human condition, connection with others especially across lines of difference, and adaptation in the face of adversity.

 “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”   – James Stockdale

I am a Black woman, and I chose to be a teacher. I believe that educators have the power to lift up students who have been taught to stay down, and teach the value of difference in a society that too often uses difference to divide. Educators play the vital role of helping the next generation understand the realities of this world as it is, while also teaching them how to imagine and fight for how it should be.

I urge you to open your minds and do the same. I urge you to take the anger being voiced seriously and evaluate the ways you perpetuate racism. I pledge to never stop helping to create a country that brings these challenges to light and drives positive change. For all students and for all Americans. Join me.

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Peggy Brookins, NBCT, is President and CEO of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Prior to this role, she was the National Board’s Executive Vice President and also served on the Board of Directors. In July 2014, President Barack Obama named Brookins as a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. In 1994, she co-founded the Engineering and Manufacturing Institute of Technology at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, where she served as director and as a mathematics instructor until her arrival at National Board. Brookins achieved her certification in Adult and Young Adolescent Mathematics in 2003 and renewed in 2013. She has been inducted into the University of Florida Hall of Fame and is a Florida Education Association “Everyday Hero,”  and received the association’s Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2013, Brookins was named an Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar. We are proud that she is also a member of Fund for Teacher’s Board of Directors. Follow her on twitter @Pbrookins44. (Pictured with Dr. Chris Emdin, professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…And the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education.

Enid Lee, anti-racist professional development specialist, leadership coach and writer, defines educational equity as “the principal of altering current practices and perspectives to teach for social transformation and to promote equal learning outcomes for students of all racial, cultural, linguistic and socio-economic groups.”

For three-time FFT Fellow Danielle Murray, the socio-economic group is LGBTQ students.

Danielle is a veteran teacher, LGBTQ liaison for Boston Public Schools, Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) advisor, Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) Chair for Massachusetts and currently assistant headmaster at Boston Latin High School, the first public school in America (founded in 1635). Her Twitter bio condenses all of this and more into the following sentence:

[minti_blockquote]I am a queer mother and educator in Boston working to make schools and communities safe for all![/minti_blockquote]

While she never dreamed she would be a teacher, Danielle did envision of life of advocacy when she came out her first year at Boston College, where she triple majored in psychology, English and Women’s Studies. (She subsequently earned a graduate degree from BC in Curriculum and Instruction.) A passion for empowering voices and changing society informed all three of her Fund for Teachers fellowships. Danielle used her first two grants (in 2006 and 2013) to research British, then Southern authors to motivate students’ reflection on personal struggles and use of writing as a tool for impacting their lives and communities. Last year, she added advocacy to her research by documenting how Ireland has undergone a radical social change in the way LGBTQ people are viewed, both socially and legally, to understand how a country embraces a community it once persecuted and model those actions to make the school community more affirming, inclusive, and proud.

“In designing this fellowship, I considered the intersectionality of LGBTQ kids and using voice as tool,” Danielle said. “The LGBTQ community in Ireland lobbied for the first country-wide vote on Gay Marriage and won. I wanted to know how they did this in such a conservative, Catholic country. Did it change how people interacted with each other. Was it safer for Trans kids? Did it impact LGBTQ peoples’ social status?”

When Danielle returned from Ireland last summer, she was hired as Boston Public School’s LGBTQ liaison with other schools in the district, while also serving as assistant headmaster at Boston Latin. She secured grants to host Boston’s first LGBTQ Student Summit, provided professional development for teachers addressing students’ transitions, facilitating curricula integration and leading workshops for Welcoming Schools, the nation’s premier professional development program providing training and resources to elementary school educators to embrace all families, create LGBTQ and gender inclusive schools, prevent bias-based bullying, and support transgender and non-binary students.

With all of this expertise, Danielle graciously offered some resources for those wanting to create safe spaces and educational equity for LGBTQ students:

• Ally training and establishing a GSA at your school are the first steps to creating safe spaces and equity for LGBTQ students.
• Celebrating one’s identity is a large part of making LGBTQ students feel safe and valued. Here is an Educator’s Guide to LGBTQ Pride, produced by GLSEN, as well as a school year calendar that can support your multi-cultural and LGBTQ-inclusion efforts.
• Focusing on GLSEN’s Four Supports of programs, advocacy, research and policy work to help LGBTQ students experience less harassment and discrimination, do better in school, and experience a better school climate.

Danielle returned to the power of voice as the prime catalyst for establishing LGBTQ students’ educational and social equity.

“Telling one’s story and connecting with people on a human level is key to my work with students and the teachers working with them,” she said. “We’ll practice a 30-second elevator speech together – finding the part of their story that might really motivate or flip someone to understand. Students don’t OWE anyone their story, but it’s empowering to say, ‘This is who I am and I want you to hear it in my words.’ People’s voices are the most important thing they have.”

Oscar Wilde would be beam with #pride.

Access the website Danielle created for Boston Public School’s LGBTQ community here.

On Monday, we shared the work of an FFT Fellow to educate his Tulsa students about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre for the first time. Today, as Pride Month begins, we elevate another lesser-known, yet seminal event in our nation’s quest for social justice — this time for the LGBTQ+ community.

On June 27-28, 1969, New York City police raided Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar known for its gay, lesbian and transgender patrons. The BBC story “Stonewall: A riot that changed millions of lives” proposed that Stonewall was to the gay rights movement what Rosa Parks was for the civil rights one. “And just as Ms Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama to a white man had the effect of animating the civil rights movement 14 years before,” wrote author author Tom Geoghegan, “so Stonewall electrified the push for gay equality.”

For more information, watch this “Stonewall Uprising” episode of PBS’ American Experience.

Use these Learning for Justice resources on this topic in your classroom.

Five miles south of Stonewall Inn sits Eleanor Roosevelt High School, with the mission of “challenging students to act with courage, integrity and leadership [while] preparing them to embrace the moral, social, and intellectual challenges to come.” Leading this work is Tony Cacioppo, humanities teacher and faculty advisor for the Gender & Sexuality Alliance.

In 2015, Tony was named the Live Out Loud Educator of the Year for ensuring his LGBTQ+ students receive the highest quality education and feel supported emotionally and socially throughout the process. To support this work, he designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship to explore how London schools give voice to the LGBTQ community in their curriculum and to strengthen representation and support of LGBTQ students and their allies.

“Statistics show that when compared to heterosexual students, queer students all across the country miss more days of school, experience higher levels of depression and other mental health issues, and are much more likely to drop out of school,” wrote Tony in his grant proposal. “I want my school to do more to fight this trend.”

Tony’s guiding questions throughout his month-long tour of the United Kingdom included:

1. How do we ensure that all students—queer or not—truly understand the history and current lives of LGBTQ people?
2. How do we eliminate bias, even when it’s unintentional, from the school community?
3. How do we include LGBTQ achievements, concerns, and topics in the curriculum of all courses in a way that feels authentic and purposeful? And,
4. How do we ensure that queer students are not singled out and or marginalized in any aspect of school life, including in classes, sports teams, extracurricular activities, school dances and field trips?

His exemplars were individuals and organizations at the forefront of the effort to expand the inclusion of LGBTQ voices and issues in schools through the 2017 Children and Social Work Act in England, which requires all schools to teach sex and relationship education (SRE) from the age of 11 on, with plans in place to begin this fall. Tony’s itinerary included:

Gay Pride Flag, National Museum of Dublin

• An interview with a former SRE educator/current staff member at Stonewall (a London advocacy helping to make schools more LGBTQ inclusive) that led to introductions at Stonewall’s School Champions network, where staff have been trained on best practices for LGBTQ inclusion.
• Meeting with Peter Tatchell, a longtime human rights activist and founder of The Peter Tatchell Foundation that turned into a strategy session on implementing his recommendations for inclusion of marginalized students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
• Workshops through Bish Training, a group that specializes in providing SRE training for schools, and Brook, an organization dedicated to ensuring the sexual health and well being of young people, which yielded best practices to better support the development of healthy sexual identity in adolescents and teenagers. And,
• Discussions with Dr. Polly Haste, the Head of training and Practice for the Sex Education Forum, focusing on ensuring that LGBTQ content is embedded into curriculum rather than discussed for one day so that the school can say it has “covered” the topic.

“One unexpected result was being told by several of the professionals that I spoke to that when it comes to addressing the mental and physical health needs of young people, doing certain things badly is worse than not doing them at all,” said Tony. “We must be extremely careful and thoughtful when talking to students about healthy relationships, sexuality and gender, drug use and eating disorders, etc. We don’t want to do more damage to an already fragile student who is in need of support.”

Tony’s long-range plans include incorporating more LGBTQ+ literature into his 11th and 12th grade English classes.
The culmination of the school year, pre-COVID, was to be a unit specifically on the Stonewall Riots, which he provides here.

“This fellowship helped me to see that there is amazing work going on all over the world if you take the time and have the opportunity to go exploring,” said Tony. “The people that I met and learned from were not just other classroom teachers; they were activists and advocates who care about the same things I do–namely the well-being of young people–and have chosen another path for helping to achieve a similar goal. This showed me the power of educators forming partnerships with anyone who is willing to help.”

“As teachers we get extremely focused on what is going on directly in front of us and with the things that we need to do by the end of the day, week, semester, or year,” he continued. “This project gave me to the opportunity to step out of my own small world and see the big picture. I now recognize that lesson plans and grades have their place, but that teaching can truly be powerful and transformative when it supports who students are and helps them become the people that they are meant to be.”

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Listen to Tony’s acceptance speech at the Live Out Loud Educator of the Year Award Ceremony.

We are so proud of our 2020 class of Fund for Teachers Fellows and believe Teacher Appreciation Week is the perfect time to begin a weekly series that introduces! Through individual profiles, as well as those focusing on themes these exemplary teachers will pursue in the summer of 2021, you will appreciate these Fellows commitment to their profession, students and school communities.

Today, meet Laurel Cardellichio, science teacher at Croton-Harmon High School in Croton-on-Hudson, NY. Currently, she teaches AP Environmental Science and Regents Chemistry, but she’s also taught Biology, Animal Physiology, Forensic Science, and Psychology. Prior to being named a 2020 FFT Fellow, Laurel earned recognition as a Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms Fellow, Regeneron STEM Teacher Fellow, and her National Geographic Certification.

On her CardClassroom global education guide/blog, Laurel shares her mission statement:

[minti_blockquote]“Create scientifically and geographically literate students who, have passion for discovery of the natural world around them have the knowledge, the confidence and the skills to communicate ideas respectfully and, have the drive to become positive agents of change as globally competent citizens”[/minti_blockquote]

The Fund for Teachers fellowship Laurel designed, not surprisingly, is right in line with her mission. With her grant, Laurel will research traditional knowledge-based agricultural practices in Italy to create partnerships with local farms and learning that promotes traditional farming methods:

• mitigating climate change
• improving food security, and
• conserving biodiversity.

Laurel explained the reasoning behind this fellowship in her proposal:

“Just like my students, I learn best through experience and I propose to immerse myself in the history and culture of traditional agriculture ecosystems of Italy. There are two Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) in Italy designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). These GIAHS, dominated by olive groves and vineyards in the Umbria and Veneto regions of Italy, provide significant examples of historical and modern human agricultural practices in harmony with nature. The traditional knowledge based practices conducted in these regions date back to the Roman Empire and smallscale family farms are exemplars for sustainability, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation. My teaching practice will be strengthened as I learn how historic food ecosystems reflect culture and sustainable land management, and how modernization and climate change has impacted them.”

Laurel’s goal for her students is for them to learn how sustainable management of agricultural land must be approached as an ecosystem and how that supports the Slow Food Movement. While she will pursue experiences and information across Italy to support this goal, her students’ work will be tied to farms surrounding their school community north of New York City. Three small-scale farms in Westchester County (Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Hilltop Hanover, and Cabbage Hill) will serve as her “homebase” from which she and students will learn best practices and develop mentoring relationships for future research projects.

Her keen interest in land sustainability stems from her personal interest in gardening, professional love of teaching environmental science and unique professional learning experiences.

“As a Regeneron Fellow, I took a course centered on the impacts of climate change on the ability of Athabascan Indians of Alaska to preserve their heritage largely centered on seasonally-based traditional methods for obtaining food,” said Laurel. “When I learned that I was going to Morocco [through the Fulbright program], I immediately started researching environmental issues in the country and the preservation of oases came up. I had never thought beyond movie depictions of the oasis mirage. I am thankful to my host teacher, who brought me to an oasis upon my request. When my research lead me to the GIAHS – completely by surprise – I found out the the FAO also has an interest in preserving human culture in the form of traditional agriculture.”

According to Laurel, the postponement of 2020 grant recipients’ fellowships until next summer gives her that much more time to prepare for an even more meaningful learning experience. COVID permitting, she plans to go ahead with her stateside portion of her fellowship, filming interviews at local farms and aligning her research for use in the classroom this year. This initial contact will lay the groundwork for students’ participation in the farms’ hands on workshops, guided tours and internship opportunities for seniors.

“Although I wish I could have carried out my fellowship this summer, I believe the delay for the Italy part will be very beneficial for multiple reasons. This extra time will allow me to: further develop my video production skills this summer for lesson plans, conduct the local farm research/visits/filming this summer giving me valuable time to better prepare for the two weeks that I will be in Italy ; and learn a lot more Italian so that I may communicate respectfully and effectively to the people I meet on my adventure.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

By school days, Laura Nunn is an elementary reading interventionist with Chicago Public Schools. By weekends & pandemics, she teaches yoga. Laura is offering a free virtual class this Friday at 12:30CST. Register with this link to usher in your weekend in peace. 

Laura designed her fellowship to retrace the steps of Odysseys through Sicily, Malta and Greece to give birth to a cross-curricular unit on The Hero’s Journey, modern-day perceptions of Greek myths and the meaning of “home” as it relates to travelers and immigrants.

Hearing about Friday’s event hosted by the Chicago Foundation for Education prompted us to check in with Laura and see how she and her students are managing the pivot to distance learning.

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[minti_dropcap style=”box”]Q[/minti_dropcap] What does “virtual” literacy look like with your students at Patrick Henry Elementary?

[minti_dropcap style=”box”]A[/minti_dropcap] Virtual literacy is such a change from the norm, especially with English learners!  Books are magic and we need to continue to treat them as such, even at a distance, so children can grow up believing in that magic. 

I’m currently seeing students in grades PK-8 for intervention with the majority of my work focusing on first grade ESL and schoolwide computer literacy.  I’m trying to stick to routines that mirror what we did in the classroom; we all need a bit of consistency in this upside-down world, and our children need it even more not only to get back into a positive learning environment, but also to feel safe and secure in an unknown time.  My literacy block is made up of interactive lessons made through Powerpoint or SMART Notebook with short games to keep their attention (guess the rhyme, match the middle sound, what’s the missing letter?), daily read alouds with puppets and, my number one, creating anticipation and familiarity with themed units and exciting incentives.

My best incentive is the A-Z Countdown for the last 26 days of school.  We just finished Day A, Animal Day, where students could come dressed as an animal, bring a pet or bring a stuffed animal to our virtual class to read a non-fiction animal book.  They were so excited… even though the beak of my owl costume muffled a bit of the sound!  We’re sharing our favorite books on B Day (I’ll be dressed as Ms. Frizzle!), reading under pillow forts on F’s Fort Day and we’ll act as outdoor phonics detectives on W Day’s Walking Scavenger Hunt. To me, true success is when my students are excited to read, so I do my best to bring reading to life and make life adventurous.  

[minti_dropcap style=”box”]Q[/minti_dropcap] How is your school community pivoting?

[minti_dropcap style=”box”]A[/minti_dropcap] Virtual learning will look different in every school and every classroom and, among other things, I think this pandemic has shed light on the economic inequalities within our schools and the very real digital divide that is often overlooked. We’re located within Albany Park, Chicago’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood and one of its most dense.  Based on household incomes, 100% of our school qualifies for free-lunch and 90% are English learners. Once the quarantine started, our biggest concern was getting technology into homes.  Often, only 1 or 2 students in class had a computer or tablet which had to then be shared between multiple people. Once we passed out every bit of portable technology to students, our next challenge was teaching the students themselves how to join virtual meetings and check their email: many members of our school community are unable to work from home and don’t have access to child care.  I’ve dedicated my Fridays to safe-distance home visits, often demoing computer skills from the driveway, and calling and texting families to do troubleshooting.  I’ve recorded video tutorials and created step-by-step pages. Sometimes all we can do is drop off school supplies and paper-based packets to families without wifi (it helps to do so in an inflatable unicorn costume).

[minti_dropcap style=”box”]Q[/minti_dropcap] What is your main takeaway from this time?

[minti_dropcap style=”box”]A[/minti_dropcap] Love. In my first year of teaching, my then mentor and now dear friend Edith said to me, “Just love them like they’re your own and it’ll all be perfect.” It’s stuck with me and has been formative in developing who I am as an educator.  So, for teachers out there, just love them like they’re your own, it’ll all be perfect.   We all feel overwhelmed and even the most distinguished of educators are questioning their effectiveness.  Trust in yourself that you’re doing enough and let tomorrow’s lesson be guided by great waves of love and understanding– no matter if you’re dividing equivalent fractions on your refrigerator’s whiteboard or singing songs about rainbows.  

The love in my school and professional community has made me feel that, despite the distance, we’re somehow closer than ever.  Our lunch staff, security officers and administrators are at school daily passing out free breakfasts and lunches, managing safe-pick up of technology and checking in with families.  Our Assistant Principal records her daily announcements and the pledge of allegiance and wishes kids a happy birthday.   My colleagues check-in with self-care reminders and have gone above and beyond to creatively celebrate our 8th graders’ graduation.  My after-school knitting club still meets once a week.  Sometimes all you hear is our needles clicking and then sometimes they’re talking over each other about pom-pom sizes.  What’s important is to hold that space for their voices and be present so they know they’re loved. 

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This year, Laura entered a give away contest sponsored by actor Busy Phillips and she was one of ten teachers chosen from across the country to get have her list cleared on Amazon. Her letter to Phillips read as follows:

 “Hi Busy! I’m an academic interventionist in my tenth year working for Chicago Public Schools in a low-income, high-need community where 100% of our students are far enough below the poverty-line to qualify for free lunch. Very few students come with school supplies and, due to issues at home, often their most structured, loving, and happy moments (as well as their meals) come from school. Typically, I work out of a classroom but this year, since we’re short on rooms and I believe in the wonder of reading, I’ll be taking over the library.

Here’s the thing, Busy, and it breaks my heart: due to budget cuts, we haven’t had a librarian since 2010. The room became a dumping ground for old furniture and broken materials. I’ve spent ten months working before and after school and on weekends to restore it. Come September, I’ll not only house my interventions there, but also lead PK-2nd grade library classes. The only chairs I could find are adult sized, the tables are enormous and old, and the rugs are stained. The walls are all ancient blackboard. I want my little ones to not only feel safe and successful, but also to capture the love of books that brought me to where I am. My Amazon list mostly has items to create a library space for small bodies– rugs they can take with them, chairs their size, stuffed animals to hug while they read. You’ll also see markers and hand sanitizer!

I thought I wanted to join the Peace Corps but, after working abroad in my undergraduate degree to study human rights issues, I found that the great equalizer that saved women and children alike was education. I moved to Chicago, changed my field of study, got a masters, and here I am!”

Enjoy these photos of Laura receiving donations from Phillips’ fans. You can also follow Laura on Instagram @nunn.chucks, where she’ll be posting lessons, videos and free materials.

 

 

We are so proud of our 2020 class of Fund for Teachers Fellows and believe Teacher Appreciation Week is the perfect time to begin a weekly series that introduces! Through individual profiles, as well as those focusing on themes these exemplary teachers will pursue in the summer of 2021, you will appreciate these Fellows commitment to their profession, students and school communities.

Today, in conjunction with Asian Pacific Heritage Month, we introduce Joey Cumagun, a special education teacher with the Adult Transition Community Based Instruction (CBI) team at Deer Valley High School in Antioch, CA. Joey currently he has also taught Special Day Class K-3, SDC 6-8 and autism intensive classrooms. A teacher for 32 years, his awards include Mary Allan Teacher Fellow 2019, National History Day Fellow 2016-17, Special Olympics Northern California Teacher of the Season 2015.

Joey enrolled in the Ateneo de Manila University with the intention of pursuing a degree in Engineering; however, after volunteering as a tutor his junior year, he switched his major to Education and started teaching social studies in a general education setting. After meeting his late wife who was a Special Education teacher, Joey added a second certification in this sphere, as well.

In designing his fellowship, Joey recognized a gap in the transition of his students from school to life post-graduation. He teaches 15 students (primary eligibility are (8 students with primary diagnosis of autism, 5 intellectual disability, 1 other health impairment (cerebral palsy), 1 with specific learning disability). Their learning goals cover:

• functional academics, which is how to apply reading and math skills in the real world such as following a calendar or reading a bus schedule
• appropriate communication and social skills to successfully navigate their community, and
• vital employment skills which is the primary rationale of this fellowship.

“As important a goal of getting a job is after high school is to my students, none of them actually gets employed after graduation,” explained Joey. “All my students end up in sheltered, non-work settings. In the state of California, only one out of every four workers with developmental disabilities are working in a community employment settings (according to CA Transition Alliance). On the national level, while unemployment rate is at an all time low, there is no evident increase in the rate of employment of people with disabilities. In my constant effort to find how I can best prepare students with special needs for employment, I researched top companies and best countries that employ people with disabilities. Then I discovered about Omron Taiyo in Japan with a long and reputable history of employing people with disabilities.”

[minti_pullquote align=”left”]Joey will use his Fund for Teachers grant to tour two Omron Taiyo manufacturing factories where the majority of employees have a disability to design a system for a workplace (simulated in the classroom) that is both conducive and motivating for students with disabilities.[/minti_pullquote]

“With this fellowship I will be able to see for myself a work flow system designed for workers with disabilities that I would never see in a textbook or curriculum,” said Joey. “In addition, I will learn more effective ways how to instill positive work values in the classroom, learn ways that Omron implements visual materials, automated signals, and workflow design to support workers with disabilities, and document methodologies and use of Japanese technology that I can bring to my classroom.”

Upon his return, Joey envisions a six-step plan for applying all he experiences in Japan:

1. Create workstations that incorporate workflow systems observed at Omron
2. Implement technology that supports work skills performance
3. Teach and practice positive work values, such as the attitude of punctuality
4. Introduce guided practice lessons that parallel work designs seen at the Omron factory
5. Present a training session during the school’s professional development day and provide handouts and support to
   teachers who are willing to implement whatever they have learned, and
6. Network with community organizations and businesses and policy makers by promoting my students
   employability

Joey’s ultimate goal is to see his students enter the workforce through this network, as opposed to attending adult day programs (bowling, library visits, etc.) in which most students remain for the rest of their lives.

“Essentially, the goal of school is to learn ‘skills to pay the bills,’ said Joey, “but in civic terms, the end outcome of education is to create productive citizens in the community both local and global. This fellowship will help develop a good success story for the community’s effort to engage students in real world learning. This fellowship will be particularly special because it caters to the needs of the special needs population, sending an inspirational message to the students and the school community that all students can succeed, no matter the challenges.”