It’s the New Year’s Eve song most of us mumble through, but the English translation of “Auld lang syne” is “times gone by.” Looking back over the year in fellowships, our grant recipients spent their time actively pursuing what they determined will best impact student achievement. Specifically,

• 546 prek-12 school teachers
• completed fellowships on 6 continents
• in 88 countries
• now leveraging $2.1 million in Fund for Teachers grants
• into amplified learning in 321 public private and charter schools across America
• with approximately 11,000 students.

Fund for Teachers is proud of the way our Fellows transform learning communities after dreaming big and clicking “Submit” on the FFT application. Enjoy this homage to our dedicated 2017 Fellows and to all we wish a new year of interests and impact!

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.

As I think about my teaching practice, I believe it is important to provide my bilingual second grade students with a well-developed and engaging science curriculum. I recently read a study that showed only 10% of workers in science and engineering fields were African-American or Latino. As a teacher of students who are 98% Latinos, I want my students to see opportunities in these fields and I believe it is my responsibility to provide them with a strong base in early childhood to empower them to pursue scientific careers.

To that end, I decided to model for them scientific inquiry by designing a Fund for Teachers fellowship to explore the unique geography and biological diversity of the American Southwest. For two weeks last summer, I investigated geological formations and desert habitats to develop an integrated unit that references Southwestern literature and folk tales.

Before my fellowship, I was struggling to find meaningful ways for my students to connect to our science unit about rocks and pebbles. The curriculum felt stale and boring to me, so it was understandably difficult to get kids enthusiastic about something that I was finding dull. By exploring the parks and learning about the formation of canyons and rock formations, my excitement flourished and in turn reinvigorated the unit with some fresh lessons and demonstrations. I learned that, like my students, real authentic experiences deepen my knowledge.

During my fellowship, I was able to learn extensively about our national parks. I visited 8 national parks, 2 state parks and 2 parts of the Navajo Nation.  I collected information from both Park Rangers and locals about the region and its treasures. Since I couldn’t take my students with me it was important for me to bring my learning back to them. Through photos, artifacts and stories I was able to find ways to incorporate my leaning and experiences back to our work in the classroom.

I attended a number of presentations given by park rangers. It was truly inspiring to see the wide variety of topics that individual rangers and researchers are currently studying. I attended programs that varied from evidence of dinosaurs found in the Grand Canyon to the formation of the Rocky Mountains. One of the biggest lessons for me was how the rangers were definitely looking for more questions than answers. When I questioned different rangers for ideas for my own classroom, they often returned to the idea of encouraging student questioning. This pushed me to incorporate more inquiry into my lessons.

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Back in the classroom as a result of my fellowship, students are now:

• Conducting investigations on how rocks can be classified in different ways.
• Simulating erosion, weathering, and glacier’s effects on lands.
• Reading folktales from the region.
• Writing creative legends to describe natural phenomenon in my photographs.
• Studying the unique characteristics of the desert habitat and what adaptations are needed to survive there.
• Creating maps and travel logs that recreate my fellowship practicing map skills and elapsed time.

Participating in my own self-directed learning experience revitalized my teaching with fresh perspectives. As I enter my sixteenth year in the classroom, this fellowship provided me with time and space to reflect upon my teaching practice, as well as how it has changed over the years. By designing my own learning plan, I was able to focus on some of the elements that brought me to teaching in the first place. I am excited to recommit myself as an educator to curiosity and questioning.

I did not anticipate how much the level of autonomy would effect my learning in this fellowship. I knew that I would learn more about land forms and geography; I didn’t realize how much I would be influenced by how we learn. The education system has been moving to a more test based, data based, linear view of education. This fellowship reminded me to push back on this and allow space for questioning and curiosity. By exploring my own topics, I was able to connect to ways my students can explore in our classroom. By seeing various researchers explore their own topics and connect with
others in novel ways, I was able to see how intellectual sharing is able to deepen one’s own understanding.

This fellowship helped bring me back to center in my educational philosophy which has in its own way eroded over time. When I have spoken with other FFT Fellows, I think that this is one of the key components that makes this fellowship successful. I was able to create a fellowship that met my needs and as a result I was able to reflect on what the fellowship meant to my professional practice. This
time that I was able to study something of interest helped me connect to myself as a learner. This experience is personal for each grant recipient as we pursue topics of interest, but also immensely professional as we develop as educators.

To me, it is very powerful that as a veteran teacher I can speak about how my fellowship helped me to
develop as an educator. There are few learning experiences that I have that focus on my professional development; instead they are more frequently about analyzing data sets and adopting new methods. My Fund for Teachers fellowship let me step back and take a big picture view of what I want to do as an
educator. I went to study sand, rocks and land forms and left recommitted to fostering intellectual curiosity.

Mary Beth Werner (Telpochcalli Elementary School – Chicago, IL) is a second grade teacher who is passionate about bringing hands-on experiences to her classroom. She is a Drive Award winner, as well as a two-time FFT Fellow.

by, Jessica Mascle, Anthony Riccio, Nate Streicher & Eric Levine – Amherst, NY

On an early Sunday morning in July the Tapestry Charter School Civil Rights team traveled to Little Rock, AR for a truly unique experience. We designed our Fund for Teachers fellowship to attend an educators’ Civil Rights Institute to help students make important connections between historic events and challenges of modern society in a way that engages the question, “How can I make a difference?” Little did we know that casual conversations had with fellow educators, hotel workers, shop keepers and cab drivers would be engraved in our minds and retold in our stories of the battle for civil rights.

During the course of the week, we were students engaged in the investigation of primary sources, fieldwork, experts and assessment tools.  Our group traveled to several historic sights including the Arkansas State Capital and Little Rock Central High School.  During these experiences, participants read excerpts from Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals, which fostered a visual understanding of the author’s writing and therefore created an emotional connection that reading the text in a classroom would not foster.

The importance of the Little Rock Nine is incalculable. Perhaps the most compelling discovery was the idea of personal narratives of the students themselves and the community at large. During our time in Little Rock, we were surprised by the impromptu “narratives” we were told by cab drivers as we were given informal sight seeing tours of the city. We were inspired by working with other educators, learning how different schools teach social justice issues, learning from the people who were living in Little Rock during the school integration crisis, learning new ways to use protocols for writing and processing fieldwork, and gaining new ideas for writing projects and final products.

The zenith of the week was sitting down and speaking with our interview subjects. Our conversations turned into our product:personal narratives telling the story of our subjects – their struggles, hardships
and ultimate ability to succeed in the South.

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Far north of the Mason-Dixon Line we returned with the reality that although the fight for Civil Rights has come a long way, we still have a long way to go. From conversations with other Institute participants, informal conversations with cab drivers and shop keepers, and the interview sessions, all those involved painted a vivid picture of how America is still not equal.

Our experiences during the Institute allowed us to reevaluate our teaching plans to focus on connections from the Civil Rights Movement to modern day civil rights efforts, including those in our own school community, and what they hope to achieve. Western New York is a very diverse place and being so lends itself to the stories, struggles and tribulations of those who live here. By examining Western New York and our own school, we will be able to create a personal connection with our students, making the content more meaningful.

Experiences on our fellowship taught us is that history is better told by listening to a story than simply reading it out of a textbook. We now teach our students interview and oral history recording techniques that we learned and send them out into the Western New York community to obtain first hand stories of community members that have encountered hardships and struggles trying to achieve equality and respect so that future generations will be able to read and partake in the local civil rights movement. Additionally, we:

• Revised and implemented a successful 11th grade curriculum to narrow the focus from the evolution of the American Ideals to the application of the ideals of Democracy in Buffalo, NY;
• Created a personal narrative project for his 12th grade Economics and Government students that is influenced by the techniques learned at the Civil Rights Institute. Students interview local business leaders, politicians,and activists to explore the meaning of “heroism.” They then write personal narratives based on their interviews, which are presented to the subjects in person;
• Created a 10th grade curriculum with a fellow teacher to broaden the focus from the tension between government oversight and individual liberties to a deep look at the importance of human rights and the violations of this basic idea. This includes the case study of the Little Rock Nine as a point of departure for rest of the expedition; and,
• Wrote a series of lessons to explore the ties between the search for civil rights and the use of restorative justice to create a strong community.

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The most memorable experience of our fellowship was a conversation we had with a cab driver named Owen. We asked him to reflect on his 60 years living in Little Rock and if life has changed for the better. He told us “you are naive to think that discrimination has ended. It has simply just changed its shape, color and stripes.“

Our job as educators is to make sure our society does not become complacent with injustices, and to make sure our students and children know that issues can not be changed if others do not know about them. Through case studies in classes and activities in crew, students will deepen their understanding of civil right and the importance of community.