Transformative Education

As promised, here is my statement submitted to Alverno College to apply for a teaching certificate program. I appreciate all prayers, good vibes, and whatnot as I await news of acceptance! Thank you and enjoy!

Education can encourage all, no matter their identity, to seek an equal world.  Education has the power to invite students into a safe space of exploration, in which reflexive learning takes place between the learner and teacher, and between the learner and the world, all simultaneously. The teacher provides opportunities for a challenge, and the learner grasps this in a creative, unique way. The teacher learns something new from the unique synthesis of information by the changed learner. As the learner gains new perspectives on reality, they see the world differently. In so doing, the learner acts differently, and the world transforms.

As a student, I learned and changed most when challenged in a safe, compassionate way. For example, in a History course, I was one of 200 Westerns exploring a culturally distorted place, Africa. Professor Delehanty gave us new lenses to see Africa for the gigantic, diverse, complicated, and beautiful place it is. Books on our reading list such as Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo shocked me. Moyo examines ways charity has hurt the continent, demonstrating how, despite $1 trillion in aid coming to the continent in the last fifty years, per-capita income is lower than the 1970s. Hurtful charity is an uncomfortable subject, potentially incriminating one’s own good intentions, but in this space of discomfort I finally understood the importance of partnership rather than charity to bring about effective social change. As I currently teach in Zambia, I constantly reassess how I act as partner rather than benefactor requiring dependence.

Creating a safe space outside one’s comfort zone necessitates an inclusive curriculum that accounts for assumptions and biases in instructional resources. The space of education becomes safe when teachers and curriculum protect persons of all identity categories from physical or emotional harm, while simultaneously providing opportunities to encounter and understand the world more fully and clearly. Education can fight oppression by lifting up and exploring suppressed narratives of historically marginalized people, and then show how these groups have overcome their oppression. In the classroom, this looks like studying lists of diverse authors and historical players and events.

This reflective practice of exploratory education with its possibilities for social change will guide my work as an educator as I strive to develop my strength of compassion in conjunction with learning pedagogical strategies that promote fairness and excellence. I need this program to learn effective strategies of assessing and teaching in order to create a safe space for exploration. I want to be a social justice advocate, both in my classroom and beyond in places like school board meetings, or even the Wisconsin State Capital. Recently the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families wrote a report called, “Race for Results,” that showed the state “dead last in providing for the well-being of its African-American kids.” This report is unacceptable and I want to use the classroom to make our state a more equal place. Together Alverno and I can work toward a dream of a transformative education system.