I believe that everyone is both a learner and a teacher.

 

I believe in every learner's creativity, curiosity, and capacity for brilliance. 

 

I believe that traditional school systems have discouraged originality, question-asking, and the resources to discover one's own passions.

 

I believe in facilitating learning in spaces outside of the classroom that enables self-directed learning, artistic practice, and community dialogue.

        

I left traditional public school after 9th grade and became “unschooled,” creating my own education through a mix of college courses, public high school activities, homeschool co-ops, and self-directed learning.  When later on I decided to get my Masters of Arts in Teaching at Brown University and taught ESL English in Providence Public Schools, I both remembered the freedom of these unschooled days while also learning that leaving school is not a privilege that everyone can access.  While I grew up without the money to spend on expensive tutoring, classes, or activities, I had the family support and the community connections to leave the classroom.  Many students don’t have the same choice of leaving a place that provides them with free lunch and friendship.  

 

So when I returned to the classroom as a teacher, it was my students who taught me both why they loved and hated school.  I wanted to be part of why they could love this learning space.  I pushed against against standardized testing in favor of student-centered learning.  I pushed against the settler colonial whiteness in the curriculum through centering stories of people of color that more closely reflected the experiences of my students' identities. But at the end of the day when the school bell rung, I couldn’t push through school’s inherent truth: students do not choose to be there and teachers give grades.  This teacher-student power dynamic in a compulsory system of formal schooling creates a culture of suppressing what you want to learn.  The ones who are rewarded?  Those who do what they are told and follow the rules.  Follow the rubric that someone else (that’s me!) creates.  Now the tension, of course, is that for many low-income students of color in America’s public schools, making it through this system often means social mobility.  Doing well at school is seen as the “ticket” in life because it opens future doors in life - doors that are often systemically denied to students like the ones I taught in a public school system that is unjustly under-resourced.  But whether you succeed or fail at school, going through the system is always at a cost. 

 

I believe that public schools and teachers are crucial. And I believe there are teachers who are doing the hard work of facilitating creativity and joy inside the classroom and we need to appreciate their daily labor and resistance. I also believe there is crucial work for educators like me who have left traditional schooling and support students in learning outside the walls of the classroom.  In the past five years since getting my MAT degree as a certified teacher, I've been blessed to discover there are SO many more educational spaces (both inside and outside of schools) that I never realized imagined.

 

Check out the info below to learn more about all the ways that I’ve worked as an educator in experiential global learning, higher education, museum, library, summer, non-profit, afterschool, and public school settings!