Where I Am Now
Yesterday I
completed my first semester as a teaching assistant. While my only major
responsibility as the TA was responding to the students’ weekly reading
responses, there were 25 students enrolled in the course this semester (as
compared to 15 last semester, when I was a student in the class) and the added
workload was the equivalent of taking a fifth class. It was a lot. That said,
the course is about how to both teach “diverse” student populations, as well as
about how to bring issues of “diversity” (racial, ethnic, cultural, gendered,
socioeconomic, linguistic, etc.) into the classroom. I took the course last
semester, although it’s out of my department and although I do not intend to
become a classroom teacher, because I do anticipate working in education and
specifically with teachers on how to create and practice culturally relevant
and socially just pedagogy, how to talk about difficult sociocultural issues,
and how to incorporate mass media and popular culture texts into their curriculum
to better engage and prepare students to become 21st century
learners and citizens.
I learned a lot as
a student in the class last semester—the readings were excellent and the class
discussions were productive—but the real source of learning for me was through
my self-appointed role as ‘participant observer,’ as I observed many of my
classmates critically reading and analyzing texts and topics about race,
diversity, social class, gender, for the first time. While my initial reactions
were filled with frustration and fury at the naïve and ignorant comments being made
by my [predominantly white] peers in the first few classes—using the terms
“diversity” and “race” interchangeably, identifying as “colorblind,” and having
no idea about how their positionalities (in regards to intersections of race,
class and gender) have affected who they are and who they will be as
educators—I soon realized that this group was a fairly accurate representation
of the groups of teachers I hope to work with someday. By the third class I’d
decided to think of my time in subsequent sessions as ‘professional development’
as much as an academic class. Using this lens, I followed the trajectories of
the other students in the class over the course of the semester—watched as
their readings of the texts got a little deeper, their criticality of
themselves, youth, education, and socially constructed concepts got a little
stronger. And, at the end of the semester I inquired about serving as the
course’s teaching assistant this semester.
The spring semester
got off to a bit of a rough start, mostly due to the professor’s scheduling
conflicts which made him unable to physically be in class, and when we all
finally resumed in the fourth week of the semester, it was clear that there had
not been a safe space or a trusting relationship established between the
professor (and me by default) and the students. I was quite aware of what was
going on, but as a first time TA, I was unsure of how to go about trying to
remedy the situation. I finally decided to take a proactive approach and
attempt to initiate the creation of a safe space through leading an ice breaker
activity the following week (ironically the week we were reading about and
discussing ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’, a topic I am passionate about and
which I personally feel needs more attention in the course, so I was determined
to make this the week that changed the uncomfortable classroom atmosphere). The
next Monday I facilitated an activity on social class and privilege (“stand up if the following statements apply
to you, sit down if they do not”). Although participation was not mandatory
everyone stood up in front of their chairs when notified we were about to
begin. The room was silent except for my voice reading the questions, the
professor and I also participated (which I think said a lot), and in less than
two minute’s time, the 27 people in our classroom had shared more without
speaking a word than they had in four weeks of class. It was powerful. So
incredibly powerful. I’m not exaggerating when I say that by the end of the
meeting the mood, comfort level, and climate had dramatically changed; it felt
like a different class.
Throughout the
semester I have spent hours each week taking the time to provide thoughtful
feedback to the reading responses of 25 students—asking them questions, pushing
back on notions and attitudes that I feel need to be more carefully analyzed
and deconstructed; always being sure to clarify when I was giving my personal
opinion with “I think…” and challenging statements with “Perhaps…”. I received a few emails from students
throughout the semester thanking me for my feedback and suggestions on how to
deal with situations, bring up difficult conversations, or think about themselves
and their students more critically. And as the weeks went on, it was clear that
the classroom environment had greatly improved—conversations were getting
deeper, more people were participating in class, and many of the students were
really taking the time to honestly and critically reflect and share personal
stories and experiences in their weekly reading responses. I felt privileged to
be given access to all of this incredible information and I let students know
that, thanking them for sharing and for taking the time to use the texts to
synthesize what they had experienced in their own lives.
Cut to last night,
students shared their final group projects, something they’ve been working on
since late February, and they were amazing. All of the unit plans they’d developed
had culturally sensitive and relevant content and activities, and the students
had critically engaged the assignment with the hopes to actually be able to use
the lessons developed by each group in their own future classrooms. At the end
of class, the professor left and I remained to administer the student course evaluations.
On their way out, two students handed me their papers and said they gave me
“shout outs” on their evaluations, two more students approached to sincerely
thank me for the obvious time and effort that I had put into replying to their
reading responses every week, and they wanted me to know how helpful my
feedback had been for them as student teachers this semester and as real
teachers next year. A few other students wished me luck on finals, a few smiled
and left silently, but I was on top of the world. All of the long hours,
frustrations about not getting all of the work done for my other classes
because of the time I’d spent on the work for this class, questioning why I was
giving paragraphs of feedback…it was all worth it. Not only that, these few
comments reinvigorated and reassured me that this is what I want to do with my life—although I’m not exactly
sure about what the work will look like, I have no doubt that this kind of work
needs to be a part of who I am and what I do for the rest of my life.
I was not at all
planning on writing about this for my fourth story, but I think I really needed
to reflect and document what proved to be an incredible experience this
semester right after it ended. And I needed to do it now, and not a few weeks
ago because in the thick of it I wasn’t always thinking about how useful and beneficial
this role was for me. In writing stories about “educational” experiences and
thinking about “storying” our educational lives this semester, all I can say is
that I don’t think that I could have written any other story for my last piece
because this to date has probably been one of the most personally significant educational
stories that I can tell and that I know will stay with me and continue to
influence my work for a long time.
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