When I transferred to Rhode Island college in 2008, I never imagined that I would graduate five years later with a certification in teaching. In fact, I was vehemently opposed to the idea. You see, nearly every adult in my family works in public education - both grandmothers, my mom and dad, and a handful of aunts and cousins. And all of them told me that I would make a great teacher. But I didn’t see it. I had a much more glamorous vision for my future. A career in journalism, or public relations, I didn’t have a concrete plan, but I imagined a job with opportunities to travel, see the world, and live in a big city. So I majored in communications and started working for The Anchor, RIC’s student-run newspaper.
It was an exciting time and place and we took our jobs very seriously. We shared a communal sense of urgency and importance as we covered RIC related events. Perhaps to a fault -we had an almost antagonist relationship with RIC’s Student Community Government -we thought we were working for the Washington Post or something. I remember this one incident where we managed to get an anonymous source to reveal the finance committee’s proposed budget for student organizations. For some reason, the LGTBQ and multicultural clubs’ budgets had both been slashed and it felt like an injustice. We rallied together to print an emergency mid-week copy of the paper as if it was our own Watergate investigation
At first, I was a layout editor. We would start on Monday afternoons and work until 4 or 5 in the morning to get the paper to the printers. I liked organizing and arranging images and articles in an aesthetically pleasing way. In my 3rd year, I ran for and was elected as one of two Managing editors. With my new title came new responsibilities and a lot more stress. I enjoyed the friends I made, but for most of my time there I was suppressing a feeling like I did not actually belong or deserve to be there. I doubted my accomplishments and had a persistent internalized fear of eventually being exposed as a fraud. There were aspects of the industry that I didn’t understand and it always seemed like everyone else was more talented than I could ever hope to be. Ultimately, The Anchor was a place where I had learned and experienced important things but I realized, after 3 years, that this was not a world I wanted to make a career out of.
So one day, midway through the spring semester of 2010, I literally turned around on my way to Whipple Hall, skipped class, went to Craig-Lee instead, and spoke to an advisor who helped me apply for the secondary education program. Then, I walked upstairs to the Writing Center and asked for an application to become a tutor. By the Fall of 2010, I was taking FNED and working as a writing tutor. A new course and a new path. Both the program and the writing center had a strong sense of community within their spaces, but unlike at the anchor, I truly felt like I belonged. The writing center, specifically, shaped who I am as a teacher and my belief that kids learn best within a community of learners built by telling stories and sharing experiences.
I have always tried to carry these beliefs and experiences with me and within my own classroom. For the past 5 years, I have been teaching English Language Arts at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School. I feel like I am at my best when kids are working together in groups and collaborating towards a greater goal. After my first year of teaching, I was offered the opportunity to trade one of my sections of eleventh grade English for a journalism elective. There was a lot of freedom for me to take the club and the class in any direction I wanted and I was excited! I put a lot of time that summer writing out the curriculum. My plan was to rebrand the school’s newspaper entirely - create a new logo, website, and social media. I made press passes ss badges for the kids when leaving the classroom to do interviews. It was going to be great!
My guidance and expectations were clearly lacking, however, because what I found in the first semester of this elective was a group of unenthusiastic and disinterested kids. Or honestly, it might have been that I actually overplanned. I should have given the students more responsibility and autonomy over the direction of the course. Either way, that imposter syndrome was at it again and I felt like I did not have the authority or credibility to teach the class. Luckily, the course was only 1 semester, so in January I could reevaluate and start over.
Since then, I have spent the past four years reinventing the course every semester hoping that something finally clicks! There are some aspects of the course that I am happy with. Like our weekly Socratic seminars on student-chosen news articles and current events. In this way, I can kind of get away with the “no-politics” rule at my school and you can tell the kids really enjoy the opportunity to discuss “controversial” topics and how the media portrays thems.
Something I want to change is how my students create, share, and publish articles and photographs. I have already worked with the IT department at my school to get a license for InDesign - a program that will teach them graphic design skills and that will allow us to publish one special print edition per semester.
I believe that kids learn best when they have an authentic purpose, medium, and audience for their work. Reading Mike Wesch’s writing, “Anti-Teaching: Confront the Crisis of Significance” really got my thinking about the structure of my own room both physically and pedagogically. When I look back at my time working for The Anchor, my best memories are when I was collaborating with my peers and publishing meaningful work for the RIC community. I want to work towards embodying this final quote from Wesh: “I decided to get to work creating a learning environment more conducive to produce the types of questions that create lifelong learners ratty than savvy test-takers.” In this respect, I want to recreate this space and atmosphere in my classroom - where students are given leadership roles and the space to operate as if it were a “newsroom” and not a “classroom.”
I plan on achieving this is by creating a class Remind so that we can communicate even when we are not in class. News happens at all times and on the weekends - and I want students to be able to post ideas for stories as they come up and be able to assign work to themselves and one another in a more organic way.
Also, we currently have a WordPress site that is overwhelming, difficult to use, and disconnected from the G Suite tools that they are used to work with. Instead, I want to create a class and student-run newspaper using Blogger. Students already have Gmail accounts through the school, and the blogger platform is more user-friendly. As I have played around with it, I have learned that I can toggle permissions in the settings so that students can use their own email account to publish articles to the shared blog.
Overall, this will allow me to foster a learning environment where students can build a strong sense of community among themselves as well as with their larger community - where other students, parents, and teachers can interact and respond to their writing in a public sphere.
If you would like to watch this narrative with visuals, feel free to check out my Pecha Kucha!
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