What I told the H bomb

Here is the bulk of  the “statement of purpose” essay that I wrote for my Harvard application.  It is a little on the formal side, but I think it accurately captures both my goals and my philosophy.

Having both taught and been taught in settings framed by student-directed learning, I am drawn to and motivated by the openness of Harvard’s Special Studies program.

Through Harvard’s Special Studies in Education program, I endeavor to design an experiential education curriculum that engages youth with issues related to food security through urban farming.  A handful of successful program models exist across the country already, including The Food Project, an organization based right in Boston.  My long term goals for this project include the development and implementation of youth-run urban farming programs and education centers.  This experiential education program could take the shape of a charter school, a youth employment program, a network of school gardens, a residential outdoor school or a capacity building non-profit organization.  These possible incarnations of this project are universally informed by the principles of project-based learning, sustainability education and community building.

I would like to ground this project in the study of education because my fundamental question is about curriculum and student learning.  How can experiential education be best used to foster meaningful learning, culture and community?  I have a particular interest in how this type of program could successfully build community between youth from varying backgrounds.

I envision a program in which students are engaged part-time in the hands-on work of food production.  Youth will plant, maintain and harvest the season’s crops, as well as produce value added products like jams and salsas for distribution to their communities through hunger relief work and farmers’ markets.  In the balance of their time, students will be engaged in a rigorous and multi-disciplinary curriculum that addresses food security from an academic standpoint.  For Example, such a curriculum could incorporate plant biology and environmental patterns; history and economics of farming; principles of local and global economics, an inquiry into the social forces that contribute to hunger and homelessness; or basic design and architecture as they apply to the construction of buildings with natural materials like cob.

Education, as a technology of cultural production, has the power to transform society.  This is, in no uncertain terms, why I chose teaching as my path.  In the September 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine, a panel of educators and theorists examined the past and imagined the future of public schooling.  Theodore Sizer of the Essential Schools movement argues that, in this pursuit, “the only villain is a society unprepared to think hard about what it means to learn”.  In considering Sizer’s statement, there are a number of questions that arise.  How do we shift the education system such that it becomes more meaningful to both students and teachers? As school choice gives students more diverse options, how do we ensure that young people have equal access to quality education?  And, perhaps most importantly, how can the education system both reflect and improve the world we live in?

Currently, I work in a middle school program for students with learning disabilities.  The Key program is essentially a school within a school.  I have, over the past two years, taught Science, Social Studies and English to classes of seven students.  Though the classes are tiny, vast learning differences between students means approaching each child individually with their strengths in mind.  What ultimately convinced me to take the job was the potential to establish a tight learning community and the challenge to creatively design my teaching practice around my students’ highly individualized learning profiles.

In 2006, I was one of five students to complete Brown’s Undergraduate Teacher Education Program.  I studied alongside the Masters of Arts in Teaching students and earned a teaching certificate in Secondary History and Social Studies.  In teaching, I found a practice for my theory-based undergraduate degree in Ethnic Studies.  I was able to link the two faculties together in a culminating project called “Paradox and Praxis: an Investigation of how White Educators can best address issues of Race, Racism and White privilege in the classroom.”  This project included literature review, interview-based research and lesson plans.  I continue to refer to this document as “my life’s work.”  It informs how and why I navigate increasing access to learning in my classroom and why I would like to pursue a graduate degree in Education.

As an educator, I have always worked with students who have highly individualized learning needs and goals.  I did my teaching practicum at the Met, a Big Picture charter school in Providence where students, mostly working-class students of color, have no classes or grades, but rather achieve their learning goals through internships in their communities that they select.  In my short time there I identified one paradox of alternative education.  On one hand, the privilege of being invited into these kids’ lives and communities obligated me to equip them, as best I could, with the tools they need to access the culture of power from which I benefit (for example, standard English grammar).  On the other, is Audre Lorde’s equally true axiom: ‘the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house’(1984).  This paradox parallels the dichotomy between my theoretical BA in Ethnic Studies and my practical teacher education program.  The challenge I am taking up in my process of becoming an educator is that of navigating the uncomfortable space between these two equal but opposing truths.

What Key and the Met’s “student centered learning”, have in common is that I am constantly called upon to innovate.  It is an ongoing challenge to work within the traditional school system when my students have such non-traditional minds.  In my first year in Key, I was consistently amazed by young people like Christian, a sixth grade student who could tell me everything about the conquests of Genghis Khan and yet experienced considerable difficulty reading the simple notes on the whiteboard.  Because of this disjoint between my students’ intelligences and their ability to express their knowledge in traditional ways, differentiation has never been an afterthought in my lesson planning; it is at the very core of my pedagogy.  In a school and education system that tends to prioritize certain types of learning, how do I teach and assess my students, as well as strengthen their self-images as intelligent young people?  Though I teach in a college preparatory school, my primary goal in the Key program is to keep my students’ love of learning alive – and I have found ways to embed dynamic and meaningful teaching in a regimented system.  I believe that Harvard’s M.Ed in Special Studies will help me develop the tools I need to continue this pursuit.

Last spring, as part of our grade 6 science study on ecosystems, I built terrariums with my students. Each child brought in a pickle jar, and we set off towards the fringes of the schoolyard to collect specimens for our glassed-in biomes. What ensued was the most animated fight over worms I’ve ever been party to. When Isaac and Caleb both found earthworms amongst the ferns, the others, even those who were squeamish about getting their hands dirty, refused to come back inside until they, too, had found critters for their terrariums.

Isaac came to school late the next morning carrying a small Styrofoam container. He had convinced his mom to stop at the gas station on the way to school so that he could buy bait worms for the class. After giving one worm to each child, we took the remaining worms into our nascent school garden. These students, who are deeply embedded in a culture of video games and computers, perched on the edge of the garden and watched their worms for a full 30 minutes as they eased between patches of shade and eventually disappeared beneath the soil.

As I develop as an academic, as a community-builder and as an educator I am continuing to navigate the spaces between theory and praxis.  I have progressed from learning in an unconventional program to teaching in one.  Through the Special Studies program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education I hope to develop the skills necessary to design and implement these non-traditional educational programs such that the teachable moments that so deeply affect students are not peripheral or accidental, but make up the very core of both curriculum and pedagogy.

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~ by youthagriculture on May 25, 2009.