Scholarly Autobiography

Be as you are, search for your own way.
Know yourself before searching to know children…
Above all you are a child too,
and you must know and educate this child first.

Korchak, 1943

One empty, plastic soda bottle. Potting soil. Seeds. Water. As a four year old preschooler in New York City, I thought it was incredibly special to be able to create my own garden with just these four items. I remember very little from preschool or kindergarten except that word: “terrarium.” I couldn’t believe that I could design and create this system of growing, rooted, living things inside a discarded soda bottle. The best thing about the terrarium was that once the water accumulated or the temperature decreased, the condensation gathered on the plastic and moved down the sides, back into the soil, adding moisture and completing one cycle of many. Then, the process would begin over again. I was amazed. Looking back, I realize that this was my first experience with a very miniature ecosystem--albeit amateur. It was my first tangible experience of learning how to create a kind of sacred space that had growth and potential as its basis. This terrarium had roots and promise. As a four year old, I was in love with that concept and with the space of that plastic container.

It may be a stretch but….Looking back more than 25 years later, I realize that certain, framed spaces (often larger than the terrarium but sharing the same concept) have shaped my life. While I was growing up, my family had a large, corduroy couch in the living room that was placed a foot or two away from the wall. It created this narrow, alcove-like space that I named (and proceeded to label) the “krismidowee.” When I was 6 and my twin brothers were 4, my dad was diagnosed with a mental illness which served as the emotional background for a lot of fighting that would often wake us up late at night. It was then that I started holding “sibling meetings” in this space, the “krismidowee.” It became a sacred space where I taught Mike and Jon how we could write letters and notes to each other, explaining how we felt during nights like this. After these sibling meetings, we would sometimes leave them underneath the door of my parents’ bedroom so that my parents could read them in the morning and understand the nature of our “krismidowee” discussions and family concerns. For all of the screaming that occurred during those years, my brothers and I did collect some responses. More importantly, my love of literacy, language, words and communication, along with a belief in their power to make change, was born. In some ways, I think that the “krismidowee” was kind of like my first classroom in which I was the facilitator. It was certainly a special place, with a distinct purpose, its own culture, full of immediate and relevant objectives, rooted with meaning, potential and promise.

Throughout my life so far, I have grown attached to physical spaces and the unique parts of myself that these places demanded and exposed. Most of all, the relationships fostered within these spaces have changed me. My passion for and moral commitment to children feels just as visceral as it did when I woke up each day at Camp ABC. It is a camp in upstate New York for children from high poverty neighborhoods in New York City. Each summer, the Fresh Air Fund campers leave their homes in New York City and arrive in wood cabins in upstate New York. That summer, shivering in my sleeping bag in a wood cabin at 6:30 a.m., I had no idea that the next eight weeks were unfolding to be a life-defining experience. Although I began the job with what I thought were realistic expectations, I had not anticipated the high physical and emotional demands of 18 hour days, of the living conditions, my responsibilities, and, most of all, the campers’ needs. Many girls would scream all night because nature’s silence scared them. Most of them were terrified of the camp’s environment. For them, it was an unfamiliar space lacking promise. I spent the early part of the summer in shock at this problem, not understanding the terror and alienation they felt.

Clearly, this shock did not work for me as a leader or educator and I was frustrated. One night, when reading a bedtime story to some of my campers, I realized a well of patience and love I never knew I harbored. This allowed me to better connect and lead my campers. After finishing the story, I kissed each camper goodnight on the forehead. That night, instead of insisting that they find a way to calm down and get to sleep on their own, I sat in their beds with them until each of them fell asleep. I realized that I had been fighting my campers’ most basic needs: to be loved and understood in a new place, a space that was completely unfamiliar. I had been fighting these needs all summer because I was too busy trying to control their behavior. Following this realization, I tried to control their behavior less and respond to their needs more, I became a much better and, more responsive educator and facilitator. Through conversations, patience, humility and humor, I began to know these 9 year old girls. I became interested in the language they chose to name their experiences and themselves. I started to understand what it meant to be an active listener which seems to me to be the first step understanding that children have such interesting an important things to say. This space allowed me to realize the first critical skill of being a literacy teacher: inquiry. By the end of the summer, I realized the symbiotic relationship that that this camp, that space, had created. My campers taught me about the significance of love, patience and inquiry—they rightly refused to expect any less.

After graduating from college, I entered a new space: a first grade classroom in Compton, California. I chose to be a teacher in a low income community to be a part of the tide of change that needed (and still needs) to occur in our public education system. During the next seven years of teaching first and second graders in urban areas in Los Angeles, I began to get a glimpse of the “educational space” in which we place our country’s, our children. I felt blessed to be able to teach these early grades because I was again being demanded by my students to give them nothing less than the tools to read and write, to be literate. I began to view teaching as a socio-political act and the classroom as a transformative space. Working with my 6 and 7 year olds and focusing on language, phonology, reading, writing and words became a sacred space to me. Teaching my students to find patterns and beauty within language was transformative for both them and for me. My classroom was becoming a place of promise. We were developing roots and starting to actualize our potentials as literate meaning makers. In room 10, I felt like we were a symbol of the changing space of public education.

I spent the next couple of years teaching and in graduate school, learning as much as possible about the field of Literacy. I learned the difference between being a responsive reading teacher and being a restrictive one. I learned that attempting to have power over children is criminal and learning how to give children power to express themselves is critical. I felt privileged to enter this space each day and help give my students power to their own thoughts by being able to express them or read more about them. Enmeshed in reading, decoding, imaginary characters, nonfiction reports and writing, I felt deeply fulfilled and felt that, “Teacher and learners are correlates, one of which was never intended to be without the other.”(Author unknown)

After understanding more about how to effectively teach beginning readers and writers, I started to become more interested in how my students not only decoded words- but decoded and interpreted their own worlds. I was deeply inspired by Jonathan Cohen’s Caring Classroom/Intelligent Schools that emphasized the seminal importance of social emotional learning in the classroom. Social emotional literacy became as important to me as traditional literacy. Our classroom culture and the way in which my students constructed it with me was my pedagogical focus for my last 5 years of teaching. Just as the ability to break the code of phonemes is necessary for language learning, the capacity to “read” oneself and others is just as important (Cohen 3). Peter Senge’s concept of “dialogue” and “thinking together” about social problems within the space of our classroom and school became a hallmark of my classroom (Senge 19). (Need more here about how the kids felt empowered to own the classroom space as their own, everyone had a role, culture and community…ecosystem)

Last year, I moved back to my “roots” in New York. I started working as Reading Specialist with middle schoolers who were having difficulties in school, particularly in the area of writing and language. Many of my students had dyslexia or a mix of language learning challenges. Above all, they were frustrated with their language processing and their abilities to access language and call it their own. They had ideas, could visualize and feel them but could not express them. Above all, they could not express them in the kinds of ways they craved. Their minds were becoming a stifling space and I was hired to help them navigate this space. I spent they year developing academic “interventions” based on reading and writing skills and research-based strategies. However, in working with my students, I was simply amazed at their tenacity, their humor and their commitment to their own learning—despite the discouragement from schools that they had received. I recalled one of psychologist Carl Roger’s quote: “Doesn’t it sometimes amaze you the way weeds will grow through the sidewalk, or saplings crack boulders, or animals survive desert conditions or the frozen north?” The educational space of my students had failed them and they felt ashamed of their skills and competencies. However, during each session, they were engaged. The dialogic space of the two of us working together on fixing breakdown point in their skills was again, transformative for them and for me. It also reconfirmed for me that social emotional learning was intertwined with literacy learning.Need transition.

By starting this doctoral program, I want to further investigate the ways in which language, literacy and social emotional learning programs play out in urban schools and classrooms. With testing pressures and assessment emphasis, I think our educational space is losing its promise and its humanity. Our children are not dumping grounds for knowledge to be regurgitated. They are co-constructors, meaning makers…I would like my research to elevate this area from being secondary or tertiary in schools to being as basic as decoding…(improve this!)