My Philosophy

 Learning how to become a teacher has taught me a lot about my experience as a learner, and about how informative the learning process is to our outlook on the world around us. Being a learner is an incredibly vulnerable process that affects one’s mental state and relationships with others. Without proper care to this process, we can disrupt the confidence and emotional maturity of our students. 

Schools are a place where many different variables interact. Students, families, faculty, and administration are sections of the greater school community that affect how each student moves through their educational path. Schools must be full of faculty who are sensitive and adaptable to the nuance of each situation. Inspired by the philosophy of Reconstructionism, I believe that an educational environment can be a place where a healthier world is ideated and created. As a teacher I want to be able to provide a place where students feel safe enough to explore their boundaries and skills as they grow in their identities as members of a greater community. 

I desire for collaboration to be at the center of my teaching processes. Students can grow in their social and emotional skills from the more frequent they participate in varying modes of collaborative assignments. Through this framework, the teacher is a facilitator of experiences that allow students to play as they safely explore the intersections of public and private self. Student personal interest is at the core of curriculum, and student insight is valued as highly as the insights of the founders and historical leaders of any discipline they are learning. I believe that students are able to learn deeper when they are presented first with accessible themes and concepts instead of confusing technical processes. Every discipline is more malleable than we lead on in general US education. 

Last fall in 2023, I spent the semester working for the education department at The Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky. I regularly co-taught after-school programs and in-school workshops. A large amount of this programming that I taught was improvised acting. While I have a tiny bit of acting experience from when my family participated in community theater growing up, I would not call myself an actor. My boss knew this, but she still trusted me to find the confidence to lead students through the process of learning a little about improv. Quickly into the process, I realized that I had the skills needed to teach the students. I did not need to be some “all-knowing” highly trained actress who knew the profession like the palm of my hand. In fact, I felt a closer connection to the students because I was learning alongside them. As an artist, I had mainly constricted myself to the boundaries of visual mediums. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if I had allowed my self-perception to hold me back. That is the ultimate motivating force for me as I enter into teaching; allowing students the space to redefine themselves as they continually unfold into new iterations. 

Assessing learning is an important part of the process that tends to lack an adequate level of care in general education. I believe that students can learn a lot from failure, and teachers should provide ample opportunities for students to respond to and reflect on this aspect of the learning experience. Through the process that we use to assess and measure students we are modeling a process of determining worth. We must be very careful with this process or we can risk the formulation of a highly-competitive environment which only caters to a specific kind of learner. As an educator, I want to assess students through a lens that is dense with context about their learning style and experience in my class. It is my hope that I can create lessons that empower and uplift students to care about their unique voices. I want to motivate my students to care about their growth as an artist, and through that themselves and others.