Master Helzer--Squared

Today marked a monumental step for Nate and me: we finished our Masters Degrees! Nate passed his comps a few weeks ago and had his last class today to earn a Masters in Music Education. And I passed my comps on Monday and deposited my thesis (Nate always giggles when I say this because it sounds like deposit my feces....he's so grown-up) today on UNL's Digital Commons website to earn my MA in English. The kind people in Graduate Studies gave me this little button:

If you can't read it, the button says: Congratulate me, I just completed my thesis! It's not near as cool or monumental as my sister in-law's button she received for completing her dissertation, but I'm still pretty tickled about reaching this next step. We started our programs in the summer of 2009. Nate has taken courses every summer since then, and I plugged away taking at least 6 hours each school year and 6 hours each summer (with the exception of this summer). I started the thesis process this fall by reading through a stack of books to finally stumble my way into a solid topic: Using Place Conscious Education and Social Action to Plug the "Rural Brain Drain." After four years of juggling, it's weird to be done. We both commented on the way home that we'll miss the interaction each summer with highly motivated, quality teachers. They pushed us to evaluate our own classroom practices and become better teachers. Our Master's programs gave us more than a few steps over on the salary schedule: they gave us each a professional network, reinforced our decision to become teachers, and gave us a strong desire to learn. I think in the next year or two we'll find our way back in the college classroom because we're nerdy like that :)

Graduation is August 10th at UNL, and though it seems that many people don't walk at their own graduations anymore--Nate and I have decided to be there. It's a big accomplishment that we did together, and it's our way of celebrating. So if any of you will be in the Lincoln area that evening, give me a call. We're just planning on going out for dinner, but we'd love to have you join us!

Social Justice in Omaha Part II

Here's the second part to my previous post:

Q: What kinds of social justice issues do you face as an educator? What does that look like?
A: One big issue that I think all teachers face is that our classrooms are diverse, but the tests were so bound to by the government don’t take these diversities into consideration. While there is a need for standards in education, the current method of assessing these standards only looks at a very select skill on one particular day of a student’s life in order to determine if this student is “proficient” and if teachers are “proficient”. These test don’t take into consideration the whole student. They don’t reveal how far a student really has come in his/her learning. Our current assessments are stifling for both teachers and students (they often result in canned curricula that is separate from the real world) and the consequences of these assessments on districts often cause districts and teachers to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.

Q: Are these issues specific to your classes or are these issues that most educators face?
A: I think this is an issue most educators face. Unfortunately some are just not aware of it. They haven’t been encouraged to be critical of these practices.

Q: Why should these matter the Omaha community? Why is this significant for the Omaha Metro Area?
A: As I mentioned, I’m new to Omaha---so I’m coming at this with a pretty limited viewpoint. However, a more equitable society should be important to each community. If we don’t learn to see the potential in all people, then we will continue to commit acts of injustice. We’ll continue to treat people unfairly, we’ll continue to remain divided by class and race...injustice is a vicious cycle. Omaha won’t reach its own potential as a community if we don’t learn to value one another’s potential.

Q: How do you approach the issue of social justice in your classroom? Why does this matter to you and your students?
A: I’m not perfect, but I try to set up a just classroom; one that is nurturing to all students and is a safe place for them to grow, create, and engage. We do a lot of character building activities and character study through the literature we read, the essays we write, and the disscussions we have. I always tell my students that I want them to leave my classroom a better person. I try to treat them fairly and I expect them to offer this same courtesy to their classmates. And I want them to be critical, so in relation to the literature we read, we discuss a lot of current events and socially relevant topics that explore injustice. Of course, I have to teach them how to discuss how to challenge one another civilly. We also discuss what might be the most effective way to speak back to injustice. It’s important me to teach this way because, it’s the right thing to do. Many students don’t learn these skills at home, and these are skills necessary to be a critical and participatory adult. I don’t want them to get caught up in a circle of apathy because that’s no way to live. I want them to learn how to live well in their communities (wherever they end up).

Q: What might justice look like in education? Can you paint me a picture of that?
A: Going back to one of my teaching role models, Linda Christensen, I think justice in education or life in general, might start with believing in people’s potential. When we are able to look past surface level and when we look at each person (no matter their appearances or their past) and truly believe they have potential and value, then our actions will change. We’ll start treating people more fairly. We’ll start teaching to each individual student, we’ll make education relevant to students’ lives and the lives they’ll take on in the future, we’ll start trusting our teachers more, and maybe we’ll begin to eliminate draconian educational policies.

Social Justice in Omaha Part I

Tonight I have the awesome privilege to help out our friend Micah with a project he's doing to promote social justice in Omaha. He and a crew are interviewing a few people tonight about their experiences and views on social justice; they'll use some of the clips to create a video to show at the church Micah works at (Christ Community) for a sermon on social justice. I would say that social justice is a fairly contentious issue among many evangelical Christians because of the connotations of liberalism that it arouses in peoples' minds. So, I'm interested in seeing the final product. I'm humbled that Micah asked if he could interview me to get my perspective about social justice in education because I really don't see myself as doing something out of the ordinary; I teach the way I do because it's just the right thing to do. Plus, I feel like most of what I've done from my classroom is to the credit of other people. I've learned to teach from so many other great educators.

Today I sat down for a few hours to process through the questions that Micah will ask tonight. In typical type-A English teacher fashion, I typed out all of my responses...so, I thought it would be interesting blogging material. My responses are long, so I'll break this into two posts.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your story and background? How did you end up in Omaha and how has Social Justice become a topic of interest to you?
A: In the fall I’ll be starting my fifth year of teaching high school English. My teaching experience so far has been in rural school settings in western Nebraska. I took interest in social justice primarily because of my experiences in my graduate work with the Nebraska Writing Project at UNL. I took classes with some of the best teachers in the state, and these people pushed me to think more deeply about education. Teaching is more than tests, it’s more than standards; the best teachers present their students with a diverse perspective of the world and then give them chances to and push them to think critically in order to develop their own opinions of the world, to be able to articulate these clearly and logically, and then to equip them to act. This kind of teaching is tough and it’s messy and it’s not always valued by administrators, teachers, students, communites, or educational policies. As one of my teaching role models, Linda Christensen from the Oregon Writing Project says, "Social justice is at the core of my work because it is a belief in people's potential.” I think why I took interest in social justice and continue to find ways to bring this work into my classroom is because it takes on this belief that everyone has potential (which I think is a good starting point for social justice), and as a teacher, it’s my responsibility to tap into this potential in students. It’s my job to find their potential and help nurture it. It’s just the right thing to do.

As far as how I got to Omaha, my husband and I have enjoyed small town, rural living, but as we got closer to growing our family through adoption, we decided that we wanted our kids to grow up in a culturally rich area. So we began searching for jobs and were blessed enough to land here.

Q: Tell me more about the work you've been doing with Social Justice in the classroom? What does that look like?
A: Originally I started small by introducing a variety of writers into my classroom. I moved from a primarily white dead-guy curriculum to one that included women writers and writers of different backgrounds and cultures as a way to introduce my primarily white students’ eyes to other ways of living and being in the world. I also introduced lots of non-fiction articles that discussed issues I thought kids needed to think about: issues like race, gender, oppression, activism, etc. Eventually by the time I left Ogallala, my 9th grade curriculum included an entire quarter devoted to social action where kids studied the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s four steps to non-violent direct action in his text Letter from a Birmingham Jail. My students interviewed local changemakers in our own community to capture their stories and then make them public via stories on our class blog, and then they were required to make some sort of positive impact on their community using their passions, talents, and resources. Their projects were research based as I required them to do some initial digging through primary and secondary sources to see if their project was valid. Their culminating activity was to create a visual presentation of their research to prove why their project was necessary to complete, the vocabulary learned along the way, and photos of themselves in action, as well as a summary of what they planned to do next. They planned a project night similar to a traditional science fair, and they invited community members to attend via business letters. The two years I did this was a success--I had close to a 100% completion rate, and this year over 100 community members attended our project night to support students in their own form of social action.