As an educator, my role is to guide the learning and development of the entire human being, not just by stimulating their minds, but by engaging their bodies and spirits. I seek to go beyond the traditional model of drilling facts into the minds of learners, instead prioritizing the long-term growth of these minds by focusing on skill-building and critical thinking. This focus on holistic education requires that my students and I create an environment that is more than just a supposed “safe space” to sit quietly and listen. Instead, my teaching must occur in a classroom where all students are not just encouraged, but feel a responsibility to share their feelings and ideas about our focus subject. With a classroom that encourages and fosters dialogical relationships between all participants, students get the opportunity to learn from one another. As students continue to share with me and their peers, their confidence and communication skills grow, preparing them to be engaged learners and teachers in other educational spaces for years to come.

As a bilingual environmental educator, my responsibility is to create a collective classroom with an equitable, level playing field. I must recognize that when I step into a new space, my students have a wide range of experiences and knowledge related to the topics and the languages I teach them. My students come from a diverse array of backgrounds, and my first job as an educator is to recognize how these past experiences may impact their perception of my teaching and the space that I am in charge of creating. Every student comes to the class with different linguistic and cultural perspectives, and I work hard to ensure that each learner receives an educational experience tailored to these backgrounds. Additionally, this bilingual education allows students to explore the cross-cultural connections that form significant parts of their lives, showing learners that our world is an amazingly diverse place.

In my teaching, I strive to decentralize the power of an English-only instructor, leading activities in which students are strongly encouraged to share their ideas with me and their peers in English and Spanish. For example, when introducing students to our focus bird species, I provide learners with the space to share their observations and questions with the whole class, sparking dialogue and conversations that can engage each student. These observations can display an impressive grasp of scientific concepts, with one student noticing the different color patterns on two Western Tanager individuals, but not knowing why they might look different. This created an opportunity to call on another student, who hypothesized that the bird with brighter plumage might be the male, while the female had darker colors. Through this type of class-wide discussion, students can think through and answer many of the questions presented by their peers.