Michigan State was the best choice (and the only choice) I had made when applying to colleges. Though I am not one for sports (frankly they put me to sleep), the BIG 10 emphasis on campus did not steer me away from rigorous courses and fulfilling extracurricular activities. 

Below are various experiences, achievements, and activities that helped culminate my experiences at Michigan State University.

Student Commencement Speaker for the College of Arts & Letters Spring Commencement 2017

I had the honor to be the student commencement speaker at my graduation last year, though I originally did not intend to apply for the opportunity (thanks to pressure of my mother). Being an avid storyteller, I challenged myself to develop a speech that would speak to my fellow graduates experiences at MSU, reflecting on achievements, successes, but most importantly the struggles that taught us the most about who we are and how we must continue to keep moving forward

TE 807 Professional Development & Inquiry.

This course helped me navigate why I entered education and how I can improve my role as an educator. As politically motivated as I am, I really see myself in the classroom for the long-haul, but I have to be honest about my own motivations and passions that led me to the classroom. Especially in this great exodus of teachers during the pandemic, I have to prepare myself for weathering this storm.

Artifact 1: Teaching Commitments (essay and flier)

• Standard 4: Reflective, systematic inquiry, and study refinement of one's practice

• Goal 1 & 2: Critical Inquiry and Accomplished Teaching

At the beginning of my journey in the MATC program, I was challenged to consider what is “Good” or “Quality” teaching. Having just started my fourth year of teaching, I was hopeful that I was doing just that. In TE 807, one of the first assignments was to write our initial stances on quality teaching. I had focused primarily on systemic issues that needed to be changed in order and having looked at it from a macro perspective, I had removed myself from the experience and thought about what conditions needed to be put in place so that all teachers, regardless of district, grade level, or content could teach well. While joy was emphasized for both students and teachers, I was still arguing for joy with the focus on work/school conditions. It was clear that after submitting the paper that I had slightly missed the mark. 

In the final revision of this paper, I had finally narrowed the focus on myself. Rather than focusing on working conditions, I attempted to manifest what I would like to do as an educator in order to teach well (Standard 4). My areas of focus were leading with love, uplifting student voice, engaging in civic-focused education, teaching with honesty, and speaking back to administrative demands (Goals 1 & 2). It was important and necessary that I challenged myself to do more that school year because of the crying demands that “normal” schooling could not happen again. Teaching during a pandemic had its challenges, but I could not continue practicing as if the pandemic did not hold up a mirror to all of us. The cracks and flaws in our system were too grand to ignore, and so I had to decide to focus on how I can help change the system within my own classroom and school. While I am just one person, it is still possible that community can be built from practices that are centered on joy and love. 

This project and course provided a perfect place for me to begin reevaluating the practices and pedagogies I had learned in undergrad. The texts that Professor Farver exposed us to allowed for me to re-examine the systems we have in place that are no longer beneficial to educators and students alike. It offered me a chance to not be anxious about the reality of public education. We are living in disheartening times with inequitable funding, racial reckonings, and political warfare that puts all of us at risk. By stripping away the fears that I had about the system, I was able to challenge myself to be a better educator and advocate.

TE 831 Teaching School Subject Matter With Technology:

I'll be frank that I thought I knew all that I needed to know about teaching with technology after being online for an entire year, but I learned how to be much more efficient with PowerPoints and what digital tools I can introduce into the classroom so my kiddos (and myself as well) can become even more tech savvy!

A text that helped me create better PowerPoints: Behind the Bullet Points: The Surprising Secrets of Powerful Presentations by Don E. Descy, PH.D.

My favorite digital tool: Diigo Web Collector: Capture and Annotate

• Now THIS would have saved my life during undergrad while writing my honor's thesis and it will absolutely help me as I continue my studies. This tool is an extension on your web browser, and it allows you to annotate the web browser or PDF that you're working on. Not only can you highlight and take notes on what you're reading, it will also save your work in a digital library. You just want to make sure that you are signed into your Google account and into your Diigo. 

  • Granted, you only have so many FREE annotations available, but you can delete them as you go along to free up your space.

• Would HIGHLY recommend to anyone who is teaching students to complete research or for anyone who is actively doing research during their studies

TE 870: Curriculum Design, Development and Deliberation In Schools 

Naturally, I was a goob and signed up for the capstone class long before I was supposed to. It was just one of the few available classes I needed for my program in the fall and I had signed up for it without realizing it was basically the senior capstone and I am not academically (or emotionally) ready to graduate with my master's. 

But with that said, this course was incredibly relevant to what I've been studying for the past year and what I'm working on in DPSCD as I've been piloting a new curriculum with an ethnic studies framework. This course helped me see the inner working of curriculum development and also see the massive barriers that are currently at stake. We are living in an extremely volatile poltical state where schools and curricula are constantly being attacked so this course helped ground me in what tactics and rhetoric are being used to chip away at progressive and liberating educational policies. 

Favorite Texts: 

• Podcast series "Have You Heard: The K-12 Culture Wars" https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/culture-wars 

• Interactive article from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/17/us/teaching-critical-race-theory.html

• Leading Curriculum Development by Jon Wiles (granted, this wasn't the most exciting read but I felt like it gave me really solid insight into what I need to know if I ever decide to ever work for the Office of Literacy in my district). 

• Transformative Ethnic Studies In Schools: Curriculum Pedagogy and Research by Christine E. Sleeter and Miguel Zavala

Artifact 4: Curriculum Analysis & Revision Project

• Standard 2: Understanding Subject matter, how to teach it, and how to design curriculum, instruction, and assessment to foster students' understanding

• Standard 6: Proactive participation in collaborative initiatives, professional learning communities, professional organizations, and teacher leadership beyond the classroom. 

• Goal 3: Collaborative Professional Development, Teacher Leadership, Contributions to the Field.

TE 870 provided me an opportunity to analyze how curriculum is developed on a macro scale, and what is at stake with the current culture and political wars that are targeting education and curriculum. As a part of the MATC capstone, this artifact showcases the brainstorming, reflecting, and reimagined unit plan for a unit I was currently working on. Though I wasn’t able to apply those changes in real time, it has provided me a firm place to start when I teach this unit this upcoming school year as Fahrenheit 451 is a staple 10th grade text at my school. 

This project is made up of lessons from the F451 unit I was asked to teach, and supplementary materials that I injected into it as I went along. There are screenshots of actual lesson plans that were given to me that included my reflections and revisions. As a participant in the district’s new curriculum piloting team, we were given liberty to add and take out what we didn’t feel was useful, so there were no consequences for improvising (Standard 6, Goal 3). In the original analysis, I focused on main texts, pacing, missing voices, learning objectives, and learning assessments where I was able to reflect on the lessons given to me by the Office of Literacy. In the revision section, I insisted that my Office of Literacy team needed to ground themselves in Ethnic Studies and Abolitionist readings as much as possible before launching this unit again. I included texts and lessons that can be used prior to reading the book, and what can be read throughout the novel, and what can be done afterward (Standard 2). Using the philosophies from Christine Sleeter and Miguel Zavala, I emphasized the importance of Youth Participatory Action Research Projects so that students can act as the agents of change we wanted to inspire them with. I was also given the chance to think outside of the Bradbury box as I was asked what would I teach in this unit if it wasn’t for F451. With the focus of censorship and banned books, I imagined creating a Banned Books lit circle with the current most banned books in the United States. At the end of this revision project, we were asked to analyze the potential constraints with our reimagined curriculums, and while I was optimistic about this project, I had to ground myself in the reality that many teachers are at their capacity because of poor working conditions. There is still much more work that I need to do for myself so that I am more confident in using Ethnic Studies in the classroom and not just the principles of it. 

This artifact is significant to me because it was during one of the most difficult semesters of my career. I was struggling with the “first normal” school year since the COVID lockdown, I did not know how to manage my work-life balance, and I felt incredibly overwhelmed in that course. However, I am very proud of what I created and I shared my work with the Detroit Perspectives Curriculum team to offer some ideas for the next school year. TE 870 showed me how I can remix the curriculum to benefit all my students and not just satisfy a required text for the school district. It has become an important part of my practice that I share my work with others so that I can improve my teaching and the learning experience for my students. 

Curriculum Analysis & Revision Project

As an educator, I have rarely followed the prescribed textbook and felt satisfied by the end of it. The one year I "tried", I mostly remixed it. Every year, I use the essential question and maybe one or two texts as inspiration, but other than that, I will almost always create my own materials so that it meets the needs and joys of my students. 

Existing Curriculum

Introduction

This year, I was honored when my district's Office of Literacy (OOL) invited me to join their curriculum revision group so we could pilot new materials in the wake of the district's 2020 Anti-Racism Declaration. In light of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, my district committed to fighting racism in and outside the classroom. I spoke candidly with the OOL team about my thoughts on the current textbooks, whose voices were missing, what I was doing instead of the lessons outlined, and I attended various trainings they hosted with Dr. April Baker-Bell (my former professor), Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, and Dr. David Kirkland as they offered insight into the new curricula materials the OOL were creating. I was really optimistic going into the fall of 2022 because it would give me a chance to try something totally new. 

The unit that was being revised is titled "Extending Freedom's Reach" and it's original essential question was "What is the relationship between freedom and power?" I frankly, loved the vagueness of this question because I was able to bend it so many different directions in the last two years focusing on intersectionality and youth empowerment. But for this pilot, they chose to reimagine the essential question with a focus on a particular book in mind: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. With that novel in mind, the essential question turned into, "How do those in power control entire populations of people through information access and freedom of expression?"

And while I really like the new essential question, it made me wonder: Are Eurocentric novels the ideal texts for an Anti-Racist school district? If not, how can we still use it as a starting place and where can we go from there? 

Main Texts From Pilot

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• "Debbie Reese on Book Bans and Native Representation" by Coshandra Dillard and Crystal L. Keels

• "Literacy By Any Means Necessary: The History of Anti-Literacy Laws in the US" by Carliss Maddox

• "'Critical Race Theory Is Simply the Latest Bogeyman.' Inside the Fight Over What Kids Learn About America's History" by Olivia B. Waxman

• "Lawmakers Push to Ban ‘1619 Project’ From Schools" by Sarah Schwartz

• "TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate Propaganda Ended Up in the South's Schoolbooks" by Greg Huffman

• "More than McCarthyism: The Attack on Activism Students Don’t Learn About from Their Textbooks" by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Pacing 

The pacing of this module was set for six weeks and while it was written in the document that students were expected to read at home, the OOL team advised me that because Fahrenheit 451 was a little bit of a slow burn (no pun intended) that I should read with my students in class, which meant that it was going to take much longer than six weeks. There was also a considerable amount of supplementary texts that were insisted to be taught while also reading the novel. These texts were culturally relevant in the sense that they primarily focused on Black Vernacular, Anti-Literacy laws during slavery and the reconstruction era, as well as the current hysteria surrounding the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory; however, it's difficult to interrupt students' reading of a novel that does not have actual chapters. If the guidance placed these readings in between Parts 1 & 2, and Parts 2 & 3 of the novel, it would have a much better pacing for students. Looking at the lesson plans themselves, they were jam packed with activities that did not feel do-able in a class session (1.a). With these nonfiction texts, it will take several days to read, analyze and assure comprehension of the texts. It is unlikely that it can be completed in one day. While I understand why educators enjoy Do-Nows and Exit-Tickets I find these activities a nuisance as they take away significant amounts of time from reading the novel and that would add even more time to an already packed schedule. 

Missing Voices

A weakness I noticed is the lack of other writers of colors in the supplementary texts. Granted, I was already surprised when I learned that they chose Fahrenheit 451 as their anchor text for the unit despite there being so many other options featuring characters of color when the world of Fahrenheit 451 is very white and our students are not. As I was reading Christine Sleeter and Miguel Zavala's Transforming Ethnic Studies In Schools, this quote rang a bell in my head as they write, "Despite efforts to make textbooks and other curriculum documents and materials more reflective of the diversity of students in schools, analyses of curriculum standards and widely used textbooks find them to continue to be grounded in White studies to which people of color have been added" (43), and perhaps the OOL team felt that they had compensate with the supplemental materials despite them being the decision makers on what novels we can teach. Maybe I'm being too hard on my colleagues. In his text Leading Curriculum Development, Jon Wiles insists "Curriculum issues will often reflect general diversity issues and therefore present a challenge to curriculum leaders” (18), but even then, I found it confusing that the OOL would choose supplementary texts that mostly focused on the struggles of Black people, and only one text on Indigenous people despite our growing population of Latino and Bengali students. I understand that we are a majority Black district but had those children and those communities simply not been considered? 

Learning Assessments

For the last year and a half, I have been trying to learn as much as I can about ethnic studies because I find it to be incredibly liberating. If I had all the money in the world, I would quit my job now so I could conduct the research needed to assess Detroit's needs so we could actually have proper ethnic studies courses here in the city, but until then, I can only use some of its framework to bring into the classroom. In the last two school years, I've focused most of my assessments to be YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research) inspired "... [which] involves students identifying social issues in their communities and using the tools of ethnic studies together with research to study up both oppression and social structures of inequality, while also using research to effectuate social change” (Sleeter, Zavala 13). My students are too young to vote but I simply ask them, how can you make a difference right now? And so I ask them to identify issues that are relevant to our essential questions (freedom, power, justice/ forgiveness, healing, criminal justice), and have them conduct research, and then publish their research to a wider audience either through a TikTok, a PowerPoint they share on social media, or a letter they mail to a person in power that they believe can address the issue. It's important to me that students see themselves as agents of change and do not have to wait till they are adults in order to speak truth to power. I had shared my students' work with the OOL team and they had expressed that they wanted to adapt my project for this pilot as they thought it would meet their vision. You can imagine my surprise when I saw in the module that their assessment was writing a narrative (1.c). When creating curriculum, the team must consider "...the learning experience of the student. Because the student experiences the curriculum, he or she can do new things” (Wiles 3), and I couldn't answer with confidence that students were doing new things by writing narrative pieces when they were already doing that kind of work throughout this pilot. To end the unit with this writing project felt almost as unsatisfying as Guy Montag's end in Fahrenheit 451. 

Revision: Where Do We Go From Here?

While it will of course feel daunting for educators, I do believe that if the OOL wants to continue on this Anti-Racism path, they need to immerse themselves in as much abolitionist, ethnic studies texts as possible. Granted, I am not sure how we negotiate that with our superintendent and the school board (maybe we don't even have to--I'm not sure about the structure of that) but I do believe there is much required reading before we hop into more transformative curriculum:

After reading these texts, this will give us a much better sense of what we want to be able to do with the curriculum. After all, we've seen after the COVID-19 shutdown that the inequities in our education system are not going away, so what are we doing to make schools a more loving, affirming and more liberating place? Wiles insists that “Our assessment of the curriculum must be observable, authentic, and real world” (Wiles 9) because of how we designed the curriculum. Expecting our students to perform well on tests is not the outcome we actually desire (though legislators argue otherwise) but what are we hoping to see from our students in the end? In my classroom, I want my students to be more informed, engaged citizens who feel confident speaking out. Too often, children are told to be seen and not heard but when injustice occurs, I want them to feel confident that they can and should speak up. But I also want them to see themselves as fully formed, realized beings who come from peoples who were cut from the same thread and had many skills and knowledges to offer the world. 

Conceptually, Ethnic Studies is an easy sell because it sounds wonderful, empowering and just what Detroit needs! The downside is how do we sell it to the decision-makers above us who are concerned about data. With Ethnic Studies it's particularly hard to measure "...the impact of ethnic studies on students...eliminating racism, decolonizing students’ minds, sustaining minoritized cultures... How does one operationalize them for research? So researchers have landed on more measurable outcomes—achievement on tests (standardized or otherwise), retention rates, graduation rates, scales for academic self-concept, academic engagement and ethnic identity” (Sleeter and Zavala 45).  I would likely start each quarter (or semester) with surveys in all the ELA classes about students' academic self-concept, engagement, ethnic identity, and representation so we can have at least some data to start with. I believe that would be crucial for the OOL because not every school is the same. While Detroit is majority Black, we have ethnic enclaves all over the city, so while Cass Tech is majority Black, the pilot that is very pro-Black would not have been super applicable to Western International Academy which is mostly Hispanic and Latino. 

Once that data was collected, I would then create connections with scholars in the city at Wayne State University, the Charles H. Wright Museum, El Museo del Norte, and Bichitra Inc., so that the OOL and collaborating educators can meet and learn about different ancestral practices and knowledges we can bring to the classroom. It could also be an amazing opportunity to invite those scholars to visit our classes. In my eyes, this would be the first two months of the school year, long before we even crack open any book. The first two months are about establishing ourselves, our community and our norms so we can make time for students to learn the four geohistorical themes of Ethnic Studies: 

1. Indigeneity and Roots: “…everyone has ancestral roots somewhere that are worth reclaiming.” (71)

2. Coloniality, Dehumanization and Genocide: “While colonialism historically dehumanized and traumatized people of color globally (through processes such as genocide, theft of resources and labor, and forced migrations), its ongoing impacts shape the contours of many students’ lives, such as institutionalized poverty and mass incarcerations that many communities of color experience” (71)

3. Hegemony and Normalization: “Colonization and racism, brought into being through violence, are institutionalized in a way that manufactures the consent of oppressed peoples by leading them to believe that the system is fair or at least unchangeable” (71)

4. Decoloniality, Regeneration, and Transformational Resistance: “This theme engages young people in authoring and working toward conditions in which they can thrive, anchoring their vision and knowledge in ancestral knowledge and counter-narratives, and fully affirming them as human beings” (71).

If we start the school year with these principles, I firmly believe we will see incredibly engaging dialogue, writing, and other creative projects. 

Before Starting Fahrenheit 451

If the district decides to stick with Bradbury, again it's a great story with solid message--it's simply a slow telling story for many youth today--here is one way to go about it. It's important that we begin with defining key terms like censorship, dystopia, marginalization, oppression, and suppression so that they have familiarity with those terms. To introduce them to the concepts of censorship, we will view and discuss three videos: 

As We Read The Novel

As someone who doesn't believe in homework, I would still read with my students in class so we can active discussions. I would also structure our reading time so that we would read about 12-15 pages a day so that we can have a solid routine as we read. Again, I find Do-Nows and Exit-Tickets bothersome as that simply means less time to read, and more work for me to grade, so I would not include those either in the days that we are reading the novel. I would be much more willing to incorporate Do-Nows and Exit-Tickets during the nonfiction sections in between parts of the novel. 

I'll be frank, with a novel like Fahrenheit 451, I'm not particularly sure how to apply Ethnic Studies to it. What ancestral ways of knowing can I apply to Guy Montag, Millie and Clarisse? Is that a fault of me? A fault of the book? Both? I feel that I can apply the framework to the supplemental texts and use it as inspiration for the final assessment but as we read the book, that's where I feel challenged. 

In between parts 1 and 2 where Guy Montag confesses that he has been stowing away books in his house for the last year, I would have my students pause so that we can take a look at some nonfiction texts. Like Millie Montag, some American's are terrified of what we might learn if we look at the histories that shaped our countries. 

In between Parts 2 and 3 where Guy realizes that he has been caught and will have to set his own house on fire, I would like to take a pause where my students and I can be creative. Prior to the end of Part 2, Guy reads a poem aloud to his wife and her friends who have an absolute meltdown because they were forced to feel something that wasn't pure unadulterated happiness. Even though Montag is struggling to make meaning of the words he doesn't understand, he wants to feel a connection to something deeper than the fake actors on his TV screens. He wants to feel seen. 

With this activity, it gives an opportunity for students to use their creative and artistic ability to take the center stage. For majority of this unit, they were writing, reading, listening, and speaking, but here is a chance to create. Using art supplies, students will be asked to create a visual representation of their Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors so that they can celebrate the stories that made them feel visible, and offered them new perspectives. When finished, students will be able to view their classmates work in a gallery walk so that “...students [will] actually hear one another’s realities... ethnic studies seeks to reverse the assimilationist mission of schooling by focusing on restorative and culturally sustaining experiences that, in the words of Alim and Paris (2017), serve to ‘to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism' (p. 1)" (Sleeter and Zavala 7).

This activity would hopefully plant the necessary seeds for them to feel confident as they prepare for their final project.

After We Read The Novel

Hopefully with a better understanding of how YPAR projects function, I think it would be incredibly beneficial to have students find ways to speak up about censorship considering the world we live in now. Rather than write a literary analysis on Bradbury's allegory, opening up students ability to create, write, and produce would allow them to see themselves as change makers: "The emphasis on project-based learning that leverages the arts is a noticeable dimension in this ethnic studies course. Grounded in culturally responsive and relevant teaching, project-based learning is quite promising when students become text producers and take ownership over their own learning…ethnic studies demands culturally responsive and relevant assignments—along with pedagogies and curriculum” (Sleeter and Zavala 88). 

Potential Ideas:

• Social Media campaigns advocating against book bans, allowing young people to use media to their advantage 

• Visual media like paint, digital art, photography, graphic arts, videos, or animation, to advocate against censorship, the importance of representation, the necessity of literacy, etc. 

• Letter writing campaign to the opposition, demanding that the book bans be reversed, advocating against censorship, the importance of representation, the necessity of literacy, etc. 

Essentially, students should be able to choose how they wish to express themselves. Not every student feels that they have the best artistic expression but may have a solid way with words that may upset a hysterical congressman. The project should allow students to choose what they would like, and the "assessment" should have very little attachment to grammar as that is still a symptom of epistemic genocide as "forced assimilation to European languages" (Sleeter and Zavala 3). The projects should be assessed on the overall effectiveness of the message, the overall aesthetic (if we can tell the project took time or if it was thrown together last minute) and student self-evaluation. 

Once projects are completed, students should have the opportunity to showcase their work to not only their classmates, but the school, their families and the wider community. The work that they've done matters, the advocacy that they do matters, and we should make space for them to be proud of that.