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Honoring your roots, your beginnings and your history.

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When Dr. V. spoke about feeling in her soul that she is meant to be a teacher, I resonated deeply. In my life outside of school, I can be a deeply judgmental and cynical person. However, among my students, I'm perpetually inspired, optimistic, and filled with love. I just KNOW they can, and I'm so excited for them. If I weren't a teacher, I don't think the world would be as beautiful.

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Making a deliberate choice to learn history

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Making a deliberate choice to learn history

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In high school I realized I wasn’t going to learn my history or see myself reflected in the stories I had to read in my English or Social Studies class. So, I started researching Black and Latinx history, reading stories about the Caribbean, and just becoming more curious about who I was and where I came from

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Having been in educational spaces for so long, I’ve often focused my attention on achievement, accomplishments and educational success, paying little to no attention to the relationships I have with myself and others. I’m currently engaging in this work and building these relationships, but I’m super excited for where it leads me.

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Everyday I would say this to my students encouraging them to have dreams and make them a reality.

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To this day I also still experience the same question Dr. V got - which one do I "feel more like" when asked about my ethnicity - 2 Latin American countries, but both different in culture and language. It's taken a long time to get used to the question and not let it anger me but it still makes me feel so awkward, especially when it's asked in the presence of my parents.

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Imagining a future that centers love and critical hope

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Ensuring the agency of students is activated

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Ensuring the agency of students is activated

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I absolutely feel called to education...I triedddd to leave and felt the pain of trying to reject my calling. I was burned out, and had been burned. But here I am coming back again, and hopeful for the impact of working alongside my community again.

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I pride myself on getting to know each and every one of my kids individually throughout the year. I want to make an impact on every child's life that I encounter as a teacher and love getting to know my kids on a deeper level. Some of these kids I still talk to today through their parents and it makes me so happy to hear how they are doing.

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hooks' definition of love as supporting/nourishing each others' growth

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I feel called to make the world a better place through education. This is my way of spreading holy love.

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I feel so honored to now work in the same community that raised me. I see myself in so many of the students and hope that everything I do honors our unique community and our culture.

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Do what fuels you and nourishes your soul.

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I recently joined a Board of Directors and recruited a council of artists of color who are passionate about youth arts education and dismantling the Eurocentric practices of arts organizations that don't reflect the populations they serve. Connecting with other artists gives me hope that institutional change is possible.

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Like Dr. V I still have people question my ethnicity or try to play the guessing game with me of “where” I’m from. Im less awkward about it now but it still makes me uncomfortable when it’s one of the first topics of discussion when I meet others.

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The young people I work with have taught me this, the relationships we have built by keeping it real and talking thru when we don’t has been transformative and can see us replicating this outside of our program time

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Where I live and recognizing that we’re part of nature

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Love my students each and every day for who they are and share who I truly am with them.

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Every year I have taught I have made a deliberate choice to include a unit about our cultures and our histories as members of our class in order to raise up and highlight the importance of where we come from.

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Bring laughter into the classroom!

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And questioning why I think they aren’t possible as a way to breakdown the blocks that keep me from dreaming bigger

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Too often, I let folx use my passion for equity work to volutell me into uncompensated labor. Saying no is important.

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Relationships are at the core of education

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Relationships are at the core of education

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When parents trust us with their children, we can move forward collectively.  Teaching isn’t about power dynamics, it’s about working with the community to determine what is needed and to cultivate the learning that is already happening in homes.

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Don't be afraid to cut toxic people/relationships from your life. Even if they are family.

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imagining the future together; trusting that if you are not imagining something, someone else is

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"Learning is biologically impossible without care."

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As a future school counselor, it was disheartening to hear Dr. V and Mich share stories of the ways in which their school counselor limited their agency and their dreams. I know that the field has a long way to go, and especially as a Latinx counselor, I am one of very few counselors of color in the field. I hope to help my students find agency in their future hopes and dreams, and convey care and love to them.

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Purposefully including authors that represent my students in the curriculum

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Imagining and working towards new ways of moving through the world

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Imagining and working towards new ways of moving through the world

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I always say that my students are "my whole heart" because I truly put my whole heart and soul into teaching, interacting, loving, supporting, and growing with my young ones.

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Learning with my first black teacher in a black studies course was life changing and altered my orientation to academia.  I aspire to have a similar impact on my students through how and what I teach.

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Building deep connections with those I am surrounded by

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One unit comes to mind that I studied with my students- civil disobedience- the idea that we need to be willing to stand up for what we believe in and the profound impact that that can have.

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Fall in love with your community and create a world that loves you too

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Fall in love with your community and create a world that loves you too

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Ain't nobody got energy/time for phony relationships

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Teaching my students how to advocate for theirselves. Giving them the language I didn’t have when I was their age.

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^That part

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Bringing my past and identities with me in every environment I enter.

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Standing up in instances of racial inequity. Using intellectually telling off rooms full of white people

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In colonial development, the colonial power creates a middle class, usually to control the colony for itself. So when you have the creation in black American communities of a class of physicians and managers and lawyers and judges, their education takes them away from the communities that created these people. These are not like my parents' generation, people who are trained in the black schools and whose talents are confined to the black community through a regime of segregation. These are people who are trained in the major institutions and are able to use their talents in the corporate and business structures of the larger society. Therefore they're not available to the poorer black communities.
- Kathleen Cleaver