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ETEP Faculdade - Avenida Barão do Rio Branco - Jardim Esplanada, São José dos Campos - SP, Brasil

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Uncle Weber (my stepfather), my mom and me

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Abby Buchanan Fall 2022
Jan Berger (grandmother) :

My grandmother's experience in school was greatly influenced by her race, socioeconomic class, and the nondiverse environment she was in. In elementary and middle school there were no children of color and in high school, she remembers a few children that weren’t white. She said she never thought of those students as different until there was “a school event or whatever…[and] the Jewish families couldn't participate in the same way.” This is when she realized that her school was treating students differently. Her experience in school is a reflection of her privilege and she did not even realize it until we were talking.

She wondered about the logistics of busing “and what that would mean if [students] were involved in any kind of… after school [activity].” What she didn’t understand is that while she was guaranteed those opportunities, the students who went to school on the east side were not guaranteed after-school activities or even education of the same quality. She even said, “it was hard for me to understand how it can be more beneficial to do that.” She didn't get why people would want to make a commute of more than two hours a day when there were neighborhood schools, because she didn't have to understand. Schooling wasn’t something she had to worry about receiving, she knew from a young age she would receive a thorough education. Instead of busing students across the city, she believed that the state should just allocate more funds to the lower economic schools.

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Querer Es Poder! - Kaleigh and Esperanza Cansino 

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Querer Es Poder! - Kaleigh and Esperanza Cansino 

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Esperanza recalled not being able to speak Spanish in school and said that she still feels the effects of having the Spanish language erased from her early education. She described herself as an emotional kid that obeyed the rules and didn’t speak Spanish to avoid trouble. As a result of the ban on Spanish in her schools, her name had to change to fit the rules pushed on her in school; she started going by Hope and not Esperanza. Now she has taken that identity back and proudly introduces herself to people with the name Esperanza.

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Rural French Boarding Schools: It's a Hard Knock Life

On Monday mornings schools would pick up all their students by bus. At this time in France, it was uncommon to have more than one car, if they had a car at all, because of the price of gas, necessitating the use of buses. Classes would end Saturday afternoon, they would have classes in the morning and get on the bus at noon to go home for the weekend. This extra half day was balanced out by a half day on Wednesday where the school would allow parents to come to visit or for the kids whose parents couldn't visit they would go on outings. Edith's parents were working or couldn't afford to pay for the gas to get to the school so they never came to visit during the week. These were the days when she would notice she was on the low end of the economic ladder and that other kids were better off than her. Edith and her siblings were always jealous of their friends whose parents would come and take them out for “gouter” (4pm snack time) while they had to have the regular snacks at school.

Edith hated living in the dorms, but she attributes this to being the youngest in her family as she often missed her mom and was the “baby of the family.” But she said that her siblings and most of the other kids enjoyed it as they were not lonely like they were in their small towns. The dorms were in the same building as the classrooms, the boys were on the top floor and the girls were on the lower floor. There were two to three kids in a room depending on age and there were no doors on any of the rooms. There was only one shower room in the building with only a few showers in it so each kid was only allowed to shower once a week. They would have recreation time and study hall multiple times a day to keep kids engaged and focused. They also had access to a tutor. However,Edith said it was always hard to get help because there was a single tutor for the whole school. Her favorite recreation was basketball, looking back on it she said the reason she must have liked it so much is that to her it was a fundamentally American sport.

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Lauren Olivares/Fall 2022
Bullies and Barriers: The Romanian Immigrant Experience in American Education

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Bullies and Barriers The Romanian Immigrant Experience in American Education

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Olivia Predmore / Fall 2022
1970s Rural Education Experience

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Isabela/Spring2022
Curuchupa

My interview started with a general question, one that might elicit reminiscence, "Tell me about your memories of school." My father studied at a school in Quito, Ecuador called Intisana School of Opus Dei. The Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic lay and clerical organization whose members seek personal Christian perfection and strive to implement Christian ideals and values in their occupations and in society as a whole. Opus Dei does not have monks or nuns, and only a minority of its members are priests. Opus Dei emphasizes uniting spiritual life with professional, social, and family life.Likewise, as described by my father, it was "new, intercultural and interracial." Likewise, other than religious education, the school was very undemanding and with a "very mediocre quality of education."  He was placed in a catholic school as he was raised in a catholic household. The subjects taught in primary school were basic subjects: writing, mathematics, and civics. The basics that a child should know.

Going into that, I decided to question my father on the themes of segregation and discrimination, how did this look like in his school, " there was discrimination, but in a very slight way, more bullying than discrimination, for example, we called the most talkative one "Lora" (parrot) and that's how we gave them all nicknames." In this way, I decided to go deeper and find out how teachers reacted to this, "the teachers didn't care. He insulted us, sometimes he kicked us. It was like a public school, the kind you see in the movies. Over time, they gave us very strict teachers, very hard classes, and we no longer had time to think about anything else." Furthermore, as we talked, I came to notice that segregation was not described the way we talked about it in class, “There was a lot of diversity at my school and no one was segregated. The aspect that most impacted our relationships and integration was the difference in resources and economic situation.” The culture was very prominent in education and was embedded in subjects such as politics, socioeconomics, and civics.

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Aly Castillo / Fall 2022
Growing Up with English as a Second Language

My interviewee, Maya is my grandma who was born in Mexico and moved to Fort Worth, Texas in fourth grade. Taking ESL classes, she felt more comfortable in them and relied on them like a "crutch." Her school had a language learning center to help students learn English and she felt like it celebrated cultures, however, moving to English courses, they no longer celebrated them.

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Sydney Mayhew
The Impact of a Progressive and Changing Education

Richard Simons, my grandfather, is an 89-year-old psychiatrist who is still running his own private practice today. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado, where he runs his practice out of his apartment. While his professional achievement amazes me every day, it is fascinating to look back on his schooling years and how influential they were to him as an individual, student, professor, and now psychiatrist. My grandfather’s schooling experience is not that of a simple one, but rather quite complicated.

My grandfather benefited from a progressive education for most of his schooling experience. He was educated prior to a time marked by the obsession of accountability. When he thinks back to his schooling, he does not describe testing, ranking, or comparison between students, but instead a time of exploration of activities that he found exciting and worth wild. The purpose of education was true learning based on the child for the child. The fact that he was able to make the most of his education is a privilege in itself.

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School thoughout the Years, an interview with a student, parent, and teacher

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My aunt went to school from 1973 to 1979 in an extremely rural town that did not have access to electricity or running water, therefore getting basic necessities wasn't the easiest thing to do. She told me that her siblings and she had to get water from a well near their house and that they would use lanterns powered by batteries in order to get any type of electricity in their home. These living conditions immediately stood out to me because it made me wonder how her school functioned without electricity or running water. She started out by telling me that the norm in her town was walking to school and that there was no such thing as public transportation or buses for children. Her class size usually ranged from 10 to 15 students and she also mentioned that there were only two main teachers in her elementary school.  One teacher taught 1st through 3rd grade and the other teacher taught 4th  through 6th grade.

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Nelson Rose / Fall 2022 / Interview with Nora Simms, Grandmother

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Nelson Rose / Fall 2022 / Interview with Nora Simms, Grandmother

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I interviewed Nora Simms, my grandmother for the interview assignment. Below is my favorite section and attached is the full paper:

"Both in her public first to fourth grade experience and in her Catholic education from fifth to eighth grade, Simms was only educated by nuns. Due to budgetary and talent constraints in hiring qualified teachers in Simms’s rural, public elementary school, the school was staffed by nuns instead of lay teachers. Simms characterized these nuns as exceptional educators. Having studied at prestigious universities like Notre Dame, these teachers inspired a love for learning in all of their students. Simms was no exception, and fondly recalled how well-read, confident, and inspiring that the nuns who taught her were. I later researched if the practice of hiring nuns as teachers in public schools was even legal, as they are so intimately involved in the affairs of the Catholic church that lawmakers may perceive the practice to have some sort of proselytizing effect. In doing so, I found that the practice of nuns teaching in public schools has a rich history in Central Kentucky, specifically in Marion County, where my grandfather was born. In the 1930s, when county governments were reeling from loss of tax revenues from the Great Depression, school systems and the Catholic church partnered to enable public schools to utilize the churches’ facilities and staff to ensure that children were educated in such a difficult economic environment. While most parents in the area were Catholic and had no qualms about their kids being educated in these settings, minority religious groups' began to complain. So, in 1941, the Marion County Superintendent issued policy recommendations in response to these complaints of “1) a definite break between the religion period and the regular school day; 2) no religion grades on county report cards; 3) no religion credit on high school records; 4) time spent

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in religious services not counted as part of public school time.” ("Background of Controversy in Marion County, 1940s" 3) These recommendations did not appease minority religious groups, as protestant parents in the district sued in circuit court, before the practice of nuns teaching in schools was deemed legal so long as religious teaching did not occur during the school day. This is congruent with Simms’s experience in the 1950s, as there were once weekly religion classes taught off-site at her grandparents’ farm that neighbored the school. Simms claimed that all students at her public elementary school were Catholic and everyone attended and enjoyed the once weekly religion classes.

In her private, parochial Catholic middle school, Simms’s relationship with these nuns grew closer. Since Simms had to ride the public school bus to get from her home in a smaller rural community to the larger town where her school was located, she had to stay at school an additional two hours until her bus arrived to take her home. As she wanted ways to pass the time, the nuns at the school gave her the responsibility of cooking supper for them. Beginning in fifth grade, Simms gradually gained more important jobs in the dinner-making process, starting with cutting vegetables and progressing to cooking entire meals. Despite the laborious nature of this task, Simms enjoyed being trusted by the nuns and getting the opportunity to know them not just as teachers and catechists, but as people.

However, not all was excellent with the education given by these nuns, as they were staunch disciplinarians who accepted no excuses for any bad behavior. She described physical punishment of students including slaps and paddling for so much as chatting in class. While not entirely physical, Simms recalled her experience with a form of punishment that students called “comebacks,” where students were given a large number that they had to multiply and divide by a given series of numbers by hand. Simms recalled her hand being in intense physical pain after taking more than an hour to complete the comeback. Despite the harsh punishments and chores that she had to complete, Simms indicated that the nuns who taught her throughout her educational career were the largest influence that forged a lifelong love of reading and writing. Both their qualifications as educators and their staunch imposition of discipline on students set them apart from the lay teachers that Simms had later on in high school, and enabled her to succeed in the long-term, whether as a non-traditional college student, professionally, or socially."

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When I reflected on the interview responses from Claudia, I never realized that someone at this age (43) could have so much input on education’s change throughout time and even in different areas of the world. Nevertheless, I was overjoyed and intrigued with the detailed responses. Despite the fact that she did not enjoy school much in her time in Chile due to the extreme strictness of the school environment as well as the curriculum, she commonly excelled as a student. Migrating into the US meant migrating into a new school system as well, which was somewhat of a culture shock and struggle for Claudia. It was intriguing to hear about such a difference in terms of the demographics of the schools she attended in each country. In Chile, there was no separation based on ethnicity, instead all the kids were identified as Chilean. This was not the case in Claudia’s American schooling experience where she noticed the clear separation of ethnic groups with the classroom and school communities.

There was also this underlying struggle when she began school in the US due to the language barrier she faced. Spanish was her first language and this is what she knew by heart, but because of the focus on English-speaking within the American education system, Claudia was placed into an  ESOL program. Here she studied the English language rigorously but in a fun manner until 5th grade when she became literate enough to get integrated into the general education classes with the other English-speaking students. As she moved on into her years of schooling, she recalls more of the social aspects of school including not fitting in at first. When she attended an advanced academy of sorts for high school, after a few weeks of torment she knew this was not the place for her. Noting the difference between this school, predominantly white and wealthy students of which she shared no commonalities with, and her neighborhood school where there was much more diversity and students in her socioeconomic status, it was much easier to fit in the later. It is in this school that she became more involved and also developed an ambitious drive for learning which she carried into her post-secondary education.

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1922 S General McMullen Dr, San Antonio, TX 78226, USA

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1922 S General McMullen Dr, San Antonio, TX 78226, USA

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1922 S General McMullen Dr, San Antonio, TX 78226, USA

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Shane Ridoux/ Fall 2022
Meritocracy and Machismo

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ETEP Faculdade - Avenida Barão do Rio Branco - Jardim Esplanada, São José dos Campos - SP, Brasil

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Sofia Leobas de Macedo/ Fall 2022
Differences and similarities of an High School over generations and countries