Teaching Philosophy
To be teachers of all students, I believe we must cultivate empathy by creating opportunities to seek a deeper understanding of others’ perspectives and experiences; we must encourage a growth mindset in our students by being truthful about our own adventures in self-examination and self-discovery; and, lastly, we must combat systematic injustice through the centering of critical thinking and individual/collective action in our classrooms.
Looking Inward:
Encouraging a growth mindset through self-examination
As educators, we must create a culture of self-examination for ourselves and for our students. By being open about our journeys to know ourselves and the world around us, we show our students that the beauty of living intellectually-wakeful lives comes not from arriving at a final understanding, but from the journey – the ever-deepening spiral of questioning itself.
Our transparency highlights our shared ability to grow and change.
In showing that adults don’t have all the answers to life’s difficult questions, we show students that it’s okay for them to not have all the answers, either; this fosters a culture that cherishes mistakes not as world-ending, but world-expanding – to see each error as a hard-earned steppingstone on the path they’re charting toward subject mastery.
If we can successfully begin our academic work armed with the understanding of the innate worthiness of each of us – that we all contain curiosity, complexity, compassion, and that we all deserve and can actualize our wildest dreams – we have created a foundation from which we can build the future.
Looking Outward:
Cultivating empathy through interpersonal inquiry
As educators, we must relish the similarities we find between ourselves and our students, but we must also lean into our differences – to frame friction or disagreement as opportunities to learn and participate in a living cultural exchange.
As we seek to know ourselves through an ever-deepening questioning of why we are the way we are and think the way we think, we approach each other with the same unrelenting curiosity. While this does not always lead to consensus around an idea, it does lead to deeper understanding of – and empathy towards – others. By fostering openness around our own fallibility, we have encouraged our students to recognize their own and others’ fallibility – and approach it and themselves with empathy, humility, and kindness.
This equal exchange of knowledge breaks down traditional dichotomies of “teacher” and student” – it makes us all students and teachers of one another (Pinto 2013, 53).
Looking Upward:
Combating systemic injustice through critical thinking & collective action
By allowing space for the questioning of authority, we also encourage students to think critically about their own indoctrination into the systems that shape their lives. This centering of critical thinking becomes the foundation toward the collective action that will be necessary for their survival in an increasingly complex and at-risk world.
As educators, we are charged with the responsibility to set an example worthy of the students we serve: we must “become a threat to inequity” and “challenge systems, advocate for resources, and make changes within our school so that inequity doesn’t stand a chance against us” (Venet 2021, 24).
As educators, we must empower our students to both advocate for themselves and to speak up for others. We must give them the tools they need to identify for themselves what problems are present for them in their communities, facilitate conversations between them and community organizers so they can get the guidance they need from experts in the field, and advocate for the resources necessary to enact change.