Thinking about my philosophy of education and looking back on my personal experience as a student and a teacher, I realize that education makes the world a bigger place for students. By exposing students to new ideas and perspectives, which happens when you teach them a new language, take them to a new place, or teach them about other people, you are showing them what is possible for people to achieve, and, more specifically what they can achieve as an individual. Our vision for what is possible is limited by our life experiences. Therefore, the more we experience, the more we can imagine. I work hard to do this for all of the students I teach.

 

At Breakthrough, each summer we had a a scavenger hunt in downtown Philadelphia. There were a number of students each year who had never been downtown even though it was a 15 minute bus ride away from their home. We also went on a day trip to either New York City or Washington, DC, which was a new experience for most of the students.

 

For the Astronomy program I taught at IBA, we learned how to control a telescope and make it take photographs of selected stars. The students then learned to manipulate those images on the computer. Finally we took a field trip to actually see the telescope at Harvard. Most of the students in the class had never been to Cambridge before, even though it was just across the river on the bus.

 

In my class at the Dearborn, we visited the MIT Media Lab, talked to people who work in STEM careers, and learned about some of the new things people are creating. It was really exciting to watch my students get excited about the possibilities of STEM.

 

Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn is a great example of what it means to for the world to get bigger. The students not only travel to new areas of Boston and meet people who come from different backgrounds, but they are also given the opportunity to create a project of their choosing. This makes the world a bigger place in several ways. First, it physically becomes a bigger place because the youth who participate go to new places. Second, their social world becomes bigger because of the new people they meet. Third, we help them see the countless things there are to invent and create.  Finally, and most importantly, the world becomes a bigger place in the sense that the youth realize what they, individually and collectively, are capable of doing.

 

I also worked on some research about the Learn 2 Teach program through an AERA Research grant. Most high schoolers know little about the research that occurs in university settings, but through this grant, we were able to do some participatory research with a group of youth teachers and college mentors. After learning about ethnographic research, we collected and analyzed data from a variety of sources. We presented this research at the Northeastern Educational Research Association. By participating in the research, the youth teachers were able to gain experience doing something which they previously had no experience with. This is important because it's hard to envision yourself doing something you have no experience with and people are more likely to accomplish something if they know that it is an option. For example, unless these young people are exposed to different careers, they do not know that they exist and won't know how to get there.

 

By exposing students to new ideas and different ways of seeing the world, the classes that I taught at Breakthrough and MacDonough and through BTR also helped make the world a bigger place for those students, as did the after school program I worked with at Green Street. Whenever you learn something new, your world gets a little bigger. Furthermore, I believe that if the teacher is aware of this and makes a point of exposing her students to new and different ideas, the student's world will expand even more.