Prompt 7- My Teacher Identity

This experience definitely shaped my teacher identity. Watching these 9th grade students struggle with simple things like reading and writing, strengthened my desire to be a teacher to help these students. Particularly being in a classroom where the teacher is struggling to get students to participate, made my desire to embrace Shor’s argument for Empowering Education that much stronger.

Shor defines empowering education as a critical-democratic pedagogy for self and social change. He encourages individual growth because “self and society create each other.” He encourages student participation by challenging unilateral teacher authority. This pedagogy encourages students to participate and basically run the class with the teacher’s guidance. It teaches the students to challenge what they are learning, and why they are learning it. While it can be met with resistance, a successful participatory class can renew a student’s curiosity in learning and make them more open to new ideas.

If I have learned anything from my experience, it is that I, as a future teacher, want to encourage students to participate, challenge standard thinking, and most of all renew a students interest in learning. Being in a classroom where, as I’ve previously said, most students have written off college as a non option, it made me realize that I want to instill that love of learning again. As Shor says in his article, “People are naturally curious. They are born learners. Education can either develop of stifle their inclination to ask why and learn.” If I can, as a teacher, do one thing it would be helping at least one student renew that natural curiosity. I realize I won’t be able to effect all of my students, especially as a high school teacher when some of them checked out mentally 2 or 3 years before, but if I can help one student every year realize their dreams, and encourage them to move on to the higher education they had previously thought impossible, I would feel successful.

I loved every minute of my VIPS tutoring, I’m glad I got to be placed into a high school classroom where I realized not every high school is as well organized and well off as mine. It was a good learning experience and definitely made me realize my decision to become a teacher was the right one for me.