Overcoming Obstacles: Shaping Pedagogy Through Experience
By REGINA DISTEFANO
Regina is a Lower School Science Teacher and the Sustainability Coordinator for the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York. She participated in CWI’s Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability.
I am always looking for ways to make learning more relevant and impactful for my students. As a science teacher, I try to find ways to connect what we are learning to my students’ lives outside of my class and beyond school. I would also like to empower my students to become change makers within their communities. Additionally, I worry that my students rarely see beyond the privileged bubble we have created for them within our school community. I want to help them see and relate to the larger world — to find and use their voices and their resources to help make the world a better place.
My time working with Community Works Institute at their Summer EAST Institute in Brooklyn truly broadened my view of service-learning and strengthened my commitment to and enthusiasm for this work. Moreover, it provided me with a plethora of resources and contacts from which I can draw inspiration and support. At the Hackley School where I teach, we have Diversity, Sustainability, and Service Coordinators for each division (Lower, Middle, Upper School). Through Place Based Service-Learning, I really feel like we can unify our missions, goals, and projects in order to better facilitate our students’ learning, connections to community, and identity formation.
In attending CWI’s Summer Institute I was hoping to learn how others are including service work in their teaching and school communities. I wanted to get ideas about how I can incorporate Service-Learning into my science curriculum, my sustainability work, and even my Lego robotics teams. I am only at the beginning stages of learning about and looking at how I can incorporate service learning into my teaching.
I know there will be challenges. One challenge that I face is my limited time with my students. As a specialist, I only see my students for forty minutes at a time, 2–3 times per week. The lack of flexibility and time within my schedule will be a big challenge for me as I try to incorporate more meaningful, real world experiences for my students. It would be ideal for me to find ways to collaborate with colleagues to create cross curricular experiences for students that maximize our available time. As I approached The Institute I knew there is still so much for me to learn about how to build relationships within the community. Like many schools, so much of what we’ve already done with service-learning and sustainability have been “one offs.” So, I was hoping to gain insights into how to develop a more comprehensive, integrated, sustainable program rather than a series of singular experiences.
On our second day of The Institute CWI’s founder/director Joe Brooks launched us, following a workshop on Collaborative Ethnography, on a street based practicum in the nearby neighborhood of Gowanus. During the week, as we moved through the different challenges and experiences during the week at CWI’s Institute, I was struck by how many opportunities there really are for using Collaborative Ethnography in my teaching. I had gone into The Institute thinking mainly of the students in my sustainability group, hoping to come up with ideas for them to be more impactful within our community.
But hearing from the many different K-16 educators in our Institute group helped me to see possibilities for engaging all of my students in different grade levels in ethnography work. While I still find it daunting to take elementary students out into the community and “set them free” in the way that we approached our ethnography work as adult teachers in Gowanus, I am embracing the idea of bringing the community to my students. While I was still at The Institute, I reached out to the Tarrytown Environmental Advisory Council and subscribed to their newsletter. I’m hoping to make connections and build relationships with leaders and concerned citizens within our community, so that they might be willing to engage with my students. My colleagues and I are also reaching out to the local farmers’ market, since that may be a good starting point for our students to engage with the community and do some ethnography work in a more contained, yet authentic, setting.
The idea of Collaborative Ethnography was initially intimidating and unnerving to me as a shy introvert. The entire idea of spending a whole week at The Institute talking with new people and sharing ideas was also somewhat overwhelming.
When I was randomly sorted into a group of fellow introverts to complete the Collaborative Ethnography assignment, I felt a bit stressed and overwhelmed. And, against the odds, our group turned out to include ONLY introverts. This became obvious as our group found ourselves in near silence, surrounded by other more gregarious groups who were quickly actively planning and sharing ideas for their afternoon’s work in the street. But we all quickly stepped out of our comfort zones and set out with determination and positive attitudes.
As our initial trepidation waned we were able to complete our task successfully by taking a perhaps slightly different approach from our colleagues in other groups, utilizing our strengths and finding an approach that worked for us. This helped me to realize that my students will be able to work successfully in partnerships, and I might not need to plan out every pairing the way that I am tempted to. Sometimes, random pairings can lead to students discovering new strengths or solving problems in a way they might not have otherwise. This was echoed the next day during Natania Kremer’s presentation on a project around exploring gentrification. Her students were grouped based on the type of presentation they wanted to create. I’ve already implemented this with my summer students, allowing their interests to dictate groupings rather than pairing them up based on who I think will work well together. Of course, I do take personalities into consideration a bit, but I’m leaning now more toward giving them choice and autonomy.
During our ethnography work on the street we found that splitting into smaller groups for the initial approach of people, and sometimes for the entire conversation, was more comfortable for us as well as the people we were getting to know. We mainly approached people in shops or businesses who seemed able and willing to speak with us, so as not to impose on busy schedules. We only approached one person who was sitting outside. I think we all felt as though we didn’t want to impose on anyone’s time or space and we felt more comfortable speaking with people whose jobs involved speaking with the public.
The person who most impacted me during our Collaborative Ethnography project was a gluten-free baker we met. My Institute colleague Joseph, from a public school in Indiana, and I entered a door that said OPEN, but when we got inside, it was a tiny space, not at all what we expected from a bakery. But the owner, Pedro, immediately welcomed us, seated us in his small office, and asked about our gluten free needs. I shared a bit about a family member’s battle with systemic inflammation. Pedro then shared his story. He is originally from northern Spain.
He was diagnosed with Celiac at twenty-six during a routine physical. He only weighed 115lbs, but he loved to eat. The doctor knew something was wrong and ran tests. Once he was diagnosed and changed his diet, he actually grew several inches, gained weight, and even had to buy new shoes! He was finally getting the nutrients he needed. He came to Brooklyn with his wife and worked for 20 years as a mechanical engineer. But he had memories of baguettes from his childhood and desperately missed the bread. Every gluten-free product he tried tasted awful.
So he used his engineering skills to create his own recipes for breads that he could eat. He said he focuses only on making a delicious product. We asked about the changes he’s seen in the neighborhood of Gowanus and he mentioned that all of New York has changed. He wouldn’t say that change was bad; change is just change. But he mentioned that there used to be lots of mom and pop shops and beautiful independent bookstores, and now there are hardly any. That, he said, he misses. Pedro offered us cookies and we ultimately bought a few bakery items.
Speaking with Pedro made a deep impression because he was so kind and open about his life. He was eager to share and make connections. We didn’t even have to ask much because he had so much he wanted to tell us. Where I had been so worried about bothering people, imposing on them, he was welcoming and eager to learn about us and share his story.
I really love the idea of taking a social justice approach to our Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability work. Throughout the week, I was seeing so many connections to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social justice work. It was really helpful to see this approach fleshed out within a specific unit of study (on gentrification) when CWI faculty member Natania Kremer shared her work with ninth graders at Brooklyn Friends School. Natania is the Director of Service-Learning & Civic Engagement at Brooklyn Friends.
During the class-project “Service & Justice Seminar: Understanding Identity, Power, and Privilege” Natania’s students engaged in an Immersive Exploration of Gentrification. Students researched gentrification in their Design & Technology class and designed websites focused on the impact of gentrification in neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn. During the first week of May, they learned more context about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn, and they engaged with community partners doing meaningful work related to gentrification. They also connected with Brooklyn-based community organizers, and artists.
Brooklyn Friends takes the approach of building accountable, reciprocal relationships in the community (CARE). The CARE acronym particularly resonated with me and seems like a really accessible way to frame the work for my students. I appreciated hearing again that our students are not supposed to be leaders in this work within the community. Rather they are supposed to learn from those leaders already established and working within the community. This seems right and encourages a sense of humility which my students may sometimes lack. At the same time, students can seize opportunities to act as leaders within their own SCHOOL community, reflecting on their experiences and sharing their work with their peers and the school community at large. I agree that amplifying student voice and allowing them to take the lead in sharing their learning with the community is a way to increase buy in, as well as providing a broader platform to share the importance of the work of our community partners.
I am so grateful for my experience at CWI’s Summer Institute, and I think it will definitely shape my pedagogy. I’ve come to realize that the best way to reach my students and impact them is to develop strong, personal relationships with them. I now believe that this needs to extend beyond the classroom and into the community. Through cultivating strong relationships between myself, my students, and the greater community, I will help my students not only to learn and grow, but also to help create a better world.
About the Author: Regina is a veteran Lower School Science Teacher and the Sustainability Coordinator for the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York. She participated in CWI’s Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability and continues to use ethnography in her work with students.
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