What Can We Become: An Introduction
My name is Danielle Vogel, and I’m an educator.
I teach high school English (mostly freshmen) and News Media in DeForest, WI. It’s my second year there, and my 6th year teaching overall. I grew up in Baraboo, infatuated with books and stories and my sagelike teachers, and attended UW-Madison for Secondary English Education. A year of teaching at Stoughton under my belt, I joined GMWP for the summer institute before I shipped off to the east coast for the biggest experiment of my adult life. Spoiler alert: It was a success.
My heart is still in my 6th grade Reading class in Arlington, Virginia, with an incredibly diverse student population. The actress in me still yearns to read aloud to kids every day and entertain them with over-exaggerated faces and silly voices. My mind still wanders through pages of reading notebooks used to create character webs and charting our monthly reading… and avoiding glue blobs. My disciplinary sensibilities still revert to teaching kids how to be kind to one another as they grow into teen-hood, and my assessment sensibilities lie in wonder at 11-year-olds showing off their learning in project-based results that they will actually use in the real world: exemplar pages for sketchnoting, create-your-own business plans and prototype models, community action projects, and awareness-raising TED Talks.
I miss my small discussion groups of 10–11-year-olds reading Amal Unbound, The Crossover, Just Mercy, New Kid, El Deafo and Who Was…? books together, and having them teach me more than I could ever have taught them about mothers growing up in Pakistan, fathers wrongfully jailed, and what it’s like to get chased by a chancla. It was so clear to me that I taught them reading skills and how to apply them to the adult world, and they taught me about life writ large.
I left Arlington to return to my Wisconsin roots and family, but every time I think back to this school, my rose-colored glasses slip back on. This was a place where we got to take city kids to a pumpkin patch and cornfield, to the Newseum, to field days where we represented countries and played games from around the world. Where we had students from every corner of the world; sons and daughters of immigrants, of refugees, of diplomats who’d returned stateside from China and Djibouti, or were representing their own countries on our soil. It was a thing to behold.
Okay, let’s take off those rose-colored glasses now.
In our first week together at GMWP’s What We Can Become Institute, we studied the elements of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, Youth-Adult Partnerships, and Critical Mentoring. You may ask, “if this institute is about what we’re supposed to BECOME, why are you reflecting so much, Danielle?!”
Quite simply, I lived these principles and didn’t even know it.
So, if I supposedly know what culturally-sustaining, perfectly-partnered learning can look like, why am I here?
Well, for one, teaching in rural and suburban Wisconsin is very different from teaching in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C.
But mostly? I’m here at What We Can Become because of a very fraught TIWI and an even more fraught last go-round with online learning. I realized a lot of things about myself as my personal context changed, and as our contexts as teachers changed with COVID, and time to agonize over the continuing murders at the hands of police, last spring.
I realized I don’t do well without face to face teaching and/or synchronous time. I really hate being the “truancy cop”, and had to play that card way too much to get anything done last year. I also realized I began to treat learning like a “did you get it done?” checklist, and that is just not me! Yes, I did get to see a sweet ferret yawning in its hammock, and heard about kids who Google Met each other on roofs at sunset after reading Shakespeare together, but the rays of light in my own days were few and far between. I never felt like I could get a pulse on what my students were thinking and feeling if I wasn’t in the room with them, and during last spring, that was the only thing that seemed important to me. How were the kids? How can they learn if the world is burning around them? How can our curriculum and class culture support activism, and their ability to imprint the world in positive, just ways?
Pair that thinking with a summer of anxiety around quarantine, a worldwide pandemic, and not knowing what the fall would bring, and you get the recipe for one very anxiety-riddled teacher who needs to be surrounded by her people. I needed dedicated time and structure to think among thinkers, not about these terrifying emotions, but of the possibilities this unprecedented time offers us: If we start the school year with intention, what can we become?
I am so ready to infuse activism and voice into what my students learn and create. I am so ready to infuse the warm and welcoming spirit of my 6th grade Reading class into my current context, even if it’s online. I can’t live without it. I need to reconcile who I want to be with who I was, and plan how that can become my new reality, no matter where I teach.
