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Gillian Ricci

Fieldwork Assignment: Youth Profile

One of the hardest things about being a teacher is saying goodbye to students and wondering if your paths will cross again. Year after year, new students move past the threshold of your classroom, yet these budding relationships seldom eclipse former ones. Instead, your heart grows larger (think of “The Grinch”) to accommodate all of your students. If you find it doesn’t, you might need to consider a different profession.  

Last year I was assigned J’s advisor as he entered the 5th grade at a charter middle school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. During our meeting at the beginning of the school year, J and his family regaled stories illustrating his humor, big heart, love of dance, tendency to exaggerate, strengths and struggles, and attention-seeking behaviors. J attended third grade in his home country, where he lived with his mother and younger sister until he moved to the United States to live with his aunt and cousins. As he joined the charter school in the fourth grade for a year of remote learning, we noted some challenges he might encounter entering an in-person school for the first time in a new country.

I explained we were a small middle school (5th-8th grade) of about 200 students within a collocated building. Our staff was young and slightly more diverse than in previous years. Each class comprised 30-35 students and assigned 2-3 lead teachers (this was due to high turnover rates). Students had the opportunity to choose two electives each academic year. While J opted for dance every semester, he spent most days in the art room or the leadership office due to situations occurring within his content classes.

Additional information I did not share with families is that I had worked alongside our new principal at another location. I admired her teacher persona as she respectfully and firmly managed a room. However, becoming a principal was a challenging transition: she was constantly at professional development sessions, negligent in building relationships with families, and left the majority of sensitive communication to advisors, regardless of their experience.

As a principal is the driver and keeper of school culture, J had an incredibly challenging year. He is brilliant, yet he struggled to complete homework and classwork in almost all his subjects. He wavered between apathy and bouts of energy that could look like placing his head on the desk and refusing to work, raising his voice at teachers, throwing furniture and technology, and threatening self-harm. His family was cooperative and supportive during the slow-moving process of getting him counseling in and outside school. Our one school psychologist, responsible for a packed schedule of individual and group sessions, acted as our school dean and often came to J’s aid to prevent escalation.

I regularly checked in with J, encouraging him to think about what contributed to his feelings and actions; however, he was speechless. After months he confessed that he was angry yet could not articulate what led him to feel this way. After several incidents in which the leadership team and staff members called school security on him, our principal shared her decision to hold J over the next year due to the amount of work he missed. His family decided to transfer him to a public school during the last month of the school year. While I wanted to reach out, I was concerned that my intentions could be misread.

Currently, I am observing the art teacher at M.S.354 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which shares its building with a charter school. Serving about 200 students between grades five through eight, the staff is highly diverse and very experienced. Classes seldom exceed 25 students, and many dedicated paraprofessionals assist in ICT rooms.

The principal, a quintessential no-nonsense nurturer, opened the school in 2005. She holds weekly morning meetings with each grade, reviewing expectations, glows and grows, SEL coursework, and elicits how these lessons positively impact the school community. You can tell she is highly respected as students and staff perk up attentively as she circulates the floor throughout the day.

On my first day as an “intern,” I spent three periods with the art teacher before escorting her class down to lunch. Within moments of scanning the room, a head popped backward from a table against the wall, and my eyes met with J’s. As we hugged, I thanked my usually unlucky stars that we were reunited. J was now a radiant, more wise, and articulate 6th grader, thriving in a very different environment from whence we came. In addition to being able to check in with J, I was afforded the rare opportunity to witness him navigate a different setting. A change in schools, which is typically matched with academic struggles, can also be a fresh start.

Within days of meeting the principal, I asked her how J was doing and told her our story. She was curious about our charter’s classroom management expectations and connected J’s current participation and possible trauma. She immediately noted his need for attention and placed him on the list for in-school counseling via a non-profit team of two that works in the school. The psychologists observed J in his various classes and came to lunch/recess to watch his social interactions.

J remains a popular student, and his attention-seeking behaviors have softened. A gentle shoulder tap or whisper from a teacher helps him quickly reset. In art, he is focused and seems to be embracing the growth mindset we were working on last year. He fills each of his sketchbook pages with definitions, notes, and a series of characters he is creating. In the morning, he leads the school pledge for the 6th grade. J was also selected as a tour guide during the school’s open house for incoming fifth graders. He explained that to get the job, you needed to be mature and confident, do your homework, and have good grades. The last time I called J’s family about his academics, he had 27% in certain classes, and his participation marks were even lower.

While J and I could not pinpoint what caused his frustration at our former school, we regularly discussed racism in the context of art, representation, and the future of curation and exhibitions. Later in the school year, he publicly addressed White staff members as racists. As his advisor, I followed up with his teachers and classmates, trying to get to the heart of the matter before calling his family to explain why he was in reflection (detention), receiving a letter of reprimand, or being suspended.

As a founding teacher and the oldest staff member at my school, I was open with leadership and my colleagues regarding my distaste for our organization and what I see as the policing of Black and Brown bodies. Younger staff members came to me for guidance, while our principal regarded me as “emotional.” I was torn about how to address this with my classes, but when it came to speaking with families, I felt hopeless. I wanted them to know what was happening while selfishly protecting my job. As a White educator and a player in a system that I knew was inherently wrong, I was nervous that my words would become diluted and distorted.

Considering the introduction of Lewis and Lee’s “Critical consciousness in introductory psychology: A historically black university context,” I started to think about J’s experience and interaction with “key social actors.” Giroux highlights that “pedagogy is now subordinated to the regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other” (2010, p. 715). For years, I have watched this play out in the lives of young people. Did J view my colleagues and me as supporters of this system? Is this why he was at a loss for words when we inquired about his feelings? How do children manage the cognitive dissonance that comes with loving some of their teachers while battling restrictive and harmful school environments?

In Lee and Lewis’ definition of critical consciousness, they state, “The action component of critical consciousness involves the degree to which persons move from being objects of oppression to being subjects that act on their sociopolitical environment” (2009, p. 51). Did J’s previous frustration arise from the lack of genuine opportunities to reflect and critically assess the power dynamics within our school community and the world?

In his new school, there has been much fanfare about student government and the journalism club, both open to all grades. Reflecting on Giroux, we can see how participation in these activities can “prepare students to become informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination, or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live” (2010, p. 216). Using and developing their voice to inspire change provides students with a sense of critical hope and a framework for addressing and challenging the status quo. Finally, J had found a place that held space for him while amplifying and nurturing his voice.

While lining up after recess today, I told J I was genuinely proud of him, and we laughed because I usually remind my students to feel proud of themselves. While I am still unsure of J’s feelings about last year, he is now joyfully glowing. Mindful of being in a public school setting, it took all my strength not to hug and squeeze him. He waved goodbye and nonchalantly danced away to join the rest of his class, quickly and quietly lining up to seize the remainder of the day.

References:

Giroux, H. (2010). Rethinking Education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the

promise of critical pedagogy. Policy Futures in Education, 8(6), 715-721.

Lewis, M. & Lee, A. (2009). Critical consciousness in introductory psychology: A Historically

Black University context. Pedagogy and the Human Sciences, 1(1), 50-60.

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Hi Gillian!

First off, thanks so much for writing this.

Please read my comments above for more specific feedback. I also raise a number of issues to hopefully consider. As you already note, there is so much to consider.

I can really feel your heart in this. From this, although your submission is a kind of fieldwork assignment (or adolescent profile), it transcends these types of bounding labels. It really becomes an honest observation of a life at peril as well as testament to the human spirit to endure and flourish. You clearly have a strong bond with J that certainly deserves this type of examination. Also, as you can imagine, his struggles speak to more corrosive trends that occur at schools all over the country and across the world. Please continue to think about them and push back when you can. Students like J deserve this.

We can often tend to look at ourselves from a deficit model. What could you/we/society have done to help J better? Instead, hopefully J’s story gives you hope with the inevitable heartbreak that invariably accompanies teaching. If you are feeling and caring, it is really inescapable. Just do your best to also survive and thrive.

Thank you so much for sharing this precious story Gillian! It was truly a pleasure to read! Thanks again!

Dino