Beliefs, Values, and Ideas that Shape My Identity and My Work as a Teacher

"Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental … The freedom to learn … has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn... We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them…to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be."

- W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Freedom to Learn” ([1949] 1970b)

One of the biggest ideas that shapes my identity as a teacher is the idea of educational equality. Too many students are damned to receive a poor education because of the place that they were born, and the location in which they reside. Today in our country, students’ families’ financial statuses determine the type of education that their children will receive. Rich families send their children to wealthy schools with boundless resources and inexhaustible funding, where learning is effervescent—while poor families send their children to the poor schools, where often times a lack of funding and scarce resources makes it difficult to learn.

 Today, much of the educational inequality in our country is a result of the “opportunity gap,” which Linda Darling Hammond says in her book, The Flat World of Education is, “the accumulated differences in access to key educational resources—expert teachers, personalized attention, high-quality curriculum opportunities, good educational materials, and plentiful information resources—that support learning at home and at school,” (2010, 28).  

Darling-Hammond also goes on to list the five factors  that create the major building blocks of unequal and inadequate educational outcomes in the United States:

Unfortunately, the students in the school district that I work in experience all of the factors that Darling-Hammond talks about, and they will continue to experience for many years to come. In turn, this shapes much of my work as a teacher. It is my job to make up for whatever missed opportunities my students may have in the classroom that I teach in, through an engaging curriculum, through culturally relevant teaching, and through knowing my students and the funds of knowledge that they bring with them into the classroom. While my students may have not had parents who practiced fact fluency or phonics with them before entering school, these urban students bring with them a “substantial knowledge base” (Donahue, Richert& LaBoskey, 2008, 649) and have “acquired a multidimensional depth and breadth from their participation in household life” (Gonzalez et al., 1995,456), which is my job to draw upon to help bring them to high levels of academic success.