How to sum up one's teaching life?  I was hired this year to both conceptualize and design the Senior Capstone class as a member of the BCLA history department and a teacher interested in student leadership development and community change.  I've taught in a number of different settings in my eight years of teaching, from two years in a therapeutic wilderness program in North Carolina, to a year at Concord Academy, to four years at the Boston Day and Evening Academy.  I graduated from the Brown MAT program in 2000.  I'm lucky to be teaching some amazing students.

 

The class was also made possible because of the work of the other capstone teachers at BCLA, Kiril Johnson and Carolyn Gomes-Vieira, who both taught small, modified sections of the course to students with particular learning needs.  Kiril also was instrumental in his role as our internship coordinator, making phone calls, visiting students on site and evaluating their overall performance.  The work of my two student teachers over the year, Jessica Rubin-Wills from the Harvard UTEP program as well as Mali Lipchik, a graduate student from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, was essential.  We also benefitted tremendously from a year-long partnership with the Boston Plan for Excellence, including Stephanie Sibley, Sarah Joslyn and Shardai Davis, who helped to provide context for the work, and either supplying us with insight, resources, professional development or ideas, and most critically, making the internship component of the project a reality.