Madrid Neighborhood School | 7 teachers share their stories
Seven teachers from Madrid Neighborhood School in Phoenix, Arizona share their perspectives on K-12 education.
Teacher stories, interviews, and videos related to the topic of community involvement with schools.
Lupe Ramirez | “I am, beyond words, grateful to be a teacher right now”
It's hard to view my career in stories. Maybe it's not even my story. Maybe it’s the story of my dad. I grew up in South Chicago. My dad was a preschool teacher. And everywhere we went, it was like, ‘El maestro, el maestro!’ And so that made me a celebrity by extension: la hija del maestro.
“When you see a teacher, it’s really a community.”
I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Inner city, poverty-stricken area. My sister and I are first generation in our family to go to college and to get our advanced degrees.
Jessica Lander | Teaching history and civics to immigrant students
I have the honor and joy of teaching U.S. history and civics to recent immigrant and refugee students. My students come from more than 30 countries: from Colombia, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to Cambodia. Most of my students have been in the U.S. for less than five years.
Tamika Fluker | Community and containment drills
I was working at The Bridge Home at St. Mary's Women and Children's Center. It’s a shelter for infants to 12-year-olds. If the Department of Child and Family Services pulled a kid from their home, we housed and counseled them.
Benjamin Grignon | Teaching within the Menominee Indian Reservation
I was full-on ready to be a full-time artist. And then I was invited to be a teacher at a summer institute in Denver, through the Native American Youth Outreach Program. I think it was seeing those kids connect to our traditional arts — part of our cultural inheritance that they had little exposure to before. It was seeing kids connect to our indigenous ways that changed me.