Portrait-based stories from Teachers in Their Power. These interviews use photography as the primary visual medium.
I pretty much always knew I wanted to work with kids because I always found joy in it. I felt I had innate instincts, and I knew how to navigate different situations. When I was seven or eight years old,…
I never thought of becoming a teacher. Early on, I wanted to be a pediatrician, but I was more interested in studying mental health and behavior vs. other sciences, so I thought, ‘Psychology would work.’ I thought it was a…
At first, I didn't want to be a teacher. I come from teachers. My mother's a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher — on my mother's side, there are teachers all the way back to slavery. I grew up in…
Three art teachers from Brown Deer High School in Brown Deer, Wisconsin share their perspectives on teaching and learning.
My mom came to the U.S. from India. She got a scholarship to do her PhD in French at UCLA, and then she adopted me from India when I was six months old. It was a huge family occasion —…
For the majority of my life, I was convinced that my road ended with me becoming an attorney. My family set the value that attorney was the route to go, and I thought I was pretty good at public speaking…
My aunt and uncle raised me. I’m the youngest of seven kids; my brother and I were taken away from our biological parents due to their drug addiction. I was adopted by my mother’s sister right after I was born,…
I went to high school here in San Leandro, at the school where I teach. We have three ‘academy programs,’ where students can apply to go through 10th through 12th grade in cohorts focused on multimedia, business and finance, or…
I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up from pre-K to seventh grade in the Bronx — but then they started to raise the rent. The buildings were terrible. My mom told us the rent prices and the conditions of…
I grew up in Wisconsin with nine younger cousins and two younger siblings. I was constantly asked to babysit them, from the time I was nine years old all the way until I left for college. At the time, I…