My educational philosophy constitutes a variety of experiences that I have had as a student in primary, secondary and post-secondary classrooms.  It incorporates frameworks, lenses and theories that I have studied and reflected on. Thus, it continues to change and transform as I continue to have experiences in the classroom as an educator and engage in praxis.  One of my core beliefs is that educators must constantly be engaged in the process of both reflection and action. Educators are the mediators positioned in between their students, curricula and the world. The classroom is simply the site of mediation.  How critically educators are reflecting on their students, the curriculum, and the world shape how a classroom is experienced. Reflection must be followed by meaningful action; educators must actually take the steps to translate lessons from the world as well as knowledge they have gained about their students into their curriculum as well as their practice.  Of course this means educators must bring a critical consciousness to their work in the classroom and ask the questions that present all narratives, including those often marred by or left out of the master narrative completely. Critical pedagogy is intimately interested in reflection and action upon both the self and world for the sake of transforming systems of oppression.  What brought me to education was the belief that if we are socialized into a reality that constructs and upholds oppression, we can surely be socialized to both deconstruct and reconstruct this reality. Education should be the place where this occurs based on the positioning of educators in between students, curricula and the world. When I think about my goals as an educator, social justice definitely fits into this framework of transformation.  As an educator, I’m preparing students to transform their immediate realities, themselves, and their worlds. Thus things like critical knowledge, rigor, literacy, and real-world application have to be apart of any curriculum I implement in the classroom.

However, it isn’t just a coincidence that I find myself drawn to developing a critical consciousness and that of my students.  I have my own relationship to oppression. My understanding and my interest in developing a broader understanding of oppression for the sake of transformation stems directly from my experience as an oppressed person.  While I believe that everyone has a relationship to oppression and some level of interest in understanding it, I believe educators have an obligation to interrogate oppression and their relationship to it. The structures of education have historically been tied to oppression such that American education as a social institution has been historically complicit in reproducing and facilitating the oppression of black, Latinx and Indigenous students.  Because race has been central to the formation of education in the United States, education has had just as much of a troubled history as the rest of the country has in terms of racism. The ways that race and education intersect in order to systematically prioritize certain students while marginalizing others are innumerable, but my point is to discuss why this matters.  It matters to me because I recognize that the privileges I’ve reaped throughout my educational experience are not just anomalous, but in fact contrary to how educational structures have been poised to (dis)serve low income black students like myself.  You don’t have to look far to see what the norm is for students of color. Educational rhetoric very casually pathologizes students and blames their familial, cultural, racial backgrounds for underachievement. School structures and educators that don’t inform their approaches with enough, or any, informed empathy set themselves up to commit violence on our young people.  Our young people then become victims to disengagement which is the first step in the facilitation of students out of school. The pedagogical approaches that schools use must center culture, race, relationships, and healing; and leverage these in order to construct a repertoire of strategies that promote academic engagement and achievement among their students. I have a core duty to humanize my students and make humanization a process that happens in my classroom through my interactions with students and their interactions with each other as well as the curriculum.