Lighting the Fire: A Call to Service

by NESSA MAHMOUDI

I am a teacher. I am an activist. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that these are not mutually exclusive. The words of Paolo Freire: education is a political act. I want to say it loud, clear and with force. To every teacher I work with who hesitates to restructure their curriculum this year because it worked last year and the ten years before that, to the colleagues in my teacher preparation cohort who don’t take action when they feel incensed with educational policy, to the school administrators I work beneath who seem more concerned with the staff’s feelings than social justice and equity for their students. I am disappointed. I am angry. But more so, I am moved to be different.

I know what you are thinking: You’re just a student teacher. You’ll see when you get here. It is harder than it looks. You can’t really change anything. I’m tired. I can’t re-plan this curriculum. I know it isn’t working, and it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough.

You are right. I am a student teacher. That class doesn’t belong to me but to my cooperating teachers. But is this what you want me to look forward to? I know it is hard, even harder than it looks. But we made the decision to take on this enormous political act. If you do not see your profession as a political movement and act on it, social change cannot and will not happen.

We want new teachers who are “highly qualified”? I know a dozen in my teacher preparation program. They are impassioned and energized and often very, very tired (many of us work various jobs outside of student teaching and school). What do these innovative, intelligent, excited pre-service teachers hear? It is hard. Things are bad. Just try to survive.

We also have an administration at our university telling us that they are closing admissions to our teacher credentialing program next year and the following year, likely to never return again in the form it once was. This is happening to programs around the country, replaced by college to classroom programs like Teach for America. The message we hear, “The government does not think of your job as a profession. The University does not care to stand up for it either. Nobody but you really cares what happens to your population of underserved students.” I can feel and hear pieces of my cohort becoming disheartened.

And then there are the gems. These are the cooperating teachers who we call Master Teachers and us, their apprentices. We watch them critically examine their practice, open to all sources of knowledge, including that of their student teachers. They enrich the community they have built in their classrooms every day. As teachers for social justice, they view themselves as students open to learn from each student as well as their colleagues, student teachers, administrators. They question and push everyone they meet to rethink their own practices. We see ourselves in their work. They aren’t perfect and they are surely tired, but teaching is their profession, their calling, their priority.

In a time that teaching is at the bottom of the priority list for most, it must be at the top of ours as teachers. If anyone is going to take our profession with the seriousness it deserves we must start with ourselves as teachers. Teaching is a call to service and making change. Thank you to all the teachers who remind me of this each day and inspire me to keep critical hope alive for my students.

Nessa is a first grade student-teacher in San Leandro. She is also working on her master’s degree in her second year of the Developmental Teacher Education program at UC Berkeley.