Breakthrough Providence, Providence, RI
I taught at Breakthrough Providence (BTP) in 2017 and fell in love with the program. It was the first place I felt embraced me and embodied my educational philosophy. It is a program dedicated to empowering kids AND their communities, and, like me, sees these two aims are inextricably intertwined. It is a place full of passionate young people who are eager to teach because they believe in the power of BTP and know the necessity of an educational space that encourages students to examine and embrace their own identities. What is beautiful about BTP is that it employs students as teachers (what is known, in the literature, as a “peer-to-peer” teaching model). We, as student teachers, are eager to reinvent “the school” in order to make it a more student-centered space that meets the holistic needs of its student body. In order to meet the holistic needs of the student body at BTP, Teaching Fellows take on multiple roles—we are moms and dads to our Families, facilitators of free thought, mentors in Advisory, mediators, makers of extracurricular activities, event planners, editors, and counselors—people our kids can come to with personal and interpersonal issues.
Despite how all-consuming BTP can be, I chose to come back to BTP in 2018 because, as a student from a community similar to the one from which BTP sources its student body, I knew that teacher turnover in public schools serving majority low-income, P.O.C. student bodies is high. Work in these communities all too often means extracting information from these communities in order to bolster an outsider’s ability to “assess” their needs, when what we really need is to empower their inhabitants to assess their own needs. Committing to long-term community development, instead of short spurts of self-gratifying “service,” meant, for me, coming back to BTP.
BTP is a place that seeks to empower students who attend Providence Public Schools (PPSD), or similar inner-city school systems, to teach students who come from these same schools. Breakthrough works to empower people from low-income communities of color, enabling them to undo the cycles of poverty and powerlessness that affect and afflict their own communities. BTP strives to create a cycle of empowerment where people who attend/attended public schools (people like me and the other Teaching Fellows at BTP) are empowered to be the best teachers they can be, so that they can inculcate self-advocacy in students from the same or similar communities. The idea is that these teachers will produce critical, curious thinkers who will continue to contribute to their own, and others’ communities. This is part of the reason why, at BTP, we embed social justice issues (like the school-to-prison pipeline) into everything we do, including our English and Math classes—connecting learning to life experience, rhetoric and ratios to reality and real change. BTP is not simply about gaining the tools to be able to teach; it is about committing to empowering your community.
Every Family (of about 14 students and 4 teachers) at BTP produces a student-led social justice project to showcase to BTP and the boarder community. My Family (Family 3) used performance art to raise awareness about the school-to-prison pipeline—a system of punitive policies and practices that send students in public schools—especially P.O.C.s—on the path to prison. BTP stresses differentiation—the idea that every student learns differently and, consequently, needs different scaffolding to come to the same conclusion or critical thought as their classmates. In our social justice project, students honed their unique strengths to contribute to the class and community—whether that strength be a personal story or testimonial, a real talent for rhythm and rhyme (AKA rap), or a flare for dramatic dialogue and a deep desire to direct a skit or small play. BTP is all about reaching beyond ratios and rhetoric to touch reality, so we chose to publicize our performance art by taking students to Thayer Street for a fieldtrip where we interfaced with individuals on the street to spread the word about our social justice project and the school-to-prison pipeline. I am of the belief, espoused by BTP, that when students see a direct connection between school and society, specific skills and what they want to see happen in their own community, their innate intellectual curiosity comes out.
I learned how to hone my skills from both summers at BTP and my experience as a student from a similar school system to create “rigorative” (rigorous and creative) curriculum. I was pushed forward by the passionate young people I worked with who were creating exciting, engaging activities. Consequently, I created a Great Escape Room game to encourage my students to apply ethos, logos, and pathos, theme vs. topic, and other English skills that we had been strengthening throughout the summer. Before Breakthrough, I was terrified to touch a lesson plan, but with the mentorship of Andrea and O’Sha, I became comfortable with curriculum design. I saw how my mentors were able to develop a strict, standardized system to connect common core standards to social justice issues and self-awareness/advocacy skills.
Ultimately, I want to take everything I have learned at BTP and transform it into something transformative in my own community. The dream is to create a branch of Breakthrough in my home city and/or create curriculum that can be used to illuminate the radical history of New Bedford, Mass.—a place that intersects with many national and international struggles against injustice. In my history classes in high school, I learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X briefly, but I didn’t learn that a famed freed man, Fredrick Douglas, once lived in my city, that my city was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, that an active branch of the Black Panther Party existed in my city, that my classmate’s family wrote from prison about the inhumane condition of incarceration. These are points of intersection that could make history more palatable to people of New Bedford.
Breakthrough is about elucidating and expanding upon the education that exists in our own life experiences. It is about making history concrete and contemporary. These are ideals that I will take with me. We learn best when we see that we live what we learn. Students at BTP are teachers and teachers at BTP are students—the power dynamic that traditionally exists in teaching evaporates and is replaced by a fluid formation that allows for students to see themselves as assets and the arbiters of their own education.
In my second summer at BTP, I came to see the organization more critically—to see that true implementation of these ideals isn’t easy. It takes intensive training and a deep, undying commitment to equity, restorative, rather than punitive, practices, and self-care at the same time that we critique society. It is challenging to pair Team Teachers who are at two different points in their lives (high school and institutions of higher learning). It is challenging to pass fluidly between two identities (teacher and student) and still maintain a sense of professionalism. It is challenging to edit ourselves at the same time that we are educating others. But, the ideals BTP espouses are ones which I will stand behind. Being at BTP is, as some of my mentor teachers have said, the single closest thing to teaching a class chock-full of kids: enlightening, exhausting, and exhilarating. It is intense; filled with immense growth over the span of eight weeks. It is entering a brave space where we make it safe to broaden the boundaries of our comfort zones. For this, I thank you the ’68 Center for Career Exploration at Williams College and Dawn Dellea for allowing be to broaden my own boundaries at BTP.
Megamenu Social