ERIN THESING (she/her)

The American School of Paris • Paris, France • Fourth Grade

How did you get into teaching?

I became a teacher as the era of school reform gained national attention. Michelle Rhee was on the cover of Time Magazine with a broom. Waiting for Superman was in the theatres telling us that the key to fixing schools was to replace so-called ineffective teachers. In this climate, I joined Teach for America (TFA), freshly graduated with a degree in Anthropology from the University of New Hampshire. I really thought I was joining a movement and that maybe I’d move into a policy role after a few years in the classroom, fulfilling the organization’s theory of change. I was placed in a Kindergarten and first grade classroom during the state takeover in Philadelphia.

I had the opportunity to teach with veteran teachers who had taught in the neighborhood school for decades. I soon realized how poorly-informed and paternalistic were my views of teachers. I burn with shame thinking about my entry to this profession. I am indebted to the communities of teachers that I worked with who pushed me to disrupt my thinking through mentoring, candid feedback, PLCs, and a whole lot of recommended reading. While I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to learn from educators who introduced me to critical pedagogy, critical literacy, and workshop models. One had been a founding teacher at an Expeditionary Learning (EL) school in Washington, D.C.

From her, I learned about the power of project-based and inquiry-based teaching. Eventually working at that school was an experience that fundamentally shifted my approach to pedagogy. I have always believed that teaching is social justice work and at that school I worked with experienced educators who engaged in culturally responsive pedagogy centered around building relationships with children and families. We built mud huts, made bottle cap mosaic maps of the Potomac River and Rock Creek, and rowed canoes. I have found so much joy in this approach to teaching and learning!

I’m about to start my eleventh year of teaching, something I never imagined as a twenty-one-year-old joining TFA. I’ve been able to teach with so many badass teachers who led me to the magic of teaching! I really want to be a damn good teacher.  

Who was the K-12 teacher who made the greatest (positive) impact on your own life?

My high school English teacher, Mr. Timm. I attended a very small public high school in New Hampshire in the U.S. Mr. Timm led Shakespeare book clubs during summer and independent studies for students who couldn’t get enough of Jane Austen. It was Mr. Timm who helped rekindle my love of reading. As a young reader, I swapped chapter books with my sister and ravenously devoured the series shelves from our public library. But when choice and voice were taken away over the years in school, my relationship with books changed. When Mr. Timm introduced us to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I learned to love reading again. In his class, I relished the opportunity to talk about books and writer’s craft in a community of readers. Mr. Timm built trusting relationships by centering students’ voices in his classes. He moved his teacher self out of the way. By decentering himself—sitting in random spots in the circle, for example—he showed us that every voice mattered, not just that of the teacher. My experiences in his class made me want to become a teacher.  

What is a professional inquiry you are currently pursuing? 

“What can racial justice look like in international schools?”

As a white teacher in an international school with students from all over the world, I’m thinking a lot about how anti-racist, humanizing pedagogy looks in my school. While international schools widely promote themselves as diverse spaces that grow global citizens, their origin story is one rooted in colonialism and white supremacy. So, an ongoing question for me is: How do we engage our colleagues and ourselves in interrogating our role in enabling white supremacy in our schools? How do we begin to create humanizing spaces where Black, indigenous, and people of color can thrive? 

In my classroom, I have also been inquiring into how to bring a critical race lens to my curriculum. I’m interested in challenging dominant narratives and decolonizing our curriculum--one that inherently centers American and Western European white history. I’m especially thinking about how we can use the first few weeks of school to co-create a classroom culture where we—teachers and students--commit to having what Glenn E. Singleton calls “Courageous Conversations About Race.” How do we center children’s voices and identities as we engage in conversations about race and identity in our classrooms? Rudine Sims Bishop’s work  on providing students with texts that offer “windows,” “mirrors” and “sliding glass doors” is at top of mind as I select read aloud texts and mentor texts in units. Gloria Ladson-Billings’s Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children shows how teachers successfully create culturally relevant classrooms through trusting relationships.

Much of my thinking about this work is also shaped by adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. In her chapter on fractals, adrienne explains, “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” In change movements, we need to take many small steps, living at the small scale how we wish to see our schools working for our children and communities. 

How are you pursuing it?

Last year, I used a critical pedagogy lens to our existing reading, writing, and social studies unit on the American Revolution. It feels so disconnected to have fourth graders from countries around the world write books about Paul Revere when they are living in France! I tried to shift the unit into a whole class inquiry that centered around three questions: Why are there statues of Americans in Paris? Why do people go to war? Why are some people memorialized and others not? For a provocation to kick off the inquiry, I took my fourth graders on a walking tour in Paris to analyze these statues as primary sources and to develop questions. They wondered, “Why are there statues of men?” “What about the indigenous peoples living in the land? Where are their stories?” “What about the enslaved people living in the colonies?”

This provocation launched a whole class inquiry, which culminated in a walking tour website during the confinement and distance learning. 

Even now, as I’m reflecting on this, I realize that the stories of white American heroes were still centered in this unit. As I look toward the coming year, I am thinking about how I can take an even more critical lens to this unit. I’m asking myself: How can I teach these same information reading and writing skills in a way that is culturally relevant for my students? 

As I engage in this work, these are some of the resources that are informing my curriculum and instruction: Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Multicultural, Anti-Racist Education and Staff Development from Teaching for Change The Teaching Tolerance Social Studies Standards and Teaching for Change’s Social Justice Books Collection

What is a personal inquiry you are currently pursuing?

“What are all of the different ways we can cook what’s in our pantry without shopping for new ingredients?”

In France, the government closed the whole country for months and we were not allowed to leave our homes without a signed permission slip stating that we were buying food, visiting a doctor, or walking within 1 kilometer of our homes during designated hours for exercise. To avoid trips to the market in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Paris, cooking with the set ingredients in our pantry became my creative challenge. During our last trip to the outdoor market before they were closed for the confinement, we filled our baskets with the most hardy looking produce available in March in France--cabbage, potatoes, pumpkins, and squash. 

During the first week, I wanted to make a galette with butternut squash, but it called for cheese. I looked longingly at the fromagerie across the street but my partner reminded me, “It’s not in the challenge! No contact, remember?” So the gruyère in Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen was out. All recipes were out! This became my project--how could we use the ingredients we had on hand without making trips to the store? We were quickly out of fresh produce apart from two pumpkins, which became risotto, soup, salty roasted seeds, pie, and a pumpkin curry! 

How are you pursuing it?

Finding ways to create something delicious from what we have in our pantry (we have a miniature refrigerator) was a fun creative project. Also, my fourth graders and I kept “Confinement Journals,” in which we wrote poems, journal entries, neighborhood observations, and made drawings. The cooking projects filled my own journal with lists, sketches and watercolors of what I came up with.

These cookbooks became a weekly reference when I stared down a basket of storage-friendly beets: The Art of Simple Food  by Alice Waters Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat East by Meera Sodha (Plus, many Facetime calls to my mom)!

To improve teaching as a profession, what three things would you advocate for and why?

1) We need to hire and retain Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) teachers. The majority of teachers in American schools are white women but the majority of our students are Black, indigenous, and people of color. Schools need to work on more effectively recruiting and hiring BIPOC teachers. They also need to make their schools places where BIPOC teachers can thrive. We, white, women teachers need to take accountability for our complicity in maintaining white supremacy in our schools and classrooms. Working to be an anti-racist teacher is ongoing; there is no end point. 

2) We must prioritize building relationships. We know that building relational trust allows teachers and students to take risks together. Strong relationships are central to collaboration among teachers. And they are essential to creating a classroom environment that is ripe for inquiry. Schools need to create dedicated time for teachers to build relationships with students and their families. We know that dedicating time to morning meetings, closing circles, whole class games, and co-creating the class environment at the beginning of the year and throughout the year is critical for sustaining a classroom in which children ask questions and lead their own learning. And yet we are constantly running against a clock to pack in units and standardized assessments. The time to build and maintain relationships needs to be protected in order to create environments where powerful inquiry learning can happen.  

One of my fears going into distance learning was losing the classroom community my students had built together. I was surprised! I finished the school year knowing my students in a way I didn’t before. During distance learning, I had uninterrupted conferences one-on-one with each student every week! They shared their cats, their toddling siblings, and their collection of puppets. They brought their writing and books packed with sticky notes of questions and tasks they wanted to work on together. There was more flexible time for students to dig into collaborative projects over Zoom and Google Slides without needing to transition to another class.

3) As teachers, we need to be involved in decision-making.  Schools are going through a massive transformation during this global pandemic. Districts are scrambling to put in place distance learning plans and hybrid models. We teachers have learned how to hold Morning Meetings on Zoom, to host student-led book clubs, to create spaces for student collaboration outside of our physical classrooms. We’ve been reading books, participating in webinars, organizing teacher Zoom calls to share resources. We have learned a lot and we have ideas! And yet, few teachers I know have been invited to join conversations with school leadership for creating reopening plans. Our teachers and students who have intimately lived distance learning should be co-creating this new kind of school.

One of the webinars I attended was on Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools. In it, Bettina Love urged teachers to let this be an opportunity to not return to schooling as usual but to tear down the structures that are harming our children and to build humanizing, liberating spaces. Teachers, families, and children should be at the forefront of these conversations. 

You gotta see this!

Still Processing, a podcast hosted by Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham of the New York Times. Nice White Parents, a podcast hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt from Serial Productions and the New York Times.