TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

My TEACHING PHILOSOPHY is simple. Its comes from a very personal place and starts from very early in my life.

Neither my undergraduate preparation nor my professional experience prepared me for a future in the field of education. In fact, I would say that my dedication to early childhood education is a direct result of an life-altering decision involving my becoming a mother. Certainly, there were premature signs that I would find fulfillment in teaching children. These signs stem back from the positive influence of my elementary school teachers, my mother as my first teacher and my community.

Growing up, I often reached out to teachers who offered their support in focusing my dreams and goals. I admired their ability to become an influential force in my life. I wanted to inspire that same type of admiration in my own students and dedicate my life to reaching them at critical stages of development. However, my first teacher was my mother and my earliest childhood memories center around my mother teaching me the different language disciplines of reading, writing, listening, and oratory in my native tongue--Spanish. Due to this intense learning environment at home I became completely fluent in Spanish. I entered elementary school as an ESL student and became a high-achieving Bilingual student. I was also fortunate to have grown up in the town of Richmond Hill, an urban area of Queens county. Also known as New York City District #27, it is a district committed to helping students learn by providing a solid education so that students can go to college and lead productive lives.

Taken together--my enriched learning environment at home, my influential elementary school experience and a community committed to excellence in education--cultivated in me a deep passion for learning and teaching non-traditional learners. Yet, as I continue to reflect on my desire to teach special needs preschoolers in an urban environment, I must pay homage to my immigrant experience. My position in my family as a second generation immigrant was very difficult because it posed a direct threat to my dreams of receiving a higher education.

Detrimental to my academic dreams were my family’s cultural beliefs that higher education was a luxury for native-born Americans and that we had emigrated to this country to work hard and make money. Everyone in my family had an obligation to work long hours at multiple jobs in order to support themselves and relatives back in our native country. This obligation did not allow for savings accounts or college funds. Therefore, if I wanted to realize my dreams of going beyond a high-school diploma--I would have to finance my own collegiate ambitions. It would be a long and arduous mountain to climb.

And so I began to climb that mountain. I financed my night classes by working full-time during the day. My first stable job granted me the title of Business Administrator at an international publishing firm. I worked in the corporate world for three years before starting a family and becoming the proud mother of a wonderful first-born son! Unfortunately, upon returning to work after maternity leave I became disenfranchised with the lack of flexible options for working parents. I had come to a crossroad in my life and was faced with the very difficult decision to either continue my career in business management while missing out on the most critical time of my son’s development. Suddenly, it became clear that the moment had arrived to recall and pursue my dream of influencing young minds. I made the decision to take on a part-time, work-at-home position as a Bilingual Researcher for differentiated instruction and returned to school for a graduate degree as well as a completely different career path--one that would educate me on the development of my children and fulfill my desire to be involved in a selfless profession.

Even though it continues to be extremely challenging to balance multiple roles as a mother, a student and a career woman--there have been notable achievements. In May I graduated with honors and received my Master of Arts degree in Teaching. During that same month I also became the proud recipient of the Culturally Aligned & Responsive Early Intervention (Project I-CARE) grant--a federally funded scholarship program to train and mentor individuals at the post-graduate level who are interested in pursuing early childhood special education teacher certification. Both these accomplishments serve as true testament that I continue to climb higher on that mountain and get closer to becoming an educator for children facing extreme challenges. They also serve as testament that I am committed to shaping my career according to Queens College’s foundations of excellence that include equity and ethics in education.

In addition to being an educator I am also the proud mother of two lovely boys. I consider myself their first and most important teacher. Towards that end, I believe in creating scientific learning environments where my own children as well as my students can develop their natural inquiry skills. It is necessary to create opportunities for children to formulate their own questions and construct classroom learning experiences according to their own innate curiosities. This view is the cornerstone of an instructional model called the science workshop inquiry (Kauderer, 2012) which allows children to learn scientific concepts in tandem with developing inquiry skills. In my opinion, this is the most effective way to structure student learning environments because it speaks directly to the manner by which cognitive knowledge is built.

Today, my future looks bright from the mountain that I continue to climb. With a renewed sense of achievement, my future career goals as a teacher now include working with special needs children at critical points in their early development, serving multi-ethnic communities by teaching in multicultural settings, fusing theories of psychological development into instruction, working with various spectrums of learning disabilities, sharing my life story with parents and encouraging students to aspire onto higher levels of education--despite any obstacles.

References

Berk, L. (2009). Child development. (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Higher Education
Publishing

Kauderer, A. (2012). STEM education: inspiring our future. Retrieved September 21, 2012 from http://stemeducation.com/about/