When Students Return to Teach
By: Jill E. Thomas
Photo Left: Life Academy’s Graduation, June 2013 @ Holy Names University, Oakland
Photo Right:
OUSD’s New Teacher Institute, July 2024 @ MetWest High School, Oakland
The truth is that most English teachers look like me. That is: white, cis-female, from a middle class background. All of my own high school English teachers looked like me thirty years ago. Decades later there are still four times as many white teachers as there are BIPOC teachers in K-12 public schools (Schaeffer, 2021).
Luckily, Grow Your Own (GYO) programs and teacher residencies are cropping up all over the country to increase the number of BIPOC teachers in the workforce. Intern programs also attract BIPOC teacher candidates. At The Teaching Well, we focus on retaining the BIPOC educators who are navigating these programs as they anchor classrooms at our partner sites. Thanks to recent scholarship, we have evidence of what we already knew – that BIPOC educators have a positive impact on all students, especially BIPOC students (Bristol & Martin-Fernandez, 2019; Easton-Brooks, 2019; Kohli, 2018; Philip, 2013).
As a teacher at a bio-science-focused high school, I supported students in finding their passions within the medical field. I created integrated projects that explored epidemiology, nutrition, and medical ethics. English was a subject about making meaning with language, not about England! Many of my students were drawn to the medical field as a way to uplift their hard-laboring immigrant families, and I full-heartedly encouraged that pursuit, myself the daughter of a public health nurse. I encouraged my students to “use their voice” and “push for the changes you want to see.” But oddly, I never explicitly uplifted the idea of teaching as a possible career path for my students.
With all of this in mind, you can imagine the special kind of delight and surprise that surfaces when I find out a former student has decided to join the profession. And it happens more often than I would have guessed given the medical science focus of the school where I taught.
Most recently, I learned of Elizabeth, from the Class of 2013, when she showed up at OUSD’s New Teacher Institute (NTI) last month. She’s already been teaching English Language Learners in East Oakland and is returning to earn her credential and make it official. Elizabeth has so many of the assets that make her the right teacher for the job: she is of and from the community, she is a bilingual Spanish speaker, she attended school in the same district where she now teaches. As my former teaching colleague Dr. Cliff Lee names, for BIPOC educators like himself (and Elizabeth), “Our life experiences are often shaped by our experiences as racialized people, immigrants, English learners, or free lunch recipients, yet we have navigated, resisted, and survived the dominant culture, systems, and institutions to earn our rightful place within the academy” (Tamerat & Lee, 2023).
It is good for students to have teachers like Elizabeth. It is good for the educational system to be pushed by students who grow into teachers like Elizabeth. And it’s good for white teachers like me to be colleagues to BIPOC teachers like Elizabeth. In the same way that I worked to ensure students like Elizabeth could do more than survive as adults, I am deeply committed along with my colleagues at The Teaching Well to ensuring new teachers like Elizabeth thrive in schools as adults.