VictoriaDeneroff.com

I am a teacher educator, artist and social activist, committed to empowerment of all young people through education. I began my education career as a Montessori teacher, attracted to Montessori’s belief in the intrinsic worth of each child. Children will learn and grow if their environment does not prevent it, and will thrive if they are given the opportunity to develop their minds and hearts. As a high school and middle school science teacher, I strove to show students the beauty of science, its relevance to their lives, and the importance of the life of the mind.

Dissatisfied with my ability to reach all students in the urban high school where I was teaching, I applied and was accepted to the Urban Schooling PhD program at UCLA. Within the first year of graduate school, as a result of engaging in cultural studies of education, I developed the understanding that the reason for many students’ disengagement with school in general, and science in particular, is the widely held societal belief that all students cannot learn, and certainly cannot learn science. This assumption plays out in essentially all of the practices of schooling, from the way grading is done, to the way standardized tests are constructed, to how students are assigned to classes, to how parents are involved with schools, to students’ peer group expectations for each other.

Because of the pervasiveness of cultural assumptions about schooling, this simple problem has been stubbornly resistant to improvement in spite of decades of school reform attempts. As Donald Chalker wrote in 1993, “My big conclusion is that … we have the schools we want to have.”

Does this mean the situation is hopeless? Far from it. Seemingly insoluble problems almost magically disappear within a generation—when cultural assumptions change. At the time I started teaching at Cleveland High School in 1993, the nominally integrated school was in fact segregated, with students of different ethnic backgrounds hardly mixing at all, either in classes or the cafeteria. Starting sometime about 1995 or 1996 there was a noticeable change: mixed-ethnicity couples could be seen strolling the halls hand in hand, and groups eating lunch together seemed no longer to be only Latino or African-American or Vietnamese or White.

I see science and nature as intrinsically linked. As an artist I seek to embrace the light and the dark in the world, not shrinking from the beautiful or the terrifying, not hiding from truth. As a teacher educator, I accept the beauty of incredibly dedicated colleagues sacrificing time, energy and money in the service of students, and the cruelty of their perpetuating the harm which the “system” fosters.

Therefore, all of the teacher professional development which I facilitate (whether for pre-service or in-service practitioners) is aimed at introducing and fostering the idea that all students can learn science. Being talked at will not help teachers examine their cultural assumptions; they must inquire into students’ learning for themselves, developing a learning community which supports personal and professional growth. I am committed to the idea that teaching is an art, and that who I am is what I teach.

— Victoria Deneroff