What do you do as a Graduate Assistant at Civic House?

My role as a GA is specifically focused on social justice education programming, which includes general Civic House events, working with full-time staff, and working with the undergrads who are facilitating, organizing, and making these events happen.

Another part of my role is helping oversee portions of the West Philadelphia Tutoring Program (WPTP). In that capacity, I work with LaDonna to review the curriculum that we have developed and evaluate how we are training tutors before they go into the schools. As the program grows and more wonderful people get involved, we want to make sure that we maintain the same high level of quality that we are offering to these students.

I am still getting to know how WPTP is currently operating and how it interacts with the undergrad board. I believe one of the best ways to make something efficient and help it work well is to really understand how it is going as it is now, because then you can get a sense of the program’s structure and what it is struggling with. I am spending the rest of this semester getting very familiar with how the program works and building relationships with the people involved so that we can review these things, come up with a plan to strengthen and patch any holes, and make sure that we are emphasizing the elements of the program that are working really well.

What inspired you to do the work you’re doing now?

I started undergrad as a computer science major and switched halfway through to sociology, and finding sociology was such a gift. Sociology looks at people, society, and culture as a system with many different moving parts and elements. I am currently pursuing a Master’s of Education, and it has been really interesting to see the ways in which these various elements, actors, and people invested in children’s education come together, as well as the different perspectives they bring.

In particular, as someone very interested in strategic planning and youth advocacy, I am very interested in looking at education from a systems perspective and at what exists outside of what we traditionally think of as schooling. For example, WPTP is a great example of a place within a larger structure where education happens outside of formal school buildings or traditional schooling. That has a lot of generative capacity for building things that we cannot yet imagine. For example, how are we empowering these students in a way that the traditional school system would not be able to?

I am really excited for this role at Civic House because I think it will give me the opportunity to develop not just management skills, but also the ability to be an effective facilitator for things that are happening when I myself am not the one teaching. How can I make sure that the people working with these children are as prepared as they can be, so that those children, those students, are getting the best that they possibly can?

What motivated you to join Civic House and work with WPTP? 

My initial introduction to Civic House was through LaDonna. We’re actually taking a class together this semester called Decolonizing Education. A lot of what we look at are the depth and commonality of colonial systems in pretty much every aspect of education as we know it right now. […] But the thing that I feel most drawn to is that, in this web of activity and action, everyone [at Civic House] is grounded in the understanding and practice of naming and calling out white supremacy; of naming and calling out systems of colonization, especially as we may not even realize oppression is affecting us because it’s so normal and commonplace. So, that really feels like something that excited me in being part of Civic House. That’s what drew me to want to participate in not only the programs, but the mission and goals that Civic House has.

It’s also very aligned with what I want to be doing after I graduate: the work of translating these things to students so that students can be empowered, and to teachers so that they can be informed when they go to interact with these students. I want to translate how these different elements play into schools and how these systems might be, without realizing it, creating structures of harm for their kids.

What are you looking forward to being part of at Civic House?

I’m really excited to see it progress over the course of a full year. In the fall, I’ll get to meet new students. [In the summer] I’ll get to see the lead-up to these programs restarting in the fall, then see the different ways that students on campus are engaging with Civic House, even if they aren’t Civic Scholars.

I’m really interested in pursuing something in professional development, or teacher education. I want to work with new teachers who are studying to become educators, and work with them in terms of curriculum and pedagogy such that they can really care and meet students where they’re at, especially students in areas like Philadelphia.

I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which has a very similar school sort of dynamic that Philly has. There are children in schools right now with faulty lights, plumbing issues, and teachers that must provide everything in the classroom out of their own paychecks. Resources change everything, and in these cities, the resources do exist. And I’m interested in working in those areas, particularly to connect students of color in urban areas with resources, because that creates so many opportunities. So, no matter what specific city I’m working in, I am practicing a model that could be adapted and could be useful in other contexts.