06 Jun2023
By Christine Gentry
With the crucial need for diverse representation and inclusivity in education, two innovative teachers are making an impact in their fields of teaching. I had the pleasure of working with Linden, a science educator from Boston, and Bill, an English language arts teacher in San Francisco, during their residency years spanning from 2017 to 2020.
In honoring trans/nonbinary educators, I captured our discussions, highlighting key themes on the challenges and opportunities they have faced, as well as how they have both transformed their classrooms into safe and supportive spaces for their students.
28 Jun2022
By Christine Gentry and Stacie Brensilver Berman
GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey (N=16,636)—the most recent for which results are available—provides an alarming overview of the state of LGBTQ+ inclusive education. According to GLSEN, only 16.2% of participants reported engaging with positive representations of LGBTQ+ content, and fewer than 20% stated that LGBTQ+ topics appeared in their textbooks and curricular resources.
10 Jun2022
2022 Washington Week Attendee Recaps Her Experience
By Christine Gentry
This year, AACTE’s Washington Week event (Educating the Future: Policy and Advocacy as Levers of Change) was held in person for the first time in three years. The energy in the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel was high as colleagues met and reunited with each other.
The week opened on Monday with a warm welcome by Lynn M. Gangone (AACTE’s president and CEO), followed by a plenary session on AACTE’s legislative priorities by Mike Rose (AACTE’s senior director of government relations) and members of AACTE’s Committee on Government Relations and Advocacy (including myself), who offered tips on having successful meetings with public officials.
18 Sep2020
Revolutionizing Education
By Christine Gentry and Lorraine Zhong
Christine Gentry
The culminating course of the NYU Teacher Residency focuses on a year-long participatory action research (PAR) journey residents take with a small group of students. PAR is a collaborative, iterative process of inquiry and action in response to an organizational or community problem. Residents and their students work as a team to identify a problem of practice, research that problem of practice, craft action and data collection plans, implement those plans, and then evaluate their impact through analysis of gathered data. In presentations at the end of the course, residents reflect on the entire process and how it helped develop student agency, advocacy, and voice as well as their own leadership. It is the faculty’s hope that during the PAR journey, residents practice radical listening and how to be mindful learners and leaders.
In March 2020, COVID-19 entered the residents’ PAR experience like a wrecking ball. I gathered with the other PAR instructors to decide how we were going to adjust the project for our residents, considering the radical change in access both to physical spaces and to the students in the PAR teams. We ultimately decided to offer the residents two choices: a reflective path, in which they could craft a presentation on their team’s original plan and the progress they were able to make pre-COVID, and a virtual pilot path, in which they could adjust their projects to the virtual space we all suddenly found ourselves in. Understandably, most residents chose to pursue the reflective path, but one resident, Lorraine Zhong, and her team of students chose to continue their project virtually. Her project is a model for how the PAR instructors in the NYU Teacher Residency will be approaching the project this year, with COVID-19’s grip still firmly on our schools. Her journey is a beautiful example of the transformative power of PAR—its ability to strengthen relationships, build student investment, and spark meaningful change—even in the face of this new and terribly difficult time for our schools.
I’ll let her take it from here.
