MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

My role as an educator is to advocate for all students to have access to equitable learning opportunities through differentiated instruction, and I am committed to finding ways to incorporate my students’ uniqueness into my curriculum through an asset-based philosophy. As a reflective teacher, I teach with three attitudes—open-mindedness, responsibility, and wholeheartedness (Grant & Zeichner, 1984). I believe that in order to cultivate a safe and positive learning environment for diverse learners, communicating my goals and expectations with my students is key in providing an equitable education.

Being an inclusive teacher means critically acknowledging issues regarding race, class, gender, and disabilities within the education system before doing the work to free students “from the constraints of Eurocentric, mainstream methods of knowledge and learning” (Gay, 2010, as cited in Power et al., 2024). I plan to cultivate a culture where young people are free to make mistakes and motivated to learn from their errors rather than feel punished. 

I believe that art education is critical to developing rich multicultural expression (Nieto & Bode, 2018). Through art enrichment, students are able to develop their sense of self-expression, emotions, and empathy (Krieger, 2023), and empathy enables us to see the world in all its diversity which directly aligns with multicultural education. By using art education to teach empathy, I will form meaningful connections with my students, creating learning experiences that are adapted upon their cultural experiences.

Teaching should come from a perspective of joy for learning, but it is also a form of activism. Lilia Bartolome (1994) remarked that teachers play an active role in protecting their students from discrimination as “their roles as educators is a political act that is never neutral.”