My earliest memories of learning usually involve trips with my mother to the library or her prompting me to name fractions at mealtimes as servings were divided up amongst the family. We sliced the frozen lasagna into fourths and eighths, and the books were free.
As a doctoral student in Teaching and Learning in the College of Education, I often reflect on how I reached this point in my education. And those who know more about me and my upbringing sometimes ask, with emphasis, how did you reach this point in your education?
My academic achievement is punctuated by a series of alphabetic abbreviations. BA. BA. MA. MFA. PhD. All along, though, I have been acutely aware that my background is not common among my peers. According to the most recent survey conducted by the National Center of Science and Engineering Statistics, only 14.9% of doctoral recipients’ parents hold a maximum educational attainment of high school. Estimates for undergraduate degree attainment for children raised in poverty usually don’t exceed 25%. Given that only about 2% of the general population holds doctoral degrees, the subsection of those degree holders who were raised in poverty must certainly be infinitesimal.
The Humanities Without Walls consortium names as one of its strategic goals “to prioritize the education of people who have not historically had access to higher education, and to rethink traditional doctoral training by foregrounding the discernment of values and opportunities that graduate education has not imagined or anticipated.”
Through this program—administered by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies—I was placed in a paid summer internship at the Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County, a natural fit given the organization’s focus on education and telling stories about the communities they serve. My work this summer involves writing profiles of the staff and neighbors around the Pheasant Ridge community, developing a podcast to highlight a variety of ethnic communities in Iowa City, and utilizing my background in pre-college planning, improvisation, and empowering others to tell their own stories. I still enjoy classroom teaching, but education must also take place in homes, in neighborhoods, and throughout the proverbial village it takes to raise a child.
During my first staff meeting, the Director of Neighborhood Health Equity, Michael Shaw, spoke about his team’s partnership with Parents as Teachers, a national, award-winning, research-based organization centered on helping parents support their child’s earliest learning experiences, years before they attend formal schooling. Neighborhood Centers has long been recognized for its early education programs conducted in house, but this idea—that parents are themselves the first to teach their child how to learn—sparked what I might refer to as a delicious itch, the feeling of excitement I get when I am curious, when I am intrigued by a new research idea or opening the first page of a book I have been yearning to read. It’s the same feeling that I try to pass on to my students, even when I suspect they are barely tolerating my enthusiasm.
My teaching population over the past decade has consisted primarily of adults, and my exposure to early childhood education is negligible. But I have worked with scores of parents in the community college classroom, and many of my most impactful experiences in the classroom have been with the middle-aged mothers who return to school not only to better themselves, but to understand how to support their children’s education. Sometimes they would ask me what they could do to help those kids succeed in school.
I think back to my own mother—a self-confessed mediocre student, no college, riddled with obstacles impairing her mental health and impeding her efforts to be a strong parent. How did she know to expose me to math and books starting as early as I can remember? Without having the same benefit herself, she somehow understood that she was my first teacher. I doubt she had organizational support of the kind like Neighborhood Centers, but I’ve always suspected that someone planted the idea of her role as teacher in her mind; it might have even been a neighbor.
Where the idea came from, I’ll never know. Instead, I can just be grateful that somehow the message was received. This summer at Neighborhood Centers, I hope that I can be like the invisible hand of that neighbor, playing just a tiny role in the village that we refer to as community.