My Experience at NMH
I deeply believe that understanding and reflecting on one's own intersectionality of identities to be crucial components to one's development. Especially as a learner in a space that you are unfamiliar with. On this page, I list a few things I've learned and am still learning, as well as inextricably reflecting on my own identities and my own resilience.
A Few Areas of Learning
Portrait of a Learner
In my first semester at NMH, I engaged in a week-long project where I shadowed a particular student on campus, in my case, a freshman girl, in order to establish a more in-depth portrait of her as a learner. The goal of this project was to better my understanding of a boarding school student's complex and ever-evolving life on campus, as well as to learn more about how to learn about students that we interact with on a daily or weekly basis. This project revealed to me many aspects of a student's life that I was not previously aware of, especially as someone who did not attend boarding school, and it informed me to be a better educator in the long run.
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There is also a rejoinder that I produced in the fall of 2022, a full year after the completion of my initial Portrait of a Learner. You will be able to find that at the bottom of this page.
Reflecting on Privilege
As someone who did not attend boarding school, and knew nothing about boarding schools until after the start of the Penn ISTR program, getting into the New England elite boarding school world has been a wild ride. Throughout the two years of my teaching fellowship, grappling with ideas of privilege has been central to my experience. How do you authentically connect with people, students and adults, who were born and raised in completely different socioeconomic classes and cultures?
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One of the first pieces of writing I produced that I was happy with is a paper examining privilege, cultural capitals, and socializations. In it, I grapple with David Labaree's claim that there are fundamental, political disagreements in Americans' perceptions regarding education. Labaree's work provided me a lens to see education at NMH as “private good designed to prepare individuals for successful social competition for the more desirable market roles” (Labaree, 1997, p.42).
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You can read the paper in its entirety below.
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Evolving Educational Philosophy
As a philosophy double major in college, I specialize in talking about the ideal and the abstract. However, educational philosophy is something that is so inextricably complex and dynamic, that I felt utterly unprepared to talk about at the beginning of my teaching fellowship. In contrary to other kinds of philosophy that I have engaged with, about knowledge, love, government, cause-and-effect, or even properties of chairs, having an educational philosophy requires one to concretely and I would argue even passionately work in the field of education on a daily basis.
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Now, towards the end of my teaching fellowship, after 1.5 years of working at a boarding school, I have a much better idea of what I find important and what I believe to be fundamental in education. I have developed a system of values that I am proud of, that I deeply believe to be just, that I am happy to dedicate the rest of my life working towards. As you may have guessed by now, building resilience is central to my philosophy.
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As I read more about the world of education, as I engage with students in different settings over time, my educational philosophy is also evolving, and will be ever-evolving. In fact, I am now not at all satisfied with my educational philosophy paper that I produced last year. Though I would always love to sit down with you and talk for hours about it. But, if you'd like, you can read past Dominic's version of educational philosophy below.
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Here is another version of my educational philosophy that I wrote at the beginning of 2023. It is much more flushed out and clearly influenced by my work throughout the Penn program.
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My Own Experience, and DEI Work
Lastly, I want to reflect on my identities, and how they have shaped my experience here at NMH in the last two years. Consequently, I have also learned so much more about myself, and values that I hold near and dear to my heart.
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By the summer of 2022, there have been countless challenges I have observed and encountered in my first year of teaching. I expressed my frustration with the departmental (and perhaps more general) culture at NMH regarding teaching and learning math, where feelings, emotions, and personal stories have no place in the math classroom, and the only thing that matters is absorbing materials from the textbook and preparing for exams. It was difficult to navigate through the political differences in the department, while holding onto your convictions and wanting to change and challenge existing structures.
As one of the few faculty of color at NMH, I have also at times felt micro-and macro-aggressions of various sorts. As a faculty of color, it was extremely difficult challenging those who hold power on campus, especially when disciplining white male athletes in the dorm. After catching a room full of hockey players breaking major school rules in the dorm, I experienced numerous acts of vandalization as a result of their retaliation. Resilience, then, is only one of many things that I needed to get through the day or week. How do I survive in a space that is never meant for me? How do I challenge the institution and the power structure as an outsider?
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By clicking the button below, you will get to read much more about my work with adults and students on NMH campus, how I build resilience in the community by having difficult conversations with others, and how I build resilience for people so that they are equipped to have difficult conversations in the first place.
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