For 16 weeks, Wesleyan students have been trading in their backpacks for teachers’ briefcases, their seats at desks for standing positions at the front of the classroom, and their student stationery for sticks of chalk.
The Urban Education Semester, a joint program of Bank Street College of Education and the Venture Consortium, offers students a chance to take part in an accredited study away program in New York City’s public schools, in which participants learn about public education and gain experience teaching in schools.
“Students have described the program as formative and transformative,” said Associate Director of the CRC Vicky Zwelling.
The Urban Education Semester group held an information session in the CRC library last Monday, which featured several previous participants. Peggy Chang, director of the Venture Consortium, which is partly funded by Wesleyan and housed at Brown University, gave a short presentation to prospective applicants. She emphasized that the program is not a teacher preparation program but has nonetheless been rated by the Teachers’ College of Columbia as one of the top three teacher preparation programs in the country. Its overarching goal is not to convince people to be teachers but to introduce liberal arts students to public education and the impact of urban policy on education in New York City schools.
The program is offered in both fall and spring semesters and combines coursework at the Bank Street College with teaching assistant work in local public schools. In addition to coursework and teaching, students must complete a final project.
“You’re there for four months, almost 16 weeks, the students really get to know you,” Chang said. “While you are there you will notice some gaps in the system and get the chance to address that [through projects].”
Erin Moore ’07, for example, designed a project integrating music into the mathematics curriculum in the class she was assigned to, while Sean Conlon ’06 implemented a “social action letter writing” curriculum to coincide with the 2004 Presidential Election and his class’s emphasis on writing.
All involved students stressed that they thoroughly enjoyed their experience notwithstanding the fact that the work, including both their coursework and their teaching load, was heavy.
“Graduate level coursework should not deter you,” said Molly Dengler ’06. “All of the work is totally applied. I took a literature course and I never wrote a paper that was not applied work [in some way or another]. You really won’t want to miss a day.”
Other participants pointed out that the program was a step outside the purely academic realm.
“The whole program is intense in a different way [from Wesleyan],” Conlon said. “You’re living in New York, living the life of a teacher. I used to fall asleep on the bus on the way back. It is overwhelming but completely rewarding.”
Other veterans of the program concurred, adding that each day was complete and full of new challenges.
“The experience is gratifying, [you] learn what actual responsibility is,” said Elena Schilder ’07.
Each participant is assigned to a different class in schools all over New York City. Amy Ruiz ’07 taught U.S. History to high school juniors in the South Bronx, Sean Conlon helped in an eighth–grade humanities class, Dengler worked both in a kindergarten and second grade class, and Moore and Schilder taught in fourth– and sixth–grade classes, respectively, in Harlem.
“Sixth grade in my mind was bordering on scary adolescent stuff, but it turned out fine,” Schilder said. “[The whole experience] is much more like it’s happening to you than merely that you are giving something out to other people.”
According to Ruiz, the personal nature of the classroom environment forged close bonds between participants and students.
“The students have an expectation, they really want to see you and [they] invest emotionally in you,” Ruiz said.
For many of the previous participants, the program was a practical application of issues they had discussed in their classes.
“At Wesleyan before I went to Urban Education Semester, my big thing was charter schools,” Conlon said. “Doing this semester day in day out makes things more real, more complicated— not in a bad way. I have a better understanding of these charter schools than I would have by just reading about it in Wesleyan.”
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