Design Forward
An emergent exploration of critical instructional design.
Design Forward
Portfolio Part: Whole Students
Student Biography
Whole Students
In this exercise you will explore the stories and lives of your current students. You may choose to write a biography (incorporating the elements identified below) or you may choose to draw or otherwise represent a student (again, finding some way to incorporate the identified elements). Be as specific as possible, but think of your imagined biography as an amalgamation of students, rather than the actual biography of an individual student you know:
Elements to include:
- Name
- Hometown(s)
- Childhood education experience: type of school attended, typical grades, relationship with teachers, overall impression of what school is for z Family background: How may parents, siblings, etc. Who do they live with? Who do they have close relationships with?
- Interests & hobbies
- Declared major(s) or minor(s)
- Future life goals
- Stressors and obstacles
- Opportunities and comforts
Lydia is from Dorchester, MA. She is a high achieving, driven kid in a family that encourages education and traditional academic success. There are high expectations for school and as well as many responsibilities at home (working, supporting younger siblings with homework, cleaning, cooking, etc.). Lydia lives with a large extended family, is bilingual (Vietnamese and English), and is close to her older sister as well as the caretaker for her two younger siblings. She spends significant time with cousins, grandparents, etc. She loves poetry, drawing, and painting, and has just been accepted to college to study Communications. Eventually, she hopes to be a lawyer.
Lydia’s mother is sick and father works 60+ hours a week, and there are constantly people coming and going in the house that make it difficult to study. She is extremely tired and burned out with many worries about money and how she will pay for school.
Lydia is optimistic, joyful, and loves the arts. She writes poetry to engage with and release her emotions and has several friends, cousins, and one sister with whom she can speak to openly about her fears and her REAL goal, which is to be a writer (something she feels that she has to hide from her parents).
When you’re done, write 1-2 paragraph reflecting upon the student you have created. Where did you get your inspiration? How is this student like/different than you were as a student? As a teacher, what do you think are the 3 most important things you can do for this student?
When I worked at 826 Boston, a literacy nonprofit in Dorchester, MA, I ended up spending most of my time building a Writing Room at the John D O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. O’Bryant is a public magnet school, and many of the students I met were driven, high achieving, and incredibly stressed. Academic and family pressure– combined with commutes of sometimes over an hour– led to stomach aches and headaches and many conversations about what they wanted to do versus what they were expected to do or had to do in order to continue on to higher education.
I became closest with the students in the Slam Poetry Club and Literary Magazine, both of which met regularly. Lydia is a typical example of one of these tremendous people: smart, ambitious, exhausted, and secretly yearning for the arts in a family culture (and society) that made her believe that she had to split herself into parts and tuck away anything that wasn’t going to help her earn money. I understood her completely. I had a similar background based in a different place (rural Vermont as opposed to Boston) and I understood the fear about money, parentification, desire to prove, and complete denial of anything that didn’t relate to success as I understood it.
Looking back, what hurts about Lydia (and myself) is that good students are often good because they deny their own needs: sleep, food, exercise, the arts, things that make their hearts light up. If someone is academically high achieving in all areas, it usually means they’re doing many things that they don’t really like but doing them really well. In college, if a student is lucky then they’ll be able to put their attention towards ideas and information that they enjoy. But in my experience, that often doesn’t happen, particularly if there’s trauma and family pressure.
It took myself a long, long time to unscramble and unlearn, and at this point I think that the first, second, and third greatest things I could do for any student (but especially high achievers and those navigating trauma) is to listen to the words behind their words. They’ll show me where they light up, and I can tell them what I see even if they’re too disconnected from their bodies and themselves to know. (Every time you talk about car engines you start to smile! Is that something you could look into for your next essay topic?) They don’t need to do anything with the information and perhaps wouldn’t be able to for some time, but giving students a mirror into their own interests as well as permission to “fail” (or at least rest, which they might view as the same) might be the best way to help the Lydias of the world become whole students, not just good students.
