The Bridge to Brilliance by Nadia Lopez

Author:Nadia Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-11T13:39:19+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

EXPANDING HORIZONS

I was forever changed during my first year of teaching in Fort Greene, when Ms. DeCoteau opened my eyes to the truth that children absorb many important lessons simply by getting out of their everyday surroundings. While walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with our class, I witnessed firsthand the power of experiential learning. That moment was the inspiration for Mott Hall’s community walks, which have been part of the fabric of our school since the beginning. We leave Brownsville and travel to other communities so the scholars can learn that there’s a much bigger world beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood—and that they have a place in it.

With television and the Internet, it’s not as if my children aren’t keenly aware that there is a whole other universe of privilege, wealth, and white people in America. But it’s one thing to watch people order lattes on TV and a whole other thing to actually sit in a café sipping a drink.

Getting outside the school building has long been considered a vital didactic tool for all students. The concept of the field trip is at the heart of experiential learning, a major trend in progressive education. It’s the idea that people often learn best through experience, in other words, by doing things, going places, and making discoveries with their own eyes.

Yet more often than not children in underserved communities aren’t offered these types of experiences. It’s a huge injustice that the very students who stand to benefit the most from opportunities to expand what they’ve seen and done are precisely the ones denied them.

I first had this shocking revelation during my last year at Susan S. McKinney. After teaching at the Fort Greene middle school for two years, I had hit my stride. My students grew to such a level that they were engaged in a multidisciplinary project on Hurricane Katrina that encompassed discussions of not only political process and civil rights history but also global warming and the science behind its impact on weather. Just by coincidence, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth hit the theaters at the same time we were working on this project. Honestly, I didn’t even make the connection. It was my students—my inner-city, special ed middle schoolers from the projects—who brought the film to my attention. “Ms. Lopez, we want to go and see it!” they said. It was the perfect field trip; the documentary would complement what they were learning in class as well as bring them into a current national conversation. I was so proud.

But when I asked the coordinator in charge of granting permission for field trips, he told me flat out, “No.” If I wanted to show them the movie, he said, I could show them the bootleg version in school. What? I was so confused I didn’t even get upset. I wasn’t asking to take them to Great Adventure (which, by the way, I think is a great field trip, particularly when the theme park is free on Pi Day).

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