Recognition from the World Affairs Council

Last night, an organization called the World Affairs Council recognized me with their World Educator 2025 award. They honored me, I think, for much of what is reflected on this blog. Below are my remarks at the event.

              Thank you to the friends and students who have honored me by showing up tonight, to Evangeline for nominating me, and to the World Affairs Council, for being about the kind of connections and community that I am so happy to celebrate in accepting the World Educator award tonight. 

               I want to take this opportunity to speak to what I think we are valuing here together when you’ve recognized my contributions in particular. As a public high school English teacher, my job is to transmit skills, take attendance and answer emails, attend meetings, and pass my students. As long as I do that, I don’t hear from school leadership. But what’s most meaningful to me in our work with children is their sense of self and world, their emotional power to hurt and heal and grow community and understanding.

               I have had the fortune to work with institutions and educators that honor such experiences: The Fulbright Teacher Exchange brought my family to Hungary in a life and culture swap. Hands for a Bridge has built enduring relationships in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Washington state, stepping across difference towards sharpened appreciations of political, historical, and cultural contexts. Margins and Centers, a course that investigates power with an eye towards empowerment, justice, and joy, is built on collaborations guided by one of the wisest, most creative instructors I’ve ever met, Anu Taranath. She exemplifies the kind of open-eyed, open-hearted teaching I most want to embrace.

               What these programs have in common is an understanding that education involves not just the mind but the heart—a hungry curiosity, a generosity of spirit. We can learn skills and pass tests and follow rules; but if we want to learn more than obedience or self-promotion, then we celebrate the communal nature of the classroom; we step outside comfort zones and look beyond schoolhouse walls; we acknowledge and interrogate and honor our emotional reactions to events and ideas outside of us.

               Any time we can elevate students from habituated contexts and ideas, we can do this.

               Consider an afternoon that American students experienced in Cape Town, side-by-side with their Xhosa and Afrikaner friends: We’d read a novel about a fraught moment towards the end of Apartheid when a young American was killed by a mob in the township of Gugulethu. We stood where she was killed, meditating on both the anger of the moment and the truth and reconciliation work that later stared into it and allowed a measure of healing. Our guide grieved the vandalism and decay on the monument before us: important history was either not being taught or not being appreciated. And then we sang, bringing ourselves into a personal mournfulness of the shared experience.

               Later, we would write and talk. The cracked, vandalized monument and Siya’s words made us think about memorials, heroes, shared history when it’s communally remembered: such history and heroes help us understand others and energize around common values. Without these, those most marginalized stay divided; and bigotry is left undisturbed.

               It was the specificity of this moment, this place, these specific cracks, surrounded by these people, wrapped in this song and these ideas, and the unflinching group dialogue that followed, that deepened our thinking about history, our collectivity in it, and above all, our invested feeling in it.

               Again, it’s getting students out of their habitual contexts that accelerates such heart-work. Group travel can do this. Field trips can do it. Eleven p.m. talking circles can do it. But you don’t need to travel across the world or even across the city to do this. Any group experience that students understand as bigger than a classroom and bigger than an assignment for a grade does the same work: We’re already a community—thinking and experiencing, together, in a classroom—and that gets us a lot of the way there. From that collectivity, a learning and cultural encounter that expands a person, both in mind and heart, has the potential for joy and for support from a world outside of our own close needs and interests.

               Tonight, I want to reaffirm what is most joyous, challenging, and human in this work and play of learning, and that’s in the connections and relationships we make to the world beyond the comfort of what we already know and experience. When we step together as communities towards other communities—in reading, in imagination, or in body—we grow, we fortify, we deepen our own humanity. We strengthen our world.

               Thank you.