ZOE GORSKI
An Educator and Mother, Reborn
A Synthesis Essay of My Graduate Studies
When I began my graduate studies in Michigan State's Master of Arts in Education program in January 2017, I was an entirely different person than I am today. I had left my teaching job in Ohio to move with my brand-new husband to New York. I was baby-sitting, substitute teaching, and completely unsettled. I took the plunge and sent in my application for grad school, needing to feel a sense of purpose again. The same week my first classes started, my husband went away for two months of work training, and I found out I was pregnant.
Panicked and alone, I threw all my energy into my classes. I always wanted to be a mother, but navigating the early stages of pregnancy by myself was never how I imagined finding out I was going to have a baby. Even in my panic, I knew that the timing had somehow worked out perfectly. I was studying literacy and leadership as I prepared to become a mother.
One of my very first courses required me to purchase a library of children's stories, filling my nursery before I even bought diapers. Another course asked me to examine the purpose of learning while I nursed my infant. When I watched my smiling toddler walk up to children with a different skin color for the first time, I was learning about leadership in multicultural education. So far, my journey as a mother has been fused with my journey as a graduate student. Every course is marked with a different milestone for my daughter and a different lesson I learned as both a teacher and a mother.
One of the first courses I took in pursuit of my master’s degree was TE 849: Methods and Materials for Teaching Children’s and Adolescent Literature. What I was expecting to learn about were clever ways to get children interested in reading books. What I was not expecting was to dive deep into the themes of authentic, representative, multicultural stories. We looked at what makes a classic children’s story stay a classic; we looked at picture books and graphic novels and poetry; and we looked at themes of race, hate, defeat, strength, hope, and love.
This course taught me that selecting literature for the classroom, nursery, library, or any other setting, holds great power and significance. Any book a child picks up holds the power to affect them for the rest of their life. Much to my hormonal, pregnant brain’s delight, we were asked to talk about the books from our childhood that stuck out the most in our memories. I recalled reading Madeline on the lap of my mother, The Chronicles of Narnia sitting next to my father, and reading Harry Potter aloud to my brother. They were stories wrapped up in memories that changed me and made me want to be a language arts teacher. Then we took a closer look at the characters in the stories that changed us. Who were they? Did they look like me? Who wrote the characters? It hit me harder than I ever thought it would: I had been immersed in white literature. Sure, I read black authors in high school and college, but my childhood exposure to literature was white. Even though the messages in the books I loved were wonderful and powerful, what message would it send to my students and my daughter if I only selected texts by white authors? In this course we began to pick up books by diverse authors about characters of different backgrounds, races, and abilities. I began to understand that literature’s power to connect the reader with experience depends on representation. A story cannot grab a reader if the reader does not see some reflection of their inner or outer self within the characters.
This course renewed my love for literature but gave me a new awareness of the importance of selecting appropriate, relevant, representative, and diverse texts for the classroom. The course also gave me a new perspective as a parent and helped me collect stories by a variety of authors for my daughter to experience. I want her to see herself in the books she reads, but not necessarily her white blonde self. I want her to see the bravery of characters that do not look like her, the strength of men and women with different abilities, and the power of people from different cultures and backgrounds. I want my daughter and my students to see the beauty in diversity and celebrate differences instead of pretending that diversity does not matter. I hope my future students will be able to find books in my classroom with as many characters that look like them as ones that do not. I hope they see themselves in stories and find ways to connect with characters of all backgrounds by a diverse group of powerful authors.
The same week my daughter was born, I began taking ED 800: Concepts of Educational Inquiry. The course was self-paced, with six units to work through and was perfect for my new schedule of no sleep and round-the-clock baby feedings and diaper changes. I learned how to balance a newborn with school as I dove into the six units of this course, and the themes I explored as a new mother will stick with me for the rest of my life and impact my future teaching. The first unit asked me to think about the role knowledge plays in our lives and examine the theories of John Dewey and his belief that accumulating knowledge is a fluid, lifelong, constant process. As I adjusted to my new role as a mother, I connected with Dewey’s beliefs and carried this foundational concept with me through the rest of my courses as I unpacked the implications of truly learner-centered teaching.
Another major theme in this course was the nature and process of inquiry. Through the exploration of Vivian Paley’s The Girl with the Brown Crayon, I learned the importance of self-reflection and inquiry as a teacher. Reading about the journals Paley kept of her teaching inspired me to begin writing again and challenged me to keep track of my experiences in order to reflect and question myself. In the midst of my sleepless nights, struggling to feed myself as I focused on my newborn, I found time to write again, and it is a practice I have not stopped over a year later. I write every day, not only for school, but also for myself. Writing is my own form of educational inquiry, and it is the method I choose to reflect on my personal and professional life.
This course ended in discussing themes of goodness and truth in an age of technology. I was able to see the advantages and disadvantages of social media in my own life and reflect on the role I would like for technology to play in my personal and professional life going forward. The greatest danger I see in incorporating technology into the lives of my students and my daughter is the risk that they will lose, or never develop, their own identities. I believe that knowing who you are and what you believe in is what grounds us and helps us navigate life. Change and growth are inevitable, but that does not mean we have to get lost in the trends and expectations of others. I hope that I will be able to use technology as a mother and an educator to help others use technology as a tool and an extension of their selves, rather than allow it to define them. Learning is a lifelong, constant process; our experiences define and shape who we are and who we will become.
The third course I would like to discuss, EAD 850: Issues and Strategies in Multicultural Education, became part of my schedule when my daughter was walking and beginning to talk. She was, and still is, constantly soaking in everything about her surrounding environment. This course allowed me to catch a glimpse of what the world looks like through my daughter’s eyes and the path she might follow if I do not carefully curate her experiences and exposures. It made me aware of everything I say, watch, and do. It made me listen carefully to the words of my husband, family and friends. It opened my eyes to the racism that surrounds me.
I may not have been as open or receptive to what I learned in this course if I had taken it first, or if I had not watched my daughter grow for a year before I enrolled in the course. We used a central text titled Is everyone really equal?, which taught me the politically and socially correct language for discussing race, sex, and gender. We discussed the misconceptions we so often hear about “reverse racism,” and the lies that privilege taught us. We discussed the institutions we belong to, the effects of intersectionality, and the various ways discrimination occurs. Through this foundational “refresher” on multiculturalism, I was able to rethink everything I had been taught as a young millennial and see how damaging and diminishing the teaching that we should be “color blind” is to people of color.
In this course, I had the opportunity to examine my self and the conditions that created me and see the things that blocked me from becoming an inclusive, equitable educator. I was asked to write papers and produce multimedia projects analyzing the experiences of black, female, college students, and suggest ways for school leaders to become more inclusive. I feel that this course not only provided me with updated, current terminology, and the best practice strategies for promoting multicultural education in schools today, but also equipped me with a newfound lens to view the world. Going forward, I will use what I learned in this course to teach my daughter to use her white privilege and intersectionality as a woman to connect with others and promote social justice. I want my daughter to understand that everyone has a responsibility to promote kindness and compassion, no matter what career she pursues. As an educator, I will work every day to be inclusive and provide equity for my students and peers. Everyone is different, but everyone is of value in this world; this course has helped me to see the importance of diversity in every aspect of our lives.
When my graduate studies officially end, my daughter will be twenty months old. This means that twenty-eight months of my life were spent working on furthering my education and obtaining my master’s degree, all while I was born as a mother. For a long time, I would see old friends or meet new people and say “I’m not teaching right now, I’m just staying home with the baby and working on my master’s.” I wrote off the importance of what I was doing every day because I wasn’t technically a teacher anymore. I missed the classroom and felt the burden of my own expectations for myself to be working. It took me nearly twenty-eight months to truly see the value of what I have been doing with my life.
My graduate studies have shaped me as a person, and the courses I took have strongly impacted my values and beliefs as a mother and a teacher. I now fully understand and appreciate the value of my studies and can see that perhaps I would not have changed as much as I did if I had not been home with my daughter, fully investing myself in my education. This was my time to fully immerse myself in the process of lifelong learning, and I emerge from this program as a refreshed educator, ready to step back into a classroom and facilitate the learning of my students.