NOLA!

The UNCA Teaching Fellows took their yearly January trip to New Orleans, Louisiana this year.

As always, students were exposed to the beautiful diversity that characterizes this bustling city.

An unexpected lesson, however, came in the charter school movement pushing NOLA to its best. Students and faculty on the trip were asked to blog about their experiences.

"I hope that the world is watching, because the charter reform happening in the New Orleans Parish is quite remarkable. We went to four individual schools, and three of them said they have seen immense improvement in their students since Katrina. At the first KIPP elementary school we went to the principal bragged that their students were improving by three grade levels in reading in the lower grades. Once the students reached their grade level, improvement leveled out a little more, but the students did not fall further behind.

It is amazing that these schools are taking children who are normally considered to be failing beyond repair and transforming them into highly successful college-bound scholars. I have never seen such drastic improvement, and I like it. I want to be the kind of teacher who can inspire this kind of change in her classroom and then have that effect bleed into the other classrooms throughout the school. I may never have the opportunity to work in a charter school, but I want to inspire the kind of change that I saw happening in these classrooms. I wa

nt to be the teacher who takes her students to new, amazing levels and has all of her students go on to be successful college-graduates. We need reform like that all over the nation, so I hope everyone is watching, because it needs to happen."

--Brittany Huffman, Sophomore TF

The group also made a stop in Montgomery, AL, birthplace of the civil rights movement.

"As a teacher, I could tell my students about the civil rights movement and the part Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played in the establishment of federal laws that guarantee the rights of all citizens. My students might take away facts and figures, names and dates. I could show them photos or video clips of key moments in history where people were discriminated against, had dogs set upon them, and were driven from their homes from fear. My students might take away images and a sense of the injustice of it all.

Or – I could stand with my students on the street corner where Rosa Parks was arrested. I could walk on the street where 25,000 marchers approached the capital building of Alabama to confront governor

Wallace over the treatment of Blacks. I could enter, with my students, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Dr. King lead his first and only congregation, view the desk where he worked the phones setting up carpools to assist African-Americans during the bus boycott, and stand in the pulpit where his profile was raised to national import as he became the most well-known leader of a movement that still resonates with people across all nations.

The most recent TF January tripafforded me that very opportunity. And my students took away an experience – an interaction with the people and places that shaped the world they live in;

an emotional engagement, an encounter with history that transformed their comprehension of the events that preceded their own births, yet daily impact their lives."

--Mark Sidelnick, Associate Professor of Education

Check back for more inspiring posts and some pictures from this trip!