AmeriCorps Week Reflection

In honor of AmeriCorps Week, Teach For America corps members focused on community engagement by inviting speakers into their classroom to teach a guest lesson. Two of the guest lessons are profiled below.

AmeriCorps Member: Tracey Tomlinson

Tracey is in her first year as a 9th grade biology teacher at Gallup High School in Gallup, New Mexico. Tracey graduated from Colby College in 2012.

My guest speaker is Shruthi Rajashekara. Shruthi is in-between her third and fourth of medical school as Harvard and is currently living in Gallup as she finishes up her field work for her master's degree through the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on access to healthy food on the Navajo Reservation. She and her team and identifying areas of need and are working on a number of strategic interventions to increase healthy food access for people living in the more remote parts of the reservation.

Due to her medical training, Shruthi is an expert of human anatomy and came to my classroom to help us kick-off our human systems unit. She opened her talk by describing her background and explaining her decision to major in biology as an undergraduate and how this decision led her to medical school. She also talked briefly about her current research as well as prior research she had worked on in Zambia. For the body of her lesson, Shruthi discussed the importance understanding human anatomy to help engage my students with the material and get them invested in the unit from the beginning. She talked about human systems (such as the respiratory and circulatory systems) by tying what these systems do for us to medical problems she has seen during her training to give more context as to why these systems are important (and what happens when they no longer work). At the end of the lesson, she asked for questions from the students (detailed in the next section).

The students responded incredibly well to Shruthi's talk. They were clamoring for more of her stories about the types of medical emergencies she has witnessed during the past few years. During the question and answer time, the students demonstrated they had been engaged in her talk because they asked questions about details of her stories, asked more about her "path to Harvard," and developed medical scenarios they had always wondered about. I was incredibly impressed by the level of questioning in which they engaged. The day after Shruthi's presentation, I had my students write a brief reflection of what they thought of her talk and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

AmeriCorps Member: OreOluwa Badaki

OreOluwa is in her first year of teaching 7th and 8th grade English/Language Arts at Navajo Middle School in Navajo, New Mexico. OreOluwa graduated from Cornell University in 2012.

Mr. Wauenka is the Vice President of the Red Lake Chapter here in Navajo. I invited Mr. Wauneka because he is already such a foundational pillar of our community, and he is only 22! He was born in Navajo and went to school here, before pursuing other opportunities outside of the reservation. What I admire most is his commitment to use the opportunities he earned to help his community reach its full potential. Students created interview questions about Pride, Joy, and Confidence (as those were the 3 elements our school wanted students to think of going into NMSBA). Mr. Wauneka answered questions on his upbringing, as well as on why he has pride, joy, and confidence in his people and how he shows it through his life's works. He spoke eloquently about how his fascination with Traditional Jewelry making and the Navajo Nation's advanced Government system helped him decide at an early age that he was meant for something great.

The students were a bit nervous at first, many of them had to speak in front of the crowd to ask their questions and were not used to that scenario. However, Mr. Wauneka spoke of his fear of public speaking as a child and how he learned to overcome it, so he was able to connect with some on that level. Students wrote down some of their favorite quotes from his presentation and all in all they chose some really poignant points, one student quotes "We can do anything special. We have gifts. We have a bright future."

I am extremely grateful and humbled that Mr. Wauneka took time out of his busy schedule to speak to our students. I think it is imperative that my students see successful people who grew up in conditions similar to their own, and who refused to turn their back on their community even after they left the reservation. Many of my students express a dissatisfaction with life on the reservation and talk of leaving as if it were a dream, I want them to know they have the opportunity to see and experience the world AS WELL as having strong roots and remembering where they came from. Mr. Wauneka is a living, breathing example of that and I am very grateful that my students and I had the opportunity to learn with him.