On March 6, local educators and students filled the Carroll Room for a celebration dinner. They were celebrating the culmination of the Urban Ed Pathway, a program run by the Urban Education Initiative (UEI), part of the Jandon Center for Community Engagement, and Teach Western Mass, a nonprofit working to ensure that all students have access to an effective educator and a vibrant education. Anna Lugo ’05 was the educator of the hour as Smith presented her with the Advocate for Educational Equity Award. Lugo participated in the Urban Ed Pathway as a junior at Smith in 2004, an experience that the Holyoke Public School teacher and educational leader says led to a love of teaching.
The UEI addresses greater racial and class inequalities both here in Western Massachusetts and in cities across the country by teaching students about these structural issues and how to become better educators. As Imani Hines ’13, a Springfield teacher, says, “Massachusetts is number one for some, but not all.” Through the Urban Education Pathway, UEI strives to create an educator pipeline to urban schools in Massachusetts and beyond to combat the high turnover rates in these schools that lead to fewer experienced teachers.
The Urban Ed Pathway is a year-long fellowship program designed to provide students with hands-on experiences to “try out” teaching in a supportive, mentoring environment while also working to sustain current teachers in urban schools. The Urban Ed Pathway has three segments: a fall orientation session to prepare students for the urban classroom, an interterm fellowship in an urban school and a one-credit spring seminar that connects what fellows learned on the ground during the interterm fellowship to local urban education efforts in Western Massachusetts.
Award recipient Anna Lugo re-engaged with the program this year by becoming a mentor to two students placed in Houston, Texas, giving her the opportunity to connect on another level with the program and students. The Urban Ed Pathway has changed and grown in many positive ways, said Lugo, since she completed the program in New York City with a cohort of ten.
This past J-term, 45 students participated in the fellowship, compared to 32 in 2018. The Urban Ed Pathway has grown in recent years, especially since they partnered with Teach Western Mass. The students were placed in 11 cities across the United States, including Los Angeles, New York and Holyoke. Five College students can participate in the Urban Ed Pathway as well, with nine students participating this year from outside of Smith. Kira Hill ’21 spent her J-Term apprenticing at a school in Boston for her fellowship and hopes to eventually become a teacher. She said she was truly able to see what that entails through this experience and learned about different ways to manage a classroom. Shayla Bezjak-Martinez ’20 said that she learned about various effective teaching strategies through her fellowship in Boston as well.
The spring seminar, taught by Smith Professor of Education and Child Study Sam Intrator, brings in local guest speakers and leaders in the field of urban education and education reform. The course looks at the question, “Why has it proven so difficult in the United States to create more schools and districts where educational opportunity is distributed fairly?” through a close study of school systems in Western Massachusetts. For example, Dr. Steve Mahoney — the principal of Holyoke High School, who founded Renaissance High School in Springfield and led the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program before returning to Western Massachusetts to take over the leadership of Holyoke High School — led a workshop on school reform. Bezjak-Martinez said that the seminar solidified and brought together everything that she had experienced throughout the program. Through a mentorship opportunity in addition to the seminar, the hope is that students form a personal and professional connection that will help them in their future careers.
The Urban Ed Pathway helps students think beyond their undergraduate experience to their greater career goals and the system of education beyond Smith. At the event on March 6, the Urban Ed Pathway Scholars participated in an interview simulation with local educators by giving them their resumes as practice for future job applications. Bezjak-Martinez mentioned that she is interested in doing sociological research on the institution of education and children as a result of this program. Lugo, an accomplished and engaged educator, said that the knowledge from this program will enhance your life. She found the program “personally enriching” and worth doing, if you are considering it. Through the Urban Ed Pathway, students have the opportunity to deeply examine our education system in the hopes of doing something to change it.
If you would like to get involved with the Urban Ed Pathway, you can email Jo Glading-DiLorenzo at jdilorenzo@smith.edu. This program will start up at the beginning of the fall 2019 semester, and you can find more information at https://www.smith.edu/academics/jandon-center/urban-education.
