The CSU principals exist to create a learning environment that not only speaks to individual students and their experiences but also acts to uphold and create important morals and guidelines for their students to follow. Personally, I am grateful to attend a university that takes many of these things into consideration as they all affect teaching and the learning environment. When I was about six, my Dyslexia sent me to special education classes designed to help me correct how I viewed reading and writing. I was labeled as dumb and stupid for stumbling over my words, and it is something I still struggle with today. It took years but slowly I learned how to manage; I spent my summer days not playing with my sisters or running through the sprinklers but at the kitchen table running through exercises designed to help my learning disability. The experience taught me so much about dedication to myself and perseverance through challenges. In my senior year of high school, I was in an array of advanced placement courses. The weekend after the school district art show, my stomach twisted in knots when my science professor, having seen and enjoyed my art so much, displayed a picture of my art at eight in the morning for the entire class to see, with the exclamation that he understood why science was a struggle since I was clearly right-brain dominant. I understood that while his intentions were not malicious, it felt like I was back in the first grade feeling flushed and dumb. So I worked as hard as I could to prove him wrong, and I ultimately worked my way to getting an A in his class. I was told by many teachers very similar things, that I was not good enough, or smart enough to do something. And despite this I loved school, I loved learning and going to a place that provided me stability and the chance to do more with my life. I hope to provide this stability and support that I did not always receive within my own classroom.   I was born to teen parents, their second child, arriving a few months shy of my mother's twentieth birthday. Even at her young age, my single mother worked a full-time, minimum wage job; to try and give my sister and me as much support and stability as she could provide. My mother always told me that she knew the statistics; she was a young mom who struggled to get by. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a teen mom, nearly all my aunts, uncles, and most of my cousins are all teen parents or addicts. They are living paycheck to paycheck, and she watched them all attempt to scrape by in life. Looking at my roots, the foundation of where I came from as an indigenous woman and the child of a single mother, I should have been a teen parent, a high school dropout, another member of the disenfranchised but it was my mother who wanted more for us; who tried to ensure that I would never have to endure the same hopelessness. It is why the inclusion principle, the first one is so important and speaks to me on a personal level. Because I have been judged before, on what I look like, my likes and interests, my struggles, and where I come from, this small rule makes this the first time in my life where it is acknowledged that school is not a place for this, school is safe it is a place for anyone and everyone to build a community no matter what their background it. 

 

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As we have learned within this class and possibly within personal experiences no two people have the same story or the same background. These principles highlight the importance of building a strong community, learning environment, and acknowledging the differences in people while asking for respect. These rules make you feel seen if you are typically marginalized but most importantly like I stated above they can make school feel safe and stable. These principles ask us to not be responsible for others but to be responsible for how we treat others inside our school community and this is crucial to the development of trust and communication within any sort of teaching environment and it can allow you to build strong relationships with students who are different from you. 

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For this week, I added colors in bold geometric shapes to my painting, building up the layers on top of my original piece to symbolize how these principles are in some ways a part of my own story, but also to symbolize how they shaped me and I will now carry them with me as they will be part of my own teaching philosophy. The colors I chose were shades of white, gold, and green to represent CSU, as those are the colors that I associate with these principles. These in some ways are a bridge of my own past to my own teaching, this representation of the ways these principles were not upheld while I was in school, and how that shaped me as a student. But also contrasting that with the notion that I will be upholding these principles within my own classroom and how that choice, to be better and do better for my students, to think before I speak, and to act always with kindness and respect has also shaped me as a teacher. 

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I know firsthand the damage that making assumptions about can create in a learning environment, I understand what it means to not fully feel like you belong, to have people judge you and tell you because of where you are in life that you will never amount to anything and so I know how damaging this can be to hear. Especially when you are hearing it from an authority figure whom you think is supposed to believe in you. I never want to be a teacher that makes assumptions about my student’s knowledge or abilities based on who they are, where they come from, or any other stereotypes. I want my classroom to be a safe space where all students are welcome and they feel respected and listened to. I hope to uphold these principles and allow my students to feel respected and cared for because school should be a place where they are allowed to learn and grow and feel supported.