I graduated Cum Laude with my Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from UCLA in 2008. After working for a year, I applied for the Teacher Education Program at UCLA. In June 2011, I graduated from UCLA with my teaching credential, as well as a master’s in Education.
As an educator, the goals I set for myself are small steps – small steps that I can take to reach a greater goal, a greater purpose in the future for my students. Part of my greater purpose is to teach beyond the macroscopic view of teaching; it is about exemplifying the roles of social justice and making the ideology of social justice into the curriculum. Social justice education embodies the same beliefs that rooted the civil rights movement in the 1960s: equality, liberation, empowerment and transformation. Just like the civil rights movement, it took ordinary people to make a cause and to liberate what was oppressed.
Likewise, today, we are these ordinary people in the educational system, and I believe wholeheartedly that LFCSA exemplifies these same beliefs. To teach is to mediate the challenges of success in my own classroom by creating an environment of a community of learners, establishing a space for social forging of identity and encouraging development of work ethic, critical thinking and independent work. I believe that teachers truly have the power to transform their classroom into a world of great discovery: discovery of learning and discovery of ones’ self. With this in mind, students become teachers themselves, and the impossible becomes the possible.
Other than being an educator, I absolutely love traveling, photography, music, food and the arts!
