Alicia Fitzpatrick teaches Science at Twin Buttes High School (a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools.) Her students created the Zuni Organic Greenhouse as an action research project. Alicia taught science in a small village in The Gambia, Africa for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer prior to coming to the Zuni Reservation with the Teach for America program. Abe Louise Young interviewed Alicia in her home in Ramah, New Mexico.

WKCD: What did teaching in rural Africa teach you about education?

ALICIA: I taught in a village with no electricity, no running water. I taught for five hours a day, in 125-plus degrees.  These children were the first-generation in school and they had two things: a notebook and a pen.  We did not have a textbook. I did not have a teacher’s textbook. So, I learned that you don’t have to teach in a school that has a lot of money or a lot of resources.  The environment that you are teaching in and the people you are working with—those are resources, the tools to learn with, and the curriculum to use.

I also learned that no matter whom you’re working with or where you are, youth can learn.
Just like our students [in America] are held to these standardized tests, students in countries all over the world are tested in order to have the opportunity to learn and to attend school. These students in The Gambia, no matter where they were at or what resources that they had, still met the requirements to pass the test to go on to the high school. 

I also learned that it’s really important to get to know the student as an individual. Who you see in your classroom isn’t the whole student.  It’s so important to go out and to learn how they live and who they live with. What are their responsibilities in the community and the household, their hobbies, their passions?

I believe that a school and a community shouldn’t be separate entities.  They are the same. I believe it is the responsibility of the educator to explore and learn about the community, to have the critical conversations necessary to learn what resources are available there to enhance the curriculum that you are using or developing. 

Students that usually do not identify with standardized education were not in the test creator’s minds. They never had them in their vision upon its creation.  But you do not make excuses, “Oh, I cannot teach this because I don’t have the resources, or I can’t teach this because those standards don’t reflect who my students are.” Those are the excuses. Standards are bodies of knowledge.  Some parts have been constructed with “Western” ideals. But that’s not an excuse to hold non-Western students to lower standards.

I believe it’s the basis of racism, when we teach, if we don’t hold students to the same standards as students in the rest of the country.  We can work to make the standards more inclusive and culturally relevant. But until then, we cannot make excuses. During apartheid in South Africa, Bantu education was created for black Africans with the idea that they would just be mechanics or housekeepers.  But career is a choice upon each student when they graduate, when they leave education.  Every student should have the same options available.

In the Gambia where I taught, when students finish high school, they should have the choice: Do I want to stay in the community and have a more vocational career, or do I want to go into higher education and come back to the community later? If they want to go to any college in the country, that should be their choice.  That is their right. So they should be educated: their intellect needs to be engaged with as deeply and complexly and powerfully as the intellect of every other student in the country.