Carolina Avendaño, M.Ed. Student
The daughter of a teacher, young Carolina Avendaño loved visiting her mother’s classroom and helping her set up for the school day. But she was set on medical school, like her dad, an emergency pediatrician.
“My mom talked to me about becoming a teacher, like her, but at first I couldn’t see myself doing it,” says Avendaño, now a master’s in education student at CEHD. After just one semester in pre-med, Avendaño knew she couldn’t outrace destiny. She kept getting pulled back to what she loved: her volunteer work at Kimberly Lane elementary school in Wayzata and the child development and parenting class she took at Wayzata High School. “I thought, okay, I don’t really want to be a doctor after all,” she says.
Now just one semester away from finishing her M.Ed. and elementary education licensure preparation, with a specialty in science, Avendaño hopes to be leading a classroom come fall 2010. Her preference: second grade or a middle school science class, hopefully in an urban area with a high concentration of at-risk students. “I think I can really make a difference for kids who come from rough circumstances,” she says.
After she completed her bachelor’s in elementary education from the University of Minnesota, she took a year to be assistant teacher at the Goddard School for Early Childhood Development in Plymouth. It was there Avendaño realized how fortunate she is to be naturally fluent in both English and Spanish. (She was born in Chile and split her childhood between her native country, Texas, and Minnesota.) “It’s amazing how many classrooms are out there with students who speak Spanish but a teacher who does not,” she says.
She’s used her Spanish at her student teaching assignment, in a Brooklyn Center kindergarten class, as well as her two practicums—one working with middle schoolers in Coon Rapids and the other with third-graders from Roseville.
Having time in real classrooms has given her a window into smart techniques that work, and teaching styles that do not. On the positive side, her Brooklyn Center kindergarten teacher prompted her new class to develop the class rules: respect yourself, respect others, and respect property. “She definitely guided them, but the kids were allowed to come to the conclusions themselves, and then they all signed their names on this big sheet,” she says. On the negative side: A teacher who publicly critiqued a gifted student for “goofing off” when he completed his assignment early.
Avendaño is able to process all that she’s seen through the Multicultural Teacher Development Program, which has provided a one-time $5,000 scholarship for her graduate work. About 10 future teachers of diverse backgrounds meet monthly through the program to talk about what they’ve experienced, to learn about new teacher hiring practices, and to discuss what they can expect as they move from student teaching to teaching.
In fact, it was through the program that Avendaño heard about the wide-reaching reforms of Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is negotiating with unions and replacing educators at struggling schools. Avendaño plans to send résumés there and to Minnesota’s urban districts when she finishes her master’s this spring.
“There’s a lot of good to be done, and I want to be a part of it,” she says.
Story by Alyssa Ford | Photo by Justin Evidon | January 2010
