Lara Heiberger
Statement of Purpose
Vanderbilt University
Learning and
Instruction, M. Ed. Program
December, 2012
My students are Sincangu Lakota. They live in more than twenty
remote rural communities dispersed over 1,400 square miles. They sleep in
overcrowded houses where household income is below the poverty level. The
parents of most of my students are separated. Most children have at least one
relative in prison or struggling with alcoholism. Many have grandparents who
were forced into boarding schools.
Meet Austin.
A tall, lanky 14 year-old boy, he lives with his
grandparents. His first class of his first day of high school was my
pre-algebra class. Unlike his peers, he met me at the door of room 206 with a
smile and an uninhibited handshake. He wants to be an x-ray technician. There
are no x-ray technicians on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation; most adults
are not even employed. Austin wants to move away from “this place” as fast as
he can.
Austin and I crossed many divides to come together in the
same classroom. I grew up in Rapid City, a bustling town of approximately
70,000 people. Located 172 miles west of Rosebud, the city’s population
includes a substantial group of Lakota who have moved off the state’s various
reservations. I graduated from a small private Christian school where my
friends perpetuated the racist attitudes that prevail in western South Dakota. I
attended college in my hometown at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology,
an engineering and science school. Choosing a major was not easy. Although
divorced, my parents both imparted an affinity for math. My mother has two
masters degrees, one in business and one in statistics. My father is an
electrical engineer. When I went to college, my father encouraged me to be a
journalist. My mother wanted me to be anything that would guarantee a considerable
income. I went the way of science, majoring in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
During college, I lived in the basement of a house on East
Kansas City Street. It was walking distance to campus, had a backyard for my
dog, and the rent was affordable. The neighborhood was filled with low-income
college students and Native American families. The basement door had weak locks,
and with the different schedules of my roommates chain-locks were not feasible.
More than once I woke up to find a stranger—always a Native American—searching
through my cupboards or fridge, or once using my bathroom. I began to see how
stereotypes might be fostered by this behavior. “Why,” I asked myself, “do
Natives in my neighborhood behave differently than I do?” I was poor too, paying
for my own college and working thirty-five hours a week.
I did not want to be racist, but my experiences were
reinforcing the stereotypes in my community. One day, while I was leading a
college-algebra learning lab, I had an epiphany. After working with a student from
a local reservation, I realized that our lives had very different trajectories.
I had a good high school education. After graduating from college I would be
making enough money to live a comfortable life. The American Indian student in
my learning lab had not received a solid high school education, as was evident
from his struggles in basic college algebra.
I began talking to my professors about the
disproportionately low population of Native students attending our school, and
how Native students who were enrolled often had an inadequate mastery of secondary
school mathematics. During my senior year, the chair of the mathematics
department told me about Teach For America.
Teaching on the remote and desolate Rosebud Indian
Reservation was culturally shocking. I had previously thought of myself as
someone who brought joy into a room and uplifted others, but during my first
few months, I found it hard to uplift myself, let alone bring joy into the
classroom. I was a novice teacher, and the students knew it. I am an outsider.
With a student like Austin, I feel how much I am not a part of his world.
Austin is a bright and kind young man with a great sense of
humor. Nonetheless, it was exceptionally hard to hold his attention. He wanted
to “get smarter,” but acted impulsively. Slight mental distractions caused him to disrupt
lessons. In class, he drew pictures of marijuana leaves, or turkeys with marijuana-leaf
tails or psychedelic mushrooms with marijuana leaves decorating their stems. If
Austin wasn’t drawing one of his beautiful, yet school-inappropriate works of
art, he was trying to engage his classmates in off-topic discussions. During
teamwork time, Austin made brief attempts to solve problems, but would quickly give
up and return to drawing.
I grew frustrated. Austin almost never redirected his
attention to me upon my first request, and even when all of his classmates were
on task tracking the teacher, we would often wait ten seconds or more for
Austin to join. Eventually I was reminding Austin so frequently of what he
should and should not be doing that the pace of the whole class slowed and other
students became annoyed.
I hesitated to give Austin typical consequences. I observed
that Austin was not acting improperly due to lack of respect. Instead, he lacked
the character skills to stay focused on challenging tasks. My responsibility was
to help him become invested in mathematics by showing him why it mattered in
his life.
I felt I was failing Austin. I thought, “If only I could
make this classroom a learning space, not just a learning place!” I wanted a
more interactive classroom. I have two walls covered by chalkboards, so we
began doing a few problems on the board every day. All kids were out of their
seats and working in pairs on the board together, which was an improvement. However,
it did not make the content any more meaningful. Standing at a chalkboard did not
increase Austin’s intuitive understanding of mathematical concepts. He learned
computational skills because he was up and actually attempting his work, but he
never learned why he was doing the things he did.
Austin does not need more hands-on manipulatives. Yes, they
help him visualize concepts that might otherwise be abstract, but they are not
enough to help him stay focused or to connect him personally with the material.
Austin needs to be physically and mentally immersed, to use his whole body and his
senses as instruments to deeply internalize the connections between the
mathematics he is mastering and events in the world around him. Nature is
defined by “if this, then that” relationships, and while children do not need
to be linear thinkers, they do must be able to think scientifically and observe
that for every action there is a logical reaction or flow of events.
When this last semester ended, I did not advance Austin to
Algebra 1. He will retake pre-algebra with me in the upcoming semester. For
both of us to be successful, I must implement diverse instructional strategies
and classroom structures to facilitate his interaction with mathematics. I
cannot give last semester back to Austin, but I can search for new tools to
make learning more feasible for him.
I can appreciate why Austin wants to leave Rosebud. He can
see his future on the reservation, and it looks small to him. To realize the
change our reservations need, the children must be given the tools they need to
succeed—like a strong understanding of mathematics—and they have to be
empowered to use them. They need committed teachers who believe that together,
working with the community, they can change the trajectory for students like
Austin.
I am not a perfect teacher. After I earn my diploma from
Vanderbilt, I still will not be a perfect teacher. I do hope to learn how children
learn, and thus how to broaden opportunities for my students so they can attain
the deep person-to-content connections that construct true understanding. I hope
to learn the pedagogical skills necessary to construct the cognitive structure
in students that will allow them to learn from any interesting observation and
every curiosity.
When I think of Austin, I am convinced that there is a
better way. After thoroughly examining the Learning and Instruction program at
Vanderbilt and the research interests of professors such as Dr. Rogers Hall and
Dr. Richard Lehrer, I believe that Vanderbilt will provide me with the research
opportunities, mindsets, and skillsets necessary to meet my needs as a developing
instructor of a diverse group of learners.
I do not expect to be finished learning after I receive my
diploma; life is abundant with experiences that deepen and enrich our understanding
of what can be taught in theory. I do believe that I will be well equipped to
help transform mathematics instruction on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. For me, Vanderbilt offers an opportunity to
grow, contribute, and work with like-minded people to make the world a more
equitable and interesting place.
