AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
I grew up in the North and chose to attend college in the South. It was the 1990’s, and I was at a college where most of my classmates and professors were white, while most folks fixing things, mowing lawns, and serving food were black. It didn’t feel right. A culture change can do us good – wake us up to work to do and life missions. As a college student at Duke University, an elite, expensive, private college, I made a commitment to myself that if I stayed in education, I would choose to work at public institutions and seek opportunities for my efforts in research and teaching to transform education – to do what I could to serve communities of color, rural people and folks with less financial wealth. I got lucky in finding a school like FLC – a mountain school with a mission similar to my own.
In 2017, I began teaching in new ways. I de-centered what we learned and centered on curiosity and building community.
I was teaching an introductory course in environmental biology for non-majors that term. About ¾ of the way in, one student shared her aha-moment in the course – she said to me that she now understood I was creating space for her to receive ideas via what I shared AND encourage new ideas to arise within her.
That ‘daydreaming’ in class was a goal that represents her finding a new idea she was curious to explore further. She shared that at first, she was trying to stop this, so she wouldn’t miss anything in class.
Then, she realized that the experience she was having and trying to halt was the intention of the class.
My name is Heidi Steltzer, and I’m a professor of Environment and Sustainability at Fort Lewis College.