Name: Olivia Propp

Social Justice Group: Race and Education

Date of Fieldwork: December 14, 2017

Name of Organization: Achievement Network

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Teimosa Martin

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did:

Teimosa Martin, a member of the Achievement Network came to our school for an interview with our group. Her job is to make sure all students have the tools they need to do well in school. We asked her many questions about her job and learned about her experiences with educational equity.

What I learned:

One of the main things that Teimosa talked about was based on where students live, you can have a great education or a really bad one. Location has a lot to do about educational equity because different neighborhoods can have good schools, or not very good schools. When Teimosa became a school leader, it made her think “how can I change this system of education?” She wants to make sure that wherever students lived they would have a good access to good education. One main thing that Teimosa believes is that understanding and being able to change what people think is going to drive what people are going to think, which is going to drive your actions. So Teimosa’s job is to use data as a tool to confront their beliefs.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

I learned that it takes a lot of work to change someone’s thoughts about someone or something. Many people have a set mindset of how a certain race or ethnicity acts or does things, but a lot of the time these stereotypical thoughts are wrong. So in education many people have an image of how different people do in school and how they act based on which race they are.