Tricia Ebarvia

September 17, 2023

epilogue (a love letter to teaching)

Raising a child requires profound strength and hope. You must believe in your ability to forge a future that is better than the one we currently inhabit, even if you never live to see it.
– Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.
– Rebecca Solnit, “The Arc of Justice and the Long Run”

What is grief, if not love persevering?
– Vision, from Marvel’s WandaVision

This book is a love story.

It’s also a grief story.

September 17, 2023

5 Common Teacher Biases

As teachers, we wield tremendous power in our classrooms. Our interactions with students, day after day, pieced together over time, can build community in small and significant ways—or undermine it. Our decisions about curriculum, and whose experiences are represented in the literature we teach and how, send messages to our students about the human experiences that we need to pay attention to—and which we can ignore. Our instructional choices signal to our students whether we value compliance or engagement. Our assessments can guide students to better learning or reduce them to numbers on a test.

Conversations about how we wield this power happen every day. In planning meetings, department rooms, in the brief exchanges we have in the hallways with colleagues—every day, teachers discuss the best ways to reach our students, to make learning truly engaging for all the
kids in the room. Yet underneath all these conversations about what we’re teaching and why, there’s something deeper that often goes overlooked and unsaid.

September 4, 2023

How Inclusive is Your Literacy Classroom… Really?

Several years ago, I published a guide for educators called, “How Inclusive is Your Literacy Classroom… Really?” Since then, I’ve kept coming back to these questions and have found them to be an important way to keep myself accountable in the work of creating truly inclusive classrooms. Now just a few weeks before my book is finally published, I’m re-sharing the guide, updated with a downloadable PDF that educators can use for self- and group reflection. These questions also appear in Chapter 1 of my book, along with several other invitations for self-reflection.

May 1, 2023

inheritances

The aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. – Audre Lorde

Raising a child requires profound strength and hope. You must believe in your ability to forge a future that is better than the present we currently inhabit, even if you never live to see it. – Angela Garbes

When I was growing up, my mom was always cooking. If you have a mom who cooks—especially an immigrant mother—then you know what I mean.

While my brother and I did homework or watched TV or lazily lounged around on the sofa fighting over the remote, my mom was in the kitchen cooking, either for that day or many upcoming days. Our freezer was always filled with future meals.

May 31, 2022

driving lessons

We’ve always been a little behind when it comes to our oldest son. As the oldest of our three, he gets to experience most things before his brothers, which means that we get to help him navigate all of these firsts for the first time, too. As parents, we’re just trying to figure it out as we go.

And there are so many firsts to figure out.

When I was a young parent, there was one summer that stood out among others. It was the summer of 2007; my oldest had just turned two and I also had a plump and relatively agreeable newborn on my hands. It was a lot to keep my oldest occupied now that there were two of them. With my husband at work, I was outnumbered and outmatched. It was day after day of nap, eat, change, play, go to the park, snack, nap, change, play, play some more, laundry, and repeat. That summer, the days felt long and endless in a way that maybe only young parents can understand. But then an older friend said something to me I’ve never forgotten: When you’re a parent, the days can be long and slow but the years go by fast.

May 1, 2021

one year later

The start of another #31DaysIBPOC series brings with it an opportunity to reflect—and after the year that has been, there’s certainly a lot to reflect back on.

There’s a lot I could say about this last year of pandemic living and teaching—how so much and too many have been lost. Part of me feels compelled to write about that loss, the grief, and yes, the rage—to give it voice so that it can’t be ignored.

August 9, 2020

Building blocks for online learning

This school year will be my 20th year in the classroom.

For the past 19 years, summer months have provided necessary respite—the quiet pause—I’ve needed to refuel for the coming school year. To refill my cup so that I can arrive well and whole for my students in September.

But during a pandemic that continues to rage—and with racial inequities (which have always existed) laid glaringly bare yet again—this was not that kind of summer.

Instead, much of my summer has been spent in constant, alternating states of fear, anger, and anxiety, as many school reopening plans ask teachers to put themselves at risk by returning to potentially unsafe buildings and working conditions. How can schools enforce physical distancing? Will students be required to mask? Can they wear masks for hours on end? What about ventilation systems? What happens if someone gets sick?

And how can I teach under these conditions?

Like many teachers, I spent this summer, losing sleep, trying to answer this question. And for many of us, this also means figuring out how to teach in entirely new or modified schedules. Based on conversations I’ve had with teachers across the country, these schedules may also not be in the best interest of kids or supported by research. Compounding all of this is the fact that delayed reopening decisions have left many teachers with inadequate time to fully prepare.

We are going to have to save ourselves.

May 31, 2020

Connect the Dots

Last year, in my first post for this series, I asked, how do we show up?

What does it mean to “show up” in anti-racist work? What does it mean to “show up” in educational spaces—educational spaces which (of all places) should be inherently anti-racist but are often not?

One year later, I’m still asking the same questions.

Part of me hates that I am even writing this post. I want to write about the joy of being who I am and the joy of loving the people I love. I want to write and imagine worlds, as shea martin has said, outside the confines of Whiteness. I want to write about giving my boys haircuts yesterday in our backyard, as streams of sunshine filtered through tree branches that sheltered us.

But here we are. Read More

May 12, 2020

Guest Post: Many Ways of Giving

This is a guest post by Michelle Martin, PhD, for the #31DaysIPBOC project. Dr. Martin is the Beverly Cleary Professor for Children and Youth Services at the University of Washington Information School.

When I was five years old, two different relatives gave me the same doll for Christmas, a Black Baby-Go-Bye-Bye and a White Baby-Go-Bye-Bye. Both of them had a little pink car to ride in, and both had curly hair—black and blonde, respectively. As is often the case with “cookie cutter” dolls of the 1960s, 70s and sometimes still today, the toy company hadn’t given a thought to the fact that facial features of the Black doll should be different from that of the White doll. Hence, the only difference between the two was the skin and hair color. Read More

February 15, 2020

Beyond either/or: agitate for change

Advancing the false idea that teaching through an antiracist lens and developing students’ reading and writing skills are mutually exclusive is a gross misinterpretation of the work I see many teachers do—teachers who engage students in deep learning and support them in developing the skills necessary to be active, informed participants in a democracy.

Excellent teachers know how to help students to develop the reading, writing, and communication skills they will need to be successful in the world and how to put those skills in service of a more just society.

These are not mutually exclusive.

We teach more than skills. And furthermore, we teach more than content, too.

After all, currently there are many people in power who have rich content and disciplinary knowledge. But what comprises that content? What types of knowledge (and whose) is deemed valuable? There are also many people currently in power who also have excellent reading, writing, and communication skills. The question is: how are they using those skills? To what ends? For whose benefit? And at whose expense? Read More