Mr. Brown's 1st Year Teaching Fund
Donation protected
Peace family! 2017 will be my first year lead teaching in the city of Boston with Boston Public Schools. After a few years of student teaching in elementary school and debate coaching junior high school students I am taking my work to the next level - I will have my own 5th grade classroom.
I consider myself an activist, organizer, and revolutionary. In my "free time" you can usually find me organizing against police brutality, the prison industrial complex, colonialism, fascism, and war. I consider myself to be walking in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Assata Shakur, and Huey P. Newton. I am a Black Liberationist. My philosophy for education is rooted in yearning for liberation - real liberation, collective liberation - through raising critical consciousness about how power functions in our current unjust social system. In my past classes I have taught students about the racist chain gangs following slavery, how science is not so "objective" as it has been used to oppress people of color and colonized people, and used the power of debate to challenge young people to think critically about U.S. domestic and foreign policy. I don't believe that education will change the world, but as Paulo Freire said "education changes those who will then change the world." My philosophy of education is to inch students towards learning their true role in this society and see themselves and their peers as the next revolutionaries who will fundamentally change the world.
I am currently unemployed until school starts and am not materially equipped to gather all the materials I need to both set up and begin teaching. I will be teaching at the Oliver Wendell Holmes and live in the community. I can walk 10 minutes maximum to work. It is my goal to use the resources I can gather to embed myself in community struggles and educate my students to not just live in the community but be in the community. Students are the future of our communities and must see themselves as a part of the fabric of future societies.
To that end, I am making this plea for donations to my first classroom so I can purchase things like: films, fidgets for students struggling with focusing, posters of leaders from oppressed communities, buttons of past revolutionaries, back of the seat pouches for student storage, a projector and portable screen, a classroom printer, paper towels, hand sanitizer, multicolored pens, highlighters, journals, a large student calendar, a historically and geographically accurate map of the world, folders, binders, dry erase markers, a set of flip cameras for classroom projects, post it notes, organizing paper baskets, electric pencil sharpener, and a learning library for books about African American, Indigenous, Latinx, Women and gender non-conforming people, and international issues.
My end of the year project is to educate my class about the Hidden History of Massachussetts through doing a series of anthropological field trips to places across Boston that have white supremacy hidden in plain sight. The central focus will be around places named after white supremacists such as Dorchester's Codman Square which was named after Captain John Codman who was killed by the very Africans he enslaved. Through this year long project I hope to inspire a scientific attitude in my students to see beyond just the surface level of our society and think deeply about both problems and solutions hidden in plain sight.
Please donate what you can, everything helps! My school is "turning itself around" as an "innovation school." Most of our staff are people of color or from formely and currenty colonized and neo-colonized nations like Haiti Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Many of us are young educators and by helping one of us you can help all of us as we work as a unit to educate our youth to be critically minded, forward thinking, and engaged in practical work in their communities. I understand that this is not just a year of teaching but one of learning for their can be no true teaching without learning. This year is going to be both orthodox and unorthodox, in the classroom and out the classroom, and both in the present and with the future (the children).
As Huey P. Newton once said “Throughout my life all real learning has taken place outside school. I was educated by my family, my friends, and the street. Later, I learned to love books and I read a lot, but that had nothing to do with school. Long before, I was getting educated in unorthodox ways.”
Please help me in this process!
Warm regards,
Mr. Brown
I consider myself an activist, organizer, and revolutionary. In my "free time" you can usually find me organizing against police brutality, the prison industrial complex, colonialism, fascism, and war. I consider myself to be walking in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Assata Shakur, and Huey P. Newton. I am a Black Liberationist. My philosophy for education is rooted in yearning for liberation - real liberation, collective liberation - through raising critical consciousness about how power functions in our current unjust social system. In my past classes I have taught students about the racist chain gangs following slavery, how science is not so "objective" as it has been used to oppress people of color and colonized people, and used the power of debate to challenge young people to think critically about U.S. domestic and foreign policy. I don't believe that education will change the world, but as Paulo Freire said "education changes those who will then change the world." My philosophy of education is to inch students towards learning their true role in this society and see themselves and their peers as the next revolutionaries who will fundamentally change the world.
I am currently unemployed until school starts and am not materially equipped to gather all the materials I need to both set up and begin teaching. I will be teaching at the Oliver Wendell Holmes and live in the community. I can walk 10 minutes maximum to work. It is my goal to use the resources I can gather to embed myself in community struggles and educate my students to not just live in the community but be in the community. Students are the future of our communities and must see themselves as a part of the fabric of future societies.
To that end, I am making this plea for donations to my first classroom so I can purchase things like: films, fidgets for students struggling with focusing, posters of leaders from oppressed communities, buttons of past revolutionaries, back of the seat pouches for student storage, a projector and portable screen, a classroom printer, paper towels, hand sanitizer, multicolored pens, highlighters, journals, a large student calendar, a historically and geographically accurate map of the world, folders, binders, dry erase markers, a set of flip cameras for classroom projects, post it notes, organizing paper baskets, electric pencil sharpener, and a learning library for books about African American, Indigenous, Latinx, Women and gender non-conforming people, and international issues.
My end of the year project is to educate my class about the Hidden History of Massachussetts through doing a series of anthropological field trips to places across Boston that have white supremacy hidden in plain sight. The central focus will be around places named after white supremacists such as Dorchester's Codman Square which was named after Captain John Codman who was killed by the very Africans he enslaved. Through this year long project I hope to inspire a scientific attitude in my students to see beyond just the surface level of our society and think deeply about both problems and solutions hidden in plain sight.
Please donate what you can, everything helps! My school is "turning itself around" as an "innovation school." Most of our staff are people of color or from formely and currenty colonized and neo-colonized nations like Haiti Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Many of us are young educators and by helping one of us you can help all of us as we work as a unit to educate our youth to be critically minded, forward thinking, and engaged in practical work in their communities. I understand that this is not just a year of teaching but one of learning for their can be no true teaching without learning. This year is going to be both orthodox and unorthodox, in the classroom and out the classroom, and both in the present and with the future (the children).
As Huey P. Newton once said “Throughout my life all real learning has taken place outside school. I was educated by my family, my friends, and the street. Later, I learned to love books and I read a lot, but that had nothing to do with school. Long before, I was getting educated in unorthodox ways.”
Please help me in this process!
Warm regards,
Mr. Brown
Organizer
Nino Nkrumah
Organizer
Boston, MA