This month we’re excited to release our Young Authors’ Book Project, our biggest publishing project of the year, in partnership with Civic Center Secondary School, Willie Brown Jr. Middle School, Mission High School, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. Our History is Deeper Than What They Tell Us features the collected voices of young students as they tell the stories of their most resilient selves and their brightest dreams. To celebrate, we’re honoring our three partner teachers with the Teacher of the Month Award.
Marc Anthony Robinson
Mr. Robinson, a teacher at Willie Brown Jr. Middle School, is dedicated to building a community in his classroom. He says, “Ubuntu is an African proverb that is the foundation of my class, and ubuntu means I am, because we are. Sometimes we step into school or into the world or into our job as an individual–but the process of ubuntu is really that we’re a collective. What happens to me, affects you.”
For Mr. Robinson, part of the process of creating a community is sharing stories. This was something harder to do through distance learning, and therefore it has been one of Mr. Robinson’s main focuses. He does this in order to make space for his students to be vulnerable: “Being able to identify if one of us is going through something and letting others explain what they’re going through as well—whether it be joy, whether it be pain—we all can reflect and share that same joy or pain. It just allows us to become a lot stronger.”
The sense of belonging in Mr. Robinson’s class is reflected in his efforts for adaptability, and his ideas on the future of what teaching could be are fully invested in the betterment of his students. He says, “I think education…needs to be a lot more active, a lot more engaged with nature, with life. Because schools are bubbles. Being in one location creates a bubble. And I think the world doesn’t have to be a bubble, I think actually when you live outside of a bubble you actually engage with different things and you learn a lot more…I’ve done a lot of different things and seen different things that have opened my mindset and how I learn, and that’s what I want for my students. Being in the same building on a consistent basis—it’s boring… I think we need to have a little more respect in the process of how we educate our students—allowing them to be more free versus encapsulated in four walls.”
Thank you Mr. Robinson for the flexibility and kindness you bring to your classroom. Congratulations on being our Teacher of the Month.
We warmly thank our friends at KKR for making our Teacher of the Month Program possible this year with a KKR COVID Response Fund. Learn more at KKR.com/grants.