By Dare Dukes and Marlene Peralta with Esther Alatishe, David Ibarra, Nadia Feracho and Niko Darling
Responding to Youth
In 2018, the youth leaders of Educational Video Center (EVC) were instrumental in the hiring of the organization’s first BIPOC executive director, Ambreen Qureshi. Soon after, EVC’s youth leaders began telling Qureshi—over and over—that the biggest change they wanted to see at the organization was more educators who looked like them.
When EVC named Ambreen Qureshi executive director in 2018, replacing departing founder Steve Goodman, Qureshi became the first person of color, first immigrant, and first woman to lead EVC in the organization’s history. As someone who shares many of the lived experiences of EVC’s youth and community members, Qureshi was and remains fiercely committed to refining and evolving the methods and strategies of EVC’s work to build a more equitable and culturally responsive education system and, beyond that, world.
Aware of the large body of research regarding educators of color and student outcomes, Ambreen understood that BIPOC youth feel more at home and connected in educational settings when they can see themselves and their stories in their teachers. This connectedness makes young people feel like they matter, which, in turn, increases a sense of safety, purpose, and likelihood of educational achievement.
First Home, Then the School System
Qureshi understood that in order for EVC to do the work in the world—building a more just and equitable education system—EVC had to first do the work at home. In collaboration with the staff, alumni, and board, Qureshi began shaping an organizational community that reflects the broader communities EVC works with. EVC has always supported youth from predominantly BIPOC as well as intersectional working-class, LGBTQIA+, and migrant communities. Over a four-year period, EVC evolved into a BIPOC-led, BIPOC-majority organization. Along the way, the staff and youth leaders came together to transform the organizational culture to allow for safe and brave spaces to talk about white supremacy, structural oppression, and how to disrupt these systems. Qureshi, in turn, started fresh mission-driven initiatives that evolved the work for a new era of community and youth activism.
It was during this process that youth leaders told Qureshi they wanted to see EVC educators who shared their lived experiences. Qureshi responded by creating Credible Educators, a professional development program aimed at recruiting, mentoring, preparing, and placing in jobs BIPOC educators equipped to use media-arts as a tool for student healing, learning, and civic engagement in middle and high schools. Of that moment, Qureshi says:
It is a top priority for us to have educators who have the same lived experiences as our young people because our young people have been asking about this since I joined EVC, especially Spanish-speaking instructors. It is an important part of making EVC a safe space for students to hold difficult conversations as they navigate the impact of systemic oppression.
Credible Educators’ goals are to increase BIPOC student achievement by diversifying New York City’s population of media arts educators and increasing the capacity of schools to create transformative, culturally responsive, anti-racist learning spaces for youth let down by traditional education.
Following the Research
EVC and its youth leaders are not alone in making the case for the benefits of having a more diverse pool of educators. Research supports this approach. According to a report from Johns Hopkins, Black students who have even one Black teacher by third grade are 13% more likely to enroll in college. The same research shows that Black men are 39% less likely to drop out of high school if they had at least one Black teacher in elementary school. This is due to what social scientists call the positive outcomes of the “role model effect”—an effect that is especially beneficial for low-income youth. Despite these compelling facts, New York City, as with school districts nationwide, has a dire disconnect between students of color and their teachers. The vast majority of New York City students or 83% are BIPOC, while only 39% of teachers are.
Meeting Young People Where They Are
EVC’s pedagogy, which grounds Credible Educators, equips educators to meet young people—especially BIPOC, queer, and working class young people—where they are, at their unique stories, cultures, identities, traumas, and triumphs, to help them heal, grow, and thrive as learners, artists, and agents of change.
This pedagogical approach, inspired by the work of educator, philosopher, and activist Paolo Freiere, replaces the traditional teacher-student hierarchy with non-hierarchical collective knowledge-building, in which everyone—educator and youth—is both learner and teacher simultaneously.
The result is a learning space in which youth feel seen and heard, which, in turn, affords them the opportunity to begin to heal from trauma. This safe and brave space fosters joyful and rigorous collaborative learning, creative play, and, ultimately, a sense of agency, purpose, and power.
Trainings with an Equity Lens
Each trainee receives almost 130 hours of pre-service instructional training and individualized coaching. The program is a mix of workshops on theory and practice, including topics such as student-centered learning, instructional scaffolding, developing a line of inquiry, and more. In parallel, so trainees can apply and reflect on their learnings in real time, they also work with a cohort of youth for a hands-on teaching practicum and are supported by an EVC pedagogy coach for feedback and support.
Compensation: EVC compensates trainees in order to remove an often fatal barrier to participation in entry-level opportunities for trainings and hands-on experience—a lack of resources required to enable a novice educator to take time off from work to participate in low-wage, no-wage, and sometimes high-cost trainings and internships. This addresses a systemic inequity that is a root cause of the need for diversity that Credible Educators is designed to address.
Youth Participants in Mock Workshops: There is no better way to learn, especially for educators, than by doing. Mock workshops, therefore, are a critical component of Credible Educator’s hands-on approach. To this end, EVC recruits program youth and alumni to act as participants in mock workshops. EVC compensates youth for their labor, time, and expertise. These same youth provide feedback, from a youth perspective, on the quality and effectiveness of Credible Educators and of the teaching skills of the trainees.
Instructors
Instructors of the program have included Christine L. Mendoza, an EVC alum who, after receiving a BA in Media from Hunter College and an MA in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Queens University Belfast, returned to EVC as a media educator and consultant. As a program alum with a remarkable story of challenges, growth, and achievement, Mendoza is a prime example of the kind of credible educators EVC has cultivated since its beginning. Mendoza’s journey from program youth to media educator to teacher trainer in Credible Educators is the embodiment of EVC’s commitment to empower youth to not just heal, create, and achieve, but to lead. Leading, in the case of Mendoza, means returning to the communities and institutions that nurtured her to ensure those behind her have a path to their own version of success.
Currently, the program is led by Cynthia Copeland, a veteran education consultant, a public historian focused on Afro-American studies, member of the Center for Trauma Resilient Communities teaching faculty, and adjunct professor at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University (NYU). At NYU, Copeland specializes in teaching and preparing preservice teachers.
The Incredible Credible Educators
Since the Credible Educators’ launch in Fall 2022, nine BIPOC educators have completed the program’s intensive training.
Esther Alatishe, David Ibarra, Nadia Feracho and Niko Darling are some of the instructors who have been trained in Credible Educators. They agree that EVC’s anti-racist and student-led pedagogy changed their lives as educators. EVC’s transformative approach not only developed their professional skills but impacted them personally, as it made them reflect on their own experiences as students in oppressive education systems and how that experience inspires their approach as teachers.
EVC Media Educator Nadia Feracho reflects:
Most of us come from a culture where the hierarchy starts with the teacher. You listen to the teacher. You do as the teacher tells you to do. Learning in a way where there is no hierarchy helped me create better relationships with the students. I understand that they are more the experts in their own experiences, and it’s not my job to tell them how to feel or how to think.
Niko Darling calls the program “Incredible Educators,” based on her deep gratitude for her experience:
The Credible Educators program reminded me of the importance of sharing my knowledge and passion for storytelling, filmmaking, and social justice. I am now much more adaptable and responsive to the changing needs of my students and the various educational environments.
For Esther Alatishe, the program helped her change the way she thinks of herself as a teacher:
…the student-led approach…as a teacher made me really reflect on that relationship I have with students. Being more of a supporter instead of instructing them to be a certain way, was something I really liked and I wished I had it more in my upbringing. I think it’s the most effective way of teaching.
David Ibarra, an EVC media educator who used to be a teacher's assistant in his native Ecuador, said the program transformed the way he sees his students:
The biggest change I had was to have patience, as part of the process to make [students] feel seen, heard, and especially valued. This experience reinforced my continuous self-learning and to understand more about them too. It’s a lot about self reflection, understanding, patience, and trusting their own path and giving them the tools to understand this. I think this changed me a lot in the way I approach teaching.
Nadia expressed gratitude for how the program helped her learn how to see things from the students’ perspective, and to meet every student at their lived experience and culture—no small feat in a city as diverse as New York City:
Credible Educators allowed me to be in the position of the students, because we had to literally do all the work that students would be doing during the semester. In doing that I realized how hard it was, number one, as a person who is from here, and so to think about students having to do all this work, and English being their second language. And then being new to the country, to the city, I can definitely see how that may affect them.
Ripple Effect
Credible Educators is still a new program, and EVC refines it with every new cohort. Building off of EVC’s 40 years of teacher professional development expertise, Credible Educators is rolling out a new generation of educators equipped to facilitate transformative learning spaces for BIPOC youth and significantly diversify New York City’s community of public school teachers. The program is exponentially increasing the reach and impact of EVC’s curriculum and it builds the capacity of public schools and afterschool arts programs throughout all five boroughs.