“One must care about a world one will never see.” — Bertrand Russell
Melissa Leigh Gibson is a doctoral student in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, focusing on Multicultural Education and Educational Policy Studies. She holds a BA in Women’s Studies from Harvard University and an MA in teaching from Dominican University.
Before returning to school (yet again), Melissa was an English teacher in a variety of settings–from teaching at a racially and socioeconomically diverse boarding school to a 90% low-income/100% students of color K-8 charter school on the South Side of Chicago, from a service learning program in Cincinnati to a neighborhood middle school in small town Wisconsin. Those experiences have focused Melissa’s attention on the inequalities and injustices that persist in our educational systems–as well as on the possibility for education to be a transformative experience, both for the individual as well as for communities and the greater society.
Melissa came to teaching quite serendipitously: Having worked as a writer and editor for a travel guide during and immediately after college, she discovered that her favorite part of the job was instructing and training new writers. Around the time that she realized this, she was invited to apply for a teaching position at her high school alma mater. A career was born. After teaching in a private school for several years, Melissa took a year off from teaching, living her own version of “The Office”–painful commutes and ironic promotions included. But the cubicle life was not for her–she spent a lot of time time that year working with Northwestern University’s Civic Education Project (a service learning program for high school students) and figuring out how to get certified to teach in public schools. She ended up matriculating as a 2004 Teach For America corps member in Chicago.
Teaching sixth grade on Chicago’s South Side could have kept Melissa enthralled forever. In fact, in her teaching portfolio from that period, she described her love of teaching:
“I am eager to wake up each morning and spend my days with energetic, hilarious, challenging young scholars. My students challenge me, teach me, love me, and in return, I work my hardest to catalyze their learning with active, relevant, and inspiring lessons. My students–and the lives they are forging for themselves–are why I teach. To help them have the most rewarding, fulfilling lives possible, I teach them skills, I introduce them to new worlds, and I push them to think critically about the communities they live in. My students are why I teach, and through our days together, we are creating a more just and equitable world–a better world.”
But Melissa ended up moving to Wisconsin with her then-fiance, who was pursuing his own PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A year teaching in a suburb/small town of Madison was enough to send her back to school herself. The macro-perspective she gained on educational inequality from her experiences teaching in such varied settings forced her to think about making change on a more systemic level.
These days, Melissa is researching teacher education for social justice, how the social context of education is shifting in our globalized and super-capitalized era, and how to include urban communities and parents in policy- and meaning-making around education. Eventually, she wants to become a hybrid academic/teacher educator/community organizer, but a little thing called the dissertation is currently standing in the way.
When she’s not reading, reading, reading, Melissa is either pretending she’s a yogini, cooking up a feast, or harrassing her cats. And in the summers (or whenver she can finagle a really cheap plane ticket), she’s off traipsing the globe, trying to out-write and out-photograph her ridiculously talented husband the whole while.
