Poetry, Political Science And Possibilities: Alumni Teachers Introduce Seventh-Graders To The SMU Experience

By Patricia Ward

As SMU Associate Professor of English Timothy Rosendale concluded a special poetry lecture for seventh-grade students from Dallas’ W.E. Greiner Middle School, one of the youngsters approached him.
Just minutes before, Micah Roberson was inspired to write a poem, which Rosendale asked him to read to the group. Roberson spoke from the heart of love found then lost.
“Being in the class, I started to think of relationships as poetry,” he says.
That’s the sort of eureka moment language arts teachers Cheyenne Rogers ’09 and Allie Showalter ’09 were aiming for when they brought 50 of their students to the University Dec. 7.
Nina Schwartz, chair of the Department of English in Dedman College, who sat in on the lecture, sweetened the experience for Micah and the teachers: She plans to publish his poem in a future issue of erudition, the departmental newsletter.
Clearly this was no ordinary field trip; rather, the visit was designed to give the youths from Dallas’ Oak Cliff neighborhood a true taste of life on the Hilltop. Rosendale introduced them to the nuances of poetry; in another lecture the students learned about the nation’s highest court from Joe Kobylka, associate professor of political science and a Supreme Court scholar.

The seventh-graders wrapped up the half-day trip with the definitive campus dining experience: lunch in the Umphrey Lee cafeteria.
“I think the biggest thing for the students was being able to picture themselves in college,” Rogers says. “When you’re 13, you can’t really see past January. But we were there on campus, in class with professors, asking questions, thinking and imagining – that was the most valuable part of the trip.”
“Thinking and imagining” began weeks earlier when students had to apply to participate – the teachers required their students to fill out the same application essay that SMU requires. Once accepted, the students had to attend several preparation meetings that provided background for the two lectures.
Many of the youngsters could be the first members of their families to pursue a college degree, so planting the seed of higher education now is crucial, according to Showalter.
“I will be their teacher for only one year, so my biggest focus is changing the mindset of my students by showing them what success looks like and how to obtain it,” she says.
 

Teach For America In Dallas

Rogers, Showalter and reading teacher Caitlin Myers ’09, who served as a chaperone, are part of the Teach for America (TFA) corps in Dallas. Teach for America is a nonprofit organization that recruits and trains outstanding college graduates to teach in low-income urban and rural public schools, with a goal of ending educational inequality.

The trio is in the first Teach for America cohort in the Dallas Independent School District. A recent DISD report deems the program a success. The report says a higher percentage of students with Teach for America teachers met TAKS standards in the critical needs areas of math and science when compared to students with other teachers in the 51 Dallas schools where TFA operates. The district wants to add 120 TFA teachers in the 2011-12 school year.
The alumni also are in the first group of 18 SMU graduating seniors to be accepted into the highly competitive program. Last spring, another 17 Mustangs were accepted by TFA from more than 46,000 applicants for 4,500 positions.
Teach for America’s ties to the University have been strengthened by a partnership with the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Education that provides graduate-level courses to the organization’s teachers in Dallas. Twenty-one corps members are enrolled in the Simmons programs.
For Rogers, who graduated with honors in English literature and political science and served in the SMU Student Senate, teaching is the ultimate public service.