Pink Shoes and Art Teachers

My daughter, Reagan, inherited my love of shoes. She has her own style, and lately, she has been obsessed with platform Converse hightops. She saw a pink pair online and has been searching for them for months. Converse doesn't sell them anymore in the US and the online auctions have them going for $300 or more. She managed to find them through Australia's Converse website for just $100. Throw in a promo code and the exchange rate, and that's just $64 US. But the problem is they don't ship outside of Australia. Undaunted, Reagan reached out to her grandfather, who had told her about a cousin of his that lived there. She pleaded with him to contact his cousin to see if she could ship the shoes to her and then have her ship them to the US. After figuring out payment, several phone calls and emails and some help from half the world away, the pink shoes arrived this week. I don't think she's taken them off other than to sleep and shower since.

My daughter's ability to access resources through her connections to others is known as social capital. Our social capital is the web of people that we know and those that know them. A large social capital gives us access to knowledge and resources much grater than what we own ourselves. It's the reason for the old addage, "It's not always what you know, but who you know." But not everyone has a grandfather with a cousin in Australia, and we all don't carry around the same social capital. This was the theory behind my doctoral dissertation. There are marginalized students all around us every day, and we can play a role as their social capital. When we have relationships with students, we give them access to our knowledge, experiences and resources. They also gain access to the people that we know beyond our school. And when students don't always have the social capital at home, they lean heavily on us to fill those gaps.

During Spring Break, I received a text from our art teacher about attending a first-generation celebration  for a former student that we had been keeping up with. Julene was about to graduate college with a degree in Art Education. Julene's story isn't like most students that become educators. When she was at Greene Central, she was no stranger to discipline issues early on. Her incident history shows infractions for inappropriate language, disruption, skipping class, insubordination and fighting. The mural on our math hall was done in an after school detention as a punishment for skipping class. Towards the end of her time with us, she had gained some social capital with a few teachers, and was inspired by her art teacher, Ashley Shiosaky. She stopped getting into trouble and leveraged her new resources to follow that path to college. She needed help along the way as a first-generation student on filling out paperwork and financial aid. She needed support when she had a baby and when she needed a way out of a difficult relationship with the father. But she had the social capital to navigate all of that through the same people that she had come to depend on in high school. 

In just a few days, Julene will finish her teaching internship, graduate ECU, and become an art teacher. She has already accepted a job at a nearby high school. She's still leveraging her social capital here to figure out how to sign up for benefits like insurance, something she's never had. In a time when we need young people that are willing to become teachers more than ever before, we can see just how important it is to invest in our young people as their social capital. If we expect them to navigate into the unknown without an example, then we have to be the example and fill in the gaps for all of the questions and fears along the way. When you become a piece of social capital, the relationshiop doesn't end with a bell or a semester for that student. You are forever part of their web of resources. But the great thing about social capital theory, is that Julene now gets to become social capital for someone else. Her new knowledge and experiences let her impact a classroom full of students. I sincerely hope that she gets to find a student just like she was, so that she can answer their questions. This is how you change the world.