2018 Nashville Educational Summit

Recently my English “Writing for Advocacy” class and I took a trip to Nashville TN and we attended the two day Tennessee 2018 Educational Summit. My experience at the educational summit in Nashville was an absolutely fantastic first time experience and has definitely influenced me to consistently practice advocacy in the near future. Also, while attending the summit my Mobilizing Memphis team members and I were able to identify and network with our ally Conexión Americas who is also striving to educate Latino immigrants in the Memphis community. However, Day 1 of the educational summit left a huge impression on me! That particular day’s agenda was jam packed with guest speakers, informative data power points, and group breakout sessions. Although, out of all of the events that took place on that day, the group breakout sessions will be the focus of this blog post.

There were several different sessions to choose from, however; I chose the breakout session group geared towards discussing ways to provide equal educational opportunities for students enrolled in academic institutions. Everyone in my group agreed that minority and students should have access to a wide range outside resources to assist them in progressing in their studies. For example, my group desires and envisions that in the near future it should be normal for academic institutions in Tennessee to implement afterschool projects such as peer-to-peer tutoring and mentorship programs. My group and I strongly believed that a strong sense of community is an essential key in providing kids with an extra sense of motivation to not only attend their required classes consistently, but to also excel in their class in the process.

However, providing kids with outside resources and opportunities wasn’t the only essential aspect of education that we wanted to implement within all of Tennessee’s academic institutions. We also wanted to be sure that teachers assisted students in identifying and understanding their WHY and true PURPOSE for learning new topics no matter the subject. This is a crucial first step in the beginning stages of a student’s educational career, and the data provided to us during our discussion supports our claim. Unfortunately, the data revealed that in basics subjects such as reading and math there was an overwhelming surplus of minority and underprivileged students who received extremely low scores on assessments given in these particular subjects. With that being said, if students are pushed through the system and haven’t grasped the basics skills needed to communicate and operate in the world these weaknesses will hinder their educational progress in the future; this is why we believe that it is important for that teachers to assist their students in identifying and understanding their WHY and true PURPOSE while learning new subjects!