Stop Homophobic Bullying in Schools

Teachers who participate in our program tell us about the impact that our trainings have had on them and how they manage their classrooms;  however, teachers aren’t the only ones who benefit from our trainings. Indeed, our student actors do as well!

There is no better example of this than Isaac, one of our former student actors who had the unique opportunity to take what he has learned in his time with our program and implement it in his own career path.

            Isaac is a now a college sophomore studying Gender and Women’s Studies and hoping to become an elementary school teacher.  Isaac visited us last week and described his first teaching experience: 

“This past summer, I was a teaching fellow at Breakthrough New York: Bronx and I had the fantastic opportunity to co-teach Biology to two classes of fifteen seventh graders from under-resourced schools in the area. The entire summer, whether I was in the classroom or creating lesson plans, I constantly thought back to my experiences with Creating Bias Free Classrooms in an effort to ensure that I was making my classroom as safe and welcoming for my students as I possibly could. The world that we live in is unjust and cruel, full of prejudice and systemic oppression, but in teaching, I see a way to mitigate that. My time as a high school student in this program and as a college student in Breakthrough New York have allowed me to witness the truly liberating potential of education. Looking forward to a career in teaching, I am grateful for the experiences that have gotten me to where I am today and have given me the tools to be as thoughtful of a teacher as I can be.”

            It is great to hear his story and know that the impact of this program is expanding not only from the teachers we train, but also from the students who help train them.