By Sarah Boyd | September 5, 2019
I have grown intellectually and professionally from having had this wonderful opportunity to interact with educators at all levels from around the state. This, for me, is the beauty of World View.
Tonya Smith teaches Spanish and African Studies at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, NC. NCSSM, which opened in 1980, offers a comprehensive curriculum including highly specialized courses in science, technology, engineering, computer science and math, and operates as a free public school open to qualified NC students. Altogether, nearly 1,500 NC students from all 13 congressional districts and nearly all 100 counties are enrolled in one of NCSSM’s three programs.
Tonya attended the Global Education Leaders Program in 2019 with two of her world languages colleagues from NCSSM. At the end of the intensive weeklong process, she was voted by her peers as a class representative. “The program did a wonderful job emphasizing that we all act as ‘leaders’ in a myriad variety of ways in our daily lives, even when we don’t consciously set out to act as such,” she says. “It underscored that we are all capable of demonstrating the qualities most often associated with effective leadership: high levels of emotional intelligence, empathy, commitment, vision, compassion, and passion, as well as the ability to inspire, lead, and create possibilities for effective change. I have grown intellectually and professionally from having had this wonderful opportunity to interact with educators at all levels from around the state. This, for me, is the beauty of World View. We were all inspired, energized, and made important steps toward realizing our goals for the future even before the program’s conclusion.”
During the Leaders Program, World View provided educators with knowledge, resources, skills and connections to other educators across the state. “In turn,” Tonya says, the educators in her cohort have equipped themselves with “the tools and introspection to constantly challenge our own perceptions of the world and others so that we can model such behaviors for our students, helping them build the skills that they will need to be engaged global citizens.”
Tonya has already incorporated some of the ideas and resources made available to her at the Leaders Program in her classes and lesson planning. But beyond that, she has bigger plans. She and her colleague Alina Hunt were impacted by the stories shared during the Leaders Program, all of which had “humanities moments” that transformed the individuals recounting them. With Alina leading the team, they plan to create a variety of NCSSM humanities stories that “will show the ‘global’ dimension of the humanities and reach across disciplines and departments, thus showcasing how unique and diverse our school is, and how integral the humanities are to STEM educational endeavors.”
World View is thankful for our partnership with NCSSM and the wonderful educators who participated in our Leaders Program. We are also thankful for Tonya, a dedicated, thoughtful leader who will serve her peers well as the K-12 class representative from 2019. We can’t wait to see the work she will do this year!