Adrienne Porter Staff Spotlight
At Citizen Schools, our mission comes to life through the dedicated people who bring passion and purpose to their work each day. In our Staff Spotlight series, we’re introducing you to the Program team members who are shaping learning experiences in powerful ways.
Here we are highlighting Adrienne Porter who leads our Educator Development work. After discovering a Citizen Schools Teaching Fellow role through a friend, Adrienne embraced the chance to step outside her comfort zone and create a classroom experience rooted in her own vision of education. What struck her most was Citizen Schools’ thoughtful approach to connecting the personal and professional. For Adrienne, that spirit of blending real-world connection with personal story is at the heart of her work, and it’s what continues to inspire her commitment to Citizen Schools and the communities we serve.
What drew you to the Citizen Schools mission and approach? Share a little about your journey that led you to CS. I had recently graduated undergrad and my major was Psychology . I knew I had a passion for kids but I did not know how I wanted to marry those two factors. I ended up finding a Citizen Schools Teaching Fellow position through a friend and falling in love with the opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone to teach middle school students. Though I was given a framework, I was going to be able to do it my way and how I envisioned being an educator in the classroom.
There was a question in the interview about marrying the personal to the professional, around ‘who was your key motivator growing up to strive for educational academic success.’ I don’t think anyone had ever asked me that before and I was so grateful for the opportunity to share that it made me emotional in the interview. It was definitely my grandma because she was the person who literally taught me how to write cursive and read, and that reading can take you anywhere. Even if you're a little Virginia girl, you could be in Trinidad and Tobago if you wanted to be just by cracking open a book. From that initial interview I thought it was so cool that Citizen Schools was thoughtful enough to marry the personal to the professional and I carried that into what I was doing with my students. I think that is what has kept me here. I saw the personal to professional, real world connection and that every person's story matters and that is how we should approach our work.
What does Experiential Learning (EL) mean to you, and why is it important? What would it look like to truly learn experientially? I hearken back to my own experience as a kid in class. I was really excited to learn things, but I needed to understand why. I always wanted to understand the root cause of why we were learning something and I think Experiential Learning gives students permission to ask those questions. It allows for students to come up with their own reasons as to why. It allows for teachers to facilitate conversations and engage in more conversations which builds relationships. I believe once kids are able to know why they are there and what they are there to learn, they are then ready to truly engage with the learning.
It is a multi-layered opportunity for student agency and identity to be showcased, experienced and navigated. For me, it's important, because as a kid, you start to see how you fit into the grand scheme of what you're learning. You start to get to know yourself and how you fit into this world, and how you can be a change agent in that.
There are different pieces of what it would look like to truly learn experientially. I think in the traditional schoolhouse view, administrators would allow true agency to happen with their teachers, and allow creativity in them to flourish as well as the frameworks for success. As a teacher it would translate into something that does not live within the four walls of the classroom exclusively. It would look like community members chipping into what learning looks like. It would also mean teachers experimenting with what it looks like for kids to be designing their own learning experiences. Students would be able to say out loud that they don’t like something they are learning and be encouraged to go deeper on the things they are passionate about. Fundamentally for students, teachers, administrators, everyone participating, it would look like all cultures, races, genders, different abilities etc. being celebrated and honored. Because when we're all celebrated and honored and respected, we are the better for it.
What do you believe is the best first step towards advancing the future of learning? What is necessary to make it successful? The first step is honesty. I think that we have to acknowledge the reality of inequities that are happening. We see this at Citizen Schools with different partners because some schools would like to do this work but it comes at a cost, and that comes at a risk. Being honest about the fact that we have inequitable parameters around how we do learning, or how folks are able to fund this type of learning is the very first step.
Once we name this reality we can start looking at how we make this playing field not just level but equitable. We can start to ask ourselves, how do we meet the needs of all people, no matter where they are, who they are and where they're from? This goes back to having the ability to get to the root of “why.” Why are these things the way that they are? Why is this political game of education the way that it is? Why are teachers leaving the profession? Why is that? Why are students not feeling seen and heard? Why are there way too many kids in prison versus in schools? And once we get down to that bubble and boil it down, that would make us the most successful.
Who is the most influential mentor you have had throughout your life? What qualities did they impart that you continue to embody in your work? I am fortunate to have a few people who come to mind when the word mentor is mentioned. I already shared a little about my grandma who was the person who planted the seed around the importance of education for me. But the person who comes to the front of my list and who watered and cared for that planted seed is my aunt. I lost both of my parents before I turned 16, and my aunt stepped in to raise me. The quality that she really exhibits is honesty. Sometimes I wasn't the most receptive to it, but it was one of the things that was absolutely necessary for me to get through life. She is very open to how I want to live my life and did not try to influence me to be in any type of profession, but she wanted me to be honest with myself.
She would encourage me to reflect and question myself. When it came to my Citizen Schools role she would ask me: Do you want to work with kids? And if so, are you ready for that challenge? She wanted me to know that there's going to be times where you're not just going to be the teacher, sometimes you're going to have to be the nurse, the social worker, the mom, the auntie, the big sister. She wanted to make sure I was able to embody all of that at 23.
She also works with a spirit of excellence in everything that she does. She taught me that once you define what excellence means for you, you have to rise up to it whatever it looks like. I think that the true definition of a mentor is not somebody who is going to fluff you up all the time but instead those who are going to question you and encourage you to rise to new challenges.
Can you share a story about a past partner who inspired you through their involvement with Citizen Schools? A story that comes to mind for me is around my work in New York with a volunteer named Lucy Vasserman. Lucy was originally partnered with a Citizen Schools staffer who needed to go on medical leave, so Lucy and I were placed together as a last-minute solution. This quick change was important because it meant there was less time for me to support Lucy and she did most of the planning on her own. I was worried she may not have what she needed to start. But she was a true mentor for those girls.
Lucy started by sharing her life experiences and being incredibly vulnerable with this class. She did not know this at the time, but some of the challenges she shared directly mirrored the experiences of the students. She was not a native New Yorker, and she was a white woman from corporate America speaking to a class of primarily black and brown kids, and they were really seeing each other. The love that was shown between the students and this caring adult was very powerful. The kids did an amazing showcase and project, but for me when I think back to what mentorship should look like, this connection is what I think about. It truly means that you can share yourself, and strip away any ego, or title, so that these students can see that someone else was able to transcend whatever trials or tribulations in their life to become this leader at a company like Google.