EduCon 2.5

Mark Bey has been teaching for 15 years in a variety of school urban and suburban environments. He's been teaching students Spanish at SLA for 5 years. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1994 with a BA in Finance and Spanish and from Temple Graduate School in 1999 with an MA in Modern Foreign Language. Mark will share his personal and professional issues of transitioning from a more traditional school and curriculum to SLA, a progressive and project-based school, and the difficulties he had practicing an ethic of care in his classroom management.

Pearl Jonas is a first year SLA History teacher. She spent one year student teaching in Philadelphia and 17 months in a bilingual school in Ecuador. She graduated with a BA in History in 2005 and an MS in Social Studies Education in 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania. Pearl will speak to her recent transition into SLA coming from a test-based school culture. and the role of common language and collaborative culture at SLA in that transition.

Kevin Beckford is a student teacher and a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 2011 where he majored in African American Studies and Political Science. As an undergraduate, Kevin participated in a variety of tutoring and mentoring programs with organizations such as the Yale Black Men’s Union, the NAACP, and New Haven Reads. He  just earned a Masters of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge in African Studies. He is interested in bridging classroom theory with practice and reconciling personal and professional interests within an inquiry-based setting.