CASTLedu: A Middle School Program that brings together Culture, Art, Science, Technology & Literacy
By: The Acorn Team
Tags: Education Reform, Middle School, Education, Teachers, Social Justice

Watch the entire interview here.

Earlier this month our CEO Ankita Joshi was able to sit down with Ms. Castro-Mitchell, a computer science teacher and Digital Learning Facilitator at Everett Middle School (San Francisco School District), and founder of CASTLedu. CASTLedu is a program that brings together culture, art, science, technology, and literacy, and places an emphasis on empathy and social justice. Ms. Castro-Mitchell holds a Bachelors in Sociology and Fine Arts, along with a Masters of Education and Instructional Technologies.

During this interview, Ankita and Ms. Castro-Mitchell spoke about the CASTL program, how students and teachers use technology, the role that empathy plays in students’ education, and the future of technology and education.

The Building Blocks of CASTLedu:

You might wonder how culture, art, science and literacy came together as essential pieces in fostering empathy in students. As we learned in speaking to Ms. Castro-Mitchell, these building blocks are based on her own experiences and values.

One of the biggest drivers to create the CASTLedu program, Ms. Castro-Mitchell shared, came from her parents and the community where she grew up. Both of her parents are first generation immigrants. During her childhood in Los Angeles, they passed their strong background in art as well as their passion for their community onto their daughter. When reflecting on that time in her life, Ms. Castro-Mitchell highlighted how much she loved the many different communities and cultures surrounding, influencing and supporting her. The intersection of culture and art remained prominent throughout Ms. Castro-Mitchell’s life. As a teacher, she finds this intersection to play an important role in her classroom, especially when it comes to students whose first language is not English or who have typically been left behind in traditional educational models, particularly women and people of color.

Along with her love of culture and the arts, Ms. Castro-Mitchell was drawn to science and technology. During her education, Ms. Castro-Mitchell focused some of her coursework on technology and computer science. This track showed her the value of these methods, which is constantly affirmed as she watches more and more technology be integrated into all classrooms. As a teacher, Ms. Castro-Mitchell feels lucky to have a strong background in these areas as so many of her colleagues do not. Without a scientific and technological foundation, it is much more difficult for them both to integrate technology into their classrooms and to teach students about how to use it. From her experience as a student and as a teacher, Ms. Castro-Mitchel knows the critical roles science and scientific thinking play in solving daily problems and thinking about the world critically.

The final focus of CASTLedu is literacy. In our conversation, Ms. Castro-Mitchell emphasized that literacy, as commonly defined as and should remain important: being able to read and comprehend material is as essential now as it ever was. She also pushed us to think of literacy using a wider lens. Literacy should no longer focus solely on ‘reading comprehension’, it must also include technology. We live in a world where we interact with technology constantly. Teaching students how to use it smartly, carefully and well informs how they will interact with and understand the world. When teachers don’t feel comfortable teaching through and about technology, they are leaving kids behind. Furthermore, we need to focus on who has access to this kind of tech literacy, because, as with most educational inequity, the students most likely to be missed are women and people of color.

By bringing together each of these elements, Ms. Castro-Mitchell built an add-on program that can be attached to all curriculum in all classrooms.

Bringing in Social Justice and Empathy:

A unique feature of Ms. Castro-Mitchell’s program is its focus on empathy and social justice. In our conversation, she told us more about how the CASTLedu program has brought social justice and empathy into her lessons and curriculum overall. To concertize this abstract point, she shared an example from her own classroom.

First, she asks students to read about female muralists and graffiti artists from around the world. The class then discusses the artists: who they are and where they stand with their art. Through these discussions Ms. Castro-Mitchell asks students to begin looking at their own identities and to explore how art can be used to express themselves. As she told us:

“In this curriculum, students are not held back because they don’t think of themselves as good artists in my class, we dispose of those thoughts of ‘I’m not good at something’ and it becomes more of a conversation of, we are creators. We are creating, and there is nothing wrong that we can create because we are exploring ourselves. You destigmatize the conversation around art. Students feel at ease, we have many circles early on. We talk about the values of the artists, such as why they are creating graffiti and the opposition towards graffiti. But we begin to question this notion and think about how she is providing art for her community. These help to build empathy among the students to better understand different types of art.”

At the end of the semester, students create their own art walls and some students even get to have their artwork featured at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

Through these projects, students begin to look at different cultures through a different lens, they form empathy for other communities and cultures.

Who is the program for?

Currently the program is offered as an elective for students at Ms. Castro-Mitchell’s school, but she hopes to scale up the program so that teachers of all subjects can apply it in their own classrooms . To make this scaling accessible, the program is easy to use and flexible enough to meet the needs of many different subjects, teaching styles and student ages.

As Ms. Castro-Mitchell told us, it is important for educators to find ways to connect with their students and make their curriculum engaging. The CASTLedu program allows them to do just that.

How should technology be taught to students?

As a tech educator with significant expertise, we were curious about Ms. Castro-Mitchell’s thoughts on how technology should be taught to students. She feels that technology should not just be defined in technical aspects, but also in how we use it and how we teach students to use it. While teachers should be teaching the technical aspects of different programs, it is also important to understand how we connect with technology on an emotional and societal level. She gave the example of Instagram pictures, the most ‘instagrammable’ photos are highly photoshopped which often leads young people to have unrealistic expectations. But we can not blame Photoshop for falsified photos or skip teaching it to mitigate these. Rather students need to consider what it means that people feel it necessary to make their life postable. What does the availability of these technologies make us do that we wouldn’t have done? How does this affect our values, our senses of self and of our own worth? How can we teach students to use Photoshop to connect to the world in a healthy way? These questions are just as important when teaching technology as the specifics of debugging a code. This helps students understand that technology is not inherently good or bad, rather everything depends on how we choose to use it. It is incumbent on teachers to teach more than just technology. They must also teach about how to use it wisely and well to make a better world.

Ms. Castro-Mitchell went further in adding that:

“It’s [also] important to highlight that anyone who is in tech needs to commit to grow with it and make changes. We must constantly revamp our skills and approaches because it [technology] changes so quickly. We must be continually educating ourselves on technology. We must keep up to date with what our students are using and make it useful for them.”

Vision for the future of education:

Overall, Ms. Castro-Mitchell’s slogan for now and the future is this: “to create joyful, lifelong learners.”