City Year Team Report
When City Year asked our team to report on the Fern Bacon Middle School community, I picked up a camera. Some stories are better shown than written."
City Year Legacy Project
Every City Year team leaves something behind for the next. I made sure ours was a film.
Materials
Multiple Subjects Methods
Unit Plan
A 15-day 6th grade ELA unit plan exploring human-animal relationships through Jane Goodall, Hachiko, and xenotransplantation: building toward an exploratory essay while centering bilingual supports and UDL accommodations for a majority English Learner classroom.
Literacy
Literacy Portfolio
A literacy assessment portfolio documenting a student's phonics, fluency, and vocabulary development over time: with targeted instructional strategies addressing specific decoding gaps and a reflection on prosody, comprehension, and English Language Learner supports.
Bilingualism
Language Biography
A personal language biography tracing how growing up in a racially homogeneous Pittsburgh shaped a narrow, utilitarian relationship with language: and how teaching English Learners in East Palo Alto transformed that into a deeply political commitment to multilingualism, translanguaging, and linguistic justice.
Research Project in Transformative Education
Research Project
This is a graduate research paper from Loyola Marymount University examining the relationship between standardized testing pressures, teacher burnout, and turnover across high- and low-performing schools. Using a mixed-methods approach grounded in the Job Demands–Resources framework, the study compares burnout data from three California school sites to explore how institutional conditions like leadership stability, workload, and school culture shape teachers' decisions to stay, move, or leave the profession.
Anthropology of Cultural Diversity
Cultural Plunge
A reflective ethnographic essay documenting an immersive experience at the Nikkei Matsuri Festival in San José's Japantown, exploring Japanese-American cultural identity, community, belonging, and connecting those observations to educational practice working with students of color and English Language Learners.
TFA Cultural Ambassador
Branding Kit
Designed a comprehensive brand identity kit for Teach For America's Cultural Ambassador Program. The kit establishes full visual guidelines — including a color palette extracted directly from TFA's official logo, typography scale, spacing system, logo usage rules, UI components, and brand voice standards — all tailored to reflect the program's mission of equity, cultural humility, and community-centered leadership. Delivered as both an interactive HTML document and a print-ready PDF.
Latino Cultural Digital Story
A digital story and case study completed for a Chicano Culture course, examining the adaptation experiences of Colombian immigrant families in the United States through the lens of one student's journey navigating Sacramento's school system: exploring how prior schooling, ELD placement, peer relationships, and language assessment intersect, and what educators must understand to serve immigrant students beyond labels and test scores.
25-26 Final Data
Final iReady results, Year 2. The majority of students entered below grade level. As of this report, significant grade-level growth has been achieved, with students on average achieving 124% of the year’s iReady growth.
