Maria Rodriguez-Brannon is a current Seton Teaching Fellow at Brilla Veritas Middle School in the Bronx, where she teaches catechism to 7th grade girls. She graduated from the University of Mary, where she studied History and Catholic Studies.
Introduction
One piece of advice resounded as I began my Fellow year: You have to own the room. It is your room. Objectively, this is true. Experientially…not so much. I had an idealistic idea of how I wanted my disciples to perceive me and how I needed my classroom to look in order to be successful. But nothing humbles you as much as actually standing before your students. By November I felt like a shell.
My formator, Abby, invited me to consider how I could incorporate myself and my love of hospitality into my classroom when I felt the most alienated from it. She asked, “Maria, when do you feel the most yourself? How can you incorporate you– and your love for hospitality- into your classroom?”
My formator challenged me to think of my classroom as a playground for hospitality, which is the ground for creative tension and receptivity. In case you did not know, hospitality is a miraculously adaptable disposition and practice.
Approaching teaching through the lens of hospitality has expanded my freedom in the classroom, not because it makes teaching easier, but because it relieves me from the pressure of thinking of my classroom as something that must be fully constructed instead of something that must also be received. Each classroom is dynamic and unexpected. It does not exist in the abstract but in reality of the uniqueness and messiness of each soul that inhabits it.
The Framework of Hospitality
But first, what do I mean by hospitality? I do not mean a fancy dinner and friendliness towards guests (goods though they are), but a disposition and practice that consists of welcoming the stranger. Hospitality is bound by a real place and real relationships. Hospitality is the hard work of human relationships. Is not always soft and gentle. It is constantly pushing boundaries, testing and redefining what makes someone be “in” and “out” and at what expense.
Consider hospitality’s basic structure: a household with a clear identity and boundaries; a host responsible for provisions and communicating the household rules; a stranger responsible for providing his/her story and following the rules; and a designated space where tension and encounter can happen between these two parties.
Most importantly, hospitality is rooted in the reciprocity between two parties. It is as much about receiving as it is about providing. While the household has a clear identity, this identity is not impermeable. When a true encounter happens, neither guest nor host can remain unchanged.
Hospitality in the Classroom
Now extend all of this painfully simplified information about hospitality to my 7th grade girls El Camino classroom. Imagine me, Ms. Rodriguez Brannon (host), a first-year teacher with zero classroom experience, leading a classroom (household) full of pre-teen girls (strangers), full of energy and many opinions. This very naive Ms. Rodriguez thought she could crush classroom management with clear expectations.
She was wrong. For all the training on classroom expectations and teach-backs, nothing prepared her for the unleashing of the colorful dynamic of twelve-year-old girls. The first week, my girls were angels, eager to prove themselves responsible. By the second week, there was more talking, less listening. They tried to push the edge of the routines to see how real they were. Deep-seated friendships, drama, and attitudes from the Brilla day unfolded in my classroom. The reality became messier, and my understanding as the authority within it started to shake.
Wanting to create classroom culture by oneself was not only tiring, but fruitless. As the host of my little El Camino classroom, I have to come with a lesson and materials prepared. While this is no easy task, much of my provision actually comes down to knowing my girls and adapting classroom culture to their particular social and academic needs. This has looked like incorporating a manipulative for my student who gets easily distracted, making classroom jobs to keep the girls engaged, changing seating arrangements when tensions are high, not engaging in power struggles with dominant personalities, and, when necessary, being a little bit more clever than them.
“Much of my provision actually comes down to knowing my girls and adapting classroom culture to their particular social and academic needs.”
Teaching is an exertion of time and energy before, during, and after class. The eyes of hospitality, however, have prompted me to see that this provision is not one-sided. My girls are constantly providing for our classroom too: through their clarifying and deeply-perceptive questions which often expose my own lack of knowledge, their strong attitudes, their light-hearted use of middle school brainrot, and their relationships.
My girls have had to accept my eccentricities too. They have pointed out the expressive (and admittedly humorous) ways I move my right hand, the way I incessantly call them chicas, how I use the Mexican ahorita instead of their Dominican ahora, how I often misplace our classroom materials, and how I often forget where we need to pick up in the text.
As I continue to teach, I realize more and more what is essential and what is adaptable in our classroom. The essential identity of my classroom is rooted in the El Camino mission: to foster the habits and dispositions that will make our disciples into saints. We pray the Our Father before each class. We have a Catechism lesson. I enforce systems and routines conducive to a learning classroom environment. But above all, I need to remind myself that my work is the work of a bigger household, that of the Kingdom. This is a household to which I am host through my baptism, but to which I am also stranger to now and can only hope to experience fully in the future.
The Classroom is a Community
Within a hospitality framework, the classroom in which I am a host in is also a community of which I am a part of— a community which stretches and challenges who I am as a teacher and as a Catholic. As I finish my Fellow year, I want to continue making room for my students to transform me and the classroom, so that neither me nor them remain unchanged.
Christ shows us how to give and how to receive. As I strive to be the face of Christ the Teacher to my students, they, in their child-like poverty, continue to reveal His face and my face back to me.
