FEATURE Students from Sheboygan South High School visited UWM to learn more about the Grow Your Own program.
Grow Your Own SAMANTHA SWENSKI WAS THINKING ABOUT her future career
even while she was in high school. “I have wanted to become a teacher for many years, although I did explore other careers before deciding during sophomore year that teaching was right for me.” Nancy Cee Her enjoyed tutoring her classmates who were struggling in mathematics. “I liked doing that. It was a good experience when they’d come back with a good score on their test, and I felt like I was part of that.” That was why they both joined Greendale High School’s Educators Rising club. Both are now first-year students at UWM, taking general courses with the goal of moving into the School of Education. The Educators Rising program, adapted at UWM as Grow Your Own, is providing high school students insights into careers in education. The goal is to get more students interested in teaching at a younger age and increase the number of future teachers in the pipeline. “GYO is an exciting effort which began with colleagues 2 UWM SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
at MATC and MPS. Our goal is to build and support interest in the teaching profession starting with high school students,” says Hope Longwell-Grice, associate dean of the School of Education. “Working with MPS teachers and staff is very important to create a tradition of teaching among all students, and especially among students of color in the district,” she adds. “The whole community will benefit if the teaching pool reflects the diversity of students in our schools.” In 2020, the School of Education was working with Grow Your Own clubs at several Milwaukee Public Schools. Grow Your Own is a collaborative effort, under the M-cubed umbrella, involving MPS high schools, Milwaukee Area Technical College and UWM’s School of Education. It has been supported by a grant from Bader Philanthropies. A number of suburban school districts like Greendale have started or expressed interest in similar partnership programs with the SOE. “I think it offers a lot of opportunities for students who are clearly interested in or even who are peripherally interested to engage what it means to be an educator,” said Amy Zientek, an award-winning science teacher at Greendale who started the
