What makes a lifetime? Growing teaching practices with/in communities

What makes a teacher? How might educators be oriented toward children, rather than institutions? How might we grow pedagogies through humans, instead of systems? In a time of scope, sequence, standards, and scripted lessons, the orientation of teachers is often turned away from the actual people who inhabit the classrooms: the children and the teachers themselves. But what is that alternative? How might we frame teacher education and practice toward and through the classrooms themselves? This narrative, auto-ethnographic study examines a non-traditional path into teaching. This unique path, absent the formalized structures and expectations of what teaching is/should be, invites reconceptualizations of how teaching might emerge through communities, rather than institutional systems. Through the experiences of a young settlement house “teacher” and her classroom of young children, I explore the possibilities of building a curriculum, a democracy, a practice and a lifetime of teaching in collaboration with children, and all members of the community.