leviton ’25 explores how educators define a sustainable future

Every year, the Bailey COE awards fellowships to fund summer (and spring and fall) research opportunities for Wesleyan undergrads across all majors and class years. Most recently, the Bailey COE awarded almost 40 fellowships to Wes students, including Isadora Goldman Leviton ’25, an education and American studies major, who spent the summer conducting qualitative research interviews in the Greater Hartford area, regarding how educators define a sustainable future for themselves and their students. 

Hi, Isadora! Do you want to share a little bit about your background and academic interests?
I’m an education and American studies double major, with focus in educational and environmental justice. My freshman and sophomore year, I worked for the Sustainability Office as an eco-facilitator, and I also co-started the Sew What program. The overall values that I learned while I was working there feel very pertinent to my research: I’m really obsessed with the intersection of environmental justice and educational justice, and to me Sew What felt like part of that. In addition to mending clothes, it’s a way to educate people on how they can slow their consumption of fashion. When I’m not researching, my work now is with ASHA, which teaches sex ed in Connecticut schools. I recognize it doesn’t sound related, but I think there’s a huge interrelation between reproductive justice and educational justice and environmental justice. It all goes hand in hand, and I feel really lucky to get to just do it all the time.

What was the process of coming up with your Bailey COE summer fellowship proposal? What inspired you?
Generally, I wanted to be in Connecticut; that felt very important to me. A lot of what our university does is talk about global issues, but we don’t actually think about it on this local scale that’s happening near us all the time. That was the first thing that felt really pertinent; I knew I wanted to be in Hartford. Since I have the privilege of knowing that I will probably spend the rest of my life with young people, I very intentionally wanted to be working with teachers, because there won’t be as many times when I’ll get to sit down and learn from educators who have been in the field longer than I have. I was also really interested in envisioning intersecting definitions of sustainability, both in terms of literal environmental sustainability and what it means to sustain a career that is inherently devalued and disrespected. I was thinking about what it looks like to put these definitions of sustainability together while knowing that both the planet and my career are dying at the same time. That’s the reality that I’m walking into in this relatively unexplored field, knowing that both of these things that I care so deeply about, and their intersection, is inherently seen as not worthy. I was thinking about how to navigate that, and I ended up here.

Can you give us an overview of what you’ve been doing?
Basically, I interviewed 11 teachers. Each interview was supposed to be an hour and a half, but most of them ended up being closer to three, because the teachers wanted to talk and I wanted to listen. I would go to the teachers’ schools, they would give me tours, and I would learn about them. I would ask them questions about how they find just and sustainable futures. For example, I would ask them about what their ideal school system looked like, and how they see environmental issues coming up in their classrooms. I wanted them to be able to tell me how they needed to be supported, looking at the idea of supported as in sustained as in sustainability. I was trying to get them to see the intersection without actually saying it, and often it came up, but the point was not to give it to them. Since I lived in Hartford, I was also working with a lot of community organizers, listening in on meetings in coffee shops. 

Tell me about the role of community organizers in your research. 
Last year, Hartford public schools underwent a budget cut that left a lot of students without teachers in their classroom at all. Parents realized their kids didn’t have teachers or resources, so they started a group called Save our Schools, under the umbrella of the Hartford Deportation Defense League, and I had the opportunity to sit in on those meetings and hear from them. It was really intense and interesting, and I would hear these stories of parents talking about how their kids are illiterate. One of the biggest things I realized is that while it is an inherent privilege to not talk about environmental justices in your classroom, it’s also a privilege to have the time and space to do so. The West Hartford teachers weren’t talking about climate change or environmental injustice because it doesn’t affect their kids, and it’s ‘too political’, while the Hartford teachers just didn’t have any time. No one is talking about environmental justice, but the reasoning is totally different.

What were some of your main takeaways?
There were ten main points:

  • Teachers desperately need more time across the board. 
  • Despair manifests itself most often in escalating student behaviors, and is frequently reflective of their learning and living conditions. 
  • While the magnet and learning program within Hartford and CREC has, in many ways, benefitted students, it has also devalued and decentered the purpose and connection of a neighborhood; when students are forced to leave their own communities in order to learn, it often disempowers them. 
  • It is nearly impossible to envision a future for educators that allows them to make a career of being teachers. Particularly for urban teachers, the idea of staying in education comes at the expense of their ability to take care of themselves. To say they are drowning is an understatement. It is difficult to bear witness to. 
  • Even within a school system that is almost entirely students of color, nearly every educator I interviewed at was white and female. Students do not see themselves represented in positions of authority. 
  • Every teacher I interviewed sees hope, almost to a radical extent. They see it every single day in their students, and it keeps them going when the system has been set up for them to fail.
  • Disinvestment is a powerful tool and it often impacts both students and teachers. Disinvestment is quite literally dangerous, and unless we reinvest in our schools, we are putting students in positions of high risk, both physically and emotionally. 
  • To have the time and space to care about environmental issues is a privilege. To not care about them is also one. Hartford teachers are band-aiding bullet wounds within their school system and do not have the time and space to accurately address environmental inequities their children face on a daily basis. West Hartford teachers often choose not to get political in order to make everyone comfortable. 
  • Educators know love in a way that is remarkable to me. It is so ingrained in the way they move through the world. To be a teacher is to choose love, over and over again, even when it is the most difficult choice. 
  • The future is sitting in our classrooms right now, central offices and our government get to choose what it looks like, and so do we. 

How do you see the research you’ve done informing the way you move through your future?
I recognize, especially after doing a lot of this research, that to think of teaching as a career goal is probably lofty. Most teachers, especially in urban districts, burnout within the first five years. Through my research, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sustainability practices, in terms of how to be a more conscious teacher so that I can be in the classroom longer. I think that teacher burnout is a practice that is very intentional in a lot of ways: when people who are well intentioned go into schools and don’t make any money and end up exhausted, the first kids that are impacted are kids of color. So, the best thing that I can do, the most radical political practice, is to be a really good teacher for a really long time. And that means that I need to know how to not burn myself out early on in my career, because a lot of what my research found is that students feel totally abandoned by their teachers. They don’t think that anybody cares about them, because their teachers are leaving every few years, so the best thing I can do for them is to be there long term. And ideally, I will be able to be a better advocate for educators as well, because I think that being an advocate for educators is inherently being an advocate for students. 

These are heavy topics. How do you keep yourself hopeful?
That’s sort of been my entire college question, and something I’ve had a really hard time with: studying educational theory is really devastating, and a lot of classes in the American studies major have to do with the disadvantaging of the other, so I spend a lot of time thinking about a lot of dark things. Which is funny because for those who know me, I’m a really happy individual! A lot of that comes from spending time outside in the sun, but I also think a lot of it has to do with my belief in total radical joy; joy as in a practice of liberation. I’ve learned so much about that from these teachers that I’ve been interviewing: every day they go in knowing that everything is falling apart around them all the time—I don’t know what other way to say that—and yet they wake up and they choose to bring joy and energy to the classroom. I feel really inspired by that, and really grateful to spend time with people who are thinking about joy so much. And so, it has become a practice to cultivate radical joy in my life every day, as much as I can. I also think that spending time with young people, who are such a hopeful bunch, makes me feel really hopeful. I’m fascinated with their ability to see the world in this very simple way, in terms of there being answers to every challenge. If you actually simplify it down to how we see the world before we become entrenched in all this horror and darkness, there is a way out! We just have to listen to young people, and the more time that I get to do that and spend time with teachers who do that, the more joyful I find myself.