What do you do as an educator to instill curiosity in students?What do you love?
What seizes your imagination?
What amazes you with joy and gratitude?
These are the questions that I so desperately want to explore with students. They are too boring, sometimes too direct, sometimes too abstract. So instead, I let my dorkiness, my weirdness, and my joy shine in as many interactions as possible.
By showing all of these parts of myself, I give permission for our students (and even our faculty), to be more of who they want to be, who they are called to be, and who they are exploring. I share the things that I am constantly learning.
I share of the things I don’t know or the things that I keep getting wrong. As a working mom with young children, I have plenty of areas of learning or lack of knowledge. As a professional, every student and every family has particular needs, desires, and hopes. I share my curiosity.
I know that I don’t have all the answers and I share of this, so that students know that my learning and my explorations are incomplete. We give space in our classes to explore topics that are of interest for individual and class exploration.
We give space to get it wrong. We give space to ask questions. We are curious of where a student has been and where they want to go as learners, individuals, as adults, and within a community.
Julie A. Tracy-Prieboy, MS, MSW, LICSW
Director of Counseling
