Her Story
About Erika
I grew up attending a trilingual school in Mexico City, which gave me the foundation for my passion for languages and education. After graduation, I had the opportunity to travel to Japan for 7 months to work as a translator. When I returned to Mexico City, I studied translation at the National University and took English Language Literature as my major. I started my teaching career at Thomas Alba Edison Middle School in Mexico City. I always wanted to go to the United States or England because of my major, and when School District U46, Aurora School District 131, and Valley View came to Mexico City to recruit teachers, I took the opportunity. I came for one year but stayed and completed my master's and then my doctoral program at NIU in English as a second language and bilingual education. Through my doctoral program, I did a lot of research on the impact of oral language into modeling for dual language students, specifically Spanish-English speakers. I was working in a transitional bilingual program at first, which is subtractive, meaning Spanish was taken away while English was introduced. Growing up with three languages, I always thought the best model is additive, meaning you have one language and then you add another rather than take away. I was looking for a model that would be more equitable, and School District U46 started a very thorough, good program in 2011. My former principal, Mrs. Luvke, Karen Luvke, told me about the program and said I would really like it, so I applied there. I've been with U46 for 11 years now. I currently teach science as a special to kids from 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade. I run labs and also cover the literacy part of science, and I prepare the 5th graders for state assessments. My doctoral program prepared me to be a good grant writer, and I've been able to write maybe 4 or 5 grants for literacy development and Title I grants. I've always been granted those funds for supporting ELLs, and I think the doctoral program helped me get stronger in the research backing up the proposals.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Erika
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think that having an open mind and becoming a lifelong learner is important. Set your expectations high and say it's a long run, it's not a short run, it's like a marathon, because it's long distance and it's many years of it. You have to evolve with your students and keep on updating how you teach, how you see the new generations, because like the pandemic showed, a lot of things were outdated. Going through that and updating yourself as well, being able to adapt to change is important, as well as keeping your core values in place. That's what your kids will remember - you as a person and what you bring to them, and building their potential.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think that the pandemic was a breakthrough in our educational system that opened up a realistic view on how much our system was overloaded. When teachers were not working, a lot of the kids didn't receive all the services that our school has, like nursing and lunches and supplies, so going through the process of the pandemic made us realize how much we have in education. I feel like that was a really great challenge for us to overcome, and it created opportunities to do other things while we were remote, like create opportunities for kids to pick up supplies at school, or we would send things to the houses and materials. I feel like for many families that qualify for Title III or Title I, school is a big structure and it's an equitable field for them, so when you don't have that structure, some families really struggle. But the schools were still trying to reach out. We would organize pickup dates at school, and we would organize the materials at school, and then meet the families by the door and do the drop-off and the pickup. That was an extra effort from the school district. It was just a very rapid change, providing kids with Chromebooks and everything.
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