Raquel Fleming Email & Phone Number

My name is Raquel Fleming and I am currently a High School Science teacher in Brooklyn. As a teacher, I am challenged with educating a diverse student population from different cultural backgrounds. We often think that because students share ethnicities that they also share experiences but that is not the case. Each student brings a different story and culture into the classroom. It is my job to make each student feel heard and seen, to believe that what they bring to the classroom matters. Gloria Ladson-Billings teaches the importance of having a voice and how having a voice is empowering to oneself and community. This shared belief is one of my driving forces for arming my students with the knowledge needed to identify the implicit and explicit biases that exist in education and society as a whole. With this knowledge, they are now empowered to use their voices to stand up for what is right and claim their rightful positions in society.My main motivation for being a Science educator is the need to motivate more Black students to enter the STEM field, a field that this system is working hard to keep our Black and Brown students away from. According to the National Science Foundation (2010), "In 2006, African American students represented only 8.3% of the students obtaining Bachelor degrees, 6.6% of the students obtaining Masters degrees, and 2.5% of the students obtaining Doctoral degrees in one of the science and engineering fields." These numbers are very diminutive and my purpose as an educator is to be able to contribute to a positive change in this STEM statistics amongst Black and Brown students in the US.