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Making the road by walking
Nathan Toews goes from Bethel through Mexico to Ecuador and back to a bilingual classroom in Texas.
by Melanie Zuercher
Nathan Toews ’01 would probably say it isn’t about the map but where the journey takes you.
The North Newton native moved to Austin, Texas, in August 2008, because there were teaching jobs available and he wanted to work in an area that he knew would require Spanish-language skills. He is currently in his first year as a bilingual special education teacher at Sanchez Elementary School, part of the Austin public school system.
But such a career track was on the outskirts of his imagination, if in sight at all, when he finished a degree in history and social science at Bethel in 2001. In fact, he says, “For better or worse – although I don’t consider it a bad thing – I was without the desire to put myself right into a career track.
“In a broad sense,” he continues, “the people I met at Bethel and the friends I made gave me a sense of, a desire for, exploration.”
The journey began close to home and eventually broadened geographically as well. While he was at Bethel, Nathan was one of many Bethel students, before and since, employed at Northview Developmental Services (now called ResCare) in Newton. After he graduated, he got a job with the day school at Prairie View in Newton, working with children with developmental disabilities and behavioral disorders.
He discovered that he liked interacting with these populations. “I had thought about teaching,” he says, “and I’m more interested in, and curious about, working with people with disabilities, who need [extra] assistance.”
He decided to return to Bethel to get certified in secondary education. Despite what he knew to be his own interests, he credits a conversation with Tricia Lopez, the administrative assistant for the Department of Teacher Education, with actually “sparking my interest in special education – showing me it seemed to fit more what I wanted to do than regular education.”
He continued working at Prairie View while taking classes. He earned certification in regular and special education and in 2004 was hired at Southeast High School in Wichita.
In the meantime, Nathan’s interest in improving his Spanish as well as doing some traveling remained. In 2006, he spent six months in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he lived with a family and studied Spanish through CETLALIC (Centro Tlahuica des Lenguas e Intercambio Cultural). Then Nathan and a friend, Henry Dick ’05, took an extended trip, traveling on land through all of Central America to Panama, where they took a plane to Colombia, finally ending up in Ecuador. Nathan returned to Kansas in late 2007, spent the spring 2008 semester back at Southeast High and in August 2008 moved to Austin.
“I wanted to go further south, where Spanish is more prevalent,” Nathan says. “Austin had a lot of teaching jobs.”
And in fact, he had little trouble finding one – though it wasn’t quite what he expected. “I don’t know if it was a mistake or the high need, but I was given elementary special ed. certification for Texas, even though I’m not certified for elementary in Kansas,” he says. Texas gives one-year certification to a teacher without it in the necessary areas, with the understanding that the individual will take the appropriate certification exams, most of which Nathan has by now completed.
He had moved to Austin “wanting to speak more Spanish but not necessarily expecting I would get that in teaching,” he says. “But when they gave me elementary certification, I saw there were a lot of bilingual openings so I decided to go ahead, even though I hadn’t had any elementary education classes [at Bethel].
“That has made it even more of an adjustment,” he says. “There’s nothing like learning on the job.”
He went to work at Sanchez Elementary as a special education teacher with a focus on SCORES – Social Communication Resources and Services. His job description is to work primarily with students diagnosed with autism in grades K-5. However, most of his six students are in first grade. Not all are Spanish-speaking although two have parents who speak little English. Two of the students are in Nathan’s class for the entire school day while the other four are in regular classrooms. He also has two teacher assistants, Ana Lucio and Alicia Rodriguez.
“Our job is to go [into the classroom] and, depending on need, provide school work at a level they can work with, since they are mostly below grade level, as well as social skills training,” he says. The latter refers to helping with “routine classroom procedures and interacting appropriately with teachers and other students.”
Of the two who stay in his classroom all day, one student “has very severe autism and is just learning how to talk and the other was struggling with a regular classroom to the point where he wouldn’t listen and would just hide in the corner – he had come from a program with only five students and was put into a class of 20.”
Not surprisingly, the job is a challenge. At Christmas break 2008, looking back over the first semester, Nathan says, “I’m enjoying it much more and finding the work very engaging than when I started, but it has been a struggle to get to this point.
“The academic component wasn’t something I was expecting to work with,” he says, “only the social skills, but I’ve had to do it because of the high need and lack of [other personnel]. The amount of work has been something to get used to. I have had to learn how to manage the workload.
“Being in an elementary school is a new experience. I had no previous training in autism. There are more students than I expected, with more severe needs. I thought they would all be able to manage in the classroom and only be pulled out as needed. I started out with no teacher assistant,” which meant, at first, he somehow had to work with his classroom students while also addressing the needs of the “pulled-out” ones. And the whole program is only in its second year, so the principal and the other teachers are learning, too.
“It has been a big challenge to get through all this, but the school community has been very helpful and patient,” Nathan says. “I have good personnel to work with. They’ve given me time to develop.
“I’ve come to the realization,” he says, “that I can’t and won’t do everything in one day or even in one month. I’m feeling more control over that.
“It’s been exciting to have the opportunity to work with students in this condition, to learn how to communicate with them,” he continues. “When you have the time to work with them, you do see progress.
“There have been times when I’ve felt a breakthrough, if not for me then for the student. For example, I have been learning a technique called discreet trial training, a strategy to use with students who don’t have verbal communication skills and even limited visual communication [abilities]. I’ve started putting it into practice with one particular student and it was successful. I could communicate with him on a new level. He has started talking more, saying phrases – he might not understand the concept of language but he knows if he says certain things, he gets results, which is the first step in communication.”
How long he continues in this kind of work will depend on “if I continue to feel like I’m doing my job and not burning myself out,” Nathan says.
The encouragement he feels he received at Bethel to question and explore and his travels in Latin America, Nathan says, taught him that “having new, unexpected things happen is part of the journey. You have to have the attitude: ‘This is what’s in front of me – I have to engage it as best I can.’”