Ridgeway High School Alum Credits Facing History As He Gives Back

Memphians know what it’s like to live in a city where it is common for high school graduates to go off to college, and never move back home. The stakes are high: with each student that relocates, the city loses valuable hands, hearts, and minds familiar with local needs, politics, and culture. Stephen Nelson, a 2006 graduate of Ridgeway High School and a 2010 graduate of Rice University in Texas, is not one of those Memphians.

After graduating from Rice, Stephen joined Teach for America (TFA), a nonprofit organization that sends recent college graduates to teach in underserved communities across the United States.

Rather than requesting to be placed in a new city for his teaching experience, Stephen expressed a desire to return to Memphis. He credits his “development in Facing History.”  “[It gave me] a healthy perspective and awareness for the city I live in,” he said recently.

Stephen grew up in what he described as a “comfortable” household in Memphis, with two “highly educated and passionate” parents. As he got older, Stephen realized how grateful he was that his parents pushed him to work hard not only for his own sake, but for the sake of others as well. He described his mother’s community work as “consistent and earnest.” ”[It kept] me grounded and active,” he said.

At Rice, Stephen studied history and English. “[The subjects satisfied] both my desire to have thorough discussions of character, culture, traditions, identity, and power,” he said. As graduation neared, Teach for America seemed like a good match for what Stephen described as his “passion about the rights and needs of children in Memphis.” The application process included discussions on traditions, identity, and power, which reminded him both of his undergraduate coursework and his time in his Facing History high school student group.

During the 2010-2011 school year, Stephen taught at Freedom Preparatory Academy in Memphis. There Stephen saw firsthand the challenges of daily lesson preparation and implementation, along with the bureaucratic and social struggles teachers face, both in the school system and in the home lives of the students. But he also saw the investment his fellow teachers were making to bring change to the city.
     
Now in his second year of teaching, Stephen has moved to the Memphis School of Excellence. He continues to incorporate the lessons he learned with Facing History into the classroom – as well as the lessons he learned in his first year in the field. “I learned over time that every person in the discussion has valuable insight to offer and our diverse experiences enable us to have a richer conversation,” he said. “I have learned repeatedly that adversity is not deterred by privilege. Nor is our capacity to connect with each other on profound levels dependent upon shared background or experience. Ultimately our shared human experiences and needs cut through artificial and perceived differences in education, wealth, and power. I can see the genesis of these thoughts and understandings in the conversations, interactions, and studies I engaged in with Facing History, at my days at Rice, and through Teach for America. Together they have formed the trajectory of my life that continues to propel me forward.”