Your Environment Made You. And It's Making Your Students Too.
From the South Side of Chicago to Phoenix. What Dewey, Tupac, and my mother taught me before I had a name for it.
I’ve got something to say. That’s how I started my first Substack, and since then I’ve written about what it costs to be a Black father raising children in predominantly White spaces, about school closings and what communities lose when institutions treat buildings as budget lines, about Pride in Chicago and Transgender Day of Remembrance and why bearing witness is not optional for those of us who care about others and teach the full range of humanity. This post is about all of it. And none of it. It’s about what runs underneath.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago moving through spaces most people experience separately; a popular Black church on the South Side, several integrated day camps, independent schools, youth sports leagues, and neighborhoods where the boundaries between safety and danger shifted block by block. I did not think any of this unusual. I thought everyone grew up this way.
They did not.
The philosopher John Dewey, who argued that education is not preparation for life but life itself, founded the University of Chicago Laboratory School where I attended high school. His most basic and essential framework, learning by doing, centered on the belief that learning happens in and through experience, that the environment a child inhabits is not backdrop to their education but its primary text. I did not know any of this as a teenager walking through those doors. I know it now. And I understand that my mother placed me in spaces that were a living experiment in exactly what Dewey theorized: if you design an environment with intention, the people inside it learn things that no lesson plan can fully transmit.
What I understand now, decades later, is my environment was doing something to me before I had language for what it was doing. It was building a set of capacities; for navigating difference, for reading rooms, for meeting people where they are rather than where I wished they were, that no classroom explicitly taught me. My mother understood this before Dewey’s name meant anything to me. She was deliberate about the spaces she placed me in. She knew that a child does not just learn from what is taught. A child learns from everything the environment communicates about who they are, who belongs, and what is possible. And from the people they are surrounded by.
As Director of Student Teaching at National College of Education, now National Louis University, the original Dr. Rhoden trained teachers to do what she had always done instinctively: to walk into any classroom, in any neighborhood, and make every student feel not less than but capable, seen, and worthy of being called a scholar. That is perhaps one of her greatest legacies. Not just the students she taught directly, but the teachers they became and spread across Chicago into their own classrooms carrying that same conviction. My mother demonstrated cultural trust before I could identify it as such.
The cities I chose as an adult continued that education.
Los Angeles, first as a college student, and then eleven years later when I returned, taught me about scale and imagination. A city so vast that every version of America seems to exist within it simultaneously, and where the distance between opportunity and despair is measured in freeway exits. Teaching high school in South Central, I learned that the neighborhood the world had either stereotyped or written off entirely was full of people who had not written off themselves. The roses, as Tupac observed, were growing from the concrete. What they needed was not admiration for surviving the concrete. They needed soil.
Washington D.C., after college graduation, taught me about power: how it moves, who holds it, what it costs to seek it and what it costs to walk away. The District is a city of extraordinary proximity; poverty and policy, monuments and neglect, all within walking distance of each other. It showed me early that the gap between what institutions say and what they do is not incidental. It is structural.
Philadelphia, where I earned my Ph.D., taught me about history as a living presence. A city that carries its contradictions openly, where the Liberty Bell and some of the nation’s most entrenched educational inequities occupy the same geography, and where people are not afraid to advocate for equity. Graduate school gave me the scholarly language for what I had been observing for years: trauma is institutional, trust is cultural, and the relationship between educators and students is never simply personal but always historically situated.
And then I came to Phoenix.
Phoenix, despite competing with Philadelphia for the title of fifth largest city in the United States, is unlike any city I have ever lived in. The landscape is different. The demographics are different. The political climate is different. The students are different in ways that took me time to understand and are still teaching me. Many are first-generation college students navigating higher education without a map, a condition I recognize from classrooms I have taught in for decades. Others hold perspectives shaped by communities and experiences that look nothing like the South Side of Chicago or South Central Los Angeles. Many of my students’ politics, faith commitments, and ideas about education differ sharply from mine, and they arrive at my classroom with their own forms of doubt, their own histories of being unseen, their own quiet questions about whether they belong in a university.
I did not grow up knowing these students. But I have learned how to reach them.
Not through agreement or indoctrination. I do not pretend to share every value, and I do not think pretending serves anyone. But through something Dewey would have recognized: the conviction that every person in the room has a legitimate experience of the world, and that education begins in the encounter between that experience and something larger than it. Understanding is not the same as acceptance. Curiosity is not the same as endorsement. What I offer my students, all of them, across every difference, is the same thing my mother offered hers: a room where they are met fully, where their presence is not a problem to be managed, and where the person in front of them has been shaped by enough of the world to know that complexity is not a threat to learning. It is its condition.
Every student who sits in front of me has been shaped by environments they did not choose: neighborhoods, schools, families, institutions that sent messages, often contradictory, about their worth and their capacity. Some of those messages were affirming. Many were not. And by the time a student fails a course and ends up in front of me, someone they may not have expected to see at the front of a classroom, they have usually internalized at least some of the noise that tells them they are less than. Imposter syndrome is real. And it does not only live at the margins.
The psychological research on Post-Traumatic Growth, the work of Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, tells us something important and counterintuitive: adversity does not have to be the end of the story. When people are supported in making meaning of difficult experiences rather than simply surviving them, something can shift. Not always. Not automatically. But often enough to matter. The failed course is not a verdict. It is a moment. What happens in that moment depends enormously on what the environment around it communicates.
That is where I come in. Not as a therapist. Not as a savior. As someone who designs the environment by making students feel seen, welcomed, and trusted.
I tell my students on the first day: you failed a class. You are not a failure. The distinction sounds simple. It rarely lands simply. Because for most of them, the environments they have been navigating have been communicating the opposite implicitly, or unfortunately explicitly. That their transcript is who they are. That their setback is their sentence. That failure is fatal. That the institution’s assessment of their performance is the truth about their potential.
After a long season of grief and loss that tested everything I thought I knew about resilience, I am returning to my scholarship and finding the full theoretical language for what I have been doing instinctively all along.
I call it cultural trust.
Cultural trust is the belief students develop that their educator and institution will recognize, respect, and protect who they actually are, not who those around them have decided they are. All of who they are: culturally, historically, relationally, in all the nuance and complexity of where they came from and where they are trying to go.
It is not warmth as personality. It is not likability or charm or the ability to code-switch convincingly enough to seem relatable. It is the sustained, consistent, repairable practice of building an environment where a student does not have to choose between being themselves and being safe. Where difference is not managed or merely tolerated, but understood. Where failure is not a moral verdict but a developmental moment. Where the person at the front of the room has lived enough through enough experiences, loss, and difference, to meet whoever walks through the door with a smile and a kind word.
I have known this since I walked into my first classroom in South Central in 2004 as a long-term substitute, and a young man shoved his desk back and said: “Why you frontin’ like you care? You’re just gonna leave like the rest of ‘em.”
I just did not have a name for it yet.
Now I do. And I have spent the better part of the last decade teaching while being interrupted by grief, sustained by students, and challenged by a city that has taught me as much as any I have ever lived in.
Now I am turning that instinct into scholarship.
Alongside several peer-reviewed manuscripts currently under review, my forthcoming book, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? The Journey from Unknowing to Knowing, is the culmination of that work. It is, in every way that matters, my mother’s book. And my students’. And the young man in South Central who taught me, by challenging me, that trust is not given. It is earned. It is a homage to the spaces and places that raised me, to my expansive and loving village.
I’ve got something to say. I’m finally ready to say all of it.