Teacher Spotlight: John Gensic
Meet John Gensic, high school science teacher at Penn High School in Mishawaka, Indiana. Katy and Lauren from team TNP had the pleasure of meeting John when he attended their session at the ATIA Conference, which he was attending with a group of students from Penn’s Robotics team, and soon after John brought TNP’s STEMpathy Club to Penn. From the start, John has brought a creative energy and a serious passion for promoting disability inclusion at Penn. He’s the first to run the STEMpathy Club as a part of the school day - students work on it during their advisory classes - and he has inspired students and teachers to join workshops and trainings to learn more about disability as a natural and expected part of human diversity. We touched base with John recently to learn a bit more about his story.
What initially drew you to The Nora Project and what made you want to bring it to Penn?
Meeting Katy at ATIA drew me into The Nora Project. I think the idea of connecting learning about disability while engaging in the engineering process was very appealing initially. I also think that being with students at ATIA, and seeing that students were interested in the program, helped draw me in. We have had "Mission to Engineer" at Penn for a number of years where students have worked on accessibility projects for students with disabilities. Additionally, my son is austistic and my wife writes about interviews she has with adult autistics. My awareness of the civil rights and social models of disability were already planted prior to The Nora Project. However, The Nora Project has given me greater confidence to pursue what that means in a school setting.
How has TNP impacted you, personally and professionally?
Professionally, TNP has given me resources to put into practice the really important things I truly believe...like all human lives having equal value, accessible spaces being better, and inclusive activities being richer. It has given me the language to have more difficult conversations with students, teachers, and learning. When people make plans about separating students in our schools, I have the tools to ask, "Do you think inclusive activities are richer activities? How does this apply here?" This has made me more knowledgeable about all things disability (even though I still have a lot of room to grow). Personally, it has helped me better understand natural variation and how it works in humans.
What has the impact of TNP been in your school? What kind of changes and growth have you seen in students and fellow faculty members?
We are a big school. There are about 3-5 other teachers who are now very interested in the concepts and mindsets that I have learned through The Nora Project. We have about 200 teachers. I have seen some change in a few teachers about their thinking about disability and openness to talking about subjects we don't usually talk about. I have a set of 9th graders that I believe have really bonded over learning about the social vs. medical models of disability. I have ten students with either IEPs or 504's in that class. And while many teachers are describing their classrooms as silent and students not interacting...this class is very talkative and engaged with each other. I think part of this community has been built because of our disability awareness journey mapping and our conversations about all human lives having equal value. In one of the Nora Project lessons in class around disability as natural variation...one student...while being a little snarky...applauded when we made the connection between these variations and being accepting of who people are when they are themselves...not trying to fit into some form of normal. After applauding he said something like, "No, I'm being serious. Preach."
Tell us a little bit about the STEMpathy Club at Penn and the sensory wall project your students are working on.
STEMpathy Club has taken on a couple of different forms at Penn HS. We have had numerous classroom sessions where an inclusive group of students have worked on biology engineering projects. We have also been working on making our HS more inclusive through an inclusion survey and trying to teach all our students about inclusion and disability through a set of lessons to be used school wide in 2021 and 2022. The work on these lessons is ongoing and focusing on student voice and community collaboration.
We are also working directly with a number of students to help engineer a sensory wall that helps students learn the biology standards. The standards we are focusing on are focused on evolution. There is a lot of work still to be done. We are hopeful to pilot some of the materials late this school year.
I think this work will grow as we continue to have our classes become more and more inclusive. I think the next few years will be years of lots of progress. The following year may be even more eventful (in terms of number of inclusive classrooms). I am also envisioning a redesign of our handicapped parking space signage in both our district and throughout the community to be a more progressive icon.
Want to meet other amazing folx that support our organization in a variety of ways? Check out our other spotlights, like this one about the Hicks family, or this one about volunteer Jillian Jordan.