The Graduate School of Education helps students put their knowledge into practice through community engagement. Three soon-to-be graduates speak with Penn Today about how their service enabled them to deepen their connection with West Philadelphia.
(Left to right) Penn GSE’s Vicki Swanson, Hongyang Zhao, and Toby Johnson share how their how community engagements deepen their connection with West Philadelphia.
(Image: Scott Spitzer)
A heat map developed by Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) offers a graphic account of the hundreds of activities where faculty and students are at work on issues facing communities and schools across Philadelphia. It is a snapshot of Penn GSE’s commitment to community engagement.
“Commitment to community, in practical and tangible ways, is core to who we are,” GSE Dean Katharine O. Strunk says. “Our students inspire me constantly with their enormous energy and drive not only as scholars but as change agents focused on making a tremendous impact even before they graduate.”
At the forefront of that work since 2016, Caroline Watts, the founding director of the Office of School and Community Engagement (OSCE), has been leveraging partnerships across Penn and beyond, connecting students, faculty, and resources to Philadelphia schools and community programs. “It is about redressing inequities to improve access and quality for kids in low-resource public schools and community organizations. It is about engaging in the complicated process of working together to make the city a better place,” she says.
As part of this endeavor, GSE runs a tutoring program in two Philadelphia schools, including Penn GSE partnership school Henry C. Lea Elementary. Julie Berger, OSCE associate director, oversees the program, which provides math and literacy tutoring during the school day. A graduate of GSE’s teacher education and executive counseling programs, Berger says she loved her own fieldwork at Lea, and she now brings that passion to leading the program.
“It is really incredible for our tutors to get this real-world experience,” Berger says, “and we continue to look at how can we grow and make sure that we are supporting tutors as best we can. They are the ones who can effect change with the kids.”
Watts and her team work to identify ways to connect students to this kind of real-word experience. “What is wonderful about Penn GSE and the University,” Watts says, “is that for students who are curious and are looking for these experiences between Penn GSE and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, there are lots of opportunities to be actively engaged in the West Philadelphia. With Netter, we have synergies and complementary goals in wanting to serve the community and make Penn a productive and responsive partner.”
Three members of the Class of 2024 who are working with Watts and Berger to do just that are Toby Johnson, Vicki Swanson, and Hongyang Zhao. Penn Today spoke to them about their path to Penn, their community engagement, and their plans for the future.
Toby Johnson, M.S.Ed. in Education Entrepreneurship
Path to Penn
Johnson grew up in Idaho and earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from DePauw University in Indiana. He says his love of teaching began while he was volunteering as a reading tutor to a first grader at DePauw. The experience taught him the importance of reading, which, he says “improves students self-perception, vocabulary, and critical thinking.” Johnson then spent 12 years in China, where he founded a company, USA English, focused on teaching English as a second language to kids using primarily reading courses. When COVID-19 hit, Johnson’s team dispersed, and he moved to Malta.
While running USA English, Johnson says he had started to explore the phonics approach to teaching reading through the use of decodable text. He found that "while decodables were very useful, the fact that they were not leveled to a student’s reading comprehension level was a major pain point.” In 2017, the USA English team “chose to use profits from the tutoring business to fund the development of decodable books addressing that need.”
He enrolled in the Education Entrepreneurship master’s program at Penn GSE with an aim to “increase the pedagogical quality of the Phunics—Fun Phonics reading program through game and assessment development of decodable books and to learn more about introducing the curriculum to schools.”
Connecting with West Philadelphia
During the last year, Johnson has volunteered through GSE in West Philadelphia as a reading tutor both at Lea Elementary working with 1st and 2nd graders and with a 4th grade student at Andrew Hamilton Elementary School. He has also been working through the Netter Center and the Penn Reading Initiative at Benjamin B. Comegys Elementary School. At the Comegys K-2 after-school program, he teaches a literacy course to a group of 15 students each Monday and helps them with their reading homework Mondays and Tuesdays.
As part of his work at Lea, Hamilton, and Comegys, Johnson offered the resources of the Phunics program for free. “Penn Reading Initiative reviewed the curriculum and gave permission to introduce Phunics decodables, worksheets, and games to other tutors,” he says. “Penn’s focus on putting research into practice made it possible to implement the curriculum quickly. The kids are much more engaged and encouraged when working with stories at their level.”
What’s next
Johnson’s plan post-graduation is to grow his passion project Phunics—Fun Phonics. He says that to date, with students in “Indiana, Idaho, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and then internationally Malta, Cyprus, Turkey. Vietnam, China, and the Philippines, the company can claim that over 25,000 Phunics decodable books have been read.” And Johnson wants to bring the curriculum to others. He is now working to get approval for a research pilot program that would bring Phunics into schools throughout Philadelphia and nationwide.
Vicki Swanson, M.Phil.Ed. in Professional Counseling
Path to Penn
Swanson grew up in Nebraska and earned her undergrad degree in relational communications studies at the University of Central Missouri. That program, Swanson says, taught her a lot about people and relationships and “laid a really good foundation for me when I came to the counseling program at Penn.” While an undergraduate, she did peer-counseling work that “sparked some interest in going into the mental health field.” That interest, coupled with a desire to move to the East Coast, and the work Penn faculty were doing, drew her to the program at Penn GSE.
Connecting with West Philadelphia
Through GSE’s Professional Counseling program, Swanson has interned as a behavioral health counselor at Elwyn West Philadelphia working with adults. During the course of her two-year program at GSE, she has also worked with the Netter Center at West Philly High School as a social-emotional learning coach, and last summer with students at Comegys Elementary as part of the counseling support team.
“In my program,” Swanson says, “You spend at least three days a week on site having a case load and getting practice, whether you’re in schools or in a clinical setting doing the actual counseling work while being supervised. The centerpiece of the program is the practical work, and the classes around it are meant to provide foundational learning. Philadelphia is a really enriching city to get to learn to practice mental healthcare within; there’s a lot of really important work happening and needed here.”
Swanson says it was challenging at first “being in a space so different from where I grew up. Working there with the students, the school community, and their families has been super impactful learning how to function within that space and build relationships. It’s been an incredibly impactful professional and personal experience for me,” she says. “I’ve seen high school students learn more language for talking about themselves and their needs and watch them advocate for themselves and other people.”
What’s next
Swanson has accepted a part-time position with Elwyn West Philadelphia and will be working part-time as a high school social emotional coach with the Netter Center. “I am passionate about a lot of the different work that gets done in the mental health field,” she says, “both clinically and in schools, it’s something that’s really needed and has come to light more in the last couple of years since the pandemic.
“What drives me is empowering people to be themselves and build self-ownership and to see them increase their autonomy and self-ownership within the context that they’re in,” she says. “That is the kind of counselor I want to be.”
Hongyang Zhao, M.S.Ed. in Education, Culture, and Society
Path to Penn
Zhao grew up in Shenzhen, China, and came to the United States for his undergraduate studies, graduating from Boston University with a degree in education and a certificate in teaching. With the long view of returning to Shenzhen to teach, he looked for a graduate program. “Penn GSE was the perfect place for me,” he says. “I found faculty members whose research interests aligned with mine, and Philadelphia was attractive as a whole new experience for me.”
Last year, GSE piloted a new track in the program called Community Action and Social Change, in which students focus on community-based work. Zhao says he chose the concentration “to produce something meaningful for myself and the people I serve. Tutoring was the best alternative to teaching full-time while I’m in graduate school,” he says. “It offers me this unique opportunity to engage with the community through the practical application of what I learned in the classroom. It’s the perfect combination of theory and practice.”
Zhao recalls the moment a student he had been tutoring in math mastered the mathematical concepts once impossible for that student. “I felt like a real sense of purpose,” he says. “During our daily interactions, I was thinking, ‘How do I become a better tutor? How do I convey this message or information to her more effectively?’ My biggest takeaway from this experience is that to be a good teacher or tutor you have to really put yourselves in the shoes of the student. West Philadelphia is not a community that raised me,” he says, “but I feel like, in order to do my work to learn to better serve the community in China, I have to put myself into the position of someone who was born into and raised by this West Philadelphia community.”
In addition to the community engagement work in West Philadelphia, Zhao is also giving back by volunteering each week to offer virtual lessons teaching social emotional learning at a rural elementary school in China.
What’s next
Zhao plans to return to Shenzhen, China, and hopes to secure a job there teaching at an international school. “I’ll hopefully teach history or other social science subjects,” he says. “Teaching has always been my passion. It’s considered a luxury to do what you love as a job. I feel really lucky that I can do that.”
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