Abbi Kopf she/her
Self-Bio: I’m a senior in college going into early education. Currently I’m working on a thesis that’s part interview study and part literature review, and I’m going to develop my own ECE curriculum! A fun fact is that the part of graduation I’m looking forward to the most is getting my own kitten 🙂
Year of div 3:2021
Name of div: Investigating Identity in Early Childhood Education: Research and Curriculum
Summary of your div 3: I’m conducting a series of interviews with current educators and education researchers in an effort to understand how identity develops in early childhood, and how that development is shaped by school curriculums. I want to use that study, along with a literature review, to understand how children are taught about “right” and “wrong” ways to be and how a curriculum could be created to resist that occurrence.
Hampshire’s influence: It makes me busy but also driven! My time at Hampshire has completely changed how I think about education and what it means to be an educator. I started teaching before college so I can’t say for sure that it was Hampshire and not just growing up that changed me, but my practices now are so much more child-centered and deliberately focused on anti-racism than they were five years ago. I think outside of work, because its environment is so isolating, Hampshire has made me more independent and more able to be alone.
What place on campus was significant to you? : Mixed Nuts! Aside from being a beautiful space, it’s where I found one of the warmest and longest-lasting communities at Hampshire that I’ve been a part of. It’s also the first place I went on campus! When I did an overnight, the student I stayed with had early morning work so I went to Mixed Nuts and worked while they were out. It was perfect and peaceful, and it’s the space on campus where I’ve always felt comfortable.
Describe the on-campus place as you remember it. : It feels like a cabin in the woods somewhat. There are benches along the left wall where students go to study, and on the right is the actual co-op. There are couches and comfy chairs all around the middle of the space, coffee and tea to drink while you work or hang out with friends, and always really good snacks. My favorite are the garlic sesame sticks! I used to work there in the afternoons after a morning class, and my friend would always stop by and pull a chair up to the cashiers desk to read, eat bagels, and joke around with me. My favorite part is all the little windows scattered around – there’s one right over the sink where I could see the sunset during evening shifts.
What place off-campus was significant to you? My home!
Describe the off-campus place as you remember it.: It’s a house in Philly, on a smaller street off of South Street. I haven’t technically lived there my whole life, but we moved there when I was two so I’ve lived there as long as I can remember. My cats are always around in the same places, one on the couch downstairs and one on my bed, and we always have good food. It’s cozy and feels safe there.
dear you/me,
this is weird! i’m not very good at writing letters, let alone writing a letter to a past me. i feel like there’s so much to say and so much that’s already been said. this is probably good timing, though, because i’ve spent so much of the last year grappling with the question: if i could go back and pick a different school, would i?
i don’t think i would. i think i wish i wanted to more than i do, which is too convoluted to really make any sense. there’s so much bad on this campus! so many bad memories, so many people who are bad for me, i mean, the campus itself has been bad for me from the start. i’m nota farm person. i crave the action and life and change of a city.
for some reason in this past year i’ve been connected to a lot of projects that involve prospective students, so i’ve been thinking a lot about how i would talk to someone who thought they wanted to go here. i told my cousin, who’s 14, that she shouldn’t go here. i told my sister that i should visit her, not the other way around, because she wouldn’t like it here. hampshire is so quiet, so empty, so isolated/isolating. no wonder so many people leave after their first year!
we preach collectivism and collaboration but the entire campus breeds individualism. would it be better if all the rooms weren’t singles? or if there were more events, more clubs, more parties? i know hampshire attracts a Certain Type Of Person – i feel like i’ve heard that line a thousand times since coming here. does that mean that people who come here are better suited to being alone/living alone/working alone, though? or just that they can deal? between hampshire and covid quarantines, i’ve definitely gotten very good at it. i think hampshire pushes out people who thrive on being alone, on working alone, on pushing themselves towards their goals alone. i feel
like there’s a disjunct between what Hampshire, as in the abstract administration, wants to be and what the students/faculty/on the ground community thinks it is. i think we want to be a community but the administration keeps us apart. i mean, you can see it every time a free store or mutual aid group gets shut down.
i think i’m getting off topic. how has hampshire changed me? it’s a hard question to answer. i think, to answer that, i would need to have a firm grasp on who i was before coming here and i don’t think i have that. i’m happy with who i am now, and i feel sure in what i care about and what i want to do with my life, but there’s also an incredible amount of uncertainty just two months away. i feel like i’m in this weird space where some part of me desperately wants to be away from hampshire but another part of me doesn’t because i know leaving here means leaving safety, routine, comfort, a sense of knowing where i am and where i’m supposed to be. i feel like i know where i’m supposed to go, but it still feels like it should be years away. i don’t know how to get there. and what if i end up like jess, in that episode of new girl, crying outside the school i got fired from because i’ve never wanted to do anything else with my life but teach? my friends seem so comfortable and assured as they move forward with their lives, get homes, get jobs, move away from family – i don’t want to do any of that. not really.
i guess, in sum, i’m confused. i feel lost. there’s so much that hampshire has brought me that’s good – friends that i adore, a feeling like i know my way of making change in the world,
but there’s so much i feel like i should have that i don’t. it’s like when you leave high school and realize that they never taught you how to do your taxes. i know you’re scared, and i know you’re sad. i feel the same way now! it’s funny, in a way. i’ve been thinking a lot about freshman year. i guess the advice i would give you would be to jump in head first. don’t hold back. something’s always gonna get you eventually, so you might as well just try as hard as you can to have fun while you can! like eva said, life is just a crazy acid trip and then you die. make it fun.
sorry this letter is bizarro, sorry it’s all over the place, sorry you’re never actually going to get a change to read it! hoping for the best for you,
abbi
What We Remember 