This is the first of four profiles on students in our Teaching and Teacher Leadership Program: Licensure Strand. Students in this strand will pursue Massachusetts initial licensure in secondary education with Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) endorsement. To learn more about our two licensure pathways, internship and residency, please visit our website.

As I’m writing this post on September 24th, 2026, I’m remembering where I was one year ago today: Mombasa, Kenya, probably in a classroom rehearsing with high school students in a performing arts club, preparing for their end-of-year competition. I was most definitely smiling as I watched a senior lead her classmates in a choral rendition of one of her favorite Zulu songs from her home in Durban, South Africa. I was thinking, What a gift that I get to be their audience .

At the time, I was wrapping up the last few weeks of my grant term living in Mombasa as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. I was saying goodbye to many of the traditions my students and I had shared over our nine months together: our Swahili and English “Words of the Day,” our games of Pictionary and Wordle, our debates about Kenyan and American pop culture. Our original poetry, our mini grammar lessons. Our discussions of Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his 1964 novel about the Mau Mau Uprising, Weep Not, Child. In its best form, our classroom was a home to rich dialogue, playful creativity, and cultural exchange – and, of course, to laughter.

Still, I desperately wanted to know how I could more effectively support the students in my classes who didn’t yet feel like their voices had a place in that rich dialogue. I wanted to know how to support those who didn’t yet feel confident putting pen to paper to share their ideas through writing. In short, I wanted to figure out how to build a classroom where every student learns how to use their voice and understands why their voice matters. While it’s an incredible gift to be their audience as a teacher, I also wanted them to understand that their audience extends far beyond the classroom.

And so, I applied to HGSE’s Licensure Track in the Teaching & Teacher Leadership (TTL) program to do just that. As someone who is passionate about global citizenship and language arts education, I was inspired by how HGSE prioritizes diverse, cross-cultural perspectives. Rather than shying away from difficult discourse, I noticed how the environment at HGSE instead encourages respectful disagreement. When we began our classes as a TTL English Language Arts (ELA) Licensure cohort in June, I found these values to indeed be core to our learning, as well as to our teaching. Our ELA Teaching Methods professor, Dr. Rosette Cirillo, pushes our cohort to question the assumptions that both the authors we read and we ourselves make each time we enter a conversation about what it means to be an educator.

Over these past few months, I have discovered that there is a particular magic to the TTL program that comes from the mirroring effect of being simultaneously immersed in a learning community while also figuring out how to build our own learning communities as teachers. In July, Dr. Cirillo and our Teaching Fellow, Peyton, surprised our ELA cohort by walking into class wearing cowboy hats and carrying a blow-up horse. We started class with our usual write-in and share-out, following the prompt, “Write a story about a real cowboy.” Yes, it may sound ridiculous. But, as Dr. Cirillo and Peyton showed us that day, we can’t forget to bring our whimsy into the classroom. In that moment, I thought back to all the laughter my students and I shared in Mombasa – as well as the confusion, frustration, and exhaustion. All of these vast emotions find their way into learning, and in TTL, we learn how to help students navigate them together.

In fact, we dove right into navigating these waters in July when, as a TTL Licensure cohort, we taught in the Cambridge Harvard Summer Academy. At a local high school, we worked in teaching teams led by mentors to teach classes ranging from Shark Tank, to Algebra I, to Hip Hop as Literature. My teaching team and I taught Being Human in 2026: A Time Capsule for eleventh and twelfth graders, in which we explored questions of storytelling, creativity, and identity in a world of AI. Throughout our month together, we put our learning into practice as a teaching team, bringing our whimsy and our respect for difficult discourse to the classroom. As we crafted our classroom community, through every little mistake and victory, our students began bringing their whimsy and their respect for difficult discourse, too.

If you’re considering applying to TTL, think about your future students’ audiences beyond the classroom– or, in other words, what beauty and positive change might they bring to the world? How could you, as their teacher, build a learning community where they can discover what that change could be? Where they can consider diverse perspectives, challenge their own assumptions, and laugh? In TTL, all of these questions have a home.

Meg Beuter is an Ed.M. candidate in Teaching & Teacher Leadership, pursuing the English Language Arts Licensure Track. She earned her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2024, where she studied English, American Studies, and Education, Schooling, & Society. Before moving to Cambridge, she was an Assistant Theatre Director at a middle school where she grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, taught high school English in Kenya as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, and led students in an after-school graphic novel book club as an AmeriCorps member in South Bend, Indiana. She is currently interning at Newton South High School, where she teaches tenth-grade English Language Arts as part of Newton South’s Global Justice Communities program.