Hello everyone! I'm Kyra Pitts, a senior here at New Jersey City University pursuing my Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a major in Dance in collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet School in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. As you can probably tell from my major, my primary passion is dance, complemented by other art-based hobbies like knitting, drawing, and photography. I chose this class for my senior capstone because, in addition to being a professional dancer with the Ellen Sinopolli Dance Company and constantly performing, the company actively engages with local schools to bring the arts to public education. I believe delving into the history of American public education will provide valuable insights into the industry our company works in.
Coming from a white middle-class background, literacy became a part of my life at a fairly average age. While not initially interested in reading or writing before preschool, my curiosity grew rapidly during my early years of structured education. In the beginning, I would "pretend" to read tracing my finger along each line of text in a book speaking absolute gibberish. But once I was in elementary school and my knowledge of the alphabet was applied programs like "book-in-a-bag" used in my kindergarten and first-grade classes, allowed me to choose books according to my reading level and interest to practice reading at home, this played a significant role in my early literacy. My parents greatly supported my literacy journey during this time. Embracing phonics, the sound-spelling method, further fueled my passion for learning new words daily, outside of school (and made me feel quite excited to share my knowledge of these new words I had learned on my own). Writing came naturally by early 1st grade, and by 2nd grade, I felt confident in my reading abilities. My literacy improved year after year, each year feeling more confident than the one before.
In middle school, I was placed in "advanced" classes, surrounding myself with strongly literate peers that further enhanced my literacy skills. This period also marked my discovery of a visual and audible approach to reading, incorporating audiobooks alongside physical books to boost comprehension. Then, transitioning to online high school while pursuing dance training in New York City exposed me to eloquent and highly literate individuals over the age of 20 in my dance school. Striving to match their level of literacy, my word choice strengthened during my high school years. A significant source of inspiration for my literacy development was the artistic director of the pre-professional training program at Joffrey Ballet School. After graduating last spring, my continued motivation to enhance my literacy comes mostly from reading articles, driven by my natural inclination to always learn and absorb new information. As I mentioned earlier, being surrounded by young learners in schools myself, but this time on the other side compels me to take a deep dive into American education and its history as well as the bidirectional effect between race, income level, and ethnicity, and accessibility and retention of literacy.
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