NEA Today for Aspiring Educators, Fall 2025

A MESSAGE FROM NEA ASPIRING EDUCATORS PROGRAM CHAIR 
HANNAH STCLAIR  

Our Why, Our Future

We are constantly asked for our “why.” Why do we want to become educators?

For the students! Whether we’re inspired by the students we have had, the classmates we once knew, or the way we were treated as students, we want to replicate the good experiences and prevent the bad ones from ever happening again. 

Does your why include fighting anti-public education rhetoric and attacks by certain lawmakers? When we set out to become educators, we didn’t expect to be living at a time when our schools, students, and educators were under attack. Yet, here we are.

Becoming an Aspiring Educator today means preparing for both the day-to-day needs of our students and the impacts of systemic underfunding, anti-public education legislation, and negative rhetoric about educators.

Being an educator today means being an advocate—both in and out of the classroom. So, what if we reconsider our whys?

I think of my little sister, Sophia. She just started the fifth grade. Sophia doesn’t know a world that’s any different from the one we’re in, yet she has radical hope for a better one. Sophia creates protest signs, stands up against xenophobia in her own classroom, and exercises her First Amendment right to not say the Pledge of Allegiance, because there isn’t justice and liberty for all in this United States. 

Sophia says I give her hope, but, in reality, she gives me hope, courage, and the drive to push forward. 

We will not go back. 

Our students are living through a “season of suffering,” to quote Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, they push onward. 

In my lifetime, I hope to see an empathetic society with individuals who care for their neighbors and work together to put people above profit. I dream of a nation where systems work for the people, not just those in power, and where every child has a safe place to live, learn, and be fed. To achieve that world, I believe we need a society that prioritizes community, critical-thinking skills, accessible mental health care, solidarity among workers, and joy. 

As an Aspiring Educator, I believe my future classroom can be the world I want to see outside the school building. However, I must live with the reality that my students and I face a different world outside the walls of the school building. This is why I advocate. I advocate because I believe a better world is possible—one where my little sister doesn’t have to protest at 10 years old, where her friends do not fear that their families will be taken away in an immigration raid, and where I don’t fear a school lockdown because of gun violence. 

What do you dream of? 

What change do you want to see in your lifetime? 

How do your actions help build the world you want to see?

Thank you for being a part of the movement for educational justice, for turning your values into action, and for believing in a better world.