Nefertari Galeta became a teacher six years ago for a simple reason: to teach kids. But it’s all of the other “stuff” that came alongside working with middle school math students that made each morning walk to the classroom a struggle.
Galeta felt that what was being asked of her as a math teacher wasn’t enough. She tried to balance meeting state standards and getting students ready for the next school year with a more meaningful holistic approach. Unfortunately, there was little time to address the socioemotional skills also lost in the COVID-19 pandemic, which Galeta considered foundational to academic success.
“We are expected to be exceptional problem-solvers, educate, and keep forging ahead with minimal support,” she says. She adds that it’s difficult to teach in a way that encompasses the entire scope of her students’ lives when the challenges of their lives take up so much space in the classroom.
She also felt alone. In a majority-Black school, she was one of few Black educators on staff. And the challenges that educators face—both inside and outside the classroom—are tough to explain to anyone who hasn’t been a teacher before. Which is why, after spending a long day teaching math to middle schoolers one Thursday in May, Galeta went to Carnegie Museum of Art to be with other people who understand. She was one of around three dozen people participating in the museum’s spring session of the Empowered Educators program, which aims to bring educators together through art to cultivate a deeper understanding of how race and racialized experiences shape the experience of learning for students and teachers.
“People are needing a place to come to not just exhale, but inhale as well. Empowered Educators is a place for receiving positivity in the midst of things maybe collapsing around you.”
Maisha Johnson, Carnegie Museum of Art’s senior manager of youth and family teaching and learning
For one evening each month between January and May, these teachers came together to eat, laugh, study art, write, have conversations, and be authentic with each other. Facilitators guided the groups of educators through artmaking exercises and reflective conversations. Some may have left with ideas for their classroom, but that’s not the point.
“People are needing a place to come to not just exhale, but inhale as well,” says Maisha Johnson, the museum’s senior manager of youth and family teaching and learning. “Empowered Educators is a place for receiving positivity in the midst of things maybe collapsing around you.”
“[Community] is our anchor, and belonging is critical work that we are intentional about,” says Johnson. “People are looking for a place to be able to just exhale and to receive love and give love.”
Needing and Making Space
Every evening begins with dinner. Educators must nourish themselves—physically, emotionally, spiritually—before they can nourish others.
This Thursday night in May—the fifth and final session of the spring season—the catered dinner included platters of sushi, serving bowls of cold peanut noodles, and hot trays of pork dumplings. As people entered the Ford Mateer Classroom on the museum’s ground floor, they waved and called out to one another, smiled and exchanged hugs before helping themselves to food.
“There’s something about that ritual that’s like being part of a family,” says Shari Holland, a licensed professional counselor and director of behavioral science at UPMC McKeesport Family Medicine Residency Program, who teaches residents in the program. “It becomes this natural place to be authentic.”
For Galeta, that authenticity is everything. “Empowered Educators is such an important space for teachers,” she says. “It’s a place that is psychologically safe that validates teachers and understands the importance of community.” Surrounded by these colleagues, she doesn’t feel silenced by, or worry about retaliation from, school administrators for speaking the truth about classroom education in 2025. She can just speak. And be heard.
The 21/2-hour sessions are free and qualify for ACT 48 continuing education credits. The evenings together include three segments: dinner, viewing art, and making art. Each season has a theme drawn from what’s on display in the museum at that time. Since it began eight years ago, the program has covered a melange of topics, including the utopic possibilities of the internet, Black feminism, and mapmaking. They are all, ultimately, a way of re-seeing the world people think they know.
Carnegie Museum of Art launched the program in collaboration with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project in August 2017 after hearing that some of its student-focused programming, which used art to spark deep conversations among young people, could be helpful to teachers as well.
At its start, Empowered Educators asked this question: How does art support relevant, engaging, and equitable learning in classrooms? The initiative, which specifically sought to give teachers tools through art and language to navigate race and identity in learning, was immediately successful. The first evening workshop was fully booked and was repeated three weeks later.
Dana Bishop-Root, the museum’s director of education and public programs, says that until relatively recently, what was valuable to the visitor experience was determined by the museum. Empowered Educators embodies how museums are reconsidering that notion, she notes, and are evolving using their resources to meet the needs expressed by their communities.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and its subsequent fallout took hold, Bishop-Root says teachers’ exhaustion became a growing concern. She recalls them saying, “We also need to be poured into. What our young people are struggling with is deeply painful, and there is so much trauma.”
Johnson says Empowered Educators averaged 35-40 participants this spring, nearly double from the year before. The program’s definition of “educator” is broad: classroom teachers, doctors, lawyers, qualitative researchers—anyone who is in a position to hear, influence, or reflect on another person’s story.
Karen Howard is a co-founder of Empowered Educators, former classroom educator, and current program facilitator. She says an essential goal was to intentionally create a space where participants and facilitators alike felt safe to be emotionally vulnerable. “Once people know that we’re sincere and we have something of truth to offer, they want it,” she says. “I think everybody wants to be better in what they’re doing.”
Creating Difficult Conversations
In recent years, the need for fellowship among educators has only become more critical, as school districts become ground zero in the culture wars while teachers figure out how to help close the post-COVID learning gap. More than three-quarters of teachers—78 percent—have considered quitting the profession since COVID, according to a recent University of Missouri survey.
“People are seeking, post-pandemic, ways to be in the right relationship with each other,” says facilitator Michelle King. Empowered Educators allows people to engage with difficult questions—especially around race—and difficult answers. That kind of collaboration, King points out, is the very nature of a commonwealth (which Pennsylvania is).
The theme for spring 2025 was The Art of Archiving: Remembering, Imagining, and Becoming. It included visits to the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive, and special exhibitions Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden and Gala Porras-Kim: The reflection at the threshold of a categorical division.
“As teachers and educators, we are curators, too. There’s a real deep power in what information you put together because there are ways that we are telling the story, both implicitly and explicitly.”
Michelle King, Empowered Educator facilitator
Over the course of five months, participants spent their time together considering the definition of archiving, its purpose, and what they archive as individuals.
For the May session, discussion centered on Porras-Kim’s work on display in the Forum Gallery. The exhibition featured rendered drawings of artifacts from Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh archives. Through these drawings, Porras-Kim asked why museums choose to display—and classify—the objects that they do.
One section of the exhibition is the result of asking the museums about the objects they choose not to display. Each related drawing has a description of the object and the reason it’s unlikely to be displayed, such as a vase that once contained human remains.
Context is essential to interpreting art and cultural artifacts, King tells the group, and she encourages people to consider the context of their own lives. Toward that end, King asks them, “What’s going on in your lives today? The political climate? School dynamics? What are you dealing with?”
Those questions are important to consider, King says, because they influence how educators choose to teach their students.
“As teachers and educators, we are curators, too,” says King. “There’s a real deep power in what information you put together because there are ways that we are telling the story, both implicitly and explicitly.”
Holland began attending the program at Howard’s encouragement. Not only has it informed her approach to teaching medical students, but it has also challenged her to rethink her own practice as a professional counselor.
“Where does my own bias get in the way?” she asks. “I’ve had times where I’ve had to think differently about where I was coming from and ask what the other person is bringing to the experience.”
Personal Archives
The evening ends with artmaking. Tonight, participants will be finishing a project they’ve been creating over the previous five months—an “archive,” in book form, of their own life experiences.
“That’s always my favorite part—everyone is sitting there together, creating,” says Stephanie Flati, who teaches middle school visual art at Winchester Thurston School.
The tables on which everyone had dinner only hours before now contain a few basic items like scissors and glue. But it’s around the large table in the middle, piled high with materials and supplies to share, where everyone gets to know each other, says Flati.
“Even though it might be a different group of people each time, you would also see someone that you talked to the time before,” she notes. Flati finds that communal-table aspect of the program so wonderful that she’s incorporated it into her own classroom.
“There’s something about that ritual [of eating together] that’s like being part of a family. It becomes this natural place to be authentic.”
Shari Holland, Licensed professional counselor and Director of Behavioral Science at UPMC McKeesport Family Medicine Residency Program
As everyone works, Howard suggests that they be “mindful to remember that we have not gotten into this space and time by ourselves. We were carried here on the shoulders of our ancestors.”
That speaks to Holland. She realized in considering personal archives that her grandmother’s quilts acted as such. She remembered her mom pointing out various patches, recalling the dresses they had once been and the people who wore them. With that in mind, Holland included pictures of quilts in her archive book as well as imagery from the Civil Rights Movement. She wrote out her first memory of marching with her dad in 1963; she was 5, and they were protesting a Michigan real estate agency’s policy of not selling homes to African Americans.
In making her archive, Galeta considered what it means to fully present the truth and “to continue documenting through periods of turmoil and censorship.” The result was a zine that reflected her values as a “born-a-crime, born-free” South African woman now living in Pittsburgh. Those values: “heart-space, producing more than I’m consuming, responsible community, and spirituality.”
These archive projects may never directly inform each person’s classroom, but there’s still plenty of value in their creation. King wants their artmaking to continue outside of this space.
“Let this be an invitation for us to be bigger,” she says, “to think about how we can spread love and joy.”
Art feeds curious minds and builds community. That goes for everyone—especially teachers.
“It is the core of our creation,” Howard says. “We were created; therefore, we create. So go for it, empowered.”
Empowered Educators is generously supported by The Grable Foundation.
