As students and teachers head back to school on August 9, Juliana Urtubey will have a different mission for the 2021-2022 school year: attending some 200 events across the country as the reigning National Teacher of the Year.

In May, Urtubey made history by becoming the first Nevada educator to win the prestigious award, and the first Latina teacher to receive the honor since 2005. First lady Jill Biden surprised Urtubey with a visit to her classroom at Kermit R. Booker, Sr. Innovative Elementary School to congratulate her, and resorts on the Strip celebrated Urtubey’s achievement by posting her name on marquees.

And Urtubey says the excitement hasn’t worn off. “I love teachers and I love hearing teachers’ stories, so I’m at a really unique position to be able to not only share my perspective, but to hear different teachers’ perspectives and do my best to unify all the stories and find common themes, things that unite us and can help us grow. So I’m really excited about it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she tells the Weekly. “There are countless teachers who make an impact every single day in the lives of so many children. And I hope that all those teachers know how much their work matters.”

Urtubey, who just finished her 11th year of instruction, teaches pre-K through fifth grade special education at Booker. It’s an area, she says, that she feels especially passionate about, driven by her conviction that everyone has strengths and that we all learn and think differently.

“I was a fellow with Understood.org, which is a resource hub. They do so many things in addition to just resources. How can we support kids with learning and thinking differences? Because one in five people have learning or thinking differences—if that’s autism or learning disability or attention considerations or behavioral considerations. This is really a big population of our community,” she says. “So how can we ensure that we are not only just providing them with the strategies to be able to have self-determination and self-awareness, but also to learn and thrive in environments?

“One of [Understood.org’s] taglines is, ‘Shaping the world for difference,’” she continues. “When we don’t necessarily have a normative idea of what normal learning looks like, what a normal language is or what a normal child looks like, we tend to break that. And we’ve put that to the side. We take each person for who they are, and we meet them where they are. That’s when we’re really creating the space for everybody to thrive.”

This celebration of difference sits at the core of Urtubey’s beliefs, not just in her teaching philosophy, but in her life as a whole. She came to the U.S. from Colombia with her parents at age 5, and as a child of immigrants, she feels very strongly about honoring her culture and heritage. She strives to impart the same to her students.

“I recognize what a journey it has been for me to protect and maintain and affirm my identity,” Urtubey says. “I feel that many students are so confronted with the expectation [of] assimilation. So many families of colors and first-generation families want their children to be loved and to succeed. And they feel it’s kind of an unspoken understanding that in order to do so, they must really subjugate. I hear families telling their children, ‘Don’t speak Spanish, speak in English so you can practice,’ when research tells us that when children make spaces for their languages, they’ll maintain goals. It’s really important for me, for families to know that it’s important to us as educators, for them, for their children, to be able to feel like they can be themselves, that they don’t have to exchange who they are for acceptance or for success at school.”

In her role as National Teacher of the Year, Urtubey has committed to a platform that fosters a sense of belonging, one that integrates a child’s school life and home life. “I call it the ‘joys and just’ framework,” she says. “All students really deserve to experience joy in their learning. And joy is more than happiness, it’s more than just smiling and loving what you’re doing. It’s having this really deep sense of belonging to the school environment. And schools can do that by truly affirming who students are, right? So that teacher affirms your languages, your culture, your resilience, of being a first-generation student.

“And then the ‘just’ part is that we’re committed to looking at where inequities lie in school systems, and we’re not afraid to speak up and say, hey, we should do it like this, because that way we can bring children forward; we can bring them just as they are without having them take off parts of who they are to succeed in school. And by doing so, we want families to be connected, too. … We see strengths first for families and communities, because we don’t want education to separate our children from their families. We want it to support the families through their education.”

Urtubey has a big task ahead fulfilling that mission. It’s a life’s work that’s just beginning to flourish, not unlike the school gardens she has planted with her students, who call themselves the Garden Gnomies. The project has helped them to feel part of the school, Urtubey says, by giving them an opportunity to start something from the beginning and see it come to fruition. They watch seeds grow into fruits and vegetables, which they donate to the community.

“I think that it’s really important for children to know that they are valuable in the community and that therefore makes an impact, because it truly does,” Urtubey says.

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