Portland Magazine
April 25, 2024
Caryn Anderson ’97 won recognition as a 2023 Educator of the Year.
Story by Emily Nelson
GROWING UP, Caryn Anderson ’97 didn’t have many teachers who looked like her. As a Japanese child living in Alaska, she often felt like she didn’t belong. “I didn’t have a teacher of color until high school,” she remembers. Now, as a teacher in the Portland area, Anderson makes it her mission to connect with and empower her students of color directly, working to be the role model she missed in her own classrooms. Anderson is currently a fourth-grade teacher at Abernethy Elementary and the recipient of OnPoint Community Credit Union’s 2023 Educator of the Year Award for grades K-5, a recognition she admits is “uncomfortable” for her to step into.
“I’m just an ordinary teacher,” she says. “We don’t go into this profession to be famous; we want to make a difference.”
Anderson completed her degree in education at University of Portland and has gone on to teach at the elementary level for 24 years, primarily first and second grades. Of the many highs of her career, she cites teaching fourth grade as one of the most rewarding, as it allowed her to reunite with her former first-graders and complete the year together they had lost to COVID in 2020.
Anderson’s time in education has certainly not been without its difficulties; along with rebuilding after COVID, Portland Public Schools recently emerged from a three-week teacher’s strike, the first in the district’s history. To Anderson, however, these challenging times have only affirmed her commitment to her students. “I’m fighting for them to have access to a better education,” she says. “It’s important to keep your desire for change and connection at the center of your work.”
EMILY NELSON ’19 is UP’s marketing project specialist.
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