Ethelyn Tumalad holds the Oregon Teacher of the Year plaque with family at Clackamas High School.
Governor Kate Brown announced the honor for the first generation Filipino-American teacher in early October, Filipino-American History month.
When Ethelyn Tumalad came to the U.S., she was five years old. “In Filipino culture, it’s very much like a collective, and being the eldest in my family comes with certain roles, almost parental,” she explains. “I’ve always naturally been a teacher,” says the alumna of Portland State University.
Now in her fifth year of teaching at Clackamas High School, a recent weekly staff meeting came with a big surprise. Governor Kate Brown joined the meeting virtually to bestow the 2022 Oregon Teacher of the Year award, which comes from the Oregon Department of Education.
“I screamed twice,” says Ethelyn, “once when I saw Omar, and once when I saw my family. I knew I was in the running, but I didn’t think I would get it,” she says. “I grabbed my mother’s hand, and I could feel her emotions. I felt her and my father’s pride. I am thinking of my parents coming to this country when they were my age now, and how they encouraged me, “lakas ng loob,” which means “inner strength.”
Growing up, it was her only teacher of color, Miss Pritchard, who first encouraged her to excel in school. “She said, ‘Ethelyn, you are shy, but you are very good at English.’ Here was someone who looked like me, and she saw something within me,” Ethelyn recalls. “It was up to me in my family to learn how to get to college, and once I did that, to help the younger ones to do the same.”
By 2016, Ethelyn, who is getting married to her fiancé Omar Granados this week, was a graduate of PSU’s School of the Humanities. In 2017 she finished the Graduate Teacher Education Program (GTEP) at the School of Education, thus holding two master’s degrees from PSU, one in English Literature and the second in Education.
“My husband is also the eldest in his family, and we have both navigated cultural knowledge that doesn’t always come easily with being first generation. You have to figure it out,” she says. “Being a first generation immigrant and having the power of being bilingual [Tagalog is her first language], is something that I want to show students, and that is why the AVID program is so important.” AVID stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination.
At Clackamas High School, Ethelyn, who will go by Ethelyn Tumalad-Granados after her wedding on October 16, teaches AVID and started two BIPOC Affinity Groups, one for staff and one for students. While at the College of Education, she started her first Affinity Group, called United Conversation. “I saw how much the educators of color needed to be together,” she says.
As the 2022 Oregon Teacher of the Year, she will serve as a spokesperson and representative for all Oregon teachers. “I want to shine a light on recruitment and retention of educators of color, because it is so important for the students. The students have taught me a lot. They teach me as much as I teach them,” she says. “I teach them to be empathetic and to be the change agent that they want to be. It’s all about them at the end of the day.”
The 2022 Oregon Teacher of the Year Award is sponsored by the Oregon Department of Education in partnership with the Oregon Lottery.