Double Anteater weaves music, filmmaking skills into educator role

As a daughter of immigrants, Shirley Nieto MAT '23 cultivates empathy in her dual-immersion student teaching placement.

By Phillip Jordan
June 8, 2023

As the daughter of a father from El Salvador and a mother from Mexico, Shirley Nieto felt she had grown up in a nurturing, musical, but insular family. “We lived in a bubble,” Nieto said. “Much of that was out of fear due to my parents’ immigration status. But I wanted a bigger world. When I got into UCI as an undergrad, I was hungry to figure out the world beyond me.”
 
She found her avenues in film and political science, eventually graduating with degrees in both. Nieto soon started working as a music teacher for young children at a church near her in Orange County. The experience made her consider teaching as a career for the first time. Next, she got a job as a music teacher with Save Our Youth in Costa Mesa. The wheels started turning in Nieto’s mind.
 
“I thought, ‘Maybe I can bring film and music and art and skits and all of the things I love into a typical classroom, to help students really connect to all the possibilities in the world,’” Nieto said. “We need to expose more kids to art inside the classroom. It’s so much more than a hobby. It’s part of who you are and how you express yourself.”​

Shirley Nieto MAT '23

​Fast forward to today and Shirley Nieto MAT ’23 will soon graduate as a double-Anteater with her Master of Arts in teaching and a multiple subject credential with a bilingual authorization to be a bilingual teacher. Nieto credits her School of Education professors with not just supporting her ideas, but constantly finding new ways to weld her musical and filmmaking skills into her role as an educator.
 
In her student teaching placement this year at a dual-immersion first-grade classroom in Lake Forest, Calif., Nieto plays the guitar almost every day. Or the ukulele. Or the jarana. Or the vihuela. The multi-instrumentalist recently taught her students a traditional Mexican song in both Spanish and English, and they learned a dance that the kids performed at a school open house.
 
“Teaching music is such a great way to teach culture,” Nieto said. “And music helps you retain what you learn, too.”

Nieto was one of three School of Education candidates to receive the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) Teachership. She, pictured right, along with MAT candidates Melanie Macias and Estefanía Hurtado were among only five awarded this honor in the state this year.

She’s also using her film expertise. As Nieto learns her students’ interests, she makes short film clips to teach lessons. For instance, she recently incorporated a student’s love of jewelry into a math lesson — creating a short animation of the student’s beaded bracelet that allowed them to add and subtract the beads.
 
“Shirley brings so much of herself into the classroom both at UCI and in her student teaching,” said Myuriel von Aspen, coordinator of the Multiple Subject Teacher Credential Program. “She is an extremely talented and creative individual and yet she is one of the most humble students I know.”
 
For Nieto, bringing her full, authentic self into the classroom includes her experience as a first-generation college student who remembers the day her father — from whom Shirley got her love of music — was deported.
 
“I was just a kid in first grade, and all of a sudden my dad was gone,” she recalled.
 
Nieto’s mother moved Shirley and her two siblings from Santa Ana to Victorville, Calif., where they rented a room in a relative’s house. Nieto had to switch from a bilingual school to an English-only school. Nobody in her family spoke English at the time, and both her grades and confidence suffered. 
 
Nieto’s father returned when she was in fourth grade and the family moved back to their familiar community in Santa Ana. One of Nieto’s teachers noticed she was struggling and gave up her lunchtime to help Nieto get back on track.

The one thing her teacher couldn’t fix was the fear that consumed Nieto on a daily basis due to her parents’ immigration status.
 
“It’s a stressor that lots of kids live with who have immigrant parents here,” she said. “It’s the continuous fear that your parents might not be there the next day. My parents couldn’t get driver’s licenses. They couldn’t get payroll jobs. My dad was one of those people standing outside Home Depot. My mom cleaned houses during the day and sewed shirts at night.
 
“That’s why I teach in a dual-immersion classroom. I understand that stress for my students.”

“Shirley exemplifies empathy,” von Aspen said. “And that’s one of the most important traits for an educator to have. We know that students do better academically when their socio-emotional needs are met, but to meet those needs a teacher first has to build trusting relationships with their students. That’s Shirley.”
 
Back in 2019, Shirley graduated with her bachelor’s degrees on Father’s Day in the United States. This year, she’ll receive her master’s degree on the day El Salvador observes Father’s Day — and Shirley’s father says that seeing her graduate again is the only Father’s Day gift he needs.

For the 2023-24 school year, Nieto will join as a teacher in the Las Palmas dual immersion program in San Clemente. While a teacher candidate in the MAT program, she was placed in Lake Forest in the dual immersion program at Gates Elementary School, where they will be offering a bilingual residency for student teachers starting next year.

But it’s not just Shirley’s graduation that her family has to celebrate this year. On October 28, 2022, Shirley’s mom had her U.S. citizenship ceremony. And just recently, her father passed his U.S. citizenship test, too, with his own ceremony coming later this summer.

​“We’re going to have a huge party when that happens because it’s such a relief and it’s been such a long journey,” Shirley said. “That will be such an uplifting moment for our family to have them both as citizens after all these years!”