Making an Impact: Dawn Garcia

By Chuck Cascio, author and former South Lakes teacher

Photo contributed by Dawn Garcia

From her childhood in the Bronx to her teen years in Reston, Dawn Garcia knew she wanted to become a teacher. However, when she graduated from Marymount University with a degree in English and a license in secondary education, she felt the need to broaden her work experience before pursuing her long-term goal. “I was not ready to transition from being in the classroom as a student to being in front of a class as a teacher,” Dawn says. “I wanted some life experiences outside of school, so I took different jobs, including retail management, government contracting, and event planning.”

After five years of exploration, she was ready. “I knew all roads would lead back to teaching, and when I finally stepped into a classroom as a teacher, it felt like coming home.”

Dawn began her teaching career at George Marshall High School, then moved to Falls Church High School before transferring to South Lakes High School in 2011, where she has worked ever since. A 1997 graduate of South Lakes, she recalls that when her multiethnic family (her father is Filipino and her mother is Chinese/European) moved to Reston in 1993, just before her first year at the school, she was unsure of what to expect. “I thought starting high school far from my Bronx comfort zone would be extremely challenging, so I expected a culture shock,” she says.

The reality, however, was different. “What immediately struck me about South Lakes and Reston was how welcoming and diverse the community was. I made friends easily, and the diversity of Reston felt very similar to what I was accustomed to in the Bronx.”

Dawn’s appreciation for diversity shapes her approach to teaching. She is keenly aware of changes in how students learn, think, and express themselves. As a result, she has adjusted her instructional methods while maintaining her primary goal: “to stimulate critical thinking.” Having seen the evolution of students from the pre-social media era to today, she believes it is more important than ever to teach them how to approach information with a discerning eye for truth.

Dawn has always sought to instill a love of literature in her students and to use it for multiple purposes. “My primary focus was to foster a deep love and appreciation for literature, especially multicultural literature,” she says. “My goals were to help students learn to read deeply and to find their own voice.” In today’s constantly evolving social media landscape, she has refined those objectives. “I now see literature as a way to help students learn about themselves and the world around them in the hopes of building empathy and understanding.”

That refinement includes one significant addition to her work: exposing students to current events. “I worry that a lack of awareness about what is happening in the world leads to apathy. I want students to be more involved.”

To that end, Dawn has incorporated monthly current events units to cultivate interest and engagement in real-world issues. She has also developed a unit on social media to help students examine its impact on themselves and on society. “Students always feel like they learn so much from that unit. It often causes them to reexamine their relationships with social media.”

Dawn points to Elie Wiesel’s classic book “Night” as an example of how she uses literature to prompt layered personal and societal reflection. “Students must understand that genocides like the Holocaust did not happen in isolation, and as much as we would like to believe such atrocities could never happen again, they have continued to occur.”

Reston has been important in Dawn’s life for many reasons. She briefly dated Clint Sigmon at South Lakes, but when his family moved to Thailand, they lost touch for 10 years. They later reconnected online, went on a dinner date at Clyde's Reston in Reston Town Center, and now live in Reston with their two children—a daughter who is an eighth-grader at Langston Hughes Middle School and a son who is a sixth-grader at Terraset Elementary School.

“The way this community celebrates diversity reminds me of the potential of our country,” Dawn says. “I knew I wanted to raise my own family here. It feels like Clint and I have started something of a legacy in that regard.”