Making Room

Gerri August's Making Room for One Another

"But what if the purpose of schooling in a democratic society is not simply to transmit and reproduce the knowledge and culture of the present order but to evaluate social an political practices according to principles of democratic ideals and, further to equip students to become active agents in the transformation of society"(2)?  Sounds like "literacy with an attitude."
Finn pointed out that all teaching is political,and it is the controversial nature, not the political nature, of topics that make teachers fret. Confirming this August suggests "the political nature of teaching ...reveasl itself in the wake of cognitive and affective consequences of exclusion" (2).   Being in a classroom each day lends itself to many of these "teachable moments" that August examines.  --On Friday I was reviewing the school's activities and clubs list with my advisory students, when one male student voiced some interest in a dance activity, a female student said , "A boy on a dance team?  That is so weird."  When I questioned her about this, and mentioned the prevalence of males in dancing, she said, "Well, like hip-hop is okay for boys, but ballet?  That is different.  It is just weird!"  -- I could help but think of this situation when Zeke danced like a ballet dance in front of his class.  Now maybe the students were laughing simply because their teacher looked silly dancing-but none of the boys initially danced this way, and the girls did.  This changed the next time.  As I continued to discuss the "weirdness" with this student I realized convincing her to assess her opinion would be more complicated than having a male do a few pirouettes for her.

       While these conversations might look a bit different in elementary school than they do in high school one thing remains the same, "social safety offer[s] a platform for [verbal campaigning] (137).  Even students as young as those in Zeke's classroom recognize the insecurities of difference and the safety of belonging to the culture of power.  August calls for "Dynamic dialogicality, the interweaving of underrepresented or unrepresented voices in emergent talk and activity, proved a powerful tool for building a democratic classroom in which students exercised agency in the context of multiple, even competing, perspectives" (166).


Silence and good intentions keep showing up...

SILENCE: Cody, the boy who exists outside the culture of power, is silenced.  Although Zeke's dialogical approaches in the classroom have helped Cody voice his discomfort in many situations, he is still silenced about one aspect of his life.  In this case it is not because people are refusing to listen, but because even as a young kindergartener Cody had already figured out that difference is a source of ridicule and rejection.  The classroom, his education, is, and needs to be, working to reverse this silence.  His voice, like the silenced voices of those not in the culture of power that Delpit mentions, need to be a part of the discussion.


GOOD INTENTIONS: "[Johnson] explained that democratic life requires more than good intentions" (144).  When we let these teachable moments pass us by it is usually because of the "real time, real distractions, and real pressures" (174) we are faced with as teachers.  This idea of good intentions has been raised in previous articles, all suggesting that good intention simply aren't enough.  We must lead students in the direction we want the world to head in.  August credits Zeke with "forging these paths...that might help our democracy reach for the stars" (144).

Much like educators can't settle for good intentions, we can't let our students do this either.  This study made me think of the recent campaigns to end the use of the r-word and the efforts against the use of "gay" as an insult or admission of disapproval.  

Many times when I have discussed these campaigns with students, I am met with their good intentions excuse:  "But I am not trying to be mean when I say it" or "I would never say it around a gay person" or my personal fav, "I know a gay person, so I can say it."  I respond to the first one is much the same way Zeke addresses Derek's pajama comment-- you my not mean to be unkind, you may not have even known you are being unkind, but now you do.  The latter excuses lead to a discussion much like the one that took place when Shiloh created her own version of Chinese and a student suggested it was not okay because someone in the class "may be that country" (151).   The conversations get a bit more sophisticated as students age, the content may be more complex, and sometimes the monological thinking may have been strengthened over the course of the student's 15 or so years prior to being in a high school classroom, but fostering dialogicality, taking advantage of emergent opportunities, as well as creating ones, to help students understand the impact of their decisions and encouraging them to evaluate them to "move in the direction of democratic practice" is relevant across grade levels.

I remember hearing frustration from some parents when my high school started offering breakfast to students each morning.  I heard my friend's father say, "The school is really ensuring that parents don't have to do anything anymore!  Why are we making it so easy for parents to evade their responsibilities?" We acknowledge the community's, and specifically the parent's role, in the success of school children, and we recognize that there is an absence of this role in many districts.  When is it the school's job to take on some of the so called "parental roles"?   Last week we talked a lot about the extent to which our school are educating students with the skills to compete in the global economy.  The skills that are measured by standardized tests; the ones that deem schools performing or under performing.  But what is the school's role in character education?  To what extent does our current system align with Nodding's recommendation that "educators [should] strive to 'encourage the growth of competent, caring, loving and lovable people''(5)?  Should it?  At what point does it become the school's role to impose moral education?

                  "Caring relations also provide the best foundation for moral education. Teachers show students how to care, engage them in dialogue about moral life, supervise their practice in caring, and confirm them in developing their best selves...What we learn in the daily reciprocity of caring goes far deeper than test results."

                                                     Nodding- Caring in Education 

“Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too” (7).

Who's bashing Teachers and Public Schools, and What Can We Do About It?  -Stan Karp While listening to Stan Karp’s speech I was reminded of my margin note while reading Finn’s line “I’ve taught in public school in every level from elementary school through graduate school and no principal or chair or supervisor ever asked me whether what I was teaching on a particular day was in the curriculum.” –My annotation ‘Well Finn, things have changed!’   The problem is the people who are asking have little experience in education.  Is there a silenced dialogue in education?  Are the people who are in the classroom and involved in education not part of the discussion?  Of course bad teachers exist.  Is there a profession that is exempt from the occasional underachiever?   The reality is not all teachers are bad, and bad teaching is not the only obstacle hindering achievement.   Accountability is important. Schools and teachers need to respond effectively when the school is not serving the students in their community.  Karp reflects on his experience and says “parents are the key to creating that pressure.”  In my experiences I would have to agree with him.  The students’ who have parents pressuring the school to meet the need of their student usually get response “Finding ways to promote a kind of collaborative tension and partners, hip between these groups is one of the keys to school improvement” (6).   We had a conversation in class on Tuesday about the parent who doesn’t know how to dress for parent-teacher conferences so she stays home.  Could community outreach or PD surrounding increasing parental involvement be a better solution than making test scores carry more weight?   Finding ways to bridge this gap might lend itself to closing achievement gaps as well.  “There is no evidence that the test score gaps you read about constantly in the papers is linked to bad teaching, and there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follows students to school.” (6).    NCLB is a little like the first question on the teaching tolerance survey.  It looks at all students with blinders on.  It screams Delpit’s first typical best intended statement: I want the same thing for every child, and as Johnson, Delpit, Kozal and Finn have repeatedly told us, this doesn’t work. THE TESTS-“If we spend as much on protecting children from poverty as we are willing to spend on testing children and evaluating teachers, we can reduce the problem considerably.’’ Stephen Krashen (6). Karp compares spending money on more tests to supplying thermometers in a malaria outbreak.     Rather than creating more instruments to measure achievement, the money would be better spent on solving the problems causing underachievement.  Accountability is necessary, but it needs to be real.  Test-based accountability is detrimental to the teaching profession and the education schools are providing, and according to Karp, it is ineffective “There is no research that shows paying teachers to raise test score improves…any of the positive school outcomes that policy makers say they seek.” (7). Fair test.org suggests placing too much value on standardized test scores and misusing the data inevitably leads to corruption.  …  “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. . . when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” Campbell’s Law, 1976 A few of their ideas: A focus on the subjects tested deemphasizes untested subjects and skills.    The subjects that are tested are valuable, but when schools and their curriculum hone in on tested material, or “teach to the test,” other subjects get left behind.    Students who do not perform well on these tests are labeled underachieving.  This devalues the students who are excelling in auto, tech courses, history, art and other subject where success is not measured by a test score.      Furthermore, any important skills or effective uses of class time that get pushed to the back burner to make time for test material are cheapened. Focusing on students most likely to make the jump from failing to passing neglects the rest. Hmmm…it leaves some children behind? There are subtler ways of cheating than erasing answers. The fact that the veracity of these tests must be questioned attests to the hefty weight they are on the shoulders of schools and teachers across the country.  Numerous indicators question their validity.  The same teachers receive inconsistent results when assessed by scores on two different standardized tests.  Bruce Baker condemns the accuracy of annual test because often lower income kids don’t learn as much in the summer as kids with higher incomes, thus testing once a year fallacious.                "The basic assumptions of these testing systems are at odds with the way real schools actually work and bending school practices because of them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to work with high needs populations to the collaborative professional nature that good schools depend on for their success”(8). Karp end his speech with a message that encapsulates what I was feeling following the Finn article, “In short, we don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.”

The Enormous Struggle.

"When working class children get empowering education you get literacy with an attitude" (xi).

Patrick Finn classifies the education in this country into empowering education and domesticating education--the first leading to positions of power and authority and the latter being the type of education that makes someone "productive and dependable, but not troublesome." (ix).  The working class receives domesticating education, thus perpetuating this social set up, which convinces people it is natural. Since working class children do not get "literacy with an attitude" they do not threaten the current social set up.

 Finn echoes Delpit in many ways.  He points out the maintenance of the status quo that our educational system fosters, "But the working class does not get powerful literacy, and powerful literacy is necessary for the struggle." (xi).  Delpit's assertion that some students come to school with more of the accoutrements of the culture of power than others is reiterated when Finn  explains the students in gentry schools are not empowered by their teachers, "they are already powerful."  He also places the responsibility of initiating the change on the culture of power, as Delpit did, he says the cycle exists "because the people who have the power to make changes are comfortable with the way things are." 

Finn suggests "educating working class children in their own self-interest", which matches Delpit's argument that education must involve teaching students "the codes to participate in fully in mainstream of American life...within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors" (45). Finn talks about motivating these students to want to learn by connecting curriculum to their lives.  Both Delpit and Finn agree that education needs to be connected to the lives and experiences of the students-the way it already is for those in the culture of power.

"Get ready for the 'enormous struggle'"



 In a study of  five differenct elementary schools one major difference noted between the schools delievering an empowering eduation versus those giving students a domesticating education was the amount of responsibility and freedom given to the students.   The lack of this freedom both academically and behaviorally contributed to the working class children learning to follow directions and resist authority.  

 Finn introduces Freire's idea of dialogue vs. debate.  This is a discussion I have had with my classes about how to communicate with each other.   A fellow English teacher gave me this document that further explains the difference. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yaXw0lH3KNHjNicLS6DgqN3Qzf5IC9jTLTunu6h5DQ0/edit?authkey=CJP01rAB&hl=en_US&authkey=CJP01rAB#

 While I think it is a necessary and important distinction to make, and I completely disagree with the teacher who said, "Do it my way or it's wrong" (10) I question allowing students too much "equal dialogue" in collaborative teaching.  It is important to empower students to have a voice, and teach them to be effective communicators, but spending chunks of class time negotiating the teacher's need to deliver instruction and the students' need for a rest might not be the best use of time.  I know he uses this example in a game played by students in role of the teacher to practice dialogue, and he acknowledges teachers have objectives and cannot simply adhere to students' requests- my problem is not with Finn, I actually don't have a problem at all, but the article paints a lovely picture: Students get tired and this effects how they work.  So they engage in a respectful, equal dialogue where they voice their opinion, reflect on it, remain open to discussion, and negotiate an agreement.  I do not believe this would happen in my classroom without a lot of practice.  (I am writing this after spending last period on Friday dealing with two students who decided to fight each other in the 2 minutes they were in my classroom before the bell even rang!) I am not suggesting that these values and skills are natural and that students cannot learn to be these negotiators, but I do feel it will be an "enormous struggle".   Furthermore, some students do not always possess the maturity to make good decisions, so negotiating with them is not always be the best option.     I think at this point I'm just rambling-maybe venting a little too.

"Teachers are supposed to teach, not blame children for what they don't know how to do." When "resistance is the dominant theme, don't expect this to be easy." (175).  I don't expect it to be easy.  This resistance is not something they learned last week; it has been building for years.    The resistance, when it rears its ugly head--in the many forms it will take--is a challenge to deal with in the classroom, and it will be a challenge to turn it around.  But I think we can all attest to the fact teaching the students who are not motivated to learn is the biggest challenge of all.

One last note...

 I thought of Finn mentioning the “excuse” of this not fitting into the curriculum, and Kelly's comparison between the "silenced dialogue" and teachers when I read Obama's speech on Friday.  "We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future." 

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/23/remarks-president-no-child-left-behind-flexibility

It is late now- at least staying up this late let me see the Red Sox finally win a game.

Lisa Delpit's The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children

Delpit qualifies those who are most skillful at educating black and poor children as those who “understand the need for both approaches [‘skills’ and ‘process’], the need to help students establish their own voices, and to coach those voices to produce notes that will be clearly heard in a larger society.” I would argue this is more good teaching, than good teaching of black and poor children.   I felt this way about many things in this article.  Delpit suggest we need to ensure “that each classroom incorporates strategies appropriate for all children in its confines.”  As educators, we need to take in to account all students’ differing backgrounds, as well as learning abilities, personal situations and other aspects that determine what they need in the classroom.   

While I feel some of the article refers to good teaching practices for all students, Delpit does raise some interesting points about cultural difference.  We should consider that “some children come to school with more accoutrements of the culture of power…some with less.”(29).   Those that have not yet “internalized the culture of power” need to be explicitly taught it.  We cannot expect students who are not part of the “culture of power” to simply figure it out.  

Students bring their own expertise in different areas. “To deny student their own expert knowledge is to disempower them”(33).   Appreciating these in the classroom helps students feel connected to their own lives, and helps them appreciate their differences.  Martha Demietieff uses the contrast between eating at a picnic and a formal diner to mirror the contrast between the students informal/Heritage English and formal English.  This suggests there is a place for both, and doesn’t dismiss one as not as important or as correct as the other.

I am reminded of an episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which Will claims he would be doing well in history if they studied any black history.  He felt the curriculum drove the “view of the world presented” (24) and it had nothing to do with him.  In search for the clip I came across the end of the episode.  Will and Carlton came from different homes with different cultures, thus they have differing perspectives and areas of expert knowledge. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StY05g5Abrw

 I agree that the parents of these students and educators who share their culture must be allowed into the conversation.  Delpit calls on those with the most power to take the most responsibility in initiating this conversation.  Much like Johnson, she explains the importance of a conscious awareness of privilege and a lack of this will “ensure that the power status quo remains the same” (39).   Both Johnson and Delpit acknowledge that there is a need to recognize our own lens if we are to engagein  the dialogue to work towards the solution.  Delpit asserts “we must keep the perspective that people are experts on their own lives”- but she includes many black teachers’ conclusion that “many of the ‘progressive’ educational strategies imposed by liberals upon black and poor children could only be based on a desire to ensure that liberals’ children get sole access to the dwindling pool of American jobs” and that their good intentions are merely delusions of their true motives.  This came under the larger discussion that I want the same thing for everyone else’s students as I want for mine means I want the same schooling.  Is it possible that this statement refers to the desire for all students to have an education that meets their needs, and teaches them to appreciate their own culture, while also giving them the tools they need to be successful in their lives?  Delpit later states “Both sides need to be able to listen”(46).

Priviledge, Power, and Difference

Johnson's account of his struggle to discuss race and gender with his African American female friend reminds me that often people do treat these topics as too "risky" to discuss and rather let them fester in the background of every encounter.  His feelings give way to the defensive reaction he says paralyzes the work towards a solution.  Even though he acknowledges that he did nothing wrong, he understands "the reality of her having to face racism and sexism everyday is connected to the reality that [he doesn't]"(9) . 

Johnson  claims that people are not naturally afraid of the differences in others.   "If we feel afraid  it isn't what we don't know, it is what we think we do know.  The problem is our ideas about what we don't know...And how we think about such things isn't something we're born with.We learn to do it like we learn to tie our shoes, talk, and just about everything else."(17). 

How we think about such things develops from our upbringing and experiences. It becomes easy to forget that not everyone views the world through our lens.  Similarly, we may be viewed differently than others of different races, genders, and classes.  Johnson refers to Shakespeare in Love as an example of how one can be afforded these privileges just by appearing to belong to the group that has been afforded them.  This indicates the privileges not only have nothing to do with who we are as individuals, but also the power lies in those who are perceiving us, not in ourselves.  We must then be aware of how we view others.

Being the tenth anniversary of 9/11 I thought of a presentation  I attended at URI on the first anniversary.  Ten speakers who were personally affected by the attacks had volunteered to speak. The first nine speakers included firefighters, survivors, and relatives of people who lost their lives that day.  The tenth speaker was a young Muslim girl who lost her Aunt in the attacks. After 9/11 she was viciously bullied in school.  Her family owned a small store that was frequently vandalized and then set on fire.  She and her family were forced to move from the home she was born in.  The people who attacked this family were not afraid of what they didn't know-they were afraid of what they thought they knew.  This girl was not treated based on who she was, but rather on how others perceived her.  Sometimes we needed to stop and clean our lenses.

 When Johnson talks of the "trouble" we are in he says it has the potential to ruin entire generations.
Adil Ibrahim in 9/11 Ten Years Later; Growing up Muslim in America says "I think, in some aspects, things have gotten worse since, and in some aspects, they've gotten better. People are more aware of the religion of Islam, and some people are more aware of what the Middle East is, and the differences between the regions and the people there. ... People have become more knowledgeable. But, at the same time, people have become more angry, people's relatives and sons and daughters have died in the war, so there's a hatred there, and I understand that. We need to educate people even more." 
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1670551/september-9-11-muslim-in-america.jhtml

Johnson asserts a lack of awareness is a "paralysis that perpetuates the trouble"(vii).  This reiterates the importance of recognizing our own perspective and biases that Peter McLaren insisted we face.  In addition, I think it is our job as educators to make students aware of their own as well.

Welcome to my SED552 Blog!

 My name is Kristen. I began my 6th year teaching English at Attleboro High School today--seems like just yesterday I started.  I will be teaching two sections of English II, and I am fortunate to have the opportunity to spend the third section of the day co-teaching an honors level humanities course.  The history teacher I work with is amazing.  We have a lot of fun with the course, and the collaborative setting has been a great experience.

 I will begin my second year as an adjunct instructor at Johnson and Wales University tomorrow.  This trimester I am teaching an ESL advanced reading class.  Teaching this population has allowed me to meet many students from different parts of the world.

Although teaching high school, pursuing my Master's degree and moonlighting as an adjunct instructor keep me quite busy, I try to fit a few softball and soccer games on my nights off.