Beginnings: Doorways We Walk Through (#SOL15, Day 28)

House by the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I.

Edward Said wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (1975, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p.76). Being beyond a moment often helps us to reframe it.

Tonight, I am wondering about the partial beginnings I have known.

In writing about the partially unknown beginning, Said explains “that we make and accept it at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” ( p. 78).  In reading Said's words, I think about the messiness of school.  We have accepted schools as they have been made.  Fictions and realities are co-constructed on a page, as well as in a classroom--in the school house. These fictions, these realities serve us little.

There are new doorways, we need to walk through if we can find the courage to do so. 

II.

In the current push for the Common Core State Standards and “tougher” normed assessments that dedicate weeks out of the school year for preparation and testing the folly of our ways is more and more obvious. Our need for certainty obscures that learning has always been a human enterprise, temporally located, fictitious and real.  

Yes, fictitious and real. 

Schooling though is not the same as learning. It never has been--even when we needed it to be so. The schools we have known--the ones we have made are ending. And tonight I know that another generation will not sit tight for the dusting off of something old, something too blue, something they no longer need. The signs are everywhere. 

Identity is composed in the joining of fictions and realities—be it on paper or in the lived-curriculum of a classroom.  Said explains that this composition holds constant “so long as we have language to help us and hinder us in finding it, and so long as language provides us with a word whose meaning must be made certain if it is not to be wholly obscure” (p.78). The meaning of school can no longer be made certain. 

What gets made in its stead, interests me, even though I know what we make can't help but be wrong.

Expeditionary Learning ELA Modules: A Critique

Grade 3 students answering questions posed by Expeditionary Learning.

I've spent the last year working with teachers in grades 3 through 8 who are using the ELA modules created by Expeditionary Learning. I've appreciated much of the design of the modules, the thinking behind some of the lessons, and the attempt to ensure active learning through the use of collaborative techniques such as jigsaw; Praise, Question, Suggest; interactive word wall and others.

But if asked to recommend these to clients after spending a year with the materials, I would not do so. The modules are flawed in ways that must be corrected, especially as these modules have been situated as being a model curriculum that is CCSS-aligned.  Keep in mind that NYCDOE endorsed these modules for their schools in February 2013 before writing had been completed.

EL states:

EL is at the forefront of creating classroom-ready Common Core curricular materials. New York State chose EL to create Common Core-aligned English language arts and literacy curriculum for grades 3-5 and deliver Common Core professional development to representatives from districts across the state. EL is also working with the authors of the Common Core State Standards to develop model secondary curriculum aligned to the standards. (from here)

Although there are several concerns I have with the EL curriculum, two represent the greatest concerns:

1. The absence of instruction that scaffolds and requires students to generate and frame questions of inquiry to answer.
2. No one present in the classroom authors the work at hand.

Additional Concerns:

• The absence of comprehensive writing instruction that moves beyond writing in response to text.
• The absence of  systematic vocabulary instruction that doesn't rely on directing students to "use context clues" (which aren't always present) or guess.  
• The amount of time allotted for students to respond to tasks is woefully underestimated.
• Situating literary texts as something to be used is problematic. There is an absence of an aesthetic appreciation of literary works. Rather literature is situated as efferent (Rosenblatt, 1978).
• Wait, where's the expedition? The translation of these modules, sans expedition, is simply wrong.  The experiential opportunities are missing.

In this post I want to focus on the first two concerns as these speak to issues of servitude and colonialism.

1. What Career Is EL Getting Your Children Ready To Do?

3rd grader answering a question.

A main challenge I see with  EL's 'model' curriculum is that it undervalues students being active problem framers and instead locates them as responders to already determined questions. Throughout thousands and thousands of pages of curriculum, students are situated in the role of responders to already determined questions and their teachers are located as mimers whose main task is to parrot those already determined questions. Learners are not asked to generate and then frame their own questions to solve. Rather, they are asked repeatedly to merely pen responses to questions that the EL curriculum writers have written, including essay questions.  

Now slide under that instruction for a minute and ask yourself what that set of practices might be developing.  Remember the CCSS is all about making sure our children are college and career ready.

As a former college professor I can assure you that not developing children's capacity to generate and then frame questions of worth is a method to ensure that students are not college ready. College ready at least ought to include students who have done the challenging work of framing problems, not merely answering an authority's questions. Questioning involves speculating about possibilities.

K Mart Greeter.  Image from here. 

But what about career ready?  What is the career trajectory for people who have been trained to answer questions, rather than generate and frame questions?

Yes, it isn't a pretty outcome for millions of children.

Recently when I asked a group of teachers this question we came up with the following jobs: phone operator, K-Mart greeter, customer service representative.  The absence of question generation and framing leaves the EL curriculum to be more a model of servitude than a model curriculum.

2. Authoring.

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."  (Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003)”  ― Edward W. Said

The EL curriculum is scripted. No one in the actual classroom gets to author--neither teacher nor student.  The curriculum is written to direct teachers to the specific materials to gather (including independent books for student reading), what to say, what to write, what to show, and allocates the number of minutes that each task needs to be completed.  It also includes anecdotes teachers can say (I guess in case teachers have none of their own?) when teaching vocabulary for example.  The curriculum is so bloated with commentary and directions that it is not unusual for each module to be comprised of 500+ pages.

With all of those pages there is little room for anyone actually present in the classroom to create curriculum: authentic and complicated conversations between students and teachers. The construct is epic, not novel.

Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) described epic as “ a poem about the past” (p.13), “an utterly finished thing” (p. 17) and novel as being unfinalizable and speculative about the unknown.  A similar difference can be said to exist between the institutionally controlled structures such as curriculum, and teachers' more idiosyncratic pedagogical and content practices. The epic world of Expeditionary Learning curriculum is unified, completed, “beyond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete, and therefore re-thinking and revaluating present” (p.17).  One can think of this epic world as being unalterable. The EL curriculum is an epic construct. It is untouchable. Dead. Beyond the influence of now.

Further, EL situates teaching as being complicated, not complex. Brent Davies' and Dennis Sumara's observe that “teaching has been cast as a complicated rather than a complex phenomenon—one that can be understood by analyzing its component parts and one that, for all intents and purposes, does not vary across time, setting, and persons” (“Cognition, Complexity, and Teacher Education,” 1997, p. 121, emphasis in original).   It doesn't matter who you are and are not. Who the children are and are not. Teaching and learning does not vary across time, setting, and persons. At 10:05 on Tuesday, all 3rd grade teachers should...

Such a belief sucks the energy and creativity from people: teachers and children alike.

In The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene writes about the difficulty teachers face with burgeoning demands and bureaucratic prescriptions that the public at large demands from educators. She writes:

“We do not know how many educators see present demands and prescriptions as obstacles to their own development, or how many find it difficult to breathe. There may be thousands who, in the absence of support systems, have elected to be silent. Thousands of others (sometimes without explanation) are leaving the schools” (p. 14). 

I've witnessed this leaving--the exiting of excellent teachers who simply can no longer allow themselves to be puppets of corporate enactments of learning. The struggle to continue to teach in light of model curriculum like EL is a formidable task as the mandated use of such curriculum restricts what is allowed to be taught and whose voice, value, and ideas are honored, ignored, and discouraged. 

Thinking About Rhizomes, Beginnings and Endings

The Middle of Something (M.A. Reilly, October 2012)

I.

I made the image above early in the morning--the same morning I was thinking about rhizomes.



II.

It's early morning also when I come in from making images and notice a tweet Gloria Jacobs sent last night--well at least last night via my time zone.

Two things catch my attention: 

• this idea of coming into the middle and
• the rather provocative use of the term, curation. 

I am wondering about the way we situate ourselves and how that placement establishes beginnings and ends. I also wonder about the practice of curation.  Curation suggests the preservation/restoration of some type of artifact by act and location. Whether we are speaking of museum curation, digital curation, sheer curation, healing--something is preserved and perhaps restored.  

III.

Curation is the juxtaposition of things; a hybrid that rises out of things placed alongside things. Gloria has me stretching this definition to now include people alongside people. 

Curation is an act of bring another into an ongoing conversation--into a specified context.


IV.

Later in the morning I read this by Bruno Latour (2009) and again am thinking about rhizomes and Gloria's tweet:

Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled" (p. 44).

It is the idea of action as a node and how it is a "conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies" that halts me, even as other ideas swirl around me.  


V.

I am standing in a stream, becoming aware of my position as the coldness of the water swirls around my ankles and calves even as I know that such awareness is fiction.


VI.

Are we not always in the middle? Is that not what makes death so pronounced and beginnings of life so contested? Do we mark beginnings and endings when we (re)frame action, separating a contextualized frame from the stream?  I wonder about this in light of teaching and learning and wonder how differently we might name these acts if we de-emphasized beginnings and endings, and focused more keenly on the middle of things.

VII.


Edward Said (1975) wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (p.76). Said explains “that we make and accept it [such beginnings] at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” ( p. 78).

Work Cited:
Latour, Bruno (2007-09-06). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) (p. 44). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Said, Edward. (1975). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press.

White Privilege, Classroom Discourse, and Being Other

Where No One Speaks English (April 2011 by M.A. Reilly)

As a small child living in Ireland, my grandmother practiced speaking Irish, a Gaelic language, with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow that skirted the lane where she and her family lived.  Such were the times in the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom from Britain--a time when British rule still prohibited the Irish from speaking their language of home. From the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland in 1169 through the subsequent centuries of conquest, colonization, and genocide--speaking Irish remained a punishable matter.  Irish culture, language, and music were banned by the British through the Penal Laws and through institutions, such as the national schools. Irish Catholics were considered subhuman. Consider Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley (1860) who in a letter to his wife wrote:

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as out own.

Or Oxford historian James Anthony Froude who in describing the Irish wrote: "...more like squalid apes than human beings...unstable as water...only efficient military despotism...the wild Irish understand only force."

Prior to the Easter, 1916 uprising, Michael Collins, a republican leader said:

We only succeeded after we had begun to get back our Irish ways; after we had made a serious effort to speak our own language; after we had striven again to govern ourselves. We can only keep out the enemy and all other enemies by completing that task. The biggest task will be the restoration of the Irish language (quoted in Ó Fiaich 1969: 111).

More than one-hundred years after my grandmother learned to speak her language of home behind a hedgerow, I sit here in the United States, thinking of this woman I never met, of a country, I too left, and wonder about the intersections among occupation, language, and stories. What does it mean to have to leave your language, religion, and rituals behind in order to survive? What does it mean generations later, when one’s native tongue is strange sounding to the ear? 

Although these matters have historical importance, they are also relevant and contemporary as situating some as Other remains with us, (in)forms our actions, and demonstrates our values and core understandings. One only needs to pop into 10-minutes of the current Republican ‘debates’ to see other being displayed.  I want to suggest here though that we can (and I hope do) also look more closely at the work we do at schools and perhaps become brave enough to see our own hand at work in othering, especially for those of us who are White and middle class.

Years ago at York University, Edward Said delivered a speech in which he defined imperialism, colonialism, and empire.  Said said:

As I shall be using the term--and I'm not really too interested in terminological adjustments--"imperialism" means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory. "Colonialism," which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. As the historian Michael Doyle puts it, "Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.”

My grandmother lived under colonial rule. At the close of the 19^th century as a child in Ireland, she was subject to British rule, an empire surely in decline, but nonetheless still a permanent force operating in her daily life. Although Empires collapse, the groups who have been privileged via the Empire often remain privileged well after the collapse, as the belief system that has set them apart and above from others is institutionalized and becomes the bearer of what ‘normal’ and ‘right’ is. I want to suggest here that much of what has informed what is ‘normal and right’ via past (and current) Empires filters into our classrooms and schools, is reflected in our definition of literacy as a singular, decontextualized matter.  We see it in the text choices that fill our classrooms, the way we limit essay and narrative to ‘correct’ forms, and the belief and practice that literacies can be represented as a finalized list of skills. We operate as if there was one 'correct' discourse and those who do not have this discourse are inferior. We have not come that far from the thinking that informed Kingsley and Froude. Such thinking permeates our daily work and may be less than visible to us, depending on who we are and how we live. 

As a white woman, middle class, and the mother of a child of color—white privilege is oddly noticeable, foregrounded.  In this post I want to take a few minutes to situate it, reveal it in its subtle and not so subtle forms as it operates in our schools.  W.E.B. Du Bois warned in 1903: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”  In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote:

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

In the opening chapter, Du Bois asks the critical question of the last and I want to suggest this century as well: How does it feel to be a problem? He deftly surrounds this question with the discourse we speak:

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

It is this ‘real’ question that we need to attend to, say aloud so that we can get beneath it and wrestle with how we situate those we consider ‘other’. Situating another as a problem represents imperialistic discourse--a belief, still with us today that informs pedagogical and content decisions, language and special education policies and practices, as well as how we situate ‘potential’ – a pernicious term if ever there was--on some learners and not others.

I had occasion a few years ago to speak with an elementary principal, Dr. Fallon (pseudonym). She explained that she did not think of the children at her school as children of color—of any color.  She did not see color, nor did anyone at the school, she told me. She insisted that the faculty and staff simply saw children; not their race.  Dr. Fallon is white. As I listened to her, I realized that she deeply believed she and the faculty were race neutral.  Such thinking is White myth-making—stories we tell and retell ourselves that allow us to remain polite, non-confrontational, removed.  If we claim to not see race, then we need not attend the underbelly of racial discrimination—the ways children get situated as problems.

As I listen to Dr. Fallon, I was equally aware of the function of memory and recalled a story I had been recently told about a child, a teacher, and the failure to see race at the school where she had indicated all were race neutral.

“When you can act like a third grader you will be allowed to sit with the other children,” Mrs. Carls, a teacher tells Jae. It is early October.

Jae, who is shy, easily embarrassed and desirous to not stand out in social settings gets up from the table where he normally sits and moves across the classroom and sits by himself at the one desk located away from the other children.  He has been caught talking loudly to a friend seated across the room, again.

This “event” is the last one in a long series of challenges that have happened only a few scant weeks into a new school year where Jae has been seen by his teacher as being a problem. One might wonder if other children in this classroom call out?  Or fidget?  Is it truly possible that only this one child does both? Is it so unexpected that an 8-year-old will do such things?

Earlier that day, Jae had yelled, “Yes!” out loud apparently disrupting his class after hearing an announcement calling for the boys and girls to try out for the school patrol.

“Aaron didn’t hear the announcement,” Jae would later tell his mother.  “He had to know. We were waiting for this. I didn’t mean to yell. I just got excited and wanted him to know we could try out. I didn’t want him to miss it.”

Being able to be part of the school patrol is a privilege reserved for third graders. Jae and his friends had been waiting until they were in the requisite grade. It would be an opportunity Jae would not come to know at this public school; a school situated in a largely white suburb. Because he blurted out, “Yes” and called across the classroom to a friend to tell him the announcement, he was left behind when his teacher and all of the other children went to the tryouts.  This was his punishment for talking out of turn.

Jae’s mother didn’t hear this story until later that night well after she had picked her son up from school, but said that she had noticed that he was extremely quiet and withdrawn throughout dinner. Hours later, in tears, he finally told her the story. She would learn that it was not only being left behind that injured Jae, but also his belief that his teacher did not like him as he is ‘different’ from the other children. The other boys, Jae would explain, can call out.  

“What did you do in the classroom by yourself?” Jae’s mother asked him.

“I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I just had to sit there with Mrs. Nomba (an aide) and wait until my class came back.”

It would be an hour later when the white teacher and the 18 white children came back to the classroom—their voices raised in the excitement that marks such occasions. Here they would find Jae, embarrassed by his misdeed, sitting alone.

It is in these small, perhaps even to some--inconsequential moments--that we need to pause and look critically for “White privilege” is an institutional matter. Peggy McIntosh explains: “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious."  She continues by saying that her schooling “followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’."

I think again of Jae’s primary grade experience and wonder what did he learn about his self-worth that day?  What did being left behind echo?  How might it have reinforced racially charged encounters he had already experienced? What is the weight of memory a child of color carries and how might teachers better understand such weight? What has Jae been learning each day in the classroom since?  What undercurrents of white privilege that is reserved for boys and girls whose skin is light and whose eyes are round has Jae internalized?  What did his white classmates learn that day about children who are located as “other’ by their teacher?

These are not small matters; ones we can tuck away with pleasantries and polite conversations alongside promises to do better next time. We need to talk openly and at length about the ways that white privilege permeates our schools and communities—even if it means feeling discomfort. We need to look inwardly at our own actions and assumptions and critically and honestly interrogate ourselves. How do our actions reinforce privilege for some? How does such history inform how we see and fail to see children?

I am not writing about the gross racial injustices that become front-page news. The ones read about from the comfort of one’s home and later talked about across expanses of lawn with all the requisite outrage truly intact. It seems almost, easy, to gather these stories and wear them as symbols of our sense of justice—as if such practice might absolve us from the seemingly smaller instances when we fail to stand up for what we know to be right. Yet overt hate crimes such as the heinous killing of African-American James Byrd, Jr., chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death by three white men in Jasper, Texas in 1998 or the murder of Asian Mohammad Parvaiz, beaten to death by six white teens in West Yorkshire, England in 2006 have potential reiteration each time we fail to stand up and acknowledge the smaller, less obvious moments of racial injustice.

Listening to Teachers

8 a.m. this morning

Edward Said wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (1975, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p.76).  I have been thinking about this insight in light of conversations and email exchanges  I have had with teachers as they readied themselves for a new school year.  It's taken me some time to wind back to these email exchanges--to understand them.  Being beyond a moment often helps me to reframe it. Against two teachers' stories, I am also remembering the many 'opening to a school year days' I have been involved with as a former assistant superintendent and here, now-- I wish that I had understood more about these beginning days--understood how to listen better, earlier.

8 a.m. this morning

In writing about the partially unknown beginning, Said explains “that we make and accept it [such beginnings] at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” (p. 78).  I wonder how often we acknowledge that in our day to day work.  Said's words help me to keep centered the reality that fictions are co-constructed on a page as well as in a classroom, school or district.  This way of knowing is a doorway. Perhaps, even one we need to walk through. 

In the current push for Common Core Standards and national mathematics and reading/writing assessments for every breathing child ages 8 to 18, I suspect we are missing that teaching and learning are human enterprises, temporally located, fictitious and oddly real.   It is in the co-joining of fictions and realities that a text’s identity is made—be it on paper or in the lived-curriculum of a classroom--or in the opening day exercises when admins often set the direction for a school year.   

8 a.m. this morning

Said explains that this blending of fiction and reality hold constant, “so long as we have language to help us and hinder us in finding it, and so long as language provides us with a word whose meaning must be made certain if it is not to be wholly obscure” (p.78). 

Hmm. Language.  Whose language gets voiced on opening days of school?  How set are we to listen--to hear?  We often speak of ensuring student voice in the classroom and I wonder how often we afford the same essential need to teachers?

 

From the Midwest, a teacher writes to me and says:

Okay, let's start out with the bad news and move along to the good.  No students this week.  It's all professional development.  Monday was special.  We all came in pretty enthusiastic: new year, clean slate, no negotiating like last year.  Greetings from the super first, where we get a mixed welcome.  Welcome back, you're the best staff ever, and by the way, here's the newspaper article ranking all the county schools and we're 13th in test scores.  Go team!  Staff meeting in the afternoon, and the principal  comes in to inspire us some more.  By the way, this year there will be no electronic devices, no food or drink in rooms, no sitting on the floor (that's bad, and no one is learning when they are sitting on the floor with a book), no students ever leaving the room unsupervised, no allowing students to sit on the floor in the hall to spread out around a large project that couldn't fit on a desk, etc, etc, etc. No no no no no... Thou shalt not....I'm very excited to be back.  Glad you're all here too.  By the way, we need to talk about the first day, Tuesday, which is a half day.  In the morning each grade level will meet in one room with their team and go over the handbook and the rules.  Then it's down to the gym at 8:30 for the principal to give his go team speech here's how to behave, and then we figure out what to do with the last couple hours. Second day of school is picture day, so there will be periodic disruptions.  Third day of school: three drills are scheduled - fire, tornado, and lock down. Have a great year.

Middle school staff used to be a lively, fun, loving group.  We sit in silence. Questions?  Silence.  I'm thinking that ph.d program's sounding pretty damn good about now. This is how we're

expected to set the tone at the beginning of the year.

Remember Carl? Science teacher across the hall from me?  Older guy?  Told you he got into teaching for the money?  That guy has taught me more about character and ethics and how you teach it and live it with kids than anybody.  He's crushed, hurt, doesn't want to end his career under this cloud, couldn't bring himself to retire while things are as they are.  I realize I've been going to him and looking for hope, but there isn't any there.  He tells me he found a story the summer that he's been looking for for years - something about a bucket that a grandmother sends a kid out with and just says bring back something.  He's been wanting to use it to demonstrate trust for his students.  Here, you've done well, go sit outside for a few minutes beneath the tree of knowledge and bring me back something in this bucket.  But wait, we're supposed to go over the handbook.  We can't let the kids wander off alone.  After a long, depressing

conversation, we finally decided that we're going to set the tone our own way and wait to get in trouble.

Tuesday morning I'm no longer excited to get out of bed and go back to that building.  But on the way to work I start thinking about Haroun and the Sea of Stories.  I'm kinda sappy and every time I read the first page about the sad city, so sad it had forgotten its name, I get a little choked up.  As I'm thinking about this text, it occurs to me that that's what we are: so sad we've forgotten who we are.  Long story as short as I can make it, I brought out the book and shared the first page with Carl and talked about it with him.  I dropped the idea on as many staff members as I could yesterday, and I think we've come to the agreement that we're going to pull back together to re-establish who we are and what we believe in and act accordingly rather than doing what's dictated. I'm feeling much more optimistic now. I believe we can take back our building.

700 miles East, another teacher returns to school for the first day and is given an oath to sign.  The first statement reads:  “I believe in and support the science of teaching.”  This is an oath the teacher is required to sign and display in the classroom and this comprises the most important opening message the superintendent thinks to provide.  He tells the gathered staff, "All teachers must sign and display the oath in the classroom."

            “What is this?” I ask after the teacher forwards the thirteen statements.

            “We get this each year and we’re suppose to sign it. Last year I crossed out science and wrote in art and then put it on the wall.”

            “What are you going to this year?”

            “I’m throwing it out.  It’s insulting.”

 

8 a.m. this morning

I collect stories as much to hear the language, as to remind myself how critical it is to know (as much as one can) another person's story.  Early in Haroun an the Sea of Stories (Rushdie), one of the more important questions gets posed: What's the use of stories that aren't even true? (p. 22). 

In some ways, stories are alll we have--these utterances that are part fiction, part someone's truth. Stories help me to wonder: What is it we privilege in public education anymore?  Who are our leaders?  Is anyone listening to teachers? 

8 a.m this morning

Yesterday I read an annual update by Bill Gates and have been thinking a lot about how he might spend some of that money in a way that would surely (in)form education. Had I his ear, I would recommend that he fund the collection and distribution of teachers' stories.  These could be audio, video, or written--collected by other storytellers, photographers, videographers.  Ten thousand stories.  Ten thousand teachers whose voices we stand a chance to hear telling us about their teaching and learning. I know we would learn immeasurably. Think of it as a new Federal Writers Project for our time: good for the economy and good for children and schools.

Said tells us that a beginning "is often that which is left behind" (p.29). Our apprenticeship is over. We need to listen.

Global Citizenship: 'The Other Echoes that Inhabit the Garden'

The Woman by the Lake (Reilly, 10.31.11)

There's lots of talk about global citizenship, but I wonder who we mean when we think 'global'.  Who do you conjure when you utter the phrase, global citizenship? Is there a face or place that serves as a placeholder for you? Who or what influences the image(s) you conjure? How do these impressions (in)form the way you think about and perhaps, teach, the concepts related to citizenship and global citizenship?

Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to engage in a sustained talk with UNESCO literacy advisors from Kabul, Afghanistan via Skype and the discussion with them has me rethinking the idea of global citizenship. Specifically I am wondering,  Who owns the phrase?  Whereas technology afforded me who was ensconced in a hotel room 20 minutes west of Manhattan to talk with four advisors stationed in Kabul--there remained a specific distance between us as well as some important connections.

That distance is as important as the connections.

I want to suggest here that we are all local to personal geographies regardless of connectivity and carry with us the values inherent in such living and against such locally defined selves, we are human.  To think personal geography is global is to tread on some well worn paths that more times than not, lead to oppression.  Is global thinking even possible? Wendell Berry would tells us, no.  He writes:

Properly speaking global thinking is not possible. Those who have thought globally have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought (1991).

I wonder about the practice of oversimplification, especially in response to culturally different ways of being in the world.  Being connected cannot mean homogenous knowing or being in which our identities are replaced by simplified race, gender, or ethnic labels.  People with power historically have sought to impose that power on others, reducing them to a definition that often situated the oppressed as less than human.

This is an old, old story and one we unfortunately continue to replay.

Understanding Other and self in relationship to Other is of paramount importance and this concern is always a complex matter, never a simple one.  To mistake this is to potentially cause harm.

In Berry's The Citizenship Papers: Essays, he notes:

The industrial economy thus is inherently violent. It impoverishes one place in order to be extravagant in another, true to its colonialist ambition. A part of the "externalized" cost of this is war after war (p. 146).

I hope as we are thinking about citizenship, both global and local, we are less dazzled by the technology that can and will connect us and more cognizant that past history suggests that citizenship is rarely the outcome when power meets Other.

Edward Said in a speech he gave at York University in 1993 (Culture and Imperialism) concluded:

Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a world scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively white or black or Western or Oriental. Just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages and cultural geographies. But there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival, in fact, is about the connections between things. In Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the "other echoes that inhabit the garden." It is more rewarding and more difficult to think concretely and sympathetically about others than only about "us." But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly to reiterate how our culture or country is number one, or not number one, for that matter. For the intellectual there's quite enough of value to do without that.

How will you help learners hear the 'other echoes that inhabit the garden'?

Literacy, Colonialism, and Web 2.0

When my grandmother was a child, she practiced speaking Irish with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow skirting the lane where she and her family lived. Such were the times in Ireland, the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom from Britain--a time when British rule prohibited the Irish from speaking the language of home.  One-hundred plus years later, I sit at home 20 minutes west of Manhattan, thinking of this woman I never met, of a country, I too left, and wondering about the parallels between colonialism and our national need to reclaim teacher and student voices in the classroom. To be sure, this imperative is not new.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said defines imperialism as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory."  He defined "colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism" as "the implanting of settlements on distant territory." In thinking about the relationship between the two, I wonder about those educational practices that serve to colonize classrooms, students, teachers, and schools, of which there are many.

In this post, I want to examine one example of colonized practice: prescribed units of study for writing. I want to explore how prescribed, commercial units of study act as agents that "re"settle classrooms into "writing workshop" products, stripping from teachers and students agency, voice, and maintaining "literacy" as a Web 1.0 practice. Now to be sure, I am not talking about organic workshops that are made by teachers and students, although these too may maintain web 1.0 practices. First a bit of clarity as to what I mean by Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 literacy practices.

According to Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2003), Web 1.0 practices privilege:

letter recognition, skill sharpening, and enhanced fluency with reading and writing conventional linear texts via use of word processing software, drill and skill software, electronic early reader books, audio software functions for matching sounds to letters, authoring software and so on. (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003 as quoted in Wohlend, 2010).

In contrast, Web 2.0 literacies integrate "the principles of Web 2.0 online interaction: global participation, multi user collaboration, and distributed resources and knowledge. Web 2.0 includes social networking sites like Facebook, fanfiction sites, wikis, massively multiplayer online games, and music- and video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Literacy 2.0 practices involve ways of participating in vast digital networks through posting, blogging, recording, remixing, uploading and downloading" (Wohlend, 2010, p. 147).

When schools (such as all public school in New York City) adopt prescribed units of study for writing that situate literacy as a single user event, a misdirection occurs.  As the mother of a 12-year-old boy, I have watched as his literacy learning has been largely influenced by "Units of Study" borrowed and in some cases, wholly adopted, from Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP). Whereas he has benefited by having caring teachers and administrators, he also has been defined and to a some degree, limited, by the his schools' misunderstanding of what it means to be literate. In every classroom he has occupied, authorship has been situated as  solo event, limited to the mind of one.  Yet, when I watch my son play online at home, he is composing narratives with other players from across three continents. I listen as he strategizes with players in order to complete missions, advance troops, considers his partners, and win/lose contests. The work emerges as the play ensues. Recently when he was teaching me how to play an online game, he told me that I needed to be sensitive to emerging situations.

"You can't figure it all out on your own," he told me.  "You got to look and see what you partners are doing and figure out how you are going to lead or assist."

A very different type of narrative emerges in the virtual world where authorship is inherently collaborative, subject to emerging situations, and located in partially constructed narrative worlds. Against this richness, I worry each school year when my son (and I imagine so many other children) is required to dust off a small moment narrative as one of the genres he must write. 

"I just gotta get it done," he tells me as I read a rather poorly written story. "It doesn't mean anything."

We all suffer through these narrative attempts and what is learned is significant. My son learns compliance and I learn about practices that colonize a classroom. Allow me to elaborate. 

Not too long ago I worked at a NY college as professor in the department of Literacies, Language and Culture. The graduate students I worked with were usually certified teachers, mostly teaching in New York City public schools, and returning to college to earn a post graduate degree in literacy.  At the beginning of a spring semester, two of the graduate students in a leadership and literacy course teaching at public schools in the South Bronx showed our class their multi-page curriculum map. The maps were voluminous, stretching across legal size paper and containing many pages that indicated what they were to teach each and every month.  Further, the school day was also parsed, and indicated what techniques they were to use at each given moment in the day.  Many of us were pretty amazed at the level of detail the maps contained and were alarmed that anyone would be given such a map, let alone a teacher. Consider this exchange:

“You have to follow this exactly,” Sophie indicated, pointing to the curriculum map she had been given by her principal. The kindergarten map, highlighting writing, was several pages.

“Can you actually teach all of this in a single year?” I ask cautiously as I turned page by page.

“You have to,” Sophie said. 

“If at 10:00 it says shared reading and someone comes into your class and you aren’t doing shared reading, you’re in trouble,” explained Lana, who teaches at a different public school in the Bronx.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Well I don’t really know.  I just know you have to do everything the way it’s spelled out if you want to be teaching next year. The threat is implied.”

"We have to follow exactly as the Unit prescribes. I mean we spent a week on learning about writing instruments and I never would have done that."
"What kind of writing instruments?"
"Crayons, markers, pencils," Sophie answered. "I had to introduce each instrument. The kids were so bored and it was the first month of kindergarten. It's not how I wanted to start, but I have no voice in this."

"Everything is scripted," explained Lana.  "I was reprimanded by a literacy coach because I called my kindergartners, children, instead of writers. It's all so absurd."

Having no voice is problematic, especially when you are a learner and required to do things that make little sense. Imagine what is being learned by children who watch their teachers following a script. Now to be sure, prescribed curriculum abounds and there are variations on writing workshop by other for profit groups.  What these groups have in common though is a belief that a prescribed curriculum is superior to a locally invented one.  That is a colonial mind set: the belief that some foreign entity holding more power knows better than the local people what is good and bad for them.  Additionally, as these prescribed literacy curricula are all lodged in Web 1.0 methodologies, they not only remove agency and strip voice from teachers and students, but they also ensure that the work that is being privileged is out of date with the times.

In the opening to A Guide to the Writing Workshop (Heinemann, 2006) the first of Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5, Lucy Calkins channeling Isaac Newton writes, “The books are intended to be read and used in sequence, each book standing on the shoulders of the books that go before it…A few homemade units can be inserted between the fifth and sixth book. I suggest one of these be a unit of study on poetry, and I will later direct you to sources of support for that unit and others” (p.4).  A few pages later Calkins writes, “There is no one ‘right way’ for a yearlong curriculum to proceed. In this series, I lay out one curricular journey, one that is especially important to the community within which I teach” (p. 25). Yet, the units of study as suggested by Calkins would fill all but four weeks of a school year.  Precious little time remains for teacher ingenuity or student interest. Calkins explains, “I’ve deliberately left this month absolutely open. Chapter 9 in this book helps you to imagine possible units of study you could coauthor with your colleagues…Whatever unit a group of colleagues decides to pursue, the process of designing that unit will probably follow a course similar to the one I outline in Chapter 9” (pp. 33-34).

 

Web 1.0 literacies are privileged in the Units of Study.  In contrast consider the classroom  Karen Wohlend (2010) describes in A is for Avatar: Young Children in Literacy 2.0 Worlds and Literacy 1.0 Schools. She writes about observing two first graders who wrote an invented version of Digimon Rumble Arena, a two-player video game. Wohlend writes:

Attempting to understand this game from the Literacy 1.0 convention of narrative fiction shrinks the boys’ divergent, rapidly changing messiness into a one-outcome progression (Ranker, 2006). Literacy 2.0 activities, such as video games, produce nonlinear and dynamic interactive texts, as opposed to the Literacy 1.0 linear and fixed narratives (beginning, middle, end) that are typically generated through story writing in an elementary school writing workshop. Video-game play merged the boys’ individual play and design moves into a joint text that blurred the line between reading and writing as each interpreted the other’s move and produced a counter-move. The pretended video game demonstrates that new texts require coordinated action.

In writing workshop, a single author produces a book with support from others who consult but do not produce the text; responsibility for production is alleviated but always individual (p. 148).

Wohlend's observations are important and offer a different understanding of authorship. The Units of Study movement posits the belief in specific types of genres that students should learn about and replicate across grade levels.  Yet missing from these units are the types of texts the two first graders compose in the classroom depicted by Wohlend. Hybrid works informed by new uses of technology are sorely missing, even though  the youngsters populating public school classrooms are avid users of virtual worlds ( Marsh 2008, 2010; Merchant 2005 ).  Ironically, in the opening to the NYC Units of Study (influenced by TCRWP)  - Launching the Reader's and Writer's Workshop: Where We Begin, the authors state the curricular intention:

The focus of the curriculum in the early grades is to offer young children the opportunity to ‘bring their lives to school'.

Yet, the very world of digital media is missing. Researcher Jackie Marsh (2008) indicates that there were12 million registered users of the virtual online world, Club Penguin back in 2007. Club Penguin targets children 6 through 14. No where in the units of study does it include privileging the extended play by students in virtual worlds as an example of authorship.  Authorship within the units of study is limited to a paper-bound text, even if computers are used.  Where is the potential for remix inside units of study?  Where is the potential for the emergence of a made genre, not already delineated by adults? Where is the potential for agency and voice?

Works Cited

Calkins, L. 2006. A guide to writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

------------. 2006. Units of study for teaching writing, grades 3-5. Portsmouth NH: 

Marsh, J. 2010. Young children's play in online virtual worlds. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 8, 23-29.

Marsh, J. 2008. Embedded link.

Merchant, G. 2005.Barbie meets Bob the Builder at the workstation: Learning to write on screen. In J. Marsh's (ed.) Popular culture, new media, and digital literacy in early childhood (183-200). New York: Routledge/Falmer.

Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Vintage.

Wohlend, K. 2010. A is for avatar: Young children in literacy 2.0 worlds and literacy 1.0 schools. Language Arts, 88 (2), 144-152.