Poetry Break: The End and the Beginning

Circa 1967 (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

The End and the Beginning

 - WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
  - TRANSLATED BY JOANNA TRZECIAK

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Wislawa Szymborska, "The End and the Beginning " from Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. 

Poetry Break - Steps

Etta and Butch Go For A Ride (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Steps


               - Frank O'Hara



How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left


here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue


where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive


the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)


and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining


oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

Poetry Break: Coal by Audre Lorde

From The Fire: Zora Neale Hurston (M.A. Reilly 2009)

Coal

BY AUDRE LORDE

I

Is the total black, being spoken

From the earth's inside.

There are many kinds of open.

How a diamond comes into a knot of flame   

How a sound comes into a word, coloured   

By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open

Like a diamond on glass windows

Singing out within the crash of passing sun

Then there are words like stapled wagers

In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—

And come whatever wills all chances

The stub remains

An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.

Some words live in my throat

Breeding like adders. Others know sun

Seeking like gypsies over my tongue

To explode through my lips

Like young sparrows bursting from shell.

Some words

Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open—

As a diamond comes into a knot of flame

I am black because I come from the earth's inside   

Take my word for jewel in your open light.

Audre Lorde, “Coal” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. 

A Teacher's Interactive E-Book: The Scarlet Letter

I spent part of a day reading Diana Neebe's (@dneebe) interactive e-book, The Scarlet Letter. Having made several interactive e-books to date I was quite impressed with the book Ms. Neebe created as I know something about the amount of work it takes to get this final product. The text was created as an interactive e-book intended for students to use during their study of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The e-book includes the full text of the novel (with an excerpted Customs House section).

There are several features that Ms. Neebe included in the book and I want to highlight three of these as I think her work might make an interesting model for other high school teachers to emulate:

1. Embedded Video: The use of embedded video of colleagues to provide background information about the text is excellent and certainly highlights faculty knowledge and community at the high school where Ms. Neebe teaches (Sacred Heart Preparatory in CA). 
2. Embedded Vocabulary with follow-up Study Cards: Vocabulary words/phrases are bolded and an explanation for each term and/or a suggestion for hat to notice is provided.  There are also study cards for selected chapters based on the vocabulary terms that a student can use to quiz him/herself about the vocabulary.
3. Embedded Teacher Talk:  At the beginning of each chapter there is a very brief teacher note to the reader that helps to establish a purpose for reading and suggestions for thinking about the text as it is read.

The e-book makes an excellent model for possible books that students might author--not necessarily as a teaching tool, but rather a multimodal possibilities.

Using Text Sets To Broaden & Deepen Classroom Discussions

In a post by Rebecca Newland, she writes about several Kate DiCamillo's books illuminating how Stories Connect Us.  She advises:

This is a great time to feature DiCamillo’s work in classrooms and libraries. Pair the books with primary sources to help students connect to the world in the books. Display items near her work in the school or classroom library. Encourage discussions of the ways in which the primary sources might enhance or contrast with the characters or scenes that appear in the books.

Newland recommend connecting archival photographs with particular books by DiCamillo.  Having students consider both types of texts helps to deepen the learning experience. She references DiCamillo's picture book, Great Joy, that was illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. The book tells of a small girl, Frances, who notices an organ grinder with a monkey on the street below where she is living.  It is a week before Christmas and the child is confused about where the man and the monkey go and so she asks her mother as her mother readies her for the Christmas Pageant.

Concerned, Frances remains awake that night and sees that the organ grinder and the money sleep on the street beyond her window. The story, some might say, ends abruptly and we may well wonder what is to become of the man and the monkey as the very temporary invitation for them to enter the warmth of the pageant does not alter in any way the man's homelessness. 

Now authors are not required (thankfully) to render stories neatly and easy for us--nor should homelessness be an easy topic. The space that feels somewhat empty at the end of DiCamillo's story is a space we can fill with conversation and action. Whereas Newland offers historical images of organ grinders on city streets as  a way to deepen the text, we can also supplement or change these images to more modern ones depicting homeless people.

We might want to create a text set ( a collection of books about a topic) in which we situate Great Joy. Using several picture books that we read alongside DeCamillo's helps us to talk alongside Great Joy and to talk back to the Great Joy.  For example, Tony Medina's Christmas Makes Me Think tells of a boy whose excitement about Christmas gives way to more thoughtful inquiries about having and not having.  At the close of the text, Medina outlines a few ways children can give to their communities:

from Christmas Makes Me Think

from Yellow Umbrella

In order to help children understand homelessness and/or to acknowledge homelessness, Monica Gunning's A Shelter in Our Car and Laura E. Williams' The Can Man each depict homelessness.

Works Cited

1. Disalvo-Ryan, Dyanne. (1997). Uncle Willie and Soup Kitchen. New York: HarperCollins.
2. Gunning, Monica. (2004/2014). A Shelter in Our Car. Illustrated by Elaine Pedlar. New York: Lee & Low.
3. Hazen, Barbara Shook. (1983). Tight Times. Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. New York: Puffin Books.
4. Medina, Tony. (2001). Christmas Makes Me Think. Illustrated by Chandra Cox.
5. Smothers, Ethel Footman. (2003). The Hard-Times Jar. Illustrated by John Holyfield. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
6. Rosen, Michael. (1992). Home: A Collaboration of Thirty Authors and Illustrators of Children's Books to Aid the Homeless. New York: HarperCollins.
7. Williams, Laura E. (2010). The Can Man. Illustrated by Craig Orback. New York: Lee & Low Books.

Poetry Break: I Was Never Able To Pray

Moonrise (MA. Reilly, 2011)

I Was Never Able To Pray 

      - Edward Hirsch

Wheel me down to the shore

where the lighthouse was abandoned

and the moon tolls in the rafters.

Let me hear the wind paging through the trees

and see the stars flaring out, one by one,

like the forgotten faces of the dead.

I was never able to pray,

but let me inscribe my name

in the book of waves

and then stare into the dome

of a sky that never ends

and see my voice sail into the night.

Curated Bibliography on Whiteness, Silence and Teaching

Whiteness (M.A Reilly, 2012)

Curated Bibliography on Whiteness, Silence and Teaching

Carter, Stephanie Power. (2007). “Reading All that White Crazy Stuff:” Black Young Women Unpacking Whiteness in a High School British Literature Classroom.  Journal of Classroom Interaction, 41 (2),  42 - 54.

Abstract: The article uses sociolinguistic and ethnographic methods and Black feminist theory to explore the classroom interactions of Pam and Natonya, two Black young females, during one event in a required high school British literature classroom. The event is presented as a telling case to explore gendered and racial complexities facing young Black female students in a British literature class, dominated by literature written from a Eurocentric perspective, primarily by White males. The telling case was analyzed to explore how Whiteness functioned within the British literature curriculum and classroom interactions and how the two Black young women were negatively positioned as a result of classroom interactions around the curriculum. The analysis made visible how Pam and Natonya were constantly negotiating whiteness within the British Literature curriculum. Their experiences are important as they afford educators and educational researchers the opportunity to see some of the challenges faced by historically underrepresented students who may have been marginalized by Whiteness within the curriculum.

Castagno, Angelina E. (2008). “I Don’t Want to Hear That!”: Legitimating Whiteness through Silence in Schools. Anthropology & Education, 39 (3), 314-333.

Abstract: In this article, I examine the ways in which silences around race contribute to the maintenance and legitimation of Whiteness. Drawing on ethnographic data from two demographically different schools, I highlight patterns of racially coded language, teacher silence, silencing students’ race talk, and the conflating of culture with race, equality with equity, and difference with deficit. These silences and acts of silencing create and perpetuate an educational culture in which inequities are ignored, the status quo is maintained, and Whiteness is both protected and entrenched

Cochran-Smith, Marilyn. (2003). The Multiple Meanings of Multicultural Teacher Education: A Conceptual Framework. Teacher Education Quarterly, 7-26.

DeBlase, Gina. (2000). Missing Stories, Missing Lives: Urban Girls (Re)Constructing Race and Gender in the Literacy Classroom.  Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New Orleans, LA, April 24-28, 2000).

Abstract: This study examined the ways in which eighth grade girls in an urban middle school constructed social identities through their experiences with literary texts. It focused on what sociocultural representations about female identity and gendered expectations emerged in the transactions in the literacy events these girls experienced in English class. It also examined what meanings girls made from these gendered representations and how girls from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds took up and/or resisted the messages. Finally, the study investigated how the girls' transactions with literacy events in English class linked to their perceptions, insights, and understandings of the larger social order. Data were collected via observations, interviews with students and teachers, and collection of classroom artifacts. The seven study findings focused on ideologies of control, power, and cultural uniformity; new criticism and unexamined standpoints of social identity; constructing literature as removed from the lived social experience of girls' lives; silencing, sameness, and missed opportunities for dialogue; girls' lived experiences influencing their transactions with literature; literacy as a tool for socializing girls into culturally mainstream society; and fractured identities and colliding ideologies. Four implications for pedagogy and teacher education are listed.

García, Eugene; Arias, M. Beatriz, Harris, Nancy J. Murri and Carolina Serna. (2010). Developing Responsive Teachers: A Challenge for a Demographic Reality. Journal of Teacher Education 61(1-2) 132–142.

Abstract: In this article, the authors reflect on the preparation of teachers for English learners (ELs) and articulate the importance of enhancing teacher knowledge through contact and collaboration with diverse ethnolinguistic communities. The authors build on recent research on the preparation of teachers for cultural responsiveness and linguistic diversity and recommend a situated preparation within EL communities that fosters the development of teacher knowledge of the dynamics of language in children’s lives and communities. The authors begin their review by summarizing recent demographic developments for ELs. This section is followed by a brief review of the context of education for ELs. The authors summarize the most recent research on culturally and linguistically responsive teacher preparation and focus on a framework that includes developing teacher knowledge through contact, collaboration, and community.

Hayes, Cleveland, Juárez, Brenda & Veronica Escoffrey-Runnels. (2014). We Were There Too: Learning from Black Male Teachers in Mississippi about Successful Teaching of Black Students. Democracy & Education, 22 (1), Article 3.

from Yellow Umbrella

Abstract: Applying culturally relevant and social justice–oriented notions of teaching and learning and a critical race theory (CRT) analysis of teacher preparation in the United States, this study examines the oral life histories of two Black male teachers recognized for their successful teaching of Black students. These histories provide us with a venue for identifying thematic patterns across the two teachers' educational philosophies and pedagogical practices and for analyzing how these teachers' respective personal and professional experiences have influenced their individual and collective approaches to teaching and learning.

Hayes, Cleveland and Brenda Juárez. (2012). There Is No Culturally Responsive Teaching Spoken Here: A Critical Race Perspective.  Democracy & Education, 20 (1), 1-14.

Abstract: In this article, we are concerned with White racial domination as a process that occurs in teacher education and the ways it operates to hinder the preparation of teachers to effectively teach all students. Our purpose is to identify and highlight moments within processes of White racial domination when individuals and groups have and make choices to support rather than to challenge White supremacy. By highlighting and critically examining moments when White racial domination has been instantiated and recreated within our own experiences, we attempt to open up a venue for imagining and re-creating teacher education in ways that are not grounded in and dedicated to perpetuating White supremacy.

hooks, bell. (1991). Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination. Cultural Studies, 338-346.

Hytten, Kathy and Amee Adkins. (2001). Thinking through a Pedagogy of Whiteness. Educational Theory, 51 (4) 433-450.

Kincheloe, Joe L. (1999). The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: A Pedagogical Analysis. College Literature 26. 162-194.

Kincheloe, Joe and Shirley Steinberg. (1998) Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness: Reconfiguring White Identity in a Pedagogy of Whiteness. In White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America. J. Kincheloe, S. Steinberg, N. Rodriguez, and R. Chennault, eds. pp. 3–30. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). Yes, but how do we do it? In J. Landsman, & C. W. Lewis (Eds).
White teachers, diverse classrooms (pp. 29-42). Sterling: Stylus.

Leonardo, Zeus. (2002). The Souls of White Folk: critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and
globalization discourse.  Race Ethnicity and Education, (5) 1, 29-50.

Abstract: At the turn of the 1900s, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the problem of the color line was the twentieth century’s main challenge. The article argues that critical pedagogy beneŽfits from an intersectional understanding of whiteness studies and globalization discourse. Following Du Bois, it suggests that the problem of the twenty-Žfirst century is the global color line. As capitalism stretches across nations, its partnership with race relations also evolves into a formidable force. Appropriating concepts from globalization, the author deŽfines a global approach to race, and in particular whiteness, in order to argue that the problem of white racial privilege transcends the nation state. Using concepts such as multinationalism, fragmentation, and  flexibility, a critical pedagogy of whiteness promotes an expanded notion of race that includes global anti-racist struggles. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting that educators consider seriously the insights of the neo-abolitionist movement.

McIntosh, Peggy. (1988).  White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack.

Rogers, Rebecca & Melissa Mosley. (2006). Racial literacy in a second-grade classroom: Critical race theory, whiteness studies, and literacy research. Reading Research Quarterly, 41 (4), 462-495.

Abstract: There is a pervasive silence in literacy research around matters of race, especially with both young people and white people. In this article we illustrate that young white children can and do talk about race, racism, and anti-racism within the context of the literacy curriculum. Using a reconstructed framework for analyzing "white talk," one that relies on literature in whiteness studies and critical race theory and draws on critical discourse analytic frameworks, we illustrate what talk around race sounds like for white second-grade students and their teachers. This research makes several contributions to the literature. We provide a detailed method for coding interactional data using critical discourse analysis and a lens from critical race theory and whiteness studies. We also illustrate the instability of racial-identity formation and the implications for teachers and students when race is addressed in primary classrooms. Ultimately, we argue that racial-literacy development, like other literate process in the classroom, must be guided.

Rothman, Joshua. (2014). The Origins of “Privilege”. The New Yorker.

Said, Edward. (1978). “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental.” In Orientalism, 49-72. New York: Vintage.

Villegas, Ana María Villegas and Tamara Lucas. (2002). Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers: Rethinking the Curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education, 53 (1), 20-32.

Abstract: To successfully move the field of teacher education beyond the fragmented and superficial treatment of diversity that currently prevails, teacher educators must articulate a vision of teaching and learning in a diverse society and use that vision to systematically guide the infusion of multicultural issues throughout the preservice curriculum. A vision is offered of culturally responsive teachers that can serve as the starting point for conversations among teacher educators in this process. In this vision, culturally responsive teachers (a) are socioculturally conscious, (b) have affirming views of students from diverse backgrounds, (c) see themselves as responsible for and capable of bringing about change to make schools more equitable, (d) understand how learners construct knowledge and are capable of promoting knowledge construction, (e) know about the lives of their students, and (f) design instruction that builds on what their students already know while stretching them beyond the familiar.

Weilbacher, Gary. (2012). Standardization and Whiteness: One and the Same? Democracy & Education, 20 (2), 1-6.

Abstract: The article “There Is No Culturally Responsive Teaching Spoken Here: A Critical Race Perspective” by Cleveland Hayes and Brenda C. Juarez suggests that the current focus on meeting standards incorporates limited thoughtful discussions related to complex notions of diversity. Our response suggests a strong link between standardization and White dominance and that a focus on standards has helped to make White dominance and the discussion of race, class, gender, and language virtually invisible in teacher preparation.