Reggio Wish #2 – Ateliers and Aesthetics

Ateliers and Aesthetics

 “When we speak of aesthetics we speak of our bodies. From this point of view we can have a better understanding of what is meant by art. The work of art is to create antennae. Antennae which perceive all that is intolerable, discomforting, hateful and repugnant in the universe that we ourselves have created.” (Vecchi, 2010)

Vecchi writes about the radical move Loris Malaguzzi made when he positioning the atelier – and the atelierista – in Reggio schools. The atelier’s central location also positions it as the lifeblood of a school, a space where all things flow out and flow in. This conception of aesthetics as central to human life and necessary for children’s daily experiences is so different to see in person than the way the arts sometimes get integrated into projects even in some Reggio-inspired schooling and writing in the U.S. Arts-integration is sometimes reduced to making things, painting, drawing, or even a dramatic performance. Rarely do I hear educators articulating the fundamental purpose of aesthetics (or “art” as we usually call it) in education as “creating antennae” for our full bodies to perceive the beautiful and mundane and unjust in the world.

Inviting a non-educator artist to play a central role in curriculum and pedagogy is brilliant. Too often in educator preparation programs, the focus is so narrowly aimed at all the wrong things – controlling bodies (aka classroom management), controlling minds (aka disciplinary knowledge), and controlling futures (aka assessment, labeling, and tracking). A serious commitment to aesthetics and its role in life would mean not only inviting non-educator artists to the table and school, but also immersing future educators in antennae-making through deep and full-bodied engagement with aesthetics.

I wish for children, youth, and teachers to live their daily lives in schools saturated with the sensibilities of artists to make sense of the world, and surrounded by massive amounts of diverse materials through which to make that sense. This would no doubt create problems in the fundamental ideology of U.S. schooling and society, however, where most people believe there is one right answer and one right way – or at least “best practices” – and the ambiguity that comes along with art-making and living through aesthetics would challenge that ideology to its core.

Vecchi writes, “An aesthetic sense is fed by empathy, an intense relationship with things; it does not put things in rigid categories and might, therefore, constitute a problem where excessive certainty and cultural simplification is concerned” (Vecchi, p. 9). We are certainly in a time and place where “excessive certainty” and “cultural simplification” are highly valued, and ambiguity and aesthetics are deeply suspect. How might we individually begin to make ourselves more pliable? If I settle into a body/mind/way of being that embraces ambiguity, uncertainty, and a creative sensibility that cultivates my antennae of the world, what impact would that have on the people with whom I interact every day? What impact will it have on me? On the world? What if children and youth and teachers were encouraged to cultivate such uncertainty? I wish for the collective courage to take such a worthwhile risk.

How and why do we learn to write?

Now that the Common Core Standards includes writing, people all over the country are scurrying around to knock down the cobwebs of good writing instruction from years past in an effort to be in compliance with new requirements. Of course we should have been focusing on writing in schools all along during the torturous decade when phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (sponsored by The National Reading Panel and No Child Left Behind) high-jacked literacy in every school across America.

All good educators knew the policies of NCLB and the practices of the NRP were too narrow and potentially disastrous. But it is the rare school (and school leader) where one can find a persistent push through the BS mandates passed by legislators and accompanied by pendulum swings and money-making products. Writing instruction managed to maintain a central role in some schools, hanging on by a thread and endangered by any drop in test scores, but in others it was pushed aside without another thought.

The good news is that writing has been deemed important again by the all powerful legislators. The bad news is that educators, children, and youth all over the country are caught up in another swirling whirlwind of curricular and instructional changes as the Common Core is “rolled out” across states, districts, and individual schools.

What I’m most worried about, however, is that old debates about how and why writing should be taught will re-emerge and distract us from the important work of figuring out what kids already do and know, and build on that foundation to make them the most capable writers possible who can shift between critical essays, engaging fiction, compelling expository texts, persuasive pieces, and writing that is used for many different personal purposes.

I’m worried that writing “to” the standards will result in standardized writing – the boring formulaic, disengaged writing that no one wants to read. Enough to meet the minimum requirements, and not enough to compel anyone to read.

I’m worried that we will forget why people want to write to begin with, and that motivation for grades or rubric scores will trump the real-life motivations for writing that students always have: teaching others what they know, telling others about their perspective, communicating with and about the broader world, and exploring their personal experiences and social analysis through creative modes that make living more fulfilling.

I’m worried that, once again, the “audience” for student writing will be the teacher with the rubric and the (not red) ink pen that gets the final word.

I’m worried that writing will be simplified: conventions over creativity; or creativity over conventions; or formulaic writing over free-writes; or, or, or, or.

Writing is broad and deep and complex and multilayered. Writing is about spelling and grammar and punctuation and creative selection of words and use of metaphor and analogy and symbolism; writing is about taking a stand, writing on the bias, research and inquiry, making things matter; writing is about personal exploration and political analysis and personal communication and crafting public policy; writing is all these things and more – and that cannot fit in a standard, in one approach, in one series of lessons, or in one program.

If we make students, their interests and their voices matter in schools, then we can open up the gates of motivation for writing. And we will have to teach them everything just as we will have to be willing to learn from them as they show us some tricks and techniques of their own.

If we make the desires of “future employers” the focus of our work rather than the students in front of us, we will fail from the beginning.

 

How do you Rage Against the Machine when you are the Machine?

Paul Ryan’s claim that one of his favorite bands is Rage Against the Machine was met with some criticism from the band’s Tom Morello.

Morello’s poignant op-ed in Rolling Stone responded to Ryan’s claim and pointed out what should have been obvious to Ryan – Ryan advocates  for the Machine that chews people up and spits them out, takes care of the elite rather than the masses, and manufactures -isms of every kind (racism, sexism, heterosexism…) that feeds hatred and divisiveness. “The Machine” works to destroy collectivity and solidarity among people who constantly get the short end of the stick because of the very kind of policies that Ryan supports.

How can he rage against the machine when he is the machine? Listen to the Lyrics, Ryan. Music is political, man, and if you haven’t figured that out by now, you are more lost than we thought you were.

And how can teachers rage against the machine from the inside?

Don’t be the teacher, and don’t teach the curriculum that is the subject of this song:

Take the Power Back 

 

 

Great new discovery…

I love this blog and the whole idea of the Institute for Humane Education.

Check is out yourself!

Projecting and Producing Failure – Where is Success?

An essay from the Teaching Georgia Writing Collective

teachinggeorgia@gmailcom

 

Projecting and Producing Failure – Where is Success?

An Essay from the Teaching Georgia Writing Collective

The end of the CRCT (Georgia State Standardized Tests) marks the time of the school year that teachers look forward to most. Its the time when teachers have more freedom and flexibility to teach in student-centered, inquiry-based, and curiosity-driven ways. It’s the time of the year when tensions subside and mandates are over. Well, at least that’s what we used to look forward to. However, this year after the CRCT is over there is a new district mandate in Clarke County to which third and fifth grade teachers must adhere. It’s called the “Blitz.”

Third and fifth grade teachers across the district have been asked to compile a list of students “projected to fail” the CRCT. Teachers were forced to use previous standardized assessments to determine this list of students. And if the lists weren’t long enough, teachers were told to add more, just in case.

Students on the “projected to fail” list will be involved in a “Blitz” session immediately following the conclusion of the CRCT – before test results are even known. Students will be re-rostered – that is, the students will be grouped with new students and different teachers so all the “projected failures” will be in one class receiving “intense remediation” while the remaining students will experience “acceleration and enrichment.”

This means that while some students are investigating how tornadoes are formed, creating inventions to fix a problem they see in their community, or making informational videos using iPads, the “projected to fail” students will be sitting in a computer lab staring at a screen and listening through headphones to practice skill and drill reading assignments for an hour every day. This is on top of the hour and a half of direct reading instruction they will receive.

When does the torture end? Why aren’t all students given the opportunity to learn in creative and inspired ways? Why are students who may struggle with reading constantly given boring and uninspiring things they must read while other students have choice and learn to read through creative projects? Don’t all students need an enriching and encouraging environment surrounded by friends and teachers that know them best?

“Struggling” students are constantly on the losing end of every battle – and now they lose even before their test results are known.

If students aren’t successful on a high-stakes standardized test in reading, the blame is aimed at the student who is labeled defective and in need of fixing. But what if the student isn’t what needs fixing? What if the way school policies and mandates are created is what needs fixing? What if the budget is what’s broken? What if we stop blaming the students, their parents, and the teachers and instead look at the conditions of schooling that produce failure?

We dream of a school system where students aren’t projected to fail and schools don’t produce failure. That school system would encourage teachers to slow down and learn about a student who is struggling and design instruction to make that student successful. We teachers don’t need more textbooks, scripted curricula or software programs, we need time to teach our students in the way that is best for them. And students don’t need more textbooks, scripted curricula or software programs either. They need a less stressful and anxiety-ridden environment and more time in creative, supportive classrooms where they know they are valued and projected to succeed.  They need student-centered inquiries back in their school lives, and teachers who do engaging projects with them where they ask questions and find answers.

School systems’ fear of failure has created the conditions for more failure to emerge. We might all be surprised if we stopped making decisions out of fear of failure and started making decisions based on hope and seeing our students as possibility. Let’s change the definition of “success” to include more than one test score and project success for all our students.

 

We might begin with a different kind of “Blitz” – which is defined as an intense campaign for something, even if most definitions refer specifically to military campaigns. Let’s use the end of the school year for a “School is a place I want to be” Blitz to motivate students to make deep connections to school and inspire them to look forward to the fall. Keeping them in their classrooms with teachers and students they have come to know and trust all year is one place to start, and engaging them with challenging and creative projects is another. If we don’t, this “Blitz” for the CRCT – even after the CRCT is over – will likely backfire on us all.

 

Body Matters in Teacher Education – a Podcast

This is a podcast of a research talk I gave at the College of Education, The University of Georgia last week. It offers a small slice of a three-year study I’ve been conducting in teacher education and creating “culturally-relevant” spaces for teacher education students. Three findings from the study seem really relevant to teacher ed and have the potential for making contributions to the field:

1 – “Bodies” in teacher education classrooms are often already ‘good’ at the practices and implicit rules in educational spaces/academic institutions, but not often well positioned to be successful in “spaces” that reward different practices and have different implicit rules. In other words, they understand and orient themselves to the “nomos” (Pierre Bourdieu) of academic spaces, and have difficulty understanding people/students who don’t already have this institutional disposition. If we are to help future teachers better understand the most marginalized groups of students and families – those who often don’t acquire or want to acquire the academic institution disposition/practices, then we have to get those future teachers outside the physical spaces of academic institutions and into spaces (or “fields” – Bourdieu) where completely different practices are necessary, rewarded, and challenging to “new” folks in the field. Riding the city bus, doing community ethnography through participant observation in local recreation and leisure, social service agencies, natural and human resources, etc. are all ways to help expand new teachers’ perspectives of “learning” and orient them toward drawing on community resources and family practices to build meaningful curriculum. Bodies, in other words, cannot be docile in teacher education classrooms where they are “taught” to engage the community and marginalized students’ lives -  they have to experience new spaces in physical, social, psychological, embodied ways.

2 – Many young women across three years of the study (over 100 participants) expressed issues around their bodies (body image, pressures to look a certain way, pressures to eat/exercise in certain ways). While much “teacher education” is now focused on digging into the complex issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language, etc. to make school a more relevant space for all students, few spaces deal with how all of these “issues” are related to bodies and how bodies are felt, perceived, and performed. Starting with the young women’s concerns around bodies and engaging them with a critically-focused body curriculum (critically analyzing advertisements, watching videos such as “Killing Us Softly,” reading articles about youth dieting, comparing these issues to the “obesity epidemic” hysteria, and analyzing their own bodily experiences on and off college campuses) can lead to engaged discussions and inquiries into the raced body, classed body, gendered body, sexed body, etc. In other words – if bodies are central to the perceptivity project in education (how we perceive others and in turn respond to them), then starting with teacher education bodies could be generative.

**This is the finding that is the focus of the podcast.

3. Tending to one’s own body in analytical ways and working to position oneself more powerfully in language and bodily interactions can help one assemble more confidence in acting as an advocate on behalf of oneself and others. In other words – if we want to help cultivate confident, critical, advocates/activists for future teachers who will stand up for children and families who are persistently marginalized and left behind, we need to work with them in assembling the analytic practices and confidence to do so. Starting with bodies can help us do that.

Papers coming out soon! Several in press and under review, so I’ll post when they’re ready.

Teaching “Occupy Wall Street” and Being Class-Sensitive Pedagogues

An important way to be class-sensitive in our teaching is to pay attention to current events around issues of social class and poverty and bring them into the classroom.

If you haven’t already started teaching about the movement of Occupy Wall Street – the protest against economic inequality that started in New York City a month ago and has spread across the world – this is an exciting time to be doing so.

This is also a terrific time to reconsider how things such as “Stock Market” and “Monopoly” games are taught and why they have become such a staple in schools over the past thirty years promoting investment in Wall Street and a focus on “profits” without necessarily considering the consequences of high profits on people, community, and natural resources.

Check out “Anti-Monopoly” game here.

Check out “Socially Responsible” Companies here.

Like all things, there are no simple answers to the issues being illuminated in OWS, but they create amazing material for conversation and continued research in schools and classrooms.

Teaching OWS can integrate reading, writing, history, economics, geography, math, citizens’ rights, politics and the influence of money in political races, community rules, etc. and could be used at any grade level with varying levels of sophistication. (For example, early elementary classrooms might roleplay a “General Assembly” from OWS in their classroom to see its benefits and disadvantages in making decisions for the whole group, or PK and Kindergarteners might like to see how OWS is using the “human microphone” and try it during their outdoor activities).

A wikipedia entry for OWS is live and being revised constantly and offers some fun facts about the movement up to this point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

Happy Teaching!

Riots in London and Connections to U.S. Politics and “Society”

Hey all – thanks to a friend for sending this along. I have grown more impatient with the “These are your children, control them!” response from UK officials to the riots in London that resulted from a police officer killing a young man of color. UK officials are now considering the eviction of all families related to any accused in the riots. Great – so then the disenfranchised, angry, resentful collection of working-class and poor (mostly) immigrants will be homeless. This is a terrific solution! That should certainly prevent any future uprisings.

Is this an uprising? Or is it just a bunch of hoodlum adolescents expressing their greed and self-righteousness the way UK officials make them out to be?

It may be an uprising.

We weren’t surprised by the uprisings in the Middle East this year, but somehow people are less inclined to speak of “uprisings” in the “civilized, western” world including metropolitan London.

But this may just be an uprising.

Margaret Thatcher (the woman who spoke the words “There is no such thing as society” quoted at the bottom of this article in The Guardian) and her cronies including everyone involved in the Reagan era politics wanted “individuals” who were solely responsible for themselves and no one else – just as no one else would be responsible for those individuals – would be bound to consumerism and market fetishes and not worry about something so abstract as “society.”

Congratulations.

This is a terrific article and a nice primer for folks not familiar with “neoliberal” policies of the last 30-40 years and their implications.

 

The end of Corporations in the Classroom? Not quite, but some movement…

Check out this story on Scholastic’s decision  to end most of their corporate partnerships for distributing curriculum materials in schools after receiving sustained critique from organizations such as Rethinking Schools and Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. 

Some fabulous inquiries for K-12 classrooms might include:

In what ways do corporations influence children and youth directly through schools?

Study the history of advertising to better understand the strategies used to influence children/youth. In what ways have these marketing approaches been criticized or ended? What other measures could be taken toward a “commercial-free” childhood?

Are there curricular materials in your classroom/school that position you to buy/consume certain products/services?

Are there curricular materials in your classroom/school that position you to believe certain things that might benefit corporations?

What kinds of analytical tools can provide all children and youth with the ability to deconstruct texts of all kinds?

What role do testing corporations have in determining what is and is not taught/learned in schools? What can students and educators do about that?

Have fun!

the trouble with language…and the beauty of trouble

“White Trash” is an insult I just can’t stomach, but then Dorothy Allison reclaimed it by naming a collection of short stories Trash and my linguistic sensibilities begin to wobble. When is White Trash being used as an insult to poor white folks, and when is it being used as an insult to mainstream society? How will I know the difference? Usually I do know the difference – it depends on the speaker’s intonation, their facial expression, their body language, and feelings of their own superiority (or inferiority as it may be). Want to know what I’ve done in the past when folks have said it in my company? I make a simple statement, “I don’t know what you mean.” “Oh, you know what I mean,” a speaker might say in response. “No, what do you mean exactly?”

But no one wants to articulate their classist and racist beliefs explicitly…so I smile and we move on, both of us well aware of what just occurred.

Words are re-voiced constantly, always carrying their legacies with each use, but then used with a particular intention of the speaker. Where’s the trouble? When the speaker and the listener have different ideas of what that word means (or, perhaps when they absolutely agree on the meaning of the word but disagree with how it’s being used).

Another word I’ve never been able to stomach is the “N” word (see? I can’t even actually write the word…). I’ve seen fifth grade African America boys shut down and punished because of their use of the word in a White teacher’s classroom – and I’ve seen White folks use the word in the most despicable ways.

Usually schools – including universities where a focus might be multiculturalism or diversity or cultural sensitivity – simply want to silence such language. Does silencing language take away the pain of words used for such insult?

I say no – and with students as young as first grade and as advanced as graduate school I’ve thrown a word on the chalkboard (yes, on an old-fashioned chalkboard, one of the most useful technologies still in responsive teaching!) and opened up a conversation about it. Some of those words have included:

Learning Disabled or “LD”

Stupid

Gay

White Trash

Black

White

Illegal

I have never had the spontaneous opportunity nor the guts to plan ahead to write the “N” word on the board and open up the possibility for the beauty that can come from such trouble. But this amazing middle school teacher did.

From Teaching Tolerance:

The Power of the N Word

Submitted by Carrie Craven on May 26, 2011

• Keywords:
• Stereotypes and bias
• Race and ethnicity

“Ms. Craven, we can put ‘nigga?’”

I pause. Images of earnest sitting-in-a-circle chats in college flash through my brain:

• A classmate from Kentucky explaining how she will never say that word, even in academic circles, because, being white, she will never be able to fully grasp its implications;
• Another black classmate asserting that the word has been reclaimed, and that when black people use it, the poison of the original use gets diluted.

Meanwhile, my 13- and 14-year-olds look at me from a class that is mostly black. They generally have heard only that the n-word is either “cursing” or “ghetto.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that,” I say honestly.  “What do you think?”

This week my kids are working on their understanding of parts of speech by making teenage dictionaries. Slang and text-speak are all allowed, although cursing and offensive language are not. Of course, I’m walking a dangerous line. If kids were good at knowing what words are appropriate for a school setting, we’d all have one less thing to teach. I, for one, would have far fewer detentions.

But I got into this project knowing these things would come up. I decided I was okay with that. My real, true, not-in-the-Louisiana-Comprehensive-Curriculum goal for this project was to involve my students in a discussion about the power of words. And here we were. Discussion begun.

“It’s just what we call each other,” said Devonta, “It’s like, ‘Wassup, son.’”

Jared replies, “Nah man, that’s what white people called us in the slave days.”

I asked them if the word meant the same thing for everybody—if it means the same thing from everybody. Would they would be okay if I used this word, for example.  (The response was mixed.)

Quite understandably, kids who saw the word primarily as a relic of its “-er” origin decided they should not include the word. Those who saw it simply as a way friends greet each other concluded that it was okay. After all, as Sha’de put it, “This is supposed to be a dictionary of how we talk.”

My kids don’t use four-letter words often in my classes anymore. A strict policy of an immediate detention has curbed the use of your standard Showtime expletives. But I still don’t feel satisfied. I’m not satisfied because I think what this has taught my kids is that swearing in Ms. Craven’s class will get you a detention. What I want to teach my kids is that swearing and using offensive language makes you appear less intelligent, less empathetic and even cruel.

This project is helping. These discussions are helping. My students are exploring the history and implications andpower of specific words. They’re starting to understand that every time you use a word it essentially has two meanings: (1.) What you meant by it, and  (2.) What it means to the person who hears it.

I still have a ways to go. My classroom is far from some utopia of all-inclusive and tolerant language. But this is a start, this honest talk about words we know can offend. And I think it’s a pretty good one.

Craven is a middle school English teacher in Louisiana.