engaged intellectuals

Kyle: Learning from a fifth grade reader who can’t find space for his interests

Kyle, a quiet and thoughtful fifth grade African American boy in an urban public school, drew in his writer’s notebook every day. In fact, while the other thirty-three students in his classroom were busy writing something in their notebooks each day, Kyle continued to draw page after page of human-like figures in various poses and wearing various kinds of attire. He was a prolific artist and demonstrated so in his notebook without a single written word accompanying his drawings. His fifth grade teacher was frustrated with him and his lack of engagement in writing (which crossed over to reading as well) and in a conversation with me as a staff developer in her school she reported that Kyle was “resistant” and was probably trying to mask a “learning disability” by focusing on his artwork instead of writing because he also “struggled” in reading. Additionally, the teacher reported that she was considering reporting Kyle and his artwork to the principal because she perceived them to be violent in nature. Kyle was drawing semi-human, cartoon-like characters with swords, blood dripping from the occasional wound on a body, and the characters were often in sparring-like stances with fists clenched and feet ready to kick. The teacher said that though Kyle had never exhibited any violent tendencies in class that this artwork may be the workings of something going on inside him, and that these terrible thoughts should be officially reported to the principal, the psychologist, his family, and maybe to the local police. In addition to Kyle not writing a single word during the first month of school in writing workshop, he had drawn himself into a pathology – one that was being read by his teacher as struggling academically, resistant to reading and writing, an unidentified learning disability, potentially dangerous, and reason for official reporting.

And then came the turn-around for Kyle’s teacher…

When that concerned, well-intended, frustrated teacher finished telling me about Kyle she waited with wide eyes, hoping that she had found the person with a magical answer to all the problems she saw in Kyle and his classroom practices. Instead of offering a solution I asked the first question that came to mind: “What does Kyle say about his drawings?”
The young teacher looked at me quizzically, “I don’t know.”
Genuinely surprised I asked, “You haven’t asked him?”
The teacher responded, “No. Should I?”
“Of course. We can’t know where to go from here until we start to understand what this artwork is doing for him.”
Kyle’s teacher agreed to have an open-ended conference with him during the week and bring what she learned back to me the following week.

(more…)

I have never been so happy to see, feel, and hear rain in all my life. My windows are being pelted with droplets, the leaves on the trees are dancing wildly, and I am smiling from ear to ear. When news programs claim one day that “experts” say the greater Atlanta area has 3 1/2 months’ supply of water and then the next day those same “experts” say we are already down to 81 days’ worth of water, what is one to do but panic?

How does the ol’ saying go? The mother of innovation is necessity (or something like that, no?)

Well, we certainly need water. So where is our innovation now? Or do some people still hold onto the hope that a magical spring will be discovered to replenish our lakes?

It is time to conserve.

It is time to imagine.

It is time to be innovative.

It is time to be critical.

And what a perfect time to engage students of all ages in interesting critical inquiry work around water.

Wouldn’t it be great if students researched a community’s water usage and plotted the usage alongside size of family? Size of home? Size of household income?

Having lived a number of times as a child without running water in the house, I know for a fact that folks struggling to pay the water bill are likely to conserve and reuse water supplies in the home. It has been said before, but I’ll ask it again here, could we learn valuable lessons from people with humble means about stretching resources, conserving resources, and living in ways that are more eco-friendly?

Now there’s a great critical inquiry: What is the carbon footprint of a family with a low income level versus a family with a high income level?

but back to water…

Who is using all our damn water???

Could students learn about and work toward promoting climate-appropriate landscaping versus the kind that needs constant watering?

What about swimming pools, fountains, and other privately-owned luxuries that slurp up water supplies? Now that would be an interesting mathematical investigation: How many gallons of water are used in the greater Atlanta area (or any metro area for that matter) for private swimming pools? If those private pools were not filled in late summer, at what levels would our major lakes be now?

And what a great ethical inquiry too: The Army Corps of Engineers has been releasing millions of gallons of water from north Georgia downstream to save the mussels in Florida. When wildlife and humans both need water, and the water supply is greatly diminished, who gets the water?

A comment was sent to me about the hospital letter and it is the closest thing to hate-mail that I have ever received. The more usual comment/email I get is glowingly complimentary thus I wasn’t sure what to do with this particular post!!! Though the writer was passionate in her expression of disgust towards me for writing the letter about my experience, she did raise a couple issues that might be important for readers to consider as I work through them myself. She claims that the worker had a right to freedom of speech, that I should have stopped to “educate” the worker regarding my experiences and views that opposed those she was espousing, and that I should not have sent a letter to her supervisors but instead handled it with her personally.

I’ll briefly respond to each of these issues below, then write about what all this might mean as we work toward a more socially-just way of being in the world:

Freedom of speech: This is tricky territory isn’t it? When does my “freedom of speech” become diminished as a result of the professional expectations of my job? How, or does, freedom of speech get played out differently in one’s work life and in one’s private life? I haven’t given enough thought to these questions to offer any insight here, but I do know that as an educator I do not see it as my “freedom of speech” right to denigrate groups of people who are supposed to be served by the educational system.

Stopping to “educate”: African American folks often complain that they are constantly expected to “educate” White folks about their racist ways, even when they were presumably unintended. Some people take on this position happily while others steer completely clear of it. Perhaps working-class and poor people should also be expected to “educate” middle-class and affluent folks about their classist ways - even if they are presumably unintended? I don’t believe this is always possible, nor always the best route to take, but I’ll offer some thoughts here:
1. On a better day, I might have pushed back a little and (too) politely asked, “Why do you say that?” or “I actually disagree with that,” because I do those things on a regular basis. But I was in PAIN, exhausted, and more than anxious to just simply get out of the hospital and get home. I didn’t have it in me in that moment - and there are many other moments when I don’t have it in me either.
2. I completely agree that personal interactions are an important way to work toward changing racist, classist, sexist, etc. beliefs and behaviors. But such change is not likely to happen in a 5-minute one-time talk with a stranger. At least a letter to the facility will put the issue on their radar and perhaps create opportunities for more “talk” about the issue to be ongoing and productive rather than a one-time shot.
3. So, I guess, I believe that it takes lots of efforts on lots of levels (interpersonal, institutional, private, public) to work toward a society that is filled with people who respect one another and act in respectful, non-judgmental ways.

Don’t go to the supervisor: Would the commenter suggest that this is true if the worker violated me directly (shaming me for being on Medicaid) rather than indirectly? My guess is no, at least my advice to anyone who is personally violated by a worker in an institution that is supposed to be caring for citizens would be to approach the worker’s supervisor to register a complaint. So…how is it different when the listener of offensive comments does not directly belong to the group that is being overtly offended? Does the listener have the right to complain? Ask for an apology? Go to a supervisor?

Here’s what I think: Different experiences are differentially “offensive” to me as a person, and differentially offensive to others as well. I have experienced thousands of interactions that are blatantly classist - some against me, others against me indirectly, and still others that were much farther removed from me personally. Sometimes these experiences make me feel so powerless in the situation that I simply can’t respond in the moment - and those are times when after-the-fact letters, complaints, conversations, etc. may be the only recourse. Other times the experiences are so enraging that I can’t help but lose my temper in such moments. But, most of the time, the experiences are somewhere between those poles and I make decisions about which offensive comments to essentially ignore, which ones to register in my mind and decide not to patronize the business any more, which ones to “talk about” with family, friends, and colleagues afterwards, which ones to push-back on in the moment requesting that the offender reconsider her/his comments, and which ones to take-on beyond the offender.

On my spectrum of offensive, had the woman in the hospital stopped the bantering when I tried to wheel myself out of the office, I would have likely ignored it or talked to friends, family, and colleagues, but little beyond that. It was the persistence of the comments even as I was trying to politely excuse myself that pushed me to take-on the issue in a broader way. I was not in a position to “handle” this issue with the woman personally, and feel very strongly that this is an issue that is much bigger than me and the woman in that office. It is unfortunately an issue that impacts millions of people’s lives daily and therefore should be talked about, cared for, and responded to in public, private, and institutional ways.

What are the best ways to work toward change?

My favorite answer - it depends.

Sometimes it’s interpersonally, sometimes it’s publicly, sometimes it’s through writing, sometimes it’s through relentless pushing-back, sometimes it’s through revolt, sometimes it’s through teaching, sometimes it’s through kindness, sometimes it’s through anger, sometimes it’s through sheer desperation. But it’s always through passion and persistence.

I received two phone calls this morning from representatives of Athens Regional Hospital. They were each genuinely concerned about the experience I had at the hospital and vowed to make a change, including conducting sensitivity training through their Human Resources department. Each of them said that such comments are never appropriate, but particularly inappropriate in the context of Athens Regional Hospital in Clarke County.

Kudos to Athens Regional for taking a stand against classism and racism in their health care facilities.

And for the rest of you out there - silence is complicity. Speak out - do something to make a change.

peace,

stephanie

I have deleted the original letter I wrote to the hospital to show my support for everyone who works hard each day to provide professional, respectful, non-judgmental health care to the citizens in and around our county as well as across the country. You know who you are - thank you for making this world a better place one interaction with a patient at a time.

The hospital did not ask, or even imply that they would like me to remove the letter from the Internet, but I have decided that their response was a positive, productive one and I don’t want future Internet surfers to make quick ongoing judgments about the facility based on my original letter.

Cheers

What is the age-old theory/practice divide really about? Can one exist without the other? Are there ways that we can integrate theory and practice in sophisticated and yet practical ways in teacher education?

Teachers are often over-worked, over-burdened with managerial tasks (especially in today’s age of Accountability), and very tired at the end of the day after being with a room full of students. This doesn’t create the most optimal condition, perhaps, for critical reflection and deep thinking about how theory informed their practice throughout the day. However, every teacher is working across her day informed by theory.  Perhaps a question we could ask is whether or not she has had access to readings, discussions, and/or activities throughout her education that do at least three things: 1) recognize and engage personal and scholarly theories of the world/societal structures 2) engage theories of learning, and 3) recognize and engage in theory-building through teacher research.  Perhaps if some - or all three - of these kinds of experiences are in place, teachers might begin to question and critique the “theory/practice divide” as something that positions them on the consuming end of knowledge and information rather than as producers of knowledge and - dare I say it - theory.

I know far too many deeply engaged, intellectual teachers working with young children to be speaking of this myself. I would love to hear from some readers:

-How do you read the theory/practice divide?

-What have you found helpful in your own education (either formal or informal)?

-Who benefits from the theory/practice divide?

-Who is disadvantaged in the ongoing presentation of this divide?

-What are teacher educators, professional developers, and researchers to do?

-What are teachers, principals, families, and students to do?

-Who are the other players in this theory/research divide?

The sun beat down ruthlessly as I marched across the spacious and vulnerable lawn of the outdoor Florida high school campus that was framed by one-story brick buildings. Doors hung open in fifteen feet intervals revealing classrooms filled with rows of chair and desk combinations and a teacher at the front of the room. I stepped into the shade of the canopy that covered a walkway and made my way to the classroom where I first learned about beakers and chemicals and where I memorized the table of elements and slouched in a chair staring dreamily into the dark afro in front of me. Today I was on a mission – no attending class, no slouching or dreaming, no goggle-wearing or chemical mixing. It was a new semester and a new day, and though Mr. Ramirez held my attention impressively throughout Chemistry, I was not going to follow through with his recommendation that I take physics. Stepping up and into the laboratory-like room, I handed him a piece of paper that indicated I was intending to drop his physics class and take something else. Mr. Ramirez (who was about forty years old, dark-complected, good-looking, and the food for my fantasies of marrying off my mother to a middle-class man who could provide her with an easier life) pushed his moustached lips together, shook his head and said something like:
“Stephanie. Don’t do this,” and gave me a long hard look.
“Why are you doing this?”
Another pause.
I can’t for the life of me remember if I responded to him or just sat there staring at his face or my shoes.
“Tell you what, I’ll give you an A. Just take the class. You can do it.”
At the time I had constructed some perverse fantasy in my mind that this “bribe” was to keep me in his classroom as eye candy, or something exceptionally stupid like that. People told me that I was pretty and had since I was old enough to understand words, so nearly everything that happened to me was immediately designated as a response to my physical appearance. Now, as an educator who has counseled first-generation college students who were on the verge of dropping out, and as someone who has made similar “offers” just to keep students in the line of possibility I reread this historic event differently. I have sat in my office chair pushing my lips together, shaking my head:
“I will do everything I can to make this a good experience for you.”
“Don’t drop out. I will get you through this, you can count on me to do that.”
For the life of me I can’t remember their responses. Perhaps they stared silently at me, or at their shoes, or perhaps they shook their head and mumbled something about not fitting in, not being able to manage family and school, not being able to talk in classes where they felt so different. Those details have left me, but the real physical pain of feeling my heart in my toes and knowing that I was about to lose one has stayed with me. Mr. Ramirez must have felt that same pain.
Mr. Ramirez was trying. He had to know that I was a recent newcomer, that I was from a family headed by a single woman at the time struggling to pay the bills, that I had been teetering on the edge of the abyss for at least two years, that I had the brains and the motivation but not the know-how to find comfort within school walls. How difficult it must have been to watch me walk out the door with his signature on the paper indicating that I was now officially dropping his course, physics, a course that could have provided me with cultural capital had I thought about applying for college, a course that could have convinced me to pursue science beyond high school, a course that might have helped me find comfort within academic settings.
He knew.
I didn’t.
That part of the conversation never happened, but of course, it’s so clear today.
Even had that conversation taken place, what is a sixteen-year-old who hated school, despised witnessing the privilege of schoolmates, and needed to make every dollar possible to pay for her own clothes, food, shoes, and help with younger siblings and household expenses to do? I needed money, and school was placing too many boundaries around the hours I had for working. I transferred to the district vocational school where I took classes for a few hours in the morning and then left to go to work – to make money – at noon. Mr. Ramirez, in that moment, didn’t have a shot at me. He might have convinced me across a number of conversations and across time, but in that space of me smiling and handing over the “drop” slip from the high school office, he didn’t have a fighting chance. I was done. Gone.
The multiple, competing, and contradictory narratives of my mobility across social class divides are filled with tense spaces such as that constructed between Mr. Ramirez and myself on that hot Florida day. Near-misses I call them – moments when I might have begun down a path that was foreign to me and most of my family, moments that might have made me miss the carefully practiced beat of walking in working-poor shoes, moments that might have gone either way, though they were in the habit of going in the same direction as the moments for generations before me, moments that constantly threatened to reclaim any stake I had made on the path to mobility. Money and time were always at the center of those tense times for me, two concepts that I found intriguing as a young child but unable to control them, at least in small ways, until I was an adolescent. Both, however, are forms of capital that work for us or against us in various societal exchanges, and that was something I did recognize early on in life, as well as the fact that physical beauty and a feminine demeanor could be used nearly as well as money in most circumstances. And use them I did.

Paul Tough, one of my favorite journalists, was recently led astray and wrote a piece on the work of Ruby Payne. With presidential candidate John Edwards on the cover, the entire issue was devoted to economic inequities, and is worth taking a quick look: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/.

Payne is very popular among teachers and principals largely, I would argue, because she does two things: 1) talks openly about poverty and education, and 2) offers a straight-forward and simple solution to a complex social issue that manifests itself in local classrooms every day. I applaud her popularity on the first account, and I deplore it on the second. Additionally, the book was written in one week about Payne’s experience with her husband’s family, and without engaging the extensive research available on social class, poverty, and education. I have written a letter to Paul Tough expressing some of my views:

June 13, 2007

Dear Paul Tough,

Greetings from a fan of at least four years. I love your pieces in the Times Magazine and sometimes have my students read them for class discussion. Your piece on Ruby Payne, however, has left me wondering what temporarily led you astray. With your experiences in writing about working-class folks and the real social issues faced by people in a complexly stratified world, I am surprised that someone offering a quick fix to the problems of poverty and education by teaching students the “rules” of class was able to sustain your interest much less be worthy of such exceptional publicity.

Payne’s work does not challenge the classism that exists everywhere in our society but is most felt and experienced in schools every day, and she certainly doesn’t engage with the possibility that in a market-driven economy where enormous bonuses and greed rule the day that there will always, always, be workers on the bottom of the heap. Frankly, it won’t matter if they know how to use the right silverware, substitute their old “ain’t”s for “isn’t”s, or speak with more (middle-class) clarity and in a more (middle-class) elaborated manner when they still find it improbable or impossible to pay the bills at the end of the month even when working two full-time jobs at a low wage. And in the meantime, if students really do learn all the “rules” of class and they still don’t find themselves in an upwardly mobile trajectory, they may end up blaming themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods. This couldn’t possibly be productive in a society where working folks need to depend on one another so much just to survive.

I am from a poor family, was a first-generation college student, and am now a relatively young professor at Teachers College, Columbia University (maybe one of the “angry assistant professors” referred to in the Payne piece). I know enough about education, class, language, and literacy to teach graduate students, teachers, and children, but I know much more about the painful, disjointed, and incredibly challenging journey of class mobility. The series on social class in the Times two summers ago did a fabulous job of making the complicated nature of class and mobility apparent, and when such complexities are stripped away and simple solutions are proposed to problems, we may find ourselves on the fast road to blaming the victim – again – who doesn’t seem to just follow the rules.

I humbly offer the title of my book, Girls, Social Class, and Literacy: What Teachers Can Do to Make a Difference (Heinemann, 2006) only because I have tremendous respect for you, and a number of teachers and professors have said that they find it to be an inspiring alternative to Ruby Payne’s Framework book. It is far from perfect and I do not claim to have solutions, but I have at least attempted to work through the enduring tensions that teachers, students, and families face when kids from working-class and poor homes go to school. At the same time I continue to focus on pedagogy, social justice, and a powerful education in the best interest of those who are born already on the lower rungs of the social class ladder.

Keep up the great work. I still love it and will continue to be a fan.

Hicks, D. and Jones, S. (2007). “Living class as a girl” In Late to class: Social class and schooling in the new economy. J. Van Galen and G. Noblit (Eds.), p. 55-86.

Jones, S. (2007). Working-poor mothers and middle-class others: Psychosocial considerations in home-school relations and research. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 38(2), 159-177.

Jones, S. and Clarke, L. (2007). Disconnections: Pushing readers beyond connections and toward the critical. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2(2), 95-115.

Jones, S. (2006). Lessons from Dorothy Allison: teacher education, social class, and critical literacy. Changing English, 13(3), 293-305

Jones, S. (2006). Language with an attitude: White girls performing class. Language Arts, 84(2), 114-124.

Jones, S. (2006). Girls, social class, and literacy: What teachers can do to make a difference. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.