engaged intellectuals

My dear friend and colleague Lane Clarke at Northern Kentucky University sent an email about this story from NPR on the 826 in Brooklyn. I’ve heard and read about 826 before, but somehow it got wrapped up in the sticky webs of my mind and I had nearly forgotten about it completely. I love the concept: really cool, kid-enticing storefront (spies, superheroes, etc.) that mark the entrance into a really cool, creative space where kids read and write. Love it.

Karen Spector gave a fabulous invited talk to students in my undergrad course (integrated curriculum) at UGA last week. Two days before her talk we viewed Paper Clips, the popular documentary about a school in Tennessee that engaged the Holocaust for four years and included a school-community, local-global social action project resulting in a permanent memorial being constructed at the school. The memorial is now used as a site for educational tours which are planned and guided by middle school students.

As a class we were looking at the film from the perspective of an integrated curricular experience that lasted a long period of time and we asked questions about what subject areas were integrated and how, what further integration might have taken place, whose perspectives are represented in the Holocaust study and whose perspectives were missing, what tenets of critical literacy were apparent, how the students came to study the Holocaust, etc.

Karen offered us more questions to ask ourselves:

Why are the “ghosts of the Holocaust” regularly awakened for “us” (whoever that may         be) to learn about tolerance?

What might have been learned if the students had moved their study of intolerance and         hatred to their local contexts and researched the community to better understand             why there weren’t Jews, Catholics, African Americans, or Latinos living there?

What might have been learned if the students studied the history of Anti-Semitism in             Christianity?

What symbolism is employed in the film (crosses, paper clips, rail car, etc.), and how                 can that symbolism be read from multiple perspectives?

One of the questions, “Why are the ghosts of the Holocaust regularly awakened…for the study of tolerance?” has stuck with me for some time (Karen and I are friends, so I’ve heard this before;). Some of my undergraduates had fabulous insight when responding to the question including thoughts such as the U.S. can be portrayed as a “savior” of sorts since many soldiers were involved in the liberation of many concentration camps (albeit 6 million people too late), that the hatred and intolerance of the Holocaust can be couched as historic and therefore a lesson we’ve already learned (ignoring ongoing genocide and human rights violations around the world…including serious hatred and intolerance in our own country), and an overall furthering of “us” versus “them” who would allow such tragedies to take place to begin with.

So…why is it that the Holocaust is awakened for our own purposes? And should we continue to do so?

The French President seems to believe the ghosts of the youngest victims should be awakened in ways that would mark the education of every fifth grader in France.

And other stories have been asking for years what we’re doing about the present-day holocaust in Africa. Perhaps much like the Jewish Holocaust, stories of murders by the millions remain “Buried by the Times” while we educate our children about the horrible tragedies that happened long before their births.

There are so many ways to study, understand, and do something about hatred and intolerance - both local and global ways - and this website offers some great ideas.

Fight hatred.

Fight bias.

Fight.

Turning Assumptions into Inquiries
Kyle’s teacher has had much training (both socially and, perhaps, through formal education) in recognizing “problems” with students, diagnosing those problems, and remediating those problems. For his teacher, a lack of engagement in school reading and writing was immediately read as a coping strategy for a learning disability that was yet to be diagnosed and remediated. To further complicate things, recent media attention to violence in schools had placed pressure on teachers to analyze student artwork and writing in particular to recognize and flag any indication that a student may have psychopathic tendencies that may, hypothetically, result in some kind of violent behaviors. Kyle’s teacher, then, has been persistently positioned as someone who must be on the look-out for problems.
The simple question, “What does Kyle say about his drawings?” aims at turning-around a teacher’s positioning, to go to students for information about what’s going on in their schooling experiences rather than relying on outside forces to “frame” and then label a student’s performance in a classroom. This turning around of a teacher’s positioning toward inquirer of students can lead to turning around classroom pedagogy, which can lead to turning around a student’s trajectory as a reader that is headed in the wrong direction.

The following Wednesday this same concerned, frustrated, well-intended teacher on the verge of reporting a student for violent tendencies in his drawings and going to special educators to begin a process to have him identified as learning disabled, came prancing into her professional development group with a writer’s notebook in her hand. Smiling from ear to ear she reached the notebook to me and enthusiastically said, “He is totally into Anime.”

“Ohhhhh,” I said, knowingly.

“And when I told him I didn’t know what that was, he couldn’t believe it. He wrote a fourteen-page informational narrative all about Anime.”

“Ohhhhh?” I said, raising my eyebrows and smiling.

This fifth grade teacher experienced, in her own words, a great epiphany during
her conversation with Kyle: “I am making assumptions about students I don’t really know.” Turning her position around from problem-finder and problem-solver to that of inquirer, interviewer, curious investigator changed this teacher’s perception of herself, her job, and her students.

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.