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.

This story about the lives of elevators in the New Yorker last week is fabulously written and reminded me of how a simple observation in the world “wow - a man was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours” can turn in to an in-depth inquiry. If I had been conducting this research, I would have incorporated more issues around labor regarding elevators (installation, technicians, operators, etc.) as well as some of the challenges various elevator workers have faced across time and in different parts of the country/world. Alas, it wasn’t my piece, so I found myself content with the incredibly engaging style of writing, the movement between technological information about elevators and the urinating man stuck inside one, and my own envisioning of the animal-like organs always at work inside the steel, wood, stucco, brick, and glass structures we have built around us.

Even kindergarteners can turn a simple observation into a lengthy inquiry…we just have to take the observation seriously and recognize the yet-unearthed understandings waiting to be created from it. Well, and also provide the space, time, and resources for allowing students to do such research

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.