A friend re-posted the letter below from a colleague who marched yesterday (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-teachers-union-rally-0524-20120524,0,473624.story).  While they were marching, I was teaching a class of first-second-and-third year teachers who wanted to talk about the teacher burnout they see all around them — and, already, inside themselves.  They attributed burnout to two chief factors: 1) not being able to teach, to engage with students in the joys of learning, because of the scylla and charybdis of the under-resourced classroom: the stresses of home and neighborhood and the pressures of the tests; and 2) widespread public disrespect for the profession.   It was a painful conversation, but the teachers have a clearer view of what is going on than what I usually encounter in beginning teachers.  This clarity has the potential to lead to real unanimity of purpose — and unimaginable power — amongst teachers.

from Dave Stieber (TEAM Englewood)

I just wrote this and submitted it to multiple newspapers. This rally was super inspiring!

Why I Marched

I marched today along with over 5,500 CPS Teachers and Staff because we are tired of being disrespected by people who are not educators. We the educators, the people who work with students, work with parents, and are invested in our school’s communities, know what will work for our students.

We marched to show that our schools are not failing; it’s the policies that are failing the students. I marched because we care so much about the students that we realize if we don’t march and come together now, the privatized educational system that is being proposed by the current administration will cause irreparable harm to our students, schools, communities, and our careers.

We do not want to march. We want to teach. We do not want to strike. We want to teach. We do not want to be forced to implement the newest, latest, ineffective and untested educational policy. We want to teach.

In the course of caring about our students, we have to care about ourselves. We have to care about the policies that we are asked to implement. We have to care about our compensation as educators. We have to care about full rich curriculums. We have to care about schools with counselors, librarians, psychologists, and social workers. We want to teach in a school system that values and respects every child, no matter where they live. We want to teach, but until we are allowed to teach and feel that our students best interests are at heart WE WILL MARCH.

Reflections on Coming Together – for the MCA Educators’ Symposium April 13, 2012

The Coming Together group has helped me understand ecological identity in learning and teaching.   I am going to try sketching out a little portrait of ecological identity as a way of thinking about the flow of life in education.

I grew up in a small town near the California Coast.  Petaluma means “little hills” in the Miwok language.  My school emphasized the Native American heritage of the region, and all the field trips I remember had to do with that heritage.  Demonstration villages were big in that area — we went to one where we learned to weave baskets and make acorn bread.  We also learned about plants through Native stories and practices.  Most interesting was the Miwok Indian Village, which we and many other school groups helped construct, using tools that the elders told us the Miwok used.

We probably went once a year, over the course of my 2nd through 6th grades.  My memory of those years is marked by stages of construction of the Miwok Village, not by the school calendar.  Our time at the Miwok Village always included rituals and stories that seeped into the rest of our lives.

I’m sure there was a curricular connection — I have a sense that there were books and papers and tests on the native tribes of California, but I don’t remember anything specific.  In the classroom, my attention was much more on the psychosocial dramas going on all around me.

At the Miwok Village I learned about taking care of the land.  Digging in the dirt with shells taught me to think about work as a way of being present, that it was more important to build this village respectfully than to build it efficiently. I learned that human responsibility for the land demanded that we look to past cultures to see how they carried it out, and know the land ritualistically, in our souls as well as in our bodies.

The people who led our expeditions had a passion and a focus that I couldn’t imagine being contained within a classroom.  They loved their history, loved the land, and we got to sit at their feet for a day.  I remember they were also fierce — we were not to mess around.  I was a little afraid of them, afraid of doing something disrespectful.  This gave me more of a focus in what I was doing.  Respect and disrespect were very important concepts coming out of this experience. Our teachers looked like marshmallows next to these Miwok elders. It was clear that none of this was to be trivialized; it wasn’t quaint or romantic.

What stuck with me was reverence for people’s traditions and identity. Responsibility for the land, people.  And an endless need for getting outside.

It wasn’t until I sat down with this group of educators from school and community contexts that I remembered this part of my education, and realized how deeply it had impacted me.  I hadn’t understood that a set of field trips in childhood mapped out the work I do now — developing experiential learning programs means: questioning the authority of academic knowledge, trying to understand and work with the distinction between boundaries of respect –and boundaries of avoidance and ignorance, and exploring the power of rituals in the lives of young people.

When I shared my story, I was amazed to hear that the other teachers had also been powerfully shaped by experiences outdoors and outside the bounds of academic learning.

One of the teachers summarized the connections between our stories in this way: There was an underlying sense of reverence, seeking deep roots and seeking knowledge, seeing the ecological systems, and a link toward present commitments to working around issues of environmental and human capacity, possibility and justice.

Starting out our time together in this space that was a little wild gave us the courage to venture into experiences that were a little new and a little scary for all of us.  Over the course of this year, sharing our stories has enabled me to dig into where I am now, and where students are, to slow down enough to notice what we’re doing, think about who we are here.  Sharing inquiry across school and community contexts helps me to appreciate the knowledge, perspectives, and movement around me.  To cultivate my artist’s eye.

A couple of weeks ago I came across this passage that evokes the integrative practice that I have been experiencing with this group, so I’ll end with that; it’s from John Tallmadge, Meeting the Tree of Life:

Imagine a map … drawn from your memory instead of from the atlas. It is made of strong places stitched together by the vivid threads of transforming journeys. It contains all the things you learned from the land and shows where you learned them…. Think of this map as a living thing, not a chart but a tissue of stories that grows half-consciously with each experience. It tells where and who you are with respect to the earth, and in times of stress or disorientation it gives you the bearings you need in order to move on. We all carry such maps within us as sentient and reflective beings, and we depend upon them unthinkingly, as we do upon language or thought…. And it is part of wisdom, to consider this ecological aspect of our identity.

The lines that connect learning in the classroom and outside of the classroom, the overlapping circles of learning in schools, museums, and community organizations, map out the ecological identity of engaged learning.  Whereas in much of our work we are asked to focus on deficiencies and goals, in the Coming Together group we are attending closely to what is. We take our bearings in the work of mapping meaning, which we share no matter where we teach.

I got the news this morning that the Chicago Public School Board is going ahead with its plans to close or turnaround 17 schools — a message from Teachers for Social Justice was in my mailbox, putting the news in the context of ongoing struggle.  I appreciated the way the news was delivered; it spoke to — and honored — the community relationships underlying the fight to save the schools while naming a systemic set of relationships that promotes financial and institutional gains.  By offering the social justice education community information, questions, and encouragement, TSJ yet again models critical pedagogy in a way that also sustains us.  And then there’s the parodic twist on the story making the FB rounds: aststand4children.blogspot.com…

A Love Letter to Educators | The Forum for Education and Democracy.

Here are notes on the April 2011 workshop of the Teachers’ Center for Democratic Inquiry (which has since become the Teachers’ Inquiry Project — read about it here.)

Deepening the Inquiry  (synopsis)

April 2, 2011

“And something weird is goin on, I can feel it in my chest.”

-Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson”

Where does learning take place in our lives?  Where is learning taking place within ourselves?  How do others spark our learning, and what are the processes by which learning grows?  These were some of the hundreds of questions that moved through the room in the second workshop of the Teachers’ Center for Democratic Inquiry, held April 2, 2011 at Jane Addams Hull House Museum in Chicago.

The TCDI workshops of 2010-2011 were designed to bring together teachers from a wide variety of school contexts to reflect on practice and imagine how teachers’ ongoing learning can contribute to education as a sustaining and sustainable life.  The first workshop centered around four processes; the first three were processes of reflection based in dialogue: Civic Reflection; Matrix Leadership; Descriptive Review.  The fourth element of the first workshop was envisioning the Center.  The TCDI conveners worked with the ideas, perspectives, and stories shared in the first workshop to develop a business plan and to plan for a second workshop, focused on delving more deeply into teachers’ questions about their own learning and about the relationship between teachers and students.

Inquiry builds alliances, networks, and power.

-        TCDI Spring workshop participant

The complexity of teachers’ work, holding together the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the intellectual and the physical, has much in common with the field of social work, which took shape in Chicago under the leadership of Jane Addams and the Settlement movement.  Thus it was important for the conveners of the Teachers’ Center for Democratic Inquiry that the Spring Workshop, “Education: Deepening the Inquiry,” was held in the original Settlement Dining Hall of the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.  Jane Addams’ work was a key inspiration for TCDI planners, who agreed with Addams that “ Teaching… has to be diffused in a social atmosphere, information must be held in solution, in a medium of fellowship and good will…. It is needless to say that a Settlement is a protest against a restricted view of education.”  The TCDI workshop was designed to set reflection within the “social atmosphere” that supports, challenges, and helps to clarify the work of teachers.

Change comes from inside.

-        TCDI Spring workshop participant

We began with a discussion facilitated by Adam and Kelli of the Project on Civic Reflection.  Civic Reflection on Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” provided a good space for exploring the contexts of learning.  We discussed experiential education and school structures and the relationship between educational objectives and unintended consequences.  We argued over the intersections of individual learning and political education and the impact of the race of the teachers and students in the classroom.  We noticed who is heard in the classroom and how they get heard, and tried to notice who doesn’t get heard.

Does all inquiry ultimately become self-inquiry?  To solve a given problem you have to turn back to yourself and your values.

-        TCDI Spring workshop participant

After a hearty lunch of soul food, generously furnished by the McCormick Foundation and De Paul University School of Education, we re-gathered in small groups to share stories of inquiry.  Joan designed this Descriptive Review process to enable us to listen to one another’s recollections and to watch the patterns that emerged within and between the stories.  We discovered anew the riskiness of inquiry, the personal investment that makes it both urgent and unwieldy.  While inquiry often seems fraught with danger, groping in fields of uncertainty and experimentation in challenging authoritative sources of knowledge, even more dangerous is the suppression of the inquiry.

Empowerment is the ability to pursue questions about your interests

-        TCDI Spring workshop participant

We ended the day with Joby and Shanti facilitating a closing discussion on the implications of reflection for learning.  We explored questions about applications of teacher inquiry to students’ learning, the limits of institutionalized schooling, the development of the character of the teacher and the development of the student’s character, and the responsibility of the teacher in relation to student needs and society’s needs.

 Here are notes on the December 2010 workshop of the Teachers’ Center for Democratic Inquiry (which has since become the Teachers’ Inquiry Project — read about it here.)

 I came away with many strong feelings about the ways educators can talk to each other about their craft and their commitment.

It was good to reflect on if I learn about something or really learn it.

It is heartening to see the work of others within the education reform sector.

What came up for me was a real desire to have some kind of transformative professional community that wasn’t opposed to or cut off from my classroom practice. I reflected on whether there are ways that I can shift my perspective or engage differently with my colleagues to lessen the sense that interesting and meaningful professional conversations stop at the door of my classroom.

–Teachers’ responses to TCDI workshop

On December 2^nd and 3^rd, 2010, 30 teachers came together to build a vision for A Teachers’ Center for Democratic Inquiry.  The inspiration participants brought to the vision included centers like Highlander Folk Center, Teacher Curriculum Work Center, and Hull House, and processes like Critical Friends and Descriptive Review.  Across differences of generation, grade level, and kind of school, all shared a commitment to reflection and conversation as mainstays of healthy educational life for teachers inside and outside the classroom.

Participants walked in ready to take a dip in the intellectual and spiritual waters of reflection, to nourish our craft and remember our delight in learning.  The workshop centered around three processes chosen to enable us to explore democratic inquiry:

CIVIC REFLECTION

All participants gathered in a circle to read Howard Nemerov’s poem “Learning the Trees” aloud, and attend to the poem in order to re-consider our own and our colleagues’ thoughts about teaching and learning.   Teachers mused on their own learning while the group explored the boundaries of language and knowledge and the powerful spaces where they intersect with learning.  This process launched the workshop to suggest by the experience that reflection (as distinct from planning) is important for our work and ourselves.

DESCRIPTIVE REVIEW OF CHILDREN’S WORKS

This session focused on looking closely at a piece of child’s work, describing it as a group.  One group described a kindergarten student’s drawing and the other group described a third grade child’s story.  The lingering, collective description led to greater understanding of the child’s way of thinking and working — and of the schooling and learning processes that she finds herself in.  This reflection invited teachers’ attention to the many levels of a child’s, and a teacher’s, work.

MATRIX MODEL OF LEADERSHIP

Matrix circles enabled participants to experience a growing awareness of a group as a dynamic living system.  The process of building a network one pair at a time enables groups and their members to have access to the collective intelligence of the whole and become more resilient, adaptive and responsive to each other and to the changing environment.  This experience enabled participants to weave the connections of curiosity, stories, and questions that sustain us as human beings. Each process enabled participants to share their stories about learning and teaching and to ask new questions about relationships with students, colleagues, and most of all, the inner self.  Questions that emerged from the workshop included: Is there a way to take back “democracy”?  What assumptions do we need to inquire about?  How do we make professional restoration more the norm than the exception?  To different degrees in different environments, we all shared a constriction from the demands of a results-oriented educational domain — airing questions reminded us of the spaciousness of inquiry.

Participants also worked together to generate ideas for the center, with attention to the body of the place (“hearth;” “bridge;”  “food!”), the mind (“library and resource center,” “teachers’ studio;” “lively debate,” “lesson study,” “teaching laboratory – a place to tinker with ideas”) and the soul (“Interest in working differences (among, within, across, etc.);” “Linking communities;””Ability to call forth everybody’s gifts & leadership”).

The gathering of people who have joined to help create the Teachers’ Center for Democratic Inquiry accomplished much already with a small outlay of resources.  With a gift from the McCormick Foundation, pro bono facilitation by Matrix Leadership trainers, the conveners’ own contributions, and the generous investment of many teachers’ time, we accomplished: workshops in three democratic inquiry processes; a harvest of ideas for the Center; the development of a network of supporters; and the creation of contemplative space for teachers to share stories, struggles, and growth.

In the spring, Educating: A Life Workshop Part 2 will continue the growth of TCDI by engaging democratic inquiry processes in greater depth.  It will take up the suggestion offered by workshop participants to provide space for reflection on practice.  The workshop is planned over a day and a half, with the half-day on participants’ own time with a reading and reflection leading into the full workshop day when teachers will gather: April 1, 2011.

Teachers’ Inquiry Project — A Prospectus

 

“When we met with the other students it was difficult at first to intertwine with them.  Everyone felt uncomfortable with each other.  I think that it was only uncomfortable because we live in different areas of Chicago and there are huge differences between them.  I remember one kid told me that his neighborhood used to be full of white people but then a few black families moved in and the white people migrated north.  This really made me feel bad because people hurt him and his family not by discrimination but by avoiding them… In all, this project helped me explore topics of discomfort, expand my knowledge, brainstorm in groups, and allow myself to become an associate.  I grew up a little more inside from this experience.”

–9^th grade participant in intercultural arts partnership

 

On a bright cold morning in early May, two groups of students met on the bridge over the Chicago River.  One group had come from the west side, from a predominantly Latino neighborhood, the other from the north, from a predominantly White neighborhood.  Every student had on a white T shirt on and a bucket in hand.  A young Oxfam activist walked up with an armload of sheets and spray paint and a megaphone.  She explained the experiential learning activity for the morning: Walking for Climate Justice.  Global warming is causing water shortages all over the world, such that people are having to walk farther and farther for water.  The students were going to learn about the issue in a civically participatory way, taking education to the streets by marching downtown holding buckets and banners and broadcasting the stories of some of the individuals affected by water shortage.  The students got to work, spray painting banners and making signs which they taped to their buckets, declaring access to water as a human right.  They then marched down Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute, passing around the megaphone and passing out fliers urging people to demand that world leaders prioritize climate justice.

This group of 50 students had been meeting throughout the year as part of an “Art on the Streets” partnership project, focused on learning about environmental justice in Chicago, and working on a mural designed to raise awareness about the toxic coal power plants in two southwest-side neighborhoods, Little Village and Pilsen.  But the weekend before the groups were to come together to paint the mural, Little Village, the neighborhood where the painting was to take place, was shaken by several shootings and the field trip – the culminating event of the year – was canceled by school administrators of one of the schools concerned about the violence.

The partnering teachers decided that instead of having only one of the groups paint the mural, they would create an alternate plan for the day.  They contacted Oxfam and arranged the climate walk, which broadened the day’s focus from a focus on the impact of pollution at a local level to the global level.  They made sure the day would still involve visual creativity, intercultural collaboration, and public action.

Students were disappointed about not being able to complete the mural, but some were able to stretch beyond their own experience to take stock of the much vaster problems people in Little Village were dealing with.  They also recognized that their school-to-school partnership was the priority, and the relationships they were growing with students in the other school were in some small way themselves a protest against the geographic separations that signal and enable injustice.

This day was relatively typical for the social arts partnerships, which live in the difficult spaces between neighborhoods that are normally filled with distrust or ignorance.  As a student commented:

 The art we all are creating really changes a city. We are just [small] groups, but adding more and more art and artistic messages is so powerful in beautifying a city, bringing out people’s creativity, and sending many messages within that art. Also introducing people to new people and having them work together in creative and socially active and caring ways can change the dynamic of the city (especially beginning on a youthful level as we are). Meeting new people and working together for the same causes really makes an impact on what type of relationships exist within our country.

In Chicago, schools and neighborhoods – with a few exceptions — are so firmly segregated that it takes deliberate and assiduous effort to make sure that Caucasian students will spend time with African-American students, Latino students will spend time with Asian students, and so on.  Thus, in striving to overcome segregation in our city, a growing number of educators are developing partnerships between schools and community organizations, as well as collaborative small group projects centered on shared exploration of the city, of social issues, and of students’ lives and communities. They are also experimenting with arts as a means of creating a wider, more dynamic spirit of community between diverse groups.

Developing these partnerships is not easy on the teachers or the students: it is uncomfortable and inconvenient to challenge the patterns of separation that define our lives.  As one of the participating students recently noted, “in society, people generally associate with people who are similar to them.  This can be seen with race, gender and culture.  This pattern of not wanting to branch out is common and the typical high school education lacks the social education that people who may not look like you are a lot like you.”  The more we strive to facilitate partnerships, the more powerfully we realize how much is set up for students of different ethnic backgrounds to never to look one another in the eye and talk together and explore common purpose. Multicultural days and diversity workshops are hollow at best, and at worst a lie, without this deliberate attention to BEING in a diverse environment – and preparing students to work toward creating diverse environments as they move into the larger world.

In designing collaborative experiential learning projects, teachers plan and work with other teachers both within the same school and at other schools, and often include interested students as co-leaders in the project.  These projects, which are not primarily academic in focus, communicate to students value for and commitment to social learning.  By earmarking social learning time throughout the year, schools participating in these partnerships help students to understand the ongoing process of partnership-building, which takes a different form from the discrete boundaries of academic units and projects: it weaves through and around the school schedule, sometimes according to a pre-arranged plan and schedule, and sometimes deviating from arrangements and popping up or changing suddenly.

Students and teachers come to understand that social learning includes logistical and relational problem-solving – and that sometimes these types of problems are inseparable.  The projects are fluid, intentionally adjusting over the course of the year in response to the students’ experience and to events and situations that have direct relevance to the participants (election issues or the issue of school closings in Chicago, for instance).  The collaborating teachers are resourceful, deft, and flexible enough to make changes as needed despite the amazing array of obstacles, because they care deeply that their students gain the exposure to new environments, new faces, new perspectives, that will help them to develop as intelligent and engaged citizens in society.  Partnership as a mode of democratic learning strengthens students’ social, intellectual, and civic capacities, and when it is neglected in our schools, isolation, inequality, and prejudice proliferate.

American schools live with a legacy of social division and social uplift that must be addressed in dynamic ways in order to enable democratic growth.  We learn our social habits in our schools, and since this country has not yet developed democratic habits – as evidenced by economic disparity and racial segregation – our schools are charged with becoming working laboratories for equality.

By fostering opportunities for connection, relationship, and shared inquiry, schools can empower young people – and their communities – to break through the barriers that limit the reaches of democracy, to work together for justice.  Social arts – the practice of integrating the growth of cross-neighborhood relationships into the structures of schools — enable students to appreciate diversity, provide natural and equitable forms of mutual enrichment, and deepen social awareness and social commitment.  When educators interrupt the patterns of segregation to enable young people to ally with one another across race, class, and gender lines, they build recognition of interdependence amongst different social groups that enables students to develop the power of solidarity within and around them.

 

“The scene that had the greatest effect on me occurred …after a board member demanded that the Principal “control [his] staff!”  Every teacher (the majority of the audience) walked out of the meeting in protest against the implication that they had less of a right to speak than or should be kept under control by authority.”

 As I read my Teacher Ed students’ papers at the end of the quarter, one strong theme emerged, which surprised me since I had given them total free rein in choosing the focus of their final questions.  The single idea that I saw taking shape was of presence.   It seemed to me that between the 17 of them, they had constructed a picture of what presence in education looks like, from the students’ connection to course material to teachers’ voices in school policy, as registered in the excerpt above (from a student’s reflection on her visit to a local school board meeting).

I wanted to try to draw that picture.  I decided to write back to them all together about this, explaining, “In one way or another, all of your papers helped me to see learning as rooted in presence – the presence of the student, of the teacher, and of the worlds, languages, cultures, experiences that stand behind each person.”  My students’ papers, constantly referencing one another and their own experiences, themselves communicated presence in an unusual way — they were immediate, reflective, and dialogic.  This will be a condensed version of that letter where I addressed each student’s paper; here I will touch only on a few, and will use pseudonyms.

Some students focused on ways that classroom learning can honor the day-to-day rhythms of students’ lives.  Brooke wrote,  “by acknowledging a student’s body of knowledge, opinions, and insights as valid within a classroom setting, a teacher can set up a respectful dynamic. Teresa points out the importance of allowing norms in students’ lives to interact with the norms expected in a school setting in order to make the knowledge presented in the curriculum seem more relevant.”  By recognizing a student’s life as a text enabling powerful learning, the teacher makes space for the whole person, rather than keeping real life outside the classroom door, which implicitly discounts parts of the student’s life.

Making space for the presence of the student in the room also creates space for the presence of the teacher herself.  Brooke confronted her fears about teaching students from less sheltered backgrounds than hers.  She drew together her questions about the risks that come with making space in the classroom for the real challenges of students’ lives with attention to cultural modeling, to offer a pedagogy based in conversations about the risks we share and don’t share. “Intentionally presenting scaffolding that more closely relates to the student’s body of knowledge presents a certain level of risk for a teacher who might have different life experiences that inform his or her reading of these scaffolding texts. This risk, made explicit by the teacher, might go a long way in establishing trust and respect in class.”  Valuing students’ language, modes of connection, and here-and-now experience builds students’ capacities while reducing the pressure on the teacher to be the source of understanding, enabling ALL to learn.

Philip urges the teacher to concentrate on empowering students to be present to one another: “we are constantly discussing how to connect with students and understand their perspectives; it occurs to me that one way to do so is to get out of the way and let students connect with each other through shared experiences and an ability to communicate in a language and on a level that we might not be able to access.”  Reciprocal learning involves nurturing students’ relationships with one another.  By focusing not only on output but also on response in both students and teachers, we develop capacities that cross divides between academic and social learning.  We learn to heighten the other’s presence.

Does the material we put in front of students heighten their sense of presence in the world?  When we teach literature, do the ideas, characters, stories feel present to students?  When many students in Chicago schools wrestle with attendance issues, whether because of illness, violence and lures in the neighborhood, or school pushout, it is vital to consider how to maximize students’ sense of presence when they are there.

It seemed important to my Teacher Ed students to not take for granted the purpose for learning; to be willing to ask oneself and engage with students about questions of purpose that, when put up against the background of real life, may not stand the test.  One student highlights this tenuousness by positing teaching as bridging.  He begins with an intriguing epigraph: “Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture,” and goes on to question their sturdiness.  Cesar’s reflection, based in an image of a rope bridge in his hometown in Mexico, questions whether teachers know where they are leading their students and why.  These bridges we build through reading and writing are pathways. They take us from one point to another, but they are not significant in themselves. What if the bridge leads nowhere? What does that desire to learn for the sake of learning do for us?  I have been thinking about Cesar’s bridge since class ended.  In my response to him I wrote, “ I’m wondering what, for you, is the other side of fear.  Is it hope? faith? belief? or determination?  I’m guessing your answer to this question is what shapes your course as a teacher, as a thinker…Keep asking, keep being honest, but ask out loud — make sure others are hearing your questions and engaging them with you.”

A number of students stressed the importance of the voice, the questions, and multiple dialogic forums that teachers need to exercise as they become increasingly present in their practice and in the wider world.  They see that the world of teaching extends out beyond the classroom, in terms of external supports and the teacher’s ability to advocate for those supports.  I will close with the observation of the student whose reflection I opened with, describing the teacher’s public voice: “those same teachers who presented awards at the beginning of the School Board meeting spoke out in favor of the proposed change in the structure of the freshman year. As one teacher read aloud their letter to the administration, a group of at least ten teachers stood behind her in silent support.  The scene Flavia describes is one of teachers extending their presence into the public sphere, speaking up for policies that respect the integrity of every student and every teacher.

I came out of the Progressive Education Network Conference last weekend with some questions about the people and the relationships in schools.  It is a common thing to hear in the progressive ed circles “we teach people, not subjects,” in distinction to the prevailing focus on knowledge acquisition and skills (and, correspondingly, evaluation of teachers and of students) in schools.  Here are some moments that stood out for me.

Francisco Guajardo told a story about walking down the street of their town with his father and his father drawing himself up respectfully to introduce him to “the most important person in this town:” the teacher.  And his career stemming out of that moment of trying to make sense of the contradiction between the respect for teachers that was etched into him at such an early age and the devaluation of teachers he saw throughout his life.

This was part of a panel discussion, which, when opened up to audience participation, turned to the matter of privilege — how to teach our kids about their privilege.  If it makes them uncomfortable/alienates them/shuts them down, is that something to avoid, be very careful of? or confront/engage? Francisco went from talking about his father to talking about his son: My 10 year old didn’t want to take the test, so we got the law changed.  I talk to my son about his privilege.  These are important conversations to have with your children.  An audience member said: but I am a parent who doesn’t know how to have these conversations with their children.  Can’t the school help us with this?

I was sitting in the back of the auditorium with the only high school students who came to this part of the conference: Gage Park HS students, who had woken at 5 to get to this conference on their day off school.  They wanted to spend their day at this education conference.  I asked them what did they think of it?  Robin was outraged at the imbalance of power she saw in Francisco’s story.  “He just picks up the phone and makes a call and gets the law changed.” I argued that it wasn’t that simple — Francisco also talked about what a struggle it is to get laws changed. But I agree with them in the sense that we know he has the resources to keep on fighting.

Expressing some frustration with all the talking and little signs of action, the students kept emphasizing how “we all need to come together.” I asked, why aren’t people coming together? “They don’t know what it’s like for us.”  Why don’t they? Why are people so isolated from each other?  What would it take to come together?  I came away from the conference feeling that the only way “coming together” is really going to happen is under students’ leadership.

Xian and I organized a workshop at the conference to tap into precisely this perspective.   Entitled “social justice education by youth, not at youth,” we wanted to create space for exploring how youth allies can build platforms for students’ voices and actions.  The workshop itself — which Xian and I struggled to organize in such a way to keep the Gage Park and Francis Parker students participating front and center, even though they hadn’t had as much opportunity to prepare — was one such platform.  In the workshop, students stressed the importance of their leadership in getting parents involved in struggles for quality education in schools.  Markeith said, “we have to show that we’re serious about our education, our abilities, and our will.  So we have to take the lead.”  One of the things Markeith was suggesting here was that leadership both emerges from and lends itself to power that you earn.  Which is perhaps the counterforce to unearned privilege, the specter of which haunted this conference at one of the wealthiest schools in the city.

The Parker students and the Gage Park students communicated the expectation of themselves and their peers that they would engage in the struggle for earned power.  By doing so, they illuminated a foundation for education for social justice that crosses generational, neighborhood, class, and race lines.