Tag Archives: Shanti Elliott

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Jackson-Chicago Restorative Justice Teachers’ Exchange

by Shanti Elliott and Carol Redfield-Mims, with Suzanne Amra, Maryam Bilal, Jereece M. Brown, Gael Byrnes, Martria Clifton, Kassandra Cosby, Olivia Cote, Shauna Davis, Roshunda Harris-Allen, Nicol Hemphill, Jacqueline McClendon-Griffin, and David Stieber

“People in Mississippi are good at doing things that have never been done.”

  • Jackson Historian Mr. Franklin Figgers

“To know where you are as an individual and as part of a collective group, you have to know from where you came.”

  • Chicago teacher Ms. Jereece Brown

In the fall of 2017, 14 teachers from Jackson, Mississippi and Chicago, Illinois began meeting to share stories of their cities and classrooms. They were preparing to participate in an annual meeting of educators focused on equity in education, called the North Dakota Study Group because it began in 1972 in North Dakota.  This year the Study Group meeting would be held in Jackson, hub of ongoing collective work for liberation and democracy, where the fight for fully funded, vibrant schools is understood to be a continuation of the Civil Rights work led by Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Bob Moses and other Mississippi leaders.

The North Dakota Study Group (NDSG) invites you to Jackson, Mississippi, a singular place in the African American struggle for emancipation.  Rich historic sites in Jackson celebrate the courage, creativity and perseverance of activists who were part of Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement.  Jackson leaders of today are no less challenged by policies that condone violence, white supremacy, police brutality, and lack of access to healthcare, housing, jobs, and more.  Of particular concern for NDSG will be access to the emancipation that can occur through education, including our own emancipation from racism. https://ndsg2018.weebly.com/

The teachers of Jackson and Chicago, two cities joined by a common legacy of Black resistance to systemic racism, sought to build conversation and relationship between their students in the months leading up to the Jackson NDSG meeting.  A Jackson teacher described her goal in participating, “to partner with schools doing the work of transforming our schools as a place for cooperative learning and students to benefit from these new opportunities.” A Chicago teacher noted,

The first thing that comes to mind is my students’ family connections to Mississippi, and the history of migration from Mississippi to Chicago. We could learn about each others’ family histories, migration and non-migration – comparing and contrasting life and social justice issues between the two communities. A project could take form through many angles – by reading literature/art of each community, by researching family histories and migration trends, analyzing the impact of individual choices and the impact of the environment, etc. I am in charge of initiating our first year-end “capstone” project, and I see a collaboration as a unique learning experience that that provides leadership and collaborative possibilities for students in both locations

(Teacher application, Jackson-Chicago Teachers’ Exchange, Fall 2017).

In Jackson and in Chicago, public schools are under-funded, over-tested, and racked by the broader economic and social issues of their cities. The schools are also full of curious students, visionary teachers, and committed family members who teach and learn in powerful ways that are disregarded by the deficit narrative about public education, and especially public education in Jackson and Chicago.  They share a vibrant history and current reality of communities who organize social change around love for and protection of young people. So, while teachers were interested in building relationships between their classrooms, they also shared a vision for dignity in schools, authentic community-based learning, and social justice.

For the first several months, meetings were held online and by telephone, so that participants could learn about each other’s interests and teaching approaches, and share challenges each teacher experienced in their own contexts.  The teachers taught diverse subjects and grade levels, but quickly found that they shared a commitment to restorative practices as a support for improving relationships between students and between students and teachers.

Over the course of the year, the Jackson teachers traveled around the country deepening their understanding of restorative justice. They brought back to JPS new methods and perspectives and led peace circle training for students, teachers, and parents in the district.  Meanwhile, Chicago teachers practiced restorative justice in their contexts, with the support of professional learning offered by youth leaders of VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education).  The teachers from the two cities talked periodically, sharing new learning, questions, and applications in their schools.  In one public example of the teachers’ exchange,  Jackson teacher Dr. Roshunda Allen and Chicago teacher Mr. David Stieber connected in a Facebook Live chat to discuss educational issues impacting educators in Jackson and in Chicago.  For instance, they reflected on the racial disparities underlying current public attention to gun violence in schools: “gun violence has been impacting communities of color for years but it is only now after a shooting at a white school that everyone seems to care.”  The educators’ dialogue emboldened them to develop an analysis of the impact of systemic injustice on their students and bring it to a more public stage, to promote education that values the lives and believes in the dreams of all students.

To prepare for the Study Group meeting, teachers steeped themselves in Civil Rights history as well as current realities.  With the rest of NDSG, they read I’ve Got the Light of Freedom,  Jackson Rising, A Different Kind of Takeover for JPS, and other Readings.  They came to the February 15-18, 2018 Study Group meeting in Jackson primed, as NDSG’s invitation urged, to think about personal experiences in relation to a legacy of white supremacy in this country and to engage in conversations about education based in equity and justice.  NDSG Jackson Host and Institute for Democratic Education in America Director Albert Sykes challenged participants to ask, “How do we put ourselves in the story?  It’s not about coming to Jackson,” he said, “it’s about sinking in to Jackson. Not a drive-by, but a serious focus on race, on equity. If we can see what’s happening, we can know where we are.”

In February 2018, educators from all over the country came to Jackson with questions about national education policy and practice paired with intentional inquiry into the city’s local context: How can we learn to be in this place fully and respectfully?  How does my being here help me learn more about myself and my world? How does it impact my students when I follow Ella Baker’s lead, and sit at the feet of people who stood up when pushed down? What does a grassroots approach to change look like in education and in politics?

Participants of the meeting visited the Civil Rights Museum and the NAACP, mourned Medgar Evers and the thousands of victims of white supremacist violence, and at the venerable
HBCU Tougaloo College, sat together in conversation about approaches to education that combat racism and grow what keynote speaker Ms. Rukia Lumumba called “collective genius.”  She sparked questions for educators: Why hasn’t it been part of my education, to vision and dream? Who is served by my obedience to the accountability systems that are in place in my area? Why do I perpetuate approaches to education that don’t ground students and teachers in their capacities to collectively, boldly, creatively vision?

The Study Group focused on challenges to equity in education, in a context where the state has condemned Jackson students to what Mr. Albert Sykes names, “a sharecropper’s education.”  Local leaders situated the vulnerabilities of the school system.  They noted that the threatened state takeover of the schools stemmed from the fact that “Jackson never healed the gaping wound of slavery and Jim Crow.”  They also emphasized the resilience and resourcefulness of the people of Mississippi, whose work led to the Voting Rights Act and other critical social advances.  In the 1960s, local leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer took on the national Democratic Party though they couldn’t vote themselves. Dignity and collective power was embedded in the buildings like the building NDSG met in, home to CORE, NAACP, SNCC, and many local Civil Rights organizations. We were in, they made it clear, sacred space.

At Tougaloo, the Jackson and Chicago teachers held a fishbowl conversation, surrounded by NDSG colleagues from all over the country.  Chicago teacher Ms. Martria Clifton talked about the importance of students sharing stories, being able to say: “Here’s who I am, where I’m from. Here’s what’s going on in our schools.”   Jackson teacher Ms. Olivia Cote responded, “we need to create the space for students to explore their identity and be proud of their identity. To share with students who look like them in another area is a way to build their identities up.”  The teachers shared approaches to community-based civic engagement: Teachers and students researching their communities, oral histories, studying statistics through histories of local housing, and restorative practices in the classroom and community.

NDSG colleagues sat in a circle around the teachers.  They listened closely, then offered observations and support:

“This is a critical platform for building dialogue.”

“How are you building trust amongst yourselves? When educators take the time to do this, it models relationship-building for your students.”

“A seed has been planted. Protect it.  People try to trample on seeds before they have a chance to grow.”

“Unlike the vertical power structures that organize many of our institutions, this is horizontal development – teachers unfolding the lives and the wisdom of teachers.”

“Create the conditions of a no-whine zone. That’s what we’re not doing. Hold up the work of a child with each other.”

In her reflection on the Jackson-Chicago Teachers’ Exchange, Chicago teacher Ms. Shauna Davis wrote, “By exposing and encouraging students to have conversations with a different population than they are used to, we are helping them learn and grow into productive global citizens.  We are empowering them to take chances and get to know people, no matter how big or small the difference is.”  She emphasizes that supporting students’ development as global citizens requires that educators engage in a particular kind of preparation, one that is deeply reflective and influenced by community-based processes:

I am developing my practice as a culturally sustaining educator.  I am learning how to actively communicate with adults and students about race and injustices that are happening in the world.  Living in a large city, we are constantly observing injustices on people of color.  Students and adults need opportunities to discuss what is happening to us and our students.  I am learning through NDSG how to hold and lead these conversations, as well as sharing this information with colleagues so that they can have these conversations with their students too. Through NDSG I am gaining confidence in my abilities and a supportive community (networking) to become a leader in my school community.

We look forward to continuing the Teachers’ Exchange, where educators share their learning with one another and with their students, and invite students into the process of learning about the history, issues, challenges, and connections with the other city.

* The Jackson-Chicago Teacher Exchange is supported by the Mississippi Association of Educators and Chicago Public School’s Department of Social Science and Civic Engagement.

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#Nobannowall vs. #Buildthewall: Rethinking conflict in school

What does it mean to teach civil dialogue today, when the leaders of democratic society aren’t modeling it? When many children of immigrants are living in terror of deportation ripping their families apart? When students in cafeterias and on athletic fields across the country have adopted “build a wall!” as a handy taunt, and often teachers and parents don’t know how to respond? When we lack the language of social responsibility and trust in human community?

In many schools, administrators have attempted to protect students and teachers from confusion and conflict by prohibiting political discussion, declaring schools safe zones from controversy. So, the place where students are educated for thinking through hard things, for exchange across differences, comparing, interpreting, re-evaluating, questioning, is not the place where they are processing the complex ideas and events that the world around them presents.

When I was in high school in the 80’s, those of my classmates who knew about the wars in Central America said the U.S. was right to support death squads to prevent the rise of Communism.  I knew refugees from Central America who had fled the death squads, and I didn’t know how to disagree with my classmates without disliking them.  I needed to dig into questions of U.S. policy, ethics, and human rights with my teachers and peers, not to change anyone’s position or solidify my own, but to recognize that these questions mattered.  Instead, we continued learning equations and reading Shakespeare; my teachers’ silence on political issues told me that these issues didn’t matter to the school.  I looked outside of school for the hard conversations I needed to have to feel I was engaging with real life.  I wish my school had encouraged us to question authority, to challenge our assumptions, to engage complexity.

When we simply avoid controversial discussions, we drive complexity underground temporarily, ensuring that it will burst out in moments and contexts of stress.  Abandoning students to handle these hard moments without adult support and guidance is unethical.

Yet, controversy also has the potential to generate better thinking and learning.  Controversy creates a powerful filter: everything shifts when it surfaces in a room, whether in the form of a direct lesson on immigration policy or because a hallway snub has spilled over into the classroom. When people sense the possibility of a controversy, they become more alert, more focused.  The air becomes a little electric.  There is potential in these moments for deep, true learning:

Despite its sometimes uncomfortable presence, conflict is both unavoidable and potentially beneficial. Controversial discussion adds energy and motivation to the classroom; heightens awareness and increases student engagement, and gives us as instructors opportunities to encourage the development of critical thinking skills and potentially new solutions to societal issues (Landis, ed., 2008, p. 32: this and other helpful resources can be found at this link: Conflict/Civil discourse/Controversial issues: Teaching Resources).

In the classroom, conflict is often ignored or pushed down: it threatens to push things out of control.  Teachers worry, “What if I don’t have a good answer, a helpful response?  What if I fall in this pit that has suddenly appeared? What if I can’t climb out, let alone help my students out of it?!”

There’s an opportunity here for adults to recognize we don’t have the answers, to embrace the process of growing. We can model something very authentic for students – not just how do we make sense of things, but how do we deal with the things we can’t make sense of?

Sometimes it’s ok that we don’t know. Students often have the answers we are seeking, if we listen.

The other day I was at a gathering of Midwestern educators, discussing social justice education in today’s fraught political context.  Olivia, a high school Junior, described a project she leads, raising awareness about Syria and supporting refugees.  Together with student leaders of the Latino Students’ Club and the Muslim Students’ Club, she organized a lunchtime discussion for any high school students who wanted to come.  The event was called “#NoBanNoWall.”  A teacher listening to her presentation asked Olivia, “what about students who support a wall? How did they feel about this discussion?” Olivia answered, “I kept my focus on my own reasons for being there, for having the discussion; I kept what I said ‘I-centered.’”

Olivia’s response may come across as self-absorbed.  But to me, and I think to the other teachers in the room, her words illuminated a sturdy path through difficult territory.  By keeping focused on her own goals for the dialogue, Olivia overcame a common pitfall in controversial discussions: the attempt to convince, correct, change another person.  For Olivia, the goal of the dialogue was the dialogue itself.  Her intention was that people would have a chance to explore and express what they feel and hear what others feel.  It wasn’t to convert anyone.

This, I think, is civil dialogue: in Olivia’s telling of it, the discussion of a charged subject was an opportunity to be more conscious, to notice her own responses to others, and reflect.  I want to stress the humility inherent in this frame.  Olivia was not trying to change others, but to see how she might evolve herself as she listened to others.  The more difference in the room, the greater the opportunity for her own growth.  She came out of the dialogue with new perspectives and deeper commitments.

I am continually humbled by the complex range of feelings and stories that unfold when people lean in and explore their differences.  I believe that democratic life is never so real and powerful as when people are engaged in conversations across differences.  Tension, conflict, and discomfort are vital opportunities: they have the capacity to separate people, but when understood in a context of relational learning, they can heighten consciousness.  Engaging difference jars complacency and provokes hard questions.

The frame for dialogue matters.  If communication is seen only as a way to make a point or effect a desired result, the possibilities for relationship and change are limited.  If the dialogue is understood as the goal in itself; if people can welcome difference as a source of community power and as an opportunity for personal learning, limits fall away.  People who feel encouraged to explore what is important to them and who they are have access to richer thinking and stronger human connections.

Engaging difficult discussions, we are challenged to be more intentional and focused than in routine communication.  We slow down and learn to be more attuned to non-verbal dimensions of the conversation: we learn from our own bodies’ responses and we remember to breathe.  This deep engagement can make the most difficult conversations restorative.

 

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Just Numbers

 Their hope bursts out of a system designed to thwart it.

                                                        –Program Notes, Just Numbers

Darius pokes his head around the corner to make sure the coast is clear.  He holds his breath, all senses on alert.  Is there graffiti warning him of new territorial shifts? Not this morning.  He sprints to the bus, gets on it safely, and can breathe while the bus takes him across the city and drops him off a few blocks away from his school.  He gets off and skirts dangerous territory, passes under an overpass where new tags are going up.  The taggers look at him but don’t follow him.  Darius survives another morning commute.

And gets to school 5 minutes late.  He is sent to the principal, and to detention.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to understand that a child whose commute is anything like this is not in a state to learn.  And that rather than sitting that child in detention, or in a test, or test prep, we adults need to offer healing now and community safety long term.  Once our children are safe, we can turn our attention to education.

Darius’ story is one of six that, along with impressive ensemble poetry, make up Just Numbers, the new Chicago Slam Works play.  Why do adults need to watch other adults performing a play from kids’ perspectives?  Because we aren’t listening to the kids’ voices.  Students are hidden from public view in their schools, in segregated neighborhoods.  But over and over the students in the play remind us: they aren’t blind; they see exactly what’s going on.  They see they are pawns in a game of powerful players whose rhetoric of student achievement masks self-serving economic and political machinations.  Students’ actual lives, interactions, and thoughts are presented against a background of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s speeches on education policy, which sound distant, irrelevant, and offensively glib.

Chicago Public School students are very clear about what they need: safety, health, parents who can be present for them, who are not forced to work multiple jobs, who are not in prison, killed, or deported, and teachers who will not be replaced next year or next week.  And in the classroom: an education that respects students’ intelligence and humanity.

In case white parents in Chicago – half of whose children don’t go to CPS — don’t understand why teachers voted to go on strike next week, this play offers a point-by-point lesson: from the questionable funding, operating, and staffing of charter schools, to the high-stakes testing forced on Black and Brown children.

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This is not public education.  Public education means that all children are valued, that people hold accountable the system, its architects and decision-makers, not individual teachers and students.  Many Americans have bought into the education reform emphasis on test scores, but the world’s most successful education system rejects testing — and calls out the testing profiteers.  Finnish education minister Pasi Sahlsberg insists: a successful public education system is based on equity of quality education.  It values informal learning and emphasizes reciprocal trust between students, teachers, parents, and administrators.  “Measuring of what matters in school is difficult, if not impossible. It is character and mind that matter… not being among winners in knowledge tests.”

Public education requires that the voices of people in schools – students, teachers, and parents – are at the center of decision-making about schools, both in the classroom and in the district.  Not bankers, realtors, and politicians.  Let’s act like a public: let’s listen to public school students and teachers, take seriously their stories, their questions, and their ideas, and demand that our leaders stop treating them like “just numbers.”

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“Invisible Borders:” Walking Tour of Istanbul

And before long, the music, the views rushing past the window, my father’s voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway.
–Orhan Pamuk

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Istanbul is known to be the crossroads of the world.  In visiting the city, I am curious about how different groups have lived together there in different eras and conditions.  How do people compose their community life in day-to-day relationships, regardless of how news headlines and history texts portray them?  How do they create the “in-between” space that Maxine Greene describes as the key to public life, “where people speak in terms of ‘who,’ not ‘what’ they are”?

These questions take shape around borders: How do borders sustain respect? How do they abuse human dignity? I know a little bit about the waves of conflicts and oppression, the written laws and unwritten customs used by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities – and many languages, cultures, and other subgroups within and across these communities – to co-exist over the course of Istanbul’s history.  And the news shows people all over the world engaging in a range of collective behaviors, from nationalist xenophobia to democratic inclusion to indifference.

The scale of these views is too large for me.  I am looking for small, local processes of relationship building across differences.  Neighborhoods are where people are listening and learning and growing side-by-side, day-by-day, in many contexts over time and across countries.  But media and politics tend to ignore these local spaces and the knowledge and struggles of their residents.

My daughter is studying in Istanbul; she arranged for us to take a walking tour of a few intersecting neighborhoods of Istanbul: Fener, Balat, Dramond, and Edernekape.  The tour focused on demographic and architectural changes, but the subtext is, “how do people live with another across class, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences?” We spent about an hour in each neighborhood, covering a few blocks and several “invisible borders.”

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Our guide, Gaye, lives in the neighborhood we are walking through.  She describes her view of neighborhoods: spaces where people want to be in relationships with other people, where they experience otherness as a rich resource, not as a threat.   She, along with a team of students and professors at the university, is developing what they call “active anthropology,” engaging people from different communities in asking questions about identity, social change, and culture.  In contrast to widespread media attention to ethnic conflict, the anthropologists are interested in “how we’re nourished by intersocial relations between different groups in a place.”  They wonder if the increasing societal emphasis on private life is “a deliberate plan to create distance between people.” These neighborhood researchers demonstrate “intersocial” commitments in the way they approach us.  Gaye urges us to ask questions, “not because I’ll have answers, but so we can all learn from what you are asking about.”

The framing question she has for our group of western visitors, mostly university exchange students, have to do with patterns of gentrification: Would you choose to respect the historical quality of the neighborhood or to respect people’s daily lives and choices – including their self-interested changes to the historical buildings of the neighborhood? Pointing out historical markers like “jumba windows” of the Ottoman period, she emphasizes that homeowners may or may not preserve such features when they remodel.

Gaye is studying gentrification in this particular community because in Istanbul, “Usually gentrification happens too quickly to track.  Here it’s happening slowly enough that we can watch it as it unfolds.”  She classifies two types of gentrifiers: Type A gentrifiers, who are investors, and isolate themselves from the neighborhood with fences, bars on the windows, and general absence. Type B gentrifiers are the hipsters, who seek out relationships with neighbors, sensitive to problems in the neighborhood.

Gaye puts herself in the Type B camp.  She originally comes from a neighborhood across the river on the Asian side.  She tells a little story about learning the language of neighborhood life: “Women express themselves with cleaning.  There’s a discourse of laundry in this neighborhood. Ropes strung between buildings are used to express connection and conflict. I wanted to hang laundry and arrived at my window at the same time as a woman on other side of the street.  She glared. I smiled a little, she smiled a little, gradually, smiling more and more.  We silently came to an understanding and shared the rope.” Gaye shows us how she “reads” the streetscape, including doors and windows, empty space, sounds, and, of course, people.

She describes what happened when scores of Syrian refugee families came into the neighborhood recently.  She took part in a community response: people in the neighborhood rented flats for the refugee families, taught them Turkish, provided food and other supplies. But the refugee families sold the food, left the flats.  The activists researched – what went wrong?

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I feel ambivalent.  I appreciate Gaye’s team’s deep interest in neighborhood relationships and their creative intellectual work.  At the same time, I think their research stance carries dangers: they are experimenting and intellectualizing, a response that seems irresponsible in relation to the vulnerability of the people in their neighborhood living through humanitarian crises.  On the other hand, is it less irresponsible to do nothing?

As a place-based educator, I am fascinated by these university researchers’ “active anthropology.” I’m also disturbed by it.  I won’t assume that gentrification in Istanbul works the same way that it does in Chicago and other U.S. cities, where the influx of wealthy, trendy folk assaults the integrity of lower income neighborhoods.  But, like American gentrifiers, the Turkish gentrifiers don’t seem to demonstrate the self-reflectiveness that is necessary when people of privilege enter into more vulnerable communities.

Gaye is exploring her own conditions, the neighborhood she is over time making herself part of. She is studying gentrification from within.  Her focus is still, though, on the other, on other people, on buildings, on streetscapes, not on herself: her reactions, people’s reactions to her.  Without such reflection, her study is incomplete and likely to unintentionally perpetuate an “othering” approach.

Even though they’re on the lookout for othering, the team’s faith in their anthropological method may block them from doing the kind of self-examination necessary to interrupt objectification.  Without examining their own prejudices at every turn, they are perpetuating stereotypes.  Gaye’s research questions can sound like veiled accusations: “Why did you sell the rice we gave you?” “Why did you leave the apartment we put you in?” “Why aren’t the Syrian men working?” “What could change this problem?”  She doesn’t hear the power she wields in her voice, her stance, her freedom of movement, and without being alert to this, she is likely to alienate the neighbors who are most different from her, the ones she is most interested in connecting with.

If the enterprise of peaceful co-existence subordinates local knowledge to common understanding, it will always be the more powerful who set the terms and maintain order.  So, local knowledge is always threatened, never fully respected.  As an outsider to a community, who wants to learn how to be in relationship with people in it, I am wondering if there is a way I can hold awareness of the danger I as an outsider pose within my respect for the community.  Does attention to the ways local knowledge is threatened, including my own gaze and narrative as an outsider, make my relationship in another community more possible – or less so?

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Immersion Education, or Down the Rabbit Hole

The biggest bowl of cookies I have ever seen sat on the table between us, and as its layers descended, we learned more and more about the layers of “The World of Edutainment.” “Klasno!” My colleague Vadim kept saying – something like “what class!” My sense of the word is that it communicates aesthetic admiration as well as excitement about an idea.

Vadim Riskin and I are in St. Petersburg, Russia on a Eurasia Foundation funded fellowship; our charge is to learn about how organizations, schools, and government policy approach youth development. We are serving as advanced practitioners for the US-Russia Social Expertise Exchange,* in the Education and Youth Working Group. On first day here, and our host Mikhail Epshtein and his colleague Valerii Puzyrevskii have brought us to The World of Edutainment. Across the street, they point out, from the hospital where Pavlov conducted his famous experiments.

We were in the physical center of Nanoschool; the place is airy and inviting, with touchables everywhere, from rope puzzles on the walls to tangrams and books on tables (and a beanbag loft which I eyed longingly as I struggled with jet lag). Playing at the interactive math museum and with the elaborate and beautiful physics-detective board games our hosts Mikhail and Valerii had created would have kept me engaged for a long time.

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This external center was, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Nanoschool extends out along lines that extend across Russia, touching hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students, in virtual and live settings, with dynamic points of connection that continue to extend on their own. Dewey’s image of education as “the live creature” comes to mind: the structures that Mikhail and his colleagues have created to engage young people in real-world problem-solving are highly generative.

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Mikhail, Valerii, and the other staff at “Nanoschool,” are committed to experiential education through-and-through. They have formed a partnership with RusNano involving high school students in solving real-world problems. They have two main goals: providing authentic learning experience to students, and halting the “brain drain” that is slowing Russia’s development. In one of these projects, 10,000 students from all over the country take part in year-long online learning forums developed in collaboration with RusNano; then the most committed students come for a summer camp focused on solving an actual problem RusNano is dealing with.

Summer camps and after school programs are the living heart of youth development in Russia. “Supplemental” (дополительный) programs are as much part of the conversation about education as schools, if not more so. In the U.S., where such programs are more auxiliary, the overwhelming focus is on schools, in terms of policy, training, and personnel. But in Russia, the emphasis on “supplemental” programs corresponds to a general understanding that education spreads across multiple sites: in-school education is only one dimension. Out-of-school education, which is less regulated and more innovative than in-school learning, is an integral part of how, what, and why students learn.

Mikhail and Valerii and other educators run a number of such camps and programs, but they also integrate the innovative play of camp into school. At Epishkola School, the 7-18 year old students and their teachers participate in a week-long camp that focuses on a key idea. The large-scale roleplaying game involves intensive collaborative interdisciplinary work that is physical, social, and intellectual. It is an “immersion” experience and experiment. The theme one year, for example, was “Chaos and Order.” Young people wrestled with ideas of physics, literature, philosophy, math, and history as they worked their way through a living social maze of order and chaos. Experientially digging into the complex world of The Dictionary of the Khazars, they navigated ideology, loyalty, passion, and treachery in their interactions with one another — with the help of intellectual lifelines that scientific and philosophical thinking offers to human society.**

A book Valerii wrote opens by emphasizing the interdependence of education and philosophy: “Philosophy without education is like a body without legs, education without philosophy is like a body without eyes.” The “Immersion” camp Valerii has designed with Mikhail embodies this systemic interdependence. It is all designed to bring young people to the rabbit hole: immersion into a new amazing world that stretches and changes the brain and the self. I am getting a whiff of it just sitting here hearing about it.

But at this point we have been sitting for hours; the cookies could tide us over only so long. Our stomachs are empty and our brains are full. We head out of The World of Edutainment to a corner restaurant for mushroom soup and piroshkis.

*The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SEE or Eurasia Foundation.

**Mikhail and Valerii wrote a book about this “Immersion” pedagogy: Mezhpredmetnye integrativnye pogrzheniia. St. Petersburg: Shkolnaia Liga Rosnano, 2014.

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Against an Economy of Learning

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Dog people in Chicago know that Dog Beach is a space of boundless curiosity, delight in strangers, and freedom.  Usually dogs live their lives bounded by separate houses, yards, streets; their encounters with each other and the world are multiply controlled. At Dog Beach I never see fights; tensions are quickly dissolved in the sand, the flying feet, and in the sheer multiplicity of dogs.

We human companions exult in our dogs’ romping that so pungently expresses our own love of play.   Even when we aren’t partaking of the sniffing, capering, pissing extravaganza, we do loosen up with the other humans on the beach following their dogs around.  We are all offleash.

The dog beach is the best analogy I can find to the mode of learning I saw during my night at the San Francisco Exploratorium last Thursday.  Hundreds of people running around following their noses, their senses, leaving their marks in sand, in light, in sound waves, reeling past crazy mirrors as omnipresent and enticing as the lake here at Chicago’s Dog Beach.  A dazzling display of curiosity.

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I had stumbled upon Adult Night at the Exploratorium, which I think much more closely resembles Dog Beach than the usual family experience during the day.  While the Exploratorium specializes in “offleash” play, “Adult play” at the Exploratorium is an especially offleash experience.  True, kids don’t get enough chances to play and explore, but generally they get more than adults.  And adults are cripplingly play-deprived.

For me it was a novelty to be at the Exploratorium without kids in tow, observing, wandering, listening, touching – just taking it all in. I realized how habitually I formulate, distill, analyze, express – focusing on output and not a whole lot on input.

Back in schools, we teachers also habitually concern ourselves with the output of our students; the economy of learning in this country dictates that the value of inputs is measured by output.

Play defies this economy.  Play is input that resists measurable conversion into output.  This doesn’t mean the input just sits there though.  When I look at some of the ripples of the input of my childhood experiences of the Exploratorium, I realize they are actually waves – forceful and generative.  For example, playing with the many different kinds of mirrors in the Exploratorium, the way faces and bodies merge, shift, and multiply, entered into my developing understanding of multiple and overlapping identity.  It drew me to be fascinated by complexity and ambiguity, and attentive to patterns – interests that enable me to keep learning.

Giant Mirror Exhibit at The Exploratorium

There is an extravagance and dignity to the activity of taking in without having to put out right away.  It is vital that people have as much access as possible to exploration that is not constricted by forced output and rigid measurements, whether they be tests for children or evaluations for adults.  Even in places like Chicago, sorely lacking an Exploratorium, we can trust in “offleash” play to help our children — and we adults — grow as human beings.

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Democratic Education: Look for Progressive Schools’ Missing Link in Neighborhood Schools

What you need to understand is in our culture, when there’s not enough, we don’t quit, and we don’t close…When our children’s book bags are underutilized, we don’t kick them out, we fill them up. When there’s not enough potatoes, you don’t stop cooking dinner. When there is not enough gas, you don’t give away your car. Goldblatt is not an underutilized building. I’ll say it again: Goldblatt is not an underutilized building. It’s a greatly-utilized school. Don’t get schooling mixed up with the building…If you want to see progress, you got to keep our schools open.

— Marcus Brady, Goldblatt School Security Officer

 Unless local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find out and identify itself…For it will be alive and flexible as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed.  While local, it will not be isolated.  Its larger relationships will provide an inexhaustible and flowing fund of meanings.

–John Dewey, The Public and its Problems

“When Public Education is Under Attack, What Do We Do? STAND UP, FIGHT BACK!” This   protest chant illuminates an important source of democratic education that have been left too long untapped by progressive education practice: struggle in community.  This value is at the heart of John Dewey’s writing on education, but its relevance to the progressive education that developed out of Dewey’s work has not been developed, because the people carrying out struggle in community were by and large not in progressive schools.  The fight for public education in Chicago challenges the progressive education community to decide whether democratic education matters enough to join in the struggle in community.

Recent analyses have focused on political implications of the fight over school closings at both local and global levels, exemplifying the kind of critical thinking schools should be nurturing in students.  But the school closings controversy also brought to the wider public voices in the community that teach us precisely the practices that we urgently need for democratic society today.  Coming from a progressive school context, I am interested in the meaning of struggle in community for progressive education.

In the Chicago Public School Board’s “community engagement” process over the past several months, community members spoke to the meaning of the school as a community.   Students, parents, faculty and administrators and staff across Chicago neighborhoods and schools all describe school as a place of belonging, continuity, trust, and safety.  They describe the nexus of relationships at the school: the school is a space where families come together with one another and with other families, in peace and hope.  Children find the protection and affirmation that they need to grow.  Adults find resources and encouragement for employment, health, and financial and reading literacy.  These are real-world supports that schools offer — and that the school closings now jeopardize.

Thousands of Chicagoans of every age, class, and race have been explaining to the Board of Education that school is not just an appendage of the state.  That it is not just a building in which to warehouse, test, and sort children.  That education is a broader field than academic progress — and that the measures by which they are considering academic progress are deeply flawed, with little correspondence to people’s actual strengths, nor to the capacities that are actually demanded by today’s world.  That investing in the economic, social, and physical health of the neighborhoods will improve education more surely than any strategy propagated by Central Office.

Community members’ testimonials describe exactly the kind of schools that the great education philosopher John Dewey proposed for America: community schools.  Dewey saw the school as the living source of democratic society: the closer its connections with the community, the stronger the learning that happened in it.  At the same time, he was clear that education viewed only in terms of academic growth is both rationally incorrect and socially dangerous. In “The School as a Social Centre,” he writes,

The intellectual life, facts, and truths of knowledge, are much more obviously and intimately connected with all other affairs of life than they ever have been at any previous period in the history of the world.  Hence a purely and exclusively intellectual instruction means less than it ever meant before. And, again, the daily occupations and ordinary surroundings of life are much more in need of interpretation than ever they have been before.

Education for today’s world requires breaking down the boundaries between academic learning and the challenges and opportunities of real life.  Over and over again, community members of scores of schools like Lafayette, Jackson, and Stockton, point to the community partnerships that enrich children’s education, like HEART, Merit, and multiple museum partnerships — that the school closings kill.  “Community” is not just being nice to each other and collaborating.  It lives in diverse relationships and in respect for the many parts of the learner — the musical learner, the ethical learner — parts which the School Board doesn’t recognize.

What does all this have to do with progressive education?  Progressive education philosophers knew that community didn’t just exist; it had to be fought for.  As Benson, Puckett, and Harkavy argue, however, in Dewey’s Dream, Dewey betrayed “the dream” of democratic education by shrinking from the battles that sustaining such a model required.  After founding his Laboratory School, he left Chicago and withdrew into philosophy that was removed from struggles surrounding real-life schools in cities like Chicago.  This left progressive schools to develop to spectacular success one dimension of Dewey’s philosophy, child-centered pedagogy — while leaving undeveloped the social implications of his philosophy.

Progressive education is anemic without struggle in community.  Dewey explained better than anyone how schools could and should be the vehicle for social transformation.  “The educational end and the ultimate test of value of what is learned is its use and application in carrying on and improving the common life of all,” he wrote.  Dewey saw schools as the place where people came together across diverse backgrounds, and co-created “the common life.” This necessarily included intelligently standing up to the powers that threatened the common life: “Obviously a society, to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need be specially attentive only to the education of its ruling elements.”

Writers and thinkers from Dewey’s contemporary George Counts to present-day philosopher Maxine Greene have lamented Progressive Education’s failure to take on the fight for the democratic work of the schools that Dewey envisioned. In “Dare the School Build a New Social Order,” Counts writes,

If Progressive Education is to be genuinely progressive, it must emancipate itself from the influence of this class, face squarely and courageously every social issue, come to grips with life in all its stark reality, develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling and challenging vision of human destiny, and become less frightened…Progressive Education cannot place its trust in a child-centered school.

Counts, along with other progressive philosophers, seeks to change the paradigm of education.  Schools, according to this paradigm, are not for preparing young people for success in the real world.  Schools are for changing the world.

Progressive education has not made much progress on this goal in its 100+ year history.

But community schools have.  Built up by people in the neighborhoods separated from the schools Dewey founded, community schools offer wrap-around supports for the improvement of the neighborhoods.   They grow community. 

Dewey said, “Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community,” but he didn’t know how to actualize the neighborly community.  People in the neighborhoods did, and do.  They repeat over and over again that the measures that CPS uses are don’t fit the real work the schools are doing to strengthen communities, that these measures are limited, low, and ignorant.  As Andre Perry explains,

When we remove our eyes from the higher standard of community, we don’t see the intersectionality of community problems. When you’re community focused, you can’t be vigorous about school reform without being spirited about prison reform…When we have faith in community, we can never believe in a theory of improvement by deletion. Community members don’t go away. They may be literally locked away in jail and prison, but people are still here.

The people closing the schools (many of whom, of course, send their children to progressive schools like Dewey’s Laboratory School) are viewing public schools in a narrow and anti-progressive light.  Meanwhile, the people in the neighborhood schools are growing the potential of schools for furthering social change.  They know how to strengthen the school’s function as a social anchor of the community.

The people in the neighborhoods fighting together for their schools have been fleshing out the democratic implications of progressive education, which have been largely missing from progressive schools.   Their teachings offer a vital resource for a society struggling for democratic community.  The Chicago Public Schools Board didn’t listen: they summarily closed 50 schools yesterday.  I wonder if people in progressive schools can listen better — to foster democratic education in solidarity with our public schools communities, and STAND UP, FIGHT BACK!

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Making Learning Public – a look at teachers’ testimony in School Board meetings

In my first month of teaching at Parker, my mentor teacher told me, “you’ve got to get outside of the classroom.  The great projects, discussions, and thinking that happen in your class are of very limited value if you aren’t always testing things out in larger contexts.”  My normally jovial and gentle mentor teacher got very serious – he made it clear that it was a responsibility of educators to make learning public.

This went beyond collaborative learning; the social learning he was talking about involves breaking down the barriers between teaching and learning.  He was talking about students presenting their work to a larger community, about the circulation of teaching methods beyond the department, beyond the school, and all with the consciousness of learning connecting with what was going on in the world.

My mentor’s advice helped me to broaden my conception of where learning happens, and start to imagine how place could interact with, catalyze, or transform learning.  In teacher education classes, I propagate my mentor’s advice by assigning students “experiential education events,” where they witness or participate in local public events focused on education.  In this way, they are developing critical questions about perceptions and treatment of teachers, and developing a metacognitive awareness about their work as educators.

The “experiential education events” tend to sharpen my students’ awareness about power, decision-making, and representation.  Whether they are attending a school board meeting or an education conference, attending and reflecting on these events often sharpens and widens the perspective of the pre-service teachers, getting them thinking about dimensions of teaching that they hadn’t previously given much thought to.  They quickly see that public education doesn’t just mean publicly funded: public means struggling for dignity and justice.  They see that it is impossible to educate effectively without a constant eye on what’s happening outside of the classroom, the bigger picture.

One of the experiential event options is attending a school board meeting in Chicago or in Evanston.  Here, the teachers-to-be encounter questions of education policy up-close.  Though Chicago and Evanston are very different educational climates, in both they see right away a profound disconnect between the Board members on the one hand, and the teachers and students on the other.

Maria attended a Chicago school board meeting, and was struck by the distance between the policy makers and the teachers who are charged with enacting the policy.

 I thought that several teachers had pointed out an important idea: although the CPS school board is trying to implement new strategies for change, these strategies are highly abstract and theoretical. We do not know how these theories will transpire when they are practically executed. One teacher stated bluntly “I don’t understand your fancy charts, I just want to know what you will do to change things.” There is an obvious breakdown in communication between teachers, parents, and the school board. I could see the brimming frustration of conflicting ideas between teachers and parents, teachers and the school board, and parents and the school board.

Sitting there in that chamber room, it suddenly seemed apparent to me that power structures shape our perceptions and our decisions. The CPS school board seems to operate on a top-down hierarchy in which policies and assessment criteria are prescribed by a small group of policy makers. Yet these policy makers produce their results through theoretical analysis, which often is disconnected from how a school actually operates on a daily basis. In gaining such insights into the education system, I have slightly altered my goals as a teacher. In my first paper, I described how I aimed to engage students and foster intellectual curiosity in the classroom. This goal still remains, but I am adding an additional component to it: I would like to engage the administration in cultivating a similar curiosity in its schools and students. I have no doubt that the members of the CPS school board are invested in the students’ interests, but I hope to engage the policy makers to refine their understanding of the dynamics of student learning and performance. 

Attending one school board meeting has led Maria to see beyond the borders of her classroom to the “chamber room” of decision-making.  She is beginning to shape a call that she intends to put forth as a teacher, a call to education policy makers to practice the principal work of education: inquiry.  Educators know that policies imposed without careful study of the people who will be carrying out these policies are educationally unsound.   If the School Board were to follow Maria’s lead and demonstrate “curiosity in its schools and students,” it would be making learning public.

In her reflection on a school board meeting a few miles north in Evanston, Tamara writes,

I witnessed firsthand how much being a good teacher should extend outside the classroom. More than just planning and teaching lessons, it’s about being an advocate for your students, acknowledging their achievements, trying to improve the structure of the school and curricula, and encouraging them to use their voice in their education. Many of the students in the audience were there for the first item of the agenda: awards. The school board recognized the winners and finalists of National Merit Scholarships, National Achievement Honors, and National Hispanic Scholars by having their own teachers give personalized speeches. However, those same teachers who presented awards at the beginning of the meeting, along with others, 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. Other teachers attended as sponsors for the school’s new MSAN (Minority Student Achievement Network) club, who spoke for themselves about how they wanted to help combat the achievement gap in their district.

In the same space and at the same event, at one moment the teachers are representing the school, at the next moment they are challenging its policies.  At this meeting, teachers are drawing attention to the frame of their work.  They show that education in a democracy involves an agility often lacking in political processes.  They show independent thinking in neither accepting nor rejecting Board proposals out of hand but considering each matter separately.  Such teachers model for students a metacognitive stance as they consider and organize around the conditions of learning.

Tamara continues,

The scene that had the greatest effect on me occurred [when 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.

Through their words and their silence and their bodies, the teachers at this school board meeting expressed a small slice of the vast range of response teachers use to sustain one another in their work.  Teachers standing up for themselves and for one another sets an example for their students and for the whole community: they will not tolerate disrespect.

By bearing witness to the contrast between the practices of public policy makers and those of public educators, our new teachers are preparing themselves to make learning public.  They are ready for the struggle that education for democracy will demand of them — and for the powerful community of practice that sustains and strengthens America’s teachers.

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Counter-Narrators

“All my life I’ve been tracked.  I’ve been told you need to leave your community to be successful.  Now I know that’s BS. My message is not that I’m intelligent but that we are intelligent. Because our collective knowledge and abilities are more powerful than that of any individual. And that’s powerful, so measure that!”  The Curriculum Director walks back down the aisle to the cheers of the students.  Administrators and teachers are sharing their stories of academic struggles and achievements, especially surrounding the stress of the ACT test, which some of the students will be taking next week.  Each story ends with words that claim intelligence and power.  Another teacher speaks into the mic, “I’m intelligent because I’m honest, thoughtful: a reflective person who believes everybody in my community deserves quality education. That’s powerful, so measure that!”

In this special assembly, the Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy faculty are educating students as “Counter-Narrators,” and, like all the curriculum at this alternative public school, this lesson is liberatory.   This is a school that educates students who didn’t fit or weren’t accepted in the traditional school system, and who also mostly come from low-income, immigrant families.  The faculty has collaboratively developed a Praxis model of curriculum design, based in Paulo Freire’s work on liberatory education, to deeply engage the strengths and challenges of the community.

So, no lessons fit within the boundaries of one single discipline; rather, all learning directly relates to students’ lives and connects their experiences to a larger social analysis.  And it addresses one of the several competencies that all curriculum is driven by.  The competency this assembly addresses is Voice vs. Intimidation* – and the contrast with the kinds of knowledge and skills that standardized tests measure is crystal-clear.  “By claiming your intelligence,” the Principal tells the students, “you are manifesting what will happen for you.” 

Students then come to the mic and share their test-taking stories, and related challenges.  One student shares, “I am intelligent because I am never ashamed to see errors in my reasoning.  That’s powerful, so measure that!” Another says, “I am intelligent because I have the ability to adapt and adjust to my environment. I practice the virtue of humility; I accept feedback and learn from it, even if it’s negative. And that’s powerful, so measure that!”  Each voice I hear makes me wonder again, “well, how would you measure that?” And shouldn’t students’ education be based on supporting them in the strengths they identify and care about, rather than information dictated by people from outside their community, that is irrelevant to their lives?

I learned about the school’s “Counter Narrators” campaign at an event a few months ago, a forum on the problem of over-testing in Chicago.  At that time, Alejandra Frausto, the Curriculum Director of RLLA, held up the t-shirt the students designed.  On the front, it said, “Counter Narrator,” on the back was an Einstein quote: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything is counted that counts.”  Alejandra spoke about the multiple meanings of “counter narrators” – through this campaign, the students are telling a different story about themselves and their community.  The students are transforming the story that casts them as dropouts and gangbangers and claiming their creative agency, deeply rooted in community values and support. But their “Counter Narrators” campaign is also drawing attention to the opposing senses of “counting” as a numerical operation and “counting” as what matters. 

The community counts, critical consciousness counts, solidarity counts. So, when confronted by the mandate that they assign the ACT test, the school community takes this emblem of individual competition and success that contradicts their values, and they transform it.  They surround the test-takers with the love and wisdom of the community.  They put the test in the context of the narratives and counter-narratives they study and act on.  As Alejandra explains, “the students take the exam, but they are very critical about what’s happening.” 

The students at Rudy Lozano know what counts, and they know how to counter intimidation – the kind they experience on the street, and the kind they confront within themselves.  And that’s powerful, so measure that! 

 

* RLLA Voice vs. Intimidation Competency:

         Manifest a “voice” that articulates one’s place and that of others simultaneously for justice in the world

         Communicate effectively with the world