October 23, 2008
Umm…is this that William Ayers we’re all supposed to be afraid of?
There’s an alternative to acceding completely or whining constantly, and it begins with thinking through and naming the commitments you bring with you into the classroom, your values, your pledge. These are not pure abstractions, but rather standards to hold in mind. A fundamental commitment might involve taking the side of your students, affirming the humanity of each and resisting anything that constrains or reduces them. Another might be to create in your classroom an environment that is a kind of republic of many voices, allowing every student a space to be seen and heard and known well as a person of worth and value.
Because teachers work in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world, and because there’s much beyond our immediate control, it makes sense to focus on these things that you can control. First, you can see your students as whole human beings, three-dimensional beings much like yourself with hopes and dreams, bodies and minds and spirits. You can see with your own eyes, your own curious and critical mind, your own generous heart. And you can resist the alphabet soup of deficits and the toxic habit of labeling kids that infects most schools. No one can make you see kids as creatures with labels clinging to them like barnacles, sharp and ugly. You have a mind of your own, and you can become a student of your students in spite of everything. This gesture alone can be full of surprise, and deeply satisfying.
Ayers writes almost poetically about the main point I took away from yesterday afternoon’s CWP-sponsored workshop with Jeff Wilhelm. Classrooms are places where students should be engaged with learning what’s important to them, and what they see as useful. The inquiry model, about which more at a later date, seems to be a good way of starting to begin to make that change part of daily practice.
As far as “teachers work[ing] in a fluid, complex, idiosyncratic world” goes, few people can say it better than Doug Noon. His latest post, “Teaching for Change in a Culture of Compliance,” gets at the Ayers controversy (kind of) and the notion that teaching for social justice is somehow dangerous or subversive:
Test-based school reform and the politics of accountability has pushed classrooms further away from discussions about social issues than at any time in the last two decades. Teachers and administrators have been all too willing to embrace the authority of test scores, standards, and “research-based” reading instruction, minimizing and forgetting the value of community, intuition, genuine motivation, and common sense….Inquiring into our history, sources of power in society, current events, and discussing race and stereotyping does not preclude observing high academic standards. And there’s nothing subversive about such discussions unless you admit that the moral order has already been undermined.
What is our purpose as teachers if it isn’t to help students recognize and understand the patterns that might need to be changed?
Oh! And Bruce Fuller weighs in, too. Man, this is a great day.
Politicians’ obsessions with making schools and colleges more vocational in character are unlikely to lift the economy. According to new research by James Heckman at the University of Chicago, today’s workers don’t need vocational skills, they need better “non-cognitive” skills — like the capacity to communicate effectively or to cooperatively solve problems.
Schools should be focusing on these human skills, as well as ethical reasoning. Wall Street’s meltdown, linked to shady lending practices, reveals the moral bankruptcy of huge segments of the market. Yet political leaders now urge our children to quietly fill-in bubble tests, seeking only to become productive cogs in a broken wheel.
