education, education reform

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect: On the Lives and Education of Children

December 12, 2013 plthomasedd 4 Comments

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect: On the Lives and Education of Children

Edited by P. L. Thomas, Paul R. Carr, Julie Gorlewski, and Brad Porfilio

Peter Lang USA

Rethinking Childhood Series, Gaile Cannella, series editor

Call and Submission Requirements

Submit a proposal of about 300 words by February 28, 2014, to paul.thomas@furman.edu.

Chapter initial drafts due July 15, 2014, should be in APA citation/style format (see citation proofing guidelines below) and 5,500-6,500 words. Authors are urged to submit clean and carefully edited drafts to enhance the editing process. Please take great care with block quotes (do not set off with returns and tabs) and hanging indents in the references list (do not create hanging indents with return/tab, but use the ruler or Menu>Format>Paragraph>Special>Hanging Indent). (Please read carefully below the background underpinning informing this volume.) Also, it is important to have complete bibliographic information with up-to-date references. (See the end of this document for more information on APA).

Topics, problems, and practices addressing the following will be included:

How are “no excuses” ideologies dominant in child rearing and schooling in the U.S. and elsewhere? How are these practices harmful to children?
Why are the Commons essential to a thriving democracy, and how does a cultural attitude toward children impact that culture’s commitment to the Commons (notably public schools)?
What constitutes pedagogies of kindness and respect?
What practices in child rearing and schooling reflect pedagogies of kindness and respect?
How are attitudes and practices related to children connected to democratic values?
How are current educational structures reflecting and perpetuating stratified opportunities for children, and what education reform alternatives address those structures?
How does kindness play into the conceptualization of educational curricula, pedagogy, policy and evaluation?

Submission of Chapter Proposals

To be included in the 300 words are:

Name(s) and affiliation(s) of author(s)
Proposed title
A detailed abstract on the focus of the proposed chapter, including conceptual, theoretical and methodological frameworks as well as the central research question.
A list of 8 keywords.
Also attach the CV(s) for the proposed author(s).

Points of Emphasis

Because we are living in times of historical amnesia, the chapters themselves should be critical, illustrate multiplicity and nuance, and demonstrate an awareness of historical and critical constructions of childhood (and the past work done related to these areas). The following are examples of expectations for the work:

The fields of education, and especially early childhood education, have included some histories and perspectives that view/treat those who are younger with kindness and respect. Examples include the works of Nel Noddings (1992), The Challenge to Care in Schools, and Lisa Goldstein (1998), Teaching with Love (in Peter Lang’s Rethinking Series) as well as various scholarly and educational models practiced or put forward by multiple educators and scholars. Chapters in the work should demonstrate an informed awareness of this history and the ways that both old and new ideas can counter current conditions that are harmful to both those who are younger and older.
The chapters should avoid reconstitution of the romantic, innocent child to be saved by more advanced adults; this has been addressed by many. The issue is the context in which we are all being placed (not that we should protect the “innocent” child) that is harmful to those who are younger, as well as everyone else.
The notion of two interpretations of childhood: (a) those who are poor who are also often labeled as not knowing how to raise their children so needing help, and (b) those who are privileged and know how to raise their children, has been discussed and problematized over the past 30 years. Rather than treating this circumstance as a new revelation, the issue is “why has this circumstance continued and even worsened?” The gap between the rich and poor has certainly increased (why?); testing and standards based education has been critiqued as problematic, but the practices are more accepted than ever (why?); why has past work been ignored and what can be done to change our current circumstances?

Timeline

Call, proposals due: February 28, 2014

Accepted chapters: March 15, 2014

Chapters due: July 15, 2014

Revised/final chapters due: September 30, 2014

Manuscript delivered: October 15, 2014

Background

Eliot Rosewater in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater implores:

“Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkles some water on the babies, say, ‘Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:

“‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” (p. 129)

In Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Eleven,” Rachel sits in class on her eleventh birthday, a day in which she is confronted by her teacher about a found red sweater that the teacher is certain belongs to Rachel:

“Of course it’s yours,” Mrs. Price says. “I remember you wearing it once.” Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not. (Cisneros, 2004, p. 42)

While these are fictional representations, children live in a state of powerlessness, silenced by the hierarchy of authority. The sweater in Cisneros’s story is, in fact, not Rachel’s, but as the narration reveals, facts are secondary to hierarchy.

In the U.S. and throughout the world, children tend to experience not only silencing but also a level of harshness not found in other cultures.

The twenty-first century remains a harsh place for children in their lives and their schools, even in the U.S. where childhood poverty is over 20% and the new majority of public schools involve children in poverty (A new majority, 2013).

But more than the conditions of children’s lives and schools in 2013 is worth addressing. As Barbara Kingsolver (1995) details in “Somebody’s Baby”:

What I discovered in Spain was a culture that held children to be meringues and éclairs. My own culture, it seemed to me in retrospect, tended to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it’s not our own we don’t want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it. (p. 100)

A sort of cultural antagonism and authoritarian control of children pervades the U.S., and during the current thirty-year cycle of accountability, children tend to face this formula[i]:

Corporal punishment—persists in 19 states in the U.S.
Medication—ADHD diagnoses and medications have risen in the U.S. during the same 30-year period as the current accountability era in education.
Grade retention—one of the most popular forms of reading policy in the U.S. is retaining children in 3rd grade based on one high-stakes testing, despite 40 years of research about the overwhelming negative impact of grade retention.
Testing, more testing, and even more testing—over the past thirty years, U.S. schools have increased dramatically both the time spent testing, the time spent on test-prep, the funding spent on testing, the funding spent on test-prep materials, and the consequences of high-stakes testing.
Segregation by race and class—both public schools and charter schools can be accurately described as reflecting and perpetuating the return of segregation in the U.S.
“No excuses” schools and demands for “grit”—especially children who live in poverty are segregated in schools where their days are characterized by “no excuses” policies that include authoritarian demands on their behavior.
Children must prove they are deserving—childhood is Social Darwinism in the U.S.

If children in the U.S. can survive the gauntlet that is the national formula for children, as young adults they can look forward to crushing debt to attend college so that they can enter a nearly non-existent workforce.

But there is a caveat to this formula: The U.S. formula for children above is for “other people’s children,” that new majority in U.S. public schools and those children living in homes of the working poor, the working class, and the dwindling middle class.

Children of the privileged are exempt.

This volume will collect a wide variety of accessible chapters from scholars and practitioners to explore pedagogies of kindness, an alternative to the “no excuses” ideology now dominating how children are raised and educated in the U.S. The genesis of this volume cane be linked to two poems by P.L. Thomas: “the archeology of white people” and “the kindness school (beyond the archeology of white people, pt. 2),” the second of which reads in full:

it simply happened one day
when the teachers decided
enough was enough

all the boys with OCD
spent the day playing drums
or riding their bicycles

and the introverts sat quietly
smiling periodically in the corners
while the extroverts laughed and laughed

and soon the pleasures became many
as varied as the children themselves
until one day a child stood to proclaim

after reading Hamlet all on her own
“I say, we will have no more tests”
to which there was thunderous cheering

yes it seemed simple and obvious enough
the founding of the kindness school
with open doors and children singing

References

Cisneros, S. (2004). Vintage Cisneros. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Kingsolver, B. (1995). High tide in Tucson: Essays from now and never. New York, NY: Perennial.

A new majority: Low income students in the South and nation. (2013, October). Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.southerneducation.org/getattachment/0bc70ce1-d375-4ff6-8340-f9b3452ee088/A-New-Majority-Low-Income-Students-in-the-South-an.aspx

Vonnegut, K. (1965). God bless you, Mr. Rosewater or pearls before swine. New York, NY: Delta.

Thomas: Charter schools not a smart investment for S.C. (The State, Columbia, SC)

December 12, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Charter schools not a smart investment for S.C.

See full data tables and analysis HERE.

Poverty, SAT

Our Real-World Dystopia

December 11, 2013 plthomasedd 3 Comments

As a science fiction (SF) fan, partial to dystopian SF, and writer, I would have a great novel on my hands if this weren’t simply the way things are.

How to create a real-world dystopia:

Identify “privilege” as “achievement” using a mechanism that you label “scientific” and “standard.”
Use “achievement” to create the authority class.
Repeat.

Sounds easy, but some may call this outlandish. So let me offer a visual:

And for those who enjoy the power of the word, let me offer this:

Paul Tough v. Peter Høeg – or – the Advantages and Limits of “Research” or, How Children Succeed v. Borderliners , Ira Socol

Dystopias are hard to see when you live in one—just as fish have no idea what “water” means.

Teacher Evaluation, VAM

VAM Fails Test, Again: The Bizarro World of Education Reform

December 10, 2013 plthomasedd 6 Comments

The great state of South Carolina (and for full effect, you should hear that with “great” and “state” rhyming, sort of, with “pet” because that is how the good ol’ boy patriarchy says it around here) continues down a path all too familiar across the U.S.: adopt any and all education reform policies that other states are rushing to implement, even (and maybe especially) when research fails to support the practices.

I have catalogued the inexcusable political and public support in SC for retaining third graders based on high-stakes testing scores—a policy directly linked to Read, Florida.

And despite equally ample evidence to the contrary about basing teacher evaluations on value added methods (VAM), also a corrosive policy in Florida, Charleston, SC is moving forward with BRIDGE, characterized by Peter Smyth as A BRIDGE to I Have No Clue Where.

Public policy implementing grade retention, VAM, and lingering commitments to merit pay—just to name a few—continues to thrive in SC and across the U.S., seemingly as a bold-faced snub of the idealistic (and increasingly Orwellian) call in No Child Left Behind that education policy must be “scientifically based.”

Education Reform in Bizarro World

In the DC Universe, Superman has often encountered Bizarro World, Htrae. Education reform is no less bizarre with the political and public mania for policies that have been and continue to be refuted by large bodies of research.

For example, Edward H. Haertel’s Reliability and validity of inferences about teachers based on student test scores (ETS, 2013) now offers yet another analysis that details how VAM fails, again, as a credible policy initiative—with a few caveats*.

Briefly, the analysis by Haertel offers the following:

First, Haertel addresses the popular and misguided perception that teacher quality is a primary influence on measurable student outcomes. As many researchers have detailed, teachers account for about 10% of student test scores, as shown in this graphic (see p. 5):

Next, Haertel confronts the myth of the top quintile teachers (pp. 6-7*), outlining three reasons that arguments about those so-called “top” teachers’ impact are exaggerated.
Haertel also acknowledges the inherent problems with test scores and what VAM advocates claim they measure—specifically that standardized tests create a “bias against those teachers working with the lowest- performing or the highest performing classes” (p. 8).
The next two sections detail the logic behind VAM as well as the statistical assumptions in which VAM is grounded (pp. 9-13), laying the basis for Haertel’s main assertion about using VAM in high-stakes teacher evaluations.
The main section of the report, An Interpretive argument for value-added model (VAM)
teacher effectiveness estimates (pp. 14-25), reaches a powerful conclusion that matches the current body of research on VAM:

These 5 conditions would be tough to meet, but regardless of the challenge, if teacher value-added scores cannot be shown to be valid for a given purpose, then they should not be used for that purpose.

So, in conclusion, VAMs may have a modest place in teacher evaluation systems, but only as an adjunct to other information, used in a context where teachers and principals have genuine autonomy in their decisions about using and interpreting teacher effectiveness estimates in local contexts. (p. 25)

In the last brief section, Haertel outlines a short call for teacher evaluations grounded in three evidence-based “common features”:

First, they attend to what teachers actually do — someone with training looks directly at classroom practice or at records of classroom practice such as teaching portfolios. Second, they are grounded in the substantial research literature, refined over decades of research, that specifies effective teaching practices….Third, because sound teacher evaluation systems examine what teachers actually do in the light of best practices, they provide constructive feedback to enable improvement. (p. 26)

Haertel’s concession that VAM has a “modest” place in teacher evaluation is no ringing endorsement, but it certainly refutes the primary—and expensive—role that VAM is playing in the rush to reform teacher evaluation in SC and across the U.S.

In the irony of ironies that can occur only in the Bizzaro World of education reform, each time VAM is tested, it fails, and each time it fails, more states line up to implement it.

* Haertel offers a more than generous analysis of the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2011) claim that teacher impact can be extrapolated into adult earning for students. I urge readers to examine Bruce Baker‘s and Matthew Di Carlo‘s more nuanced and cautious analyses of those claims.

education

“He knows, or thinks he knows”: It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World

December 8, 2013 plthomasedd 3 Comments

During the spring of 2006 when members of the Duke lacrosse team were first accused of rape (later to be dismissed by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper), I was teaching a freshman English course that focused on Kurt Vonnegut. Although my university is composed of a female majority, this class was mostly male students; since the university is a small, selective liberal arts university, the students in most ways identified with the lacrosse players.

Nonetheless, I was taken aback that the students almost unanimously (including the females) believed the lacrosse players were innocent. Class and race identification was central to these feelings, I believed, but when the case was exposed as a false accusation, I was placed in a much more complex position.

As the accusation against Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston unfolded, then, I was once again faced with the tension that accompanies high-profile public discourse about rape and sexual abuse. Beyond the issue of innocence or guilt of Winston, however, we have been confronted with something we seem almost unwilling to acknowledge, something Emily Bazelon frames as How Did Jameis Winston Evade a Rape Charge?:

At a press conference that turned weirdly jokey—at one point, a female reporter in the room blurted “Come on” in exasperation—why did Meggs make a point of the fact that the victim “acknowledged having sex with her boyfriend”? I suppose he felt he had to say something about the presence of someone else’s DNA, in addition to Winston’s, on her clothing. But the effect was to fuel the slut shaming she’s already enduring—treatment that has led her to withdraw from her FSU classes.

Here is what’s bothering me most: I’ve been looking for a case in which a woman accuses a big-time college athlete of rape, and he is charged and then convicted.

Bazelon has found few examples, and adds:

The underlying question about Winston, his accuser, and Meggs’ decision is this: Did she lie, or did she make an accusation of rape that is credible but too difficult, in the view of this prosecutor, to prove in court? One thing is clear: It is uncommon for victims to make false accusations of sexual assault. Yes, it happens, causing terrible damage for men who are falsely accused. But the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the time, women who go to the police about rape are telling the truth.

Reading through the police narrative of this alleged victim’s account, it is hard for me to imagine that she had consensual sex with Winston and then decided to lie and say it was rape. It’s not easy to call the cops and say, as she did, after explaining she was out drinking at a bar with friends, that “next thing I know I was in the back of a taxi with a random guy that I have never met. There was another person in the taxi. We went to an apartment, I don’t know where it was. I kept telling him to stop but he took all my clothes off. He started having sex with me and then his roommate came in and told him to stop. He moved us to the bathroom ‘because the door locked’ and I’m not 100% sure how everything in there happened.” She also said, according to the warrant, that after the drinks she had at the bar, her “memory is very broken from that point forward.”

Again, beyond the specifics of the Winston case, but in the context of high-profile sexual assault accusations such as those identifying Ben Roethlisberger and Kobe Bryant (both of which were not pursued), how must all women feel when sexual assault of any kind is aired publicly with smiles, smirks, laughter, and essentially derision exhibited in the press conferences by Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs and Winston lawyer Tim Jansen?

Are we to believe that women targeting athletes, as Jansen claims, is somehow more prevalent and a greater scar on our society than women being sexually assaulted?

As Laurie Penny declares in a discussion of Miley Cyrus, the agency of women and girls remains decontextualized from their humanity: “We care about young women as symbols, not as people”:

Another week, another frenzy of concern-fapping over teenage girls. A few days ago, I was invited onto Channel 4 News to discuss a new report detailing how young people, much like not-young people, misunderstand consent and blame girls for rape. The presenter, Matt Frei, tried to orchestrate a fight between myself and the other guest, Labour MP Luciana Berger, because it’s not TV feminism unless two women shout at each other….

The tone of the reports on girls’ lack of confidence, on the persistence of myths of ignorance about rape and sexual violence, is as patronising as ever. The implication is that girls fret about their appearance, are confused about sex and consent and worried about the future because they are variously frivolous or stupid.

Penny highlights both the specific mansplaining around Cyrus and the wider mansplaining, paternalism, and objectifying that remains pervasive in public discourse of girls and women. The “slutshaming” of women—whether it be aimed at Cyrus (as simultaneous sexualizing and de-sexualizing of females) or the wink-wink-nod-nod discrediting of Winston’s accuser by Meggs and Jansen—exposes the fact that it’s still a man’s (hostile) world for women, including when women are accused of slutshaming women.

A Man’s (Hostile) World for Women

A rare safe haven for challenging paternalism and slutshaming (see Penny’s The Miley Cyrus complex – an ontology of slut-shaming) is art, where writers (mostly women) and film makers have portrayed the aftermath of sexual assault as another sexual assault.

Poet Adrienne Rich‘s “Rape” is a stark and powerful recreation of a sexually assaulted woman doubly assaulted during her police interview, beginning:

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.

And then concluding:

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:
he has taken down your worst moment
on a machine and filed it in a file.
He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;
he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

He has access to machinery that could get you put away;
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,
will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

With a dexterity that leaves the reader deeply uncomfortable, Margaret Atwood explores “date rape”—both as an unfolding of the reality of a woman in the context of the possibility of sexual assault by a male blind date and as a complicating of normative views of women having “Rape Fantasies.” (Atwood builds similar examinations in her The Handmaid’s Tale.)

While it raised considerable attention when released, The Accused and the real-life events it was based on, the gang rape of Cheryl Araujo, the film also anticipated discussions of slutshaming by highlighting what was then and still remains the pre-disposition to blame the victim, when the victim is a woman and when the violence is sexual.

But the attention achieved by the film and the sanctuary of poetry and fictional narrative bring us back to Penny’s charge: “We care about young women as symbols, not as people.”

For example, Lisbeth Salander is powerful and complex in the Millennium Trilogy, the fictional personification of blaming the victim:

“Our client on principle does not speak to the police or to other persons of authority, and least of all to psychiatrists. The reason is simple. From the time she was a child she tried time and again to talk to police and social workers to explain that her mother was being abused by Alexander Zalachenko. The result in every instance was that she was punished [emphasis added] because government civil servants had decided that Zalachenko was more important than she was.” (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, p. 733)

Salander’s entire life is the situation in Rich’s “Rape” writ large.

But we must not ignore that even in fiction—Lisbeth as symbol—the first book in the trilogy is given the English title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (why “girl” not “woman”?), instead of the literal translation from Swedish, “men who hate women,” and as in the film The Accused, why do we appear more concerned about women being assaulted in books and films than in real life? And is it possible that at least in the U.S. film version, we appear more drawn to Salander as vigilante than morally enraged by the repeated violence and sexual assaults she endures?

•

It is without question that the human dignity of a man wrongly accused of rape is no less valuable than the human dignity of a woman raped; it is without question that I have no inside knowledge and cannot know the innocence or guilt of Winston or his accuser.

But unknowables do not excuse us from confronting the known: The smirks and grins, the innuendo and direct slutshaming aimed at Winston’s accuser were all the sort of double assault we have been warned about, the sort of double assault that affects all women, the sort of double assault that must not be tolerated:

“The victim and her family appreciate the State Attorney’s efforts in attempting to conduct a proper investigation after an inordinate delay by the Tallahassee Police Department,” Carroll [the accuser’s lawyer] said in a statement. “The victim in this case had the courage to immediately report her rape to the police and she relied upon them to seek justice. The victim has grave concerns that her experience, as it unfolded in the public eye and through social media, will discourage other victims of rape from coming forward and reporting.”

As Christine Brennan explains:

There was laughter. There were jokes. There were smiles. The news conference in which Florida state attorney Willie Meggs announced that Jameis Winston was not going to be charged with sexual battery was an extremely light-hearted affair.

Everyone seemed so incredibly happy to be talking about an alleged sexual assault.

The known has confronted us: relief that a football career and national championship would not be derailed combined with a levity not suited for public talk around the possibility of sexual violence—it’s still a man’s (hostile) world, and as Rich reminds us in “What Kind of Times Are These?”:

…this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK to Mandela: Dishonored by Passive Radical Myth

December 8, 2013 plthomasedd 7 Comments

Early in February 1990, my daughter, born March 11, 1989, spent an entire night vomiting. My wife and I were new parents, and we called our pediatrician multiple times, always urged to be patient and wait it out. By the morning, we were in the emergency room, followed by our tiny child, a month shy of a year old, being admitted to the hospital.

After a few sleepless days for my wife and me, my daughter was released from the hospital on February 11, 1990, the day she was eleven months old and the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

I think that I will never forget the moment that remains in my memory when I stood in the hospital room holding my frail, beautiful child, watching on the TV the news coverage of Mandela’s release. There were personal and political promises of relief and hope in that coincidence, that intersection of history and my own life that filled my heart in a way that is beyond words.

Mandela’s death now overlaps with my daughter in that she is carrying her first child and has begun to live a life that offers challenges and hope in ways than Mandela’s legacy speaks to for me, but I also must pause my hope because, as Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) posted to Twitter: “They’re turning Mandela into a harmless icon.”

NBC reports, Nelson Mandela’s death: World mourns ‘hero,’ ‘icon,’ ‘father’—with a reductive paragraph near the end:

Mandela spent 27 years in prison and led his country to democracy. Though he was in power for only five years as his country’s first black president, his moral influence earned him the praise and respect of people all over the world.

And as Klonsky anticipates, an annual ritual will now follow, reducing Mandela like Martin Luther King Jr. to the passive radical myth.

Passive Radicals: The Manufactured Myth [1]

With the annual and somewhat functional recognition of certain versions of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. behind us in 2013, let me ask this: What do Jesus, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and King have in common?

I admit the answers could be many: Significant historical voices and lives, shared messages of peace and harmony, tragic assassinations, and more.

And while these are all credible answers, I suggest the most important commonality among Jesus, Gandhi, and King is how their legacies have been manipulated by the privileged in order to create a mythology of the passive radical.

Consider Jose Vilson’s framing of how King serves other people’s purposes:

For some revisionists, MLK Jr. was either one of two things: a staunch conservative who lived patriotically, owned guns, and worked towards self-help, or he was a such a commercial pacifist whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment. Then, there are those who, after having recognized MLK’s full history, still want to use his name for things he would never entertain, like breaking unions and limiting opportunity to a full education to only the “good” kids, whatever that means.

It is at Vilson’s second point—framing radicals as “commercial pacifist[s] whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment”—I want to pause for a moment.

Passive Radicals?

My journey to critical consciousness may very well be anchored in my confrontation as a child and teen with the Hollywood portrayals of Jesus common at mid-twentieth century. I shared a revelation found in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in a letter from Nettie, in Africa, to Celie:

All the Ethiopians in the bible were colored. It had never occurred to me, though when you read the bible it is perfectly plain if you pay attention only to the words. It is the pictures in the bible that fool you. The pictures that illustrate the words. All of the people are white and so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That’s why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb’s wool. Lamb’s wool is not straight, Celie. It isn’t even curly. (pp. 140-141)

Just as the church and Western culture created a mythology of Jesus as white, the Hollywood versions of my youth clearly established Jesus as passive, meek, exactly as Vilson characterizes one version of King—”no real threat to the establishment.”Many years later, I included the film Gandhi in a unit that explored Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, King (about whom all students know only “I Have a Dream”), and Malcolm X (a figure students had either never examined or had been taught he was a negative figure in history). That film portrayal of Gandhi perpetuated the passive radical myth in Gandhi through a British actor, able only to mask the whiteness but not abandon it entirely.

The life and work of activist and historian Howard Zinn has catalogued and confronted what Nettie learns in Africa: Those in power who control the images and the narrative use those images and narratives to feed their privilege.

The passive radical myth allows the privileged in the U.S. to wield the mask of praise to hide their self-interests.

Jesus, Gandhi, and King are reduced to cartoons, single-dimensioned, almost entirely upon a middle-class and white norm of “articulate.”

In school (including Sunday school in churches), children are led in close analysis of the rhetorical power of their words, keeping the gaze almost entirely on the mechanics and not the reasons why those words were needed, the consequences of what those words did and could incite.

As Nettie discovers, however, if anyone looks carefully, even at the words that the passive radical myth uses to honor rhetoric over action, the truth is right there before us.

Even in the reductive film, Gandhi challenges the term “passive resistance” and prefers “civil disobedience.” And many Jesus scholars note Jesus overturning the tax collectors’ tables may best reflect the radical Jesus.

For America, the mythology of King, the distorted mythology of King as passive radical, must be confronted and dismantled if any of the promises King envisioned can become reality. As Zinn notes,

Martin Luther King himself became more and more concerned about problems untouched by civil rights laws—problems coming out of poverty. In the spring of 1968, he began speaking out, against the advice of some Negro leaders who feared losing friends in Washington, against the war in Vietnam. He connected war and poverty….King was turning his attention to troublesome questions….And so, nonviolence, he said, “must be militant, massive nonviolence.” (pp. 205-206)

Like Nettie, we must look carefully at the words, and not be distracted by the fabricated images, the narratives creating the manufactured myth of the passive radical. King, especially in his last days, offered words that refute that myth:

These are revolutionary times; all over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression….We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, Communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. (“Conscience and the Vietnam War,” in The Trumpet of Conscience)

These words of a genuine radical ring true today, but are unlikely to be read in a classroom or quoted from a political stump, or echoed in the pulpits of any church. Nettie’s revelation about Jesus leads to her own blossoming self-awareness: “We are not white. We are not Europeans. We are black like the Africans themselves. And that we and the Africans will be working for a common goal: the uplift of black people everywhere” (p. 143).

Knowledge is the fuel of the liberatory impulse, and thus, it is in the interests of the privileged to manufacture characters and narratives of the passive radical in order to maintain the imbalance of equity that enslaves the promise of democracy in “proneness to adjust to injustice.”

King’s embracing unionization, direct eradication of poverty, minimum salaries, the eradication of permanent war, and the insidious racism maintaining the historical divisions between impoverished whites and blacks will not be allowed in that myth since the voice of a true radical is also the voice raised to lead to action.

[1] Originally posted January 22, 2013, at Daily Kos.

education

What Is Only PISA Stat that Matters?

December 8, 2013 plthomasedd Leave a comment

What Is Only PISA Stat that Matters?.

Teaching

Setting Free the Books: On Stepping Aside as Teaching

December 5, 2013 plthomasedd 4 Comments

While film critics have offered mostly negative reviews of This Is 40, I have watched all and then parts of the film multiple times during its run on cable TV because I am drawn to the scenes that include the children (who in real life are writer/director Judd Apatow’s children with lead actress Leslie Mann).

In one scene, the older daughter, Sadie (Maude Apatow), charges into the kitchen and unleashes a profanity-laced diatribe onto her parents. Many years ago, my daughter did the same to my wife and me, and when the two of us burst into laughter, my daughter stomped upstairs to her room, doubly infuriated at our response.

Maybe This Is 40 isn’t a good film, but I am nearly 53 and my daughter is 24 and carrying her first child. And she and I are quietly emerging from many dark years between us so I admit viewing films and reading books through a sort of middle-aged nostalgia that allows me to appreciate things I probably didn’t recognize when I should have.

The dark years and incessant tensions between my daughter and me often included yelling, first by me and then by my daughter, who enjoyed accusing me of being bi-polar. Today, I recognize that throughout my life I have fumbled almost all of my close relationships because I have struggled with nearly paralyzing anxiety combined with a proclivity toward feeling things deeply, feeling things too deeply.

As a result, my love has often manifested itself as all-consuming, overwhelming, suffocating.

My only child, then, had little choice but to rebel, to seek freedom from the tidal wave that was my love. She is now an adult—working, married, and with child. I have been forced in many ways to set aside the worst parts of how I tend to respond to loving another, and thus, we are re-building now how a father and daughter can be.

While I have struggled with personal love relationships, I have had two other loves that provide different contexts, ones that have confronted me with challenges as well—my love of books and my love for my students. Because of these three arenas of my life, my life loving, I am in the midst of a journey as a teacher that involves stepping aside as teaching.

On Stepping Aside as Teaching

The film The Words presents a multi-layered narrative about writers and their relationships with people as well as words. One story examines a writer that Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) creates in his eponymous novel in the film; Hammond explains to Daniella, “You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close but they never actually touch. They are two very, very different things.”

In Hammond’s novel, the novel published by Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) but actually written by The Old Man (Jeremy Irons) explores a writer who comes to love the words more than the woman who has inspired him to write the words.

I think the film speaks to what happens when anyone begins to covet the extension of what one loves even when that displaced urge corrupts the original love. And thus, this film speaks to parents, lovers, and teachers who are all bound by their passions as essential to who they are.

This brings me to books and teaching—two of my greatest loves— and a foundational question about how books matter in my teaching.

Since I have been an English and writing teacher for most of my 31 years of teaching, books are the lifeblood of my classroom. But I have always been deeply conflicted about the use of books when teaching. Traditional practices such as assigning required books and meticulously analyzing books (from the historical dominance of New Criticism in English courses to the more recent obsession with close reading in the Common Core) have always felt as if the inherent dignity of books was being violated.

I feel much the same way about how traditional teacher-centered instructional and discipline practices deny students autonomy and even their own dignity.

Because I have always sought ways in which I can remain true to my love of books and my students, then, I have struggled in formal educational settings. My only recourse has been to create classes where both my students and the books we read are honored over me and my role as an authority (or realistically as the authority) in the classroom. In other words, I have come to view stepping aside as teaching (much as I have learned to view stepping aside as parenting).

Setting Free the Books*

I have returned recently to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, fascinated by both the enduring power of the novel and Bradbury’s own love affair with books. In the 60th anniversary edition of the novel, Bradbury (in the text of an audio introduction) explains:

I’m a library-educated person; I’ve never made it to college. When I left high school, I began to go to the library every day of my life for five, ten, fifteen years. So the library was my nesting place, it was my birthing place, it was my growing place. And my books are full of libraries and librarians and book people, and booksellers. So my love of books is so intense that I finally have done—what? I have written a book about a man falling in love with books.

Bradbury’s love of books as a learner, a reader, and a writer creates for me even greater tension in my roles as reader, writer, and teacher—especially in the context of Charles Bingham, Antew Dejene, Alma Krilic, and Emily Sadowski’s “Can the Taught Book Speak?” The authors address three questions:

First, what does the banning, and the unbanning of books have to do with teaching? Second, what is the nature of a book, and do we honor the nature of books when we teach them? And third, is it possible for educators to let books speak for themselves? (p. 199)

Throughout the discussion, the role of the teacher—I would add the corrupting role of the teacher—is confronted:

If a book is banned because it is dangerous as a written text, then a book could only be un banned by letting loose the dangerous potential of such a written text. A book is only unbanned when it is let loose to be read by anyone, anywhere, any time. It is unbanned when it can be read in public or in private, aloud or in silence, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, without “a parent to protect” the book. When one teaches a banned book, one falls short of unbanning the book on a number of counts, but primarily on the last count. When one teaches a banned book, one does something different from unbanning the book. One parents the book. One stands against Plato’s fear of writing to be sure, but one also sides with that same fear. One lets the book be read, but one makes sure there is a parent present at the reading. (p. 201)

Teaching a book, then, is the same as parenting that book—both the teaching and parenting here characterized as intrusive in the ways I have experienced and discussed above as both teacher and parent: “What Derrida thus reminds us is that the very act of teaching is always a parasitical act.”

Teaching and parenting as necessarily “parasitical” and destructive parallels the way writers and the their love of words above people is destructive in The Words:

This figure of the teacher vis-à-vis the book might be formulated as follows: A teacher teaches a book. However, the teacher is not fully a teacher unless the book is not fully a book. That is to say, a teacher needs a book, but she needs a particular kind of book: a book in chains, a banned book, a book that does not speak for itself. If a teacher were to teach a free book, a book unfettered by place, space, or human voice, then the teacher would not be a teacher. A teacher without a book to call her own —without a book to chain in some way, shape, or form — ceases to be , as a teacher.

To put this another way, as soon as a teacher teaches a book, then the book ceases to be a book. (p. 203)

As Bradbury’s own experiences reading in libraries and not attending college show, the book is its own reason for being, as Bingham, et al., explain:

A book, after all, is meant to be free . A book is written. It is written to be read. A book is a book precisely because it is meant to be read, and to be read by anyone. It is meant to be read by anyone who chooses to read the book. If it were not to be read by anyone, then it would not be a book, but would rather be a private communiqué. This bookness of the book signifies something important for educators. Namely, it is not in the nature of a book to be taught. Why? Because a book is, itself, language. It is language that speaks. If the book was not language, if it did not speak, then it would not be a book. A book is not intended to be interpreted into speech. A book does not require that people come to consensus about what it says. A book is itself consensus. It already says something before any consensus. There is no book that requires or expects a teacher, just as there is no speaking person who requires or expects a teacher. A book speaks in and of itself. It speaks without the need of parasites, chains, or megaphones. (p. 203)

So what are we to do, we who are lovers of books and teachers?

Simply stated, the problem is this: the taught book cannot speak. Indeed, the solution to this problem would seem simple now that the problem has been identified. The problem would be solved if teachers were to leave books alone. (p. 206)

At the intersection of love, books, students, and teaching, I have come to recognize the importance of setting free the books by seeking ways in which I can practice stepping aside as teaching. Just as I had to understand that loving my daughter required me to leave her alone, I must leave books and my students alone—and thus the highest form of respect, the highest form of trust, the highest form of love.

The risks are high in this practice because so few adults trust children, so few adults trust books. And in our paternalistic culture, parenting is viewed as necessary and good—not intrusive and corrupting (in fact, we see books as potentially corrupting and childhood freedom as corrupting).

Ultimately, stepping aside as teaching is a paradox likely to be perceived as not teaching at all—by students, parents, colleagues, and the public.

But risk we must, in the name of those things we love.

* I had a long and wonderful love affair with the novels of John Irving, mostly in my 20s and 30s. Irving’s first novel, Setting Free the Bears, is intentionally alluded to in this subhead.

No Excuses Reform

GUEST POST: Let’s Nurture Inner-Directed Students and Ignore the “No Excuses” Crowd, John Thompson

December 5, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Let’s Nurture Inner-Directed Students and Ignore the “No Excuses” Crowd

John Thompson

Early in my career, Latifa taught me an important lesson about the teaching of noncognitve skills. Latifa’s dress-for-success style and leadership made it easy to forget her unhappy childhood in foster homes. When she got up, shut both doors, and walked to the front of the classroom, it was my time to take a seat in a desk. Latifa often did this when she and her classmates were angry about something at school that offended their senses of fairness. Once they had their say and articulated solutions, Latifa would reopen the doors so I could get back to teaching Government standards.

When participating in our discussions, I drew upon my decade living in a neighborhood in the middle of the “Hoova” set of the Crips street gang turf, as well as lessons learned from students, counselors, therapists, and fellow teachers at an alternative school for juvenile felons. I also drew on techniques for getting along with people gained from extensive hitch-hiking, roughnecking in the oil fields, and lobbying Oklahoma legislators. Yes, I drew on eclectic real-world experiences to help mentor students. No, I did not impose some primitive KIPP-style cognitive behavioral model.

Yes, my inner city students drew on diverse experiences and, yes, they wrestled with many issues that were no different than suburban kids raised in two-parent families. No, I don’t believe that many affluent classrooms had as many survivors of extreme trauma.

Yes, I used my generation’s vocabulary, as I coached students on making sense of the world from their generation’s perspective. I recounted the theme of “the Lonely Crowd” and instructed them on the distinction between “other-directed” versus “inner-directed” persons. I presented my belief that adults needed to help young people develop an internal locus of control. I offered my opinion that a key purpose of schooling is helping to nurture creative insubordination.

No, I did not push “grit,” “true grit,” or a John Wayne value system. Back then, the term of art was “character education.” That name bothered me more than today’s word, “grit.” I had bigger concerns, however, than the label that we attached to the qualities which we now call “the socio-emotional.”

By the way, often it was a dispute over our school’s periodic enforcement of the dress code that sparked our confabs. During these spasms of “No Excuses” for their outer appearances, my students and I discussed the best ways to respond. We knew that the “this too shall pass” nature of these crackdowns would soon reinsert itself. I would volunteer that the dress code isn’t my priority, but supporting my colleagues is. I would spell out my desire for a balance between supporting my students, while fulfilling my job’s responsibility. We’d discuss how to deal with the rules as a team until the enforcement frenzy burned out.

Students voiced their anger about the system’s priorities. Untucked shirt tails wasn’t seen as the key to overcoming the effects of generational poverty and the legacies of Jim Crow. They also articulated their pain, being treated as objects to be ordered around. And, as David said, “I don’t feel whole without my hat …”

Yes, David’s expression of his divided consciousness prompted a serious discussion. Yes, some themes we had learned from studying Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were recalled. No, we didn’t tell him to just conform and grit it out.

So, I thank Paul Thomas and Lelac Almegor for reminding me about those wonderful experiences. Thomas has long criticized the work of Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough, and James Heckman and their support of KIPP’s pedagogy. He now adds a link to Almegor’s “The Inherent Flaws in Character Education.” Almegor astutely writes in opposition to the current emphasis on character education that sounds “like a magic wand. Working kid by kid and school by school, we can fix what is wrong with our historically struggling student populations while implicitly laying the blame on the students or their parents or their communities.”

If I read them correctly, there are two issues. The first is rooted in the conversation which grew heated in the 1960s when Patrick Moynihan used the phrase “a culture of poverty.” Sometimes that debate was a nuanced academic dispute; other times it was an avoidable conflict dividing liberals from ourselves. Conservatives got a kick out the fights between the various wings progressives, but there were important scholarly points to be made. I also agree with Paul Tough that these disputes were a part of “liberal posttraumatic shock” for supposedly losing the War on Poverty.

The second issue involves recent research on the socio-emotional, and the unfortunate term “grit,” which are being coopted by reformers “No Excuses” schools, it seems to me, are teaching an other-directed value system and doing so in the name of inner-directedness. To paraphrase Karen Lewis, accountability hawks are claiming that their schools liberate poor children so they can become Masters of the Universe, when they are actually training students to become Walmart greeters. Only in our Orwellian education reform era, could behaviorist indoctrination to pass bubble-in tests be branded as the cultivation of qualities such as adaptability and empathy.

On this issue, again, Almegor provides a wise explanation. At his school, “we do character education not because our children are disadvantaged but because they are children. It belongs within our school building not because nobody else is doing it, but because everyone does it. Our school is a part of our community and so we share in its responsibilities.”

He notes that teaching character should be about “being more independent, assertive, and persistent, but often it is not.” He observes:

We are not trying to fix them so they are more like middle-class kids. We are trying to get them ready to compete from behind. But some of it isn’t about character at all, only the appearance of it. When we teach a kid to give a firm formal handshake, we are not strengthening his character. We are teaching him how to translate his strength into a language that people in power will understand.

It seems to me, however, that most non-reformers will read the research of Duckworth, Heckman, and Tough as incompatible with accountability-driven reform. Their criticism of achievement tests, and their inability to predict success in school and in life, applies equally to standardized testing. Even those who believe that school choice is a key to improving schools, I suspect, would prefer Almegor’s approach to character education to KIPP’s structure. Or, they would at least choose Almegor’s nurturing over a competitive, top down approach to produce higher “outcomes,” i.e. test scores. I have to believe that parents prefer the already huge and growing social science on the need for high-quality early education over the drill and kill school of reform.

So, I have to wonder why Thomas, Almegor, and others are so upset that some scholars and reformers overuse the word grit. Are they afraid that reformers will do something crazy like impose bubble-in testing and test prep on young children? Seriously, Gary Rubenstein’s “My Daughter’s Kindergarten Common Core Workbook” shows the extremes to which reformers will go.

As during the battles over the “culture of poverty,” we in the progressive tradition have no choice but to live by our values and debate ideas in public. It is tricky to do so in an era when reformers are likely to take any concept or word and turn it into a weapon to advance their agenda. But, it is the price we play for being committed to democratic education for all. Our job is preparing kids for an Open Society.