Edu 12. I really like Mike Rose in “Possible Lives”
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 10, where he discovers excellence in some of the most marginal school districts.
We have two chapters from Rose’s book. - Intro repeated from Edu 11:
For four years Mike Rose, director of the UCLA Writing Program, visited classrooms, collecting 100’s of anecdotes of dedication, from rural Montana to New York City. At a time when faith in public education was at its nadir, Rose finds redeeming attributes in America's greatest democratic experiment.
The book's findings are a testament to the resilience, boldness, and inventiveness of our nation's educators. Whether on Chicago's South Side or in Kentucky's coal country, those teachers who are in the forefront of meaningful education share a deep respect for their students (both as individuals and as members of distinct communities and cultures), and a determination not to be bound by the bureaucracy of traditional pedagogy, which departmentalizes knowledge and divides students by age rather than ability.
I’ll repeat the download link for this Chapter 10:
"Possible Lives." But both chapters are outstanding:
Here is an excerpt that I retyped in. You might like his writing style, or might not. You could say he is a “name-dropper”, but these are names of ordinary teachers with extraordinary dedication. He finds them in all parts of our country. (2,000 word post.)
THE FOLLOWING IS QUOTED MATERIAL:
Whether or not an institution is democratic is often determined by procedural criteria. Do members have a vote, any input into policy, a place at the table? These concerns are important, of course, but considered alone, or primarily, they can lead to reductive definitions of democracy. That's democracy as a procedure, it's a set of rules. My four-year visits to classrooms in American schools led me to be more interested in the experience of democracy, the phenomenology of it. What did it feel like to be in those classrooms in Watts, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Eastern Kentucky coal fields, in Hattiesberg and Missoula, in Calexico and Tucson? If we can situate ourselves within that experience, we may come to understand on many levels, not just the definitional and formal, what schooling for all in a democratic society can be, and how we can meaningfully talk about it.
The first thing to say about the school rooms I visited is that they created a sense of safety. There was physical safety, which for some children in some environments, is a real consideration. But there was also safety from insult and diminishment: "They don't make fun of you if you mess up", said a middle school student in Chicago. And there was safety to take risks, to push beyond what you can comfortably do at present, "coaxing our thinking along", as one of Steve Gilbert's students put it, "bringing out our best interpretive abilities".
Intimately related to safety is respect, a word I heard frequently during my travels. From what I could tell, it meant many things, operated on many levels: fair treatment, decency, an absence of intimidation, and beyond the realm of individual civility, a respect for the history, the language and culture of the people represented in the classroom.
Surveying the images of Mexican and Mexican-American history on Carlos Jimenez's wall and bulletin board, a Chicago student exclaimed, "This room is something positive". As you walk around, you say, “Hey, we're somebody!" Respect also has an intellectual dimension. As New York principal Louis Delgado put it, "It's not just about being polite - even the curriculum has to convey respect. It has to be challenging enough that it is respectful." It is interesting that virtually all of our current discussions of academic standards are framed either in the quasi-technical language of assessment and accountability, or as a lament for diminished performance. There could be a whole other discussion of standards in the language of expectation, respect, and democratic theory.
Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority. Most discussions of authority in the classroom involve either a teacher's "management style", (perhaps contrasting authoritarianism with democratic style), or the degree to which a teacher involves students in making decisions about what will be taught and how the class will be run. While none of the teachers I observed could be categorized as authoritarian, I did see a range of classroom management styles. While some teachers involved students in determining the rules of classroom conduct and gave them significant responsibility to provide the class its direction, others came with curriculum and codes of conduct fairly well in place.
Two things seemed to hold across classrooms. First, a teacher's authority came from multiple sources - knowledge, care, the construction of a safe and respectful space, solidarity with students' background - rather than solely from age or role. Though there were times when our teachers asserted authority in a direct unilateral way, in general, authority was not expressed or experienced as a blunt exercise of power. As one of Stephanie Terry's first-graders put it, "She doesn't fuss a lot".
The second thing to note was that even in classrooms that were run in a relatively traditional manner, authority was distributed. In various ways, students contributed to the flow of events, shaped the direction of discussion, became authorities on their own experience and on the work they were doing. Think of Stephanie Terry's students reporting on their observations of a tree frog and a hermit crab, or Michelle Taigue's Navajo and Hopi students explaining the slang and dialect on the reservation. There were multiple pathways of authority, multiple opportunities for members of the class to assume authority. And since authority and the generation of knowledge are intimately connected - those who can speak, affect what is known - there were multiple opportunities to shape the knowledge emerging in the classroom.
These classrooms then, were places of expectation and responsibility. Teachers took students seriously as intellectual and social beings. Young people had to work hard, think things through, come to terms with each other - and there were times when such efforts took a student to his or her limits. "They looked at us in disbelief," said New York Principal Haven Henderson, "when we told them they were intellectuals." The teachers we met assumed that a small society of achievement and civic behavior could flourish. "All children", said Evangelina Jones in Calexico, "have minds and souls and have the ability to participate fully in society." It is important to note that such assumptions were realized through a range of supports, guides, and structures: from the way the teachers organized the curriculum and invited and answered questions, to the means of assistance they and their aids provided (tutoring, conferences, written and oral feedback), to the various ways they encouraged peer support and assistance, to the atmosphere they created in the room - which takes us back to considerations of safety and respect. The classrooms required thought, participation, effort - they were places where you did things - but not without mechanisms to aid involvement and achievement. Such aid to participation should be a defining quality of public institutions in a democracy.
This mix of expectation, responsibility, and assistance established the conditions for students like the young woman in Mark Hall's Graphic Arts Lab in Pasadena to say, "I'm just learning all this. I can't wait to get really proficient at it." Or for the child in Calexico, engaged with an exercise on the telling of time, to implore Elena Castro to "make the problems harder." Earlier, I suggested that there could be in our country an alternative discussion of standards, one that involved expectation, respect, and democratic theory. Yvonne Hutchinson, the middle school teacher from Watts, offered one direction such a discussion might take:
"Teachers will either say, ‘we can't lower our standards’ or ‘this poor child is reading below grade level, so I'll need a third - or fourth grade book.’ But what you need to do it to find a way to make that eighth grade book accessible. You have to respect the child. We get so busy looking at children in terms of labels that we fail to look for the potential - and to demand that kids live up to that potential. Children can tell right off those people who believe in them and those who patronize them. They rise to whatever expectations are set. They rise or fail to rise. And when they rise, they can sometimes rise to great heights.”
The students I talked to, from primary grade children to graduating seniors, each in their own way, had the sense that these classrooms were salutary places, places that felt good to be in, places that honored their best interests. "They really care about you," that student in Mark Hall's lab said of the Graphic Arts Academy. "It's like we're family." discussing difficult times in making their video, two students recalled Bell High School teacher Larry Stone's encouragement: "girls, you have to do this, it’ll work out, I believe in you." Calling Michelle Smith of the COMETS program in Chicago, a "good teacher," a student explained that "she's teaching us how to do things we couldn't do before." "Math will take you a long way in life," said Algebra Project student in Hollandale Mississippi. There was variation in the way it was experienced and expressed - nurturance, social cohesion, the fostering of competence, a sense of growth, a feeling of opportunity, futurity - but there was among the students I met a common recognition of concern and benefit.
The foregoing characteristics combined to create vital public space. The rooms I visited felt alive. People were learning things, both cognitive and social, and doing things, individually and collectively, making contributions, connecting ideas, generating knowledge. To be sure, not everyone was engaged. And everyone, students and teachers alike, had bad days. But overall. these classrooms were exciting places to be, places of reflection and challenge, of deliberation and expression, or quiet work and public presentation. People were encouraged to be smart. “I wanted to feel the challenge of a tough course,” said Carlos Jimenez’s student about electives like Mexican-American history. “I think I came to Understand,” said Lois Rodgers’s student after completing a video project on Camp Sister Spirit, “something about the fear behind prejudice.”
“Rick Takagarki’s classes made me realize I needed to go experience things,” observed a University High student in Los Angeles. These young people were acting as agents in their own development. And that agency became and essential force in sustaining the classroom. The work they were doing had an effect beyond itself.
An important post-revolutionary essay on education, the eighteenth-century journalist Samual Harrison Smith wrote that the free play of intelligence was central to a democracy, and that individual intellectual growth was intimately connected to broad-scale intellectual development, to the “general diffusion of knowledge.” To a significant degree, the occasion and energy for intellectual growth in these classrooms came from engagement with others, often over a common problem. Consider Aleta Sullivan’s human anatomy and physiology students trying to find a solution to their blood-antigen experiment, or Bette Ford’s students, also at Hattiesburg High, struggling to convey to an audience of children the complex legacy of sharecropping, or Michel Taigue’s students in Tucson trying to render in a video play the tension between White, urban education, and the social fabric of reservation life.
Smith celebrated “the improvements of the mind and the collision of mind with mind.” As a number of contemporary critics of our public schools and of the larger public sphere have noted, what Smith referred to as “the general diffusion of knowledge” has been restricted in our country, and many voices remain silent. If we consider these classrooms to be miniature public spheres or preparatory arenas for civic life, then it is essential to note how the formation of intellectually safe and respectful space, the distribution of authority and responsibility, the maintenance of high expectations and the means to attain them – how all this is essential to the development of the intelligence of a people.
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