Sunday, December 1, 2013

Theory in Practice; The Dance

"In November, the air grows cold and the earth and all of its creatures prepare for winter. Animals seek food and shelter. And people gather together to celebrate their blessings with family and friends." -Cynthia Rylant, In November.


Photograph of the Civil Rights March on Washington, 08/28/1963
Mr. Vachon and dancing partner, Montreal, QC, 1928

November is a busy time for all of us creatures, and a time marked by change. Highs and lows become more pronounced as we brace ourselves for the winter, prepare for the painful process of shucking off old coats and growing new ones, and celebrate the possibilities of newness and rebirth when the ice finally melts. November is a precarious point between one season and the next. It's neither summer nor winter, but rather flits between the two with t-shirt weather one day and ice flurries the next. I can really relate to November in this way, as I also find myself in an awkward, fluid place, unsettled yet in exactly who or what I am as a teacher and socially responsible advocate for justice.

Dr. Lynch, my coach, often speaks of this teaching thing we do as a dance, and mine has been a clumsy one this November, with plenty of troddings on toes. My lows stem from the justified complaints of my dance partners, and my highs from the small moments of grace I achieve thanks to the practice and hard work I put into memorizing the steps. I still have a long way to go, and sometimes looking far into the future can be discouraging when I stop and realize just how long the waltz really lasts and how much my feet already hurt. There are so many styles of dance, and my different dance parters expect me to dance like them. I am still figuring out which dance is my own.

Common highs this month are rooted in my growing competence in seeing my theories play out in practice. My abilities in fostering peer collaboration and student-centered engagements have grown noticeably and in turn the students have grown as well. My favorite example is from our bucket note returning ceremony. The last two ceremonies I led, calling the student forward, giving them the notes from their peers, and calling on students to share specific anecdotes about moments their friend filled their buckets. On this particular ceremony day, when I announced the first student, she immediately came to the front of the room and started calling on the raised hands herself. I backed off instantly and let the kids run the rest of the ceremony, which they did seamlessly. This showed me a few things: That the successful modeling of the first two months of bucket-notes taught them the procedures they needed, that they are eager to take ownership of the procedures and rituals that should rightfully be theirs, and that they are seeing themselves as competent and capable of running the show themselves. I have also seen my kids thrive as helpers to each other in their learning journeys. Supporting kids in developing these peer collaboration skills is so important to my practice because “cooperative learning produces better learning and more motivated learners than competitive learning and individualistic learning” (Pressley and McCormick, 2007, p.276). Many of my highs come from stepping back and watching this capable young people help themselves and help each other. Our community bonds strengthen day by day as do the individuals within it.

In this dance between highs and lows, I often find that the highs and lows stem from the same source. Successful peer collaboration and student ownership has had me soaring in my practice, while botched attempts have left me in brooding lows. I see a pattern in these failures, and their source originates with me. While the kids are eager and willing to work with each other and to take charge of their own learning, often they are left high and dry because they don't know how to collaborate or how to be in charge of their learning. I have been very influenced by Ladybugs, Tornadoes, and Swirling Galaxies and have tried to lift engagements straight from this text. I have observed that my biggest failures come from turning the kids loose and expecting Ladybug-esque buzz and activity and collaboration and instead finding kids continuing to work independently or seeming aimless or perplexed by the wide open possibilities of pursuing their own topic of interest. I've reflected upon the difference between my engagements and theirs, and have pinpointed the many GROUP and SHARED inquiry and writing experiences the authors do before ever setting kids free to do it themselves. The teachers from the book model, provide experiences of group engagements, and then spend time consulting with each kid on his or her work. They say that “this kind of consultation creates a community of learners who participate in the learning process together” (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 379), which is exactly what I am going for. Moving forward, I will definitely take more time for teaching procedures before overloading kids with incomprehensible and overwhelming tasks.

Can I now take some time to talk about another kind of dance that popped up on several occasions during my reflections this month? This one has been circling in my mind continually, and was marked by some large events that left me with big questions about my role as an educator and in the larger scope of American society as a whole. I speak of the delicate dance, perhaps even done on a tightrope, that a teacher does between working for social change and maintaining professional neutrality on controversial issues. Let me give you some background:

In my old school, I taught a transgender child named Sunshine* for 2 years. (By transgender, I mean a person who is biologically one gender but identifies as the other gender). When I met Sunshine, we used ambiguous pronouns and avoided them when possible. Slowly, as she became more comfortable and confident in her feminine identity, and after discussing it with Sunshine and her mother, we transitioned to exclusive use of the female pronoun in reference to Sunshine and encouraged and reminded her classmates and other teaches to do the same. The students embraced their friend as a girl and barely batted an eye, as if to them this transition was an obvious one. Sunshine was a respected and beloved member of our community, celebrated for being exactly who she is. My heart overflows whenever I think about it. Sadly, Sunshine did not come over to our new school with myself and many of her old classmates, and is at another school where the administration has recommended she "go stealth", or in other words, pass herself off as female without revealing the true nature of her situation to her new friends and teachers. This in and of itself is problematic in my eyes, but I digress.

Not long ago, I heard some of my current students in conversation about Sunshine. They were debating whether she is a boy or a girl, saying "He's a boy, no, she's a girl," and going back and forth. Then I made a choice that I am still experiencing the consequences of. I weighed in. I sat down and listened for a minute and then I dove in. I said, “In my opinion, Sunshine gets to make that decision for herself. If she tells me she is a girl, then as someone who is a friend to her and respects her, I will treat her as a girl.” My coteacher very quickly jumped in and cut the conversation short, telling the kids to talk about this at home with their parents if they still had questions. I am very torn by how this played out. There is a dance here going on in my mind, where on one hand I want to hold high the torch of justice and what I believe in, but on the other I want to be responsible and refrain from doing the thinking FOR the kids, even if I strongly believe my way of thinking is ethical and right. Something I consider over and over again when it comes to transgender issues in American society is what Stevenson says about being proximate. In my mind, making talking about people like Sunshine taboo at school is pushing the topic away and making it far away from us, when what we really need to elicit the necessary and just social change is to make it CLOSER to us. And how lucky are we to have a remarkable child like Sunshine to be proximate with? I don’t appreciate the message that Sunshine’s gender predicament is something “taboo” to talk about and is forbidden to wonder about in school. These kids are very fairly trying to make sense of their world and the people in it, and adults can like it or not, but Sunshine and people like her are some of the people in our world. It harkens me back to other interesting gender conversations that have come up, such as what is for boys and what is for girls that kind of thing. I want to encourage them to think critically about this, but maybe when I expressed my opinion, I closed off the critical thinking and gave too strong of an answer. Did I say too much by giving my opinion? My coteacher was obviously uncomfortable enough to silence me. But is that in and of itself a sign that I went too far, or is that evidence that I am touching on important transformative ground? I still don’t know. I sometimes hesitate in this dance, taking a step forward, taking a step back.

I think I need to acknowledge that I am strongly influenced by some of the critical thinkers we’ve encountered this year like Joyce King and Bryan Stevenson. Hearing them speak left me with a fire coursing through me. I wanted to put on my biggest ass-kicking boots and kick down the school doors and shout my social justice message through every hall. Maybe I let myself get too militant, maybe it's not a good idea to put my job at risk by spreading a message the powers that be don't want to hear. But then again, both King and Stevenson assert that change needs to come from changing the narrative, and that sometimes we need to be deliberately uncomfortable to do this. How should I interpret the discomfort of the administration and parents and other teachers? Is it a healthy discomfort that comes from talking about the necessary topics, or is it a sign to me that I overstepped my bounds? I am still trying to figure out where I stand in this. Was I wrong or right? Or somewhere in between? Part of me thinks “I don’t want to step on toes” and part of me thinks “wait, yes I do, these are toes that NEED to be stepped on because it’s the right thing to do.” But then the message I got from the administration was that it's not my place to engage in these controversial issues. I haven't decided if I agree with this or not. My principal made lots of salient points as to why what I said was inappropriate. Part of me thinks that this is exactly a teacher's place, positioned as we are to be the barometer for right and wrong for the next generation. But then part of me thinks maybe it's not my place to encourage topics that the paying customers, the parents, are uncomfortable with. These questions are exactly what makes this teacher dance such a complex one.

I do believe I was somewhere between right and wrong. I think I said too much, I "named" and I told the kids (what I believe to be) the answer rather than encouraging them to get there themselves. One of my role models is Jane Elliot who did the famous engagement with her students in the 60s, where she got them thinking about race in terms they could understand. (Watch the documentary below if you've never heard of it, it will blow your mind). She really epitomizes a child-centered, inquiry based, discovery model to encourage her students to come to their own conclusions about America's racial inequality and the Civil Rights movement. Keeping her style in mind, next time this topic comes up that is so important to me (and in my eyes the next frontier of the civil rights movement), I won't get so fired up but remain calm and trust my students to get there on their own with some skillful guidance from yours truly.

2 comments:

Donna said...

WOW! Very thought provoking. Love your imagery of a dance.

Aidinas said...

Hey Kate,

I really enjoyed your thoughtful and metaphorical conversation in regards to this month and connections you've made from the reading. I found it interesting that you referred to different teaching styles as a dance. I suppose it could be seen as that, for me it is more of learning how to drive a stick shift. Lots of grinding of gears and bad upshifts, downshifts and stop and go. The engine shuts off every now and then, and you have to crank it back up.

It's not an entirely pleasent experience. I often wish that I could just fast forward the learning part. But I Guess that would be counter productive.

I really liked how you talked about inserting your opinion in conversations in regards to social justice and equality. I struggle a lot with the same things. I think it takes a lot of practice to be able to use some of the evasive, yet thought provoking tactics and questions that seasoned crit lit teachers are able to produce.

At Agnes, the whole approach to learning was critical thinking, etc. My professors had this incredible knack for avoiding telling us their opinion, but asking questions to explore ourselves, and open a dilalogue.

I think you're doing great, and I can't wait to see where you'll be in another year.