Liberating or domesticating education

"A multicultural approach values diversity and encourages critical thinking, reflection, and action.  Through this process, students can be empowered as well.  This is the basis of critical pedagogy.  Its opposite is what Paolo Freire called "domesticating education," education that emphasizes passivity, acceptance, and submissiveness.  According to Freire, education for domestication is a process of "transferring knowledge," whereas education for liberation is one of "transforming action."  Liberating education encourages students to take risks, to be curious, and to question.  Rather than expecting students to repeat teachers' words, it expects them to seek their own answers."

Nieto, Sonia.  Language, Culture, and Teaching.  New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2002. Print.

Rigor, de rigeur

     Our American education system has been shivering and cracking with newness against the crusts and rinds of traditional molds.  The Common Core, project-based learning, and a new way of thinking about teaching, learning, and (more philosophically) about what a public education should and can do is wafting from district offices, lingering like smoke over the cynics and idealists to equal degree.

     Between the furtive glance and the furrowed brow of doubting practitioners, there hangs a word that many utilize to combat the trajectory of the new and fluttering ideas.  Rigor.  Administrators want the reputation for it, teachers are evaluated for it, and yet rigor seems to go largely undefined or thought of generally as how strenuously students are made to work.  At least linguistically, I have found an irony in the way we are trying to incorporate the idea of "rigor" into what is meant to be a more flexible and exploratory mode of learning.

rigor (n.) 

late 14c., from Old French rigor "strength, hardness" (13c., Modern French rigueur), from Latin rigorem (nominative rigor) "numbness, stiffness, hardness, firmness; roughness, rudeness," from rigere "be stiff"

     I think most educators today would balk at the idea that we need more "stiffness" in our classrooms, though the word itself seems to draw to the forefront more questions than answers about what education could and should be in the public classroom.  If we are allowing more student freedom for exploration, are we losing the idea that we put our noses to the grindstone and do the hard and tedious work? Furthermore, if we want more flexibility of how students see and apply and integrate information, is there a place for the stiff, hard work that was characteristic of the strict old school?  Is there a way to think about rigor in a new way, some new definition for our new pedagogical purposes?And it is in this conversation that we begin to unearth a wider point of conflict in educational philosophy among educators and with the public at large: is it the purpose of school to create obedient producers and consumers, or to set them free from the constraints of ignorance and a passive receipt of knowledge?  I would suggest that the challenge for the next generation of teachers is to step forward and offer a vision for a hard-thinking, tenacious pedagogy that will not rely on fact collecting, but rather on the more challenging task of seeking truth in a flexible and mutable world of ideas.

   On a personal note, I overhead a conversation of older teachers discussing the idea of rigor in the language classroom.  There was a cynicism about projects and Common Core and the 21st century collaborative idea; it permeated the group, tainting the beating of beautiful idealism, covering it over like a tacky veneer, dismissing out of hand the possibility of a new way forward.  Does the jadedness come with age and fatigue, or can enthusiasm and desire be kindled, our brittle bones seasoning like bundles of wood over the course of time?

If there are any practitioners who would respond, perhaps you might consider offering a picture of what rigor means in your discipline, and how it may or may not coincide with new ideas about collaboration and inquiry.

Web 2.0 Resources - hit play and explore!

Oda al aire

Ode to the air

Pablo Neruda
(my translation)

Walking down a road

I ran into the air,

greeted him and said

respectfully:

I am glad

that for once

you aren’t transparent,

so we can talk.

The untiring one

danced, rustled the leaves,

shook the dust off my shoes

with his smile,

and raising up all

his blue masts and sails,

his glass skeleton,

his eyelids made of breeze,

unmoving as a mast

he stayed there listening to me.

I kissed him on his

king-of-the-sky skin,

I wrapped myself up in his flag

made of heaven’s silk

and I told him:

king or comrade,

thread, bird or petals,

I don’t know who you are, but

I’m asking one thing of you,

don’t sell yourself off.

Water sold itself away

and I have seen

the drops stop dripping

from the pipes

in the desert

and all the people, the poor people

walking thirsty

staggering in the sand.

I saw the light at night

get rationed,

the best light in the houses

of the rich.

Everything is dawn in the

new suspended gardens,

everything is darkness

in the terrible

alleyway shadows.

And then the night,

the mother-stepmother,

comes out

with a knife right in the middle

of her owl eyes,

and a shout, a crime,

they rise up and are ended

swallowed by shadows.

No, air,

don’t sell yourself off,

don’t let them put you in canals,

don’t let them put you in tubes,

don’t let them put you in boxes,

don’t let them pack you away,

don’t let them make tablets out of you,

don’t let them put you in a bottle,

be careful,

call me

when you need me,

I am the poet-son

of the poor, father, uncle,

cousin, blood brother

and brother in law

of the poor, of everyone,

of my country and all the other ones,

of the poor that live near the river,

of those that live in the high places

of the vertical cordillera

they pick at rocks,

nail together tables,

sew clothes,

chop wood,

grind up the earth,

and so

I want them to breathe,

you are the only one they have,

that’s why you are

transparent,

so that they can see

what will come tomorrow,

that’s why you exist,

air,

let yourself breathe,

don’t chain yourself up,

don’t trust anybody

that comes in their car

to examine you,

leave them behind,

laugh at them,

blow off their hats,

don’t accept

their propositions,

let’s go together

dancing around the world,

knocking the flowers

off the apple tree,

entering through windows,

whistling together,

whistling

yesterday and tomorrow

melodies,

a day will come

when we will free

light and water,

the earth, man,

and everything for everyone

will be, as you are.

That’s why, now,

be careful!

and come with me,

there is a lot left

to dance and sing,

let’s go

over the sea,

above the mountains,

let’s go

where the new spring

is flowering

and in one gust of wind

and song

let’s pass out the flowers,

the aroma, the fruit,

the air

of tomorrow.

El hombre invisible

The invisible man
Pablo Neruda 
(my translation)

I laugh
I smile
at the old poets,
I adore all
the poetry that's written,
all the dew, moon, diamond, every
silvery submerged drop,
that was my ancient brother,
adding to the rose,
but
I smile,
they always say "I",
at every step
something happens to them,
it is always "I",
through the streets
only they walk
or the sweet girl they love,
nobody else,
fisherman don't pass by,
nor bookshop salesmen,
bricklayers don't pass by,
nobody falls
from a scaffold,
nobody suffers,
nobody loves,
only my poor brother,
the poet,
everything seems
to happen to him
and to his sweet beloved,
nobody lives
but him alone,
nobody cries from hunger
or from rage,
no man suffers in his verses
because he can't
pay the rent,
in poetry they don't
throw anyone out into the street
with beds and with chairs
and nothing happens
in factories either,
nothing happens,
they make umbrellas, cups,
guns, trains,
they extract minerals
scratching at hell,
there are strikes,
soldiers come,
they shoot,
they shoot at the people,
that is to say,
at poetry,
and my brother
the poet
was in love,
or was suffering
because his feelings are sea-like,
he loves remote
ports for their names,
and writes about oceans
that he doesn't know,
together with life, full to the brim
like corn with its kernels,
he passes by without knowing how
to thresh it,
he rises and falls
without touching the earth,
or sometimes
he feels so deep
and dark,
he is so big
that he doesn't fit inside himself,
he gets tangled and untangles himself,
he declares himself damned,
he carries his cross of darkness
with great difficulty,
he thinks he is different
than the rest of the world,
every day he eats bread
but has never seen
a baker
nor has he entered a meeting
of the baker's union,
and so my poor brother
himself goes dark,
he twists and twists himself again
and he finds that he is
interesting,
interesting,
that is the word,
I am not above
my brother,
but I smile,
because I go through the streets,
and I am the only one who doesn't exist,
life flows by
like every river,
I am the only invisible one,
there are no mysterious shadows,
there are no darknesses,
the whole world speaks to me,
they want to tell me things,
they tell me about their relatives,
about their miseries
and about their joys,
everybody passes by and everybody
tells me something,
and they do so many things!:
they chop wood,
they put up electrical lines,
they knead until late into the night
our daily bread,
with an iron spear
they perforate the intestines
of the earth
and transform iron
into locks,
they rise up into the sky and carry
letters, weeping, kisses,
at every port
someone is there,
someone is born,
or the one I love awaits me,
and I pass by and they ask me
to sing about these things,
I don't have time,
I must think about everything,
must go back home,
pass by the party headquarters,
what can I do,
everything begs me
to speak,
everything begs me
to sing and to always sing,
everything is full
of dreams and sounds,
life is a box
full of songs, it opens
and flies and a flock
of birds
that want to tell me something comes
resting on my shoulders,
life is a struggle
like a river flowing by
and men
want to tell me,
to tell you,
why they fight,
if they die,
why they die,
and I pass by and I don't have
time for so many lives,
I want
everyone to live
in my life
and to sing in my song,
I am not important,
I don't have time
for my own concerns,
by day and by night
I have to note down what happens,
and not forget anybody.
It's true that I soon
become tired
and I look at the stars,
I stretch myself out on the grass,
a violin-colored insect passes by,
I place one arm
across a small breast
or below the waist
of the sweet one I love,
and I watch the
severe
velvet of the trembling night
with its frozen constellations,
then
I feel the wave of mysteries
lift up into my soul,
infancy,
the sound of weeping in corners,
sad adolescence,
and it makes me sleepy,
and I sleep
like an apple tree,
I fall asleep
immediately
with the stars or without the stars,
with my lover or without her,
and when I arise,
the night has gone,
the street has awoken before I have,
the poor young women go
to their work,
the fishermen return
from the ocean,
the miners
enter into the mine
with new shoes on,
everything is alive,
everyone passes by,
they go on hurriedly,
and I barely have time
to get dressed,
I have to run:
nobody can
pass by without me knowing
where they are going, what
has happened to them.
I can't
live without life,
without man being man
and I run and I see and I hear
and I sing,
the stars don't have
anything to do with me,
solitude has neither
flower nor fruit.
Give me for my life
every life,
give me all the pain
of the the whole world,
I am going to transform it
into hope.
Give me
every joy,
even the most secret ones,
because if it weren't this way,
how would any of you know about it?
I have to tell it all,
give me
the struggles
from every day
because they are my song,
and in this way we will walk together,
elbow to elbow,
all men,
my song brings them together:
the song of the invisible man
that sings with all men.

Inquiry and implications

Inquiry

Often times when we think of school, we think of the teacher, standing at the whiteboard expounding or sounding out or conjugating or dictating or solving or explaining or diagramming.  She has the knowledge, it lives in her, she must know her stuff. Then, through pedagogical voodoo, she transfers this thing that lives in her, the finer points of biology or French or calculus or European History or carpentry or computer programming, sends it like an email with all those ones and zeroes into the brains of the awaiting Others, those adolescents who will receive the information, interpret it, and reproduce it.

I propose that this is a misconception.  Our world gives and receives information a quintillion times a day.  (You're probably thinking "quintillion is totally a made up word."  To prove my point about giving and receiving information, click here to see whether I am making it up).  Now, I could have just included that definition here and been done with it, and you may have read it and chuckled to yourself at my pluck and cleverness.  But that would have been evidence of this misconception: that I have the knowledge, you don't have the knowledge, and that I must place the knowledge into your brain like cookies into the cookie jar.  But by clicking and searching and taking just one more step, you prove your own curiosity, that natural instinct to explore and know the world.  And in the act of inquiring further, I allow you to build meaning on your own terms and in your own way.

This seems to be getting at a new concept of knowledge, because in this scenario, who has the knowledge?  Where does it come from?  Did I give it to you?  Did you make it?  What does it say about you?  What does it say about me?

Implications

And the bigger question that follows all of these other questions is: why does it matter?  Quite frankly it matters because everything in our society and world has changed dramatically over the last 50 years except for one area: education.  If you walked into a classroom from the 1960s, you might have found something like this:

And then, if you were to walk into a classroom this year, you might have found something like this:

What do you see?  The same thing with a screen?  

Now, many people are saying these days that our "system is broken" and that we as a nation must do something differently in education to "fix it."  Unfortunately, more often than not those are code words for buzzy political ideas about test scores, teacher evaluation and money, none of which address the eerie similarity that we observe in these two pictures at 50 years remove.

I don't wish to say that students should no longer sit in desks or raise their hands to speak, but something in the nature of the interaction between student and teacher and subject matter seems to have been left untapped as we have remained static in our educational practice through the years.  I am doing my own inquiry into these things, and I think it has something to do with curiosity, originality, undoing hierarchies in the classroom and society, and helping students prefer to name and know the world on their own terms rather than speak when prompted and remain in their passive role as receiver.

Zapatistas and the preterite tense

This week I challenged my Spanish class to write a personal travel blog containing specified features and structures.  It was my goal to make the connection between the grammar and vocabulary and the real-life functions of using the language.  The blog was my way of trying to marry them together.  I provided what I thought was a lot of structure on the first day of explaining the project, which will be there unit assessment.  It will work as a sort of online portfolio of their work, and will be assessed through rubricking throughout and at the end.

Though I had thought that I had included plenty of scaffolds for the cognitively demanding work of writing descriptively in the preterite tense in Spanish, several students showed despair, not knowing where to start or how to develop the ideas for what they might describe.  I concluded that I hadn't included enough framing and supports around the language needed to accomplish the task, so I developed some guiding questions that, when answered in their writing, would be sufficient to produce the type of narrative required.  This seemed to help, as certain students indicated that they had "just gone through and answered the questions."  I was happy with this, but wondered at the same time what that structuring might have done to the open-endedness of the assignment.   I learned my lesson for the prompts for each day's writing tasks, and developed more and more banks of questions and graphic organizers to build a safety net around student writing.  The feedback so far has been that this is a helpful scaffold, but their writing samples will tell the true story.

Other students required none of these extra supports, and one student even went so far as to create a fictional travel account during a Zapatista movement in Mexico.  This was not at all what I had been expecting, and I was fascinated and delighted by the out of the box thinking of that particular student.  In some way she had felt free enough to develop an original idea and run with it beyond the scope of the project.  I am glad that the project guidelines were flexible enough to accomodate and allow such creativity.

I am finding that the open-ended assignments and questions need to always be buttressed by the structures and forms that hold them up, though knowing how much to offer and how much to allow students to discover freely requires intuition and an appreciation of the nuance of learning a language by doing.

You don't receive, you build

I write today to reflect on the first week of the semester.  By all the current standards of public education, I was given an incredibly manageable group to facilitate.  Here are the vitals for my class:

• Spanish 3
• 26 students
• First period (8:00-9:30)
• 7 contact hours / week
• 3 native speakers
• 12 girls, 14 boys
• 2 Freshman, 9 Sophomores, 16 Juniors

This week was a fairly unorthodox start to a language class.  Students were asked to draw from their well of past knowledge to generate, putting them in the role of Subject rather than Object of learning.  They freely associated, created lists, explored geographical phenomena, and narrated past events in their beautiful sputtering way.  I gave neither grammar lesson nor vocabulary list, allowing students to muck about in Spanish after so much time away.  The purpose is not to take away the structure, which we know to be a deep need for children, but rather to try to view language in a new way.  It is going to be a groaning process of breaking the habit of passivity in students accustomed to being treated like receptacles for information.  

Students have a composition book that they use to complete class activities, take notes and write me a short letter in Spanish at the end of the week telling me what they learned and any questions or concerns they might have.  The comments were positive, and at times telling.  There were many questions that were indicative of the assumption that the system has built into them: 

knowing grammar = productive/receptive language ability

I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water here, and I will indeed be signaling some of the finer points of grammar and syntax for those linguistically inclined, but I maintain that these things are only important if they are connected to their real world functions, and how they are fleshed out in communicative tasks.

Seeing the students as co-creators

Reading through the names, letting them roll off my tongue, there is a language to it, I memorize these words because I need them, is it for communication or love or power or control or is it just rote?  Something teachers have been told to do from time immemorial? I look at the faces, let the consonants and vowels and the way they feel in my mouth establish themselves as I see the young people blush and giggle and embarrass and distract and spew.  These are my co-creators.  Even as I write this I sense the difficulty in my task of ceding power, giving away the illusion of my control and letting them have it to manipulate meaning as they will.  I want them to name the world, know themselves, know their neighbor.  There is something whole and true about naming things as they are, an opening up of possibility in pointing out the window at the rise in the land and saying hill or mountain or butte or plateau or colina or loma or montaña or cerro or mesa.  And knowing that others know the meaning of such things when you say them, there is the power.

Day one was uneventful in the way of first days.  Introductions and syllabi and the normal blah blah blah.  Unfortunate but necessary as administrative tasks tend to be.  Having 90 minute periods does allow me to unfold a bit more each day, though, and I took the opportunity to see what the sophomores and juniors think an ideal Spanish student looks like.  They formed groups quickly and efficiently, which impressed me more than a little, and then sat together working out the kinks of a first morning of work together, trying to visually represent the ideal student, labeling things in a broken third semester Spanish that indicated a wide range of language levels and a whole spectrum of interpersonal and intrapersonal strengths.  It was telling that several groups drew the textbook, subtly indicating in their scritch and scratch on poster paper who their true teacher has been these past few years.

Walking through a sea of adolescent timidity--they were dipping a toe into the water--I had a glimpse of the mountainous task before me.  A generation of children bred for following and filling in blanks and bubbles on tests and sitting waiting to react to the teacher instead of acting purposefully on their own will.  Hoping for a list to memorize and some worksheets to fill out quietly while the teacher nods and smiles and says you get an A.

Today is day two, and a chance to begin the process of handing back the learning to the students, who wait for the crumbs of learning to be brushed from their teachers' tables.  They must create purposefully today, or I will succumb to the current of what is, instead of rowing against it to give students the opportunity to transform their world.

Seeing the world, seeing the words

Paulo Freire speaks about the necessity of seeing the world as it is.  It is a first step, prior to accessing language, which allows a more whole vision of the act of entering into communication, using those fresh and new words purposefully and drawing them into one's own heart.  It is precisely the humanization of the other that allows human beings to see the world, see one another as we really are.  That is the access point for tapping into language for adolescents and adults.  The student must delve into herself, decide upon love and understanding of the other, decide to place herself in a place of humility at the altar of unknown words that have real meaning.  It must begin with the asking of questions, the student seeking the other with his inquiry, seeking to see the world wholly and with new eyes, and only secondarily to converge upon the conventions and conjugations of language.  In fact placing the latter in front of the former may irreparably hinder a personal connection to people, and dehumanize the other by reducing him to a series of letters and patterns and linguistic rules.  And it is the great and honorable goal of language teaching to provide the opportunity for students to become more fully human, to become their best selves by developing empathy, solidarity and a thirst for peace.  And the language teacher so often becomes just another cog in a system of educational oppression, forcing the voy vas va vamos van into malleable human lives as though they were computers needing the data entered quickly and efficiently for processing.  The student needs to catch a vision of another way--and here is the liberating impetus--that he may enter into grammar with compassion, understanding that the forms are subordinate to their functions and not the other way around.

Freedom in routines

I am finding that imagining a series of routines for my class this semester is helping me to feel more innovative and creative and whole.  It gives me a fuller picture of how class time can be arranged to give students more ownership and voice in their language learning.  The key with the routines is to keep them fresh, keep them from becoming dead and, well, routine.  They can work as guideposts marking the way, helping me to think more critically and creatively about the learning environment.

I am particularly interested in how the writing and reading routines will be taken up by the students.  What can I do to make them accessible and interesting and enlivening, rather than just another boring activity that they have to do for Spanish class?  Is it in the prompts?  Is it in the readings I choose?  I think it might have something to do with pushing the boundaries and urging ourselves further and further out on the limb that I want us to step out upon.  In the beginning, the writing will be narrating the small moments of our days for the benefit of our own reflection and the development of our writing skills.  It will be of utmost importance that students feel they have the tools and supports to put something down on paper that is meaningful.  This will be the great challenge: giving the students the grammar tools without making the class all about grammar.  It seems something of a conundrum, and I have not seen many teachers do this well.  What is the ultimate goal for the learning?  That they know the preterite tense and can articulate its conjugations, or that they have just enough skill and confidence to narrate the past (albeit with mistakes) and without a primary focus on the structures?  I lean toward the latter.

And there is still this issue of choice.  By developing a highly structured syllabus and outline of the course, I automatically begin sending the message that I am in charge and the learning will be dictated by forces outside of the students' control.  How can I somehow create an environment in which organization and student choice and ownership can interact?  Is this possible, or do I have to choose camps?  The other difficulty here is that I have to prove myself to be super organized, ready to carry out my detailed lessons despite the interjections and various musings of the students.  This unfortunately does not seem to give any trust or autonomy to the students in their learning process.  I need to give them more chance to tell me what and how they want to learn, and I must provide the situations in which this can happen.

The student as the Subject

I cannot give any student any new thought or ideal.  I am not the Subject while the student is the Object.  This cannot be.  The student and myself must both at the same moment be Subjects who meet together to name the world and transform it.  If I act and hope for the student to receive, the student does not act but rather reacts or responds and in the receiving does not employ his or her own will to transform reality.  The student must also think and must also act.

I am having a hard time trying to imagine this Spanish class that I will be facilitating beginning January 22nd.  The cooperating teacher, a grisled veteran of the pedagogical arts, has boiled down this course to a bolstering of grammatical forms.  To be fair, she is concerned with student participation and in linking it to meaning through a few projects that seek to hold these concepts together and lead them forward.  I tip my hat to this thinking, but I must push past the temptation to settle into her pre-established ways.  If I hope to evolve with the students and give them more of the learning as we move ahead, I must see the greater language functions more and the grammatical nuts and bolts less, or at least as cogs that help turn the larger wheel of language.  The knowing of concepts is not the use of them, and the use of them may not be a precise knowing, but which is better?

Freedom and Oppression

I have been thinking lately about freedom and oppression.  I am reading Paulo Freire and I feel my pulse quicken as those revolutionary ideas breathe into me slow, leeching into my ideals like a shuddering irrigation.  Humanity does not merely adapt to the world as it changes, but rather transforms it by the dual processes of reflection of action.  Education is "communion with", not an "imposition of" or a "giving to."  Freire speaks against what he calls the banking concept of education , saying,

"Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.  Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.  This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.  But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.  For apart from inquiry, apart form the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human.  Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

He goes on to say that, "education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students."

Though I have already been challenging many of my previously held perceptions about education throughout this year, nothing has caused me to pause and question so entirely as these words and the ideas that wrought them.  I am becoming overwhelmed by the task of establishing a classroom environment in which I and my students are co-creators and co-investigators of the language-learning experience.  The difficulties are legion, between the inflexibility of the established routines and procedures of my cooperating teacher, my own inexperience in giving away my power-role as authority or oppressor, and the students' unfamiliarity with an environment in which they are asked to help establish the trajectory of their own learning.  And at an even greater scale, the wider educational climate of testing and measurability of outcomes which attempt to fit every shape into a single-size hole.  Yet how do I interface with this understandable desire to determine whether or not my class is an effective method for developing the capacities and knowledge of children?  How to offer up meaningful results that do not rely on the accepted oppressive methods that see students as passive receivers instead of those who transform the world?