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?