On collective responsibility for engagement

"There are times when I walk into my classroom and the students seem absolutely bored out of their minds. And I say to them, 'What's up? Everybody seems really bored today. There seems to be a lack of energy. What should we do? What can we do?' I might say, 'Clearly the direction we're moving in doesn't seem to be awakening your senses, your passions right now.' My intent is to engage them more fully. Often students deny that they are collectively bored. They want to please me. Or they don't want to be critical. At such times I must stress that,'I'm not taking this personally. It's not just my job to make this class work. It's everyone's responsibility.'" Teaching to Transgress, page 155

main ideas and theses
Energy level in the classroom comes from both the professor and the students. If the students are for some reason disengaged, it is not necessarily the professor's fault. Every member of the learning community has equal responsibility to be committed to the gaining of knowledge.

consistencies with experiences as student and as teacher
I have definitely been in classrooms with a low energy level, especially in my large required classes at Baylor. Sometimes, such as in poli sci, the lecturer has been entirely aware that most students are asleep but simply continuted with his lecture. In other courses, typically smaller classes in which professors are aware of the needs of their students, my instructors have done nearly exactly what hooks describes here. My educational psychology prof has said several times in class, "We'll move on; y'all are clearly thrilled with this" at rare moments in which my classmates and I aren't fully engaged. (Also, it is true that we usually "come to" at this point and try to make her feel better and say, "oh, no, it's just that...") She would definitely agree that it is not her role to simply provide us with information; she fully intends for us to look at the material together and discuss it, each member of the community bearing equal burden.
However, I also have to admit that I have been on the other end of this situation. As Children's Intern at my church this summer, I had to fill in sometimes for missing teachers. I can think of one lesson in particular for which I didn't prepare nearly enough, when the fifth grade boys I was teaching looked incredibly bored. I wrapped up what I was doing as quickly as I could while still hitting the main points, and then moved on to some active applications of the lesson, which the boys enjoyed much more than listening to me talk. While I was trying to transmit information to them, they were obviously disengaged, but when I gave them an equal role in the learning, they became excited about what we were doing.

consistencies with teaching beliefs and practices
I agree with what hooks has to say here about engagement and responsibility of all members in the classroom. Of course, this looks a little bit different in the elementary class - I can't cancel class for the day when my first graders get a little wiggly. At the elementary level, I think this probably means more along the lines of adjusting teaching to fit the needs of my students. In this way, I can give each learner a part in the learning.
I also agree that it isn't always the teacher's fault if a class is not engaged; some days my students will simply need some time to play in the sun. However, I do think that if a teacher brings excitement to any subject, then the energy of the students should follow. All too often, kids are bored because their teacher has taken the whole of the responsibility for learning upon himself and will not relinquish any of it to the learners.

impact on future professional development
I think that, in the future, what I have read in Teaching to Transgress will be an encouragement and reminder to me to give some responsibility for engagement in the class to my students. This way, not only am I allowing them to construct knowledge for themselves, but I am also freeing myself of just a tiny bit of the burden of being accountable for the learning that happens in my class. If Billy is not engaged, Billy will not learn that day. I can help Billy and try to engage him, but ultimately, it's Billy's choice.

Teaching to Transgress

Teaching to Transgress chapter 8 – chapter 14

5 Big Picture Sentences
In the last half of her book, Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks looks at pedagogy from different perspectives. She also offers more practical and specific ways in which to use engaged pedagogy in the classroom. In these 8 and 9, she looks at how feminist thinking can affect engaged pedagogy. Chapter 10 is set up as an interview between miss hooks and a colleague; they discuss how to build a teaching community and look at how to effectively use dialogue to engage members of the classroom. The last two chapters offer a provocative look at education as hooks explains how ecstasy and passion are a part of effective pedagogy.

4 Key Passages
“To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences.” p. 130
“When I enter a classroom at the beginning of the semester the weight is on me to establish that our purpose is to be, for however brief a time, a community of learners together. It positions me as a learner. But I’m also not suggesting that I don’t have more power. And I’m not trying to say we’re all equal here. I’m trying to say that we are all equal to the extent that we are equally committed to creating a learning context.” p. 153
“In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen – to hear – and, to some extent, to be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing, there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular – or, for that matter, any language other than standard English.” p. 171
“To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and altogether allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.” p. 199

3 Key Terms
marginalized groups – women of all races or ethnicities, and men of color pg. 130-131
tradition - “Tradition should be such a wonderful word… Yet it is often used in a negative sense to repeat the tradition of the power of status quo.” p. 141-142
voice – hooks says voice “is not just the act of telling one’s experience;” it is being able to tell those experiences “strategically,” or “also speak freely about other subjects” p. 148

2 Connections
In the chapter about dialogue, I related to hooks’ and Scapp’s discussion about the issues of respecting and listening to each voice. I definitely appreciated their conversation about not letting “people who just like to hear themselves talk” control the conversation; there have been many times, kindergarten to undergrad, when one person has totally dominated a classroom discussion in which I was supposed to be participating. I think this is inappropriate regardless of whether or not what the student is saying relates to the topic at hand because it causes others to shut down and denies other students “voice,” but hooks specifically states that she calls out students when they are “unable to relate experience to the academic subject matter.” I have been on the other side of this situation, so it’s interesting to gain insight into the other side – the role of making the judgment call to keep the discussion moving.
On page 154, hooks says, “Sometimes it’s important to remind students that joy can be present along with hard work. Not every moment in the classroom will necessarily be one that brings you immediate pleasure, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of joy.” I wrote in the margins here that this made me think of working on UIL music in Choir in middle and high school. These songs were really tough; that’s why they were chosen. During the months and months that we sang the same songs over and over again, marking furiously in our sheet music, we certainly gained no immediate pleasure. But as we pushed through, and as we took the product of our labors to UIL competition to be judged, we were really proud of our work. The songs that everyone hated the most at the beginning of UIL season were the same ones the choir nerds sang on the bus ride home.

Question
The last two chapters wax poetic on putting passion back in our classrooms, but realistically, how do I as an elementary school teacher appropriately “allow [my] mind and body to know desire?” This seems very idealistic and out of touch with the reality of the public school system.

Countdown Paper:
Teaching to Transgress Intro – chapter 7

5 Big Picture Sentences
In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks seeks to define “education as the practice of freedom.” She begins by telling her own story and educational experiences. Later, hooks moves on to discuss classroom practice. She tells of how Paulo Freire influenced her work, maybe even more so because of the way he failed to address feminist issues; this made her read his work even more critically and thoughtfully. Her last chapter looks at feminist issues through the lens of race issues, giving a unique look at the problems hindering solidarity of all women.

4 Key Passages
“In the apartheid South, black girls has three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers.” (pg. 2)
“Along the way I had not found white folks who understood the depth and complexity of racial justice, and who were as willing to practice the art of living a nonracist life, as folks were then. In my adult life I have seen few white folks who are really willing to take risks, to be courageous, to live against the grain.” (pg. 26)
“Finally, we were all going to break through collective academic denial and acknowledge that the education most of us had received and were giving was not and is never politically neutral.” (pg. 30)
“…Professors must learn to respect the way students feel about their experiences as well as their need to speak about them in classroom settings: ‘You can’t deny that students have experiences and you can’t deny that these experiences are relevant to the learning process even though you might say these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful, or whatever. Students have memories, families, religions, feelings, languages and cultures that give them a distinctive voice.” (pg. 88)

3 Key Terms
“banking system of education” – “the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored and used at a later date” (pg. 5)

“praxis” – “action and reflection upon the world in order to change it” (pg. 14)

“passion of experience” – also called “passion of remembrance,” a modified synonym of the feminist term “authority of experience;” a term “encompass[ing] many feelings but particularly suffering, for there is a particular knowledge that comes from suffering. It is a way of knowing that is often expressed through the body, what it knows, what has been deeply inscribed on it through experience.” (pg. 91)

2 Connections
It has been very useful in this course to have an understanding of the educational philosophies of DuBois and Washington. I learned about them in American Educational Thought. As hooks was talking about her own school experience, she mentioned her school’s name as part of the discussion of her teacher’s pedagogical practice, and I thought it was ironic that her school was called Booker T. Washington even though the teachers were “committed to nurturing intellect so that [their students] could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers – black folks who used [their] minds.” hooks goes on to say that their goal was that their students would “fulfill [their] intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race.” These are very DuBoisian sounding ideas.
hooks criticizes professors who employ “Tokenism” in their classes. She says, “individuals will often focus on women of color at the very end of the semester or lump everything about race and difference together in one section.” As much as I enjoyed my Christian Heritage course, this passage made me realize that my professor had done exactly this; at the end of the semester we covered feminist theology, black theology, and liberated theology.

1 Question
Your whole book compels us to change our teaching styles, but other than encouraging us to make our classrooms exciting and creating learning environments in which every voice is accepted and valued, what specific strategies do you suggest?

Exam One: The Shame of the Nation Essay

Jonathan Kozol - The Shame of the Nation: Essay 1

You have been appointed by President Obama to serve as a teacher representative on the “U.S. Commission for Improving the Quality of Education Opportunity for Marginalized Children in the United States.” In particular, President Obama is curious about your opinions on Jonathan Kozol’s book entitled The Shame of the Nation. The President has asked you to summarize Kozol’s primary theses as represented in the book, support or refute Kozol’s claims of “Apartheid Schooling” in the U.S., and provide your own recommendations on improving the quality of education opportunity for marginalized children in the United States. President Obama has asked you to submit to him a letter that is no longer than 3 pages addressing these issues and providing specific citations (i.e., book, notes, documents) to support your answers.

Mr. President:
It is a great honor to serve on the U.S. Commission for Improving the Quality of Education Opportunity for Marginalized Children in the United States. My thoughts concerning the education of marginalized children have been greatly influenced by Jonathan Kozol’s book The Shame of the Nation (2005), and I will be referencing this work in my reply. This text focuses on the inequalities that exist in America today. In fact, Kozol said that his goal in writing this book was to “unlock the chains” that separated children from the American mainstream (p. 6). His research is particularly interesting and poignant because he has visited schools all over the country and formed lasting friendships with many students in order to write this book, and because he himself taught in segregated schools when he was a young man.
America, the country lauded as the “land of opportunity,” for centuries the destination of countless immigrants searching for freedom, equality, and the chance to make something of themselves, truly has an ugly secret: an apartheid schooling system, segregated by race, socioeconomic level, and class. We are willing to fight wars in order to spread democracy abroad, yet our own school system is anything but democratic. Immediately contradicting the Brown vs. Board ruling and the 14th Amendment, children who live in U.S. ghettoes receive an inherently unequal education from that which schoolchildren in affluent suburban areas receive. In the neighborhoods in which Kozol observed, “residential segregation was a permanent reality” (p. 7), a result of “white flight” – a phenomenon which describes the movement of those who can afford it away from urban areas and ghettoes, creating the dichotomy of well-off suburban areas just miles away from the devastation of the projects. Since public schools are funded by the taxes of their surrounding neighborhoods, of course this economic discrepancy translates into major inequalities in the schools.
In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol discussed the disparities in physical school buildings, quality of teachers, curriculum taught, parent fundraising, availability of quality preschools and other special schools, and programs and courses offered. In looking at each of these inequalities, the real question addressed will be: what is the worth of each child in these situations?
In Kozol’s introduction, he recalls the conditions in which he first taught; two fourth grade classes, a drama group, and a class of girls learning to sew all shared an auditorium (p. 3). His own experience does not differ dramatically from others’. Aside from basic maintenance and cleanliness, many of these schools are actually unsanitary and hazardous. At the 75th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, a letter had to be sent home because there were rats, exposed asbestos, and chipping lead-based paint on the campus (p. 172). There is also a major difference in available resources. One Sacramento student said that in computer class, “we sit there and talk about what we would be doing if we have computers” (p. 171). Juxtapose this with high schools with multiple computer labs filled with the most recent technology. Are not the children in that Sacramento school worth as much as the children in these schools?
Another key problem is the quality of teachers. One of the hardest obstacles is recruiting good teachers, especially when schools in which it would be easier to teach can offer them so much more money and job security. In troubled schools in need of the best and brightest teachers, teachers are demoted from their role of cultivating learning to merely reading off scripted lessons plans. “So,” Kozol concludes, “a curriculum that was imposed, in part, to compensate for staffing needs of schools that had a hard time in recruiting teachers ends up by driving out precisely those well-educated men and women whom school systems have worked so hard to attract” (p. 85). This curriculum, especially the Skinnerian Approach with its strange, silent signals mentioned in chapter 3, creates zombies rather than individuals who can think deeply for themselves. Kozol makes the interesting point that in these schools, “hope must be constructed therapeutically because so much of it has been destroyed by the conditions… in which we have placed these children” (p. 37), whereas hope exists naturally “in suburban schools where the potential of most children is assumed” (p. 36).
Some of the most alarming consequences of this apartheid schooling system are the dramatically different tracks offered to students: academic tracks for those children deemed to have worth, who will go to college and become successful, and vocational tracks for those children who need to be realistic and learn a trade because they will never amount to anything other than, hopefully, a skilled worker. In one elementary school in which managerial skills were emphasized to a shocking extent, the principal responded to Kozol’s questioning by saying, “Even if you have a felony arrest… we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday” (p. 93). These unbelievably low expectations carry over to the high schools, too. Mireya, a student at Fremont High School, dreams of being a doctor, but she was forced to take sewing, hairdressing, and “Life Skills” classes (p. 179). Mireya confided in Kozol, “I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I’m trying to go to college. I don’t need to sew to go to college… I hoped for something else” (p. 180). Surely an honors student in suburban America would not be put into classes like these, and most definitely not against her will.
These major discrepancies are simply the most noticeable of the many perversions of democracy in America’s current school system. While many of us can try to ignore it, those who are living it cannot. In a conversation with Kozol, Noreen Connell said, “When minority parents ask for something better for their kids… ‘the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids that we don’t value’” (p. 43). And when we try to smooth over these issues, we are confirming her sad statement. We must figure out the worth of every child, and act accordingly.
Sincerely,
Amber Hatchett

Countdown Paper:Race Matters Chapter 5 – 8

5 Big Picture Sentences
In this section, Cornel West continues his deliberate yet uncomfortable conversation about the problems in American society regarding race. In chapter 5, West says that affirmative action, although not perfect, is certainly deterring some racial and sexual discrimination. In the following chapter, he touches on the enmity between blacks and Jews, first giving some background knowledge about the brief period when there was some unity, and then the black Anti-Semitism that followed. Chapter 7 touches on black sexuality, which West considers crucial to solving race problems in America. Finally, West concludes by taking a look at Malcolm X’s good motivations and the ways in which he was blinded by trying to channel black rage.

4 Key Passages
“As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.” – Audre Lorde, page 93
“The Afro-Americanization of white youth – given the disproportionate black role in popular music and athletics – has put white kids in closer contact with their own bodies and facilitated more human interaction with people. Listening to Motown records in the sixties or dancing to hip hop music in the nineties may not lead one to question the sexual myths of black women and men, but when white and black kids buy the same billboard hits and laud the same athletic heroes the result is often a shared cultural space where some human interaction takes place.” – page 121
“This demythologizing of black sexuality is crucial for black America because much of black self-hatred and self-contempt has to do with the refusal of many black Americans to love their own black bodies – especially their black noses, hips, lips, and hair.” – page 122
“That is why Malcolm X’s articulation of black rage was not directed first and foremost at white America. Rather, Malcolm believed that if black people felt the love that motivated that rage, the love would produce a psychic conversion in black people; they would affirm themselves as human beings, no longer viewing their bodies, minds, and souls through white lenses, and believing themselves capable of taking control of their own destinies.” – page 136

3 Key Terms
what it means to be “black” or “Jewish” in ethical terms – does involve looking at group interest, but goes further to a “higher moral ground where serious discussions about democracy and justice determine how we define ourselves and our politics and help us formulate strategies and tactics to sidestep the traps of tribalism and chauvinism” (page 109)

“xenophobia” – the fear of people different from you

“cultural hybridity” – the complex mixture of African, European, and Amerindian elements of modern African Americans, “something that is new and black in the modern world,” which was feared by Malcolm X because he wanted to be able to channel black rage into Manichean divisions, such as male and female, black and white; it downplayed the vicious character of white supremacy and linked the destinies of black and white people in such a way that made black freedom possible (pages 144-145)

2 Connections
The chapter about black sexuality reminded me of both of the videos we were supposed to watch for last week’s class. The short film made up of young black females talking about society’s standards for beauty was very interesting; I never knew about “lighter” black skin being seen as more beautiful, and I thought this racism between members of the same race to be fascinating and terribly sad. Similarly, the clips of the black preschoolers identifying the white baby doll as “good” and pretty,” and the black baby doll as “bad” were tragic. This experiment definitely begs the question, where are these children picking up this message?
I experienced a kind of disconnection in the last chapter. I was slightly confused by the way that West seemed to be idealizing Malcolm X, because in discussions about his legacy in my classes and with my parents, he was always portrayed as a bad man, the opposite of everything good that Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for. I have always associated violence, hatred, and ignorance with his name, so it caught my eye when West put him on such a pedestal. The concluding sentences of the book say, “Only if we are as willing as Malcolm X to grow and confront the new challenges posed by the black rage of our day will we take the black freedom struggle to a new and higher level. The future of this country may well depend on it,” which definitely made me think about Malcolm X in a new light.

1 Question
West stated on page 120 that “everyone knows it is virtually impossible to talk candidly about race without talking about sex.” Why is this so?

Race Matters through Chapters 4

5 Big Picture Sentences
In his book Race Matters, Cornel West sheds some light on the complex problem of race in America. He explains both the liberal view that more governmental intervention is necessary and the conservative behaviorist view that says that the way black people live needs to change. West, however, thinks that nihilism is the most important element in the problem; what black America needs is “cultural revitalization and moral regeneration.” He goes on to analyze what he calls “the crisis of black leadership,” looking at the reason for this lack of black leadership, the different types of political and intellectual leadership, and what must be done to fix it. Lastly, he looks at what caused the rise of black conservatism in America and offers a well-rounded look at its pros and cons.

4 Key Passages
pg 38 – “The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics…”

pg. 53 – “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” – Malcolm X

pg 73 – “It is, indeed, one of the basic moral blindspots of American conservatism that its intellectual and leadership energy have never been focussed in a proactive way on America’s racial-caste legacy. This represents a fundamental moral crisis of modern American conservatism… On the other hand, American conservatives have, throughout this century, often embraced freedom movements elsewhere in the world… but always firmly resisting a proactive embrace of the black American civil rights movement as a bona fide freedom movement fully worthy of their support.” – Martin Kilson

pg. 82 – “White racism, though pernicious and potent, cannot fully explain the socioeconomic position of the majority of black Americans. The crisis of black liberalism is the result of its failure to put forward a realistic response to the changes in the economy.”

3 Key Terms
Nihilism – “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessnesss” (pg 22-3)

blackness – “either the perennial possibility of white supremacist abuse or the distinct styles and dominant modes of expression found in black cultures and communities” pg 43

humility – “the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one’s self and one’s mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one’s self and status.” (pg 59); necessary for a black political leader

2 Connections
On page 24, West is asking what has happened to create this crisis of race in America today. He asks, “What has changed? What went wrong? The bitter irony of integration?” This immediately made me think of what we had read in The Shame of the Nation, especially the chapter Kozol called “Dishonoring the Dead.”

Recently in American Educational Thought we discussed different historical schools of thought concerning the education of African Americans. This was actually very helpful in reading the chapter about leadership, where West mentioned both Washington and DuBois. On page 64, he criticized “race-distancing elitists,” saying that they saw themselves as “the talented tenth.”

1 Question
West made the point that the problem does not lie with African Americans; it lies in “the flaws of the American society” (pg. 6). And just as Martin Kilson said, we love making projects out of other people’s freedom. Why haven’t we fixed the problem under our noses? The one we created?

shame of the nation part 2

Countdown Paper:
The Shame of the Nation Chapters 7 and 12

5 Big Picture Sentences
In these two chapters, Kozol seems to be almost qualifying his previous expression of disdain for the American education system. He, of course, still writes with the purpose of exposing the dichotomy of white and black in education, but in these chapters, he mentions a few big exceptions: schools he calls “the treasured places.” These are places in which teachers are qualified and knowledgeable human beings, and treat their students as such. They take time to create relationships, investigate, and “do certain things with the children for no other reason than to make the classroom happy.” Writing about schools where childhood still exists seems to be Kozol’s way of giving hope for the future, but he is careful to say that it rests in the hands of teachers, “the lowliest of bureaucrats.”

4 Key Passages
pg. 163 “There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to be; we measure almost every other aspect of the lives they lead in school… You do not find the answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance. Documents like these don’t speak of happiness.”

pg. 287 “… but in their temperaments and in their moral disposition many also stand outside that box, because they are aware of its existence, and this sense of double-vision, being part of something and aware of what it is at the same time, regenerates the energy they bring with them each morning to the very little place in which they use what gifts they have to make the schoolday good and whole and sometimes beautiful for children.”

pg. 297 “Longings of the heart, not merely mercenary motivations, are at stake in this career.”

pg. 299 “Teachers and principals should not permit the beautiful profession they have chosen to be redefined by those who know far less than they about the hearts of children.”

3 Key Terms
“barracks classroom” – the old, rundown trailers across and down the street from the main campus of an Oklahoma elementary school which serve over 350 students
“multiple intelligences” – theory created by Howard Gardner, which “emphasized the interrelationship of art and science with arithmetic and reading and the other elements of elementary school instruction”
“continuous” school year – the year-round calendar created to stagger the population of schoolchildren so that at any point, only ¾ of the children were in school

2 Connections
On page 297, Kozol talks about the connections that some teachers sometimes are able to create with their students. He says that sometimes they become so “beautifully connected” that the teacher asks to “loop” with them for another year. This reminds me of the movie Freedom Writers. It also makes me think of an inner-city school I visited called Yellowstone Academy in which teachers automatically “loop” with their student for one extra year. I think this is actually probably a good idea in tough schools like this in which it takes time to establish your credibility and create trust with students.

The teacher who mentioned doing things in the class just for the purpose of making the classroom “happy” made me laugh. My family has always made fun of my desire to make everything pretty and happy. They like to call it “study pretty.” My dad said once that if I was in charge of some sort of mission dropping supplies over a war-torn area, I would distribute gingham file folders and purple notepads and polka dotted pencils, not food and water. I don’t know about that exactly, but I do really love making my surroundings and my work supplies lovely.

1 Question
My question is much like Obie’s, who said, “Come on now! Like – hello? We live in a rich country? Like the richest country in the world? Hello?” Now that we know, what are we going to do about it?