Teaching: Madison Jr. HS, 1964
I'm going to post my memoir somewhere for the world to see. Written during my last sabbatical in 2005, it was intended to be a set of stories at different points of my academic life, that together show my growth as an educator who tried to put equity into everything he did. The unpublished book is titled, "Teaching For Connection: Relationship, Race, and Reciprocity and Keeping It Read." I ran it past a publisher who'd expressed interest in it while I was writing. Upon review, he said I needed to decide who my audience was. It was too "all over the place." Well, I don't know. I was angling for the chapters being seen as a group of stories, really, a narrative of professional encounters.
While I'm deciding, I'm placing a teaser here, the Table of Contents and the Preface to the memoir. The Preface is an expression of what I wanted to accomplish with this text, and why.
Have Fun.
Here Goes
Table of Contents
Preface.doc
Introduction.doc
Prologue
C1 Images In My Brain.
Questions From My Heart. Race
Becomes The Window.
C2 First Encounters Of Another Kind.
C3 Another Part of Growing Up. Meeting Dr. Shame.
C4 Continuing On With Growing Up. The Up-Side of Dr. Shame.
C5 Urban Teaching.
C6 Urban Education.
C7 The First Real Job.
The GLS Program.
C8 My Intellectual Beginnings of Thinking About
Difference. Conceptual Systems Theory.
C9 Roosevelt Junior High School
C10 Connection Personified.
Carl Rogers.
C11 Multiage Classrooms.
The Power of Mismatched (Vertical) Environments.
C12 APEX. The American Primary Experience Program.
C13 Mathematics and Gender
C14 Reframing My Career.
Once, Twice, Three Times an Educator.
C15 Dottie's Story.
Complex Instruction: Social Justice in Action
C16 Opportunities Everywhere.
C17 Feeling Vulnerable.
What If Nobody Comes To Your Party?
Epilogue.doc
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Preface
We who are white do
not want to talk about our white skin or explore what “whiteness” has to do
with all that is going on in our own lives and in the lives of our
students. Now, I believe, more than
ever, it is time to talk. It is time to
let our children talk and our colleagues talk.
It is time to study our memories: to explore what it was in our
childhood that formed our racial definitions, our prejudices. It is time to let our students teach us, to
look for historians who will tell us the whole truth, to look for activists who
can inform us. It is time to make
mistakes and learn from them (Landsman, xii).
This book had its origins in my
urge to write about the intersection of my commitment to equity and my life as
a teacher. My personal litmus test as a
teacher is that every one of my students learns as much as they can while they
are with me, no exceptions, no excuses.
My personal litmus test as a teacher educator is that every one of my
student’s public school students learns as much as they can while they are with
the people I am teaching, no exceptions, no excuses. It’s important that they learn a lot, and
that they like what they are learning. That’s my definition for what it means
to be an equity educator. How to do this has taken me on a number of
pedagogical journeys across the years of my teaching: teaching in urban schools
and drop-out programs, conducting research on successful multiage classrooms,
creating a teacher education program for teachers who wanted to teach in multiage
settings, being a teacher of teachers, and now, teaching how to conduct complex
instruction, a particularly powerful form of cooperative learning. I’m taking a chance that these journeys might
be an interesting, even instructive read for those of you who might share
common interests and even motivations.
I am beginning my thirty-eighth
year of teaching. I began teaching in a
school that urged me to connect everything I taught to the lives of my
students. The key to hooking their
interest, I was told, was to make it real!
That was in 1964. Last summer,
the summer of 2004, I attended a Faculty Resource Network seminar at New York
University entitled Sampling Hip-Hop: Popular Culture As A Pedagogical
Tool. Once again I heard that theme of
connection. I was once again drawn into
the pedagogical power of keeping whatever it was I was going to teach,
real! Thirty-eight very different years
separated the two messages. The
ingredients for student engagement remained very much the same.
I’ve always tried to keep my
teaching real. What that means has
changed from that very first summer school at Croton Elementary School in
Syracuse, N.Y. to this past year as a teacher educator at the University of
Vermont. This book is my story about trying to
keep it real over my years of public school and university based
teaching. We keep it real by learning to
connect with the individuals we teach.
We connect with them as individuals, and we connect with them as members
of social groups. Connection comes in
all kinds of ways. This book explores
the connections that have become thematic in my professional life.
I’ve written these stories as
personal narratives of connection. They
all start with me. Some refer to
classroom experiences, others refer to historical events during the years I was
growing up, others relate moments in time where I made clear decisions about my
path of development. Some are intensely personal recountings of a few demons I
had to meet and make amends with so I could get on with the good work of being
the best educator I could be.
Three sub-themes thread their way
throughout these narratives of connection: relationship, race, and
reciprocity.
• Relationship simply means that at the heart of the
teaching/learning process is the relationship between and among the people who
are engaged in that process; big people, little people, big and little people,
big and little people of many shades of color.
This relationship is about connecting with the content of what is being
taught and hopefully, learned. But it is
also very much about affective caring and having concern for the “other” who is
involved. “Unconditional positive regard” I believe is the way Carl Rogers
termed it when he wrote about the facilitation of interpersonal relationships. I would also include the unconditional
positive regard we must have for each other across the groups we affiliate with
and relate to in our multicultural nation.
• Race simply mirrors my belief that our thoughts about race and
racism, stated and unstated, form the
subtext of every teaching/learning endeavor in this country today. When I consider race, I must consider my
“place” in the dynamics of power, privilege, and pigmentation. I don’t think any, let me say that again, any discussion of what to teach, who to
teach, how to teach, how to measure what we’ve taught, and why teach it in the
first place should take place without deeply considering the dynamics of power,
privilege, and pigmentation that inevitably affect the people involved in the
teaching and learning process. Finally,
•
Reciprocity. Reciprocity simply affirms my belief that when I teach, I am
in a transactional exchange with my students.
I stand to be changed in some way by the nature of that reciprocity just
as I expect them to be changed because of what we do together. If I am open to that change, then I am more
able to keep it real.
Ultimately, this book is about a
reformation of my own identity. The last
several years has seen a renaissance of scholarship concerning the social,
political, and educational implications of white people coming to know their
privilege. My considerations of my own
pigmentation, power, and privilege has re-shaped my identity as a teacher
educator, for sure. The narratives
herein surely show how that process is working for me.
Each chapter is written to stand on
its own merits. The narratives also
follow the chronology of my life. As I
took time to step back and see my life as one life rather than a collection of
separate events occurring in decidedly different times, I saw clearly for the first time that the
soil that nourished and fed the interests I pursue today was tilled in my very
early years.
Part One contains several
narratives from these early years. These narratives highlight the impact visual
imagery had on how I both thought and felt about the blatant racism of
America. They also show my membership in
the community of privilege which refused to see or could not see its collusion
in maintaining the racist underpinnings of so much of what goes on in this
country.
Part Two refers to events in my
learning-to-teach days, 1964 – 1975.
This was a time when each day seemed framed by blockbuster historical
events. These events have become the stuff
of nostalgia, their power to inspire action dulled by a new generation’s
concern over more material definitions of well being.
Part Three continues with my career
as a teacher educator in Vermont and brings my narrative history of learning
about the stuff of connecting to its most recent manifestation.
I have written this book from the
vantage point of today, looking back on events that have been important as I’ve
thought about the power of connection in the teaching/learning
relationship. It has been impossible to
really “get back there” although from time to time, I’ve used journal entries
made at the time the events of the narratives were unfolding. But I want you to understand each story is
constructed hindsight. The conceptual
structure I have today is what I’ve used to write the understandings of this
book.
Prologue and postlude narratives
bookend the chapters. Each is part of
one story, a story that happened recently; a story that had immediate
implications for my classes and my equity challenge. I have tried to employ them in such a way as
to evidence the fact that my past is very much a part of my present, and vice
versa. I leave the connections to be
made between the bookends and my stories to you.
Presenting the Apex Endowed Scholarship
November 3, 2017
