“It is impossible to teach without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love. (Freire, 1998, p.3)If you’d have told me two years ago that I’d be writing a research paper on love, I might have laughed. And while I still consider it amusing to ponder the subject, I find it important, difficult, intriguing, and critical to discover what love means in my own practice as a teaching artist—if it means anything at all.
As a society, we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush. Why should we be ashamed of an emotion so beautiful and natural? Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet, we’re reluctant to linger over its name. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly. On the other hand, we have many sharp verbs for the ways in which human beings can hurt one another…. Our vocabulary of love and lovemaking is so paltry that a poet has to choose among clichés…. Fortunately, this has led to some richly imagined works of art. It has inspired poets to create their own private vocabularies. (p. xix)How appropriate is it that we, as teaching artists, theatre practitioners, actors, and educators explore and create our own vocabulary of love? Or are we too, ashamed of something that appears to be too gushy, silly, or emotional?
Anthologies, Lesson Plans, and Resources
Jump Write In!
Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds
Jump Write In! is a collection of lesson plans created by WritersCorps
Teaching Artists. It was published by Josey-Bass. Summary about the
book (on the sidebar to the right), including the TOC: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/for-teachers/
There are also some of the exercises on the site for people to use.
It's in the Teaching Tools section of our site http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/
The lessons are sortable by topic. There are a just few up right
now, but a lot more will be added.
http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/for-teachers/teaching- tools/
Days I Moved is an anthology of fiction, poetry and memoir by Teaching
Artists who have served in WritersCorps. Each writer shares a brief
memoir about their time as teaching artists, as well as their own
creative work.
Summary about the book: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/events/days-i-moved/
Authors who are in the book: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/events/the-authors-of- days-i-moved/
The student work section of the site features poems and photos by
students, also sortable by category, or the cloud tag on the right: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/student-work/
From Publishers WeeklyEducation World has a few lesson plans as well.
Everyone's a poet, according to this exhortative poetry-reading and street-theater combo: "You've got a poem in your pocket, A poem on your tongue, did you know that? You can be the poet and you can be the poem too. Yesssss!" To prove it, seven young poets roam their city block on a summer day, using ordinary situations as material for syncopated storytelling. The players' portraits and names appear in the table of contents, so that each one is identifiable during their improv. Ratchit, a bold prankster, repeats a tough kid's threat ("Hey you, c'mere, Whatsa matter witcha"), while his friend Jacob describes a timid reaction to bullying in "A Good Cry." Mattie mimics her mother's phone voice "Yeah, uh huh, uh huh" in a song. While Doria creates a nonsense riff on "Silly Names" ("Mr. Grub T. Mudstuck, Diane Doobey Doo, Fineas Figmuff and Tina Tutoo..."), Ratchit sneaks off to play a joke on the group; after his ghostly noises inspire his friends' frightened poem, "Monsters," Ratchit laughs, then composes a reiterative "Sorry." Swados, author of the musical play Runaways, crafts an upbeat series of poems and dramatic asides. Using a crackling-hot palette of orange, summer green and blue-violet, Cepeda (What a Truly Cool World) limns a vibrant cityscape and brings out the strong personalities of the multiracial group. The slangy words and upbeat visuals suggest that poetry happens in casual conversation and friendship; readers might want to try this "slam" as a real play or spin some verse of their own. Ages 6-12.
Quality reveals itself “in the room” through four different lenses. There are multiple dimensions of quality in arts learning experiences. Four lenses were found to be especially useful in focusing attention on different aspects of excellence in arts education settings: learning, teaching, classroom community, and environment.
Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give the peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
-Mary Oliver
I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions. And to be neutral, to be passive, in a situation like that, is to collaborate with what is going on. And I, as a teacher, don't want to be a collaborator.
Project AIM (Arts Integration Mentorship) provides a great framework for looking at arts integration (via ATA Blog). The program's brochure contains an awesome list of AIM Speak (vocabulary). Eric Booth, of the Teaching Artists Journal, writes the forward:“As the arts continue the endless argument for a better place at the school curriculum table – more hours, more resources, more opportunity to transform lives, classroom communities, and school culture – the great experiment has begun. That great experiment is Arts Integration. There is something new under the arts learning sun. The gamble is that by bringing learning in the arts (through the arts) together with other subject matters, students can go further in both areas, and students’ lives and classroom culture can be transformed in the process.”
“Even when teachers develop new conceptions of what it means to learn mathematics, they are, in general, working within a culture in which good teaching is assumed to mean ensuring that students get right answers.”
Adventures in PeacemakingAdventures in Peacemaking includes hundreds of hands-on, engaging activities designed to meet the unique needs of after-school programs, camps and recreation centers. The activities teach the skills of creative conflict resolution to school-age children through games, cooperative team challenges, drama, crafts, music and even cooking. The guide includes easy-to-implement strategies and tips for providers to both reduce conflict in their programs and to intervene effectively when conflict does occur. Parent Connection Handouts are also available for purchase through Educators for Social Responsibility.
This classic conflict resolution guide offers more than 20 proven conflict-resolution techniques. Examples and more than 200 classroom-tested activities and games provide constructive responses to your students' problem behaviors.
1. Evidence: How do we know what's true and false? What evidence counts? How sure can we be? What makes it credible to us?
2. Viewpoint: How else might this look if we stepped into other shoes? If we were looking at it from a different direction? If we had a different history or expectations?
3. Connections/Cause and Effect: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? What are the possible consequences?
4. Conjecture: Could it have been otherwise? Supposing that? What if?
5. Relevance: Does it matter? Who cares?
Toni Morrison has collected a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation. These unforgettable images serve as the inspiration for Ms. Morrison"s text--a fictional account of the dialogue and emotions of the children who lived during the era of "separate but equal" schooling. Remember is a unique pictorial and narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American history and its relevance to us today. Remember will be published on the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ending legal school segregation, handed down on May 17, 1954.
I have always believed that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
The opposite of life is not death, but indifference.
The opposite of peace is not war, but indifference
to peace and indifference to war.
The opposite of culture, the opposite of beauty, the opposite of generosity is indifference.
Elie Wiesel,
Nobel Peace Laureate
Racial/ethnic and gender gaps evident in both music and visual arts
Although the results for music and visual arts are reported separately and cannot be compared, some general patterns in differences between student groups were similar in the two disciplines.
The Process engages participants in three roles:
The artist offers a work-in-progress for review and feels prepared to question that work in a dialogue with other people;
Responders, committed to the artist’s intent to make excellent work, offer reactions to the work in a dialogue with the artist; and
The facilitator initiates each step, keeps the process on track, and works to help the artist and responders use the Process to frame useful questions and responses.
The Critical Response Process takes place after a presentation of artistic work. Work can be short or long, large or small, and at any stage in its development. The facilitator then leads the artist and responders through four steps:
- Statements of Meaning: Responders state what was meaningful, evocative, interesting, exciting, striking in the work they have just witnessed.
- Artist as Questioner: The artist asks questions about the work. After each question, the responders answer. Responders may express opinions if they are in direct response to the question asked and do not contain suggestions for changes.
- Neutral Questions: Responders ask neutral questions about the work. The artist responds. Questions are neutral when they do not have an opinion couched in them. For example, if you are discussing the lighting of a scene, “Why was it so dark?” is not a neutral question. “What ideas guided your choices about lighting?” is.
- Opinion Time: Responders state opinions, subject to permission from the artist. The usual form is “I have an opinion about ______, would you like to hear it?” The artist has the option to decline opinions for any reason.
This special collection of Arts Education case studies and evaluations reveals the lessons, benefits, and pitfalls of existing and past projects, providing vital information for program staff at organizations running their own Arts Education projects.
The connection between schooling and the economy interests me—but for different reasons than the usual PR-linkage (you’ll make more money). As long as there are jobs that pay poorly there will be “the poor,” but a well-educated underclass will have a better shot at defending their social and economic interests—as citizens. And a well-educated citizenry in general will give us a better shot at a healthy economy. Maybe. It depends on what we mean by being “well-educated.” And the latest headlines about 46 states joining together to decide year by year school curriculum (and tests) is not the way to decide this.Will a better educated population alone change our economy? No, not if we still have low-paying jobs that pay salaries that can't make ends meet. If we neglect to teach about social issues, social justice, and social change in in our curricula, we run the risk of allowing underclasses to stay where they are. But perhaps this is in the best interest of many who make the policies and run our schools...
Recommended Reading: Keeping the Promise?: The Debate Over Charter SchoolsThe leaders of business and industry (of which there are not many left) may have messed up our economy, but they still have enough money left over to bring the same mindset to schooling. The masters of manipulating symbolic goods—money in all its varied forms—are now designing our schools with the same manipulative mindset.
But “if they work, Debby,” say a few of my critical friends, "why not?" But what do we mean by “it works?” Oddly enough, even on the measures they have chosen, the answer is, “they don’t.” But it wouldn’t convince me either way. How kids do on school tests that measure (at best) school learning is petty compared with…. It’s not a good stand-in for achievement. I want to see how those kids “produce”—the books they write, the movies they make, the cars they invent, the families they raise, the gardens they plant, the medicine they practice, the songs they sing, the fast train system they put into place, the better ways they show us to grow food, to produce energy, and on and on and on. I want to see graduates coming back to see us who are good cops, teachers, nurses, architects, furniture-makers, inventors of new products and new ideas. (And powerful, noisy, feisty citizens.)
I never saw another butterfly . . .I often think of the play and how it was simultaneously beautiful and horrific--wishing that I could see it again as an adult. The book, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, highlights the art work and poetry of children in Terezin.
The last, the very last,
so richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears sing
against a white stone . . .
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly `way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it
wished to kiss the world goodbye.
For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto,
but I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me,
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live here in the ghetto.
Did you know?
The School for Designing a Society, established in 1991, is a project of teachers, performers, artists, and activists. It is an ongoing experiment in making temporary living environments where the question "What would I consider a desirable society?" is given serious playful thought, and taken as an input to creative projects.
Why a desirable society?
We want to address people: our neighbors and our distant neighbors who, living in the current social system, find that this system maintains itself at the expense of its members so that misery, poverty, hopelessness, violence, and human degradation are daily occurrences. Our social system tells us that human beings are the problem, and that it, the current system, is the solution. We have taken long looks at this system, and we do not want it. As any social system is humanly created, not natural, and is maintained daily by human action, we wish to create new social systems, and to change our daily patterns of action.
Why design?
Criticisms of the problems of the present society are often met with justifications. Once these justifications fail, many a conversation of hopeful intention is stopped with the (final) statement: "The present organization of society is the best we have", or the question: "Do you have a better idea?"
This is a moment of possibility and not one to be left speechless. Indeed, many a time, the respondent finds herself sputtering, filled with a spirit of rebellion which unfortunately gets watered down to the mere language of complaint.
Having had the time and opportunity to create--in conjunction with others of diverse experiences--detailed maps, dreams, plans, scripts, scores, videos, and blueprints of her desirable society, we imagine the situation could go differently.
Imagine an atmosphere of audacity: She's asked the question: "Do you have a better idea?" Everyone taking a coffeebreak looks at her or their shoes. She looks the interlocutor in the eye and reaches into her purse? knapsack? briefcase? kitchen drawer? for a booklet of proposals, slaps it on the table scattering cigarette butts, and answers: "Here, read this--this will give you an idea of what I want."
“Every school has its own version of a supply closet, but I don’t think this is the same thing,” said Robin Koo, a studio art teacher at Beginnings.
With thousands of loose objects on display, the Materials Center is organized as precisely as a research lab. Metals, plastics, wood and fabrics each have a designated section. Natural materials overflow from bookcases, including seashells, snakeskin coils and an unidentified animal skull that mysteriously showed up last week in a Pampers wipes box.
Beginnings Nursery spent less than $3,000 to create the center last year after buying the brownstone where it has occupied the two bottom floors since 1984. The bright, airy attic — once an office for the Union Square Greenmarket — was spruced up with leftover classroom furniture and sky-blue paint.
Jane Racoosin, director of Beginnings, said the found objects were used to encourage children to represent their ideas through exploration, part of the Reggio Emilia educational approach that has been adopted by a growing number of American preschools. Teachers stop by the Materials Center every day, with no limit on what they can take back to their classrooms. The preschool has 210 students, ranging in age from 18 months to 5 years.
Artists not only document social change; they promote, inform, and shape it. Whether through music, plays, graphics, paintings, songs, films, media, architecture, textiles, jewelry, photography, poetry, sculpture, pottery, landscapes, written word, spoken word, dance – art is powerful. And it is San Francisco’s greatest, most cost-effective missed opportunity. For art is the intellectual underpinning of social change; nowhere is there more potential and more need for art than here and now.
Brothers and sisters in arms, companions in the struggle
Our beloved comrade Augusto Boal, that tireless sower of seeds, who travelled the four corners of the earth scattering the seed of the Theatre of the Oppressed, is on yet another journey. He set off in the early hours of the second of May. He spent the First of May, May day, in a vigil of solidarity with the workers fighting for a fairer and happier world, a world of solidarity.
He set off on this special journey, for which reason he was not able to be physcially present at any event. But, as was his habit, he lived,, loved and worked to the last drop of his energy, leaving ready (for publication) the new version of his book, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. He also left express instructions that no event should be cancelled because of his absence. ’Isnt that the very point of Multiplication?“
Yesterday, on the third of May, we held a farewell ceremony . His cremation of his body marked the start of a new phase of the Theatre of the Oppressed, in the physical absence of the Master himself. We wept, we talked, we sang. Celse Frateschi declaimed, beautifully, a passage from Arena Conta Zumbi. We sang a song written bz Nuno Arcanjo. And Cecilia Boal, with all her strength and vitality, told the world that her husband should be remembered as the warrior that he always was. We dried our tears and acclaimed Boal,s leaving.
His body has gone, but not his presence! Probably, this Saturday, the 9th of May, we will ratify his presence with a homage, at the Centre of the Theatre of the Oppressed. We will celebrate the life, the struggle, the productivity, the work of Augusto Boal and the continuity of that work.
It will not be easy to follow our Master, Partner, Friend and Comrade in the Struggle. But what has ever been easy in the trajectory of the Theatre of the Oppressed?
Ethics and Solidarity will be our foundations and our guides. Multiplication will be our strategy. And our goal will remain the mounting of concrete social actions to bring about the transformation of oppressive realities.
Viva Augusto Boal
Barbara Santos, 4 may 2009
CTO Rio
This volume collects six new essays spanning a variety of disciplines, as well as memoirs and related source materials, on the history and the arts of the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1941 to 1945. The book was assembled with the cooperation of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and others.The story of Dicker-Brandeis and her work gives me chills. Her insight on childhood & art is eloquent and rich:
Featured throughout the book is the work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a multitalented Bauhaus artist, who produced work in theater, architecture, textiles, graphic design, drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 1934, Dicker-Brandeis was arrested by the Gestapo for anti-Fascist activities and fled to Prague, where she taught art classes for Jewish refugees. In 1942 she was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. While there, she secretly taught art to the children, gifting them with the tools for the expression of their fears of hunger, disease, and death within their midst. Dicker-Brandeis and thirty of her students perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944. Before she was shipped out, however, she hid thousands of works of child art within the walls of Theresienstadt, preserving for posterity a powerful and enduring indictment of the horrors of genocide.
“Why do adults want to make children be like themselves as quickly as possible?… Childhood is not a preliminary, immature stage on the way to adulthood. By prescribing the path to children, we are leading them away from their own creative abilities and we lead ourselves away from understanding the nature of these abilities.”
Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Arts Education is a great book for any arts educator (across disciplines). Created by Harvard's Project Zero, The Studio Thinking Framework includes 8 Habits of Mind:My musician friend, Derrick Ashong - who was born in Ghana, raised between the U.S. and Middle East, went to Harvard, and now speaks internationally on the nexus of art, justice and peace - says:Check out Part 2 of the article as well.People often forget that at it's heart, artistry is human communication taken to the highest possible levels. The power in art lies not only in its ability to inspire, but also in its capacity to expand the boundaries and quality of other forms of communication. The truly educated person does not consume art as a mean of diversion from the world but rather as a tool for learning how to better engage it.
Sandup, 14, said speaking his lines made him proud. “It feels like I’m telling the public how I’ve been struggling,” he said.
He pointed to a favorite line: “My homeland screams, ‘Don’t forget me!’ My new life says, ‘Come and get me!’ ”
He said he and other Nepali teenagers spend a lot of time speaking English and having fun, not thinking much about what their parents went through to bring them here.
“I don’t want to forget,” he said.
I can't stomach being whipped or stripped because of the color of my skin so every time I write a slave poem my paper bleeds.More and more, I think poetry is such an amazing and liberating tool for expression and a great entry point to creating theatre--particularly physical theatre and movement pieces.
Lies
Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling that god’s in his heaven
And all’s well with the world is wrong.
The young know what you mean. The young are people.
Tell them the difficulties can’t be counted,
And let them see not only what will be
But see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter
Sorrow happens, hardship happens.
To hell with it. Who never knew
The price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
It will repeat itself, increase,
And afterwards our pupils
Will not forgive in us what we forgave.
The Jane Addams Childrens Book Awards are given annually by the Jane Addams Peace Association to children's books that promote peace and social justice. It's an excellent list of books. I know I often have trouble finding children's literature with a social justice foundation.Poems to Dream Together=Poemas Para Soñar Juntos, written by Francisco X. Alarcón, illustrated by Paula Barragán, and published by Lee and Low Books, Inc., has been named an honor book in the Books for Younger Children category. In nineteen short and heartfelt poems in Spanish and English, Alarcón encourages and inspires us to dream alone and to work and dream together, as families and communities, in order to make our hopes for a better world come true. The stylized paintings of Paula Barragán colorfully extend and interpret the theme.
“The essence of our profession… is to give. What is it that we in the theater give? … We give our body, voice, feelings, will, imagination – we give a form of pulsating art to life itself; we give it to our characters and we give it to our audiences. Nothing, absolutely nothing remains for us save the pleasure of having given pleasure. And yet it is only by this miraculous process that our love grows and our talent is fulfilled and replenished."
Do not leave the theatre satisfied
Do not be reconciled
Have you been entertained?
Laughter that’s not also an idea
Is cruel
Have you been touched?
Sympathy that’s not also an action
Corrodes
To make the play the writer used god’s scissors
Whose was the pattern?
The actors rehearsed with care
Have they moulded you to their shape?
Has the lighting man blinded you?
The designer dressed your ego?
You cannot live on our wax fruit
Leave the theatre hungry
For change
I Want To Write
By Miguel
I want to write to turn insanity into clarity,
write to a convict on death row
and have tears roll off his cheeks.
I want my words to reach the inner
chambers of a frozen heart and let it thaw.
I want to write to a woman who has seen it all
and had enough hardships and turn them into soft voyages.
If I could, I would write to life and
let it know
it's playing a novice while it's a pro
in a game only itself knows.
I wish I could write to who I was four
years ago
to say: take it slowly, cuz if not...well you already know.
I want to write words to express
all of the stress you gain from such a test
of having your freedom taken away
by no other than yourself.
I want to write for help but I'm scared of
the one who will send it.
I want to write to a young mother
to let her see how much harder I made her
stay here,
but still she WILL reap the benefits
you can only gain from having kids.
I just want to write until carpal tunnel takes
over my wrist...and hard,
and I'll either become left handed or the
loudest man
to say what I have to say
because the world is my stand.
I want to write...
What I Have to Say
By Rodney
I apologize,
I apologize
for leaving my loved ones behind.
I am a young Black man who has been in the system too long.
I was searching.
I was searching.
I was searching for freedom,
but I never found where it was at.
It was lost.
Will I find it?
Somebody has to hear my story.
All human societies are “spectacular” in their daily life and produce “spectacles” at special moments. They are “spectacular” as a form of social organization and produce “spectacles” like the one you have come to see.
....
One of the main functions of our art is to make people sensitive to the “spectacles” of daily life in which the actors are their own spectators, performances in which the stage and the stalls coincide. We are all artists. By doing theatre, we learn to see what is obvious but what we usually can’t see because we are only used to looking at it. What is familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theatre throws light on the stage of daily life.
....
When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed people, in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and casts; we see an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another world because we know it is possible. But it is up to us to build this other world with our hands and by acting on the stage and in our own life.
Participate in the “spectacle” which is about to begin and once you are back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what you were never able to see: that which is obvious. Theatre is not just an event; it is a way of life!
We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.
Poverty is not created by poor people; rather, it is created by institutions and policies that we have built up. In order to tackle poverty, we have to go back to the drawing board, and redesign our concepts, our policies, our institutions. My experience has taught me that poor people are as hard working, as talented as any other human beings. They are not lazy or unskilled or inefficient, as people tend to think. They just never get the opportunity to tap their own potential. An effective poverty reduction program is one that allows the poor person to unleash his or her potential. Microcredit is one way of doing that.So is education. Yunus speaks about our acceptance of the idea that some people will always be poor. He argues:
What we want and how we get it depends on our mindsets. It is extremely difficult to change mindsets once they are formed. We create a world in accordance with our frame of mind. We need to invent ways to change our perspective continually and reconfigure our mindset quickly as new knowledge emerges. We can reconfigure our world if we can reconfigure our way of thinking. This is where education, one that encourages us to challenge conventional wisdom, can try to play a significant role. I believe even the biggest problem can be cracked by a small, well-designed intervention. That is where our creativity comes in.Creativity does not only help us to invent solutions or well-designed interventions. The most important part of creativity is the important part it plays in our ability to imagine a different world--to imagine, to hope, and to believe that another way of being with people and with the world can exist. (This is why fostering imagination and creativity--via the arts, especially--is so important...rather than only encouraging and rewarding rigid adherence to existing routines and structures.)
The starting point in a commons-oriented curriculum is to have students conduct a survey of their local cultural commons, as well as the aspects of the larger cultural commons that they have a right (in spite of past exclusions) to participate in. The survey should involve learning who the elders and mentors are, who the keepers of the community memory are, what forms of cultural commons activities exist—such as playing chess, painting, writing poetry, musical performances, gardening, working with wood and metal, volunteerism, and political action groups. In a word, the survey should cover the activities and relationships within the community that are less reliant upon a money economy—and that lead to the development of skills and interests that contribute to a less damaging ecological footprint.And much more..
People who insult and denigrate teachers by forcing scripted curriculum on them are perfectly aware that they are forcing teachers to act against their conscience and students to close down their minds. What must be raised and answered for is the moral cost of creating joyless schools that resemble panopticons.
I find it painful to write about education these days. I began teaching in 1962 and after about one semester realized that I would have to become engaged in school reform if I was to teach well and be of use to my students. This engagement has continued for forty-six years and yet I still encounter schools that are as repressive and ineffective as they were forty-six years ago. Sometimes I even encounter situations, which are even more depressing that any I remember.
Recently a friend and I visited a middle school in the Bay Area. It was lunchtime and the students were lined up outside of the cafeteria. I noticed that they all had their arms folded over their chests with their hands clutching their shoulders. My friend got really upset and suggested we leave immediately. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that the lunch line was identical to lunch lines she observed when she visited prisons. The inmates were required to hold their arms that way to prevent them from touching each other or carrying anything into the dining hall. Later I asked a teacher at the school about the rationale for having the students line up in that way, and he gave me the same reason. According to him, the students, all of whom were either black or Latino, had to be kept from touching each other or fooling around on the lunch line and besides, he commented, “it’s also good education for their future.”
I observed a similar phenomenon in an elementary school a few weeks ago, only this time it was a class of second graders required to walk to the playground with their arms folded across their chests. The rationale I was given by an administrator was the same though without the cynical aside. In both instances the official reason for the policy was that it was part of the school’s zero tolerance policy.
The majority of schools don’t resort to such methods of behavioral control and do sanction some informal movement of youngsters from place to place. However, the notion of control and surveillance is pervasive these days. I believe that the consequence of scripted curriculum, teacher accountability, continuous monitoring of student performance, high stakes testing, and punishment for not reaching external standards is that schools become educational panopticons, that is, total control and surveillance communities dedicated to undermining the imagination, creativity, intelligence, and autonomy of students and teachers.
“Panopticon” was the name given by the British philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham to a prison he designed during the 1780s. Essentially it consisted of prisoners’ cells built in a circle around a surveillance core in the middle. The idea was to provide complete monitoring of prisoners at all times by guards within the core. Prisoners were unable to see into the core and therefore could not actually tell whether they were being observed or not. The motive for this was to create an environment where the prisoners would internalize and accept the idea of total and continuous surveillance whether or not it was actually happening. It was an attempt to use the physical environment as an instrument of intimidation and mind control.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault extended the use of “panopticon” to characterize social institutions such as prisons, hospitals, mental asylums, and schools which institutionalize constant surveillance and exert mind control, often without the knowledge or awareness of the people being controlled. When I talk about an educational panopticon I mean a system in which teachers and students are under constant scrutiny, allowed no choice over what is learned or taught, evaluated continuously, and punished for what is considered inadequate performance. In this context students and teachers are forced to live in a constant state of anxiety, self-doubt, wariness, anomie, and even suppressed rage.
Consider the following characteristics of schooling that I mentioned above: scripted curriculum, teacher accountability, continuous monitoring of student performance, high stakes testing, and punishment for not meeting external standards. Scripted curriculum turns teachers into mechanical delivery systems. Most teachers I know try to revolt against them, but they have to face what are called “the Open Court police” – people who wander the halls of schools checking that teachers are on exactly the mandated page, asking set questions rather than discussing ideas or texts, and accepting only the answers provided by the teachers’ booklet. Though those monitors obviously can’t check all the classes at all the times they induce a state of anxiety since they can enter any classroom at any time without even knocking. This aspect of the panopticon contributes to the erosion of self-respect and pride in one’s work by treating teachers as objects with no independent educational knowledge and judgment of their own.
The irony is that even with the imposition of so-called “teacher-proof” curriculum, teachers are evaluated on the effectiveness of their student’s performance on tests relating to material they have no control over. No one evaluates Open Court or other such curriculum when students fail. It is the powerless “proofed” teachers who take the hit. This is morally reprehensible and yet the question of the values underlying this kind of teaching and evaluation is neglected when experts discuss educational issues.
Teachers under surveillance are also the agents of surveillance since they are expected to do continuous monitoring of their students’ progress. Continuous monitoring implies that learning takes place in measurable increments and that constant testing somehow contributes to enhanced performance. Whether it does or not, it reinforces educational practice which has no space for conversation, exploration, or the personalization of learning. The classroom becomes a humanly impoverished environment, a sanitized place where students’ personality, charm, and ingenuity have no place. Morally it contributes to depriving the young of opportunities for the development of their minds. Fortunately there are many subversive teachers who work in the service of their students and according to their own conscience rather than submit to the coercive education they are expected to provide.
Add high stakes testing and school-wide punishment for failure and you have even greater weapons of control and coercion. Student and parent anxiety is increased; teachers, being judged themselves by the results of the tests, have incentives to press and pressure their students to perform or even in some cases encourage them to be absent on testing days. Because of no tolerance and no exceptions policies, students who just can’t do well because of disabilities that are no fault of their own, or students who don’t speak English, are forced to take tests they know they will fail. Setting students up to fail is simply immoral, and yet there is surprisingly little outcry about this attack on these young people’s very being.
When I bring up these moral issues to educators who consider themselves reformers in the spirit of No Child Left Behind, they usually acknowledge these “unfortunate” things can happen but that they are unintended consequences of a program designed to get every child performing to high standards. That is not the case. These alienating immoral practices are intended consequences. People who make and administer high stakes tests know the moral and personal costs of subjecting all students to them. People who insult and denigrate teachers by forcing scripted curriculum on them are perfectly aware that they are forcing teachers to act against their conscience and students to close down their minds. What must be raised and answered for is the moral cost of creating joyless schools that resemble panopticons.
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