Looking for meaningful children's books?

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.

One book that caught my eye:

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.

Awesome Resource for Lesson Plans

Check out Educators for Social Responsibility's Connected and Respected: Lessons From the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, an elementary curriculum on conflict resolution and social and emotional learning.

Chekhov on Love & Theatre

“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."

The World Becomes What You Teach

On Leaving the Theatre

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

Making Room for Hope... The New York State Literary Center

Check out the website. The founder and leader of this organization, Dale Davis, is truly a force in the teaching artist field. The work of the youth and young men in correctional facilities with which NYSLC works is moving, strong, and breathtaking....

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.

Service-Learning and Human Rights Guide - Free!

Human Rights Education Associates has published Human Rights and Service-Learning: Lesson Plans and Projects. The lesson plans touch on five human rights topic areas: environment, poverty, discrimination, children's rights to education and health, and law and justice. The full text is available for free in a pdf format. It's very detailed, with some interesting concepts, lesson plans, and activities to pick and choose from.

New Book: Applied Theatre Reader

Check out the new Applied Theatre Reader--an awesome resource on the field that includes the writings of bell hooks, Augusto Boal, Henry Giroux, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Paulo Freire...and the list goes on and on...

Augusto Boal on World Theatre Day

March 27 is World Theatre Day. Augusto Boal writes the 2009 message. He comments: "Theatre is the Hidden Truth." Some excerpts below:

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.

Dancing Democracy

Why should our children bend the knee in that fastidious and servile dance, the Minuet, or twirl in the mazes of the false sentimentality of the Waltz? Rather let them come forth with great strides, leaps and bounds, with lifted forehead and far-spread arms, to dance the language of our Pioneers, the Fortitude of our heroes, the Justice, Kindness, Purity of our statesmen, and all the inspired love and tenderness of our Mothers. When the American children dance in this way, it will make of them beautiful beings, worthy of the name of the Greatest Democracy.

That will be America Dancing.

-Isadora Duncan, American dancer & choreographer

Poverty, Education, Eco-Justice and More

The Winter 09 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy focuses on The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education. Mohammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and founder of the Grameen Bank, has written the prologue.

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.)

Other interesting stuff:

In "Poverty and Class: Discussing the Undiscussible," John Korsmos encourages dialogue and listening to understand the experience of struggling community members. He asks: "What would happen if we knew each other?"

C.A. Bowers talks about "Rethinking Social Justice Issues Within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework," commenting on unspoken cultural commons that need to be addressed within curricula:

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..

Herbert Kohl on Surveillance and Education

Herbert Kohl has a great article entitled "The Educational Panopticon" in Teachers College Journal. You must be a subscriber to read the article, but here are some of the key parts:

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.

Inputs and Outputs: Education and its maintenance of the social order

News from the West's great post, The Education System Was Designed To Keep Us Uneducated and Docile, traces the roots of the US system and its quest to maintain social order and dominant power structures. While I love John Dewey, the post points out even Dewey's references to students as products to be molded within a specific social order. John Taylor Gatto, retired NYC teacher and former NYC and NYS Teacher of the Year, unearths these problems in his book The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling. (Full text available for free online.)

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day.

Tea Time with Dr. Greg

I recently had the chance to meet with Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, and founder of the Central Asia Institute. You can find a full reflection on The NYU Reynolds Program blog.

With a meek, modest, humble nature, Greg Mortenson radiates with a passion for education that bubbles just below the surface. Perhaps it's this mild and humble manner that allows Mortenson to so gently observe and respect the communities with which he has worked.

Mortenson's Central Asia Institute has the unique posture of working with communities to build ideal schools where much of the educational philosophy can be imagined, rather than fitted within an existing bureaucratic structure. While Mortenson could have taken any approach to education, CAI appears to have done the opposite of what is happening in the U.S. As hyper-standardization and rigid structure appear to be at the forefront of "education reform" in the States, Mortenson's organization builds community-owned schools in which communities have actual decision-making power, where spending is transparent. There is a contract with communities in which they decide how the schools will be governed.

Mortenson knows about the importance of listening. Asking: What are your community's priorities? Acknowledging the lived expertise of community members. While we privilege certain types of education and expression--for example written expression--these don't define education, knowledge, or intelligence. The ability to "read the world" can be just as powerful. Community members are experts in their lived experiences and can contribute to prioritizing and planning.

Why can't education be like this in the States? Do we think we are too advanced for an education that promotes community and peace? How can we re-imagine education?

Horizontal Violence, School Discipline, and Restorative Justice

I recently saw the movie, The Class, a French fictional film (in documentary style) that depicts the classroom of a white male teacher in the city of Paris. While there is not a singular plot line, one student that the movie follows is Souleymane. After several incidents at school, for which he recieves "punishment," he is eventually expelled. The teachers knew that the approach wasn't working and didn't seem to believe that expulsion would solve the problem either. But they had given up--they had to do something, it was the principle of the matter, and the protocol was expulsion.

Why do we expect punishment to work? Those students who are afraid of being reprimanded or punished typically do not act out in the first place. Those that are not afraid of punishment will continue to act out. I hate to compare schools to prisons, but sometimes they aren't that different. So I'll refer to research that shows that harsher punishments for juvenile offenders (trying minors as adults) do not deter youth from reoffending, in fact, it does the opposite:

A 1996 Florida study authored by Northeastern University researcher Donna Bishop also found that juveniles transferred to the criminal system were not less likely to reoffend, but in fact often had higher rates of recidivism. This research compared the recidivism rates of 2,738 juvenile offenders transferred to criminal court in Florida with a matched sample of nontransferred juveniles. Bishop and her colleagues found that although juveniles tried as adults were more likely to be incarcerated, and incarcerated for longer than those who remained in the juvenile system, they also had a higher recidivism rate. Within two years, they were more likely to reoffend, to reoffend earlier, to commit more subsequent offenses, and to commit more serious subsequent offenses than juveniles retained in the juvenile system. The authors concluded that:

"The findings suggest that transfer made little difference in deterring youths from reoffending. Adult processing of youths in criminal court actually increases recidivism rather than [having] any incapacitative effects on crime control and community protection."

Following the same offenders six years after their initial study, the researchers again found higher recidivism rates for most juveniles transferred to criminal court. The exceptions were property felons, who were somewhat less likely to reoffend than those tried in juvenile court, although those who did reoffend did so sooner and more often that those tried in juvenile court.

At one point in the film, a student describes teacher discipline as "revenge." Isn't this sometimes the case? I'm reminded of a scene in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The local Christmas tree vendor has a yearly Christmas Eve ritual in which he throws left over Christmas trees at children. If the children withstand the throw, they get to keep the tree. If they fall, no tree. As he's about to throw the largest tree at two small children, the man ponders "Why don't I just give'em the tree?" He eventually concludes that he isn't "big enough" to do something of that nature: "'Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live in this world! They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain't give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world.' As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, "It's a God-damned, rotton, lousy world!"

Why are students acting out? One possibility might be to consider the notion of horizontal violence or self-depriciation. (This could also be a reason for the terrible treatment of students by some teachers as well...) In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire says:

Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the “order” which serves the interests of the oppressors whose image they have internalized. Chafing under the restrictions of this order, they often manifest a type of horizontal violence, striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons.

The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa. ... While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother.

It is possible that in this behavior they are once more manifesting their duality. Because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades, when they attack those comrades they are indirectly attacking the oppressor as well.

Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything — that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive — that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness.

In the report, "Teachers Talk: School Culture, Safety and Human Rights," the authors discuss the pitfalls of reactionary and punitive discipline and offer recommendations.

"Teachers Talk" proposes a human rights framework as an approach to reforming discipline and improving school climate. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, an important human rights treaty that is widely adopted throughout the world, recognizes discipline as part of an educational process to develop the social skills of students, encourage learning, increase school attendance, and protect the dignity and safety of the child.

In surveys and focus groups, New York City teachers call for policies and practices that protect these basic human rights standards and reflect a holistic approach to improving safety. Teachers call for smaller classes, more engaging curriculum, more access to guidance counselors and social workers, classroom management and conflict resolution training, mediation programs and restorative practices.

The report highlights positive models being used in three New York City public schools - Eastside Community High School in Manhattan, Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx and the James Baldwin School in Manhattan. At Eastside Community High School, for example, the 100% RESPECT Campaign involves students and staff in a process to discuss and define what respect means in their community. Six months after the campaign was implemented in the middle school grades, suspensions dropped by 45%.

More Resources:

• RestorativeJustice.org
• Safer Saner Schools
• Dignity in Schools
• Transforming Conflict

Demasking Stereotypes Workshop at The Brecht Forum

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory Presents: Demasking Stereotypes
A Two-day Workshop in Healing through Storytelling

Saturday, March 7, 2009 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, and
Sunday, March 8 from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm

Facilitated by Potri Ranka Manis

The Brecht Forum
451 West Street
New York, New York 10014

A practical workshop combining the Paulo Freire methodology and storytelling to look at how people are stereotyped, how such stereotyping affects people's behavior and psyches, and how people can be healed from the damage such stereotyping does.

While there is no formal application, PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. Please register on line using the form to your right, or call TOPLAB at (212)924-1858 (leave an email address) or email toplab@toplab.org.

Potri Ranka Manis is a member of and facilitator with the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory and is the Artistic Director of Kinding Sindaw, ) a Filipino indigenous dance, drama and martial arts ensemble. She created and choreographed several Kinding Sindaw dance dramas and has trained since childhood in all the traditional dance, music, and martial art forms of the Maranao people of the Philippines. She is an award winning poet and playwright, and has performed throughout the Philippines, Middle East, Hong Kong and the United States.

Diane Ravitch on the (Not) New Education Approach

NYU Professor and education historian Diane Ravitch comments on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (via Politico). I, like Ravitch, wish Obama had selected Linda Darling Hammond...

But along comes Arne Duncan, our new Secretary of Education, and everything he has said to date might have just as well been said by Bush's Secretary Margaret Spellings. Duncan paid his visit to New York City and toured a charter school, not a regular public school. He declared that the nation's schools need more testing, as though we don't have enough information already to act on our problems. He declared his support for charter schools, where only 2% of the nation's children are enrolled.

The one educator close to Obama who actually has experience in the schools--his chief policy advisor Linda Darling-Hammond--was demonized by the new breed of non-educators and their media flacks, and she has returned to Stanford University. There was no room apparently in this administration for someone who had been deeply involved in school reform for many years, not as an entrepreneur or a think-tank expert, but as an educator.

It looks like Obama's education policy will be a third term for President George W. Bush. This is not change I can believe in.

A Workshop with Cecily O'Neill - Great Video

Here's a great video on teachers.tv of Cecily O'Neill's work. Enjoy!

"What fun it is to learn in a more playful way," -O'Neill says. "Drama is pretending. It is essentially playful."

Process drama is a process-based dramatic art that engages both teachers and students in roles that create and explore various situations. Teachers are encouraged to go where the kids want to go.

O'Neill reminds teachers not to take on the most powerful role and not to go overboard in their believability/acting expertise (in order to keep from intimidating the students), along with other useful tips. Books on the topic.

Emotions & The Classroom

A new university study explores whether or not students comprehend the affects of positive and negative feelings on school performance. What's interesting is that students appear to understand the relationship between negative (sad, bad) feelings and poor performance, but the relationship between positive feelings and positive performance is less clear. Do Children Understand How Feelings Affect School Performance?

They found that children of all ages understood that negative emotional and physical states would lead to poorer school performance. The fact that young children knew that negative emotions could cause poor school performance was especially surprising, since parents and teachers often focus on the physical side of getting ready for school (hence the advice to get lots of rest or eat a good breakfast), and rarely talk about the emotional side (for example, advising children to try not to feel sad). The researchers also found that children understood that levels of interest, effort, and classroom noise would affect performance.

When it came to positive feelings, however, only 7-year-olds recognized, as adults do, that positive feelings could improve school performance. For the younger children, seeing the tie between positive emotions and school performance was difficult; it was easier for them to grasp how positive physical feelings would lead to doing well in school.

The older children also had a better understanding of why emotions and physical states affect school performance. In explaining their judgments, they described how such feelings influence concentration, attention, the brain, and other aspects of thinking.

"Changes in emotional and physiological states are an inevitable part of children's everyday experience in the school setting," according to Jennifer Amsterlaw, research scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, who led the study. "If children know how and why these experiences affect them, they will be better able to prepare for and control their ultimate impact on school performance."

The classroom is not a neutral space. We can't say that we can only focus on what happens within the classroom. If negative feelings affect performance, we must address feelings in the classroom too. "Try not to feel sad" is not enough. Perhaps it begins with addressing feelings and what they are caused by. Next, it's allowing students to discuss and understand that they can interpret situations in different ways. It is okay to feel and to feel negative feelings. Still, we can choose to let our feelings affect our performance or not.

One interesting piece on the subject is The Philosophy of the Limit and Emotions in the Classroom by Debra Shogan, University of Alberta.

In their paper, "Caring for the Emotions: Toward a More Balanced Schooling," Clive Beck and Clare Madott Kosnick emphasize the connection between a "rich emotionality" and well-being. They argue that this rich emotionality depends upon the creation of classrooms and schools which are "genuine communities" in which students and teachers are able to experience emotional living. Genuine communities are ones in which conversation is encouraged, there is opportunity for open celebration of what makes students happy or joyful, and in which there is tenderness and hence security. Each, say Beck and Madott Kosnick, contributes to friendship and mutuality. Beck and Madott Kosnick do not detail how conversation, celebration, and security might be accomplished, referring instead to Nel Noddings's The Challenge to Care in Schools and to Jane Roland Martin's The Schoolhome. Beck and Madott Kosnick's concern is to highlight what they believe to be the effects of emotionality in the classroom as well as conditions which will make emotionality possible.

"Remember": A Sixth Grade Poem

Today, I stumbled across this poem, by a student in Astoria, Queens, on the NYC Department of Ed's website.

"Remember," Katherine Huynh, Sixth Grade, PS 122Q

Remember when we were small,
when we haven't met at all?
When we didn't worry about other things,
That you'd think of as too much?
When we didn't worry about homework?
When we didn't worry about tests?
When we had no troubles?
When we thought none of pain
No worries here to taint us,
I wished it was that way we stayed.

Jeahn Clare's I Wasn't Born A Mermaid

I was recently introduced to the work of artist Jeahn Clare. Clare suffered a spinal chord injury at the age of 20. Currently, she works as a theatre teaching artist and is affiliated with VSA Arts.

I was moved by an excerpt from her play, I Wasn't Born A Mermaid.

A colleague once asked, “Do you consider yourself an artist, a woman artist, or a disabled artist?" My immediate response is, "Which day? What time?" I am a theatre artist; woman; person with a disability. None of these qualities encompasses the sum of my being; yet each expresses something true about me. And Survivor; I didn’t know that prior to my injury. I do now; I value that. I’m not saying I would have chosen spinal cord injury as a path to personal growth, but the depth it has brought to my life is undeniable. After all the pondering, praying, reading, therapy, weeping, whining, blah-blah-blah — one day I bite into a strawberry, and I get it: Utter certainty that this Life is no accident. My injury may have been an accident — but that strawberry is no accident! And I believe that living is something I can do from the seat of a wheelchair.

I wasn’t born a mermaid. I evolved. It was a dramatic moment, not quite a fall from grace, but a fall nonetheless. But then, that’s another story. This is a tale of a different sort, a transformative tale — transformation not of the outside-in, but of the inside-out.

VSA will feature the work of 16 artists with disabilities at The Armory Show in New York City from March 5-8.

Also, check out Axis Dance Company, a contemporary dance ensemble that utilizes beautifully physically integrated dance (dancers with and without disabilities). You can find a short video of the group here.