Teacher Talk

NPR's Tell Me More interviews teachers on their obstacle and challenges, why they stay, and why they leave.

New: International Journal of Critical Pedagogy

Joe Kincheloe's introduction to the new International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. Exciting! Here is the first issue. (Also worth reading, Kincheloe's book, Critical Pedagogy.) The Freire project has also launched a number of blogs, although I'm not sure of the frequency of posts.

The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy wants to be an open-access on-line journal, totally uninterested in turning a monetary profit for anybody or any organization, that helps redefine the nature of critical scholarship (and scholarship in general), transformative community building, individual and social change, and education. We want to be brave in the struggles against the oppressive imperial machine conquering the world, yet humble in our countenance and sense of selfhood.

Kidventions

I've been having some of my fifth graders come up with inventions, an assignment that I described as "things that would make their lives easier."

It's always eye opening to see how assignments are interpreted. One student who told me that she had "done the wrong thing" pointed to her answer: "If I had a father." One of those eye opening moments...

Anyways, here are some of my favorite "inventions":

• The mega super ultra auto mobile of wind energy – a flying vehicle that uses air for its energy source and can fit up to 25 people and goes over 1,000 mph
• Teeth brushing vision goggle – shows you where you have to brush
• Talking mirror
• Flying pencil- comes to you when you clap your hands and say “pencil come here.”
• Pencil that connects to your brain to just our ideas instead of wasting time writing
• Never-charge laptop
• Non-hurting need that sucks up blood
• A car that runs on water
• Hair maker
• A purse that looks small but is huge inside
• Shoe tie-er: shoe that ties by itself
• Machine that reduces pollution
• Solar power school bus
• Shirt that changes design and size
  
  
  
  

Very Special Arts (VSA) Fellowships

Fellowships for Teaching Artists with Disabilities in the Visual and Performing Arts

VSA arts is seeking applications from artist-educators for the Teaching Artist Fellowship program. The Teaching Artist Fellowship seeks to identify, engage, and support outstanding teaching artists with disabilities in the visual and performing arts.

The deadline is May 8, 2008.

Charting the Course Conference

New Jersey Theater Alliance and New Jersey Arts Education Collective
Charting The Course Conference
Monday, April 21, 2008

This conference, with a keynote address by Sir Kenneth Robinson, is for the advancement of arts education, artists, and arts organizations.

The conference has sessions on:

• Shaping the Field of Arts Education
• The Future of the Teaching Artist Profession
• The Relationship between the Teaching Artists and the Arts Organization
• Financial Planning, The Health Maze and Legal Needs for Teaching Artists

Pushing Out 50% of Our Students?

A number of big cities have graduation rates of less than 50%.

The lowest graduation rates are in Detroit, Indianapolis, and Cleveland.

Many metropolitan areas also showed a considerable gap in the graduation rates between their inner-city schools and the surrounding suburbs. Researchers found, for example, that 81.5 percent of the public school students in Baltimore's suburbs graduate, compared with 34.6 percent in the city schools.

It's Not on the Test

Great music video: "So music and art and the things you love best are not in your school cause they're not on the test..."

How we teach teachers

Education Policy Blog has a couple interesting posts on the way we educate teachers.

Barbara Stengel writes:
We can't tell someone how to teach. But we can give them opportunities to teach, invite them to reflect on what they intended to do and what they did do and what actually happened in the light of accepted theory, time-honored practice, and richly conceptualized research, and we can coach them through this process. In this way, they can be led (in another Dewey locution) "in the direction of what the expert already knows."

One commentor posts:
I think what we do an extremely poor job of is letting pre-service teachers discover that they are not "missionaries" out to fix children, but that they should be "guides in the woods" helping students get from where they are to where they need to go and want to go.Of course the problem is systemic - no system appears more resistant to change than education. College students sit in classrooms as they always have, following non-individualized syllabi as they always have, learning industrial teaching methods as they always have. Then they go out and have that "opportunity to teach" in buildings that do everything as they always have - stamping on student after student, assuming that each is simply raw material which can have 'value-added' as long as enough pressure is applied.And almost nowhere along the way do we really get them to question - what white northern European Protestant - modernist view of the world creates this system and gains from it? Why do we keep enabling a system so destructive to so many children?

Teaching Artist Rights

A few frustrations from my teaching artist work:

I attended a teaching artist training on Friday for the organization that I work for. The training includes both teaching artists and the teachers from the schools that we work with. One problem is that I usually teach on Fridays, so to attend the training I miss a teaching day with students and also I receive less compensation for training than for teaching (why?).

The teachers have a hard time attending because they miss days with their students. Often times, when teachers miss a day, instead of getting substitutes, their class gets split up and sent to other teachers (often times teachers of other grades). This is obviously not ideal. Consequently, many classroom teachers have a difficult time getting permission to attend these trainings. That's one issue.

Another one. It came to the time on the schedule labeled "Lunch: Room 408: 12-1pm." As I'm sitting in Room 408 with the other teaching artists and we are discussing our upcoming field trips with the students, my stomach starts growling--I'm eager to get to the "lunch" portion of this session. Finally, I whisper to the person beside me: "Uh, do they give us lunch?" She shakes her head: no. The training was over at 3pm. I know it is a little thing, but to be treated as a professional (or maybe just as a human being), I would have liked to a.) received lunch (as I'm being paid less for the training anyways); b.) had time to go out and buy my lunch; or at the very least c.) been told in advance to bring my lunch.

I like the Association of Teaching Artist's Teaching Artist Wish List. If we really believe that TA work is valuable and worthwhile, we need to push for the profession to be a sustainable one. This means that organizations that employ TAs need to think about the way that they treat them. Obviously, compensation is a major consideration. I am not paid for my planning (which is hours and hours of work), transportation (which is typically an hour each way), or cancellations (which happen frequently). I am also expected to find health insurance...which is a whole another issue.

I'll leave it at that for now, but take a look at the wish list below.

The Teaching Artist Wish List

To be compensated in a way that recognizes professionalism, education and experience.

To be compensated for prep time, as other contract professions do (designers and
therapists, for example).

To have work throughout the school year, not only the last 8 weeks.

To have teachers, administrators, and principals invest in long-term Arts In Education programs and not look for quick projects.

To have cultural organizations with Arts In Education programs recognize the professionalism of Teaching Artists and not continually pay the same rate year after year even though the Teaching Artists demonstrate excellence and mastery.

To have cultural organizations value Teaching Artists as integral to their mission and not rationalize that Teaching Artist can pay taxes, health insurance and transportation on less than $50 an hour.

To not have to hustle for funding and residencies every year.

To not be held hostage to flavor of the month pedagogies and emperors with no clothes on.

To be paid in a timely fashion.

To be able to work with teachers enrolled in certification programs in schools of education to foster the team-teaching collaborative environment with artists. There are great strides that need to be taken in teacher education to take advantage of the opportunity of Arts In Education and nourish it in a way that will allow for the optimal educational experience for the students.

To offer professional development to arts administrators who have forgotten the value of art, Teaching Artists, and what really goes into implementing Arts In Education: living wage fees, prep time, research, travel, and opportunities for reasonably priced health, disability, and liability insurance.

To educate cultural organizations and arts administrators with the message that they are there to support the Teaching Artist as well as the school.

To educate cultural organizations that push their programming instead of understanding the potential of Arts In Education for school reform and for the professional career of a Teaching Artist.

To provide professional development for community organizations who work with Teaching Artists on fees, Teaching Artists, program assessment.

To have funders meaningfully address the training, the lack of work, and how hard it is to earn a living as a Teaching Artist.

To have more connection with fellow Teaching Artists across the country.

A few more thoughts on community organizing, ed reform, and student voice

Given The Annenberg Institute's report on community organizing and school reform (see last post), here's a portion of a paper I wrote on drama and the student voice in education reform:

Noting the current state of school reform and the continuing existence of large achievement gaps in the educational system, “nontraditional” attempts at promoting the student voice within educational policy seem ever the more valuable. As attempts at school reform continue to struggle, Alison Cook-Sather comments on the historical lack of student voice in education: “Since the advent of formal education in the United States, both the educational system and that system’s every reform have been premised on adults’ notions of how education should be conceptualized and practiced.” She continues, “There is something fundamentally amiss about building and rebuilding an entire system without consulting at any point those it is ostensibly designed to serve” (3). Without meaningfully incorporating the voices of students into how we form our schools, we are left with an incomplete picture of education reform.

Maxine Greene promotes the arts as spaces that open up students to explore possibilities, frustrations and change. She warns that “one danger [of our education system] that threatens both teachers and students…is that they will come to feel anger at being locked into an objective set of circumstances defined by others” (124). She comments that the arts “may be able to create schoolroom atmospheres where young people are moved to find hope again and, even in small spaces, begin to repair” (130).

When commenting on the student voice in educational reform, Yvonna Lincoln asks, “how do we set the stage for such sharing?” Perhaps it is the stage itself where we find one such meaningful forum. Playwright José Rivera (qtd. in Saldaña) reasons that:

Theatre is the explanation of life to the living. We try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living and make some kind of pattern and order. It’s not so much an explanation of life as it is a recipe for understanding, a blueprint for navigation, a confidante with some answers—enough to guide you and encourage you, but not to dictate to you. (27)

There remains is a need to create forums where students can express their opinions about school communities first hand to wider stakeholders who are interested in collaborating to form strategies and change based on the student voice itself.

A Brief Literature Review

There is a great deal of literature available on the inclusion of the student voice in education reform. Patrick Lee’s “In Their Own Voices: An Ethnographic Study of Low-Achieving Students Within the Context of School Reform” is one that seeks to capture the student voice on the topic of school reform. A high school student-researcher in Lee’s study summarized: “…students sometimes feel motivated after they have talked to somebody about their problems, and they also feel that there is at least somebody that was willing to ask about their problems, and they feel like they could study because the teacher does care about their learning and being someone in life” (Lee 1999).

Readers hear a harsher reality in this 11-year-old’s depiction: “Everything that come out of your mouth probably ain’t [going to be seen as] true because you know grown up, they got more respect and more power over you” (Lee 1999). Yet, even in this ethnographic research study we read about the student encounter through the lens of the researcher’s report. We are still one step removed from the literal voice of the student.

There appears to be some dramatic work being done in this direction of including the student voice in the educational climate—for instance, Jane Plastow’s work, “Finding Children's Voices: A Pilot Project Using Performance to Discuss Attitudes to Education Among Primary School Children in Two Eritrean Villages” examines the educational experiences of fifth graders in Eritrea and their reflections on the positive and negative aspects on their education. In this program, Plastow and her colleagues utilized Image Theatre techniques to explore what they liked and disliked about their school. Looking at these images, the students were then asked to create strategies for what they might change about the images, using Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. Finally, students presented teachers with short performance pieces that provoked teacher response (Plastow 347).

I was unable to locate documented dramatic experiences that specifically approached educational reflection and reform in the United States. Yet, there are various non-dramatic programs and reports that seek to solicit the opinions of students such as SoundOut, an organization that highlights efforts where educators and students work together toward school reform, typically through local initiatives that promote surveys and school report cards created by students. Still, the forums for creating this dialogue between students, teachers, researchers, and policy makers are largely new, with much of the territory uncharted.

Stronger Communities = Stronger Schools

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform has released Organized Communities, Stronger Schools:

Data suggest that organizing is contributing to school-level improvements, particularly in the areas of school–community relationships, parent involvement and engagement, sense of school community and trust, teacher collegiality, and teacher morale. Successful organizing strategies contributed to increased student attendance, improved standardized-test-score performance, and higher graduation rates and college-going aspirations in several sites. Our findings suggest that organizing efforts are influencing policy and resource distribution at the system level. Officials, school administrators, and teachers in every site reported that community organizing influenced policy and resource decisions to increase equity and build capacity, particularly in historically low-performing schools.

Data indicate that participation in organizing efforts is increasing civic engagement, as well as knowledge and investment in education issues, among adult and youth community members. Young people reported that their involvement in organizing increased their motivation to succeed in school.

Our research suggests that organizing groups achieve these schooling and community impacts through a combination of system-level advocacy, school- or community-based activity, and strategic use of research and data. Continuous and consistent parent, youth, and community engagement produced through community organizing both generates and sustains these improvements.

Pretty interesting. Makes me wonder about the connections between the potential to explore community issue and advocacy through the arts and community-based theatre and other art forms. I think it is so important to build communities around our schools, and sometimes we see arts organizations functioning so far removed from the communities that they wish to reach.

I looked at the report's answer to "What is community organizing for school reform?" I've recently been exploring the possibility of using applied theatre to explore education reform and elevate the voices of students while connecting communities of students, teachers, and administrators.

What is community organizing for school reform?

• involves youth, public school parents, and community residents and/or
  institutions
• builds power by mobilizing large numbers of people
• focuses on accountability, equity, and quality
• recruits and develops leadership as a core activity
• uses direct action tactics to apply pressure on decision-makers
• aims to transform power relations that produce failing schools in low- and
  moderate- income neighborhoods and communities of color

So, I'd now ask:

Can the arts mobilize large numbers of people, recruiting and developing leadership?
Can the arts explore the transformation of dominant power structures and explore new possibilities?
Can the arts involve students, parents, school administrators, and teachers, building community?

Read: Student Essays

J.B. Schramm, founder and CEO of College Summit, has been blogging this week on Eduwonk. College Summit works to help build school infrastructures in order to increase their college-going populations.

Each day this week, Schramm has posted excerpts from student essays that are definitely worth reading. You can find the pieces on Eduwonk, or the full essays here: In Their Own Words: Ten Outstanding Student Essays.

Busing Crisis - In pictures

Eye opening: Slate's slide show essay detailing the Boston school busing controversy of the 70s. The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph by Stanley Forman, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977.

It's definitely worth reading the entire piece, but here is an excerpt:

In his recent speech on race, Barack Obama spoke about the legacy of racial hatred and resentment in America. One of the events he probably had in mind was the controversy over busing that erupted in Boston in the mid-1970s. A single photograph epitomized for Americans the meaning and horror of the crisis. On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston's Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The image shattered the illusion that racial segregation and
hatred were strictly a Southern phenomenon. For many, Boston now seemed little
different than Birmingham.

In 2006, when Deval Patrick became the first black governor of Massachusetts, the Boston Globe expressed hope that his inauguration would "finally wash away the shameful stain of that day in 1976." Last June, however, a Supreme Court ruling forbade school districts from assigning students based on their race, and Patrick's administration has been forced to find ways to avoid dismantling desegregation programs throughout Massachusetts. The issue, and the photograph, continue to haunt Boston, and the nation.

Comparative Conflict Resolution and the Arts

More info on the Promises Project. Another trailer worth watching: Encounter Point.

What is the role of arts educators in healing and in social healing? Throughout both films, we pick up on shared words like grief, horror, anger, heroes, pain, cycles, enemies, trust, peace, fear, strangeness, and questions: Why not talk? Is there and can there be a better future?

The common words remind us that through two very different worlds and perspectives there is a shared human story. Applied Theatre can explore the places where these shared human stories and narratives intersect and where they differ. As one child says: "Peace between you and me is impossible unless we get to know one another." Yet, our actions continue to be driven by fear and the complications of risk. When one parent is hesitant of letting his son cross the checkpoint, another responds, "Our needs are our fears."

Applied Theatre exercises may help us unpick our fears, share narratives, and open up new possibilities that challenge the status quo.

Simnia Singer-Sayada, an Education Associate at the Culture Project, describes one Theatre of the Oppressed technique that is often used to explore connections:

One such technique, the “Columbian Hypnosis”, creates an opportunity to explore he effect our actions have on one other. In a group, a leader is selected who moves to the middle of the room. Gradually, the rest of the class joins in, one by one holding onto someone within the group by the head, arm, knee, nose, etc.... When everyone is joined to someone else, the leader begins to walk through the room, and the subtle repercussions of her/his actions ripples through the group, each member being moved and therefore moving those around them. The power of literally seeing and feeling the repercussions of subtle actions can lead to huge personal discoveries.

Though they are seemingly simple activities--interactive experiences and games like the one above can uncover safe spaces for conversations.

Here's another piece that focuses on music therapy and Palestinian children of the West Bank.

NYC Public School Theatre Education

I attended a panel yesterday that included Paul King, Director of Theatre Programs for the NYC Department of Education's Office of Arts and Special Projects, and four NYC public school theatre teachers. Two from elementary schools and two from screened high schools (meaning an audition is required).

There was a little bit of discussion surrounding the direction in which theatre and arts programs are headed in the District, the Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts, the new comprehensive high school arts exam, the impact of high parental involvement in the elementary schools (which were located in Park Slope and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), and the Annual Arts in Schools Report. These are worth unpacking at another time.

Most of the discussion centered around classroom management techniques, curriculum, etc.

What are the rewards of teaching theatre in the public schools?

One teacher said, "It's getting your students to stand in a circle at the beginning of class." (I can completely understand this.) Another recalled a time when one her fourth graders sang "I Sing the Body Electric" for an audition and she found herself in tears.

Jim Moody, of LaGuardia Arts High School, an accomplished film and TV actor (he appeared in the move Fame and on "Law and Order" several times), put it best: "The rewards are beyond 'thank you.' It's when they live it."

NYC Arts (Are Not) in Schools Report (a little late)

Here's the NYC DOE's First Annual Arts in Schools Report. This came out in early March, but I forgot to post.

Read the press release and then compare it to the shockingly low numbers that you see.

The "Next Steps" section doesn't seem to have much that is substantive yet, and vaguely touch on budget issues that are a major obstacle. However, the report is a first step in solving problems and does give some baseline info. Pretty interesting.

Just a quick summary of some points that I found interesting:

Elementary
By NY state standards, elementary school students are supposed to be exposed to all four arts disciplines each year. Only 4% of schools currently do this. 77% of schools directly interact with local arts and cultural institutions, and through this, raise their percentages. However, the quality of these experiences and the longevity of them is questionable. Along with the ability of students to build meaningful relationships with these arts educators. Will the exposure and ability of schools to partner with this plethora of cultural institutions continue to substitute the presence of arts specialists in schools? Particularly in dance and theatre?

Middle School
"Middle schoolers prefer active over passive learning experiences." (Really? Wow!) Only 17% of middle schools offer all 4 arts disciplines.

Secondary Ed
More secondary schools meet the standards. But that's because the standards are lower. High school students are only required to take 1 year of an arts discipline.

82% of schools have certified arts teachers. Breakdown of certified teachers (as a percentage of total arts teachers):

• 65% Visual Arts
• 42% Music Teachers
• 29% Theatre
• 20% Dance

The percentage of students who receive high school instruction in the arts in theatre and dance is about 2%. It's in the 20-30% range for visual arts and music.

14% of schools have certified Dance and Theatre teachers vs. Music (45%) and Visual Arts (61%).

Changing the Focus of NCLB to Inputs

In this Rethinking Schools article, Monty Neill talks about changing NCLB to focus on inputs (funding and improvement) rather than outputs (test scores) - or at least the outputs as we currently define them.

In terms of making changes, he suggests:

• Federal funding should be focused on school improvement. (Duh!) But very true. (As opposed to test-based accountability.)
• Funding to create communities of learners within schools- to focus on closing the educator achievement gap.
• Strengthening the capacity in which districts and states can help schools.

Worth noting:

"Further, study after study has made it clear that nonschool factors, poverty in particular, overwhelm what most schools can do. Michael Winerip summed up a recent Educational Testing Service study in his New York Times column: Just four family factors explain most of the difference in outcomes. They are the percentage of children living with one parent, the percentage of 8th graders absent from school at least three times a month, the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of 8th graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. A decade or so ago another study similarly found a handful of factors explained most of the state differences in NAEP results.

"Gloria Ladson-Billings uses the term "education debt" — the lack of adequate educational opportunity accumulating since slavery and segregation — rather than "achievement gap." The education debt includes the school-based debt. It also includes the housing debt (such as the racial covenants that ensured African Americans could not move to many suburbs after World War II), the medical care debt (pervasive historical and current unequal access to medical care by race and class), the employment debt (African American families earn three-fifths of what white families earn, while U.S. income inequality grows rapidly), and on and on."

Disturbing School Bulletin Boards

I was at an elementary school in Queens today. A very nice and new building and brightly decorated school. There are bulletin boards EVERYWHERE in the hallway. It makes the building look like a nice place to go to school.

Today, I took some time to actually look at the bulletin boards, and ended up being very disturbed.

Student work is displayed on each bulletin board. However, not all student work is displayed, only some. For each project, only about 6 examples of student work were displayed. It was pretty apparent that these were only the "best" examples.

Even worse, on each paper/poster/art project was a post-it with the students' grade - from 1 to 4, along with comments from the teacher. The only work that I saw displayed was at "Level 3." Oh, and if you don't know what Level 3 means - don't worry! There's a detailed rubric beside each bulletin board with the assessment criteria.

So what are we saying?
We only put up examples of completed work that fits the "standards" of our hegemonic system. You worked hard, but you didn't get at least a 3? Sorry, your work isn't important, because only the product matters -- not the process.

This made me very sad.

Who are these bulletin boards for?
Shouldn't bulletin boards be for students? I'm not sure what third grade student is going to sit and read the 1-4 rubric beside each board. And I'm pretty sure the students whose work is discarded and not worthy of the bulletin board won't have much interest.

It's great to show student work. But does the fact that we are afraid to show most student work tell us something about the school? And about how they perceive education?

Obama on Arts Education

Obama comments on arts education and NCLB on April 2 in Wallingford, PA.



I am tired of the rationale that "arts help kids do well in other subjects." That may be true, but why do the arts have to be secondary (even when we say they're not)? Arts make students do better in math, arts help students do better on tests... Why can't we value the arts on their own? You don't hear people saying that we teach math because students who take math do better at reading.

Obama redeems himself here when he says the "Arts Education teaches people to see each other through each other's eyes. It teaches us to respect and understand people who are not like us." Yes - with their storytelling capabilities, the arts -- visual, music, drama, dance -- have the potential to construct narratives to better understand ourselves and others.

Helen Nicholson, in Applied Drama, speaks about drama's power to tell alternative stories that push us to question the stories that are dominant in our society. Whose stories are we familiar with? Whose have been left out? Storytelling and narrative allow us to construct our identity in relationship to others and break down or "unfix" reality. Unfixing reality so that we are able to question and transform it. That being said, I think the arts have the potential to be a perfectly meaningful subject area in and of themselves...

Education Blogs - Best of 08

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post's Class Struggle lists the best education blogs of 2008.

Among them are:

• Bridging Differences (both bloggers are from the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU)
• Eduwonk (one of my favorites)
• Edwize (maintained by the United Federation of Teachers - contains policy and classroom content)
• Forum for Education and Democracy (on the democratic purpose of education)
• Joanne Jacobs (another one of my favorites)