You can learn a lot from your grandmother!

Experience shapes who we are as individuals and is important to use as valuable means of connection; connection to self, others, and education. bell hooks (1994) would also argue that pedagogical practices in higher education should change so that our students learn to engage more fully the ideas and issues that actually do have relation to their experience: “Critical pedagogies of liberation respond to these concerns and necessarily embrace experience, confessions and testimony as relevant ways of knowing, as important, vital dimensions of any learning process” (p. 89).

Have you ever listened to a story about your grandmother, or great grandmother? These histories provide valuable learning opportunities. These experiences, positive or negative, are what shapes individual identity. We must listen to our histories, ask questions, and talk about our experiences with our families, our teachers and students to begin to connect and learn about each other and on a larger scale, connect with our peers in formal educational settings. Any experience could be a priceless lesson. Experiences shape who our students and families are and who we are as individuals. With better a knowledge and understanding of who we are we, formal classroom settings should allow students and teachers to speak from the voice of experience and connect in different ways. Consequently when pedagogical practices allow for this type of connection to take place it helps students own their understanding about subjects being studied. Unfortunately this is not usually the case. Families do not listen to each other, students are silenced when they question what they are learning, and teachers adopt what Paolo Friere calls the banking model as pedagogy in the classrooms.

As a woman it is even more important that my pedagogical practice changes so that I don’t silence myself or my students and our experiences as women and men are validated as culturally distinct (even where essentially similar) and pertinent to educational experience for all. Women and men are different, not just in sex characteristics, but in how professors often shape their pedagogical practices towards suppressing differences in how each gender learns. Ultimately, pedagogy tends to genderize traits negatively towards females Jane Roland Martin (1985) says we must worry about trait genderization and how it is used in informal and formal institutions to maintain the male dominating hierarchical structure.
"Otherwise we can expect females to continue to be caught in the middle of a war between educational goals and processes based on the assumption that sex is a difference that makes no difference, on the one hand, and cultural images and expectations that assume sex is the difference that makes that makes a difference, on the other hand (p. 36)."
It is not our sex, but our differences in learning who we are and how we learn from our experiences as men and women in cultures that insist on there being a difference that should also be considered.

As mentioned above it is especially important in university settings because, often, there is one kind of learning that is privileged. Adrienne Rich (1979) asserts that white male experience is taught in the universities.
"One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure of women’s experience and thought from the curriculum, and its exclusion of women as members of the academic community (p. 232)."

In order to investigate the claim that people identifying with different genders learn differently, while simultaneously valuing experience as a learning tool, I conducted a few informal interviews, the most important of which was with my grandmother. This project of looking at my grandmother’s experiences under the microscope is about exploring more about where my ways of knowing come from; why is listening to my grandmother’s voice so important? How does it shape my mission to change current pedagogical practices to be more inclusive and open to listening to experience within the classroom?
When I was younger, I did not know why it was so important that my grandmother told stories about her family. I didn’t see the value of her experience; Now I believe I value this more because I see that my grandmother knows more about what would shape my identity. By sharing the family’s history and most importantly the choices women made in the family, my grandmother was teaching me about who we were and most importantly how we should respect the experiences and choices that women make. For example, she respects my decision to stay in school rather than start a family, as I respect her decision to stay with her mother rather than go to college. This is similar to what the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing speaks about:
"Both the story and the actualities of family life change because parents and children evolve in tandem, supporting and challenging each other to develop ever more complex ways of knowing as they play out their lives together. Children encourage the development of parents as much as parents encourage the development of children (Belenky et. al., 1997, p 156)."
This is the process of how informal education takes place. My goal is to get teachers to acknowledge the process of supporting and challenging each other in developing ways of knowing. What the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing suggest happens in informal settings can also happen between students and teachers. This idea is exemplified in my interview with my grandmother.

During the interview I asked her about what she remembers about education growing up in the small town of Jonesboro, Texas. I asked Nanny if education was important. She answered emphatically:
Yes, it was…My mother was a fairly educated women for her day. My father wasn’t. But she had actually gone to college a little. She went to Tyler Junior College. Then her father became ill and she returned home. There was nobody left at home but boys, two little boys. Her other sisters had gotten married. Her mother had died from childbirth complications at age forty-two and I don’t blame her. She had to feed [all those children] and take care of the farm. Women were slaves…taking care of the farm, and they even milked the cow…It was a hard job being on the farm. [When she was younger, my mother’s] sisters taught her how to be a good housekeeper, seamstress, and all that.. She was one of 10 or so kids.

My grandmother insists that education was important because of the role education played in her own mother’s informal and formal schooling. Below, she only speaks of only formal schooling when I ask her to describe her education:
We didn’t have a big school, probably about 100 kids 1-11 grade. We had fun and we loved our teachers. We played ball. No one got in trouble we just had fun. There were some parents who kept their children to pick cotton, but they needed them to help out. When ever we got through with school we would go home and help pick cotton and make some money. My mother never kept us out of school. That is how much it meant to her.

My grandmother never went to college and she regrets not going. In fact, she even calls herself stupid about not going. This is not the first time I have heard my grandmother call herself stupid.
Certainly I have regretted that all my life because I loved to learn. The deal was we were stupid. [Mother and I] moved to Hamilton. If we had just moved to Stephenville where the college was. We were stupid not to go to Stephenville. We didn’t think of it. If we had of I probably would have gone to school. She might of, too. That is how much she thought it was important. We can’t rewrite a book over. But I did go to school later…out at TCJC [Tarrant County Junior College] sometimes, just as a senior citizen or to Weatherford College.

My grandmother describes herself before she had children, “I never did have much of a care free life because mother and I were alone. We had to take care of the farm by ourselves after dad left.” Indeed, a woman who has experienced such pain in her life as a father abandoning her and feeling an overwhelming pressure to care for her mother would have much to say about the differences between men and women. This is what shapes my grandmother’s identity and who she is right now. These are experiences that are not only in my grandmother’s sphere but also in other women’s worlds and they need to be listened to and shared. They are the testimonies that bell hooks refers to above. There is value in both the informal and formal education my grandmother was incapable of claiming which is why she denigrates herself and calls herself stupid.

When I asked my grandfather who the smartest person he knew was, he said,
Nanny…she is the smartest person I know. She knows just about everything. she can explain everything. If it hadn’t have been for mom, we wouldn’t have been here today. Even though I made a lot of things happen, she helped me along the way. I think she is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Nanny did help Pa along the way; she helped him with his contracting business by managing books and dealing with clients. She has proved her “smarts” often so that even the whole family knows she is a very intelligent woman with many experiences to share—one’s that I value more now.

If my grandmother had been a women who was interviewed by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) in Women’s Ways of Knowing, she would have been included in what they call the “received knowers” epistemological position. She remained self-less in devotion to others.
"Thinking that everything must be ‘either/or,’ the received knowers assume that in times of conflict between the self and others, they must choose one or the other but not both. Women worry that if they were to develop their own powers it would be a the expense of others. Not only are they concerned to live up to the cultural standards that hold that women should be listeners, subordinate, and unassertive; but they also worry that if they excel, those they love will automatically be penalized…Men choose the self and women choose others (Belenky et. al., 1997, p. 46)."

My grandmother understands that men are more about self than women. She refers to this difference concerning the experiences that they each are allowed to have depending on men and their “freedom” to make choices. When I asked my grandmother what it meant to be a man and a woman, she responded,
[Being a man] means freedom; freedom to leave four children with a sick wife. (meaning her dad) But it also means you have a lot of responsibility. It overpowers men to have five people depending on you and you having to clothe them. I think my father was just mentally ill and he just left. But also it could be like Pa. He got up about four thirty every morning to go to work. He had four children and had lots of fun with a lake house and giving them presents. Every man stands unto himself, makes what he wants to out of life.

A woman starts out as a baby girl, then grows up because of the culture she’s in that she is the caretaker of the family and her world. Many girls don’t feel that way and don’t have to, and I am not talking about everybody, only myself. They grow up and have kids and grandkids for their own.

This knowledge that my grandmother has gives voice to other women who have similar feelings of being silenced by the knowledge that for women it is about caring for others.

Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) describe their definition of voice and silence: “By telling us about their voice and silences, by revealing to us how much they could hear and learn from the ordinary and everyday, women told us about their views of the world and their place in it” (p. 19). Now after hearing my grandmother explain her decision to stay with her mom instead of going to college, I am less frustrated with the circumstances and more respectful of her decision out of strength in making that choice. She does not see it that way, however. In fact my grandmother is clear that she lived in silence to keep her family together. My grandmother told me during a recent visit back to Texas that she thinks staying silent through stressful times in her marriage gave her breast cancer therefore she is more aware of her self, her feelings, and how powerful voice can be.

When I asked my grandmother how she sees herself now, she talks about her experience as a mother: her three sons and daughter were her life. Indeed, this is the experience of which she is most proud: “I have some regrets because I didn’t go to school. I still learned and read and wrote. I feel that my children were my life. And I did a great job. They had excellent citizenship marks in school. They were very respectful.” While my grandmother measures her accomplishments with the citizenship marks her children made in school, I believe that a woman’s responsibility is more of what Adrienne Rich (1979) articulates,
"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking ‘gut’ courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems (p.233-234)."

Women will continue listening to other people’s experiences, connecting and learning from these experiences. More importantly what I have learned from this exploration of my grandmother’s experiences is that voice and experience has a place in not only informal settings but in formal classrooms. This type of experience is valuable and instructors should make every effort to value it. One way of doing this is through what Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) call “the connected class.”
"The connected class recognizes the core of truth in the subjectivist view that each of us has a unique perspective that is in some sense irrefutably ‘right’ by virtue of its existence. But the connected class transforms these private truths into ‘objects,‘ publicly available to the members of the class who, through ‘stretching and sharing,’ add to themselves as knowers by absorbing in their own fashion of their classmates’ ideas (p. 223)."

This type of connected class is a change in how traditional college classrooms are held. As bell hooks (1994) suggests, “Allow your students, or yourself [as professor or teacher], to talk about experience; sharing personal narratives yet linking that knowledge with academic information really enhances our capacity to know” (p. 148). She elaborates that when one comes to their own voice in the act of telling about their own experience you can begin to speak freely about other subjects like race, class, and language (hooks, 1994). Connected teaching allows student and teachers alike to gain a stronger voice of subjective knowledge. That voice when allowed to speak from experience will help students grow and begin to feel more a part of their own learning as a person rather than an objective listener. Teachers need to open up their classrooms to allow personal experience in and allow opportunities to connect that experience with the subjects being learned. True learning can only take place when connections are made; connections between people and the texts they might be reading. When students are allowed to share their voice of experience, knowledge and experiences are shared without dominating or suppressing pedagogical practice, they begin questioning which is critical in connecting and understanding the subject.

References
Interview. Wilmuth Mavinee Box Johnson. November 21, 2004.
Interview. Lester Lee Johnson. November 21, 2004
Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M. (1997). Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: BasicBooks.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Martin, J. R. (1985). Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rich, A. (1979). Claiming and Education. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (pp. 231-235). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Pilot Schools

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002892122_peirce27.html

this article is about Pilot schools in Boston. the inbetween of charter schools and public schools. need to research this more.

more on small schools

Posted on EDDRA listserve...

Small high schools pioneer Deborah Meier will answer questions and respond
to comments on the National Education Association web site for about the
next month. She was interviewed for the February issue of NEA Today, the
NEA¹s member magazine, and the interview is posted now at
www.nea.org/neatodayextra/smallschools.html.

high school inclusion programs

Thomas Hehir - Eliminating Ableism in Education
Article that discusses teacher's and other's abelist philosophy that inherently discriminates against students with disabilities. Hehir is saying that labeling a student with a specific learning disability as "non-categorical," it prevents a better education and the label of dislexia, etc., helps the teachers, parents and students to accommodate the student's needs more effectivly.
It is an interesting philosphy and I think, connects well to the All Kinds of Minds philosophy of Mel Levine in that it seems to be the opposite of what Levin is saying. Rather than focusing on the weakness, which is what Hehir is saying, Levine states that focusing on the student's strengths are the key to educating the child.

"The research discussed thus far indicates several clear implications for educational practice. First, there is a population of children who are likely to experience significant difficulty with reading even with the best interventions. Dyslexia is clearly a disabling condition. Second, reading improvement for these students can continue to occur throughout their schooling if that intervention is sufficiently intensive and appropriate. Third, those with the most severe problems in reading print are likely to experience increasing difficulty in school as the cumulative effects of reading deficiency become apparent. Fourth, significant numbers of these students are receiving inappropriate educational assistance in terms of both the interventions they receive and their access to the curriculum."

Success with high school students

Best Schools Share path to Success
In a first report:
"while not the strongest performers in all areas, have been able to make better-than-expected gains with their students, including large numbers of minority and low-income youths..."

In the second report, researchers found:

• Principals are more likely to match talented teachers with students who need them most, instead of following a more common practice of assigning department heads and other experienced teachers to advanced or honors classes.
= this was not the case 5 years ago in Fort Worth ISD where I was one of 4 certified teachers. Everyone else was going through emergency certification. I guess one good thing about NCLB is the highly qualified label re quired for teachers to teach at schools who receive Title 1 funds. However this blocks some "qualified" but not teacher certified teachers who have been excellent educators for years.

• Support for new teachers tends to be more thorough and includes such techniques as providing model lesson plans and teaming a beginner with an experienced colleague.
= this is like the mentor program in FCPS. It would be good to implement this at CCPCS.

• Early intervention programs — often mandatory — are used to help students before they fail and become discouraged; requiring summer school or after-school tutoring is common.
= this should be required of students before they graduate from CCPCS's eighth grade.

• Academic support services for struggling students keep them in current-grade-level classes while they are catching up; in more typical schools, such students are put into remedial classes, reducing their chances of meeting rigorous graduation requirements on time.
= this is the same research that I found 3 years ago when I did the inclusion research. I can't remember where it was, but they stated that students who were pulled during content area instruction received a lot less content and the remediation kept them further behind their peers. This, thankfully, does not occur at Capital City.

• The focus is on preparing students for life beyond high school, not just on getting students to graduation day; academic expectations are high — often including a college-prep curriculum for all students — and consistently communicated to parents and students.

CCPCS needs to enroll students into summer school and make it a requirement. Is this going on already?

Teaching Children to Care by Ruth Sidney Charney

I am reading a book that is the foundation of CapCity PCS where I will be working starting August 15. The premis of the book is how to manage the classroom to provide opportunities for ethical as well as academic growth. Nel Noddings writes the preface so the book has got to be key to the change that should be made to create more caring individuals through schooling. Charney says that it is about empathy (knowing the child) and structure (seting guidlines and limits)

Quotes: "students need to feel the power to exert self-control" and "students need to feel the power to care which gives them a greater feeling of community" (not directly quoted)

tbc

Carlos and I enjoying Castle Rock in Frozen Head State Park, TN before he died.

What High School's need...

What the Gates foundation is recommending, again, for better high schools. Now will others listen?

Change is Good?!

Tuesday was my last day at Timber Lane Elementary, a public school in Fairfax County. I am now employed, as of August 14, 2005, with Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, DC. The reason I am changing schools is first and foremost for professional reasons. When I started my master's degree program at UVA and started reading Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer I knew I wanted to work in a Coalition School like the one's they were talking about. I want to provide families a more intimate school to have their children attend, one where the parents and the children new their teachers personnally. Students in Coalitions Schools aren't just numbers, they are children with value.
Of course, I think that Timber Lane offered that, however, they were too absorbed with testing. They were pressured from their administration to raise test scores or they would lose funding and children could choose to go to another school. Timber Lane was the only school of its kind to not have to offer the choice to parents to go somewhere else because we passed NCLB AYP. Yeah!
The teachers that I worked with were great teachers. They really care for the kids. However, their instruction and pedagogy wained as they tried to teach the random Standards of Learning. They constantly worried about whether or not their children were learning the material; some were, some weren't. Those that could learn it could memorize random facts presented in a disconnected way and still do well on a test. You know the one's. The other students had no clue which way was up or down. They had made no connections to the material presented to them because of the disorganized, teach-to-the-test instruction. You might ask, Why didn't you stay around, Jill? You want organized instruction and radical pedagogy, then change the way it is at Timber Lane.
Here's the thing. Timber Lane is not ready for that. The teachers like to have the standards right their at their finger tips so that when they sit down on Friday to write their weekly lesson plans they know which objectives to teach. They also know that if they mess around with any other sort of radical pedagogy, that means that they are wasting time.
What they don't realize, and I did try to explain it to them as best as I could, is that the children will not learn the material presented unless they make a connection to their own lives. (Good luck with Virginia History, and to the rest of the states who require state history to immigrants and transient students). The students must also have ownership of the material rather than feeling like a receptacle for knowledge. They must have power of their own learning for meaning to take root. Now that seems easy enough, but Timber Lane is not ready for that. The teachers and administration do not feel as if they have the time, nor autonomy to provide this sort of instruction. They must teach the rock cycle, Ancient Civilizations, Butterflies, and more, all in one year.
Anyway, I am moving to a school that has the sort of integrated teaching that I think works for kids and provides them with the knowledge to be good citizens and smart critical thinkers. Now I must go and see if it really is all that I expect. My goal is to take what I learn at CapCity and integrate it into public schools who feel out of control with testing. If I can't do it inside existing public schools, than I can help create teams who are willing to change and provide a new school for children to attend if the shoe fits. I am not talking about vouchers for Catholic schools. That is a whole different topic. I am talking about school choice. Matching school philosophies with families.

here i am in front of the Curry School at UVA, recently graduated

my Master's in Social Foundations in Education graduation May 2005, UVA

Resources :: The Forum for Education and Democracy

Resources :: The Forum for Education and Democracy

This and other resources will be handy when I think about how I want to help a school grow to become a strong school that teaches kids about their rights and responsibilities to be citizens in this country. It is not just about voting.

High school standards

HoustonChronicle.com - Perry backs challenge to feds on student testing: "A total of 13 states have signed on to support the American Diploma Project, which aims to get all students ready for college or work. Specifically, the states committed to:
� Align their high school standards and tests with the skills required in college and the workplace. Colleges and universities would have to clearly define the skills required for their credit-bearing courses, and states would be expected to adjust their English and math standards.
� Require all students to take a test of their readiness for college or work so that children can get help where needed while still in high school.
� Require all students to take a core curriculum that prepares them for college or work. States would have to ensure that rigorous-sounding courses have the content to match.
� Hold high schools and colleges more accountable for graduating their students. States would have to improve data collection to track individual students through all grades and college.
-- The Associated Press"

What this could potentially mean is that there is less of a chance for students to experience a brad range of curriculum whether it be vocational or academic in nature. Will they have more opportunities to make connections to real life? or is this just tracking?
Another thing, this will lead to a downward shift to the middle schools and elementary schools and possibly change their curriculum to aide the high school curriculum. It is a dominoe effect.

Work and the Moral Woman. Deborah Stone.

I found this while searching about Deborah Stone. Here she writes about women and their place in society as defined by society. Good connection to Michelle Bolton.

http://www.prospect.org/print/V8/35/stone-d.html

Curry: Social Foundations | Degrees

Curry: Social Foundations Degrees

friends at my birthday dinner 

My family 

Merit Pay in Texas, Perry's proposal

DallasNews.com | News for Dallas, Texas | Education: "Would the promise of an extra $5,000 a year spur teachers to get more out of their students on testing day"

This being the most important thing, right? Wrong! What we need is for the "real teachers, please stand up!" (thoms). This is key here, why don't people get this?

"the way to encourage strong teachers is to reward their work." True...but how we judge good teaching is very subjective if we are not basing it on test scores. If we do base it on test scores, then how do we know that the teachers aren't teaching to the test, rather than, as Parker PAlmer says, really teaching and making the subject come alive? That is the goal.

see article for places it didn't work.

Decoding Why Few Girls Choose Science, Math

Decoding Why Few Girls Choose Science, Math (washingtonpost.com):
"Teachers and scientists say that there are greater differences in learning styles within each sex than there are between the sexes and that any school or teacher that doesn't approach students as individuals is missing the mark. "

This topic relates nicely to the recent comment by Harvard Pres. Summers about women being inherantly weaker in the maths and sciences.

George T would ask, however, what are we doing wasting kids time with Math. The argument gets old...but he has a point. Even Nel says so. How can we get the kids to care? and love math and science?

connection to Courage to teach, by Palmer

New Horizons for Learning Online Journal: Winter 2005

articles in issue of New Horizons for Learning's online Journal. Discussion that takes place surrounds topic of direct teaching approach that so many teachers are doing to meet the standards while forgetting about the joy of learning and teaching.

"They offer principles and tools that will not only help students to learn more effectively but will help them to enjoy the process and be intereted in continuing to learn throughout life..."