My roommates finally moved in last night. We made dinner together and talked into the evening. The three of us have been meshing nicely so far. We all seem to have an interest in cleanliness (not to mention education). I was kind of feeling an edge of competitiveness and insecurity, also regarding the interns from last year and I decided to check that at the door. I feel comfortable in the house, and it feels more homely now that two other people are here with me.
We had our first day of school today. The entire next two weeks are teacher training/inservice. We started off with introductions. They took an hour and a half, which was nice to really get a chance to hear from everyone. There were three teachers there that I hadn't even met before, and everyone else I have known for under a week. There was a wide range of experience, and interesting stories of how people got involved in the Free School. Institutionalized "higher ed" isn't a prerequisite for working here so people had lots of different backgrounds. I found out all the teachers get paid the same, despite years at the school, degrees, etc. They all share in the school administration duties, as there is no administration or higher ups.
Then we talked about the background and history of the Albany Free School. Most of that discussion was dedicated to recent history, as the school has gone through many changes in the past year. Last February they hosted a weekend long anti-oppression training. This is my understanding of the situation, as having heard about it second hand. At the meeting were teachers, parents, former students, interns, elders, neighborhood folx. The meeting was a culmination of years of people saying: we have issues we need to deal with regarding race and gender and it finally coming to a head at this meeting. One of the biggest issues was this school being in a predominantly black neighborhood and most of the students being white, and all but one of the teachers being white. Behind that issue were the questions who are we serving? are we institutionally or culturally isolating ourselves or excluding others? Another issue regarded gender: there was a predominance of male voices in teachers circles, as well as male dominance in student settings. How can we foster better relations and a better understanding of how society affects our expression of gender in our relationships with each other and the younger people in the school? This workshop caused a lot of tension among teachers and Free School community members between people who saw room for change and those who saw change as compromising the core values or other community functionality. It resulted in a more democratically run "administration" and trying to create a more accessible Board of Directors meeting. New staff were hired. Also, a white identity group has since started meeting, as well as a people of color identity group. I am really excited to be entering the school at this point of critical self-examination. I asked why those two oppressions were focused on and what sort of class issues they felt they had. They said they focused on race and gender because those were to oppressions that had come up as serious issues. They said that since the inception of the school class oppression has been openly discussed and the struggle to make the school financially affordable has always been dealt with in ways like sliding scale tuition and scholarships, whereas race and gender oppression had not been addressed to that extent.
That was the most notable part of our discussion. Another part that I really appreciated was just watching the staff interact. Surely (perhaps) there are nuances and interpersonal conflicts that I am not aware of, but I really see a leadership team among them, with different people taking on different areas and an understanding of people's personal lives and personalities.
I think school will be an exciting adventure. I feel at a bit of a disadvantage (or something) that I am the only intern who didn't visit before coming so I haven't heard the roar of music and voices that IS the free school, or witnessed the common interactions between people, but I am sure that I will quickly become acclimated.
Here I go!
Monday, August 27, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
where I'm at
I am in Albany, NY. I just moved here last Sunday. I am going to be interning at the Albany Free School. I start training next week. The community here is real different than lawrence. There are lots of community organizations, but I haven't figured out quite how they all interact and are supported. I went to a space last night called the Federation of Ideas, which designs itself as a community center, much like Solidarity with free internet and a lending library. but it doesn't affiliate itself politically, cause it wants to keep itself accessible to the people in the neighborhood. Mostly they just practice mutual aid. One thing that was a good sign to me was that they had 3 youth at their general meeting (like between ages 10 and 15) They listened part of the time, talked part of the time, and one of them is planning a showing of the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe movie.
I was just comparing Albany and Lawrence based on Wikipedia stats. Albany occupies a space of 21.8 square miles and has a population of 95,658. Lawrence occupies a space of 28.7 square miles and has a population of 80,098 people (as of 2000 census mind you) 30.7% of Lawrence's population is between the ages 18-24. 19.3% of Albany's population is between the ages 18-24. There is a lot smaller population of people my age here than in Lawrence I think, or a lot of people might be my age but have families. I am excited to start going to the school and get to know more people. Also, the weird thing about albany that makes it seem large to me besides being north-eastern (large buildings, row houses, etc.) is that it is bordered by several other cities including Rennselaer, Troy, and Schenectady. I think Albany draws a lot of people from nearby towns for jobs because of the state capital here. There isn't one particular main drag like in Lawrence, instead there are several. The free school neighborhood that I live in is quaint, everyone knows everyone else, and there are usually sounds of children or people in their yards or in the streets. The neighborhood is gentrified in the fact that all the people that live on my block either work or have students at the freeschool (and have a majority of white inhabitants) compared to the other blocks around it having a majority of black residents. There are 63% of the population of Albany that are white and 28% black, compared to 83% white in Lawrence and 5% black. It definitely challenges my internalized prejudices about how to socialize, like the cultural differences and how that effects who I make friends with. I found out Albany is known as "Smallbany"
I was just comparing Albany and Lawrence based on Wikipedia stats. Albany occupies a space of 21.8 square miles and has a population of 95,658. Lawrence occupies a space of 28.7 square miles and has a population of 80,098 people (as of 2000 census mind you) 30.7% of Lawrence's population is between the ages 18-24. 19.3% of Albany's population is between the ages 18-24. There is a lot smaller population of people my age here than in Lawrence I think, or a lot of people might be my age but have families. I am excited to start going to the school and get to know more people. Also, the weird thing about albany that makes it seem large to me besides being north-eastern (large buildings, row houses, etc.) is that it is bordered by several other cities including Rennselaer, Troy, and Schenectady. I think Albany draws a lot of people from nearby towns for jobs because of the state capital here. There isn't one particular main drag like in Lawrence, instead there are several. The free school neighborhood that I live in is quaint, everyone knows everyone else, and there are usually sounds of children or people in their yards or in the streets. The neighborhood is gentrified in the fact that all the people that live on my block either work or have students at the freeschool (and have a majority of white inhabitants) compared to the other blocks around it having a majority of black residents. There are 63% of the population of Albany that are white and 28% black, compared to 83% white in Lawrence and 5% black. It definitely challenges my internalized prejudices about how to socialize, like the cultural differences and how that effects who I make friends with. I found out Albany is known as "Smallbany"
Why Teach?
The education profession is an exciting career choice for me because it is always changing. New settings, new students, new parents, new coworkers and new pedagogical ideas are always rotating through the life of a teacher. To explain my evolution as a teacher I will explain my own childhood education, the turning point when I realized I wanted to be a teacher and my vision of continuing to teach into the future.
My childhood education is fairly normative: I attended elementary, middle and high school in the public education system. I advanced from one grade to the next each subsequent year. My teachers were almost all white and the student population was about seventy-five percent white, with about fifty percent girls and fifty percent boys. I was privileged to have teachers who believed in my ability to achieve and I excelled in the traditional education system. My parents supported my reading and I often looked forward to homework. Although I got good grades, I often was not challenged enough in my classes and would become bored and distracted. Starting in the fourth grade, my school experimented with multi-age classrooms. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders were in one classroom together and teachers cycled through with the same children for all three years. In theory this switch could have allowed me to go ahead in curriculum and find peers among the sixth graders. Ultimately, however, I think there were too many students per classroom and while learning as a group we could only move as fast as the most struggling student. The only areas that I showed great improvement in were those that we broke up into levels for, including math and art. I was able to skip two years in math, which challenged me all the way through high school. In retrospect I realize that the multi-age grouping served limiting to me because the learning was compartmentalized and the curriculum was linear. Therefore I was only allowed to “learn” as far as the teacher, the students, and the curriculum would allow me to stretch.
By the time I started middle school I was beyond ready. I had wanted to skip the sixth grade year and go straight into middle school, but I did not communicate this desire with anyone and completed elementary school the standard way. I had already been busing to the middle school for math classes for two years, and my mother taught there so I acclimated to the change in schools quickly. Academically I continued to achieve high marks according to the system, but I grew most socially. I joined the theater program and acted in many of the school’s plays. Extracurricular activities and a new social group helped me learn how to communicate better and to be humble. In hindsight I can see the way that not practicing those skills more, earlier caused me hurt in some of my personal relationships, but through that hurt I grew.
My focus in high school changed. This was in part due again to a changing social group. The city had built a new high school and split the boundaries along an East/West line in order to not have a rich and a poor school. This move actually hurt many poor families from my neighborhood because we were sent to the school all the way across town, instead of the school only several blocks from our house. This move separated me from many of the close friendships I made. After that point I saw high school mainly as academic: I went in, did my work, and went home, at which point real life commenced. Apart from a handful of genuinely intriguing and challenging teachers, I became weary of the growing amount of “busy work”. Disillusioned with high school, I graduated high school a semester early, and skipped the graduation ceremony and prom.
It would be easy for someone to look at my school career as successful due to the grades and awards I earned throughout my time in school. However it is clear to me now how I was hurt, both socially and academically by following a traditional school model. My awareness of this was heightened in high school and immediately following by my participation in a Unitarian Universalist youth group. Together we built supportive relationships and learned about youth empowerment. Through that support my conformity with what was socially expected of me began to waver, especially going to college. I did not know what I would want to study in college, and saw more of a waste of my time if I decided to pursue college at that point. I decided to take an alternate route by attending a trade school for cosmetology. My skills thus far had been mostly developed intellectually, and here was my chance to develop a skill kinesthetically.
So there I was in beauty school, with time on my hands (as beauty schools go). My awareness of youth empowerment led me to become involved with conferences and workshops focused on anti-oppression. My interest was piqued regarding my identities and their relationship to society. I began reading anti-oppression theory books with all of my downtime in school. Everything changed for me when someone lent me, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together At the Cafeteria Table?” by Dr. Beverly Tatum. My study of youth empowerment had come full circle, because this book discussed youth empowerment and anti-oppression together. I came to the realization I wanted to be a parent someday, and I had no idea how I wanted to raise my children. I immediately began seeking out books and allies to discuss what I had learned to call “multicultural education.”
From that point on all of my leisure reading was dedicated to books on pedagogy. After six months of working as a cosmetologist I decided that the time had come to put my passion into action and to strengthen my core values, my knowledge, and my skills at being a teacher by going back to school. Taking a break after high school was crucial for me to get my head on straight and figure out what I was really passionate about. The college I attended required a whole slew of general education classes, but still, once my homework was done I amused myself by reading books about education.
I was inspired by Paulo Freire’s concept of revolutionary praxis being theory plus action. At that point I felt stuck in the theory stage. I felt little support from my education peers and teachers in studying progressive education. At that point I sought out Goddard College, because it allowed me to create me own focus within education, and freed up time for me to get hands on experience in the types of schools I had been reading about. Transferring colleges meant living out my ideals for me, instead of feeling stuck in a traditional institution.
My vision now is to draw from as many progressive educators as I can. I am about to start an internship at the Albany Free School. I have never taught in a free school before, but I am excited to see what elements I think could work for me as an educator. I stand strong in the belief that there are as many ways to best teach people, as there are people! Therefore I see my time now, as I complete my teacher licensure at Goddard, as time to continue to expose myself to and draw from progressive educators so that I may become a well-rounded educator myself.
Teaching is a way for me to become a well-rounded person, a dynamic parent and a contributor in the struggle to end oppression and make our world a better place to be. As I continue to evolve in this career I stand grounded in my childhood education, I am motivated by my turning point in youth empowerment, and I am inspired by my vision of an anti-oppressive education and my willingness to adapt. I dedicate my teaching career to my struggle as a life-long learner.
My childhood education is fairly normative: I attended elementary, middle and high school in the public education system. I advanced from one grade to the next each subsequent year. My teachers were almost all white and the student population was about seventy-five percent white, with about fifty percent girls and fifty percent boys. I was privileged to have teachers who believed in my ability to achieve and I excelled in the traditional education system. My parents supported my reading and I often looked forward to homework. Although I got good grades, I often was not challenged enough in my classes and would become bored and distracted. Starting in the fourth grade, my school experimented with multi-age classrooms. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders were in one classroom together and teachers cycled through with the same children for all three years. In theory this switch could have allowed me to go ahead in curriculum and find peers among the sixth graders. Ultimately, however, I think there were too many students per classroom and while learning as a group we could only move as fast as the most struggling student. The only areas that I showed great improvement in were those that we broke up into levels for, including math and art. I was able to skip two years in math, which challenged me all the way through high school. In retrospect I realize that the multi-age grouping served limiting to me because the learning was compartmentalized and the curriculum was linear. Therefore I was only allowed to “learn” as far as the teacher, the students, and the curriculum would allow me to stretch.
By the time I started middle school I was beyond ready. I had wanted to skip the sixth grade year and go straight into middle school, but I did not communicate this desire with anyone and completed elementary school the standard way. I had already been busing to the middle school for math classes for two years, and my mother taught there so I acclimated to the change in schools quickly. Academically I continued to achieve high marks according to the system, but I grew most socially. I joined the theater program and acted in many of the school’s plays. Extracurricular activities and a new social group helped me learn how to communicate better and to be humble. In hindsight I can see the way that not practicing those skills more, earlier caused me hurt in some of my personal relationships, but through that hurt I grew.
My focus in high school changed. This was in part due again to a changing social group. The city had built a new high school and split the boundaries along an East/West line in order to not have a rich and a poor school. This move actually hurt many poor families from my neighborhood because we were sent to the school all the way across town, instead of the school only several blocks from our house. This move separated me from many of the close friendships I made. After that point I saw high school mainly as academic: I went in, did my work, and went home, at which point real life commenced. Apart from a handful of genuinely intriguing and challenging teachers, I became weary of the growing amount of “busy work”. Disillusioned with high school, I graduated high school a semester early, and skipped the graduation ceremony and prom.
It would be easy for someone to look at my school career as successful due to the grades and awards I earned throughout my time in school. However it is clear to me now how I was hurt, both socially and academically by following a traditional school model. My awareness of this was heightened in high school and immediately following by my participation in a Unitarian Universalist youth group. Together we built supportive relationships and learned about youth empowerment. Through that support my conformity with what was socially expected of me began to waver, especially going to college. I did not know what I would want to study in college, and saw more of a waste of my time if I decided to pursue college at that point. I decided to take an alternate route by attending a trade school for cosmetology. My skills thus far had been mostly developed intellectually, and here was my chance to develop a skill kinesthetically.
So there I was in beauty school, with time on my hands (as beauty schools go). My awareness of youth empowerment led me to become involved with conferences and workshops focused on anti-oppression. My interest was piqued regarding my identities and their relationship to society. I began reading anti-oppression theory books with all of my downtime in school. Everything changed for me when someone lent me, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together At the Cafeteria Table?” by Dr. Beverly Tatum. My study of youth empowerment had come full circle, because this book discussed youth empowerment and anti-oppression together. I came to the realization I wanted to be a parent someday, and I had no idea how I wanted to raise my children. I immediately began seeking out books and allies to discuss what I had learned to call “multicultural education.”
From that point on all of my leisure reading was dedicated to books on pedagogy. After six months of working as a cosmetologist I decided that the time had come to put my passion into action and to strengthen my core values, my knowledge, and my skills at being a teacher by going back to school. Taking a break after high school was crucial for me to get my head on straight and figure out what I was really passionate about. The college I attended required a whole slew of general education classes, but still, once my homework was done I amused myself by reading books about education.
I was inspired by Paulo Freire’s concept of revolutionary praxis being theory plus action. At that point I felt stuck in the theory stage. I felt little support from my education peers and teachers in studying progressive education. At that point I sought out Goddard College, because it allowed me to create me own focus within education, and freed up time for me to get hands on experience in the types of schools I had been reading about. Transferring colleges meant living out my ideals for me, instead of feeling stuck in a traditional institution.
My vision now is to draw from as many progressive educators as I can. I am about to start an internship at the Albany Free School. I have never taught in a free school before, but I am excited to see what elements I think could work for me as an educator. I stand strong in the belief that there are as many ways to best teach people, as there are people! Therefore I see my time now, as I complete my teacher licensure at Goddard, as time to continue to expose myself to and draw from progressive educators so that I may become a well-rounded educator myself.
Teaching is a way for me to become a well-rounded person, a dynamic parent and a contributor in the struggle to end oppression and make our world a better place to be. As I continue to evolve in this career I stand grounded in my childhood education, I am motivated by my turning point in youth empowerment, and I am inspired by my vision of an anti-oppressive education and my willingness to adapt. I dedicate my teaching career to my struggle as a life-long learner.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Why Teach? essay outline
- Introduction
- As someone who benefited from the system, why question it
- Review points: My education, the turning point, and my vision
- Point 1: My education
- Elementary School
- Highlights
- Lowlights
- What it meant to me
- Middle School
- Highlights
- Lowlights
- What it meant to me
- High School
- Highlights
- Lowlights
- What it meant to me
- Point 2: the turning point
- YRUU and Youth Empowerment
- Anti-oppression and social justice
- Beauty school and education
- Point 3: my vision
- Praxis: Theory + action (cite Paulo Freire)
- Reading pedagogy
- Transferring colleges: living out my ideals
- Albany Free School: experience
- Parent
- What do I value?
- What do I want to avoid?
- Social Justice
- Doing my part in the rev
- Conclusion
- Review points: my experience, turning point, my vision
Multiculturalism: A Conversation of Different Voices by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
o “Unfortunately, as history has taught us, an Anglo-American regional culture has too often masked itself as universal, passing traditions off as our “common culture,” and depicting different cultural traditions as “tribal” or “parochial.” (8)
o Henry Louis Gates Jr. addresses the controversy of a push towards “multiculturalism” in our nation’s public schools. He poses the counter argument being that the goal is “replacing honest historical scholarship with a ‘feel good’ syllabus designed solely to bolster the self-esteem of minorities.” (7) to which he counters that America was incepted as a democratic nation, but thus far our institution of education has systematically disenfranchised marginalized people. As well as posing the argument counter to multiculturalism that some people are proponents of, that people should “master our own culture” first before learning others. The counter argument to that being, “what gets to count as “our” culture? What makes knowledge worth knowing?” (7).
o “Common sense reminds us that we’re all ethnics, and the challenge of transcending ethnic chauvinism is one we all face.” (8)
o 8/21/2007 Last night I was talking to Bhawin, the intern coordinator for the Albany Free School. We were talking about multiculturalism and anti-oppression within the Free School community. He made a very good point that when addressing prejudice in children of the free school some might say that it is going against the Free School ideal of freedom of expression. Indeed, once some students felt like he was oppressing them as an adult because he was asking them to take a step back from a situation because they were dominating it. Instead of creating an empowering environment for everyone, the space had been dominated by the gender-privileged students there. If freedom of expression is the goal, then it can’t be at the expense of a portion of the other schoolmates/anyone.
o Henry Louis Gates Jr. addresses the controversy of a push towards “multiculturalism” in our nation’s public schools. He poses the counter argument being that the goal is “replacing honest historical scholarship with a ‘feel good’ syllabus designed solely to bolster the self-esteem of minorities.” (7) to which he counters that America was incepted as a democratic nation, but thus far our institution of education has systematically disenfranchised marginalized people. As well as posing the argument counter to multiculturalism that some people are proponents of, that people should “master our own culture” first before learning others. The counter argument to that being, “what gets to count as “our” culture? What makes knowledge worth knowing?” (7).
o “Common sense reminds us that we’re all ethnics, and the challenge of transcending ethnic chauvinism is one we all face.” (8)
o 8/21/2007 Last night I was talking to Bhawin, the intern coordinator for the Albany Free School. We were talking about multiculturalism and anti-oppression within the Free School community. He made a very good point that when addressing prejudice in children of the free school some might say that it is going against the Free School ideal of freedom of expression. Indeed, once some students felt like he was oppressing them as an adult because he was asking them to take a step back from a situation because they were dominating it. Instead of creating an empowering environment for everyone, the space had been dominated by the gender-privileged students there. If freedom of expression is the goal, then it can’t be at the expense of a portion of the other schoolmates/anyone.
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