Chapter 7: Variations on a Theme
First let me say that I believe a critical literacy curriculum needs to be lived and that whatever form it takes should arise from the social and political conditions that unfold in communities in which we live. So I could begin locally and move to more global issues and spaces or it could begin from a global perspective as world events and topics are reflected in the sociopolitical issues that unfold in a community. Given this take on critical literacy, I don’t believe it can be traditionally taught. In other words, as teachers, attempting to work through a critical literacy perspective, I believe we need to incorporate a critical stance in our everyday lives in order to find ways to help children understand and analyze the social and political issues around them.
….On the one hand, we need to finds ways to make the technology accessible to more children. On the other hand, we need to find ways to accept the challenge(s) of the new technological world in which we live to best support children…who participate in the world with new mindsets, identities, and practices that impact their lives at home, at school, and beyond.
Vivian Vasquez (2014)
Leading up to the turn of the 20th century and into the 21st, the flows of capital, information, and bodies across traditional borders seemed to “flatten” the world, enabling more people to participate in the negotiations of an increasingly global society. Facilitated by technological innovations and free trade political agreements, previous historical advantages among nations are being reduced, encouraging commercial and cultural exchanges under new, leveled conditions. Advocates for these changes argue that sustained global economic growth and deeper cultural understandings across differences through communications among people will drive and democratize human progress as never before. As Thomas Friedman declared in The World is Flat (2005), globalization will change the 20th century patterns of everyone’s life and accelerate the speed of changes across shorter periods of time and further scales of space.
Vasquez implies that 21st century teachers face similar challenges to those progressive teachers faced at the turn of the 19th century. Increased capacities for communication and intricate commercial networks disrupt the “established social, political and moral dimensions of everyday lives” (Dewey, 1899), leaving young and old with “habits” that are poorly suited to understand and engage the new potential opportunities (and pitfalls) across larger geographic scales. Now mobility, connectivity, and digitized forms of technology create new ways of social interactions both near and far, but they also end personal privacy as we knew it in the 20th century. Although workflow software, outsourcing, offshoring, and supply chain management increase the variety and lower the prices of commodities and services, they also change the conditions of employment, its security, and its availability across rural, suburban and urban areas. At once people are more connected to, but also in constant competition with, people all over the world.
Vasquez accepts Dewey’s conception of the roles of schooling in general and literacy instruction in particular. Progressive teachers should help people: understand these changes, identify their likely consequences, prepare for the accelerating pace, and negotiate [continuously] new ways to adapt to and to influence these forces. She acknowledges that these roles are not neutral or disinterested. Although teachers should assist students to fit in or cope with the changes, they must also prepare student to participate actively in decisions that enable and direct these changes as well. That is, schooling and literacy should be directed toward achieving a just democracy by producing social arrangements that will enable everyone to participate as peers in the globalized social life. That means continuing and extending the 20th century concerns for the economic and cultural dimensions of justice because clearly maldistribution of economic resources (surpassing the inequalities of Dewey’s time) and misrecognition of cultural standing (undermining legal gains made in the 1950s and 60s) remain barriers to participatory parity in and out of schools. When discussing this work, Vasquez’s conditional language (could, should, attempting) follows Delpit’s (1988) and Ellsworth’s (1989) advice that progressives become more circumspect and sensitive in their assumptions of similarity and solidarity across human differences and more reflexive about their goals and pedagogies.
For Vasquez, globalization adds a third dimension to teaching for social justice. Progressive curriculum should arise from students’ immediate community. However, that point of entry is confounded by the new and rapidly changing relationships between the global and the local. These changes add a political dimension of representation (Fraser, 2009). Vasquez encourages teachers and students to ask: What are the political boundaries in which distribution and recognition claims of injustice can be made and adjudicated? Who is to be included and who is to be excluded when such boundaries are established? By what authority can any body act after jurisdictions are drawn? According to what (whose) rules? What appeared quite clear to most Americans during the American 20th century has become murky during the 21st.
By the language she chooses, Vasquez reaches back across the 130-year history of progressive education in order to articulate her position. As Parker, Pratt, Colling, Clapp, and Dennison practiced, she states that a literacy curriculum “needs to be lived,” immediately meaningful in “communities in which we live,” and helping “children to understand and analyze.” Pedagogy is neither fixed (“whatever form it takes”) nor finalized (“attempting to work”). Therefore, teachers must learn along with their students because “I don’t believe it can be traditionally taught” and sensitive to their interests (“with new mindsets, identities, and practices”). Following Harvey, Rugg, Horton, Clark, and Bigelow, Vasquez advocates for teachers to make the curriculum, tools and pedagogies “accessible to more students” because all are assumed to be interested and interesting in what “arise from” and “unfold in” their daily lives and to possess the capacity to “understand and analyze.” Teachers “need to incorporate a critical stance in our everyday lives” in order to demonstrate what reading is for and what writing can do in coming to understand and to act upon the unjust “social and political issues around them.”
Other 21st century progressive teachers reach back in a similar manner as they create curricula and pedagogy with their students. Like the Quincy teachers of the 19th century, they do not follow a singular format for their work because there is not a single “progressive method.” Rather like their predecessors, the current progressive teachers choose different points of entry according to their beliefs and situations, foregrounding different elements from their progressive values. These differences matter greatly and are worthy subjects for both theoretical and practical discussions within reflexive progressive communities. The similarities are equally important – that is, if progressive teachers seek to contribute to social justice movements in the United States.
Cannot be traditionally taught
In 1993, the Center for Inquiry opened as a school within a school at #92 Elementary in Indianapolis. Forged through negotiations among teachers, parents, faculty from the local campus, and district administrators over a three-year period, the Center’s mission was to develop a design for urban schools that supported the basic tenets of the “Quincy Method.” All students and teachers have the right to ask and address questions that interest them. With the help of others, they learn all the time and in all environments. Curriculum and learning, then, cannot and does not follow a single or even a typical path for all learners. Therefore, school barriers to these principles should be identified and mitigated, if not overcome. The Center began with 100 students, five teachers and five teaching interns and has spread across multiple public school campuses in Indianapolis and to one in South Carolina. None look alike; all are in continuous processes of development; and each has something to contribute to the struggle for progressive education.
For example, Kate Kuonen’s fifth and sixth grade students dug deeply into their understandings of video games, exploring the ways that digital games work on and in their lives (Leland, Harste & Kuonen, 2008). Much to the disbelief of her students, Kuonen invited them to bring, play and discuss games in the classroom, sharing with others their talents, experiences, and advice. Over several months of play, discussion, and note taking, students noticed differences among their perspectives on and commitment to certain types of games, but all agreed that the games were commodities (highly commercially coded to increase sales and not necessarily to inform the public accurately) and that most games were gendered both in content and as social artifacts. Much of the content was directly sexist, and even in their own practices and discussions, female students were often excluded and/or their comments and expertise were discounted. Kuonen’s students decided to make their inquiry findings public, designing informational posters and distributing them about the school.
During a second phase of the inquiry, Kuonen learned a pedagogical lesson. According to her original plan, all her students would play a UNICEF “Water Alert” digital game because it broached a subject important to their class theme – “to make the world a better place.” However, she found that the game’s design undermined her intentions for serious engagement with the topic. Although the game’s producers were clearly sincere about the content of the game - the maldistribution of potable water around the world - their design violated basic principles of play, denying multiple points of entry and alternative routes to solutions. Some declared the game to be “a textbook in disguise” and actively worked to subvert its purpose. In order to “recover” her original intention and to recapture interest, Kuonen reopened the inquiry about water security through print and digital sources as well as interviews and observation, and then, worked toward written and dramatic representations of her students’ new expertise for other audiences.
Chris Leland and Jerome Harste (2005) were responsible for the teacher education component of The Center for Inquiry. They intended to prepare progressive urban teachers, who would recognize each student’s existing cultural capital and academic potential within supportive environments. Those teachers, they believed, would choose to redistribute the benefits of progressive schooling more equitably by teaching in urban schools. Toward that end, Leland and Harste immersed their interns in urban classrooms over two-year periods, encouraging them to engage in discussions with each other and students about issues of justice presented in selected children’s literature. In their remarks about this work, Leland and Harste were candid about their struggles in achieving these goals, focusing specifically upon interns’ resistance to the book discussions and their own inabilities to help the interns to understand how apparently common sense assumptions and typical everyday practices could possibly contribute to inequalities they observed between their own and their students’ lives. In clear language of hope however, Leland and Harste reported that half of their intern cohorts accepted positions in urban schools because, after they visited schools “at home,” they decided that those familiar schools were “too traditional,” “based on competition and rewards,” and “unfair for any child not right in the middle.” And therefore, those interns sought and accepted urban jobs “to do what I want to become.”
The founding members of The Center for Inquiry in Richland, South Carolina acknowledged their debt to the Indianapolis group (among others), when they “began dreaming of a better world for public education” (Mills, O’Keefe, Hass & Johnson, 2014, p. 36). Their dreams echoed those of the progressive teachers before them. Compare Evelyn Dewey’s sentiments from New Schools for Old, “What we need is not a certain system, nor a lot of new methods and equipment, but a direction, a conscious purpose towards which the school shall strive…that of educating for democracy” (Dewey, 1919, p. 331) with Richland Center for Inquiry mission statement, “When kids pose and investigate issues that matter, they learn so much more than content strategies, they also change their hearts, minds, and actions” (Mills et al. 2014). These inquiries that matter are close at hand and distant as well.
For example, Tim O’Keefe’s third grade students identified an apparent contradiction between the school’s efforts to gather food for a local food bank and the waste of considerable amounts of food each day during lunch. Using direct observation and interviews, they identified the centrality of social interaction during the lunch period and a time/taste dynamic in the production of waste. Charting their data concerning students’ vegetable preferences, they convinced the cafeteria manager to alter the ordering plan in order to entice students to eat more and waste less. Another example: Scott Johnson invited his fourth and fifth grade students to engage in international citizen science by gathering data systematically concerning how seasonal changes affect plants and animals (for the National Phenology Network). Although initially eager, students’ interests waned during the daily detailed obligation over long periods. Unwilling to forego the benefits of systematic inquiry or attention to climate (changes), Johnson introduced a variety of national projects for citizen scientists, offering students choices in subject matter and collection procedures. Groups worked diligently and thoughtfully, becoming “experts” on their topics and procedures, but long-term data collection still proved to be challenging.
What’s in a name? The Centers for Inquiry carry Dewey’s notions of knowledge production into the 21st century (Biesta & Burbules, 2003). Students and teachers name problems (as Kuonen and Johnson found, that conjunction “and” is fundamental) with intent to act toward a solution. In order to make that action intelligent, they explore the existing possible alternatives – what others have tried in different contexts and at different times – in order to decide which action might “work” toward their goals in their context. And then they act on their decision, track the consequences, and adjust their actions accordingly. In this way, curriculum and pedagogy are experimental, never finished, and always in development. And the practices of learning and the production of knowledge are not found, but invented, mediated by others, and refined. Center for Inquiry teachers and students named 21st century problems - commercialism, gendered practices, urban schools, waste, and climate change. They gathered information to develop their expertise, represented their new knowledge for themselves and others, and acted and reacted. Each step challenged barriers to participatory parity. Think about the redistribution of teacher resources to urban schools, the recognition of girls as gamers, and even the representation of the local in climate change. Across the examples, they were becoming better learners, better teachers, better citizens.
Communities in which they live
“Park Forest Elementary is a K-5 school dedicated to the historic purpose of schooling: preparing young people to participate thoughtfully and actively in our democratic society. Our practices are based on the principle that the role of education in a democracy is to sensitize young people to the delicate balance between individual growth and community responsibility.” (http://www.scasd.org/parkforest). In State College, Pennsylvania, fifty teachers and the principal work daily to foster the social arrangements that permit all students to participate as peers in the social life of the classroom and the school. With a nod to Dewey, they develop apprenticeships in democracy, demonstrating thoughtful and active participation and providing opportunities in which students experience the building of equitable, inclusive communities. Working from the interpersonal practices that students bring with them to school, teachers guide students’ participation, orienting them toward inclusive practices, linking their current knowledge with that to be acquired, offering a curriculum with a range of entry points for different students, and keeping the content and literacy challenges within their grasp. Within and across grades, teachers look for changes in students’ participation within classroom and school that indicate they are preparing to participate as peers later in the democracy to be built outside of school (Mitra & Serriere, 2015).
In Jennifer Cody’s fifth grade class, she invites students to form groups around research/action projects that they would like to engage, to use available print and digital resources in order to develop expertise on the issue, and then following Muste’s encouragement to Brookwood students, to act on their new knowledge where and when it might make a difference. Often the topics for the project are “problems” that her students recognize in their daily life. For example, one such group formed around selections on the lunch menu (Serriere, Mitra & Cody, 2010). Unable to eat the packaged salads because of religious guidelines or dietary restrictions, six girls sought to expand the menu. Cody encouraged the girls to articulate their concerns based on their group memberships and health needs rather than personal preferences. Bolstered by the results of a school-wide survey (90 percent of the student body agreed that more salad options should be available), the girls presented their case of diverse tastes and needs to the school’s cafeteria coordinator, who cited U. S. Department of Agriculture requirements, costs, and efficiency as the reasons for the single packaged salad. Discouraged by this bureaucratic response, Cody supported the group’s Internet searches of school lunch menus from other schools across the country. When they presented their new case to the district-wide cafeteria manager, she proposed a trial run of three packaged options daily. Although not every project had a “positive” outcome, Cody noted new resilience among her students, who like the gamers in Indianapolis, looked for alternatives when first stymied.
Under the direction of Principal Israel Soto, students, teachers, staff, and community members collaborated to transform Public School 57 in East Harlem, New York into a museum each year (Bryce, 2012). The idea that began in a bilingual after-school arts program for community adults developed over time into Mano a Mano, “an arts-based, interdisciplinary, and thematic approach to curriculum” (p. 179) that positioned all students from kindergarten through eighth grade as museum designers, builders, docents, and performers. Each year, teachers gathered multimodal texts at various levels on the school wide topic in order to support students’ development of content knowledge expertise, and then, modeled and mediated students’ transmediation of their understandings into print, visual, musical, and performative representations of their new knowledge. Although levels of control over literacy practices differed among students, each produced an individual museum exhibit, collaborated with small groups to produce larger works, and then, coordinated with the entire student body in order to prepare the museum for its opening to the community. The openness of the curriculum, the multiple forms of representation, and expectation that all will be successful enabled all participants to engage intellectually, emotionally, socially, and culturally as peers.
Established in 2008, The Evergreen Cooperative Initiative seeks to revitalize the Greater University Circle communities in Cleveland, Ohio. Based on the Mondragon Cooperatives Corporation in the Basque region of Spain, ECI is organized around developing green, cooperative businesses (solar energy, greenhouse farming, and laundry), hiring local residents at living wages, and keeping some of the local university’s and hospitals’ 3 billion dollar budget for goods and services within the community. Within six months of employment every worker is vested as a stock-earning owner of the companies with rights to participate in all company decisions. Along with the redistribution of economic and informational capital through employment, ECI recognizes the cultural and social wealth that exists within these communities already, developing the Neighborhood Voice, a citizen journalist communications tool to share ECI news/information, community events, and local stories (Shannon, 2011). Harnessing and developing existing print, photographic, and digital literacies, the Voice’s few employees invite, scaffold and celebrate new and old participation from more and more community members. “The Cleveland Model” has been so successful that groups from other cities are considering it as a blueprint for fostering new ways of being and new practices of living that challenge barriers to social justice.
Along with the Centers for Inquiry, these examples show how sponsored literacy practices shape and are shaped by peoples’ acclimation to and participation in specific environments. Park Forest inquiries place reading and writing within a context of civic responsibility. The PS #57 museums encourage multimodal representations of knowledge. The Evergreen projects juxtapose functional and cultural uses of literacy to further collaboration between businesses and local residents. In order to become members of any of these communities, participants must adopt and adapt those practices, adopting certain values, acquiring specialized knowledge, and learning to use appropriate literacy tools and genres accordingly. In each locale, the leaders seem sensitive to the challenges involved, drawing consciously or unconsciously on sociocultural perspectives to inform their efforts (Hull and Moje, 2010). Their educational goals are linked to topics that matter. Their curricula are open enough to accommodate the variety of interests and levels of literacy that participants bring into the context. They are prepared to mediate students’ approximations of sponsored practices through explicit and implicit teaching and performative assessments.
Moreover, the examples include critical twists of those sociocultural principles (Lewis, Enciso & Moje, 2007). That is, each example afforded participants opportunities to “try on” different identities – advocate, designer, journalist – with support from others. Each addresses issues of power explicitly – negotiating school policy, coordinating the efforts of many groups, and operating as owners. And while the participants are becoming literate members within these communities, they act (are agents) through the practices that they are acquiring. In these ways, the teachers and students work to redistribute resources (at the very least, time and choice), to recognize standing (funds of knowledge, capacity), and to represent the right of each to participate in the decisions that effect their lives (contesting institutional and governmental bureaucracies and global business).
Accessible to more children
In the North Lawndale neighborhood on the Westside of Chicago, the Legacy Charter School competes with other public grammar schools for students within the open enrollment policies of the Chicago school system. Among its many features, its board explains in its mission statement, “A high quality education must teach the foundations of a just society, ethics, and values that prepare and encourage scholars to participate in the global community with wisdom, understanding, and honesty.” The parents and guardians of 500 scholars choose to enroll their children in prekindergarten through eighth grade, and to attend the community education programs as well. Founded in 2005 with funding from a city law firm, the Legacy faculty navigates the complex politics of Chicago public schools and city services while helping children and youth make sense of the dimensions of social justice within their community.
First and second grade teacher Elizabeth Goss (2009) used the film “A Bug’s Tale” and a presidential election to probe her students’ interests in and dispositions for taking up the historical and current circumstances of their daily lives. Quoting Dewey on a teacher’s role in democracy and Bill Bigelow on social justice teaching, she planned five months of weekly lessons on African American history, working from slavery to the civil rights movement and its impact on the demographics and economic conditions of the Westside. To introduce the topic of slavery, her class watched the animated film that she described as, “a Marxist take on the power struggles in the insect world.” The six- and seven-year-olds began with issues of fairness (ants did all the work; grasshoppers took all the food) and empathy (ants’ lives were limited; grasshoppers’ appeared limitless) and then, worked toward issues of oppression (the rules favored the grasshoppers; controlled the ants) and collective action (so few grasshoppers; so many ants). Goss explained that her students made connections to slavery with references to the film and its themes and to their lives at school and home. When asked to contribute a page to the “If I Were President” class book, students responded, “then I’d…” stop war, build houses, fund schools, provide healthcare, and make jobs. From the experience, Goss noted changes in the quantity and quality of students’ participation in such lessons and of her trust of her students and her willingness to let the students take active roles in determining the curriculum.
The Summer Reading Camp at Penn State University enrolls between 30 and 40 elementary and middle school students, whom school personnel describe as “behind,” “struggling,” and “learning disabled”. Camp serves as a practicum for reading specialist certification candidates, who adopt a disabilities studies perspective (Simon, 2013), focusing on what the students can do and building upon that foundation (Shannon, 2015). Over sixteen mornings during four weeks, campers and candidates conceive, design, construct, and present a multimodal museum based on a single topic (e.g. birds, transportation, weather and others over the last decade). Employing Parker’s unified curriculum and the Maury School’s performance assessments, campers and candidates collaborate concerning the content knowledge necessary for the exhibits; campers apprentice themselves to more literate candidates in developing their content expertise and print representations (reports, poems, songs, stories, diagrams, charts, and jokes); and often, the candidates apprentice themselves to campers concerning the transmediations of that knowledge into paintings, sculptures, mobiles, video games, digital stories, youtubes, and installations. Regardless of their academic labels or individual educational plans, every camper participates in the design of the museum, produces a multimodal exhibit, and stands proudly by his or her exhibit to answer questions during the two hours that the museum is open on the final day of Camp. In their case study reports, candidates note the difference in participatory patterns between their observations of campers and the descriptions of their school activities in their permanent records.
At Manzanita SEED, an English/Spanish bilingual immersion school in Oakland California, instruction is split evenly between the two languages across all subjects. Following Kilpatrick’s project method and Colling’s excursions, the Manzanita teachers use their community as a classroom in order to provide content of the curriculum relevant to students’ lives. For example on a topic similar to one Patridge observed in Quincy 130 years earlier, Anne Perrone’s third graders took up the subject of the community’s original inhabitants, the Ohlone Tribe. To facilitate conversations and writing in both languages, Perrone and her students visited local historic sites, conducted online research, interviewed experts, and read about the people, flora and fauna that predated the Catholic/Spanish militarization of the area. Depending on the context, native speakers became the language mentors for their language-learning peers. Once back in their classroom, students expanded their linguistic expressions of their new knowledge by collaborating with others in visual and dramatic expressions (Carter, 2009). Manzanita teachers and parents comment that the authenticity and variety of modes and linguistic frames enable all students to find ways to participate actively in the construction of the curriculum.
It was more than ‘every child can learn.’ It was more than building a better school. It was doing school differently. It was thinking outside the box to create a transformative school, not one that would reproduce the inequities of the current system. (Manzanita SEED Principal Kathleen Carter as quoted on National Equity Project website).
By contrasting “better” and “differently,” Carter points toward barriers to participatory parity in and out of the classroom. Better implies that the current systems of doing school are appropriate (efficient and effective), and need only greater fidelity from teachers in order to reach the goal that “every child can learn.” “Better” has been the goal of scientific management for at least 100 years. In Carter’s words, “better” will only “reproduce the inequities of the current system,” dividing students by income, race, language, location and ascribed ableness into those who may participate actively with engaging curricula and those who may not until they have performed acceptably on official norms. Legacy Charter, Summer Reading Camp, and Manzanita SEED demonstrate by “doing school differently” that those traditional categories of exclusion are actually institutionalized hierarchies of cultural values that deny some students the requisite standing to participate as peers in the construction of the curriculum and life outside schools. In these examples, “doing school differently” approximates at least some of the criteria for culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Students experience academic success in projects they find meaningful. Teachers respect difference by building upon and from the funds of knowledge and cultural practices students already possess. Assessments are based on the artifacts students create and the actions they take. Teachers “believed their work was artistry, not a technical task that could be accomplished in a recipe-like fashion” and “exhibited a passion about what they were teaching” (p. 163).
Needs to be lived…and move to (too!)
According to Dewey, if we seek a socially just democracy, then schools must afford all students the requisite experiences of identifying, insisting on, and enacting democratic justice at some more basic, simplified level. To varying degrees, the Centers for Inquiry, Park Forest Elementary, Public School 57, Legacy Charter, Summer Reading Camp, and Manzanita SEED are becoming those schools. While not a school, even Evergreen has limited the scope of their experiment in order to provide protected space as Cooperatives’ experiences for all involved. In each example, teachers (broadly defined) made economic, cultural, and social adjustments in order to counter traditional school barriers to participatory parity. Each and all have organized protected spaces where individuals and groups could “try on,” “play at,” or “take up” the thoughts, values, and actions of just democracy without substantial risks. Because of those moves, the sponsored literacies situated in these spaces look, sound, feel, and perhaps at times, even taste and smell different than those in typical school spaces.
Latoya Hardman, an English teacher at Harlem High School, New York, explored different literacies by engaging them in her classroom (Kinloch, 2010). A transplant from Houston, TX, Hardman “encouraged students to examine their opinions and experiences through the texts and people I invited into class….[we learned] more about the local community as we questioned the ways we fit, or did not fit, into it” (p. 84). Together her students and she faced “the myths” of gentrification (i.e, new, white, and rich are better than old, black or brown, and low income) by first reading stories of Harlem (Sakur, Jordan, Wiesel and Douglass), and then, venturing into the community in order to “respond to the dilemma raised in the book.” Once outside the classroom, the words, images, sounds, movements, smells and tastes of Harlem accepting, ignoring and resisting the ongoing gentrification stretched their academic literacies. Their everyday literacies became more legitimate, even in their own eyes as they assumed the identities of researchers, teachers, performers, activists, and experts across previously seemingly impenetrable physical, cultural, and emotional boundaries. By making this space together, Hardman recognized that her students, “learned more than English. They questioned the changing community as they discovered their roles as informed citizens within it” (p. 86).
After months of preparation, the Occupy Wall Street demonstration began on September 17, 2011 with several hundred young citizens protesting the role of wealth in American politics and its apparent cause of growing inequality. In order to evade arrest, protesters retreated to Zuchotti Park, a private space among the buildings. Over the next two months despite continuous police and government surveillance, several thousand, young and old, joined OWS, erecting tents and creating institutions through collaboration and equal representation. During the first week, someone placed a cardboard box of books on a park bench, and the People’s Library was founded as “a place to engage with what’s happening in our country, a means to contribute their own sentiments through donation of materials, and the literacy to see other points of view, perhaps form one of their own, and to express criticism in an effective way” (Norton, Henk, Fagin, Taylor & Loeb, 2012, p. 9). The Library Working Group catalogued over 5,000 texts in the LibraryThing, building shelves from plastic tubs, arranging the collection into circulation and reference sections, and covering all resources during the rain with clear plastic in order to assure the police that the sheltered materials were “harmless.” Without a circulation desk, the library worked on an honor system and “creative” re-shelving. At 1 AM on November 15, police raided the Park, clearing it of all Occupiers and confiscating the library’s collection. A month later, officials returned 802 useable texts (only two from the reference collection). The Working Group made multiple attempts to re-establish the library in the Park and currently works through mobile units for a storage facility (https://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com). In 2013, a New York City district judge declared that the city government was to pay $366,700 in restitution.
In room 203 (Columbia, Missouri), Tara Gutshall Rucker has altered the space, time, materials and practices of her writing instruction (Guthsall, & Kuby, 2013; Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2015). To begin, she offered her second grade students three days to experiment with a wide variety of materials (writing and art supplies) while she observed (watched, listened, and recorded) what they did and made. From these observations, she noted that experimentation with dimension, color, texture, genre, and symbols revealed previously unacknowledged talents among peers and new modes of individual and collaborative engagement. She decided to expand her writing workshop to a studio, sponsoring and accommodating students’ explorations in multiple symbol systems and encouraging writers to use author’s chair as works-in-progress forum for likeminded maker groups. As students became noticed for their expertise, she recognized changes in their patterns of participation and their willingness to consult with others in order to revise their work (improve its effect on audiences). By leveling different modes of writing and by providing freedom to choose and act, the students and Rucker created new spaces in which all could “discover” what they meant by their work. By systematically and intentionally following each student’s artifact trail across a year, Rucker documented and represented each one becoming a writer.
These examples highlight the reflexive relationships between spaces and types of literacy. The social production of Harlem’s past and present, Occupy Wall Street’s temporary and lasting presence, and room 203’s writers’ studio invited different types of reading and writing, which in turn influenced the ongoing possibilities of those places. In each case, teachers (broadly defined in OWS) planned their actions, but not in the traditional sense in which outcomes were expected to be rationally predictable. Rather they planned for porous space and time boundaries, welcoming the literacy practices and texts valued in other spaces and acknowledging these new engagements could not be easily timetabled. The hybrids of everyday and academic literacies were rich, generative, and resilient, offering protected opportunities for participants to play with ideas, things, and identities while confronting barriers to participatory parity in and out of the institutions. In these spaces and with this time, these teachers built contemporary theories (e.g., Compton-Lilly & Haverson, 2014; Dyson, 2013; Leander & Boldt, 2013) upon the foundations Dewey, Pratt, Naumburg and Dennison laid in the 20th century.
Participate in the world with new mindsets, identities, and practices
Rapid changes in information communication technologies are driving forces in the disruption of 20th century habits and sensibilities. Although certainly confounded by economic, cultural and political barriers, many students bring insider mindsets about ICT with them to school – they are prone, if not fully prepared, to work multimodally, to use what’s at hand, to be public with their work, and to adapt the messages and media for their purposes. Most of the examples in this chapter show teachers who approach, if not fully adopt, insider mindsets, hoping to mediate students’ consumption and production of 21st century texts. For example, Kate Kuonen from the Center for Inquiry and Elizabeth Goss from Legacy focus on critical consumption of video games and Hollywood films; Tara Gutshall Rucker from room 203, the teachers at PS #57 and those in the Penn State Summer Reading Camp provide spaces and support production of multimodal texts; and Jennifer Cody of Park Forest Elementary, Anne Perrone from Manzanita SEED, and Latoya Hardman late of Harlem High combine critical consumption, and at times, critical digital production to counter the texts that construct and maintain barriers to just participation.
At Half Hollow Hills High School Dix Hills, NY, English teacher Lauren Leigh Kelly offers a Hip Hop Literature and Culture course to acknowledge hip hop’s role in popular culture, to give voice to students who are rarely heard, to shift expertise and authority among participants, and to address social issues critically (Kelly, 2016). The course is divided into four themes: hip hop roots, its culture, issues of gender, and its global spread. During the semester, students are to create annotated “mix-tapes” that reflect their interpretation of each theme, present lessons to explore one topic deeply, and compose a hip hop autobiography (from essay, film, music, and graphic representations). Although Kelly assumes a hip hop influence on students lives, she acknowledges that its influence is mediated by race, gender, and class. To assist students’ identifications and analyses of these influences, Kelly teaches the principles of critical media literacy (Kellner & Share, 2007), demonstrating for students how to crack producers’ codes and conventions in order to get to the values within any text, to examine the relationships between those values and how power is distributed in and out of the texts, and to react to and act upon those values and relations. Paraphrasing one of her students, Kelly agrees that “you don’t have to claim [them].” She concludes that to varying degrees each student meets all four of her course objectives, and she cites Ellsworth when admitting that the critical engagements elicit moments of tension as well as solidarity among students.
It is important to recognize that the goals of critical hip hop education are not to change students’ minds or cause them to disengage with hip hop culture. Rather, the focus is on creating spaces for meaningful dialogue about the media that influence youth identities. (Kelly, p. 536)
The fifth grade students of Amelia Szabo and Karen Bierwart teamed with Fertile Ground Director Catherine Sands to use Photovoice methods and software to evaluate the Farm to School (F2S) program in Williamsburg, Massachusetts (Sands, Reed, Harper, & Shar, 2009). F2S provides reliable markets for local farmers, educates students about the economics of food, and engages students in school gardening programs. At the time of the inquiry, Szabo’s and Beirwart’s students had participated in the local F2S initiative since its inception when they were kindergarteners. Many had participated in the annual planning of the garden, and all worked weekly to maintain and improve its yield. In order to judge the value of the program, students “snapped” four digital photographs of the program and recorded captions to explain what and why they chose each image to represent their assessment. Along with photos of students working in the garden and its produce, students selected images of the planning documents (“we are involved in every step”); California strawberries (“It was grown on a farm, then driven to a packaging place, then put on a truck, and then driven to a store, then you buy it, and then, you can eat it”); and the building of a Ramada shade structure (“we chose not to [build a tipi] because it would be stereotyping the Abenaki”). Throughout the project, Szabo and Bierwart consulted with their students concerning camera techniques, possible criteria for choosing among images, and composing the captions. Different assemblages of students’ final products were displayed for 3000 local residents at school and the public library, the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Boston State House, the Massachusetts, Northeast Regional, and then, National Farm to School Conferences. After viewing the Photovoice exhibit in Portland, Oregon, the Director of the Michael Field’s Agricultural Institute from East Troy, Wisconsin wrote. “How better to teach students democracy than helping them influence policymakers themselves?” (p. 20).
At Half Hallow Hills High School and Williamsburg Elementary, students use the technologies at hand to explore their local and distant relationships with the world as well as to re-present themselves in those relationships (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). With their teachers’ assistance, they identified how the public texts that surround them attempt to teach them what they should know, who they should be, and what they should value. Kelly’s students questioned the forms, functions, and content of hip hop texts, re-searching the “claims” the culture made on their lives. Szabo’s and Bierwart’s analyzed how ICT texts enable national and global supply chains and what that means for them locally, even personally. Within these practices of critical evaluation (Larson, 2014), students decided whether or not to accept their assigned places within those lessons, and then, they appropriated some of the forms and functions of ICT in order to represent their decisions for themselves and others. Szabo and Bierwart mediated students’ digital compositions of image, print and sound, helping them to declare their positions in the world of food consumption and production. After several enabling steps, Kelly consulted with her students as they sifted through their digital artifacts in order to reposition themselves in hip hop culture. In both cases, the projects involved social justice work on economic, cultural, and political dimensions; and the digital technologies afforded students new ways to decode and encode their lives in 21st century texts.
Doing school differently
The examples in this chapter demonstrate that progressive teachers practice in all parts of the United States, working with all ages and groups. They follow many of the principles that directed their 20th and even 19thcentury predecessors: they find joy in the work of learning; they seek to understand the world around them and their places within it; they respect the moral worth, cultures and capabilities of their students; and they commit to social justice, dismantling institutional obstacles that prevent some people from full partnership in social and civic life. They work through inquiry – teachers’ inquiries about relationships among learning, curriculum, and pedagogy in their classrooms and students’ inquiries into the familiar and the exotic (and the exotic in the familiar). Reading and writing in whatever mode are always in service to these inquiries and the discoveries that, as Vasquez said, “arise” and “unfold” from their experiences. During these projects, progressive teachers mediate and students negotiate the dynamics between the person and the group, the personal and the cultural, and the individual and the community. These had been the practices in Quincy, MA; Fairhope, AL; Porter, MO; and Los Angeles, CA; at the Lab School, the Moonlight Schools, the Highlander Folk School and the First Street School, and across the South in the Freedom Schools and the country in Eight Year Study schools.
Today’s progressive teachers and students do more than repeat the past. They contribute and expand “the well- established principles of teaching” that Francis Parker used to defend and debunk the Quincy Method. As the examples demonstrate, teachers and students experiment with curriculum, tools, and space in order to find the mixes that will invite (and enable) everyone into an activity as peers, and then, search for relationships, time, and commitments to support changes in each member’s participation in the valued practices involved in the activity. Each experiment produces and uses theories and practices of inquiry, socio cultural theories, culturally responsive pedagogies, new literacies, and geographies of learning that feed the continuous experimentation. As Dewey (1928) argued, “The discovery is never made; it is always in the making” (p. 48), keeping the habits of teaching, learning, and participating from hardening as the world changes. This reflexive character before, during and after each experiment keeps progressive teachers and students questioning who is included in the invitations, what (who’s) values are encoded in the practices, and what should be the scope of those changes in participation. Now as in the past, the challenges are great; the engagements are deep; and the rewards lead toward justice in the 21st century.