Where the Backyard Ends

John Jennings and Jessica May describe their imaginary worlds.

A school holds great possibility for breaking from the routines of daily life. In an age of standardized testing in our public schools, this statement might seem to contradict reality, but this has been my experience as a teacher, even in the most institutional environments. Classrooms are still spaces where teachers and students come together for a period of time and engage in a journey very different from the ordinary day-to-day activities we often must accomplish. I might wake up in the morning, take a shower, eat breakfast, rush off to work, answer emails, take care of finances, run to the grocery store to pick up some food and continue with my typical daily routine, but when I step into the classroom all that is left behind. My students and I are in a space together for ninety minutes or more, and during that time we are in a place where we don't have to rush, a place where we can put the worries of the outside world aside, read a work of literature, and share our thoughts and feelings with each other. As an educator, I believe this is and always has been one of the great privileges of teaching: to have a sanctuary, a place to step out of the routines of daily life and reflect on how to live in this world.

Literature and the arts are some of our greatest tools for fostering deep reflection. Philosopher and arts educator Maxine Greene describes how the arts provide a space to imagine what might be possible. Greene explains that the job of the teacher "is to devise situations in which the young will move from the habitual and the ordinary and undertake a search." For Greene this search centrally involves imagination "as the felt possibility of looking beyond the boundary where the backyard ends or the road narrows, diminishing out of sight."

One of our teachers at Habla, Viviana teaches a beautiful series of classes in which she helps her students look "beyond the boundary where the backyard ends." Children's literature is filled with examples of journeying beyond the boundaries from the Pevensie children discovering the magical wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter's Hogwarts Express, the train that whisks us to the world of the wizards. Viviana explained to me, "We all have imaginary places we like to go to, even when we are adults. When we were kids we had hideouts. We built houses with sheets inside or forts with branches and limbs outside." She continued, "We can use words as materials to build our own imaginary places."

Viviana was teaching a group of adults who were visiting Habla from different places in the world to take Habla's Spanish Immersion course. In her class, she was focusing on the grammatical concept of "mandatos," the command form of  verbs, like ¡Damélo! (Give it to me!) or ¡Ven aquí! (Come here!). Teaching command forms of verbs initially seems like the most unlikely moment to enter an imaginary world. Most language classes ask students to write and then give each other orders (Stand up! Walk to the blackboard! Pick up the pen!). Vivi instead asked her students to read a poem, "Cómo despeinar a un lápiz,"  (How to mess up the hair of a pencil), written by a local Yucatecan poet, Alicia L. Franco. The poem includes a series of commands, such as

Borra más mucho más, ahora retira el lápiz del papel y observa la gran cantidad de cabello que ha desperdiciar.

Erase more much more, now lift the pencil from the paper and observe the great amount of hair that has been wasted.

After discussing the poem, Viviana explained to the group that they should build an imaginary place in their minds. "It can be anywhere: in a forest, a castle, a cloud," she encouraged.  Most teachers might stop here, ask the students to describe their imaginary place, perhaps draw it, but this is the point in our pedagogical tale with a twist. Viviana asks the class to "devise a set of imaginary instructions for how to travel to or how to build your imaginary place and these instructions need to use the command form of the verb."

One student took the following notes of all the students' instructions (click to enlarge).

Using their instructions as inspiration, the students then created a cordel of images based on their instructions, an installation we displayed in our school's garden, "where the backyard ends." When we enter the school, we take a moment to look at these images and feel that it might be possible to enter another world, if only we follow the instructions.

Instructions for Inventing

1.  Enter into the obscurity of your garden. 2.  Close your eyes and leave the regular world behind. 3.  Permit your mind to dream.

4. Plant many seeds immediately in your imagination. 5. Listen to the sound of great rivers and waterfalls in solitude without civilization. 6. Create savage animals that you have visited in books and zoos. 7. Imagine that your are an explorer, and employee of the train company, and that you go to mysterious places.

8. Believe that your cat is a lion and your dogs are wolves. 9. Point your compass East, and with your dog, walk. 10. Your imagination is in charge, go wherever you want.

Waking Up: Finding Magic in the Language Classroom

Fabiola Waking Up

This semester in my language classes I've been experimenting with ways of teaching in a way that embraces magic realism. Magic realism is the literary style that is often used to describe the work of Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers where the boundary between the "real" and the "imaginative" becomes obscured. I'm not actually teaching magical realism in my language classrooms, but rather experimenting with a pedagogy that allows for magic to happen on a daily basis, where the students' seats rise a little off the floor and strange creatures peek into the windows. I'm hoping to move my classes beyond how languages are typically taught in a utilitarian way. If you examine most language textbooks you'll find they are organized into units that focus on our daily tasks: shopping for clothes, going to the grocery store, visiting the doctor's office. In my class we don't use a textbook. Our goal is to release the inherent magical quality of words. We play, improvise, and create with them. We read literature and poetry to experience the aesthetic quality of the language.

In one of my classes, we're reading John Steinbeck's novel The Pearl which begins, "Kino awakened in the near dark." One of the reasons I enjoy teaching literature in a classroom where the student's are learning a language, is that it slows us down. Since the students aren't fluent readers,  we often take the time to work through a paragraph, sentence by sentence. As readers, this gives us the chance to really spend time with the words. For example, when I read this first line at home, I didn't think much of it. I raced on through the plot eager to see what would happen after Kino woke up. But in the language classroom we had to start the novel by talking about the word "awake." Why does Steinbeck use "awakened" rather than "woke up"?  Before my student's asked this question I hadn't thought about the difference much before. As we started to explore the word "awake," we realized it is a verb that is much more profound than its counterpart "wake up."  We don't really wake up spiritually, but we might have a spiritual awakening. We can become awake in myriad ways: politically, socially, sexually, and morally to name a few. So perhaps there is more to this first sentence than what lies on the surface. Does the fact that Kino is awakening in the dark mean that he hasn't awakened to some realization, that he might experience this change later? Or does the qualifier "near" mean that he is beginning to see light of some kind, that this novel will be about his process of awakening to something larger in the world?

My work as both a teacher and a reader has been highly influenced by Robert Cole's book The Call of Stories. One of the reasons our school places literature in the center of the language classroom, is because in Cole's words,

Novels and stories are renderings of life, they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course.

Our classrooms move back and forth between the work of literature and the students' lives. We use literature to inspire us to reflect on who we are, where we are on our own personal journeys in life, and we find the words to tell our own stories. My class continued to read the first chapter as Kino wakes up . We looked at the verbs Steinbeck used to describe waking up rituals, verbs like braid and comb. I then asked for a volunteer to show his/her waking up ritual in front of the class. Fabiola mimed her waking up ritual and the rest of the class called out the verbs they were witnessing, and we put the phrases on the board (hit snooze, turn off the alarm, get out of bed, take a shower, put on makeup, grind the beans, prepare coffee, make breakfast). In pairs, all the students, using the words on the board for help, told each other their daily rituals of waking up.

So far, aside from our discussion about the opening line of the book, this might look like any other language classroom: listing the words of our daily routines. A discussion of our daily rituals of waking up, from purely a language learning perspective, is important, but I want my student to move beyond the day-to-day use of language, to find ways to play with language in a creative way, one that helps us see new worlds beyond the words on the page. One of my favorite quotes from Argentinian educator Emilia Ferreiro is

There are children who enter written language through magic (a cognitively challenging magic) and other children who enter written language through training in "basic abilities."  In general, the first become readers; the others have an uncertain fate.

As my students learn English, I want them to see their own potential in using the language in ways that are unexpected, helping them to open up to become more flexible and playful in how they form phrases and sentences in English.  I asked the students to write two sentences finishing the phrase, "After I wake up I . . . " One sentence needed to be true, something they do every morning. But the other sentence needed to be surrealistic, something that could only happen in their imaginations.

Fabiola wrote:

1.  After I wake up I make coffee.

2.  After I wake up I float up to the ceiling and turn the house upside down.

We shared our responses around the table and then I asked the students to write a story about waking up. They had two options:

1. Write a fantastic or surrealistic story about waking up in the morning.
2. Write a true story about a time you woke up and something unusual happened, outside of your daily routine.

When the students finished their stories, we had trouble telling the difference between the imagined and the real. As I read my students stories, I felt like I was in Márquez's town of Macondo in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although the novel closely relates to Marquez's life, there is a continuous procession of remarkable events that move us to see reality in a fantastic way.

Hortencia reads her story

One of my students, Hortencia, wrote the following story:

I awakened in the middle of the night feeling a strange presence in my room. It was so real that I felt it very close to me but at the same time it occupied all of the room. The atmosphere was cold, rare, silent, and with a sense of somebody here and there.

I was so scared that I couldn´t even scream or get out of my bed; I was paralyzed. I tried to pray or to remember a Bible verse and repeat it as I very slowly got out of the bed and walked terrified to the light switch and turned it on.

My room was as it was always, nobody there. I was still feeling that strange presence when I heard my mom screaming “fire!” so I went out of my room and ran to the front door and I saw red lights, and I opened the window and some neighbors were on the sidewalk next to my house.

My mother opened the door and the neighbors told her that the old lady who lived in front of us had died. That was the reason the ambulance was there and I asked them at what time she died and they said “at 2:15 a.m”; that was the time I had awakened.

HORTENCIA PEÑA GARCIA

FEBRUARY 1, 2011

Living in Mexico, I've realized how important telling stories is in people's lives. Sitting in my classroom, listening to the stories my students' tell, one might think, "That's impossible. How could that be real?," but it's so much more pleasurable to listen to the stories and for a time put what we think of as true and real, aside for the moment, and for a moment ride the wave of the sentences as they unfold.

Text and Image: Creating Books as Art Objects

In Providence, Rhode Island, a group of colleagues and I started the ArtsLiteracy Project, an organization that explored ways of teaching reading and writing primarily through performance. We partnered directors and performers from local theatres with English and language teachers in schools, and together we developed a methodology for using performance to teach reading. As our handbook reveals, in Providence we were principally concerned with getting students up on their feet and performing.

Three years ago I moved to Mexico to open Habla: The Center for Language and Culture in Merida, Yucatan. Merida is a culturally rich city, but it has almost no formal theater groups. However, many talented visual artists live in this city.  In collaboration with many of these artists, we continued experimenting with ways linking the arts to language but now with a greater emphasis on the visual arts rather than the performing arts. Recently we led a series of professional development workshops for teachers who taught in the most economically disadvantaged schools in the city, an area called Emiliano Zapata Sur. We were helping teachers find ways to teach students to read and write who have very low literacy levels. What follows is a description of the theory and practice of moving from the word to the image.

From Text to Image: A Theoretical Framework

One of the primary influences in my literacy work is the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Working with the rural and urban economically poor in Brazil, Freire created literacy circles taught by members of the community. The teaching methodology of the literacy circle consisted of showing images of daily life in Brazil, and then asking the students to find the words to describe the images. The words and the image worked symbiotically. Since Freire was working with students who couldn't read, he found that beginning with images from the world of the students rather than the words they were unfamiliar with was a natural starting point.

Although I'm a firm believer in the ideas and philosophies behind arts-integration, I've never fully accepted the concept or the term. As Freire demonstrated, there is not a separation between the image and the word, they live in solidarity. The London Group describes the modern world we live in as one of multiliteracies. When we need to communicate, we use all the symbol systems within our grasp. This is particularly true in the age of the internet where image, text, sound, video all work in tandem to communicate a message. In an age of multiliteracies, arts-integration isn't an option for the creative teacher: it is a necessity for all teachers of all subject areas. So perhaps the questions we should be asking isn't how can we integrate the arts into the classroom, but rather how can students take meaning from and make meaning with multiple symbol systems? How can we create classroom environments that are multiliterate spaces? These questions take us to the core of why it is crucial to make the arts a daily part of life in schools: to develop citizens who can think and communicate clearly, not just orally and textually, but with as many tools as are available in the global toolbox.

The Context

On a warm Saturday in Mexico, forty-two teachers from public schools around the city of Merida gathered at Habla to participate in a workshop called, "Reading Beneath the Surface - Teaching Comprehension." Our goal was to examine with the teachers the question, "What does it mean to reach a deep understanding of text?" and to challenge the way literature is often taught at a surface level with cursory examination of vocabulary, setting, plot, and character. We participated in a variety of activities over the course of the day reading and analyzing the story "Los dos reyes y los dos labyrintos" (The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths) by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. We had extended discussion about the story, using interpretation circles described in detail in a previous article on this site. After the participants read and discussed the story, teaching artist Karla Hernando and I wanted to experiment with different ways we could help students interpret the story through imagery.

Comprehending through Image

With Freire's work with words and images in mind, we wanted the teachers to see how it might be possible to interpret text not only through discussion and writing, but also by recreating the text through a visual symbol system.  After reading and discussing Borge's story in an interpretation circle, we gave the participants a black piece of paper. We asked the participants to cut out symbols representing the different parts of the story: the characters, the objects, and the setting. When they finished cutting out their symbols, they used the cutouts to tell the entire story to each other in groups, without reading directly from the text. They needed to then remember the events of the story and retell them with their symbolic cutouts in a way that captured the attention of the other group members. The idea of telling stories from cutouts was inspired by Jeffrey Wilhelm’s symbolic story representations described in his book You Gotta BE the Book.

We learned about using symbolic icons in the classroom from CAPE creative director Arnold Aprill and Chicago artist Bernard Williams. Icons are simple one-dimensional abstract representations of people, places, things, or ideas. To create icons students only need scissors, paper, and pencils. It's actually better if they don't draw on their icons at all. They simply cut the silhouette of the icon out of the paper. Icons allow us to move from the concrete directly to abstract, symbolic representation. In Borge's story of the two kings, one king might be represented by a triangle and the other by a square. (Click here to download a process for using symbolic icons with any subject area.)

Books as Art Objects

As we move increasingly to digital books with the proliferation of Kindles and iPads, we begin to be more conscious of what the special qualities are of holding a book as object in our hands. There has been a growing movement around the world of creating and curating books as art objects. Over the last year we've had several artists visit Habla--including Robert Possehl, Amanda Lichtenstein, William Estrada, and Cynthia Weiss--who have presented a variety of ways for students in the classroom to make their own books. Bookmaking in education reflects the work that is being done in several centers around the world dedicated to collecting and displaying books as art objects including the Center for Book Arts and the Jaffe Center for Book Arts.

Since the teachers had already told their stories using icons, the next step was to design a book that retold the Borge's story, but only with icons and other visual images. Most of the people in the room didn't consider themselves artists, so we wanted to give them some structures which would help them all engage in a fruitful process resulting in compelling products. Here were the guidelines teaching artist Karla Hernando and I designed:

1.  No words. Our goal was to move the participants to a higher level of abstraction. By omitting words, the teachers needed to translate from the words of the text to the image on a page. This necessarily required them to understand the story deeply in order to retell it using only images.

2.  No human figures. We've found that participants’ default settings in the visual arts are often stick figures or a similar representation. We wanted to push the teachers to think in design terms that are more abstract, using shapes to move the story forward.

3.  40-40-20. One of the primary principles we'd learned from various teaching artists is to limit the color palette of the materials. One of the initial instincts of a teacher with little artistic background might be to give the students all the colors available, offering them boxes of crayons and stacks of construction paper. We've learned the importance of offering the students only a few colors, limiting the palette before the project actually begins. Karla chose to give the teachers only four colors of paper, and she explained, "Choose two colors as your primary colors to use for most of your book; these colors should be 80% of the book. Then use one or two more colors for emphasis, but these should be only about 20% of the book. These should be the colors that surprise you when you see them."

4.  5 pieces of paper. We only had about 90 minutes to complete the project, so we wanted to keep the books small. There is a great advantage to limiting the size and scope of any creative project in the classroom. For students intimidated by art making, setting limits helps them see that the project is doable and not overwhelming.

Participants first planned their books using storyboards. Then after 90 minutes of working on their books Karla showed how they might bind them with a piece of string (holes were punched in all the pieces of paper so it was quite easy to run a string through them to fasten them.)  To document the final products, we filmed teachers flipping through their books. See the results below.

[flickr video=5162119519 secret=d9127fd403 w=400 h=300]

Educational Experience is Paramount

This article was previously posted on the Huffington Post. The recent appointment of Cathleen Black to the chancellorship of the New York Public Schools -- the nation's largest school system -- has brought to the forefront the question of who is qualified to lead our schools. Ms. Black has almost no experience with public schools. She didn't send her to children to one. She didn't attend one, and she's had no experience as a teacher or educational administrator.

Yet, Eli Broad recently wrote an editorial supporting Black's appointment. Mr. Broad writes,

Our experience shows that it is not necessary that superintendents themselves have backgrounds in education. A great education leader can learn the operations side, and a great business leader can learn the education side. But the most important thing is to get the best manager possible -- with a track record like Cathie Black -- in place while the opportunity exists.

Mr. Broad built his fortune in real estate and founded a training program for education leaders, The Broad Superintendents Training Academy whose mission is "to transform urban school districts into effective public enterprises." Mr. Broad argues that any good manager, from the military or from business, can run a school or school system: the "education side" can be learned on the job.

I agree with Mr. Broad in that we absolutely need good managers to run our school districts. But more critically we need leaders who understand the world of teachers, principals, and students. As a former teacher in public schools, my daily experiences working in urban and suburban schools was essential to my educational career as a school leader and in my work in school reform. What I learned in public schools I could not have learned in any other way, not by reading about education, by visiting schools, or by shadowing students and teachers (all things I hope Ms. Black will at least do in her new position). I needed to feel what it truly meant to wake up and teach every day.

This is what I learned from teaching in public schools:

1. Teaching is hard work and it is tiring. If you strive to be a great teacher, if you spend time with students after school, if you participate in extra curricular activities, if you work every day to plan and teach the best classes possible, then at the end of the week, you will no doubt find yourself exhausted. On Friday night, you'll need nothing more than to go home and go to sleep. You might be able to take Saturday off, but by Sunday you'll be planning and reading student papers for much of the day. My father, a career public school teacher, told me, "Teaching is not a sprint. It's a marathon. Learn to pace yourself so that you can be effective over the long haul." I believe as a nation, we have little understanding of how hard our good teachers work. The media might have us believe teachers go home every day at 2:30 p.m. and take the summers off. I've never worked so hard in my life as when I taught in public schools, and I have the utmost admiration for my colleagues who have dedicated their lives to teaching.

2. Collaboration is essential for effective teaching. It was my good fortune, to teach at two schools that placed collaboration among teachers and administrators at the heart of our work. We taught together, we learned from each other, we shared our best ideas. I can't imagine teaching any other way. Certainly we get energy from our students, but we need to work with other educators to improve what we do and to make the school environment one that is enjoyable and productive. Clearly collaboration costs more, but without it, it is nearly impossible to grow our teaching practice, analyze the work of our students, and in general improve our schools.

3. Fewer students allows for deeper learning. The average class load for a high school teacher in the United States is about 115 students. If we ask for all of our students to write an essay, and if we take only 10 minutes to read and offer feedback to each, we spend almost 20 hours responding to our students' work (so much for not working on Saturday!) For our nation's youth to improve their level of literacy, they need to read and write extensively, and as teachers we need to find the time to adequately support their efforts. It is possible to teach 115 students how to do better on a standardized test, but for real improvement we need to know our students and have the time to meet with them to help them to become better readers, writers, and thinkers.

4. Standardized tests are a narrow measure of our students' learning. Most of the standardized tests we are giving across the nation do not measure the habits of mind that are necessary for college and work. It's much easier to give students a test that is a series of bubbles corrected by computer than to ask them to read, write, solve problems and express themselves in substantive ways. As teachers, we want our students to understand the meanings beneath the surface of texts; we want them to be able to express themselves succinctly in an interview or in a college course; and we want them to be able to write a well-crafted narrative about an experience in their lives, the kind of narratives that are essential in college admission applications. Our standardized tests fail to reflect our students' learning in all its complexity and depth, yet it's the fastest and easiest way for a manager to evaluate the supposed success of a school. Even when test scores rise, as David Berliner points out, they may not at all represent increased learning.

Will managers from the business sector truly understand these day-to-day challenges that our teachers face? Will they institute policies that help teachers and students engage in meaningful work in classrooms, or will they look at the bottom-line: increasing class sizes, decreasing time for collaboration and planning, and instituting more "systems of accountability" by placing a greater emphasis on standardized test scores? Without truly understanding what it means to work and learn in a public school, their words and their policies will ring false, and they will potentially be doing our teachers and students a great injustice.

The Highest Standard

When I was sixteen my father handed me a journal my mother had kept during the nine months she was dying of cancer.  She passed away when I was two years old and the memories I had of her were only images: lying next to her in bed listening to her read a story; putting a Speed Buggy puzzle together while my grandparents visited us bringing fresh vegetables from a local farmer’s garden. I hoped these images were based on real experiences but feared they were only memories from photographs or perhaps dreams.  Fourteen years later, my father put my mother’s words in my hands in the form of an extended letter I had not previously known existed. I stood up from my desk where I was doing homework for school the next day, walked over to my bed, turned on the lamp, crawled under the covers, and began reading. I spent the rest of the night getting to know my mother for the first time, learning about my father as a young man, and strangely, meeting myself as a two-year-old.

Recently, reading through my mother’s journal again, I came across the following passages:

Tuesday, October 30

I have a terrific pain in my shoulder that goes down my right arm and down to my abdomen. I had to go back on my stronger pills, as the pain is too much to bear. This morning I was in so much pain that I don’t think I cared for Kurt properly, and Kurt and I both ended up unhappy and crying. Therefore I came to the realization that I’m no longer able to care for Kurt alone, and it’s not fair for either Kurt or me. I didn’t feel like dressing Kurt this morning and left him in his pajamas. He sat on my lap and asked me to read to him. I tried my best, but I was in too much pain to sit there and read. The morning just tore me up. I knew the day would come when I’d no longer be able to care for Kurt alone, and I knew when it happened it would kill me. I was right. I feel so dead inside having to give up my little boy. I so much for the sake of my family and myself want my life to terminate quickly.

Wednesday, October 31

Today we enrolled Kurt in nursery school. He will begin Monday. The whole time my husband Jim was talking to the women in charge I was crying. It’s a hard step for me to give up my baby, but I know it will be the best for him. I’m no longer able to care for him alone, and it’s very difficult to hire quality care. I would much prefer him to be stimulated in a good nursery school. I also know it will be good for him to get adjusted to nursery school before my death. I’d hate for me to die and then cart him off to school. That’s too much for a child to bear, and I’m determined that my death will not have a traumatic effect on Kurt. It’s also best for Jim to get the routine worked out before I die. Therefore, my death won’t change their lives dramatically all of a sudden.”

Looking at my mother’s journal again, now as an educator, I find myself thinking from the perspective of the teacher at this school, sitting in an office decades ago, meeting with my parents. I imagine if I were this teacher, listening to Jim and Sandra, the responsibility I would feel to create a home away from home for Kurt.

When I was about to graduate from college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. When I first enrolled I thought I would be a genetic scientist, but that first-year when I looked at the list of prerequisite courses that included organic chemistry and calculus, I decided it wasn’t for me, mainly I realize now, not because I was afraid of these courses, but rather because I wasn’t interested in a college experience that would involve a series of multiple-choice tests. I wasn’t interested in finding the right answer. Instead,  the literature courses caught my attention and I found how much I loved Walt Whitman calling out with his “barbaric yawp” to a nation, Ovid’s poetry of mythic transformation, and Shakespeare’s characters letting us know “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  I didn’t realize why I was attracted to the stories and words of these authors until years later: they were a way of reading my mother’s journal again and again by providing an opportunity to know other human beings who lived in different places and times and whose perspective would help me to better know myself.

Following in the footsteps of my father, mother, and step-mother, I became a teacher of literature. I realized that I would not have know my mother if she and I did not have the ability to read and write, to put our ideas and feeling into words on a page. I wanted to share that feeling with other people, particularly with young students who might not see the point of reading all these old writers that have nothing to do with them.

With these ideas in mind I recently worked with Brazilian educator Daniel Soares to build a school in the middle of Brazil in a small city called Inhumas. Our goal was to create a school that would offer students the chance to learn English as well as develop their literacy in their first language, Portuguese. We placed literature and the arts at the center of the school because we wanted the students to love the feeling of language and what it could accomplish in telling stories and communicating emotions.

One morning a colleague of mine, Angela Richardson, and I were talking on the street outside the walls of the school in Brazil. A boy, eight years old, pulled up to us on his bicycle and began to listen to our conversation. He asked what was going on in there, pointing behind the wall. We told him about the school. The next morning I was walking outside the classrooms when I saw this same boy, inside the walls of the school, up on his toes, peering into a classroom. The students in the class were writing poems in English and preparing performances of their poems in groups. “What is your name?” I asked.

“Thiago,” he replied.

“Would you like to join the class?”

“Yes, please.”

I took him into the class and asked a group of students if he could join them. Two weeks later in the Inhumas City Hall, Thiago performed his own poem, in English, for his family and the larger community. I looked at Thiago who practically snuck into our school, and I thought about my mother’s words in her journal:

Monday, November 5

Kurt went to his first day at school with no problems. When Jim and Kurt first walked into the room the teacher took his lunch box, suitcase of extra clothing, sheet, blanket, bear and put them all into a locker. Kurt puckered up and held tightly to Jim, but didn’t cry. The teacher asked him if he wanted to do various things and he said no. Then the teacher gave him some farm animals, and he started playing with them and wouldn’t even say goodbye to Jim.

Tuesday, November 6

Kurt loves school.

I think about how important it is for students of every age to love school. Once I was talking to a colleague of mine, Dan Bisaccio, who teaches biology. He said to me, “I only have one standard: for students to love nature.” It is such a simple concept, for students to love school, yet it seems to be so hard to achieve. What if we made this the standard of all our work as parents, as policy makers, and as educators? So many of our students these days are leaving school, yet instead of talking about what will make school a more joyful and caring place, we respond with more tests, more mandated curriculums, and more policies that tell teachers what they “ought” to be doing.

We know we need to create cohesive curriculum across schools, and we need systematic approaches across states and cities to help teachers and students succeed, but at the same time, so many of these conversations seem to take all of the creativity and compassion out of education.  I believe that public education plays a critical role in helping all of our young people become thoughtful, creative, and kind human beings. Mothers and fathers place their children in our care for seven or more hours a day. Are we, as educators, prepared to fully live up to this responsibility and view our students as we would our own children?

Now I live in Mérida, México, on the Yucatán Peninsula where two years ago my wife and I opened a school and community center. When I see the students running out of the classrooms with their little backpacks and lunchboxes into their waiting parents’ arms, I hope the first thing they say is,  “I loved school today.”

Interpretation Circles

When I first started teaching literature, I felt I needed to cover all the important material in a book. Before class, I would read through the chapters I had assigned my students looking for key symbols, descriptions, or dialogue, and then in class that day I would be sure we properly made our way through all the moments of the book I deemed important. Like most teachers, at some point along the journey, I realized how vital it is to hand this work over to the students. The first selfish reason being that if I only give the students everything I know I'm not growing; I'm not learning from what they have to offer. Secondly, we also know that the cognitive wrestling is where the learning takes place. If we are doing all the smart stuff before we get into the classroom, what is left for the students? And are we teachers really that smart?

Somewhere along the way in graduate school I read Russian psychologist Vygotsky's Thought and Language, or at least a couple of paragraphs of it. Vygotsky developed something called the Zone of Proximal Development. The Zone defines how much we can learn when we work with someone who knows more than we do. There is a limit to our colleague's knowledge, so we can only learn up to a certain point, but the zone defines how much we can learn from our colleague when we enter a place of mutual learning. When I began thinking this way in my teaching, things began to get messier. Because I began to really listen, I became more impressed by how intelligent my students actually were. They inevitably came up with startlingly fresh  interpretations, ideas, and they related literature to their personal experiences. I began to have  realizations about the texts we were reading as I saw them vigorously alive in the eyes of my students.  Maxine Greene describes the classroom I was aiming for when she writes,

In my view, the classroom situation most provocative of thoughtfulness and critical consciousness is the one in which teachers and learners find themselves conducting a kind of collaborative search, each from her or his lived situation.

When teaching literature, how then do we go about this collaborative search with our students? At Habla, to explore the diverse interpretations in the classroom we've recently been using a structure we developed called Interpretation Circles. At its core, it's based on Paulo Freire's literacy circles he piloted in Brazil. In a literacy circle there is no teacher, only a facilitator from the community who helps the students to learn written words to describe their world. Recently I visited Sao Paulo, Brazil, and went to an organization that has adapted this idea and named it Circulos de Leitura (Reading Circles). Every Saturday students visit an old house in the center of the city. They sit in comfortable chairs and read books from various authors including Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. They then return to their respective schools and become the facilitators, leading their own Reading Circles.  Watch the a video below (in Portuguese):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCUi78DuD8Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

One of our teachers at Habla, Jessica Robertson, introduced me to a discussion structure she adapted from the book Open Minds to Equality published by Rethinking Schools. We applied the structure to literature and named it Interpretation Circles.  I recently led a professional development session for public school teachers demonstrating how to use Interpretation Circles in the classroom. Together we first read the difficult poem by Octavio Paz, "The Spoken Word." After reading the poem for the first time, the teachers felt like their students often feel, a bit confused regarding what the poem is about. We explained that there is not one right interpretation for this poem, or any poem for that matter. However, we can arrive at a deeper understanding of what the various possible interpretations of the poem might be through our mutual exploration of the words on the page by engaging in the following process.

Interpretation Circles: A Process

1. Use Interpretation Circles with any texts -- novels, short stories, or poems. Ask the students to reread a section of the text and instruct them to do one of the following. Choose a sentence of phrase from the text that

• they think is most critical for understanding the text. What do they think is most important?
• they are confused by. Where do they need the most help?
• they personally connect to. What resonates with them?
• paints the clearest image. Where do they see images from the text in their heads?

2.  Take the students into an open space and gather in a circle.

3.  Have the students count off, 1,2,1,2 all around the circle.

4.  Ask the 2s to step into the middle of the circle and then turn around facing the 1s. Each person should be looking at a partner. (If there is an extra person, form one group of three).

5.  Explain that when you say "go" each person will share the line or phrase they selected and the pair should have a shared conversation about that phrase. If you are focusing on areas of confusion, ask them to work together to figure it out. Then they will look at the other person's phrase and have a conversation about the second phrase.

6.  They will now "steal" their partner's phrase.

7.  The outer circle moves one to the right.

8.  Continue with the process but now discussing the previous partner's stolen phrases. (This allows for each person to discuss new phrases throughout the process. The students are not always sharing their own.)

9.  When everyone returns to the classroom, lead a discussion about what the students learned from each other. The air should at this point be thick with ideas.

10. After the conversation the teacher might ask the students to select a key line or phrase and write about their understanding of it in relation to the larger text.

If a free space isn't available, students can sit in the classroom and continuously change partners for each conversation. When Interpretation Circles work at their best, the classroom hums with conversations and the teacher stands on the side . . . listening and learning.

A Little More Uproar and Chaos

I walked into one of our classrooms this summer and it looked like an absolute mess. Kids were scattered all over the place, some sitting alone and others in little groups. There were plastic bottles and torn boxes of cardboard littering the room. Paint was all over the hands of the students and often in their hair and on their clothes as well. Even though there were two teachers in the room and only about fifteen students, the teachers only seemed to be paying attention to a few students. Many students were left completely unattended. Since I'm the director of the school, something needed to be done with all of this uproar, confusion, and chaos. Do I yell at the teachers? Do I call them to the office to meet with me after class?

Absolutely not. One of my greatest teachers in education, Ted Sizer, wrote that:

Learning and therefore teaching is messy, but messy does not mean bad any more than orderly means good.

Many years before Walt Whitman, a high school teacher himself, echoed Sizer's sentiment:

To teach a good school, it is not at all necessary for a man to be inflexible in rules and severe in discipline. Order and obedience we would always have; and yet two of the best schools we ever knew appeared always to the casual spectator to be complete uproar, confusion, and chaos.

What then might we see beyond the seeming chaos and mess of this moment in this particular classroom? Note that Walt Whitman did not say that the schools were chaotic. Rather they appeared to be chaotic to the casual spectator. Habla's classroom at this moment represented one of the most ideal learning environments I'd seen. And so I began taking photographs, as many as I could in a short period of time, to capture the quality of the seeming chaos so that we might share it with other teachers to demonstrate that this is exactly what we are hoping for in the classroom.

The photographs in this essay were all taken within two minutes of each other to present a portrait of what was happening at that moment in the classroom.

The first thing that was apparent to me is that the teachers, Karla Hernando and Vanessa Ramirez, did not appear to be in a position of control or authority. They weren't  in front of the classroom lecturing or leading a discussion. Instead, each was helping a small group of students. The class was spending the summer exploring the theme of labyrinths. This week they were focusing on "Labyrinths in Nature." After examining the work of Andy Goldsworthy and watching selections from the film Labyrinth, the students were charged with building their own art installations outside in the garden. The art installations needed to include a performative element that would involve the audience as participants. The students had spent the week designing the outdoor spaces, constructing props and the different installations around the school, writing a script, and planning how the actors and the audience would interact. They decided to build a natural labyrinth around the school and to take the audience through the world of the students' original fairy tale.

In most classrooms teachers give students all the same task to complete. What I immediately noticed here was that the students in the classroom were all working on different things.  At one moment in the classroom there were students . . .

Writing the Script

Designing and Creating Props

Reading Fairly Tales and Developing the Storyline

Working on Outdoor Installations

Painting Set Pieces

What was it that allowed the students to be working on so many different projects at one time and how did the teachers keep them focused?  First the teachers inspired the students earlier in the week (these photographs are from the classroom on Thursday and the performance was the next day).  The film, art, stories, and discussions gave the students many things to think about when it was time to create their own work. Second, the work in the classroom was purposeful. The teachers and the students began with the idea of a public exhibition of work on Friday. Knowing they had a deadline and an audience, there was a sense of urgency in the room as everyone worked together to make their collective work as good as possible. Third, the final project was collaborative. Although students had space to make individual contributions (notice in the photographs many of the students are working by themselves or only with one other person), the overall product had many moving parts and required delegating in order to achieve a high quality result.  Fourth, there was precedent. This was the third week the students were together and every week of the four-week summer program the students had to present a culminating event for the public. They had already presented two. This was the third. The students knew they would have an audience and they knew what it meant to  put an event together collaboratively, allowing the teachers to put more of the planning and execution of the final product in the hands of the students.

Although this classroom appears to be in chaos, the teachers worked hard to structure a creative environment. It struck me that great teaching is about letting go. It is about not feeling the need to control everything that happens in the classroom by standing in front of the students delivering information. When we let go, yes things get messy, but messiness is the way of the world. The teachers role is to facilitate messiness, and help students come out of it, with something beautiful.

Sometimes It All Comes Together

As teachers, probably the majority of our classes are perfectly fine. Nothing extraordinary; nothing terrible. But occasionally we have that really awful class that practically sends us home in tears, no matter how many years we've been teaching. And then, at times, we teach a nearly perfect class. One that just feels right. One where it all comes together. I do think it's important to write about the classes that go poorly and to consider what went wrong and what we might do in the future to make them better (I wrote about one of these classes for me this year here.) It's also important that we document the classes where we mix the right elements together and the class seems to resonate for us and the students. Below I'll describe a class where everything seemed to work, and I'll analyze some of the distinct elements that made this class unique.

Context. Throughout the semester in this intermediate-level English class we'd been exploring the theme of "love." We began with selections from Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses and talked about the concept of "eternal love." Then we moved on to a short story "Wedding Night" by Tom Hawkins looking at the idea of "unrequited love" which led us to a Def Poetry Jam poet Maya Del Valle's "Seduce Me" and the idea of "passionate love." In the two  most recent classes, we read William Saroyan's short story "Gaston" and we began to discuss the theme of "familial love."

Turning the Text. We sometimes read literature to better reflect on our own lives. Louise Rosenblatt explains that:

The reader seeks to participate in another's vision--to reap knowledge of the world, to fathom the resources of the human spirit, to gain insights that will make his own life more comprehensible.

From my own background in studying literature, I do appreciate the analytical teaching approach -- examining structures, character development, or language in a formal way -- yet the academic side of literary studies was never as appealing to me. I've always been more interested in making literature a vital part of the community. After college I did this by directing plays and later by bringing literature "from the page to the stage" at the ArtsLiteracy Project. Now I do it in a very different way.

My students who come to my classroom at night spend the day occupied in a variety of professions. They are lawyers, teachers, social workers, psychologists, doctors, and bankers. The last thing they want to do after work at 8:00pm  is analyze a work of literature, perhaps the same way they did in college.  They come at night, of course, to learn English. But they also come to meet other people from the community. They come to chat, tell  stories, and learn about their fellow students who grew up in the same community. They do come to read literature to, in Rosenblatt's words, "fathom the resources of the human spirit." Sometimes we take the time to work through a poem, word by word and line by line. Always after reading a text we talk about the essential ideas. Usually I ask a simple broad question like, "What did you find interesting? What was a moment that jumped out for you? Was there a particular line or passage you found compelling?" From these questions we delve into deeper conversations about the story and the characters. After reading the story I turn the text towards the lives of the students, meaning, we use the text as inspiration to tell our own stories, write poetry, or create through a variety of artistic mediums.

Everyone Talks. The students entered the classroom at 8:00pm, tired from a full day's work. When I'm working with a group of people, whether I'm teaching, running a meeting, or leading a workshop, I always begin with a question or activity that asks each person in the room to say something substantial. I avoid gimmicky prompts like, "Describe your day as a color" but instead ask a question that relates to the theme we are discussing in the class or the topic we will be exploring in a meeting. I do this because it sends the message that I will not be the one dispensing information and lecturing during the class. The classroom environment is a democratic space, and I find that when everyone talks immediately when the class begins, they are more ready to participate throughout the entire class.  In the previous classes we had read and discussed "Gaston." The goal of this class was for students to talk about their own lives in relation to the text. Since "Gaston" is about the relationship between and father and his daughter, I wrote the question on the board, "What is one of the favorite things you did with your father or mother?" I placed everyone in pairs and asked them to tell their story. I told the partners to listen intently and ask many questions.  The class began with pairs intently telling stories.

Shifting Spaces. Our classes are ninety minutes. Since we could set our own schedule, we experimented with different class lengths and found a ninety minute class is the perfect length of time to delve deeply into a given subject. Many schools have forty-five minute periods which, after the class gets settled and you go over business, only allows for about thirty minutes of instruction. We found that even an hour wasn't long enough: the class ended when we felt we were really beginning to get into our groove. Even though ninety minutes feels like the ideal amount of time, it does require several different pedagogical moves, from one activity to the next or even from one space to another. For this class, after the students arrived and told their initial stories, we moved to a new physical space, one that was completely free of tables and chairs.

Everyone Performs. Since this class was new to performing, I began with an easy activity, one in which each person offered a little "performance." In the empty space I placed the group in the circle. I asked everyone to think of a phrase "your father or mother used to say to you over and over again." I modeled, "Kurt, clean up your room!" and asked everyone to repeat after me with the same emotion and pitch. Usually in the English class we only speak in English, but today I told them since their parents spoke to them in Spanish they could use Spanish. We quickly went around the circle, each person speaking their line, and everyone else energetically repeating. I then asked them to translate their lines into English, and we repeated the activity in a different language. (This activity was based on one called Lines from Childhood originally developed by theater educator Jan Mandell. Click on any of the activity names to see the full descriptions on the ArtsLiteracy Project's website).

Create. In pairs, the students then participated in an activity called Sculpture Garden. In Sculpture Garden one student is the "sculptor" and the other student is the "clay." I gave them an instruction like, "Create a sculpture of yourself as a child," and then the sculptor would form their partner into a sculpture. In two minutes, the room was filled with sculptures of children. We moved around the room and the sculptors described their own interpretations of themselves. We continued with prompts, "Create a sculpture of yourself as a teenager. Create a sculpture that represents your mother . . . your father."

Intense Speaking and Listening. The final "performace" of the class is roughly based on Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal's activity Pilot/Co-Pilot. I asked everyone to sit on the floor, back-to-back. I turned out the lights and explained, "Choose person A and person B. Now, person A will tell person B about their mother or father. It can be any kind of story, perhaps a funny story, or maybe a sad story. When I say 'Go!' person A will begin telling their story and will keep telling it until I say stop. If you stop early, go back and add more details, tell us about the context. During this time, person B needs to be completely quiet, only listening. You need to listen as if your partner is the most important person in the world. After we're done, person B will need to tell the same story back to person A so listen intently and try to remember as many details as possible."  We began and the room filled with the sound of stories being told. After about five minutes, we stopped and then person B had to tell the story back, in the first person. In other words, they became their partners, retelling the same stories back to them. We switched partners and then the Bs told their stories and the As repeated the stories back.

Those are the details, but here are the broader ideas worth remembering:

1. the importance of literature. The stories that my students told would not have been as rich if we hadn't begun first with "Gaston." The text allowed us to, as Rosenblatt notes, "gain insights" into our own lives which, in turn, lead to richer experiences when we tell our own stories.
2. everyone talks, everyone performs. There wasn't a moment during this class when students weren't engaged deeply as a speaker, listener, or performer. As a teacher I never stood in front of the class. Instead I was a facilitator providing the instructions and prompts to inspire their responses.
3. multiple moves. We changed activities and spaces many times during the ninety minutes. The students also changed groupings several times working first in pairs, then as a class in a circle, then again in pairs, then in small groups, and then ending the class in pairs.
4. displacement. During the sculpture garden, students transformed into their partners as a child or as a teenager. Similarly, during pilot/co-pilot, the listener becomes the speaker retelling the story back in first person. The students were seeing versions of themselves in the other person, a process we refer to as displacement.

Perhaps the most important foundation of the class was the authenticity of language. All of the communication in the class was real. The students didn't fill out worksheets or take practice tests. They didn't answer multiple choice or true false questions. They told meaningful stories about their lives and listened to the other students. This is what the founder of Highlander Myles Horton refers to when he talks about literacy programs he began during the Civil Rights era called Citizen Schools. The literacy programs he explains, "had a purpose but reading and writing wasn't the purpose. Being a citizen was the purpose." I thought of this line when one of my students wrote about our class:

Habla me ha enseñado ha disfrutar la experiencia de formar lazos en un espacio común pura un grupo y ¨el aprendizaje de la lengua inglés¨es como un plus.

I have enjoyed the experience of forming ties with my class in a shared space. "To learn the English language" is a bonus.

We learn a language to expand our lives and broaden our community. The classroom is a safe space to begin using language to reach out beyond ourselves to tell our stories and even more importantly to "listen as if that other person is the most important person in the world."