Reflections and Interpretations E-Book

Torbjørn Ydegaard (Ed.)

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 172

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

"Reflections and Interpretations" is an anthology on The Freedom Writers’ methodology. It is an anthology for all those with a professional need for texts explaining, not only how The Freedom Writers’ tools are being used, but also why they work so convincingly well. It is not an anthology of guidelines; it is an anthology of explanations based on theory. And it is an anthology written by Freedom Writer Teachers – who else could do it?

Leseprobe

All the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them

Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen

Content

Torbjørn Ydegaard

• Foreword

Erin Gruwell

• To right a wrong with words, not weapons

Doug Ball

• Freedom Writers Pedagogy: Literacy, Hip-Hop & Hope

Barb Fouts-Melnychuk

• It has just begun!

Michelle L. Holliday

• The Manufactured Factory Model vs. the Empowered Global Humanitarian

Brett Mitchell

• Relationship

Christine Maraist Neuner

• Cautionary Tales: The Folk Tales and Fairy Tales Our Mothers Told Us – A Cautionary Tale Unit

Carrie Longo Palmesano

• Making Waves: Freedom Writer Methodology

Sue Burdett Robinson

• Equity vs. Equality: What Can You Do To Level the Playing Field?

Torbjørn Ydegaard

• Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper – two interpretations on education

The Freedom Writers

Torbjørn Ydegaard

Foreword

For a long time I have considered to produce a book on The Freedom Writer–methods as I have felt a professional need for texts explaining, not only how the tools are being used, but also why they work so convincingly well. I was looking not for guidelines, but for explanations based on theory. Within some few hours, walking my dog in the forest, I realized the book should be an anthology written by the help of my fellow Freedom Writer Teachers – who else could do it as an insider job? I therefore wrote the following text on our Facebook-page. Now you are holding the result in your hands!

I know Erin is not too keen to talk about the theories behind the Freedom Writers methods, and as long as the methods give the desired results the pragmatism of ‘practice’ is of course well worth focusing on. However, as a college-teacher I often feel the need to be able to relate the practice to theories. Students writing about the methods in examination papers will be asked to refer them to theories – this is the conditions of ‘academia’, like it or not!

Therefore, I need a book containing reflections and interpretations on the Freedom Writers teaching methodology!

I cannot write such a book on my own. I need the help of my fellow Freedom Writer Teachers. If anyone of you would like to contribute to an anthology, it would be great. You can write a purely theoretical paper, or you can write with reference to your own practical experiences. I will write reflections based on readings of Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper – both philosophers of Jewish descent, with backgrounds in the German language-area and both had to flee the Nazi-regime. In addition, both with strong opinions on learning and teaching! There will be plenty of room for other perspectives, both the broad and well known and the more narrow views!

Conditions:

The target-groups will be primarily students of teaching on bachelor or diploma levels

All texts will be in English

There are no limits on the length of texts – short ones as well as long ones are welcome

Deadline will be March 1. The book will then be presented at #5515

The book will be published as print-on-demand, with an ISBN-number

All royalties from the book will be donated to The Freedom Writers Foundation

The texts in this book are short and long, reflecting practical matters, giving specific suggestions, going into depth with theories of learning and teaching. But they are all written with the sole concern to bring education to those in need – and whom among us can honestly say they are not in need?

All texts are arranged in alphabetic order due to the author’s surname.

Torbjørn YdegaardDenmark, March 2015

Erin Gruwell

To right a wrong with words, not weapons

Twenty years ago, when I walked into Room 203 at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, I had no idea that those same struggling students who sat before me would become the inspiration for an educational movement. A movement that transcended their simple classroom and their chaotic community to help validate vulnerable learners in other classrooms and other communities reach similar success.

I once described my students—the Freedom Writers—as colorful as a box of crayons…and as this educational journey has spread to other countries and continents, the crayons have multiplied and the colors have intensified. Now, other shades share their story and a variety of hues paint personal pictures. While the stories and pictures may be slightly different based on community, culture or class, there is a common thread throughout – a thread of hope that celebrates change and that empowers the human spirit to soar.

Since my initial lessons to write a wrong with words, not weapons, the Freedom Writers have turned their literary lessons into a legacy. One of the catalysts for their change was when Miep Gies, the simple secretary who helped hide Anne Frank in the attic, shared the importance of turning on “a small light in a dark room.” Her moving metaphor motivated my students to become torchbearers. And although the Freedom Writers may have started this odyssey as struggling students, through time, they have transformed into talented teachers who help turn the darkness into light. Luckily, Miep Gies ignited their passion, and now, the Freedom Writers pass the torch to others. Each flame that they light becomes a “Freedom Writer Teacher” and collectively, their fire burns brightly.

The Freedom Writers and I wanted to share the magic we experienced during our educational journey, and to do so, “The Freedom Writers Diary” became a testament to our time in Room 203 and beyond. Once our book made its way into the hands of teachers and students alike, we decided it was time to try and capture lightening in a bottle (or better yet, a book) and publish a teacher’s guide that would showcase strategies and the creative curriculum that defined my pedagogical process. And thus, the Freedom Writer Teacher movement was born. We are now 400 strong. And growing. The Freedom Writer Teachers geographical reach spans states in America, provinces in Canada, and over a dozen countries worldwide, but our purpose is palpable— to give a voice to the voiceless.

In the spirit of giving a voice to the voiceless, we discovered that teachers’ voices need to be heard too because they are story tellers themselves. To celebrate their unique story, along with those they serve, we invite these dynamic educators to Long Beach to spend a week with the original Freedom Writers and me to participate in an intensive, professional development training designed to improve their professional practice. While the Freedom Writer Teachers are with us, each of them get a speak-peak at the actual ingredients used to create our “secret sauce.” Our intention is that after enculturation in the Freedom Writers ethos and methodology, each of the Freedom Writer Teachers will return to their own educational environment with a purpose. Upon return, our goal is for them to take the recipe for the “secret sauce” and make it their own. We encourage Freedom Writer Teachers to adapt, tweak and personalize the lesson plans from Room 203 into their own setting, for their own students. May they add a personal touch or a modern day twist, may they do it better than we did, and may they continue to share their success.

Thus, the success of the Freedom Writer Teachers is that they collaborate, commiserate and celebrate with one another. Freedom Writer Teachers are bold thinkers, they take risks and they solve problems. They are resilient in the face of bureaucracy, they are relevant when challenged with unrealistic expectations, and they fight to create a healthy sense of self. And not only do they revel in relationships, but they foster familial bonds. Like my father once told me, they too are “blessed with a burden”—and that burden is to reach their brethren, to overcome obstacles, to tell their tale, and to dare to dream.

While using the Freedom Writers curriculum in their respective classrooms, eight passionate educators decided to showcase the pedagogical and instructional practices that they use to engage, enlighten and empower. The eight collaborators of this book may speak different languages, practice different customs, and teach different students, but they each share a universal belief—that the art of teaching is bigger than all of us. These noble teachers help inspire many voices, be it that of a troubled teen, an aspiring college student, or even a soldier on the heels of healing. I am proud of how this compelling compilation weaves best practices together, gives credibility to an educational movement, and encourages the teacher in each of us. Whether you stand at a pulpit, a podium or in front of a room full of pupils, may you, like these phenomenal Freedom Writer Teachers, teach one to teach another!

Erin Gruwell

Doug Ball

Freedom Writers Pedagogy: Literacy, Hip-Hop & Hope

For the first time I heard a teacher take a question seriously.

– Freedom Writers Diary, #40

Apologia

Given their chances of dropping out or being gunned down in the streets what happened to the students in room 203, Wilson High, was an educational miracle. A white, middle-class teacher from a gated community discovered in the weltanschauung of her street-smart students their “terms” for becoming school-smart. The Freedom Writers Diary (1997) and The Freedom Writers Diary Teacher’s Guide (2007) reveal their pedagogy of hip-hop and hope, whereby teacher became renegade, gangstas became grad students. In Part I of this paper I discuss why Freedom Writer pedagogy (FWP) is a relevant model for teacher education acquainting pre-service teachers with the critical issues and choices they will face in today’s diverse classrooms, especially when it comes to equal education opportunity for students put at risk by poverty and despair; by institutionalized racism and oppression. Academics may dismiss FWP as cultish California cumbaya because it lacks roots in theory and researched-based practices; however, I connect its well documented, undeniably wholesome outcomes to Freire’s theory of critical pedagogy as well as to academic studies about the needs of at-risk students (e.g., Murray & Naranjo, 2011). In Part II of this paper I discuss in particular how a curriculum of relevant literacy awakened the Freedom Writers’ critical questions, critical hope, and conscientização,which Freire, the Brazilian liberation theologian, considered requisite for emancipatory education.

Part I

“Hands up, don’t shoot…”

In 1989 Aarons predicted the greatest challenge facing educators in the next 20 years will be helping the underclass of poor students. Now in 2015 with nearly 25% of children in the USA living in poverty1, the recalcitrant achievement gap is still the pachyderm in the classroom. In too many urban schools dropout rates2 are as high as 40% and when 98% of students in these schools are Latinos and/or African Americans (often the case), the equal education victory of Brown v. Board has become perversely distorted.

Shorris (1998) described the anomie of oppressive forces that surround the poor, including racism and police brutality, creating a state of perpetual panic, powerlessness, and hopelessness. Recent studies show chronic stressors associated with growing up in poverty have deleterious effects on a child’s cognitive development, if not their life expectancy (Stein, 2009). Endemic factors that put students at risk have been well documented by noted authors (e.g., Kozol, 2005), in academic studies (e.g., Murray & Naranjo, 2008), and in recent headlines (e.g., “Black & Brown Lives Matter”). Barr & Parret (2001) identified three factors present by third grade that predict within 90–95% accuracy a student will eventually drop out,

Having been retained

Attending school with other poor children

Reading below grade level

What chances, if any, would a vulnerable child have of beating such grim odds?

How do they play the inequity cards they’ve been dealt? – growing up in a community of poverty, drugs, gangs, police brutality; being undocumented, raised by single parent, in foster care, the projects, or homeless? A victim of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, illiteracy, and hopelessness? Attending school where they face racism, low or no expectations, pernicious labels, stereotypes, and draconian discipline practices?

At-risk youth arrive at school far from ready to learn, and public school programs tend to isolate them, stigmatize them, and place them in programs that widen the academic gap.…school policies and practices that intellectually and psychologically brutalize [atrisk] students are rooted in educational mythology that has endured for decades in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.

(Barr & Parret, 2001, p.34, italics added)

How does a vulnerable child overcome the accumulated anomie of society, streets, and school and not end up a drop-out, thug, addicted, drive-by casualty, victim, incarcerated?

What are the chances we can we prepare teachers to meet what Aarons (1989) had presaged to be the greatest challenge facing us in the 21st century? For what W.E.B. Du Bois saw as the most fundamental civil right?

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.

(Du Bois, 1949)

And for what Dewey believed we owe all children in our society?

What the best and wisest parent wants for [their] own child that must we want for all the children of the community. Any other ideal is narrow and unlovely, and acted upon, it destroys our democracy.

(Dewey, 1907, p.19, italics added)

“I teach because I search, because I question….” (Freire, 1998, p. 35).

My younger brother, a high school dropout, was incarcerated at age 18 for dealing hard drugs on the streets of Washington, DC. He himself was a heroin addict. In a letter he wrote me from federal prison, circa 1970, he said what he’d learned “up the river” had freed him. For years after his release until he finished his master’s degree in counseling at Lincoln University, he joked he’d earned his college degree in prison. He’d already earned a Ph.D. from the streets.

Before I earned my Ph.D. and prior to becoming a professor of teacher education, I taught special education in upper elementary and middle schools. With only a “degree of caring,” I’d actually started my teaching career as a literacy volunteer tutoring basic reading skills to inmates in a correctional work camp. Their path to prison seemed inevitable given the anomie in their lives. Most were Black, in their early twenties, from poor inner cities. None believed they could be taught how to read. One of my students who’d failed to read in school (but had learned to drive by stealing a Fleetwood), dictated this school memory:

I remember when I was back in school it was fun to me. Even to this day I know that I was hangin’ with the wrong people but it seemed like everyone was learning but me. I like most all the teacher. All try their best to help me. When I got put out of school it really hurt me…. My mother really try to keep or should I said wanted us to finish school because she didn’t have the time to go to school…. I left home at age 12…

– “Mike’s Journal” 7/22/86 3

I became a public school teacher because I wanted to see firsthand the reasons why students like Mike fail to learn to read in school. In racist towns I taught kids from the wrong side of the tracks, in Appalachia I taught students who’d rather be coonhuntin’ than struggling to pass state-mandated literacy tests. In schools where I taught it was not uncommon for a teacher to point to a certain troubled student and declare in a whisper, sometimes cynically, sometimes with a burden of care, “We know where he’ll end up.”

How educators can avoid resignation to myopic prognoses for at-risk students became the central question of my doctoral dissertation (Ball, 1999). Subsequently in education courses I’ve tried to help pre-service teachers develop the skills, dispositions, and self-efficacy to teach all students and especially to believe they can help prevent, or at least mitigate, the inevitable fates of students who are at high risk.

My most astute friend, an attorney, once remarked that anyone who believes in equal education opportunity is pathological. He may have a point, given dropout rates, the byzantine politics of reform, and the mindset of many educators. A syllogism I’ve often read (e.g., Kerr, 2012) or that I heard in the teachers’ lounge, and have heard from more than a few preservice teachers goes, “If those students and their families don’t care about education, why should I care to teach them?”

…if teachers are to educate all children,…they must receive training and preparation for dealing with issues that children [from at-risk] environments bring to school with them.

(Edwards et al., 1999, p. xxiv)

Maybe I am pathological but I’ve searched for engaging and transformative ways to get my message across believing the culture of teaching and education that puts at-risk students further at risk needs to change. Many of my mostly white, middle-class female students have never had intensive, extensive interactions with people who are different than themselves, ethnically, culturally, socio-economically. How do teacher educators prepare students to consider what’s at stake in diverse classrooms? To see the inequities in schools and society that allow educational inequality. Moreover to resist seeing only their circumstantial pathologies and instead choose to look for the potential in streetsmart kids, the ones with Ph. D.s from the streets. Lisa, a Freedom Writer Teacher4, posted on our Moodle site,

Teaching is a paradox. Our inner-most self is made public. Who we are at the core is on the line each day, which makes for a most destructive or most creative environment, or a complacent or extraordinary [one]….What is it that makes us choose?

What is it that makes us choose? Essentially this is what I want my students to consider. The daily choice teachers face: to be destructive and complacent or creative and extraordinary, especially when it comes to being purveyors of equal education opportunity.

If problems of at-risk youth are complex so are the solutions (Pianta & Walsh, 1996).

I realized when I taught basic literacy to middle school students who came from the wrong side of the tracks and who’d fallen through the cracks that at-risk students, like rare hothouse plants, require just the right conditions in order to thrive. Conditions they can't provide for themselves (Ball, 1999). The challenges I faced, dealing with their resistance and inherent distrust of me their “honky” teacher, creating age-appropriate materials and learning activities, advocating for them, especially the daily struggle to keep them out of in-school suspension, was nothing compare to the challenge of helping them develop their capacity to struggle to become independent readers. (cf. Malcolm X’s “A Homemade Education.”)

Given the complex needs of so-called at-risk students and the statistical chances of their thriving in school and in the world, they require a radically sensitive and equally critical pedagogy. Again, they need teachers who can see potential rather than pathologies (Murray & Zvoch, 2011). A far cry from a pedagogy of one-size-fits-all, teaching-to-the-test or a core curriculum. Which theory, sanctioned evidence-based way of knowing could prove within acceptable margins of statistical errors that certain pedagogical practices can transform a gangsta into a grad student?

“….there is no such thing as teaching without research and research without teaching…” (Freire, 1998, p. 35).

In the Freedom Writers’ pedagogy (FWP) I see a relevant and revelatory model for teacher education, which happens to reflect multiple best practices in the published research about teaching at-risk students5, but in and of itself is not the direct result of educational theory or research-based practices. FWP hardly developed from theory-to or research-to-practice. As far as I can tell it evolved from a different path. Similarly one of my most entrenched beliefs about educating all students doesn’t come from educational theory or research, but from a 1950s abstract expressionist who wrote about his paint splattered canvases, “teknic is the result of a need.” FWP evolved as a pedagogy of need. Given our predominate culture of data-driven decision-making, this may be construed as both pathological and heretical. Richard LaVoie is well-known for this comment about what fairness means in a classroom of diverse learners, “Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same. Fairness means everyone gets what they need” (Rosen, 1989).

“Hope is an ontological need” (Freire, 1994, p.8).

In 2003 when I’d first read The Freedom Writers Diary (1997), and then heard Erin Gruwell speak at Salisbury University as part of a distinguished scholar lecture series, it struck me like a lightening bolt that what had occurred in their classroom was the kind of educational reform needed to occur so no child is left behind or left out. In particular the Freedom Writers’ transformation through “critical” literacy6