A Letter to Will

Will responded in the E-Anthology to my two-voice Social Action poem. He said:

karen,

i love this piece . . . i quite honestly got so sick of hearing one of our local SI folks talk about PC this and PC that for the last four weeks -- i just wanted to strangle her! i'm all about teaching for social action, and she just kept talking about how the only reason to do "multiculturalism" was because the PC police were out there watching over her shoulder . . . i was so sad everyday to hear her talk . . .

i felt like she and i had the conversation above!

will

I replied in an email to him:

Hi Will!

Good to hear from you and thanks for responding to my Social Action piece. My job this summer was to serve as the social action facilitator and will be to document the work. We structured our institute around the social action cycle (using the first week to explore the multitude of issues in our teaching practice we might with to change, the second week to better understand the issues, the third week to focus on a single issue and begin thinking about how to change, and this week on making an action plan.....our fall follow ups will allow for reflection). We've used 30 minutes each day (the first 30 minutes) to write; me providing prompts I hoped would nudge people closer and closer to an issue and then closer and closer to a plan. We've also done a few of the activities I learned at the social action workshop last summer.

Your comments were interesting to me because of one person (well, two actually, but the second seems to have disappeared) in the institute. She was openly resistant to the notion of social action, to the idea of her being an agent for change, or even the possibility that there was room for change in her situation. Her passive agressive behavior (during our morning's 30 minute sacred writing time when we focused on social action she maybe wrote for five minutes and then she would sit twiddling her thumbs and tapping her toes for the remainder of the 30 minutes...her sharing was never anything positive or hopeful...the voice of doom and gloom). I found this very frustrating and finally one day, she and another woman were in line behind me in the cafeteria and she made an open comment to this other woman...something negative about social action. This gave me an opportunity to ask her directly what bothered her about the notion of change and fairness and equality and justice. I really simply wanted to know but in retrospect, the way I worded the question may have done one of two things. It may have shamed her into re-thinking her position (I mean, after all, what schmuck is going to say I'm not all about fairness and equality and justice, right?) or it may have helped her re-think what social action was. That very afternoon was when I wrote the two voice poem. It felt right to do it then because she and I had a least had a conversation about her resistance.

Interestingly enough, I think the real drawback was that her writings the first week as she began to explore possible issues were quite personal in that it was pretty obvious that to follow through with any of them she was going to have to examine herself as a teacher quite closely and I think that's what scared her off. She teaches at my husband's school and he had plenty of tales to tell last year about things that went on in her classroom. Change is frightening, particularly if one has an inkling of where the finger might end up pointing.

How disturbing your experience must have been? I think it's harder to take fake "tolerance" than intolerance sometimes, don't you?

Thanks for all your hard work this summer. I expect we'll be seeing you in Atlanta in November?