Tag: Field Notes: KLM

mccomas, August 6, 2002 at 12:58:06 PM CEST

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?

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mccomas, July 30, 2002 at 4:30:04 AM CEST

Field Notes: July 29, 2002

Spent some time over the weekend reading over Beth's notes and Doug's notes. I didn't really push anything, just did a light read, fingering a few ideas as I processed the words and wondering about where we might be going next. I've noticed, so far, two things. Beth talks a lot about community issues. Doug's early resistance to the social action notion ("I don't do social action" - or something to that effect) is gone. I believe he's discovered that he does a lot of social action, just never called it that. The thought just hit that I thought it might be fair and safe to say that anyone who asks questions about their teaching is a social action worker...an agent for change in their classroom. Doug certainly fits that bill...he asks questions about his teaching.

We began writing about the SA principles this morning. Apparently, Amy and I were the only ones who struggled with this activity. I couldn't seem to rope my thoughts in from roaming all around a pretty big prairie. Just when I would start to narrow in on something, I'd see an idea just out of the corner of my eye trying to escape and I"d have to veer off to the right or to the left to corner that idea. In the meantime, as you might expect, the first idea escapes while I'm trying to rope in the second idea. What I liked about these writings however, was that everyone had something quite different to say.

The other cool thing that happened today was during response groups. Beth, Doug and I met and I shared with them my "Kelly's Story" and attempt at pulling that article together. I'll need to do some work on that tomorrow night before my group meets again. After we met and had some individual writing time (but mostly I worked on the computer getting a few things ready for today) I began to think about my class and the multigenre research project they are doing. It hit me that this kind of classwork is social action. It works toward justice, fairness, and equity. Students have choices and when there are choices there is freedom. Now, I tell Doug about this realization as we're leaving the lab and gives me a pitying look. He thinks I'm working real hard to make things fit, and he feels sorry for me that I'm having to do this. Later in the day however, a turn of events makes me not so pathetic. As we are doing our dialectal writing on our double entry journals, I get one where Amy writes something about whether or not multigenre work is really a form of social action. Of course I pounce on that as confirmation of my earlier idea. I wonder what my students would say about this...do they see this kind of project/work as ultimately fair, just, and equitable?

p.s. I'm insanely jealous of Beth's ability to write beautifully for extended periods of time. I grab 5 minutes here; 5 minutes there and produce short bursts of potential genius that never goes anywhere. Sad.

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mccomas, July 25, 2002 at 5:32:35 AM CEST

Field Notes: July 24, 2002

I'm sitting here thinking that Doug and Beth are probably being exceedingly creative with their field notes and I'm doing, well, field notes. But, damn glad to be doing anything and will settle for this type, this night.

In my morning writing I began by noting:

I didn't really talk yesterday about my social action project. What really stood out to me yesterday was how the focus of most people's work is about people; not necessarily content, but real human emotions, a recognition of the pain and isolation so many of our young students feel (no matter what level).
As for me, I'm not certain where I fit. I'm looking at the social action principles and trying to fit my work into one of them because I really don't want to start something brand new (except I might have to).

One of my jobs is to document the work of the site - perhaps another is to be the Social Action facilitator - to facilitate this group through the 5 step process - as they work through solving a problem (or at least thinking about solving a problem) in their own teaching practice.

I'm struggling with some tensions then. The tension of being a facilitator of the process, an agent for change, but here I am a member of this group - where CSA suggests working alongside, not becoming group member of group leader. It's hard for me to find the space I need to be in and to stay w/in that space - I keep overstepping my boundaries-moving the lines a little-and while I don't think this really hurts anything-it does change the boundaries and I need to be aware of that.

So a second tension is where and how - damn, I went off chasing another thought in my mind and completely forgot what it was that I wanted to characterize as the second tension. Perhaps the second tension then could refer to the fact that social action within the classroom has some pre-set boundaries - certain rules that are already in place (grading, etc.) and that means that there is a strong issue of power to deal with. Despite what we might like to happen, we aren't all created equal in the classroom because the teacher has the power - but, let me think this out a little bit...The fact that the teacher has power is cultural not necessarily real; teacher has power because things like grades are important to students. If we were to value different things, then power could be shifted.

As we read our morning pages, in response to a prompt asking folks to write about why their issue is a problem, I hear differences from what I heard the day before.

Beth: low confidence, competence Martha: grouping (today); "The top has decided that the bottom can read tomorrow" Diane: read quote writing from yesterday Jeanette: talks about how being mean inhibits student's education Tonda: talks about how intolerance and lack of respect depends upon the survival of the fittest and establishes a pecking order; she mentions power Amy: wondering why students who are intellectually patient tend to succeed while students who are intellectually impatient tend to fail; "students view challenge as a threat to [their] well-being and self-esteem" Toodie: kids having responsibility; talked a lot about her symptoms Doug: wonders about the mindset of success at any cost; how can students recover when they "fall down"; and why do students seem to lack ambition? Marlene: notices the themes in our writings Vickie: wants students to have a "me too" frame of mind

From marathon writing I make notes of interesting phrases I hear people say:

experience the power
collaboration
fear of not being clear
What would make students love learning?
creativity squelched in learners
How much do we have to choose?
Go create your own world, you don't need to play in mine.
"real" ideas
fear is the great hindrance to learning
heart smart
better qualified teachers will get the hell out of Dodge
life is NOT fair
a urine test for teaching
I deserve it, dont' you?
Some "places" work against intellectual pursuits.
Is there rigor in education programs?
We must prepare our students to move away.
dispel the myth (about Appalachia)
Instead, we leave the development of intellectual abilities up to chance.
There is fear, in our students [and in teachers?], about changing your mind...
I wonder whether school systems really want teachers to develop?

I noticed there were underlying assumptions when we did the marathon writing on the prompt about why it is difficult to generate topics that some people think the teacher assigns topics and others think students choose the topics. There are some cases where state mandated (or county mandated) requires that students are given pre-selected topics to write about.

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