Constructing Kasun, Educator

Here is a smattering of observations from last semester’s work here and how it felt.  They’re some final reflections before other activities drive my attention elsewhere (I’m about to go to the Opening Ceremony for the Korean Fulbright teachers I’ll be teaching over the next several weeks, for example).

I never took a day off.  Not. one. day.  That was unwise (I’m being kind to myself).  Yes, we moved during the semester; I went to a friend’s wedding in California; my in-laws visited for ten days; my dog got sick and had emergency surgery, etc.  There were a couple days when I really needed a day, just one.  But I refused to allow it.  It was a sick sort of fear that if I missed just one day, I’d fall behind, and I’d have only myself to blame.  In reality, if I had given myself a day off–even a day a week–I probably would have been more clear-minded about doing my work.

I almost didn’t take time off during this holiday (yes, I still have work–the Korean teachers, the advisory program doesn’t follow the university schedule, unfortunately).  I started to realize I was angry at myself for not getting a break, fantasizing about summer break already.  That was wrong, especially since I was feeling guilty for not working enough during my break.  So I just came off four days of a self-imposed break.  At Pedernales Falls on Rob’s birthday (Saturday), I felt myself having thoughts, the kind I used to have when I wasn’t working and feeling sick about working.  

When I finished writing my last paper at the end of the semester (I wrote forty-five pages in the last couple weeks… this isn’t remarkable for graduate school, but an indicator of how busy I was), I felt not just a sense of relief.  I felt like I had just gotten out of jail.  When did graduate school become prison?  Again, I like what I’m studying; I’m passionate about it.  But I do not want to feel imprisoned.  

So, next semester, I will give myself permission to have breaks.  If I end up feeling constantly shackled, my work will suffer, and I will suffer.

And now it’s off to work.

I like using a high-currency education word start.  I’ll assess my measurable goals (SMART goals?) and then quantify these measurements.

Not really.  The funny thing–coming to study at the University of Texas isn’t quantifiable.  What would I measure?  My GPA?  Hours spent paper writing?

Things are about as clear as mud.  I like the challenges of being here.  Starting a new program.  Professors with diverse backgrounds–some are very young, others very seasoned and well-published.  Being pushed to learn in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable.  At the risk of exposing my deep ignorance, I’ll take a stab at offering some things I have learned:

–Concrete historic explanations of institutional racism in the experience of immigration–see information about “Operation Wetback” if you have any doubts.

–Enhanced depth of understanding regarding the mismatch of teachers (usually, white, middle-class women) with an increasingly diverse population.  Over the holiday season, I have met many white, middle class women teachers (disclaimer–like me), and tried to explain my interests in pursuing my PhD with sympathy toward their work.  Those conversations feel kind of uncomfortable, because we talk about race, power, and class and how to try and meet students with backgrounds different from one’s own.  Solutions for what to do about “those children” (you know who I’m talking about, right?) are never ready in a twenty-minute holiday party meeting.  But we share experiences, and I listen.  I guess I’m most moved by how these teachers really want to understand what to do.   

–Better ideas about how to do research… I’ve developed better skills (through practice in one of my courses–thanks Dr. Urrieta!) at listening to people I research, respecting their positions, attempting to highlight their ideas through multiple lenses… lenses of current histories and cultural contexts, my own ideas, their lived experiences.  I have been informed by various ways of knowing (and stay here to learn more from these perspectives) including Chicana feminist epistemology, critical race theory, and others.

I read (and write) a lot.  I hear from other students that I’ll be reading a lot more next semester.  Yikes.  I tell myself that since I have gotten used to Texas (not really, but why stop lying to oneself?), I’ll have more mental space to read.  One of my professors for next semester emailed us a complaint a student sent him about how the nine books he’s asking us to read are above that student’s budget.  He was not moved and instructed us on how to purchase used books online.  I don’t blame him.  The texts are all great and important to the field (Cultural Theory).  

I haven’t made many friends.  Maybe in time.  So it’s kinda lonely here, and I miss my friends and former colleagues more acutely than I had expected.  And when I talk to them and hear about any of their problems, I feel a sort of existential angst that I am so far away and can’t be present to accompany them through struggles and joys of their lives.  

I have taken up biking and looking into state parks.  So has my husband.  The parts of natural Texas we’ve seen are beautiful.

I wonder if it was “worth it” to uproot our lives from the Washington, D.C. area and a solid PhD program where I was studying before.  Can I whine a bit about how much I miss working with and learning from Dr. Wong at George Mason?

I worry about the economy and hope Rob keeps his job.  If not… well…  I worry about the global economy and remember I’m not likely to ever go hungry because of my own social networks and then feel guilty about worry #1.  And I try to comfort myself recognizing that our species will most likely persevere regardless.

Finally–for that cultural theory class–I’m supposed to give my professor a three-page paper about my research interests.  If you’d like to write it for me, give me a holler.  That little piece of work is truly clear as mud at this point.

*** a side note–I’ll be teaching Korean teachers on a Fulbright for about four weeks, starting next week–a course titled “American Public Education” through a language institute in Austin.  It’s so strange being on the other side of Fulbright, but exciting, too.  A great opportunity to put to work some of what I’m learning in shaping the ways Koreans understand education from a U.S. perspective.

I’m not referring to the amount of time it has taken me to update my blog.

I’m talking about change.

For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of immense possibility.  The election of Barack Hussein Obama to the US presidency is a landmark moment.  Like so many of us, throughout the world, we were struck, unsure of how to believe this moment could be true.  I remembered an Arab man who spoke to us, a group of Fulbright educators in Israel a little over a year ago, a professor from the Negev Desert… that our country’s own racism test would be what happened to Obama in the presidential election.  And who could believe it–we passed.  That doesn’t mean we’re finished–far from it, but the scope of possibility has just opened up, as if we are on the edge of discovering an entire new dimension to the universe.  

In real terms, after the hugs I exchanged with colleagues in my department at an election night party, many of them people of color for whom this election holds perhaps even deeper meaning, I drove home, holding back tears all the way.

The following morning I was on the way to the middle school where advisory has become a regular part of the schoolweek.  The plan I had crafted was a debriefing that each teacher would do with students about the advisory.  I crested a hill, a vast purplish Texas horizon before me, and I was overwhelmed.  These students, almost all African American and Mexican, would know that concretely this country is ready to be led by a man of color.  

In advisory, the children were heavily engaged and curious to make more sense of the election.  First and foremost, they understood this was the US’s first African American president.  They knew Obama’s daughters would get a new puppy.  They wondered what Obama would do first; they even asked how the world would change.  That question itself hadn’t occurred to me as such, and the quiet girl who shared it with me humbled me.  So much possibility.  They knew this was the US’s 44th president, and most of them had stayed awake the previous night following the election news.

And there’s still work to do.  I need to write more lesson plans for next week’s advisory.  I have a paper due on Monday.  I’m frustrated by California’s vote to ban gay marriage, worried about a soaring unemployment rate, a world still full of inequality.  But we may just be on the edge of a new kind of world, one in which our better selves create a better world.

Stings.  You scream like hell.  Call people after you google, “Austin emergency 78702.”  

What does this have to do with my program?  

It’s indicative of how life gets in the way.

I had two recording devices ready to conduct an interview for research I’m doing for a class (and may fold into dissertation work someday).  I was planning to interview a teacher at the middle school regarding his approach to critical pedagogy.  I’m not sure he calls it that, but what I’ve heard about his teaching and my brief interactions indicate he puts theory into practice toward liberatory education with his students.

I had garlic, onion, limes, mole sauce, tomatoes, and cucumbers lining the kitchen counters.  I was going to make chicken mole (a favorite Mexican dish of mine) for him.  As a small offering of my appreciation.  He said he’d be glad to come to my house for the interview.  And after a meal, we’d talk.  With recording devices rolling.

Of course that meant shopping beforehand. I finished unpacking the last of the beer, and I heard, “bzzzzzz, bzzzzzz, bzzzzzzz.”   A bee had gotten stuck inside the blinds of the back window.  I tried to gently shoo him out of the blinds, opening the door to let him free, to no avail.  And twenty minutes later, he had neatly positioned himself beneath my left foot.  I didn’t see him, of course, and he had his way with me.

I screamed.  And yelled, hollered, raised a ruckus.  Tore apart the contents of a basket of toiletries in the bathroom looking for tweezers.  Felt the venom of anger inside me, knowing I’m allergic to bees as I pulled the stinger out.  It hurt worse.  I called people.  No one answered.  One person who did answer heard me yelling because I thought my cell phone hadn’t connected yet.

I live in a new city.  Where’s the hospital?  Google it.  No luck.  Call a stranger in Austin and get advice.  My new cell phone somehow erased all my contacts (including local ones), so I was stuck.  But I have one professor’s cell phone programmed into my new list of 8 or so contacts.  No answer.  Called my mom (a nurse).  Got advice (including a gentle version of “Settle the hell down”).  Called the university nurse.  Consensus:  Go to the hospital.  Googled husband’s work colleague because husband wasn’t picking up the phone.  Colleague quickly assured me she’d find him at all costs.  Husband comes home in a rush, I have canceled my interview and left all the food on the counter, and we leave.

Big crowds. Lots of coughing.  Two separate waiting rooms.  One for the really sick and one for the moderately paranoid.  My swelling never got too bad (was it the Benadryl Mom had prescribed?).  The doctor was nice but said I need to get real allergy tests; maybe I’m not allergic after all (just hysterical?).  My last bee sting over a decade ago was ugly… there was some kind of reaction going on.

No interview.  Haven’t finished the reading I need to for tomorrow.  But my foot is fine, and I’m back at home.  I guess we’ll reschedule.  And the reading will get as finished as it can.  Goodnight. 

It went… well?  Is it safe to say that?  I asked an administrator, and his words were, “It went about as well as the first day of advisory could go.”  I waited for a shoe to fall.  It didn’t.  ”Why are you doing, this advisory work, is it related to your dissertation?”

No.  I told him I wanted to be involved in activism and in scholarship.  I am not a white savior, I told him, but I believe very much in the connection between research and being on the ground in schools.  He can relate, as he already has his PhD.  He said that sometimes it’s “too much,” inside the school building.  That statement was heavy and powerful.

But advisory.  Went. Well.  Students sat in circles.  A couple students said they thought it was fun.  Others thought it was neat they were with their friends.  Teachers thought it went well.  Some expressed good concerns.  What about the Spanish speakers?  (I’m hoping they can get fluent English/Spanish speakers to work with the non-English speaking kids to interpret, but I probably need to be more explicit.)  What about if they didn’t finish the lesson plans that already went out?

The lead guidance counselor and I sent an email to the staff.  We thanked them for expanding their comfort zones–doing something they don’t normally do–working with another adult the entire time inside their classrooms.  And also helping students feel safe, creating a community inside their unique advisory space.

Tomorrow is Day 2.  I’ll be back.  Today a few students from the leadership class and I stuffed the teacher’s boxes with large purple sheets of butcher paper so they can make a contract of norms which all students will sign in their advisories tomorrow.  The students started talking, and I got rich stories from them.  One whose siblings, like me, study at UT.  Law.  Math.  Business.  The students said they were worried about how to manage college, about how to pay for it.  One of the students told me her mom left her dad because of problems the parents were having; she was explicit.  I told her my dad died when I was seven; I was sorry.  The other one said she was teased by her brothers and sisters because she didn’t know her dad.  ”They have a different story every time I ask.”

Working so briefly with students… seeing hope.  Powerful.  I miss the classroom and am glad to have the small connection I do through advisory.

Things looked really good in terms of advisory when I wrote my last post.

And I was writing it, the principal was meeting with the lead guidance counselor here, the person who has seen to the million and one logistical considerations from devising the pairings of teachers to run advisory to making sure we had enough photocopies for the binders we distributed… And she told him that she is cutting our program from three to two times a week.  Because she needs more instructional time for the students.

Have you ever felt the way the air gets silent still before a storm?  That’s how it felt when the guidance counselor told me.  I’m not sure why the principal didn’t tell me herself.  But no matter.

I’ve thought about giving up on the project.  Why bother?  Imagine the mind of the middle schooler, doing this activity-thingie twice a week.  Three times a week is more than half the days in a week.  Twice a week is just some thing that you show up for because you have to.  I’m tired of having to fight for a program I believe will be transformative for students and staff, transformative in ways that will pay off in terms of teachers being able to get students to pass tests, as well.

I’m at the middle school waiting for staff to run “catch-up” trainings.  I’m between classes right now, looking at a prominently displayed Mexican flag and a large mariachi hat inside the library.  I guess these things are here because it’s Hispanic Heritage Month, currently.  I haven’t seen other markers that indicate the month is happening.  That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t acknowledging it in other ways.  I just might not know.  Half the student population at the middle school is Latino.

Monday after the school day ended, I met the staff to provide an hour-long training for how to run a group effectively.  We already had a during-school training to provide staff with information regarding the logistics of how advisory would be run last week.  In schools today, teachers need to know how long the period is, how the program is organized, who will participate and in what capacity.  They need to know our expectations.

But Monday was all about two things–creating safety and building relationships.  The counselors I have been working with here helped devise a strategy for how to run the trainings.  We agreed that we’d run them similarly to advisory.  So we had teacher facilitators from the staff here provide activities and reflections to the staff in small groups.  They received color-coded handouts and then had to move to different parts of the library according to one of four colors to meet with their group of teachers.  

They reflected on what makes students feel safe in an advisory and how to achieve that safety (and also how to destroy it).  They also talked about the best relationship they had with a teacher and thought about how to build strong relationships with their own students.  The teachers from this school facilitated all these discussions.  I was so impressed at their skillfulness in talking with their peers; they were respected, and the discussions were respectful and thoughtful.

I felt good about the trainings and hope the staff feel good about them, too.  It’s a strange tension that we have to think of the difference between the role of group facilitator and teacher.  The division is pretty strong for some teachers, and I can see how that would happen with the pressures of the standards and benchmarks that the state mandates these teachers teach.  

Allies

With any new program, you want to have allies so that it is successful.  I have learned that a technology instructor got some of his students to create a short and clever video which will run for students on Monday.  One of the women who has been part of the advisory planning committee is helping her students create and perform a cheer for advisory (she’s a cheerleading coach).  An assistant principal has agreed to be our administrative support member on the advisory committee, and the lead guidance counselor has written some clever announcements (such as a call-in radio show about advisory) to help get students excited about the program.  I’m thrilled at the support we’re getting so far and crossing my fingers that the program will fly next week when it starts on Tuesday.

I’ve been awfully quiet about my coursework thus far.  I’m three weeks in now, so I’d better give some impressions.  Later, a quick update on advisory.

Three great classes.  Three great professors.  My favorite is probably the most personal.  I’m taking an advanced qualitative methods course called narrative and oral traditions (in layterms, it’s a course on how people express themselves, their life stories, and how to research them through various methods like interviews, being in community among the people with you research, etc.).  We talk a lot about bridging the (artificial?) divide between the academy and daily life.  We read an great article for this week’s class (along with four others… the reading load here is intense… so much for my illusions of spending extra hours in the library doing cross-references in my reading just because I wanted to “dig deeper”).  The article was about sacred research.  The author is a Native American who researched among healers in the community where she lived for forty-two years.  She struggled about perhaps leaving the academy but learned in an intense dream that she needed to stay… and she connected to the community, was healed by the women with whom she worked, and then published her work, based upon the research questions they wanted to have answered.  Several students in the class found it difficult to imagine doing that–connecting the personal and spiritual side of self to the researcher side.  I think that if I do not attempt to do this (and, yes, it may be difficult to convince the research community that this is “valid,” and it will likely limit my possibilities in terms of where I may be able to work), I will not be able to make it as a scholar.  This author maintains her writing within the style and framework of academic writing, but she is steadfast in demonstrating the personal, spiritual, and subjective selves that are part of her work as well.  I’m also learning Chicana feminist epistemology… and it is an intense and helpful lens for me to understand experiences.  More on that, later.  Our professor is hopefully about to make tenure at UT… and I hope he does, because I need him here!

Another class in American Immigrant Experiences is taught by an anthropologist who has done a lot of research in the field.  We’ve looked at the historic policies and court cases in the US which have helped institutionalize the racializing of our country to the benefit of people who are now considered “white.”  The class members share an antipathy toward the history we’re learning–this isn’t your classroom notion of the melting pot.  It’s more about how Asians were legally considered not fit to become Americans, how Mexicans, through decades of second-class status in workers’ programs, have had to fight for legal recognition in terms of immigration and citizenship policy.

My final class just started Monday… about the cultural knowledge of teachers.  This one will be very helpful if I decide to research with teachers.  The professor knows a lot of theory, uses highly interactive methods, and is gentle in creating a safe learning environment.  She was obviously a great teacher (she used to teach fourth grade), and I’m looking forward to learning a lot more from her as well as the vast knowledge and backgrounds of students in the class.

Advisory Update

Advisory is going well.  I gave a training on the parameters of what advisory has been built to look like ten times on Wednesday (in rotating sessions).  Most teachers seem willing to try it.  Their big concern is that this will take away too much “instructional time.”  They know as well as I do that the content of advisory is also instructive, but we’ve all been disciplined into believed that only the four core disciplines taught here (math, science, language arts, and social studies) are real instruction (that’s where the testing is, after all).  I was humbled by the co-presenting that staff members who participated in the two-day planning sessions did.  They spoke with deep knowledge, ownership, and hope, about where the program is going.  I will facilitate another training on Monday after school with the staff as well.

Balance

I keep trying to balance it all, including another move with my husband which we made over the weekend. Luckily my husband in pinch-hitting in terms of unpacking, cooking, and overall patience with me (he is also still adjusting to a new job, new city).  I also keep an eye toward a hurricane that has already been devastating and will hit Texas tomorrow morning and eventually bring some of its rain toward Austin.  We have evacuees at shelters from Galveston and Houston here.  It’s a strange new phenomenon for me.

I wasn’t sure if I was an interloper, a part of the middle school community, or a combination of both.  I wasn’t meeting “my kids’” parents this time around, so participating in Parent Night felt off somehow to me.  I could feel it in my approach toward other teachers, somehow not in full solidarity with them as they faced the enormous tasks of presenting who they are, why they care about what they teach, and building bridges with students’ families to help support those students throughout the year.

I had my bilingual flyer about advisory printed, and I brought an attractive table cloth from home along with peppermints to attract folks to my table (in the gorgeous atrium of the building, we set up about 10 information tables).  I was naturally vexed by the photocopier yet managed to have my copies and table ready by five minutes before the event started.  And, it turned out, I was sharing a table with a very talented colleague at the school, one who works for an external organization to provide additional group and individual counseling at the school.

The principal convened all the parents inside the cafeteria.  The teachers lined the back of the cafeteria, standing in attention while the families sat.  She had an agenda and started with data from last year’s test scores.  There were challenges, problems, kids weren’t passing.  And then the dress code (basically a uniform) and how the man for whom the school is named had made a large donation so that school emblemmed shirts could be purchased at half the price for students.  Collars, solid colors (and not the local blue and red gang colors)… no Dickies, only khakis and blue jeans… no baggies.  Parents had some concerns.  Meanwhile, a man who works for the school provided Spanish translation for Spanish-speaking parents. 

Parents then went to their children’s classrooms to meet all the teachers, class period by class period.  Those of us at tables stayed in the atrium.  My counselor colleague was fascinating, and I’m learning a lot from her and another outside agency counselor who work at the school.  I had mints; she had free books and a game with a wheel for spinning—full of interesting and non-threatening personal questions.  Spin the wheel, answer the question, get a free book.

“Hey, I like books,” a sixth grade girl said, cozying up to the table.

“Take a spin, and get a free book!”

Through various questions on my colleague’s brightly-colored board, I learned that parents admired their children, that the kids often chose their moms and dads as their heroes, that one dad said, if he could achieve any goal this year, it would be helping his son do well at school… That dad was hungry for a book, too, and the counselor had a ready stack of Spanish books from which he chose.  I thought about the literature about the number of books in homes and student performance and saw how excited these families were to get the books (I would have been, too—I love books).  What if these books were always free for families…  And doesn’t their interest in getting free books (remember, this is a school where 98% of the children receive free and reduced priced meals) disturb our concept of “poor” families? 

I told the parents and students about the three tiers of Garcia’s advisory content in English or Spanish, asking them which language they preferred.  Community building/relationships, decision-making/life planning, college preparation/study skills.  All but one parent seemed to offer a positive response to it, “Great!  Oh, this will help our kids a lot!”  I wrote my phone number on several of the information sheets and explained that I  wanted any more feedback or questions that might come up as we start the program.  The one man who didn’t seem to like the program walked away from me and my request to get his opinion.  I wish I could have understood his concerns as part of my interest in making the program fit the needs of the community.  Nonetheless, from the fifteen or so parents with whom I spoke, I got the sense that they supported it.

I need to build in some kind of feedback system where I continue to get parent feedback.  Perhaps the PTA will allow me to have some time at their meetings to get feedback from them throughout the year.   

I put the “C” from ICUSP into practice.  Institute for Community, University, and School Partnerships–C for community… I met with parents who the parent coordinator at the middle school selected for me to meet with.  They are three former PTA members from last year.  

We met at 5 pm in the parent coordinator’s classroom.  They are African American, and I am white.  In my introduction to them, I explained that I’m tired of the inequities that too many children in this country face in education, and the ones with the inequities tend not to look like me–white.  I also explained my reasons for wanting to do a PhD–to combat those inequities, to make school a place where kids don’t have to put on a mask when they walk in the door.  I don’t plan to explain this everywhere I go, but I felt like being as honest about my intentions as I can from the start.

These women all have children at the middle school.  The women were smart, thoughtful, interested.  It was humbling in a deep way to see the eyes of the parents–they are the ones who care the most, probably, about the program I’m trying to make work at the school.  And you know it matters the most to them–the parents, custodians of the futures for their kids.  You pray they believe your honesty and that you don’t screw it up.  The last thing I want advisory to be is some sort of mission work on the fly which serves my pursuit of, what–an advanced degree?

In general, they said they liked what they saw (I shared the page and a half of parameters of how advisory will work, the three main content components, the mission statement).  I also showed them the list of topics of curricular areas the planning committee had come up with.  However, they had important concerns.  What will we do to address the communication style some children have where they have side conversations?  Their side conversations aren’t supposed to be rude–it’s a discourse method.  The advisors (namely teachers) will have to understand that this style isn’t bad in and of itself–but rather that norms will have to be agreed upon within the group–not permitting that side conversation, but not dismissing the children’s experiences of it.  Luckily, the parent coordinator said staff have already received training to understand these (as the parent put it) “cultural differences.”  I also explained that advisory should also be a space where teachers learn a lot more about the children they teach.  It’s a cycle that should build upon itself.

More feedback–many children already have the skills we plan to teach.  Amen to that–and we want the experiences not to be redundant but to be cumulative–where kids can practice skills they have in ways that extend them.  And another interesting piece–the loud kid, the boisterous one, often is the one who is chastised.  But so often, she or he is the one who has really important observations to make.  Amen to that, too… I had to hold back tears as I thought of my students from last year in alternative education.  So often their experiences were the most important–and yet stifled by formal education.  Hopefully advisory will provide the safe space so that their experiences will be valued and voiced, as well as the experiences of the quieter students, too.

They had good questions about just how things would run… who the advisors would be, how they’d be chosen.  They had specific concerns about how to tailor the lessons as well–concerns that I will build into the way we write the curriculum as well.

We exchanged phone numbers, and I thanked them for their time.  I hope my intentions, training, and willingness to understand their perspectives, creating a space for those perspectives, will be enough to make this work.

I’ll be at the the middle school’s Back to School night on Sept. 2 and hope to meet more parents and get more feedback.  It’s about the C in ICUSP–and if we don’t put that letter in there, we’re just four letters without the critical link.

My Course Update–GREAT NEWS

I have a spare 30 minutes after my previous class letting out early.  Yes, I will drop the human inquiry course I described in my previous post.  The professor of the “Immigrant Experiences in the US” course is letting me in.  ”I could kiss your feet,” I told her.  While this is exaggerated, if she had said, “Do it,” I really would have.  The sense of relief was too immense–particularly after hearing her go through the syllabus and the incredible readings we will cover as well as her own expertise as an anthropologist in the field.  I am overcome with relief but have to put the stamina together for my next class in a few minutes.