Constructing Kasun, Educator

Like anyone who has registered with the Georgetown Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Outreach Coordinator, I received an invitation to attend a writing workshop led by Palestinian author Ibsitam Barakat.  Participants would read her memoir about her childhood and then participate in a day-long session with her on February 2. 

I wondered what the session might be like.  Would pain and bias eclipse open dialog and the ability to use writing as a vehicle for exploration and understanding?  I knew the Outreach Coordinator and had admired the way she had coordinated prior programs.  I decided as a writer and teacher that I wanted to attend.

Before the session began, I spoke briefly with Ibsitam.  I was impressed with her intensity and how hopeful she was.  She said she was interested in constructing, in bringing people together, that all of us want and need to grow, and suddenly she drew an ecological parallel, “You’ll never meet a tree that doesn’t want to grow.” 

Ibsitam challenged our thoughts on growth at personal, societal, and historic levels, right from the start.  “There is no freedom without cutting through fear,” she explained, encouraging us all to break through our fears of others, our exclusionary beliefs (religions, group identities, etc.).  Despite a painful childhood scarred by war, flight, and fear (all richly described in her book, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood), she is able to advocate for a policy of “zero attacks,” where blame is not cast in dialog in order to resolve conflicts.

And then we were writing about our most personal feelings, memories, ideas.  Various educators in the audience shared–stories of loss, stories of structures of oppression through the personal experience, of, for example, being an African American woman in the US.  Ibsitam valued our voices, our experiences, and wove them together with historical experiences, her own, and the histories of peoples–including Arabs and Jews–throughout the milennia.

We wrote several times, and in the writing and the ensuing discussions, the room was a connected class of 25 teacher-writers.  We supported each other in our frustrations at not being able to support children as we want to, the mindsplitting prospect of not reaching them on the personal levels and the awful pressure of teaching the mandated curriculum verified through highstakes tests.  We listened with empathetic ears, and there was suddenly a community of empathy, respect, and care. 

Ibsitam achieved this for two reasons, I believe.  First, she is wise.  Second, because we believed in the idea she offered us, one of a compassionate power stengthened by virtue of being in community.  I look back on my journal notes from that session and carry these memories as glimmers of hope for how a world can live in peace, by sharing our stories and listening, one story at a time.

Information about Ibsitam’s book is available at http://www.amazon.com/Tasting-Sky-Palestinian-Ibtisam-Barakat/dp/0374357331.

To learn more about Ibsitam Barakat’s ideas, scroll down to Ibsitam’s name and watch the interview:  http://culturesurfer.com/VideoIndex.htm.

If you’re a teacher, there’s no doubt you yawn at thought of the in-service you’re required to attend.

If you were at the Barry Lane in-service the ESOL Office in my district provided, if you were yawning, we need to check your pulse.

Lane was a drink of cold water for those of us stuck in the desert of standardized tests, forced curricula, and mediocre administrators (remember, I DO have the world’s best administrator–so she’s exempt).  For an entire workday, we learned writing instruction strategies that will get students excited about writing as well as a hefty dose of remembering why we teach in the first place.

Lane began  by telling us about his beloved elementary teacher Miss Foley.  She inspired him to experiment with learning and was beloved by many of her former students.  He asked other teachers in the audience to recognize their own “Miss Foleys.”  One of the women was asked to describe what made her teacher so special.  “She loved us,” she answered.  That simple.  Lane explained that this was at the heart of teaching and what makes us good teachers.  We know this, right?  But how often do we get to hear these words at our in-services?

Lane proceeded to plant seeds of great writing instruction with clever anecdotes and lots of heart.  He showed us his own awful book reports from elementary and high school–real yawners with no passion–written for the sole purpose of the transactive act of getting a grade so the teacher could write across the top, “Improve penmanship.”  Then he showed us sample writing from other students who wrote about things they cared about.  Students wrote advice columns to polygons who had identity issues–were they too square?  He reminded us to write with the students (something I find personally gratifying and gives me credibility because I often share my work with students).  After we wrote for ten minutes while listening to Claire de Lune, he told us that if we were anxious about writing, we needed to relax and address the “Watcher,” as he calls it, that awful voice inside our heads that tells us our writing is no good.  He showed some student sample letters to their “Watchers.”  The voice students demonstrated was so personal and funny as they beat their watchers into submission.

Lane remembered the words of his students, not needing to read the words off the screen as he presented, a loving tribute to the power of their voices.  He helped us consider writing leads (student collect favorite leads and explain why, ask students to write several leads before beginning their writing, among others).  We learned about revision, using “binoculars” to help focus on the subject you’re discussing, and finding the details that make writing interesting.

Throughout the in-service, Lane inspired us with the work of several great people.  Mandela, he told us, wrote his autobiography on toilet paper from prison.  Words can be powerful, and it’s hard to strip us of our humanity if we use them well, even in prison.  Freire, the great Brazilian educator and philosopher, said that, “When you write well, you read the world.”  The writer is always looking into the details of life, and by writing, you dig deeper and reveal the layers to get at life’s essence.

The one quotation that made the greatest impression on me was one from Albert Einstein:  “Great spirits have always faced violent opposition from mediocre minds.”  I think there’s something great about all of our spirits, but how often have we acquiesced to the demands of minds-gone-mediocre?  The testing requirements our states have mandated are mediocre examples of our expectations of students.  The sad ways we talk to children in classrooms are products of the mediocre.  The things we’re mandated to teach as part of the curriculum–results of the mediocre.

What I remembered is that I need to stop being disappointed when my students don’t look like the end product the mediocre mind has mandated at me.  I need to embrace the students where they’re at, inspire them to move ahead at the best pace they can manage, and teach them in ways that are respectful and meaningful to them.

My students have been writing children’s books for a couple weeks now. We have written everyday in class, from random journal entries to reflections on the text we’re studying to ways to enter text. I say “we” because I write and share with them as well. It helps show that I value the writing process enough to join them as a writer. We’ve written about ways we have discriminated against others, a time we learned a lesson, our thoughts on school policies, among other things.

But now we’re focused on children’s books. My principal sent an email to several department chairs–a forward about the B’nai B’rith annual “Diverse Minds” scholarship competition. I shared it with my students, and they were eager to meet the challenge–write a 30 page children’s book dealing with diversity and tolerance.

We had just finished a unit study with the Holocaust, literature documenting it, and also the Rwandan holocaust (they read Left to Tell in another class–I also plan with that teacher to support their learning in both my class and hers–a subject for a future blog post). It was perfect timing for them to create something positive out of the rich discussion and text we had been working with.

The results? Students are collaboratively writing truly interesting, creative books. They are grappling with crafting interesting conflicts, finding clever resolutions, and characters. Using a blank template for each page (that I printed off of Powerpoint notes, three slides with notes per page), the students draw a mock picture and write their text next to it. I’ve noticed the students are giving each other helpful feedback and negotiating how to agree and disagree with each other well.

It will take some more time to complete the books, so I’ll give a final update when we’re finished. Who knows, in a few months, I may have some students with scholarship prizes, too. But the real payoff is how much the students are learning from the process.

Originally written January 16, 2007

After three full Alfie Kohn-influenced classes, one of my few reluctant students announced at the end of class, “I like this class, now.” Some of the others giggled and knew he had erred by admitting that in front of me. I turned away from the small group of students who were Googling an article in Spanish and said, “Gosh, Arslan, you didn’t have to add the ‘now.’” Then I smiled and got back to work. The students seemed relieved that I didn’t take it badly. How could I? I feel the same way. Now I like the class, too (a lot more than before). Trying to build an authentic community where I’m not just manipulating kids into doing what I want them to do feels a lot better–it’s so much less pressure and resonates with how I treat the people I care about in genuine ways, not the forced ways of the controlling schoolmarm.

Yesterday I learned a lot from my students. We were discussing the differences in cultures about how much room there is for believing there are non-rational phenomena like ghosts and elves, for example. I don’t normally have these kinds of discussions, but we had an extra 90 minutes together (my school has a system where we build in an extra 90 minutes of instruction with each class every two weeks or so). We discussed elves and looked at their origins in history. Several students shared stories about how they had heard about and even seen supernatural creatures. Honestly, as an American teacher, it was hard for me to believe them. But I sensed the students weren’t just kicking their imaginations into gear but rather sharing things they wholeheartedly believed to be true. Then a student from Egypt wanted to know if we could look up genies on the Internet. It turns out that genies originate in the Middle East and Islam. I had no idea. I also learned that they are part of the Muslim creation story, much like angels and fallen angels fit into the Christian tradition. The other Muslim students were excited to be able to share this with the rest of the class, and I was thrilled to be learning something from them. A student from a French-speaking African country shared how genies in French are different, and I related that the concept of genies is more similar in the US (the idea of the genie in the bottle–that got some Christina Aguilera wannabes going). I was using an LCD projector and showing the class articles on the web about these topics. One of the students wanted me to Google images of genies. We couldn’t find any good ones in English, so we went to the Google site in Egypt. Suddenly the screen was transformed into right to left Arabic. The non-Arabic speaking students were surprised and curious, and the Arabic speaking students were excited to see their language in front of the others. Eventually we got a genie image for everyone to see.

There’s a lot more authentic interaction going on in my classroom. There are about 21 students in each of my classes, and we’re still navigating between the free-for-all discussions and students raising their hands. I get the feeling that they’re all a lot more open to hearing my ideas as well as their own (more importantly). Today students spent most of their class time working in small groups, and I sense that they’re getting better at working together all the way around. In my next post I’ll reflect on their projects–writing children’s books with themes of diversity and tolerance as part of a scholarship competition.

Originally written January 10, 2007