Constructing Kasun, Educator

Today was my kick-in-the-chest first day of school at UT, sort of.

I sat through the supposed-to-be three hour class related to human inquiry (turned into less than two so we could get to the bookstore to buy a necessary book before it closed at 6).  And felt shocked.  The professor laughed her way through how hard she is, how she has the power in the classroom.  And then had us write individual definitions to words like, “reality, knowledge, theory, science, objectivity,” had us sit in groups to come to consensus on a working definition, and then went around the room for each group definition.  To tell us how wrong we all were at each turn (making sometimes admissions when someone was a little bit right).  Then she gave us the “right” definition and has us take notes.

I looked around the room and saw the women’s and men’s faces fall.  Some looked down.  Some twitched.  I thought about the educational research that shows when emotions are running too high, the student can’t learn very well.  I wondered if I was there emotionally, feeling beaten down and like I knew very little.  We discovered that one paradigm of thinkers, the social constructivists, had been misusing the term for reality and confusing it with knowledge.  Reality is, after all, what exists.  Independent of everything else.  According to her.

This was my sort-of first day because it’s the class my advisor said I should take if I can’t get into the others I want (I’ll find out after sitting through a class in about one and half hours if I get in).  

To the professor’s credit, a graduate student here I admire who works with her as her advisor, says that the above professor is one of the best and perhaps most honest here.  ”Education is violent,” the student says the professor has told her–and she agrees with that sentiment. Maybe she’s right–maybe education uproots that which is false within us.  Maybe multicultural education is too soft, a repackaging and normalizing of things that already don’t work?  That doesn’t sit well in my gut, but I’m here to learn–and judging from that professor’s syllabus and student testimony, I could, despite my feelings, learn a lot.

More on the meeting I had about meeting with parents at the middle school about advisory–a meeting in which I learned a lot–in a subsequent post.

I’m almost afraid to jinx things for the folks at the middle school where I work, but I am so excited I have to provide an update.

The staff and students were shining.  I was thrilled.  I spent the first two hours of school as a warm body to help move students who were confused to their classes and just lend any support I might at the middle school.

The smartly-colored concrete floors shone with the luster of full polish and promise; the students were bright in the two stories of sunlight that penetrated the all-window atrium.  The man for whom the school is named, former Austin Mayor Gus Garcia greeted students as they entered the building.  I met him briefly and wanted to hug him–things looked great to start the day.

Kids were nervous.  A sixth grade teacher smiled and met them inside the building and had directions for where to send the kids.  All of them kept saying they were nervous.  Oh, middle school.  And somehow (maybe because I worked in high school for too long) they looked so cute.  I know they will be difficult; I know they are not fully innocent.  But so cute…

I met a brand new teacher, today.  He had lived with his family where he went to college in Corpus Christi, and today was his first day.  He didn’t have the schedules for his homeroom kids, and he was nervous.  He just moved here, just like the new Spanish teacher.  I hoped and hoped for them that things will go well.  I smiled at them and so many students…  

The spirit of the teachers was one that was absolutely positive, almost confident.  I was talking with one of the folks from “downtown” (AISD Central Office) who was helping out with registrations (warm body, like me), and he spotted the Assistant Superintendent come in at about 9:30.  I hoped the Assistant Super liked what he saw; I did.

It wasn’t my first day as a teacher at this school, and that felt funny.  I was very much the observer.  On the other hand, it felt good.  So many good people in that building.  And my first first (in terms of being a student) will be Wednesday… I think… unless something happens to my schedule.

###

I had my first “What the heck am I doing here?” moment a few days ago when I couldn’t register for a course I was dying to take.  It was ugly.  I begged, got my sort-of advisor to do my bidding–no good.  So I have him bidding for another class, and I’m not getting any answers.  This puts me into a dubious position of taking a class I’m not sure I need or want.  But at least I’ll have two that I had wanted to take (rounding me out with three classes and fulltime student status).  I guess this is kind of normal, but a bump in the road for sure.

Today was orientation for students new to the Curriculum and Instruction program at UT.  

Bold, earthy, and robust describe the employee-description of a kind of coffee I purchased at that nameless swanky grocery store where I always leave feeling a little bit entitled to piped-in lounge music, high-end salsas, and gourmet lifestyle.  When countries are only important because of the origin of the coffee bean, you know you and the people you represent are in trouble.  Yikes. (And I try to stay informed, but I’ve been so well marketed to that many countries DO mean more to me because of their coffee beans.)

So the orientation wasn’t bold, earthy, or robust.  But it was informative, and maybe my header got your attention–and there’s a reason.  Here are some nibbles of information that seemed important:

1. Earthy–Get a bike.  You won’t find much parking on campus.  Or learn to use the buses.

2. Bold–Learn to “balance” (this from the last in a line of about seven grad students on a panel–why wasn’t this advice given earlier)?

3. Robust–You will deal with lots of numbers–course codes, registration dates, your “RIS” (something that means there’s a widget in the way electronically of your registering, namely–tuition payments, overdue book fees, parking tickets, etc.).  I had a quick flashback to a scene from Woman in the Dunes where the protagonist laments how he has been reduced to a series of numbers and forms of identification–perhaps the moment where he was willing to lose all that and spend the rest of his life fighting sand while regaining his sense of self by throwing those numbers to the wind.

***

I met with my sort-of advisor on the spot (sort-of because, I’m told, you shouldn’t commit to an advisor until your research interests are much clearer).  I was the one doctoral student in my program at the orientation (should this worry me–there was a mini repeat session this evening as well?) among lots of technology and education folks (some curriculum and instruction, as well).  He advised me the way my priest counseled my husband and I before our marriage–guerrilla style advice-hit hard and fast, and hopefully glossing the essentials.  He mentioned having family and/or friends in town this afternoon, hence the quick meeting? On one hand I’m lucky to get any facetime with him; on the other–I’m high maintenance and want to feel like I know what I’m doing.  One big nugget of good advice from him–go ahead and take the somewhat advanced qualitative methods course with a good prof in my program.  I hadn’t planned on it, but my sort-of advisory agreed I’d be ready and that the professor didn’t have prerequisites that would keep me out of the course.

My s-o advisor signed my “advised” form in front of the graduate coordinator and the Graduate Advisor (also a professor at UT).  ”Oh, a blank check?” half-smile, raised eyebrows.  My s-o advisor communicated a lot in about 10 steps of facial gestures to him.  It was a short study in a long history of love.

Back in the larger orientation session, I think the 30 or so other students were either completely overwhelmed and had almost no questions or they were frustrated at the two women who had lots of questions (a Spanish woman behind me, and, well, me).  ”What do you do when you want to register for a course that’s already full?  How do you get your on-campus wireless to work?  What does the second digit in the generic course code (not the “unique number” we’ll need to register with) mean?”

The out-going (pun intended) graduate coordinator is moving into a higher, warmer spot at UT–and he is clearly a genius.  He managed to cut off the Graduate Advisor so that the new students might meet briefly during the break with the eight or so professors who had dutifully made their appearances at our orientation.  I could tell this man had skills as he cut him off.  I was wondering if he’d do it while the profs waited in the back of the room–and he was clean, quick, and graceful.  He’s also a juggler.  Really.

Classes start in a week.  I have a list of the five I’d like to take.  I can only take three.  My future may or may not depend on who I start to learn from now and the way I tune my own research interests (all 31 flavors) into the expertise of the folks I’ll be studying with.  I will log in promptly at 10 am to register (as indicated in my online sign-in slot) while I participate in the beginning of the Institute meeting at 10 am (the institute where I’m implementing student advisory at a local middle school). I can only hope those classes will be bold, earthy, and robust.

I had lunch and extensive adult-life conversation, including swapping coastal stories of how to buy a mortgage with a colleague and friend from my former life working in Mexico.  She currently teaches social studies to middle school students in Seattle.  Her partner asked what we had talked about over brunch (we met while he finished a late sleep), and I explained we had solved middle schools’ problems in the US.  Trouble is, we forgot to take notes.  Here’s the best I can remember.

Steph explained that her middle school students are just beginning to enter that awful phase of choosing whether or not to be jumped into gangs.  At her school, about 70% live in poverty.  About 16% of her students are Latino, and only about 9% are white, she said (the rest are Asian and African American).  As the Latino students population has recently risen over the last couple years, so has the black and brown tension–a phenomenon that either lurked under the surface or hardly existed until now.  Furthermore, she keeps waiting for her district to respond to the steep rise in gang recruitment… despite her letters to her superintendent.  She is hopeful that a couple community meetings being held this summer may bear some fruit.

“We have so many kids skipping now… and the 6th graders have learned it from the 8th graders–what do we do?”  I was encouraged to learn that few of her fellow teachers are of the gripe and moan ilk, e.g., “It’s because they come here and don’t want to learn.”  Rather, they want to know how they can be effective in communicating with families at home instead of ineffective.  The teachers, unlike most of the students, tend to be white.  Well-intentioned, not fully equipped–and they’re wise enough to sense it.

Ah, so close to the University of Washington, and yet, so far… Multicultural education rockstar theorists are there–James A. Banks and Geneva Gay.  And yet, where is the university in this?  Far, far away, it seems (of course these people can’t be everywhere–we know that–but they’re SO CLOSE).  It’s true–she teaches in a district that borders Seattle proper, but she’s encouraged that it is small enough to implement change without heavy layers of bureaucracy.  Nonetheless, when she complains about these issues, she is tasked, along with the one other Spanish speaking staff member at her school, of serving on the committees to solve the problems.  Her principal is proactive, she says, but one wonders how long this principal will be there.  ”We go through cycles of awful principal, clean-up principal, awful one, awful one, great one, awful one.”

The same problems.  Crisis of leadership, teachers who want to do well, but don’t know how, children with curricula that leave them preferring to skip school, enough alienation from school community that kids would rather be beaten into gangs.  It’s a common story, and, yet, we in the US still don’t have even adequate answers. 

I guess the good news is that Steph, and so many passionate teachers, still have their hearts and skills invested in the kids.  And that counts for so much, but I fear it’s not enough. 

All hesitation about getting my mind focused on advisory has dissipated.  I am fully geared-up for the advisory program I’m directing at the middle school.

First–several hours of imagining/reading/planning.  I created approximately twenty pages of planning guide materials to use at a two-day planning session with about seven middle school staff members (teachers and counselors).  Next, a five-hour planning session two days ago with the lead guidance counselor (my right-hand person in running advisory).  He is skillful, insightful, and has great relationships with many staff members already… so his instincts on how to work with them are spot-on.  Finally, attempts to contact the principal (with mixed success) regarding who would provide breakfast, making photocopies of planning manuals, and making sure we can provide adequate training for the entire staff on running advisory groups throughout the year.

Today–planning session in the middle school library from 8:30 to 12:30.  The facility at this middle school is incredible.  Hilltop location with sweeping views (not the norm for flatter Texas).  State-of-the-art technology in the building.  Thoughtful and attractive construction, including a sweeping entrance for students lit with sunrays during Austin’s 300 sunny days each year.

The teachers and counselors who participated this morning are smart, insightful, and full of heart.  They talked about what we’re fighting against–how this middle school is considered Austin’s very worst, and how kids mention it as if it were a badge of courage.  Of course, what else would they do?  They know it’s mentioned in the larger community as “the worst.”  Turn a negative into a positive?  The lead guidance guy mentioned how he’d been at dinner with his wife and a couple friends, the friends having commented that they had heard that the middle school, in its one year of existence, has already been “trashed.”  Hardly.  My old school district (complete with some of the country’s highest property tax revenues) has no facilities which rival this one.

We developed a statement of purpose… We thoughtfully worked through what exactly we hope Garcia’s students (and staff) will get from advisory.  Building relationships.  Success.  Self discovery.  The statement is inside the building (waiting for our second and final day’s work tomorrow).  We labored over whether or not to use education jargon, “buzz words.”  We said no.  I like this group!  So far, it’s about the mission, not the fluff.  We also discussed some of the parameters of how we’ll run advisory (the content emphases including community/relationship buildling, decision-making/life planning, and career/college prep).  Each week we will use one of the three themes and build out the theme, shifting the next week.

In a warm-up activity, part of the work included articulating fears.  Some suggested there might not be enough structure.  How would we create buy-in?  At the end of today’s meeting, we revisited our work, and the teachers expressed a more definitive sense of purpose and a sense of assurance that there will be good structure and programming.  A lot of that structure is my responsibility.  I humbly assess that information and hope I will honor it and do work worthy of the professionals with whom I’m working.

I’m at Mozart’s Coffee Roasters.  Jazz in the background.  Laptops are open–”Let’s focus on me,” beckons one of the stickers at my coffemate’s table.  Lots of people from all over the world–accents, flourish of dress.  To my right percolate the calm waves of Lake Austin.  Sun is coming down, and it’s a bit hazy.

I’m hard at work on the student advisory program I’m managing.  Toiling away at the design of the two-day training I’ll be running (with the lead guidance counselor’s help) at the middle school which wants to turn its failing test scores around (I understand they got the lowest test score in Austin–not good for No Child Left Behind).

Ok, the last paragraph isn’t exactly true.  But I’ve wanted to say that for a few days.  I’m not really working right now at all.  It’s hard.  I’m distracted.  New town.  Flying ants.  Thoughtful people.  People who, according to another Austinite, look like they’re homeless but really aren’t–just choose to look that way.  The gray-haired guy who works in the kitchen here sings, “Wasting Away in Margaritaville,” as he restocks the serve-yourself coffee.  And I… procrastinate?

This isn’t my normal style.  Typically I can crank out the work.  But.  I. Am. Losing. Focus. YES, I am supposed to work 20 hours a week in the fall at the institute with the advisory program.  YES, I will take classes.  But right now I am NOT WORKING.  My old school district might as well be on Uranus.  Though I’ll admit to missing some great colleagues and beautiful students. But I want to go to author’s readings, swim laps by the pool.  Finish reading The Shock Doctrine.

Another bite of chocolate cheesecake. Another sip of coffee.  Inspiration.

***

I spent all day Thursday in meetings related to my institute work with the university.  My colleagues at the institute (slave graduate laborers like I’m becoming) are smart, kind, thoughtful.  I’m already learning from them, and I feel welcomed.

Our director is whip-smart and took me to a meeting with very talented, mostly professors from UT who are designing the UT Middle School.  It will probably be a charter school run within the Austin public school system, a continuation of the already functioning UT elementary school.  I was supposed to present what UT’s advisory program would look like.  I had two sheets of bulleted notes and one academic quotation to support me.

These folks had packages.  Multiple academic citations.  Super-duper advanced degrees.  Familiarity with talking a lot because they are the authority.  I reminded myself that my unique strength was my real and valid experience from several US public school contexts.  Nonetheless, I was relieved when the meeting had already gone on for too long and the director and didn’t have time to present.  We (I) will buff up the bulleted pages into real texts with academic citations.  You don’t dare build the university middle school without them.

What are my research questions?  Where did I put them?  Maybe they’ll be back in the next post.

Today I learned that many students who could choose to move from a No Child Left Behind-deemed “failling” high school will return to that unnamed high school this fall.  The school used to be Johnston High School, but it has been failing for four years, and now is being completely restructured as per the regulations of No Child Left Behind (including the name change, according to the Austin Statesman).  I hadn’t seen this firsthand in the DC area, so it’s a little strange to me here.  I wonder what the community feels about it, and the teachers who have been displaced, and the children.

***

Look very hard for tahini at the swanky non-Whole Foods grocery store if you want it.  Go way past the vast aisle of barbecue sauces, boutique salsas, and dry rubs.  Go to the hokie little “Middle East” brand of instant couscous, and pick beneath it from four nondescript brands of tahini in efforts to make your own baba ganouj or hommous.

Wait until noon on Sundays if you want to buy beer.  Honestly, I wasn’t going to drink it this morning.  I had finished a workout at the university gym and then went to the grocery store.  The checkout woman was taken aback, “Really, you don’t know you can’t buy this for another four minutes?”  So we stalled and talked casually about her son, the New York stockbroker, son of immigrant parents from Southeast Asia… who lives in a city that she thinks moves too fast.  The woman behind us tolerated it really well–no large city harumphing or anxiety attacks.  “Welcome to Austin, I hope you enjoy it here,” the cashier smiled. I loved her in that moment for her Texas-size hospitality.

It goes without saying that you must pull out of parking spaces with extra caution if you are among the non-truck, non-SUV persuasion.  Good luck.  And good luck getting your four cylinders to pull you into highspeed traffic.

Why are black and brown the terms used commonly for African Americans and Latinos here?  To me it suggests polarity, but it could also be proximity to solidarity, depending on how you see color.  I’m wrapping my mind around it as far as my white eyes let me.

***

I met with the principal at the middle school where I’ll be setting up a three times a week advisory program as part of my graduate work at the university.  This is the first year this school will implement it, and I’m the consultant at the school.  It was strange to meet with the principal and know that she didn’t have true authority over me–that is to say, my livelihood, my reputation don’t depend on her estimation of my skills.  Something felt off in our meeting.  Was it the non-power imbalance?  Is it that she is inheriting a failing school and desperate to turn it around–is her career on the line here?  Does advisory seem like some sort of cutesy, touchy-feely bandaid for major ailments that are almost beyond repair?  Frankly, shouldn’t education be built around the intent of advisory–that all children develop healthy, meaningful relationships at school, especially with adults–anyway?  More later on advisory and my coursework.

The journey began a week ago.  My dog and I got into my Honda Civic, packed full except for the passenger seat so my 13-pound pup could ride shotgun.  We drove for two days straight–she post-surgery, me, post-Northern Virginia, post-job, post-notions of comfort and predictability of life.

We pulled into my Austin neighborhood at 8 pm.  I unloaded; my dog sniffed.  She liked the place; to me it smelled musty.  That’s ok–the place had been empty for months.  Just waiting, perhaps.

I’m switching (mostly starting) a PhD program at the University of Texas.  I’ve moved 1500 miles from what used to be “home” (I keep making references to it and catching myself).  What was a fairly promising career in a well-regarded school district is behind me, and the circle of possibilities has suddenly grown.  I don’t reinvent–I evolve.

The program I’m beginning is Cultural Studies in Education.  I want to use anthropological tools to poke, dissect, slice at questions of power.  What do people do with their power?  Do they recognize it?  Do they chew on it like morning toast without realizing they’re devouring it?  Do they scrape with their nails and climb up flesh to approach it?

With these questions I will connect to larger constructs–race, privilege, gender, class.  I hope to connect these umbrella issues to the cellular level of individuals’ narratives.  Narratives in some ways are so small but also seem to be the most elemental units of truth we can know.  I’m always compelled more by the individual’s story and hope to find collective truths from them.

I’m here in a space larger than I need to live in, more calories in my stomach than many people throughout the world will have consumed in a day, and I’ve only taken my breakfast.  I have these unearned privileges, and I hope to be both aware of them and use them for some greater good–a greater good I hope to enrich through this program of study.  

And, also, in the meantime before my program begins, I explore the local context and feeling my identity shifting, growing.  Evolving. 

It’s Sunday morning, and I received a response from a coworker in my district about a student who I am trying to refer for special education services.  I have a professional relationship with this individual and I respect her work, and I’m stuck here wondering about my response to her email on a non-work day, one where I have a small luxury of time to contemplate.

Here’s the backstory.  My student, “Claudia,” (not her real name) is an incredibly well-behaved, kind student at one of my sites of alternative education.  After a few sessions with her (like all my students, I see her once a week), I realized that her reading comprehension abilities are low, especially relative to beautiful fluency when she reads.  When I try to scaffold understanding in a story to a past event in the story, it feels like shooting at fish in a pond.  Rarely do I hit the target with techniques that work with other students (who are also developing as readers).  Furthermore, when I try to get her to empathize with characters, I can’t find any wide range of emotions from prior experiences in this student’s life.  I look in all directions and find find few cognitive pegs on which to hang understanding with her. 

Her teachers who work with her every day echo similar concerns, so I decided I would take the next step with a student who doesn’t learn the “NORMAL” way, and that is a referral for consideration for special education.

I’ve referred several students in the past and am familiar with the Byzantine and seemingly smoke-and-mirrors process of helping get a student additional support (often hinging upon dominant personalities involved in local screening committees and their subjective backgrounds, biases, and experiences).

So, here’s a thumbnail sketch of the process of referring an ESOL student for special education:

Submit the 8 to 20 pages of forms necessary and supporting evidence to my district’s Dual Language Assessment (DLA) team.  Wait for a couple months (sometimes six or seven if the summer is involved… and then maybe watch the kid get lost if she transfers schools or moves from middle to high school).  The DLA is completed, and if they suggest that there may be something amiss with the way the student learns, the Local Screening Committee (LSC) meets.    Submit a new round of paperwork all over again to the LSC before they meet, and sometimes learn after the meeting that the committee met and they failed to invite you.  If the LSC can be convinced that this student has learning issues beyond the regular difficulties of learning another language (and this is often a heated debate where polarized sides get angry and frustrated and don’t really hear each other out), then the second battery of testing is ordered.  Next, a couple months may pass between the testing and the next meeting of the LSC.  The LSC then decides whether or not the testing indicates that a student should receive special education services.  And then ANOTHER meeting is set later on to write the student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) describing which additional services a student may receive and what goals are to be set for the student’s achievement.  The amount of time involved for the original referring ESOL teacher is now up to about 20 hours of work in between checking in on the special education office to make sure they’re following up on the child and scheduling meetings and making sure they remember to invite the ESOL teacher to meetings.  The fastest I’ve ever seen this process work is about six months.  I’ve seen it drawn out over two academic years. 

Back to my email from this morning.  It had taken me a couple months to submit the original referral for “Claudia,” because I didn’t know exactly what to write.  The form itself is intimidating and cold.  Have a look at my district’s forms (not unlike most school districts’ forms)http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5.pdf http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5a.pdf

Students suddenly become broken down into symptoms and problems, and the teacher takes a cold clinician’s eye toward the “interventions and duration of interventions” and records them.  So this warm child who is a responsible worker in the afternoons with her mom at a salon, who smiles everytime she sees you, who worries about her friend who has an abusive boyfriend, is suddenly reduced to “problems and interventions.”  I don’t deny the need to be methodic in considering how we work with students, but this clinical approach is deadening and reductionist.  There’s so much I want to say about “Claudia,” and yet the form kills the life in both my student and in me as I approach the boxes, acronyms, and bold letters on the forms.

My colleague’s email was suddenly a real, living conversation about this child… and it was only about attempting to get a home phone number for the girl’s mother (the one listed no longer works).  But I found myself wanting to spill my thoughts and worries, our tiny victories as teacher and student, with this woman who had tested “Claudia” this week.  I felt relieved that the tester demonstrated in her email that Claudia was a living child, not a clinical piece of evidence. 

I breathe deeply and hope we achieve seeing the students’ humanity in our jobs as educators, beyond the layers of legal paperwork and bureacracy.  And hopefully we breathe life back into our work and into the children in education.

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.