We meet on Friday mornings to assess student work and plan the next week. No class on Thursday meant no work for us to do, so we had to time to start the professional reading group we've been wanting to do.
First up: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We only got about five pages into the first chapter because we kept stopping to talk and look up words.
axiology: thinking about goodness, value
ontology: thinking about the nature of being
We came up with a whole bunch of examples from history and from our personal lives that helped us understand him better. It was awesome. We haven't at all gotten to a point where we can talk about what it means for our teaching, but we're all bringing our copies back next Friday so we can squeeze in some more reading time.
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I want to think more about how we did it.
We all sat around two tables pushed together, nine of us. Each of us had our own copy, and a couple of paragraphs in, one guy got up to get us pens and highlighters. We read aloud slowly, taking turns without any order, and whenever necessary, we interrupted the reader to ask questions, make connections, or emote. Sometimes we went back to re-read a sentence or paragraph.
A few times, one or another of the guys would silently get up to go somewhere and silently come back to the table (e.g., bathroom, talk to someone outside, I don't know). The person next to him would point to where we were, and he'd get back into it with us.
P kept reading ahead, highlighting animatedly as he read aloud the things he liked: "Oooh, 'The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior!'" It was distracting to me and S, so every time he read aloud to himself, we would tell him to shut up and let us get there. He didn't stop, though.
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The above is a pretty complete illustration of the academic literacy behaviors that the good teachers I know work at apprenticing their students into:
We came to the table with an established camaraderie. Our camaraderie is steeped in a shared commitment to education (others' and our own). The text at hand is relevant to that commitment. We were each there by choice (and granted, we're all adults). Each of us had the academic confidence to know that we could make at least some sense of this difficult text. This was all effortless.
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At school, I was eventually able to create the conditions for students to read like this, but it was a lot of times really hard work for them and me getting ourselves there. I've been wondering about that kind of thing for the last couple of years I've spent in prison education: Was it difficult because the behaviors are difficult? Or do the conditions of "school" make it more difficult than they need to be?
I'm tripping on the extent to which context matters here. We have so much more freedom in our classroom than a lot of teachers do -- particularly those who teach kids of color living in low-income neighborhoods where surveillance is pervasive. Mandated curriculum, incessant testing, performance pay, etc. We in a prison classroom, on the other hand, are free to play with our practice and our theories about how people learn (and others' theories -- like Freire's!).
Prison officials, from my experience, don't much shit whether or not our students earn their GEDs, so they don't interfere with what we do in our classroom. Ostensibly, school officials do care about student learning, but in their caring, they really fuck it up bad.
In so many ways, school is just like prison, but not in this way, where we teachers have space to think. Barf.
First up: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We only got about five pages into the first chapter because we kept stopping to talk and look up words.
axiology: thinking about goodness, value
ontology: thinking about the nature of being
We came up with a whole bunch of examples from history and from our personal lives that helped us understand him better. It was awesome. We haven't at all gotten to a point where we can talk about what it means for our teaching, but we're all bringing our copies back next Friday so we can squeeze in some more reading time.
---
I want to think more about how we did it.
We all sat around two tables pushed together, nine of us. Each of us had our own copy, and a couple of paragraphs in, one guy got up to get us pens and highlighters. We read aloud slowly, taking turns without any order, and whenever necessary, we interrupted the reader to ask questions, make connections, or emote. Sometimes we went back to re-read a sentence or paragraph.
A few times, one or another of the guys would silently get up to go somewhere and silently come back to the table (e.g., bathroom, talk to someone outside, I don't know). The person next to him would point to where we were, and he'd get back into it with us.
P kept reading ahead, highlighting animatedly as he read aloud the things he liked: "Oooh, 'The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior!'" It was distracting to me and S, so every time he read aloud to himself, we would tell him to shut up and let us get there. He didn't stop, though.
---
The above is a pretty complete illustration of the academic literacy behaviors that the good teachers I know work at apprenticing their students into:
- read with a pencil or pen or highlighter in hand
- ask questions
- make connections
- note your responses to the text
- stop and go back when you realize you've gotten lost
We came to the table with an established camaraderie. Our camaraderie is steeped in a shared commitment to education (others' and our own). The text at hand is relevant to that commitment. We were each there by choice (and granted, we're all adults). Each of us had the academic confidence to know that we could make at least some sense of this difficult text. This was all effortless.
---
At school, I was eventually able to create the conditions for students to read like this, but it was a lot of times really hard work for them and me getting ourselves there. I've been wondering about that kind of thing for the last couple of years I've spent in prison education: Was it difficult because the behaviors are difficult? Or do the conditions of "school" make it more difficult than they need to be?
I'm tripping on the extent to which context matters here. We have so much more freedom in our classroom than a lot of teachers do -- particularly those who teach kids of color living in low-income neighborhoods where surveillance is pervasive. Mandated curriculum, incessant testing, performance pay, etc. We in a prison classroom, on the other hand, are free to play with our practice and our theories about how people learn (and others' theories -- like Freire's!).
Prison officials, from my experience, don't much shit whether or not our students earn their GEDs, so they don't interfere with what we do in our classroom. Ostensibly, school officials do care about student learning, but in their caring, they really fuck it up bad.
