Ms. Dahlke if ur nasty.

I really love my new job at Tech, but in this post I am going to tell you the thing that I don't like about it.

The adults call each other Ms. or Mr. Whatever. Like, I'm not a kid, and I think it's weird and almost... teacher-fetishy to call each other Ms. or Mr. Whoever when we're the only people in the room.

Also, a teacher that I called her first name in an email then introduced herself to me in a meeting (where everyone was going around saying their name for my benefit) as Ms. Whatever. 

Don't care for it.

learning styles

Last night Jon was saying that my thesis draws a line from students' style (as in fashion, etc.) and their learning styles. For example, one kid, a Muslim girl who wears a hijab, works within bent versions of the teacher's rules and academic expectations just like she works creatively around her hijab to achieve the look of "popularity" (read: in part, whiteness).

I usually hate when people talk about "learning styles" as if that's why meaningful academic opportunities are scarce in the hood. Because when people say "learning styles," they're talking about, "I'm a visual learner," or "I'm an audio learner." And sure, it's smart for teachers to present materials that students can access through multiple modalities -- if only because lesson planning in that way makes it less likely that they stand at the front of the room and drone on for fifty boring-ass minutes.

But Jonathan was talking about "learning styles" in terms of students' particular orientation to authority and knowledge. Students' orientation to authority and knowledge informs their identities; if your sense of yourself is that you're cool/bad, then the literacy practices you're more inclined to pick up are those associated with coolness/badness. Graffiti, rap, sagging your pants, etc. If, as was the case for me, you are a little fearful of displeasing authority figures, you're more likely to assent to the literacy practices imposed on you by the authority figure, regardless of whether or not the authority figure is legitimately authoritative.

What if we gave pre-service and in-service teachers lots of practice discovering students' orientation to power and knowledge -- practice reading the clothing, handwriting. body language, and tons of other ways that we perform our identities? What if more of us were capable of designing learning experiences that draw on the identities (and associated performances and literacy practices) of the students we traditionally fail, those students who resist authority? It's totally possible.

"DAAAG THAT'S DEEP"

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.

---

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

Together, we constructed comprehension and interpretation of the text, a text worthy of "group work."

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.

In so many ways, school is just like prison, but not in this way, where we teachers have space to think. Barf.