It is cooler this morning and as we run we notice things. It hasn’t rained for two days so the mud is curdling on the track and we stay to the centre of the trail where it is smoother. The wind is up slightly so the morning birds do not call up this day with that raucous tropical jungle singing and yelling like they do when it is raining lightly. This spring it will have been eight years of running- a personal transformative goal for me since my mom died-and three years running with Casey, my Giant Schnauzer. She knows the twists, the tripping roots, the lookouts, the red squirrel trees, the moose swamp. She knows it by nose, we know it by heart. So I am collecting my thoughts on this run to reflect on this short but deep journey of four weeks and I marvel at where we are. All my thinking happens in on the woods trail, but this time I have the voices of the researchers, the children’s books, the documentaries, the songs, the drumming, and the shared personal stories trailing along with me like the ragged scarf that waves out of the back pocket of my jacket.
Odd, how in many ways, this course, my last course, has brought me back to my first-the stark windy prairies of the University of Lethbridge, 35 years ago, where some professors wore moose hide and long braids, where my roommate smelled like campfire smoke and hides as she wore soft moccasins while doing her practice teaching on the reserve school at Burdett. I remember being surprised at my convocation to see my favourite education professor dressed in chief regalia. What secrets had he been carrying all these semesters? These memories of people from the Blood nation were my first Aboriginal intersections within an educational setting. Four weeks after convocation, my husband and I newly married and armed with newly minted teaching degrees flew on the wings of youth and altruism and adventure and immersed ourselves in teaching in West Africa for the next year. Teaching through the fire.
And here I am at the other end of many travels, many learnings, only to be surprised yet again. As Casey and I burst out of the woods and up to the hill where the canola field begins, I have a thought: this very land that has given me my quiet place, my prayer place for all these mornings is actually owned by the Samson Band. Nice touch - the circle arcs back onto itself. I think of Nokum’s question: Do you know where to find the rabbit that bent the reed…Maybe not, but I do know where the scentless chamomile is starting to bloom and I reach to pluck it out, hearing my seed grower dad’s voice reminding us kids..Pluck that noxious weed, don’t let it bloom! The documentary of the Northern Saskatchewan people shows us the old man knowing he will die on his land, so why would he want to move anywhere else? I think of the little country cemetery overlooking the Red Deer River where my family is buried , my brother just 4 months ago, and see my own grave on the windy hilltop, framed by the white Saskatoon blossoms in June…
My New Learning about Race, Gender, Culture, Social Class, Identity & Legitimate Knowledge
June 4, 2010: Mister Pip
What is your response in a time of terror? Have you given thought to how or where you would seek security, stability or comfort? The people of Bougainville reflect both cultural and individual responses to circumstances that have no foreseeable outcome. As there is no precedent for this calamity, it is unknown whether or not any strategy will be effective. So the ex-pats evacuate, the young men go to fight, the old men stay to fish, some women go to pray, the kids go to school and everyone tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy by following the rhythm of the sunrise, the closure of night, and the broadcasts of the tides.
But what a difficult question this is, as I can’t say I have been in a time of terror- fear, distress, anxiety, and utter sorrow- yes but always with an end in sight. So where to hide?
Matilda’s mom reaches back - into the family history. Is this the equivalent of me grabbing the photo albums or the lap top? Her defense is to bring her past through the present and into the future. But this world seems unreal to Matilda as she also reaches into the past – the Victorian past of Charles Dickens and into an alien world. However, as the alien becomes the familiar, Matilda finds comfort, security, and escape. Again and again in our class the question is revisited: How is knowledge constructed? Lloyd suggests that knowledge is constructed for survival and identity transforms in chaos, also for survival. What we are is not what we will be, if we can imagine ourselves as something else. This shift in identity as a response to a crisis becomes therefore, a strategy for survival. I see it in my at risk students every day.
Race
June 5: Jonathan Kozol: Savage Inequalities Article
This was a difficult read and I want to think that these conditions are from another era. I have always been amazed by the ragged mess of the American public school system, yet the prophets that troll our conventions and saturate our literature invariably emerge from the American experience. How is that possible? Kozol’s graphic sketches reminded me of the movie The Blind Side, where the journey from death to life is a 15 minute SUV ride. Kozol concludes: The market system of choice doesn’t work because you have to know about the choices! Wishart also says, “Alberta Schools provide choice but you still need money, education and social standing to exercise that choice.” In the Savage Inequalities article and The Rose That Grew from the Concrete, the authors concede that “drop out” is rather more accurately stated as a “push out”. In our early days of Outreach whenever we were pitching our program to the school board, we would use the idea of the “push in”. We also argued that in order to create equal opportunities for our preganant and parenting teens, we need to provide unequal resources. My experience in constantly seeking funding for Outreach Education is that providing simply “the same “ is never going to create an equality of outcome. One more survival strategy.
In Mister Pip, a student asks: What is it like to be white? The answer comes back, What is it like to be black? Our class is asked to consider: Is what I am normal? Have I ever been in a minority? I haven’t thought about this in a long time, but the answer is, yes. My husband and I convocated in June of 1979 and by October we were living and teaching in West Africa with CUSO. While this story is another entire journal in itself, probably our greatest challenge was the disconnect between the way we had been taught to teach at the University of Lethbridge (considered to be progressive and bi-cultural) and the expectations of the African school that we would follow the British secondary form system which we felt was totally unsuited to the local culture and the times. My role as a female teacher was diminished in favour of my husband’s male status and the students expected us to “give them knowledge of the West”. Now that I have looked at the issues of literacy in this course, I reflect on that experience and see that we did bump up against the barriers of gender, race, and class.
Gender
In class more questions arise from Mister Pip and Resting Lightly on Mother Earth:
Have you thought about what it would be like to be a man if you are a woman? Do we construct our gendered selves in relation to what we are not? Is there a gendered access to different literacies? Our classmates gave us many affirmative examples in the areas of sport, music, and technology. For example, Dorianne related how the little Ghanaian boy in her classroom was taught the drums by his father, but the sisters were not allowed to play them. This idea of gendered instruments was one that I had never seriously considered!
This question was also raised in class: Can you really understand another’s position without being that person or from that ethnic group or gender or without walking their experience? We saw how Matilda learned about her identity and her context of injustice through Great Expectations. And while Mr. Watts was not completely literate in the local culture, he did understand the need to bring in the community to help teach the children bridge the different literacies of cultures.
Yet we saw in the movie clip Malcolm X, that Malcolm felt it was not possible to bridge the literacies of race and injustice - that separation was the answer. How do we get our heads around perspectives that we interpret as radical or untenable? But perhaps it is not about needing to experience other’s experiences, rather it may be about using our power of privilege, or perhaps it is about choosing servant leadership to advocate for those who have no voice. Perhaps there lies a common ground and we do have inspiring examples of both from Bill Gates to Mother Theresa.
Culture
Film: Northern Saskatchewan Band
“We don’t save money for the future, but we do save food for hard times. You can go to any house and their food is your food. Only as a band did we know the secret of survival in a cold, hard land. This is my home; these are my people, why should I leave? I will die here”.
Where is culture? What are the underlying beliefs of the culture? In this community understanding one’s relationship to nature, or the highways of the water, or reading the map of the land, is legitimate knowledge. A collective ideology is paramount where food is important and to be shared, and where individualism and or imperialistic capitalism does not serve the needs of the land or the community.
What is their literacy? I see it in the framework of how the future after-life impacts the present...this blending of traditional and Christian beliefs is a response to the convergence of histories. Jan Hare also references the importance of the physicality of land and place as it is revealed through literacy of oral history.
Culture reflects a value system and a way of viewing the world through symbols and ceremonies that remind us of deeper values and beliefs. How do we teach culture in our classes? Perhaps by understanding culture by what it is not. I believe we teachers can show our students the stark contrast between the individualistic materialist ideology of the dominant culture and the values of the old man from this video who knows what he will eat this winter because his hands have made his food.
Nokum is My Teacher: David Bouchard, author, Allen Sapp, artist
Click here to hear the story
Could we consider bringing in these other literacies, these other ways of knowing to our own classrooms?
Social Class/Poverty
"Not to be noticed is to look like nobody at all."
Fly Away Home: Eve Bunting
This book was very moving as I remembered the students in Leduc who have nowhere to sleep. While these kids are invisible in middle class suburbia, they do sleep in cars or in their friend’s apartment stairwells. We used to lobby the city for an emergency youth shelter, but I the hidden curriculum seemed to be that “if you build it they will come.” But I never thought of a little kid living in an airport and it was rather shocking.
In church a couple of months ago we watched part of the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith and his son, Jayden Smith. Will Smith plays the part of real life Chris Gardner who, with his son, lived on the streets while he was trying to establish his career as an unpaid intern in a brokerage firm.
“Concerned for Chris Jr.’s well-being, Gardner asked Reverend Cecil Williams to allow them to stay at the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church’s shelter for homeless women, now known as The Cecil Williams Glide Community House. The Reverend agreed without hesitation. Today, when asked what he remembers about being homeless, Christopher Gardner, Jr. recalls "I couldn't tell you that we were homeless, I just knew that we were always having to go. So, if anything, I remember us just moving, always moving." [3]
Gardner himself felt that it was imperative to share his story for the sake of its widespread social issues. "When I talk about alcoholism in the household, domestic violence, child abuse, illiteracy, and all of those issues—those are universal issues; those are not just confined to ZIP codes," he said.[1] To this day Gardner is still working to alleviate pain and suffering. From a homeless guy with a little kid, to a multimillionaire he supports and inspires many charities.
In class I was challenged by the question: Do these stories fit your ideas of homelessness? We tend to ascribe social problems to homelessness, but there are the working poor and the working homeless. We also don’t think of kids as homeless or who is attached to the homeless. I wonder what creativity is lost to the world forever through a child’s constant relocation. I want my students to understand this. I would buy Fly Away Home for my high school social studies class and show them the movie The Pursuit of Happyness. I have introduced my students to The Invisible Children, a movie I also saw in church, about the child soldiers in Uganda. My students have completed inquiry projects on child sex slaves from Tibet, and the Amazon Rainforest people who are losing their land and their identities. I even pull out of my desk drawer and read to them letters from my Compassion Child in Columbia. They do not know of these things even though they know about a few things. However, I can see in their writing that they have been touched by their new awareness and that they are tenderhearted. This too is legitimate knowledge.
In Dr. B’s class when we were viewing photos of a man scrounging cans, we assumed that he was homeless…but did we really know? Like my social students, we teachers have to be taught to critically analyze and consider: Is there any evidence that supports our assumptions? Dr. B says that we make assumptions of homelessness when we see images that match the schema in our heads. Now I get what this class will be for me: checking my assumptions, stretching my categories and labels, discarding some and considering other possibilities.
Saturday June 12, 2010
During our group presentation of Finding Identity Through Chaos my partner Shelby, reminded us of how we make assumptions about the chaos kids are in and how poverty is an issue for some kids in any school. She said, There are poor kids in every school. One of my little Grade Ones came into class so proudly, “Look Miss L. I finally brought my lunch today!” He had walked all the way to school from his home carefully carrying a plate with a piece of pizza on it.
Diane Wishart explained to us how students feel shame that they are in the circumstances they are in. She explained how Ira Shore held a workshop showing teachers how creating conditions for pedagogy may also mean to feed, clothe, find housing or child care for our students. The challenge for teachers is to be comfortable in pushing standards and the even the organization in order to be responsive to student needs.
Diane shared how she initially thought her inner city school research was going to be a cultural project, but it actually became an issue of inner city poverty. Daily I see poverty connecting my student single moms and dads in my own outreach program. Gender no longer becomes an issue of division, but poverty flattens out the topography of gender, age, and race.
Diane challenged us to consider if issues of poverty could be taught in teacher education programs? She explained that the psychology of poverty particularly impacts junior high aged students during a time when they are developing identity. As they start to notice that they are lacking something because they are poor, they see themselves as lacking. Should we be talking about these issues at undergrad level?
Identity
What is the construction of ourselves and our identities? Gee (1999) explains how identity involves both multiple and situated ‘ways of being’ that have very powerful connections to the social situations that people occupy. Wishart (2009) concurs that “how we view ourselves reflects the ways in which we view the world” (p.70).
Click here to view our Identity in Chaos Group Project
Again we are confronted with more questions such as: How has my own gender, race, or social class affected my identity? How have I constructed myself through my education? Where does my awareness come from? How much of my construction identity is a choice? How do I choose to identify? What part does ethnicity play in my identity?
The articles from Resting Lightly on Mother Earth and the book The Rose That Grew from the Concrete, present students’ constructions of identity. We are inclined to define someone by a label whether it be a coding such as a “42” or a description such as “pregnant”, and we make assumptions based on these terms. If we forget that identity is multifaceted we may not consider for example, the relationships that people carry within the label, such as “daughter or mother”. Dr. B reminded us that it is okay to be confused and uncomfortable while we interrogate the social categories in order to understand them ourselves. Wishart also uses the term “uncomfortable” throughout the Rose. This will not be easy navigation for us or for our students. However, Castellano’s (2000) framework for exploring Aboriginal knowledge systems provides me with some navigational markers as I also see my pregnant and parenting teens’ knowledge as “personal, oral, experiential, holistic, and conveyed in narrative or metaphorical language” (p. 25).
Click here to view INQUIRY PROJECT: Creating Identity Through Quilting
Today Dr B described the metaphor of a good story being both “a mirror and a window”. A lovely example is the children’s book Two Pairs of Shoes where author Esther Sanderson shows the loving relationship between Maggie and her Kokum. The illustrations of David Beyerd were so effective as they clearly presented the idea of a bicultural world. This is yet another tool of literacy that I am just discovering- good literature should be able to provide the window and the mirror for all of us readers.
Why have the Secwepemctsin people, returned home?
Video: Click here for Pelqilc: Coming Home
In 1890, the residential school near Chase, BC, was built on the American industrial model. One hundred years later, the Stecwepemctsin nation is trying to heal their families from the violence of the residential school their grandparents attended. As a healing response, the grandchildren decided to take control of reviving their language and culture. So what does this reclaimed education look like? The parents recognize that their children straddle both cultures and while they need skills for the outside community, they almost lost own language. When a delegation went to the Vancouver World Indigenous Conference, the delegates were inspired by the Maori initiative of the Te Kohanga Reo, the language nest.
Parents began with a daycare to teach children traditional language and cultural skills and now the Chief Atahm School is an immersion school that showcases contemporary Secwepemctsin song, dances, literary, visual, fibre art, carving and social interpretation or expression of cultural identity. http://www.firstvoices.com/en/Secwepemctsin Their website says “The school is grounded in the belief that knowledge of the language, traditional practices and beliefs of the Secwepemc will help develop a strong and healthy community. Individuals will be prepared for today’s world and will help to protect the earth for future generations.”
This school initiative is an example of the new story that Canada and the world need to hear. The school has just held a conference to share their leanings on Indigenous Language Revitalization. While the Stecwepemctsin people recognize that they cannot go back completely to the old ways, they do include teachings of the ancestors and the elders. This is what the people believe:
Wake up and live your life. Collect your food and medicines. Revive the old skills and knowledge. While Euro-Canadian education is right and useful it makes it harder for our nation to become de-colonized. But we can become de-colonized if teach their own values. Humans are not superior, in fact they are the least needed species. We need to keep the balance of giving back what you take, and not taking more than your need. Education does become political according to the values you teach. The students will be the ones to communicate with the old ones in the sweat. This will give them strength for the hard times to come. Old teachings are useful today as they were thousands of years ago. Listen, reflect.
This video about the Adams Lake Band of the Secwepemc Nation people and the Chief Atahm immersion school was a powerful illustration of people taking control of their future by connecting to their past. There are two major themes in the film – the significance of language, and the importance of connection to the land. This gives me hope and I am grateful for having been made aware of it. Despite this resurgence however, I wonder how these values will truly influence the dominant capitalistic ideology that prevails today. How will these young people keep from becoming frustrated? Yet reading this next article, I marvel at how this mountain top to sea bed protection came about? Hmmmm…the results of a value system that somehow did prevail and influence after all??
Vancouver — The Canadian Press Published on Monday, Jun. 07, 2010
The federal government has announced plans to expand protection for an area off British Columbia’s northern coast known among conservationists as the “Galapagos of the North.” “Today's milestone is the result of an historic and outstanding collaborative partnership between the Government of Canada and the Haida Nation,” Prentice said in a written statement. Jessen congratulated the Haida for their vision to conserve the waters and for persevering in the long years of discussions and study by the federal government.
My Found Poem from Pelqilc: Coming Home, June 18, 2010
“I wanted to have my baby in the cave. I wanted him to come into the world seeing natural light, feeling the fire.”
The Fire
Heat Health
Earth
Eat
Ear
Hear
Her
Hearth Heart
Questioning Assumptions
Of all the recalibrations in my thinking during this course, my awareness of the need to question assumptions has been the greatest awakening for me. I feel like the semi-comatose patient in Robin Williams’s movie Awakenings, who has suddenly become cognizant of my environment and my own identity.
Today while I was driving Casey to our running woods, I heard a CBC roundtable discussion about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. I listened intently, while 4 weeks ago I would have changed the station to get some pumped up running music in my head! But I sat there in the car, listening to the entire interview while Casey howled her head off in frustration of her walk delayed. One of the elders was quoted as saying, “It is time to tell new stories. The stories of tragedy and sadness need to be done and we need to start sharing the stories about the strengths of our people.”
Implications for Teaching and Learning
• From their book, Resting Lightly on Mother Earth, Ward & Bouvier (2001) challenge teachers to facilitate schooling in different and more diverse ways. We educators need to be more cognizant of the intersections of gender, race, and poverty and the impact of that awareness on our own teaching. The process begins however, with an awareness of the construction of marginalization. This raised consciousness then pulls the enlightened one to action such as helping students to understand the micro-social processes in which they are engaged.
• Wishart (2009) encourages us educators to “listen without judging, to value what students have to say, and to bring the students’ lived experiences into the classroom (p. 98). My quilting project for example, is build upon this foundation and it was through working on the quilts with their mentors that my students were able to participate in a dialogue. From that dialogue I can see the potential for students to “become conscious of the social and social conditions of their lives “as they construct and co-construct their identities.
• We also need to be aware of gendered access to literacies and give both boys and girls opportunities to engage in literature, music, technology, and sport in ways that move them beyond their immediate preferences. Our class came up with strategies such as being aware of how boys engage in literature differently from girls and cultivating topics, genres or technologies of interest to both genders.
• Schools need to check assumptions that all parents have access to language and reading skills and can equally participate in the culture of the school.
• We educators need to explore what is legitimate knowledge for the learners in our classrooms and examine how diverse learners access knowledge. Hare reminds us to consider “approaches to education today to include Aboriginal people’s connection to the natural world as a legitimate text from which to learn alongside the print traditions” (p.256).
• Schools need to address the tension between meeting curricular standards and being flexible to meeting student basic needs.
• Our classmates’ presentations yesterday of their Inquiry Projects were marvelous examples of the “how to’s” of our course learnings. I was so impressed by the passion and creativity of our class’ explorations of acknowledging diverse ways of knowing and offering strategies for: legitimizing learning, particularly through technology, recognizing gender roles in sport, music, and technology, opportunities for embracing aboriginal epistemology, utilizing whole child pedagogies and recognizing the common holistic framework from which they spring, and creating community through a project that allows space for identity to be reciprocally informed with mentors.
I have also been inspired by Dr B’s leadership in her constructive model of learning within a participatory culture. I feel better equipped to bring to my own students more tools, diverse strategies, and an awareness of the barriers to student success. Our worlds are larger and our skills have grown in this transformational experience.
Final Reflections
Stories
June 10, 2010: Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman explores the gift of the story and how they become a record of our lives. Imagine a place where you get to tell your story not just listen to someone else’s…there are few places to do this aren’t there? But where do stories come from? Stories come from our experiences, values, our objects. We write stories to link us to our past and to each other. We need our stories - our students need their stories, for in knowing our stories we know ourselves. Now here are some stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Our students need to hear them too. http://www.youtube.com/TheTRCCanada STORIES
May we educators and fellow citizens of this great Nation of Immigrants (from the bulletin board of Dr. B’s school slides) have listening hearts to hear the stories of our students. May we have the courage to empower them through questioning their own assumptions about their identities and positioning in society. May we help them find words. May we also in humility, remember how we all breathe the same air, how we are all broken.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Today there is a different scent in the woods. Something is blooming, something is new. It is mid June and the wild roses are in full scent. Could be. The sounds are different...the traffic is hollering from the north and is loud today. The wind must have shifted overnight. The sun has come up red today...the lake looks icy where the wind shadows live and sparkly and shiny where they don’t. The trembling aspen leaves are showing their undersides...could be rain. There is a change underway. The dogwoods are in full bloom
I understand now that it’s about the inner journey as Shelby says. It is about how we read our landscapes. About what we know to be true. About what will carry us into tomorrow. It is about faith and truth. About Matilda from Mister Pip getting into the boat to the new world, about Michael from The Blind Side getting into the car with Leigh Ann, about Shelby marrying the Norwegian It is about our past gently pushing us into the future that is already pulling us toward it.
It is about not losing our way.
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