National School Reform Faculty

Keynote Address by Linda Christiansen
Seattle, Washington

“ Often schools really mirror society. They’re star struck. They pander to the local star- the winged wonders, the ones who soar through textbooks, while others feel weighted down, and invisible.

“ I think that schools continue to mirror society- oh this is just like a classroom, right? You just started teaching and they start jack-hammering outside your door! They couldn’t’ve done it over the weekend! Now we just need the bell and a fire drill, and it’ll be really like a classroom. Schools continue to teach literature, math, science, as if people of color or women, people with accents have not contributed anything worthwhile to our society. That’s not all schools, certainly your schools are different than the ones you that I’ve been working in. But, one of the things- I love this quote by Adrienne Rich: “When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... whether you are dark skinned, old, disabled, female or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs… when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.”1 Too often when I see student failure in school- the achievement gap statistics- I see students who have looked into their schools and not seen themselves.

“ And this is not to put the high school that I’m working at down, because I think they’re trying to work on the problem. But, we have over 100 students in the newspaper classes and not one student of color. When 30% of the students are students of color. In the National Honor Society, they’re unrepresented. In the theatre productions, in the nationally famous royal blues, a singing group, they are underrepresented. And so when we look at schools and in the curriculum, they are unrepresented.

“ Carol Campbell, please stand up, Carol is a phenomenal biology teacher at Grant High school and we were talking to her in her room over lunch. It has been 90 degrees in her room since winter break because they haven’t fixed the heating. I couldn’t stay there very long…I was having hot flashes! But as we were talking about that Grant constructed smaller learning communities of language arts, social studies and science teachers so that students of color, so that we would bridge the achievement gap. But when we change the structure but we don’t change what happens in the classroom, we continue to get the same results. So the results there are that African Americans are continuing to fail at much higher rates. So Carol asked the community, ‘how is it that the students that we are referring to the building screening committee for special ed. are all African-American students?’ That to me is the kind of questions we need to ask as social justice teachers. Who is and she said the students were actually doing work that is on par with the other students but not always turning it in and the question is why not? Have we constructing communities that make students feel like they matter where they feel like they belong? Gary Orfield of the national civil rights project of at Harvard soon to be of LA did a study of the drop out rates in 6 states and said that all of those states are underreporting the dropout rates but in urban centers in CA, Latino students are dropping out- 60% of Latino students are dropping out of high school, 56.6% of African American students are dropping out. He said we have creating drop out factories. So we need to look at what’s happening and why.

“ I’m talking to you today about being a social justice teacher and not because I’m exemplary but because I am ordinary. Because I am every one of you. I have had the opportunity when some tough questions were asked of me and those prompted changes. So what I want to do is talk about that. And on your tabletop, there are outlines of some of the changes I’ve made. And also because although you guys are really great, sometimes in my classes some of my students don’t pay attention, so this give you something to do that follows my talk.

“ So the first thing that happened, for me, the first change that happened was when Bill and I decided to teach together. Let me tell you about Jefferson high school. 1975, Jefferson high school became the school of performing arts. It was part of a desegregation plan. Although the African American community in which Jefferson was located did not want a performing arts program, the district put one in there. So what it did was draw a large percentage of white affluent students who had had the opportunities to work in dance and in theatre and gave them opportunities to work with dance theatre of Harlem, although most of the students in the performing arts programs were white. And so they had lots of opportunities. At the same time, there was an African American community. They also brought in a scholars program because the director said that if we really wanted the white students to be here to desegregate, they need to make sure they had a scholars program to keep them in the academic program. You can kind of see where this was heading.

“ So Bill and I (Bill is now my husband, but he wasn’t then, that’s the danger of team teaching- we spent a lot of time together!) we asked for permission to teach a two period block class called literature in US history. It changed my life. It was like being at the epicenter of an earthquake that shattered every assumption I have.

“ So over the summer, we started working together and Bill said, well, give me your reading list. Now, in my defense, I was no schlep as a teacher. I was pretty good- I was very hands-on. We did Shakespeare, and my students dressed up in period pieces. We had birthday cake and shouted Shakespearean lines to each other. We wore scarlet letters. You know, we did a lot of fun hands on things but it wasn’t critical. And it wasn’t real thought out or real intentional. I was teaching out of a landscape of assumptions and tradition that I had always done. So when Bill said, why this book? Why Red Badge of Courage? I could come up with all the B.S. answers. I could come up with the answers that are always given. You know it’s part of a cannon. It’s very important, you know, the historical trajectory and all that kind of stuff- so don’t send me emails telling me why I should teach it. It was very clear that I didn’t know why I was teaching it and I certainly did not know why I was teaching in a school that was 80% African-American when we could’ve been teaching Beloved had it been written then. But there were other things…we could have been reading Frederick Douglass if we really wanted to talk about slavery. And so I didn’t teach out of a belief of what I thought was best for my students, I taught out of a series of assumption. And so Bill rocked that boat and changed forever the way I taught.

“ And now I just want to show you a little video clip of me teaching. Actually it’s me teaching but also I was the director of the writing program at this point and so this video was taken to demonstrate how to respond to student writing and so just take a look and these are some of the questions because I want you to talk amongst yourselves after. I want you to think about…there are two classes. Look at who is in the basic class and who is in the honors? Who is in the honors class and who in the basic? How is the classroom set up? Look at the difference in arrangement. Everything in school is a hidden curriculum. How we arrange our classroom says who matters and who counts. Are they in rows or in circles? Who talks in each video? What assumption was I making about student abilities and who was engaged in higher level work? This was 23 years ago.

(Slide: As you watch the movie, note the following: 1. Who is in the Basic class? The Honors class? 2. How is the classroom set up? 3. Who talks in each video? 4. What assumptions do I make about the students’ abilities? 5. Who is engaged in higher level work?) (32 second video of Basic class, 1 min 52 of Honors class)

“ So think about the assumptions that I made, and just talk at your tables to see what you think those assumptions are.

“ So in going to a couple of tables, some of the kind of larger things that people pointed out were that the basic class was in rows and I was the one who was leading the discussion, I was the one providing the feedback, whereas in the honors group, the students were all learning from each other and they were providing feedback for each other. One of the assumptions that grow out of that is that I need to speak for the basic students whereas the honors students can speak for themselves. I take a much higher level of curriculum and ownership in the honors class than in the basic class. So one of the things that, you know, you can just live with things with a long time and not see them. One of the things I realized- I had been teaching there for about seven years - is jeez, you know, in the honors class, they’re almost all white. In the basic class, they’re almost all of color.

“ So one of the things that I did was Bill and I started a local group that began looking at and reading Freire and Shor, 1986.2 At the same time as we started working together we started this group that started trying to figure out what it meant to be social justice teachers. They were great on theory, but we didn’t have much of a sense of how to put that in practice. So those people became kind of the Greek chorus course in my head. What is it that we want to create and how do we create that? So we came back and de-tracked our classes. We decided that we weren’t going to teach tracked classes anymore. That was a systemic decision but then I want to go through, just if you have this handout on creating classrooms for equity and justice. Because this rubric is what came out of Bill and I teaching together for seven years and it became kind of a checklist that we went through when we developed new things. How do we create social justice units? It wasn’t enough to de-track the classes. We had to change the curriculum as well. So I want to talk a little about intentionality and construction of classes.

“ For example, I always grounded the pedagogy on the students I taught. I always had them writing about their lives. My students had won writing awards, etc. But their writing was kind of cute and quirky. It wasn’t deep. And one of the things that happened for me was recognizing the intention of my assignments and how that intention changed over the years. That instead of writing about the cliques at school, but not examining why they exist Instead of writing about clothes and the kind of clothes he wore, why not write about the class issues surrounding clothing? So everything became a lesson that looked at race, class and gender issues. This was a way for students, particularly in this de-tracked class to learn something about each other. Just one quick example – Scott was a student who came from the west coast-he was a white student- who believed that racism was dead, that it was no longer an issue. We wrote about times when we were treated unfairly. Deku, whose parents were doctors and who drove BMWs and so he was driving a BMW and he was an African American, and he was pulled over by a cop and he was African American and laid on the pavement and searched. When he read that story to the class, Scott said, “wait a minute, I thought racism was dead.”

“ And so the stories that the students told each other about their lives became a part of the curriculum, intentionally. And the other thing was that we could share the joy and richness about our family lives and celebrate the truth about where we come from.

I just want to read you a couple of quick poems that demonstrate this intentional shift. I found this wonderful poem called, “I Was Raised by Women,” a poem written by Kelly Norman Ellis, an Affrilachian poet. She is an African American poet from Appalachia. So my students used that as a model.
(Poem from Student)

“ Obviously delightful. I asked the students to take notes on the pieces that they read. At the end I asked them what they learned about each other. One of the things that we learned in this class of 27 African-Americans and 3 whites was that the majority of them were raised without fathers. One of the things one student wrote was “I was surprised- I didn’t know white people were raised without their fathers, too.” And so it’s this kind of this moment of shared community that they had.

“ Another one we did was “for my people.” I really loved this poem by Adam - it was about who they see their people as. What is their roots, are they bi-racial, is it a church group? Who are their people? So, this is “A Shout Out To My Black AP Students.”
(Students Poem)

“ So anyway, to take a look at again, what is it that we take for granted at school.

“ What I want to do now is just go through this a little bit because there’s a lot in here to talk about what it means basically in a unit. Because you have a whole curriculum but I want to look at what one unit would look like. I’m not going to take you through every little thing, but I want to give you an example. One unit that I take students through is looking at race and culture at school, so we do that by looking at our So we read “Boys Don’t Cry” by (author) which is absolutely wonderful she was one of the Little Rock Nine and it’s a memoir, and it’s just a great read for grades 4-college because it’s a memoir. And so we took a look at that. Before we begin that we actually look back through role-playing on how testing and tracking started. We look at who was at the table and who wasn’t. Why was there tracking and how did it work? And then we look at Brown v Board of Education. You can see I was talking about “Academically Rigorous”, that students are reading, (author of Don’t cry) Brown v Board of Education, their looking at David Owen’s “None of the Above” which is about the origins of the SAT and reading that. And then they go out and look at the numbers of African-American students in honors classes, in calculus, AP, and counted them, and then reported back to the faculty- “this is what we see in our schools, these are the inequities we see in our school.”

“ Participatory and experiential role-plays. We did lots of different role-plays. But not everyone agreed, not even in the African-American community, that de-segregation was the way to go. That integration was the way to go. So we looked at the arguments that people had right now. It was hopeful, joyful, and visionary because we had students creating proposals to change what happened to Jefferson, and in fact it did, that was the beginning of the end of tracking at Jefferson. And then it was also multi-cultural, anti-racist and pro-justice, because we began to look at- and this was that critical peak- we looked at who was nationally, looking at the statistics, who was getting the honors classes. And we also looked at the statistics from the SATs, and what do those say when broken down by race, class and gender. And then, I had the students create, and you can see it on the paper, a test. Because we talked about how the SAT was culturally situated, in white affluent culture, and how this test would be different if it were situated in the Jefferson community. And so what students did, while studying for the SAT and looking at how the SAT was created, because they were saying we aren’t scoring very high with white affluent teachers and what does this mean. And so we began by having them create their own. Just take a minute to take a look at this piece. And just imagine for a moment that your scholarship hopes resided on you doing well on this test, or getting into the college of your choice.

“ Now, remember you can’t talk! You’re cheating if you’re talking with other people.

“ OK, I’m going to give you the answers and then we’re going to go to a video clip. What students did was they took this test, and then we took them to University of Portland, Lewis and Clark, Portland State, to the Education classes and they gave the test to the education classes. So I have a video clip of that.
(Giving answers on test, back and forth w/audience)
(video clip)

“ So, anyway, back to the start, from actually taking them out to the world, taking to the faculty- piece of every single things that I do, I’m actually trying to get them to take their learning to the world to make a difference and not to despair about where things are.

“ Now the hardest piece for me and for most teachers I work with is that critical piece. So I wanted to give a tiny bit about another unit. One of the assumptions I really took for granted was Standard English. I was correcting student papers with standard English marking them “you need to change this”, without ever problematizing standard English. About where it came from or why it was the standard. It wasn’t like there was some god that came down and wrote it on some tablet that English should be the local language. No, it doesn’t happen that way. So, one of the things that I do is I take students through this whole pattern and look at what happened to colonial languages. So we look at what happened in Ireland when the English came over. We look at what happened in Hawaii with standard language and that Hawai’ian was taken away and then pidgin comes in. We looked at Native Americans. We looked at what happened in Africa and Haiti and so we really situated around the world and we looked at how, as Noam Chomsky says, “The difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy.” In other words a standard language is about power.

“ One of the things we need to do is get students to understand the need to code switch. To just ask them to change without question or problematizing is asking them to assimilate into a normalized society without saying why it is that way. And that always happened to me. When I was in third grade, Mrs. O’Hanna would have me stand up to pronounce words and conjugate verbs because I did it incorrectly. And then she would have another student stand up and say it right. So what I learned was to be quiet, to not make myself very big target. I felt all my life like I was in the crosshairs of a rifle. And anything I said or did would open up the trap. And so what I want students to explore is what was it that way. And so we began looking at the power of language. We were reading all of these different pieces, looking at the colonial aspect as well as the local aspect about where people are. These are some of my students’ metaphorical drawings. These are metaphors for what language in schools is doing to students.
(slides)

“ I’d like you to talk about what you’ve done in your schools, in your heads- what are the types of things that you’ve changed.

“ Let’s come back together because we talk about changing school structure, changing school curriculum, changing strategies. There’s a lot of rhetoric about rigor, and what rigor means. So I want to deconstruct that a little bit. So I knew someone who thought rigor was a fifty-page paper, or a test that half the students failed, “I’m a tough teacher, I’m about rigor, half my students failed!” And so I think that that is rigor-mortis. It’s the wrong kind of rigor. It’s the rigor that puts your teeth out; it’s the rigor that creates school-factories that fails students. Because real rigor - real rigor - is engaging students in the process so that all students are passing. And they’re all passing because we’re scaffolding their education in such a way that they know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and how to do it. If we structure a classroom so the majority of students are failing, we’re failing. And that’s one of the kind of big pieces that we need to deconstruct- who’s failing? Not the students, we are. And so, the other thing that I want to say about that is that, in my classrooms I don’t grade papers. And this probably sounds like a great idea. “You know, I don’t grade papers either, I throw them in the fireplace.” But I don’t mean it that way. I mean that for example, I give each student 500 pts, but you don’t get 500 pts until you do it right. Until you understand how to do it, until you’ve done it completely. For me, that is rigor. Rigor is not accepting failure. Rigor is making students do it over until they l earn it. Rigor means making a shift that failure is not an option for our students. It’s not ok to be failing this many students.

“ The other thing I want to say goes back to that relationship piece. The pieces of rigor and high expectations are talked about a lot but never deconstructed. The other part is about relationships. Relationships I’ve found are one of the key pieces in keeping students in school. My struggling students, my students who live in foster homes, my students are in and out of grandmas house, dads house, moms house, people who are in prison, that they have a lot of people that haven’t been there for them. And they’re used to people giving up on them. And so for me, that’s why relationships are important. This is the place where I have to say you can go with that Freedom Writer, super-teacher kind of thing, that shouldn’t have to be that way. Actually we should set up schools so that we have real relationships with students, so that we have time to talk to students, that we have time to find out why they aren’t coming to class. But without that we need to picture that we are calling the students, we need to make sure that we’re finding out what’s going on. I had a student who was loosing focus and failing all of his classes- his dad had died, and it he didn’t have anywhere else to live after his dad had died. So we need to know what’s happening with our students so we can teach them more effectively. My good friend, who is a social studies teacher and dean of Jefferson high school said, it doesn’t mean that we enable students, “oh you had a hard time, let me give you an easier task,” but it does mean we understand and we hold them accountable.

“ What I want to leave you with is a quote from Mitzy Lewison and Jerry Harste... I absolutely love this quote.

“ Education is never neutral: it either liberates, domesticates, or alienates.”- Creating Critical Classrooms, Mitzi Lewison, Christine Leland, Jerry Harste

“ A lot of education has been alienating. So as you move forward this weekend, I hope that you will work for education that liberates. Thank you.”

1(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and lesbian feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 13 (1986). From an essay written in 1984.)

2Freire and Shor, Pedagogies of Liberation, 1986

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