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Last week I had my first praxis placement at a public middle school in Philadelphia. My role is to participate in a weekly enrichment session for around a dozen students from fifth through eighth grade classes. I basically received the program/role from another Haverford student who has been developing and growing it over the past two years. Their focus has been, roughly, on discussing issues like civics and politics while working on building argumentation skills. My working goal for the semester in general is to work with this group of students who have already spent a lot of time learning about "leadership" and politics to think about how to build power and organize toward something as a group.

Originally, I was supposed to come and observe the class while another person led them in some kind of lesson/activity. It turned out that the person who was supposed to come couldn't make it and five minutes to ten I was told I'd be leading the class. "Oy," I thought to myself. I didn't have a lesson plan or any plan really. I had been excited to observe the students and the adult in the room to get a sense of how they functioned together, what the group dynamics were like, what kinds of things they were interested in. But I had to improvise--and it ended up being fine.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe swept me away with each read, immersing my childood imagination in enchanted lands full of talking creatures, magic, and a few kids just like me. I grew up engaging with this classic story, but I hadn’t realized just how important it may have been in cultivating curiosity about my very own ecological world. Narnia, while acting as a “ditch” for many readers like myself over the years, may have also been a “ditch” within the story itself for the four Pevensie children. The ecological thought presented in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is complex and crucial to the plot—the environment almost acts as a character that grows and changes throughout the story. Through an interpretive reading of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the role of the environment in this classic tale can be further unpacked.

I’ve been in my placement this entire year at a special admit public high school in Philadelphia, which is great, as it has allowed me to watch and grow with the students in the two classes I work with. The school is highly-regarded, in Philadelphia and beyond, for its progressive, student-centered approach to teaching and learning. Specifically, I’ve been participating in two 9th grade African American history courses that have been covering an enormous amount of interesting material from present-day stereotypes of the African continent to the way cultural perceptions of race influenced and were influenced by laws relating to slavery to ways of making sense in and across societies.

This semester, my mentor teacher is using a special grant that she applied for and received to engage with her students in a special “Semester of Service.” The two classes are both in the process of learning, designing, and carrying out semester long service projects in the Philadelphia community and are striving to tie the work they do to Philadelphia history. I am extremely excited about this project because asset-based, meaningful service-learning is a big interest of mine and a great way, I think, for students to engage in conversations about race, class, privilege, and what it means to “help” people versus “collaborate and co-create” with them.

http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=87801

Besides the fact that I really enjoyed reading the dialogue that Shor and Freire had, I felt that the idea of implementing a ‘Dialogical Method’ of teaching is an effective way to show students that they’re indeed at the center of their own education. Freire explains that dialogue is essential for development. Humans, are different than other intelligent organisms because we have the ability to communicate and assure each other and ourselves in our knowledge; “we are able to know that we know.” (99). A theme in the reading that really stuck out to me was the idea of empowerment and who is the center of knowledge. In lecture-based environment’s, teachers are seen as the center of knowledge where the educator is to teach the educatee. In a dialogue based pedagogy, though the teacher is knowledgeable about the subject that they’re teaching and engaging their student with, they actively engage with their students and “relearn” the subject while studying it again with their students. The teacher is able to always find out new things and rediscover the material they’re already familiar with through working with their students closely; this turns learning into a JOINT act, rather than a solitary act.  By allowing their students to “exercise their own powers of reconstruction,” the teacher allows their students to practice personal responsibility and expression.

Levinson's introduction to No Citizen Left Behind as left me with a number of exciting ideas about what a truly civic education might look like. I am especially struck by her argument that those things which require change are not simply educational content--although that is obviously crucial, and she valuably points to histories of ordinary people making change as powerful alternatives to traditional histories of "great men"--but also are the very structure of the learning environment. I sense that Levinson's idea that the entire school community, at least, or perhaps especially, among "students from historically marginalized communities should be taught both codeswitching and solidaristic collective action as means of exercising civic and political power both within and outside the system" (55) is both radical and entirely accurate. I think we might want to trouble or think deeply about what solidarity means--but in general teaching through doing, through the doing of something like community organizing, among students--combined with lessons and a culture of discussion (dialogues, to mention Freire & Shor)--seems to me like a much more winning strategy than something more conservative (although still progressive in its own of) such as writing the subaltern into history textbooks that, through their presentation and the larger arc of their history, fail to challenge the structures of action, politics, and civic feeling that in part produce the situations of inequality with which many people must live.

A theme among the two readings that has resonated with me is empowerment.

Freire makes the argument that empowerment is not an individual feeling but a social act, and that “if you are not able to use your recent freedom to help others to be free by transforming the totality of society, then you are exercising only an individualist attitude towards empowerment or freedom”. My peers and I constantly throw around the word empowerment as more of an individualist feeling than an actual social act, especially in terms of online videos like the ones on Upworthy. One of the downsides of Upworthy videos is that they can make you feel extremely inspired, empowered, hope for change, and make you feel really good, and then you can just walk away from the video and continue on with your day without doing anything with those feelings... or just waiting until the next Upworthy video shows up on the dashboard. Upworthy can most definitely be a tool for Freire's definition of empowerment as it can spread messages virally. How can we get all these people who have been inspired to come together and act for change?

He noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship. The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a rich deep green. Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch -- walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, the special smell of each day...His thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new -- and worth trying. (Juster 255-256)

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is a classic piece of children’s literature, published in 1961. A timeless and revered tale, it is not only enjoyable and educational, it also advocates the importance of appreciating and being aware of the world - the environment - around you. For this reason, and because of its educational nature and narrative, it is a fantastic environmental education tool for young people. Gauged at around a 5th-6th grade reading level (by Scholastic, etc) and recommended for ages 8-12, this chapter book is full of challenging words and word play that must elude most children who read it (many of the expressions went right over my head when I read it in 4th or 5th grade), making it equally enjoyable for adults.

In Levinson's "No Citizen Left Behind"  as the students converse about Bush's intentions, Levinson had superior doubt before realizing her students were partially correct about 9/11. Reading their sentiments did not surprise me at all, for the fact that 1. I share a neighborhood and city with the students in this piece and I did not know the New York Bourroughs or the Pentagon and as a child, and 2. I shared what seemed to be common knowledge in our community: That Bush was not fond of us. Our parents said it, Kanye said it, voting said it, Hurricane Katrina said it; so to me the students did not sound ridiculous, they sounded quite aware. Today it seems the message blacks recieved from their president in 2004 is the same message they are getting from their legal system in 2014.

The Boler Chapters were interesting to think about. The role of emotion in the classroom has always been an interesting subject for me. I’ve always found that the classes that that had more emotional tension, classes I’ve been upset about the discussion or felt like I spoke from the heart very often have been the most rewarding and I was never really sure why that was. In the chapter 7 reading, the idea of empathy and testimonial readings as more than passive, but as an active was to both identify emotions in the classroom and recognizing that “I am not you, and that empathy is possible only by virtue of this distinction”. Boler makes a strong distinction between pity and empathy saying that pity is about your own vulnerabilities, not about the other person, which makes it seem useful that empathy be brought in the classroom for education. Often I feel like when I speak with my feelings in class that the only person who benefits is myself, almost therapeutically, but if students practice empathy then we can grow together in acknowledging emotions. Empathy explores beyond just what emotions are being expressed but also asks why they are being expressed.

If feel like this chapter made an important distinction for me about why empathy and active emotions are vital for a class, not only to understand each other, but also to understand power relationships that cause those emotions and that not all experienced are experienced the same.