Tonight I celebrated Passover @ a seder @ the home of friends, and was caught by the opening line of the ritual:

"It could be said with some accuracy that the tension between home and exile is central to the Jewish experience. From God's first instruction to Avram, 'Go forth on the road,' to the modern Diaspora, to be a Jew has meant to be a transient, in search of home. To be at home nowhere and everywhere, always to be seeking a reutrn to the Promised Land..."

As I read Blackburn’s reading, I couldn’t help but think: What if LGBTQ themed books were incorporated in every school’s curriculum. How would the school environment change? Would it be a positive or a negative change? I know that this depends on the school, but I was thinking about it in terms of my high school. One of the students spoke about how her middle school teachers forbid LGBTQ, but it is more accepted in high schools. I agree. I believe that it more common that GSA would be in high schools rather than a middle school, but then again, that’s where the limit is drawn. I tried to think of books that I read in high school that included characters from the LGBTQ community, but I could not think of any.

Blackburn's book highlighted for me the potential in the overlap between school and "extracurricular" spaces. I couldn't help but think to Ceballo's "Bilingual 'Neighborhood Club'" and Lee and Hawkin's community based after-school programs when reading about the Attic, and appreciated the not-school space that the Attic made for students. However, I was most interested and engaged when reading the section about the Speaker's Bureau. I've found myself particularly and repeatedly interested lately in the ways students can act as educators and this program within the Attic was one space in which the voices of students were really important to transforming how teachers and other students understood homosexuality and homophobia.

I'm wondering now how students can be more frequently empowered to do this kind of educating within schools or whether the distance of an out-of-school program is needed to facilitate students as teachers?

Hannah Bahn
Multicultural Education
Inquiry Project

Research and Practice: How Teacher Practitioner Research can promote Culturally-Relevant Teaching

I am eager to engage in teacher practitioner research in my future classroom because the practice beautifully fuses my interests in applied education research and teaching. For many years, my entry-point into the field of education has been through academic, ethnographic research and then, later, applied education research. I love collecting peoples’ stories, expressed in a variety of mediums, and synthesizing them. For a long time, I thought I wanted to do this outside of the classroom.

But this past fall, when I was enrolled in the “Curriculum and Pedagogy Seminar” and a “Sociology of Education” course, I began to develop a newfound understanding of and appreciation for where and how educational change is created and sustained. As I read about top-down reforms that adjusted class size or the number of hours in the school day, I began to realize that these tweaks to the system matter little if they do not fundamentally inform classroom practice. This realization in conjunction with my growing knowledge of curriculum design and pedagogical practices prompted my newfound interest in becoming a teacher.

One question that came up in previous class discussions was how to connect the services and work provided by youth centers to schools. The Speakers Bureau offers a response to how programs can bridge that gap and be better integrated into teachers' and students' understanding, the cirriculum, etc. The Speakers Bureau gave youth an opportunity to engage in outreach and share their experiences as members of the LGBTQ community, as well as opportunities to work directly with teachers, exploring how literature can be used to question heteronormativity. It would be interesting to see how this outreach model could be modified for other topics like race, class and privilege. Connecting it back to last Thursday's conversation, I wonder how far a partnership between a community organization and a school could go in changing the canon of a school's cirriculum.

Here is the NPR story that I mentioned on Friday: http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/01/08/kind-world-shelagh

It's a pretty short podcast, but a really nice story, so you should listen to it if you have the chance!

 empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another

            Empathy is one of those qualities that we’re constantly told that, as “good” people, we should possess.  From elementary school character education to high school literature classes, one purported purpose of education (at least in my American public school experience) is to teach us how to care about and understand the feelings of other people.  I’ve always considered myself an empathetic person, someone who cares about and understands others’ feelings, but lately I’ve been questioning whether this quality I’ve prided myself on even exists.  Is it ever possible to truly “understand and share the feelings of another”?

• Science is based on facts and observations, and thus is objective.
• There is science, and then there is faith. Science is testable while faith is not, thus, science is better.
• There is no empathy allowed in science, never get too attached to any idea. Disprove everything until something is left.
• Science is truth. Everything else is meaningless opinion.

But:

“Expert opinion changed significantly during the process, even in the absence of new information” (Curtis 95). 

Growing up with a mathematician mother and an artist father, I’ve been heavily exposed to two seemingly opposite modes of perception. Objective science and math versus subjective art and history, a binary that has been drilled into me since before I can remember. Interestingly enough, I’ve never felt “good enough” to be on either side of this binary—climate science (my specialty) is too provocative and human for me to remain unbiased and unempathetic, thus compromising my “objective” scientific approach. But visual art, which was my major in high school, always felt too empathetic and unreal to have true meaning, too based in perception to adequately explain how the earth works. But by breaking down this binary, I’ve realized they both have one main goal and one main tool: explaining/interpreting/investigating the world, and our human perception. 

Is that a necessary dichotomy? Reading Steve Chase's Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies made me think a lot about my relationship with and confusion around social change and activism. I have this constant fight within myself about whether I'm being too radical or not radical enough - and then I worry that I'm being too wishy-washy, not fully committing to working with one faction or another and therefore feeling totally useless. I read Steve Chase's account of the Environmental Justice Workgroup's successful "collaborative and educational approach" to their fight to raise awareness and discourse about environmental justice at their school, and I experienced conflicting responses. On one hand, I was impressed and felt regretful that I haven't done more work like that at Bryn Mawr. And then immediately after that, I'm like, "no, my work isn't about helping a bunch of privileged white people see the truth about racism and oppression! I wanna smash the patriarchy! I want to destroy capitalism! I'm radical!" I don't deny that the change that Chase and his group accomplished was important and helpful, it just doesn't feel as necessary or exciting to me. And it's not just because of the hippie anarchist that lives in me and craves adrenalyn rush-style direct action and in-your-face lockdown blockades. I approach this from a "rational", academic standpoint as well.

The first half the book delved into the idea of creating a safe space to talk about potentially sensitive issues like homophobia. One sugesstion was to allow students to have the ability to writing in public private ways (41). I bellieve that this could have a very impactful effect on students as I've seen in in my praxis.

There are time where we will journal and share or just journal and look at the journals separately, but both are important to have students feel like their stories are important enough to be shared but not at the risk of their privacy. Sometimes hsaring can feel uncomfortable and intrusive. We don't know the sensitivity levels of everyone in the class. Giving the optin to share their insight or not is useful for building the kind of classroom that understand their is value in sharing but not to the extent that it is damaging to the student.