This blog post is mostly a place for me to process my thoughts and preserve some resources for later. Feel free to skip it. I promise I'll write more about the joys of pregnancy soon.
I just got back from the Free Minds, Free People conference.
(To be honest, there are a lot of hard core educators for liberation there today, organizing and making plans, but I am exhausted after three long days and need a real break before I go back to work tomorrow, so I've written myself a preggo note and will be staying home and going to the beach,and napping today). And processing.
The conference was beautiful, AND I had a strange feeling of it being almost perfect, but not quite. (Which just means I'll have to get more involved next year.)
I'm basically blogging here to preserve some of the cool resources and organizations I encountered at the conference.
http://www.beyondmedia.org/index.html Beyond Media Education are a group of youth who make videos teaching other youth about really important issues. I didn't get to see any, but would like to.
The Learning Community. This is a charter school working to give charters a good name in Central Falls. I'd heard about them from my friends at Blackstone Academy, and was blown away by the statistics about how they support the larger school system, work with ELL's and children with special rights, and partner with families. I attended a panel all about charters, and the director of the Learning Community was... Sarah Friedman, a woman I worked at Coffee Exchange with. (Ah, Rhode Island!). I definitely want to go visit them in the fall, and see what they're doing.
Institute for Humane Education. Not sure how I feel about these folks. They might be cool... or not. They had a horrifying game about Darfur to build compassion in young people. Yuck.
http://getoutma.org/ This is a fledgling organization designed to get as many middle and high school students out onto farms for short visits. Their goal is quantity, and to allow as many children and youth to have the life-changing experience of digging in dirt and seeing food on the vine.
I was really impressed with the FMFP "Guidelines for Healthy Dialogues". One of the women in my reflective group at the end still felt like she found white people taking up too much space, which is a problem. But I would like to hang on to the guidelines because they addressed a lot of things. I really liked "WAIT" (Why Am I Talking).
I made some connections, but mostly that benefited other people. :( I met a cool theater teacher from NY who was excited about Reggio Emilia because he is Italian and always looking for Italian thinkers to inform his pedagogy. I met a young teacher who may apply for the atelierista position at our school (she sounds a little raw, and is unfamiliar with Reggio, but she has an art degree and worked with infants and toddlers). I met a cool early childhood teacher who lives in JP and is interested in visiting our school. The people who seemed further along in their journeys were a little harder for me to access, caught up in their existing circles. I remembered a Hilltop conference where we all stuck together and then tried to consciously make space for everyone else. I also remembered our first Day of Learning when people really weren't able to mix together.
I have to say I didn't learn a lot that was new. I learned a little more about the term "Neo-liberalism" (I need to learn more). I really enjoyed hearing from the teachers who were featured in the plan book for social justice teachers, both on the first day as a panel, and the second day at lunch. I'm incredibly inspired by the teachers who are continuing to teach Chicano studies even though AZ recently passed an unjust law making the class illegal (for building ethnic solidarity and encouraging overthrow of the government). I was impressed at how Sam Coleman, a union rep in NYC, and Kathy Young and Stephanie Schneider, two protesting teachers from WI cast a critical eye at their unions, while working for change outside of them.
I had a conversation with Dr. Vincent Harding (although I only knew him as Vincent, at that moment). In telling him and the people at my table what I do, I mentioned anti-bias curriculum. He said "Whenever I hear someone say that they're anti-something, I ask them 'What is it that you are for?'". I gave this a lot of thought. I love the phrase "education for liberation" but I feel as thought it's important for a community of mostly-white mostly-middle class teachers to think hard about bias, and our encounters with it. I feel as though it is at the very least a first step to look squarely at bias and talk about it. After the last year of working with staff to think about questions of difference and bias, I feel like if we had posed our work more positively we would not have awakened staff to the truth of our culture. In fact, I wish that we had spent more time looking at systemic and institutionalized racism. Even though I feel very comfortable with "Education for liberation", I don't know that it would be the right thing to start with. I guess I worry that people who have been protected from the ugliness of racism and other bias need to be faced with it, including "anti-" type language. At the same time, I was very grateful to Vincent for raising this issue, and I'll have to think more about it.
