another beginning...

This year has been full of Zak and I saying to one another "Here we go... it all changes now... look out!"

Tonight was another of those moments. 

We have been signing to Simon since he was 3 months old or so. Starting with "Milk"and "diaper". Zak liked to use big strings of signs together and we often wondered what, if anything, he might pick up. (Experts recommend families starting with one and adding them slowly. This appears to be about helping the adults to be consistent and learn the signs. We had no problems with signing consistently, and knew quite a few signs already from my work with a child whose hearing was impaired, so we just had at it.

Simon first signed "milk"while he was nursing (which is when I would sign it to him). For a long while, he wouldn't sign "milk" when he wanted it, but if I guessed and signed it to him, when he was hungry he would smile, grab my signing hand and stuff it in his mouth. So, basically, he improvised his own sign for "HELL YES!" After awhile, he got tired of that, and has been "signing" milk, by tugging at my shirt and unsnapping my bra for the last few months. 

He learned "water"and signed it by opening and shutting his hand in front of his mouth, often while making a gurgly sound. We were ecstatic. Occasionally he has signed "Papa"and "Mama", although he can  now say those words. Very soon, the sign for water also meant bird, and full diaper. (We can show you the three signs and you can see how his sign is very close to water, bird and dirty.) then he generalized  from "bird"to "bird or dog". So, occasionally throughout the day, he'll sign this sign and we'll look around for context clues to tell us if he needs his diaper changed, is thirsty, or is thinking about a bird or a dog. 

He's really excited about dogs. He's been seeing them around our neighborhood and is big enough to walk over to them and pet them if the owner is cool with it. He always signs "bird" and then we sign "dog" back. For the most part, we've used ASL signs, but I have occasionally wished we'd used the "baby sign" for dog. ASL is to snap your fingers and slap your leg as if calling a dog, and baby sign is to stick out your tongue and pant. Since it'll be awhile before Simon can snap, I had been thinking this was a mistake.

Tonight we went out to dinner and saw a dog on the way home. After it was gone, Simon kept trying to look over my shoulder (I was carrying him on my front facing me.) to see the dog. (Yesterday a dog walked behind us for a few blocks and this method helped him to see it the whole way.) He frantically signed "bird/dog". Zak signed "dog"to him every time and said "dog"too. "duh" is a common sound for Simon to make and a big part of his daily, conversational babble so it was no surprise when he responded to Zak with "duh"and his "bird/dog"sign. Zak emphasized "Daw-GUH" a few times. There was no dog present and the two just kept signing and talking to each other

Simon: Dah! ("bird/dog")

Zak: Daw-GUG ("Dog")

over and over 100 times until... Simon said "Dog-guh". We all got excited. We walked down the street all chanting "Daw-guh" sign language forgotten. I hoped that we'd run into another dog, and we did. Our neighbors had their two puppies out playing and they ran over to Simon and he said to them "Dog-uh". And that was it. The beginning of a child who can definitely think with others about things that are not present, the beginning of a hunger for language, an enthusiasm for naming and describing. Language is hugely important to Zak and me and it was so exciting to walk through the dark  talking together with our little one.

Free Minds, Free People

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.