Arts Integration and Lost Connections

As part of my involvement in the school community beyond the bell to bell classroom teaching and related duties, (i.e. correcting, meeting with kids, planning lessons, going to meetings, avoiding meetings, answering emails, updating the website....See blog title) I have been coordinating the Chinese Exchange program. For the sake of full disclosure, I will say that it is a stipended position,  and, also for the record,  I will also say that I happy to do it.

In the fall each year, 10 students from China and their teacher come for about 8 weeks to live with host families, attend classes, see the area and take a big weekend trip to New York City. In the spring, 10 of our students travel to China with one of our teachers for a “similar” experience. As a chaperone for the inaugural trip in 2008, I can tell you this really is a wonderful and unique opportunity. This year, the group from China brought traditional costumes and an iPod full of Chinese music and has been performing dances at our school. Recently I completed paperwork for them to travel to the Middle School to do the same there. This is the first year the visiting group has brought dance to us, and it has been warmly received by the student body and faculty. (Imagine 1000 American high school students sitting silently in the gym during a pre-Homecoming pep rally and respectfully watching a 7 minute Chinese dance then erupting into applause. This impressed me.) All well and good, right? As far as the experience goes, yes. The next step, to bring this experience to a group of students beyond our own hosting school, however, perhaps not so much.

My journey started with the field trip form; it has all kinds of bells and whistles on it relating to payment, transportation, contact information, and the like. At the very top, partially in red and in caps says the following:

“IMPORTANT-Purpose of the Trip. If this trip occurs during school hours, you MUST STATE CLEAR CURRICULUM LEARNING STANDARDS by number and description. If not completed well, this form will be rejected and returned.” {Formatting theirs}

 Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody. Not nohow.

OK. My concern really isn’t about forms (I have filled out plenty in my life and I get their usefulness). Nor is it about the request for a field trip from school having an educational connection per se. It more has to do with how education is defined and viewed.

Being a good girl (and not wanting to not complete the form “well” and then have it “rejected and returned”) I went online to look at the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks to fulfill this important part of the mission.

I looked first in History (being a Social Studies teacher, I guess). The frameworks are in large part a list of facts to learn. Towards the end, there are some frameworks for critical thinking skills-building around said facts and events. As well, there are similar guidelines for the treatment of primary source documents. At the very end there is a list of primary sources and a fine bibliography.

Below is the extent of the frameworks for World History with regard to contemporary China:

“WHII.34 Identify the political and economic upheavals in China after the Chinese Revolution. (H, E)
A. Communist Party attempts to eliminate internal opposition B. the Great Leap Forward and its consequences (famine) C. the Cultural Revolution and its consequences (the terror of the Red Guards and the
expansion of labor camps)
the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration E. China’s economic modernization and its growing involvement in world trade

WHII.13 Identify major developments in Chinese history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (H, E)
China’s explosive population growth between 1750 and 1850 B. Decline of the Manchu dynasty beginning in the late 18th century C. Growing Western influence D. The Opium War E. The Taiping rebellion from 1850 to 1864 F. The Boxer Rebellion G. Sun Yat-Sen and the 1911 nationalist revolution”

For starters, the world history standards are pretty much limited to political history; there is no mention of intellectual history really, or cultural history or the fact that China has many ethnic groups or anything beyond these facts. I also really love the “growing involvement in world trade” line. News flash: we’re into them big time for some serious change plus all the Apple products the school and its teachers uses (this one included) have a major Chinese connection; many of them are manufactured there, for one thing.  Bottom line, there was no curriculum connection to the arts here. So, I turned to the Arts Standards.

Right at the beginning, the “Guiding Principles” for the Massachusetts Arts Curriculum Frameworks stated the following:

“An effective arts curriculum promotes knowledge and understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the arts.”

And the following (directly from the Frameworks pdf file) was also interesting:

“PreK–12 STANDARD 10 Interdisciplinary Connections
Students will apply their knowledge of the arts to the study of English language arts, foreign languages, health, history and social science, mathematics, and science and technology/engineering.”

Where is the interdisciplinary connection beginning in the History Frameworks? There is none. But right there at the beginning of the history frameworks, there is this:

“Our call for schools to purposely impart to their students the learning necessary for an informed, reasoned allegiance to the ideals of a free society rests on three convictions:

First, that democracy is the worthiest form of human governance ever conceived.

Second, that we cannot take democracy’s survival or its spread or its perfection in practice for granted. Indeed, we believe that the great central drama of modern history has been and continues to be the struggle to establish, preserve, and extend democracy at home and abroad. We know that very much still needs doing to achieve justice and civility in our own society. Abroad, we note that only one-third of the world’s people live under conditions that can be described as free.

Third, we are convinced that democracy’s survival depends upon our transmitting to each new generation the political vision of liberty and equality that unites us as Americans. It also depends on a deep loyalty to the political institutions our founders put together to fulfill that vision.”

In a never ending battle for Truth! Justice! And The American Way!

So, the priority of the history curriculum is to teach our students to look at the world Superman defended, and through his X-Ray vision, all-knowing eyes, but the arts curriculum's purpose is to see how arts are part of all the other disciplines.  This is interesting both in terms of the particular mission of each as well as what it says about how the authors experience the world perhaps: left brain v whole brain? This might be a stretch, but maybe not.

As I would ask my own students, then: So What? What’s The Big Deal? The Big Deal is that while “facts” and events are certainly important in terms of understanding History, History is not just comprised of lists of casts of characters, dates, battles, and documents. And kids WILL fall asleep if that’s all you use in a Social Studies classroom. There is a wider world, a world that people have created and continue to create in other ways. Enter the arts and the technology created and used by them. The arts have been there through history and will continue to be. They should NOT be "extra", nor should they have to defend their worth by including their reference to other disciplines. They have value in and of themselves. And whether it is about defending their place in education or not,  Massachusetts Frameworks Arts authors have the vision to see their connection to other “disciplines”. Moreover,  students are connected to them. Even kids who are not enrolled in art or music courses draw on their notebooks, walk around listening to music, and consume arts and media. The other day, a student in my World Religion class identified music as one of the forces in the universe she most bonds with: it helps her focus, it changes her mood, she said. It is a way for her to connect with her peers. (I wager many of us might say many of the same things.) And, by the way, this student is the very type of student that public education and its critics are always crying out for us to reach.

But other disciples don’t always look to the arts or incorporate them. The Massachusetts History Frameworks doesn't, particularly. How limited. What kind of message does this send? What kind of world does it want us to teach our students about or prepare them for? Not one the arts sees. Fill in the blanks here: arts should be in the public schools, not cut, not extra, not relegated to after school or marginalized any other way. It should be enough that the kids from the Middle School get to see Chinese kids performing a Chinese dance because it’s different from what we do in America on so many levels, it's interesting, and because, yes, it shows discipline and focus and a myriad of other skills we want our students to possess.

Fortunately for me, and to be fair, I am sure, in my district they will get to have this experience. (If I filled out the form “well.”) Further, I would also like to point out the following: “even” the AP European History curriculum nods at the arts, though the bias is towards the visual arts and there are “key paintings”. (Not enough Durer in my humble opinion, even; they lean heavily on the Usual Suspects: you can name them, I bet.) Also, at my school, I have several colleagues who skillfully incorporate the arts into their teachings, and this is something my department head certainly more than marginally supports. This is both encouraging and positively challenging in terms of my own professional development; and, I will reiterate, the students can’t get enough of it.

Going to China, having Chinese people come here. It’s all good. Everybody is learning a whole lot. And some of it’s not on a list! This can’t mean it doesn’t "count", that it is not a valuable part of being "educated" or even "good citizens," whoever they are. In the end, no one will really care or even remember too much about about the rise and the fall of the Ottoman empire, except some of us, and that’s more than OK.

On being a teacher on 9/11/01

A colleague and a friend of mine walked by my room that beautiful, high-pressure brilliant sky Tuesday morning and motioned for me to come outside. I was a sixth grade teacher in a public school in a community that was home to several synagogues, a handful of churches and a large Islamic center which included a mosque and a school and a community center.

Becca’s summons to step out into the hall was nearly unheard of, and especially from this particular gal. If you saw a colleague actively teaching in the front of the room, with students’ eyes on her, you didn’t ask them to step out. It’s a courtesy and practicality that was tacit but understood and appreciated by all of us, I think. It’s a challenge to get elementary school kids to attend to something you’re doing on the board. I looked surprised, but she beckoned again. I excused myself and went out.

“Two planes have hit the Twin Towers in New York and I think I heard them say something about the Pentagon.”

“What?” This was confusing, and as usual, my friend was calm. Well, pretty calm. She repeated this information.

“They think it’s a terrorist attack.”

It was not making sense to me.

I wanted more information, more details, more everything, but there were twenty- five 11-year-olds in the next room where I had fortunately thought to shut the door to the hall. So I did what I needed to do for my job, and I went back in and taught Math.

Later, when the kids were at music or gym or something, I went down to the office. People were just sort of hanging around. I put myself down next to a young first grade teacher who was sitting on what I thought of frankly as the “bad kids’ couch” – it was right outside the principal’s office. We talked about how our cats had seemed strange that morning before we left for work, like they knew something was up. I really did think that, and so did she. Cats know all sorts of things; maybe they knew that a shift in the world was about to occur.

During lunch, teachers went into to the back room of the library and watched one of the only TVs in the building (this was before they were so ubiquitous in schools, or any place else except over bars.) There in the back of the library, hidden from children’s eyes, those two planes crashed into the towers over and over and then, the towers fell to the ground. Over and over. We didn’t tell the kids. All day, we would walk through the long halls of our school with trails of little kids behind us in line doing whatever kids do in line. The adults were silent, but we met each other’s eyes in the halls as we passed and said nothing. Our job was to hold a safe place for the children. I had the kids do reading, writing; I don’t know. I was distracted.

On September 12, we had a before school faculty meeting where we discussed how to handle the topic should it come up in the classroom. Those of us who taught the upper grades were encouraged to facilitate discussion as far as we felt appropriate. Sure enough, when the bulk of my class had come in and the day started, hands were up all over the room. I heard questions, comments about protesters they had seen and other concerns, observations speculation, and disappointment over us having school that day. Mostly, I was proud of my kids for being respectful in their discussion, and I did my best to give out the message that this was a small group of people; that it didn’t represents all members of the Muslim faith, etc, etc. Then, the phone rang.

The office called and said that some of my students would be coming a little late and that they were “carpooling.” These were the boys in my class and in the class across the halls that were Muslim. When I poked my head out of the door to check on them, I saw them, all walking down the hall in a line. They were all wearing Red Sox shirts, New England Patriots shirts and one had on that year’s Old Navy shirt with the American flag on it. Yesterday they were Omar, Faisel, Jawad, Kadir. in a suburban sixth grade class with Josh, Sarah, Luke, Jessica, and all the others. Today, they felt like they had to show they were American.

Omar, usually a truly happy camper, sat at his desk and put his head on it. Kadir, one of the most gifted and cheerful kids in the class sat on the windowsill and looked out at the playground for most of the morning. And really, I don’t remember the rest of that day or the days that followed. Kids are resilient, and as one of my former teaching mentors would say, “People return to type after a while.” We got through that day and days to follow.

9/11 opened my heart to the suffering of those particular boys on that day, I know that much. I try to balance what I know to have been the heinous actions of a few extremist people with politics, a work life in an increasingly diverse community, a home life where my neighbors put up flags and some who put “Terrorist hunting permits” on their trucks for months after those attacks.

How did 9/11 change the world? This is what we educators would call a great Essential Question. Regardless, 9/11 is a part of my memory as an adult and as a teacher, and for the latter reason maybe more than the former, it will always be a part of me.  

Response to a Recent globe Article

In education, as in all types of professions no doubt, sometimes one person, or in this case teacher, will get featured as a kind of wiz bang, amazing whomever, when in fact, whatever he is doing has either A) been done before or B) is currently being done by any number of others. . I know I am biased, but educators are really generally low key and hard working and those who are NOT in the limelight are no less dedicated or competent. I work with a number of highly dedicated teachers and really, I am fortunate to do so. Whatever & Anyway. This link is to a recent Globe article and below it is my "official" response.

Test of Faith (Boston Globe: August 28, 2011)

"Readers might be interested to know that the Sharon Public Schools have had a unit in the 9^th grade Social Studies curriculum that teaches about religion for some time, and there is an elective called World Religions offered since 2008 as well. As a Social Studies teacher in the district and the instructor and creator of the curriculum in the elective course, I can report that students are very interested in the subject and opportunities for breaking down barriers and enhancing understanding abound.

Harvard University also offers an excellent and rigorous Religious Studies and Education certificate program. This professional development program emphasizes not only pedagogical techniques, but also includes a focus on the Constitutional, legal, and historical issues surrounding teaching about religion in the schools. Presentations, discussions, readings and assignments in this program continually include the consideration that religion is a delicate subject matter and its inclusion in the classroom cannot be about indoctrination in any way.

Special courses aside, in my career as a Social Studies teacher, the subject of religion appears in one shape or another in AP European History, World History and in the conversations of many of our students outside of formal educational contexts. It is always a privilege to be able to participate and facilitate in the teaching and learning of this important subject. I know that there are colleagues in my own department who are doing similar and fine work.  

I applaud the willingness of Jonathan Rabinowitz as well as that of other colleagues within and outside my district to take on the subject with the sensitivity and scholarship it deserves; I know the students do as well."

We'll see if they print this. 

Pa. teacher strikes nerve with 'lazy whiners' blog - Yahoo! News

Pa. teacher strikes nerve with 'lazy whiners' blog - Yahoo! News

This was a cautionary tale to be sure. Teachers are in a gray area when it comes to free speech both in and out of the classroom, but to me one of the central concerns I have has to do with general confidentiality. How identifiable is this teacher on her blog? How identifiable are the students about whom she complains? I would hazard a guess that many a teacher in my own school might agree with some of the "concerns" she expresses in her blog, but for reasons of confidentiality, professionalism, appropriateness, and self-preservation, it might not be the wisest idea to overshare on the internet.

Still, we teachers know that our behavior, ideas, dress, pedagogical style, personal lives, you name it are fodder for discussion not only on the sidelines of suburban soccer fields and parents' cocktail parties, but on sites like ratemyteacher.com, Facebook, Twitter, student blogs, comments to articles, choices news media makes regarding newsworthy stories as well as nearly any other outlet you can think of. Just this past winter break, I had a woman I didn't even know attack my profession, accuse me of hiding behind my union and suggest that I wasn't a "true capitalist" because I questioned her rationale for merit pay. I guess if I was a doctor, I would be getting requests for free medical consults and goodness knows what else.

Still, I would love to see an article about the sort of day-to-day that teachers live. Most of us are neither villains nor heroes exactly.