Laurita Dianita

I heard Sherman Alexie, my favorite author in the world, speak last week at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I am so excited to have heard and met this author and poet from whom I’ve learned so much over the years, but even more excited for the youth in the audience, particularly the Alaska Native youth to whom he spoke directly, at times crouching down on the stage to look into their eyes.

Alexie came from the most tremendous set of challenges, which he described in simultaneously hilarious and tragic detail—hydrocephalus & its many concomittant disabilities, poverty, social isolation, alcoholism, racist medical practices, etc. But education & leaving the reservation allowed him to find and become the poet and novelist he is now.  “We are nomadic people, we are meant to chase opportunities,” he told the Native youth specifically, urging them to go to school.

Sherman Alexie does in speaking—and his speech is a stand-up routine that could rival or better any so-called comedian—what his recent young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian does for people who do not typically read: he hooks them with humor, with fun, with a story that is so lyrical and visual and so crudely honest that people can’t help but find their own lives in it and can’t help but be seduced, at least a little, into reading and into education. Sherman Alexie does this with a wit and humor that us educators or policy makers can’t ever quite match, but I believe he sets up a model for what we should aspire to in education.

We should strive to make education so real, so relevant to the lives of students, so engaging and fun (and even funny) and empowering to their identities that they get sucked in. It should speak to the tragedies and beauties of their lives so that students find themselves in their schoolwork rather than just finding a world from which they feel alienated.

This is particularly salient for me now because of what seems to be a preponderance of textbook and worksheet teaching in the Anchorage School District and a curriculum (at least the history curriculum) that makes irrelevant most of the global South and most indigenous people. It seems that children are being asked to remember events from history or describe the contributions of famous artists without looking at their art, without understanding the link between that history and today, without really doing anything other than searching for answers to test questions.

Here are some basic things I’d like to see and help to create in schools:

• History classes would start with the question of “Why are we learning this?” and would begin by discussing social issues that the kids are aware of today and how those can be traced back, or talk about the rights they enjoy today and how those are the products of social movements. The teacher can present some of this and the kids would have to find some of this on their own to make it real for them.

• Maybe as an introductory project to get kids hooked into history class, students would have to conduct oral histories and figure out their own family’s history of immigration to or indigenous ancestry in this land.

• All students would come out of their mathematics and economics classes knowing how to make and balance a budget, avoid credit card debt, read nutritional labels and shop for healthy food effectively, and other survival skills.

• Math classes could begin with and integrate hands-on examples and guest professionals who could demonstrate how math gets applied in the worlds of medicine, engineering, art & design, social science, etc.

• Kids would learn by doing.

• Students would see themselves, their cultures and socioeconomic class experiences and genders, in the literature selected for storytime or for literary analysis, in the examples used for math problems, and in “World History” class.

• The content of health class and the way it’s taught would be informed by the public health and social pyshcology research that shows what does and doesn’t work to promote healthy sexual and nutritional/lifestyle decision-making. It would not just be based off of the fears and self-righteous dogma of educators, NGOs or policy-makers.

• Educators would be paid enough and have enough time and administrative support to make all of the above possible.

I get to implement this philosophy of pedagogy with my students in the after-school program, two of whom are pictured above shopping for groceries as part of a nutritional-literacy and food budgeting segment of the math course I am teaching. It is thrilling to see these kids stay til 6 pm excitedly calculating family budgets, calculating net income, writing pretend checks, comparing the nutritional information of meals, multiplying recipes. It is a profound reminder of why kids—and learners of all ages—need to investigate, apply their knowledge to solve real problems, and create meaningful products in order to truly invest in and learn an idea.

This is not to say that my math instruction works to make mathematicians or healthy eaters or provident spenders—this is a very humble beginning and could be far more effective. But it does reinforce for me the need for schools to engage and excite students, to make learning so relevant that students are seduced into learning more, just like Sherman Alexie does with his books and his humor.

(Left: photo by Oscar Avellaneda. Right: photo I took of my newcomers reading group in 2005)

Now that I am teaching again (math in an afterschool program & substitute teaching for the Anchorage School District), I am compelled to put words to paper. Teaching is inherently difficult and if we are at all self-reflective, teaching requires of us that we grapple with questions about how best to educate. Here are the questions that have come up for me lately:

How do we marry the need for creative, holistic and culturally-relevant education with the careful, structured and measured approach that seems to help move underprivileged kids forward in school? That is, how do we create forms of education that promote and reward creativity, that encourage children’s curiosity and love for learning, that are holistic and open to the different ways that children learn, that incorporate the best of the “open optional” kind of education I was blessed to receive, and that do this not just for the overwhelmingly white and upper class population of open optional magnet, charter, or private schools? How do we close the achievement gap between kids of color and white kids, between poor kids and rich kids, BOTH using the careful and structured approach of measurement, goal-setting, and data-driven instruction that studies show to be effective AND not leaving the holistic and creative approach behind?

At least in my own short life as an educator, it seems that sometimes in the effort to bring kids up to grade level and achieve educational equity, we are so focused on the core academic areas and on measurable achievements in those areas that we tend to push art, dance, P.E., music, sometimes science, and the open exploratory wonder of learning off to the side.  We are so focused trying to motivate kids to bring up their scores or graduate, that we frame education as a means to an end and may not encourage them to get immersed in the fun process of learning.  Lastly, we may be so (rightly) concerned with educational equity that we feel all underprivileged youth should have the opportunity to go to college and therefore need to excel in all academic areas, and in doing so we may miss that genius dancer or painter or singer in our classroom, or we may be pushing them to behave better and do their math when they should be in art school instead…On the flip side, of course, more underprivileged kids who have been in underfunded and racist systems may only believe that they can dance and may not have ever discovered their inner mathematician, and we must give them the chance to do so.

This conflict has come up recently with a student in the after-school program who attends a private alternative school and who is very far behind in math. I tested the kids in my best effort to do data-driven instruction and have the kids use scores and standards to set goals for themselves. But for this little girl, seeing her score crushed her and pissed off her mom. Her mother told me, “We don’t believe in putting kids into pegs and levels and scores.” And in a way, I agree with her. Learning should be fun and kids shouldn’t be overly burdened with scores and judgments. But the girl needs to know how to identify fractions, read a clock, divide, etc., and I needed to identify those areas so we could work on them.  Yet I felt terrible telling the girl a score that made her feel like a failure. I don’t believe in that. I am conflicted on this still.

This question also came up when substitute teaching for a 3^rd grade class. There was one boy with extreme and violent behavior difficulties who, I discovered, loved to draw. After a lesson on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, I had the kids do the silly worksheet that the teacher left behind (ugh, there is WAY too much worksheet teaching going on) and then told them they could write or draw about it in their journals. This kid with the behavior problems drew a great picture. I gave him some ideas for how to make it more detailed and he did, and so here was this fantastic visual demonstration of what he had learned about segregation, Rosa Parks, etc. As a teacher, I knew I had to catch the kid being good at things, so I praised the drawing and put it on the board. When the teacher came in at the end of the day, I proudly showed her the drawing and she said, “Oh, he knows he’s not allowed to draw in my class. But I know what it’s like to be a substitute and sometimes you have to do whatever it takes.” I told her, in the friendliest voice I could muster, that I actually think drawing is a good way to integrate information, particularly for visual learners.

I was fuming.

Yes, the kid has to learn to write, but we also have to have an educational system that approaches writing through the strengths that kids have.  And sometimes art is the only thing keeping kids in school! (A great example is that my love, Oscar, excelled in photography class in high school and actually ended up teaching the class; this was what kept him attached to a school system that was otherwise not built for the way he learns. It encouraged him and kept him going.)

In the after-school program, I have enough control to experiment with fun, holistic, real-life learning and data-driven instruction. I tried back when I had my own third grade classroom too, largely scrapping the scripted curriculums and using CELL and ExCELL practices and culturally-relevant examples. I have yet to find that balance between the education I grew up with and the Teach For America-move-kids-1.5 grade-levels-or-more approach in which I was trained. Since I am not a full-time educator, I imagine I will not have time to develop that balance.

I think what this foray back into education is helping me figure out is how I want to combine my love for community based participatory research and social services with schools and education. I have a long and exciting journey ahead to do this and look forward to insight from others on how.