Ten-year-olds tackle ‘The Lie’ of demeaning stereotypes in video

Video source:  Washington Post

Albert Schweitzer (I believe it was in the "Teaching of Reverence for Life") wrote that we do harm to children -- and to our world -- when we encourage them to "grow out of" their natural early idealism.  When I circulated this video made by children speaking up against hate, Pansy Gee, recently retired teacher of 10-year-olds, sent this spontaneously eloquent and hopeful response:

I am pleasantly not surprised by the kids' reactions.  For the most part, kids are open- minded, blind to skin color, tolerant, and much more loving of their fellow man than adults.     The indignant reactions of children, when confronted with issues of prejudice or stereotypes is the one of the truest forms of social justice and  hope for the future.  It is when the adults in their lives deem that children are "old enough" to be "taught" about the "real world" that they begin to conform to their parents' world.  It is why I chose most of the books I did.  I wanted to open those lines of communication.  Sometimes I was not well liked by the parents. 

Reading those books about the prejudices of post-civil war times in Mildred Taylor's Friendship, the way the Okies were treated in California as depicted in the Cobblestone Magazine, or issues of personal freedom in The Giver and the discussions that ensued are what I miss about the classroom.  I am not just another adult voice that perhaps the kids would listen to.  I hope I am encouraging open minds, blindness to skin color, tolerance and love (or at least respect) for all. If children learned to read, write and talk skillfully and understand that we don't all have to agree on everything, their community, our world would be a bit more sane.  I hope teachers see the importance of reading REAL texts about REAL issues and give the boys and girls the opportunity to not just know the material, but to wrestle with it.  It's good to let them think through and struggle with the problems of their world. Teachers should give them chances to form opinions and to stand on the knowledge they're learning as support. Every teacher should have a classroom community where ideas are encouraged and can be exchanged safely, where minds can change more than once and no matter what-- as a class we care about each other! 

COLONIZING BY TEXTBOOK, Part 1

What my students saw in a Spanish class

Tejano Monument, Austin, TX
Image source:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8069642490

Two students burst into my course on the American High School, angry to the point of tears, theirs the anger of righteous indignation.   Forget the syllabus and the assigned lesson: we had to hear their story.

These two Rice students had observed earlier that day in classrooms at one of the city’s predominantly Latino high schools:  95% Latino, some recently immigrated, most long-time Texans.   The subject of their fury:  a Spanish I textbook.  The kind that goes chapter by chapter introducing grammar rules, verb conjugations, and vocabulary. The interesting stuff is found in those sidebars,-- you know the ones that are in color and talk about the countries and cultures where this new language is spoken. 

My students were almost shouting, “It keeps saying ‘they’!”  “’They’ eat this, ‘they’ wear that….it keeps saying ‘they’!”

Seated in a Spanish class among Mexican American students, my Anglo students were shocked to find that these “cultural” sidebars described Spanish-speakers as an exotic “other.”  The “they” were all native speakers of Spanish wearing rebozos and singing Mariachi; “they all” eat tacos and enchiladas, with corn as the staple in their diet.

The “they” assumed the book – and the class – would be exclusively for non-Spanish speakers.

The problem of “othering” non-Anglo students is larger than the book: the district had vetoed several principals’ attempts to add Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers to their course offerings. Those courses in Spanish and Latin American literature, in advanced composition and conversation, were seen as electives “we can’t afford”  despite a Latino majority in the district’s student population. Thus students who were fluent in Spanish were having to sit through Spanish 1 and 2 to get “foreign language” credits on their transcript.

My students were very upset at what they came to see a form of cultural colonizing in the selection of the book. Even more upsetting was the silence about those “cultural” sidebars: the teacher did not mention them, nor did the students speak up against  this objectification of themselves and their families and their language.   Angela Valenzuela’s path-breaking book Subtractive Schooling:  US-Mexican Youth would suggest that by high school these students had probably absorbed this colonizing, this culturally subtractive curriculum, as normal, as the way we do school.  My students, preparing to be teachers, wanted assurance that this othering is not normal, will not be inevitable. They wanted to learn ways to teach respectfully, drawing on what students bring to class. They aspired to amass culturally rich and authentic instructional materials and, most important, they wanted to not hurt their students. And they wanted to work in schools that supported that vision and made it, not subtractive schooling, the norm.

That old textbook is not likely to still be bouncing around in our city’s high schools. But the colonizing continues and in very dangerous ways.

The newest instrument of colonizing is a proposed textbook that is as startling in the audacity of its racism as in the utter falseness of its content.  Whether as a cynical backlash against the hard-fought victory for Mexican American Studies courses to be approved by the State Board of Education in Texas or as a brash and opportunistic commercial venture, “Mexican American Heritage” produced by uninformed Anglo writers and a conservative former member of the state board of education – does far more damage than those references to a “they,” to the “them” in those Spanish I textbooks that so upset my students.  The "Mexican American Heritage" book didn't sit well with the State Board of Education committee that reviewed it, either:

"Jamie Riddle and Valarie Angle failed to meet the professional standards and guiding principles for the preparation of a textbook worthy of our teachers and youth in Texas classrooms. They failed to engage in critical dialogue with current scholarship and, as a consequence, presented a prolific misrepresentation of facts. This means that the proposed textbook is really a polemic attempting to masquerade as a textbook."

You can learn more about this book here.  Its errors and racist messages are documented by scholars and activists, as well as journalists. It does not take historians to know that a book that calls Mexicans “lazy” is toxic, racist, and frankly ridiculous.

But this racist text is not being met with silence.   Critiques have emerged from historians, activists, community groups, and most important from the state’s Mexican American community – the “we” of this story.

And this book can be stopped.  In fact, the book has catalyzed a movement.  When the State Board of Education meets later this month to vote on this book, the opposition will be organized, vocal and most of all, present.  Add your voice to opposition to having this fake history book in our schools.  See my next post for ways you can speak up against colonizing the Mexican American children of Texas. 

To register your thoughts on this book or share experiences with other ways our schools and our instructional materials may be colonizing our kids, click on the word “comments” below.

BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 5

Into the Beautiful North: Nayeli’s Magnificent Border Story

The Jaguar’s Children, the brilliantly written novel by John Vaillant, tells of the harrowing journey of two young men who, for every different reasons, put their lives in the hands (and sealed up water tanker truck) of ruthless coyotes to make their way from Oaxaca and Mexico DF to “the North.”  Hector’s mother wants him to stay, but his father urges him to go –for reasons hidden in the father’s past and hoped for in the son’s future. César is on the run for a more urgent reason.  Their suspenseful saga calls forth the powers of the ancient symbol of the jaguar, sees strange new claims on their people’s life source: corn, and holds out the promise of a bright new future for smart young men who made it to university.   

Theirs is a tale of men, strong and able and intelligent and educated young men, leaving for El Norte.  Into the Beautiful North shows what remains of life – of family life and community life --in the villages where all the men – all but the very oldest – have left to cross the border in the collapse of their local economy.  Into the Beautiful North, by the poet, novelist and journalist Luis Alberto Urrea, is a laugh-out-loud picaresque novel about one such village, the absence of men, and a young woman who decides to do something about it. 

Nayeli, a 19-year-old former high school soccer star and server at La Mano Caída, “The Fallen Hand” taco stand.  She despairs that her father has gone north to “Los Yunaites,” as have all the eligible young men of her generation. Her village, Tres Camarones (Three Shrimp), is dying and she is dying of boredom from watching the town’s only movie, The Magnificent Seven.

The movie inspires her quixotic quest:  she will go to the North to round up her own “magnificent seven” men to move back to re-build, and re-populate, her village.  And she’ll find and bring home her father, who years ago quit coming back. 

The novel could be paired with Huckleberry Finn in their journey motif (his escape on a river, hers a river crossing), their picaresque and episodic structure, and the merging of social commentary into the adventures and mishaps and unforgettable people they meet at each new place.  Just as Huck Finn sees right through the piety of the “respectable” people, Nayeli and her side-kicks (yes, some colorful friends come along) learn that the most generous people are the family they encounter living on the Tijuana garbage dumps.   The book is full of contemporary cultural references high school students will recognize (Kanye West, Sabado Gigante, internet).  And, yes, political realities:  the Border Patrol and, by inference, NAFTA:  “Twenty pesos! You couldn’t even afford corn tortillas anymore on twenty pesos.  The Americans were buying up all the maize for fuel and none of the rancheros could afford to use it for food.”

Into the Beautiful North gives voice and unforgettable personality to the ones “left behind” in Mexico and, even more important, in delightfully painful and funny and startling clarity, the story holds a mirror up to taken-for-granted luxuries (electricity, elevators, “small cartons with mushrooms piled inside like snowballs and vegetable bins [that] periodically sang ‘Singin’ in the Rain’” when the sprinklers sprayed the produce”).  And it holds a mirror up to the absurdities that a single line of political geography can make in who has and who needs, who leaves and who stays.  The book provides great fun (and no small amount of poignancy) when Nayeli declares, “We didn’t come here to get boyfriends! We’re on a mission! …. We came to save Tres Camarones!”

BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 4

THE POWER OF STORY:  The Jaguar’s Children

We hear too much about “building walls” and “improving border security” and not enough about the walls of privilege and power that make the risks of leaving home the lesser of dangers.   Behind the stats on “illegal aliens” are the alienating conditions of poverty, violence, and powerlessness that seem more the stuff of movies or social science data than of real lives.  That’s where we need stories.

Those of us who live in states that border Mexico hear the stories from our immigrant friends and neighbors who have crossed borders from El Salvador and Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico, to build their lives here in Houston, the most diverse city in the US.   We know the mom who hovered in the bathtub with her babies while insurgents and government goon squads left the street in front of her home in El Salvador strewn with the bodies of her neighbors. We know the auto mechanic who had to flee his country when warring factions began raiding central garages to commandeer trucks, his workplace likely their next target.   A friend now with a leading hotel chain who as a middle schooler served as his family’s translator at his little sister’s parent-teacher conferences and at their negotiations to buy their first house.    In Houston, when we hear “border,” we hear our neighbors and their stories.

But even if you don’t have the advantage of living near the US-Mexico border, you can bring your students into this dynamic space thanks to wonderful authors I’ve been discovering and sharing with everyone I meet for the way their unforgettable characters and the power of their prose to pull us into new understandings of “border.”

One of my latest finds is John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children, a book I’ll probably re-read this summer just for the writing. The first time through I was holding my breath wanting the mystery to be solved, our narrator to be rescued – wanting everything to turn out all right.  A happy ending for Hector was far from assured: he and friend César are sealed up in a water tank truck that is to take them to a warehouse across the border where a metal worker will free them and a dozen others who have paid extra for this vehicle guaranteed to fool la migra.

The perils of heat, cruel and untrustworthy coyotes, and fear of discovery by la migra set the tone for a predictable story of the dangers of border crossing.   But nothing in this story is predictable:  why do Hector and César want so desperately to cross to el norte?  why is the ancient symbol of the jaguar a recurring motif linking Hector to his abuelos, his home lands, his destiny?  and how did GMO’s get into a story about ruthless coyotes and the Arizona dessert?

And what about that cell phone?  How many “bars” does Hector need to be heard?  Your students will immediately relate to the frustration of dropped calls and messages that don’t get through.    “Structure” and “voice” as literary devices become familiar – and credible transports into this suspenseful tale.

Linda  Christensen, teacher and author of the “border” curricula in Rethinking Schools’ The Line Between Us, explains building lessons “that teach literary skills embedded in larger world issues.”    The Jaguar’s Children could be a study in the use of water, and water imagery, as the motif linking expectations for the journey: each person’s litre of water for what is planned as a brief trip,  a capful of water as temptation – a choice between survival or betrayal, the irony of being trapped in a water tanker truck fearing thirst as your death, Hector’s dreams of water and watermelons and water spirits and his abuelo and the corn.

Yes, the corn!  Sacred to the ancient peoples of Oaxaca, tempting to corporate profiteers.  César is not a day laborer hoping for work in the fields al norte.  We learn he is a scientist, a scientist on the run from the federales – there must be a new Willie Nelson song here somewhere.  Your students can compose the corrida!

Get to your nearest library or independent bookstore and grab a copy of The Jaguar’s Children, then email your school’s librarian to order the copies that will take your students into the convergence of “border” forces ancient and new, personal and political, communal and corporate.

See upcoming posts for more titles you and your students will want to read together.

BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

Honoring Families and their Funds of Knowledge

The visit to Houston this spring by a Danish educator coincided with dramatic news of refugees, campaign threats by a US presidential candidate to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it,” and debates in the Danish parliament to about whether Denmark would confiscate the personal possessions of Syrian (and other) refugees wanting to settle in their country.   I wanted Professor John B.Kresjler of  Aarhus University to see classrooms where teachers do not see children as “the other,” even if those children and their families come from far away.  Especially if they are “not from here.”

So of course our first stop was the Gabriela Mistral pre-K center in southwest Houston where two amazing teachers have created a rich language laboratory where very young children learn English in a nurturing environment where their own language – and their family’s story – are treasured assets to learning.

The Oral and Written Language Lab is a collaboration between Rice University  (Rice “Owls”!) and the Houston Independent School District, a next step in the Classroom Storytelling work of Rice’s School Literacy and Culture Project.

In a district where 62% of the children are Hispanic and a large percentage of those are themselves immigrants or the children or immigrants (from all over the world), the pre-K years are the perfect time to excite children about learning and about the power of words.

The Mistral OWL Lab is in no way “subtractive.”   Instead, classroom teacher Lori Espinoza and her Rice colleague Debra Paz, team up to make the classroom as inviting to parents as it is to the children.   From the first day of school, Lori and Debbie invite parents to write a note to their children telling them their aspirations for them, notes posted with a photo of the child and family and kept all year. A classroom map pinpoints the home country of each family.   The parents are the acknowledged experts on their children and on their family’s hopes for that child. The OWL lab embodies these teachers’ deep knowledge of research on language learning and on children’s development in spirited, well-crafted and enormously fun activities.

I was thrilled to bring Professor Krejsler to meet these amazing teachers, see the children’s enthusiasm for play and books and story.   He already knew of our state’s disastrously inadequate and inequitable funding of schools; he was well-acquainted with Houston’s role in exporting the standardization of schooling beyond its borders in the No Child Left Behind Legislation.   I wanted him to know that every day there are classrooms where borders are being broken down and bridges are being built:  between newcomers and local families, between families and the children’s school experience, between good research and learning as children experience it, between children’s imaginations and the stuff of schooling.

I’m grateful to Lori, Debbie and their principal, Ms. Troutman, for so generously welcoming Professor Kresjler into the OWL lab. I knew they would because that’s the welcome they extend every day to the youngest children and the families that brought them to our community.   We have much to learn from the European (and other) countries who are creating new opportunities from refugees from war zones.   I hope Professor Krejsler is already sharing the story of the OWL lab with his colleagues:  evidence that even with all the hate-filled talk of walls, or maybe in response to such hostility, it is possible to teach in ways that build bridges and open the whole world to our children.

Educando Todos Nuestros Niños

Who are the children in our schools?  What does ‘diversity’ mean when we’re talking about educating children?

One person I rely on to teach me about the children, their families and their cultures – and the policies we need to give every child a powerful education, is Angela Valenzuela, whose blog consistently challenges our often limited vision for our schools and our teaching.   

A recent post on her blog, Educational Equity, Policy and Politics in Texas, shows the need to look behind the official “diversity” categories if we want to understand our students, their families and the ways they experience school.  Most recently, Valenzuela highlights important findings on the languages spoken by people in our country officially designated as “Hispanic.”  “English Proficiency on the Rise Among Latinos,” a report by the Pew Research Center on Hispanic Trends, shows that even the languages we speak, and use on a daily basis, can’t be automatically assumed by typical demographic designations such as age, educational attainment, or country of birth.  


I highly recommend the full report to anyone working in our schools or setting the policies that shape them.  These are just two of the interesting findings from their analysis of 35 years of Latinos in the US:

• "As of 2013, 73% of Hispanics spoke Spanish at home, a share little changed since 1980 (75%), but down from its peak of 78% in 2000. Nonetheless, the number of Hispanics who speak Spanish at home continues to grow, as the Hispanic population continues to grow."

• "Fully 95% of foreign-born Hispanics spoke Spanish at home in 2013....But among the U.S. born, this share has declined from 67% in 1980 to 60% in 2013." 

And of course I highly recommend Angela Valenzuela’s blog, always insightful and informative.

CINCO DE MAYO, or
Imagine how many teachers we could have hired with all that money they spent building that border fence!

All across the southwestern United States, previously known as Mexico, the fifth day of May, Cinco de Mayo, inspires parades, huge spreads of Mexican foods, margaritas of course, and vague explanations of some kind of independence day.   Actually, the day is special because the "they" is now "we." Mexicans -- both recent arrivals and those with generations of family history in "el norte" -- are, along with immigrants from Central America, becoming our new majority.   These children are the children in our schools, the coming face of the nation beyond this southwest region.

Indeed, we have much to celebrate -- and much to learn.

One cause for celebration:  finally, finally some dual language Spanish-English schools in Texas. Embarrassingly late, rarely fully funded, but immediately in high demand.

Another cause for celebration:  the always informative, insightful and unabashedly challenging blog by my colleague Professor Angela Valenzuela at the University of Texas-Austin.   A reliable and timely source for policy analysis (and monitoring of the Texas legislature), and today offering a story that explains what Cinco de Mayo is and is not, along with a creative celebration of the day by a group in Arizona.

Cinco de Mayo captures in one day the ambiguities and legacies of colonization, making us ask who is being colonized today? And who (and what) are the colonizers?   Here is one story, one answer:

"Now we make you ugly, my mother said...In the mirror I watched her move the piece of charcoal across my face.  It's a nasty life, she whispered. 
It's my first memory. She held an old cracked mirror to my face.  I must have been about five years old. The crack made my face look as if it had been broken into two pieces.  The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl."

With this powerful image, novelist Jennifer Clement introduces us to the lives of girls and women in rural Mexico, tenacious in their dreams, fierce in their mutual protection, and caught in the cross-border violence of US demand and Mexico's drug cartel supply chain.   The minute I finished reading Prayers for the Stolen, I read passages a second time to hear again the voices of the girls in the Guerrero region of Mexico.  (I won't give away the name of the narrator, which completely unexpectedly evokes the British royals.)   I added it to my course syllabus and bought copies to give away.

A poetic account of courage, fear, resilience, absurdity, and hope,  and a portrait of the long shadow of colonization that carries into the lives of the youth who are our neighbors, not across an international border, but down the street and in our classrooms.

I heartily recommend you rush out to your nearest independent bookstore and grab a copy of Prayers for the Stolen -- and let me know if it raised your hopes, made you angry,  and maybe sparked your imagination for ways we can take down those border walls, celebrate a shared history and imagine a more just future.