The Children are Watching

Image Source:  http://pix11.com/2017/09/11/artist-creates-giant-photo-of-toddler-looking-over-u-s-mexico-border-wall/

A child, wide-eyed, peers over a wall. 

He does not know barriers. He know curiosity, questions, possibilities.  

Who has power?  The builders of tall, menacing columns of steel lined up as far as the eye can see?  The fear shouters?   The definers of out and in, us and them, friend and foe?

Or the child whose mind leaps over the barricades of exclusion.  The child who can’t help exploring beyond what he can see.  The child who reminds us that our actions--and, even more, our failures to act--are being watched.  The child who must wonder if this wall of steel will always form the backdrop of his life.

The artist JR brilliantly and imaginatively takes us to the border and, through this beautiful child, takes down the wall.  I could not be more grateful for his creative vision, his kindness and humor, and his courage in shattering the silliest – and scariest – monuments to fear.   And I am grateful to the mom and little boy who, living in the shadow of oppressive (and insulting) barriers, bring grace to the border.  

Imagine a Secretary of Education for America’s Schools

Source:  http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/static/photo/1x/Imagine-Dream-Teaching-Inspire-Classroom-1182585.jpg

When the President of the United States appoints a Secretary of Education who openly, vocally, and financially works to destroy the public’s schools, we can sigh and hope to outlive her time in office, giving what support we can to the teachers we know and the schools that serve our communities.  Or we can declare the experiment in democratic education over (as some have already done), and shed tears for what this generation of children will miss and what our country will lack when their schools are closed and they, and their friends, are outsourced to private “education management companies” called “charter schools.”

Or, we can heed Maxine Greene’s admonition to foster in each other a social imagination – the imagination to envision a more just society, a creative public spirit, and a collective sense of urgency to make democracy work for everyone.  For Greene, an esteemed professor at Teachers College and a tireless advocate for educating through the creative arts, a social imagination was not idle musing or wishing what might have been.  An informed social imagination leads to action for justice.

Source:  https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7286/27345059694_5b19ae9dfb_b.jpg

I invited readers to imagine along with me what it would mean if we had a Secretary of Education for America’s children:  a cabinet member who understands the gravity of being the voice of the children –all our children – at the highest levels of government, and who acts accordingly.   Now we need to imagine what a Secretary of Education would do in her first months in office if she understood, cared about, and used her power to advocate for the public’s schools.

Again, cue up John Lennon’s “Imagine” or maybe “What a WonderfulWorld.”  And let’s imagine together…..

Imagine a Secretary of Education who understands that an investment in America’s infrastructure absolutely must include making sure that every public school, in every neighborhood, is built as an engaging learning environment and an asset to its community. That secretary would call in the Secretary of Labor to remind him that building good schools, and renovating older ones, is a great for job creation – for the workers immediately employed and for economies that that powerful learning will generate in the schools they build.  Our imagined Secretary would enlist the Secretary of Health and Human Services and colleagues NIH and the CDC and EPA for their expertise in assuring the building materials are built with children’s health in mind, safety from toxic chemicals, with clean air and water a given.  She’d of course call on the expertise of the Department of Energy and the professional organizations of school architects for specs on energy efficiency and renewable systems throughout, to model for the children a reverence for nature’s resources as well as to reduce expenses.

Imagine a Secretary of Education who tells the Congress and the President and infrastructure designers to get ready to build, but not until she has consulted with teachers and parents about what they want their school buildings to be.  Lively learning centers, yes.    Abundantly equipped, yes – even in the poorest neighborhoods, the most remote rural counties.    And inviting to all – a place where teachers want to teach, children are excited to spend their days, parents and neighbors know they are welcome to visit and volunteer.   Well acquainted with the amenities in private schools, the Secretary will already know that teachers need offices and conference rooms for study and lesson prep and collaborating across disciplines; teachers won’t have to ask for those basics. But teachers will want to weigh in on things this particular Secretary of Education may not think of – a community clinic with mental health services as well as basic family medicine, spaces for parents to meet, a community liaison who knows well the families’ languages, needs, assets and network of referral services throughout the community.

Imagine a Secretary of Education who understands that learning involves all the senses.   She might take a literal walk in the park to confer with the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the Secretary of the Interior as well as the leaders of Nature Conservancy and various urban park systems to ask how they could work together to make sure every American child has places to play outside. She would have read Last Child in the Woods on the plane in from Michigan and arrived fired up to get America’s kids outdoors, exploring, discovering, skinning their knees and – the radical part – getting to play!

I’m beginning to like this imagined Secretary of Education.  Though I doubt she’ll materialize on her own. It will take a village – a very large and energized village and its teachers – to “raise” her.  In a future post, we’ll imagine what she might learn from America’s teachers – if she did decide to become the Secretary of Education for all of America’s children and all of the public’s schools.

Add your imaginings to mind in the Comments section here:

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 6
SIGNS AND STORIES

“Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound:  if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving?  It’s not another way of saying things:  these are new things.” 

Makina, in Signs

How do we learn the new things we need to live with each other in a world of increasingly harsh divisions, of rigidifying claims of “us” and “other,” of rising barriers physical and metaphorical?

I find power – if not always answers – in story.  And for this series on teaching the US border with Mexico as more than a line, as more than a contested territory or symbolic conflict zone, I can recommend no more compelling story than this new novel by Yuri Herrera:  Signs Preceding the End of the World.

Signs is a slim book, almost minimalist. Yet even the most spare sentence is, as one critic said, both “poetic and defamiliarizing.” Makina, a young Mexican woman, journeys north to carry two messages:  one from her mother to her brother who has preceded her in crossing the border and one from a character almost mythically representative of violence and shadows and unanswered questions.

I just discovered this book (thank goodness for Brazos, our neighborhood independent bookstore!) and got lost in the poetry of the words, the perils of unknowns, the insights of this courageous and perceptive young woman.  I’m planning to re-read it this summer just for the beauty of it. And I want to see how I might use it with my students who are preparing to teach in our urban schools, schools where many of the students will know a Makina or who will see something of their family’s story in hers.   

Teach this book in your US history class, your world studies or cultures courses, your literature classes in English or in Spanish (how interesting it would be for students to compare this masterful translation with the original Spanish), or save it for your teacher book group.  As Makina notes how even slight shifts in word choice can say “new things,” Herrera gives us fire, gives us light, shows us new things we could not have known without Signs.

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.

Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas: Border Air Quality Education - Curriculum

REPOSTED FROM ANGELA VALENZUELA'S BLOG

In my last two posts, I celebrated the lives and work of Grace Lee Boggs and Dolores Huerta -- not just as strong, tireless women who are inspirations in themselves, but for what they have taught us about justice:  it has to be worked for, that work takes sustained organizing to built collective strength, and it must begin where we live. And for us as educators and parents that means where the children live.

The old ASARCO "chimney"  that towered over the El Paso/Juarez landscape has been demolished, so it might be easy to forget that the toxins it spewed for decades still poison the air, water, soil and lungs of El Paso and Juarez.  How thrilling that this new curriculum out of UTEP not only assure that that toxic legacy won't be forgotten, but empower children and their teachers to learn the science and the activism needed to create a healthier future for their communities.  

I am grateful to Angela Valenzuela for bringing to our attention this very clear example of a Si Se Puede vision of educating our children!   (And yes, the curriculum is in both Spanish and English!)  A long and detailed post, with many helpful links; I include it in its entirety for its elegance and completeness and for its power to inspire the curriculum you need in your community to address the barriers to social and environmental justice.