Work is due on Saturday (2/8/20) at 1300 hours (1pm eastern time zone). Work needs to be completed according to the APA writing style. Total words for each story should be between 200-250 words.
Critically respond and answer the following questions for each of the stories in the attached document:
(a) what are the texts’ assumptions about the phenomena being discussed?
(b) What are the implications of the assumptions and/or the arguments?
(c) What is at stake in the text’s arguments for the authors and for you?
(d) Who (or what) are the authors arguing for or against?
(e) How do the authors construct and articulate their arguments?
(f) How do the texts “fit” (or not fit) in relation to your own thought and practice?
(g) What questions did you find yourself asking after doing the reading? Please do not simply summarize the readings.
CanI Write This?
By Laurel Nakanishi
Story Number 3
“Ms. Nakanishi, can I write: ‘You are like a bird?”
“Okay,” I say, “why is your mom like a bird?”
“No, no, no. You are like my alarm clock . . .”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Because my mom is always waking me up in the morning.”
“Yes,” I say, “that sounds like a great simile.”
Jamy A smiles and begins to write. *
For the last month, I have been teaching poetry to 3rd graders at Orchard Villa Elementary School in Liberty City. These classes are part of the O, Miami Poetry Festival. O, Miami’s goal is for everyone in Miami-Dade County to encounter a poem in the month of April. Mrs. Finch’s 3rd-grade class has been encountering me. It is good to be a resident poet in an elementary school. The kids are always excited to see me. I am not constrained by the demands of state testing. I don’t have to get caught up in the bureaucracy of the public school system, but I do get to work with public school kids. And thanks to the presence of the classroom teacher, I don’t need to spend so much time doing classroom management. And best of all, I get to share my passion for poetry with children. It is, pretty much, the best job ever. * From a WLRN radio broadcast: “This is my first time knowing about poetry, and it is fun. And I get to write my own poetry stories and we could talk about our family,” said Kendra Oriental, a 3rd grader.
Oriental is one of the students in the 3rd-grade class learning from poet Laurel Nakanishi. “Sometimes they’ll be like ‘Is it ok to write this?’ And I’ll say ‘Yes! Write that,’” said Nakanishi. “Because they aren’t sure if they have permission to get that creative or to write about their personal experience in that way.” Nakanishi received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in poetry from the University of Montana and is currently studying at Florida International University.
Isaiah Bell is another one of Nakanishi’s students. “When Miss Nakanishi came here I’m like, ‘Yes! We need poetry!’ Because sometimes in life you have to write yourself a poetry or someone else that needs help cheering up,” Bell said. * Isaiah sits at the back of the class smiling knowingly. He is one of the students who has taken quickly to poetry writing. Angel raises her hand. “Can I write: ‘In the evening my mom clips my toe- nails while screaming into the phone’?” Yes, yes. * I have taught poetry to children in Hawaii, Montana, Nicaragua, and now Miami. Each of these geographical locations and the children who live there, pose different dynamics and opportunities for creativity.
Out of all these places, I am least familiar with Miami. When I moved here nine months ago, I was warned to stay out of Liberty City. “You’ll get your car stolen!” a friend half-joked. When I watched the local news, Liberty City is often the background for shoots or hit-and-run car acci- dents. I walked into Orchard Villa Elementary School with these stories in mind. Sitting in the front office waiting area on my 1st day of class, a little girl stared, bemused, at me. She was too young to have learned to look away like her mother did. The adults in the office were extra friendly to me—the only White face in a school where almost everyone else is Black. Good, I thought, and I tried to be grateful for the discomfort. I am half-Japanese, but few know it from looking at me. My last name is a further mystery: “Nakaskisi?” Not exactly. We practiced pronouncing it on that 1st day of class. “Nakanishi. Nakanishi.” * Jokira is worried. “Ms. Nakanisi, I don’t know how to start.” “Okay, start with what’s around you. What do you see?” “My hand,” says Jokira. “Okay, I want you to describe your hand.” A few minutes later, Jokira is raising that hand. “Is this okay, Ms. Nakanisi?”
I read:
Poetry My hand,
brown, it can write words.
At first, they were hesitant. Even after an explanation, examples from professionals and kids, a group brainstorm and a suggested format, the students were still uncertain. “Can I write this?” They would ask. “Is this okay?” “Can I write about cat poop?” “Can I write about a square, squishy monster?” “Yes,” I would say. “That is brilliant!” “Yes yes, yes, write it.” I think that one of the reasons that my students enjoyed poetry class is because I am so positive. I love them. I love what they write. I love how they see the world. What is most important to me is that they express themselves. I want them to take risks. They still hold their papers up to me and ask, “Is this okay?” I am not sure why this class in particular was so hesitant to express them- selves. Thinking back to teaching in Montana, I remembered that those kids rarely asked, “Can I write this?” Was that because they were more comfort- able with poetry? The Missoula Writing Collaborative has been sending professional writers to public schools for the past 15 years—perhaps they are more used to poetry writing. Or is it privilege? Do these, mostly White, kids feel entitled to self-expression? Are they more confident because society tells them—these White, mostly middle-class kids—that their ideas matter? I do not know. My students in Nicaragua began by copying the examples. I would read a poem about birthday cake, and then receive 21 imitations of that same birth- day cake. It took about a month to really emphasize that they could have their own ideas. As the students became more and more comfortable, I began receiving poems about solar explosions, giant brains, and wind blowing through the windows. One of my students wrote: “When my mother sweats, it is like the rain in summer.” My students in Hawaii were the most similar to these Liberty City 3rd graders. They were uncertain how to start. They would ask permission before each poem. “Is this okay?” I wonder if this need for reassurance is somehow tied to the way that we test children. In a test there is only ever one correct answer. Students must learn how to block out all of the other ideas and connections in their mind so that they may give the right response. What is the main idea of this text? What is the definition of simile? What is the setting of the story? They must recall and present just that one correct answer. So how baffling it must be when this White lady with a strange last name walks into your classroom and tells you to write whatever you want. Any answer is correct. Any idea that you have is brilliant. I am affirmative of these students to a fault. I praise them because I want them to gain confidence in their own voice and experience. This sort of confidence is essential to writing. If you do not believe that what you have to say matters, you can never write something that will resonate with readers. I give my students permission to be weird or silly. I want them to write about the everyday details of their lives. Once they gain this confidence, then we can start working on shaping words into art. But if they are always looking for a “right answer” in their writing, it will never be a poem. * Ireanna asks, “Can I write that the stars are tickling?” * We are writing about place. I explain that I want them to describe their neighborhood, their house, their room—anywhere they feel at home. I give them examples from my students in Hawaii: “Is your street busy with herds of rusty cars? Is your home quiet as the library?
Vincent raises his hand. “My neighborhood is loud. They are always shooting guns.”
“Okay, write that in your poem,” I say. “What do the guns sound like?”
“Pah! Pah!” he says. “Last night there were these boys shooting in front of my house. They were shooting on the street and then some of them ran behind our house. We don’t have a gate, that’s why. They ran behind and went over the fence.”
Suddenly all the words in my head are gone. What can I say to that?
“They’re always shooting by my house too. I’m scared of guns,” says Katron.
I tell Vincent that his story would make a great poem—“Write it down.”
He writes:
I Am From
My city is very loud with the sound of pistols.
I smell the stink of the garbage.
At school, I see Ms. Finch and my paper.
At home, I love to eat crab.
It is so good, I’d eat it 24/7.
It is easy to pigeonhole these kids, to see them only as survivors of their vio- lent neighborhood. But, as Vincent reminds us, there are many other things going on. Yes, there are guns and stinky garbage, but there is also the struc- ture and stability of Mrs. Finch’s classroom. There are also delicious crab feasts. There are loving families and wildly fun times riding bikes and playing.
Jamy A writes:
Five Things I Love The hug of my little sister—
she is very special and beautiful.
The strawberry and vanilla ice cream
with a cherry on top that my mom and I share.
The pink diamond sheets on my bed
that sparkle so cute.
The candle burning on the dresser
flickering and casting shadows.
The basketball bouncing up and down
baug, baug, back.
I am new to Miami. I moved here nine months ago and I am still trying to figure out this city. Like every other place I have lived and visited, I am finding that it is full of complexity. These young poets are my teachers and I am learning that, unlike a test question, there is no one answer.
Miami is many different things: It is the sound of a basketball and chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven and gunfire. It is these shining, expectant faces asking “Is this okay? Read this.” Maybe, in addition to permission, my students also just want to share their poem. “Ms. Nakanishi, read mine!” They want to share their thoughts and perspective and world with me. How lucky I am to be help in such confidence.
Mrs. Finch’s 3rd-grade classroom is packed with people—parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, and teachers. One by one my students stand up and read their poems:
“I remember when I first started walking.
I was small and everything looked big . . .”
“In the middle of the night I hear my sister in the kitchen getting a night snack . . . ”
“Ms. Nakanishi’s glasses are popping just like Sienna’s hair . . . ”
“I remember when I was in a body cast. My auntie called me Mr. Broke-Down . . .”
“I hear people laughing at people who are poor because of their shoes . . .”
“Gazing up at the sky at night Stars are tickling . . .”
“My brother snoring with little tears dropping down like rain . . . ”
“Your hugs fill me up with love like a balloon and spits out all the hate”
A Roaring applause!
Breaking Silence
By: Carlos Gonzalez
Story number 4
Dear Students, I want to break the silence between us and talk to you directly. This will be a rambling piece, but one that I offer as a means to help you navigate through what is probably going to be a couple of years of more institutional education. I do this after 21 years or so of teaching in one place, of loving what I do, and hating with every fiber of my body what happens to many, if not most students, as they weave in and through the many obstacles called college. Silence and Storytelling My dad asked me to go with him to the store to pick something up. I sat in the car silently, thinking of the other things I wanted to do. I sat silently because at 18, I had no idea who my dad was or what I would ask him. I felt like a stranger to him. We had not spent much time together. Having fled Cuba with no money and little formal education, he was on a continuous survival mode, and work was priority number one. That absence early in my childhood and my own quiet personality allowed me to make good friends with silence. Yet it’s more complicated than that. It always is. As I look back at that ride now, I would do just about anything to have changed the dynamic of the situation and broken the quiet in that car. There was genuine love between my dad and me, but somehow we could not break through to one another, not at that time.
A couple of months later, toward the end of my freshman semester in college, my dad was killed in a terrible work accident. I can still recall the phone call at about 10:15 am on a clear Monday in early December 1984. I can hear my mom wailing as she came to terms with losing the man she loved. I can feel my heart turning numb, knowing that I would never get to see him walk through our front door covered in the bagasse from the sugar mill. Losing him left a gaping hole in my heart that somewhat healed (but the gaps left by our losses never quite fill in) many years later when I became a father myself. It was then as a grown man that I started to understand my dad and to realize how difficult it is to sometimes let those closest to me into the sounds and rhythms of my heart and mind. We receive from our fathers and mothers what they received from their fathers and mothers. The generational passing down of all that is good in us and the burdens we carry, leave us vulnerable to the very opportunities that call us to be our true selves. By the time my three kids reached their teens, I became aware of how hard it is to be a father and also to be a son. I saw many of the same struggles I faced manifested in my own children as they wrestled with their own voices, with their own souls, and with the challenge of relating to me. (I was not my father, but was psychically one with him.) So I entered into a fellowship of love with my children that included the gifts and flaws that make us so fully ourselves. Over the years I came to know that the people closest to us often present the strongest challenges to our own constructed worlds. Unfortunately, we often place on these struggling relationships the burden of our own happiness and well-being. We often think the false syllogism: If I only had a better relationship with. . . . then. If the struggles are as intense as mine were and are, they often distract us from the very joy and pleasure of the moment in front of us and move us away from the work of consciously walking down our own creative paths. We too often spend our time looking back and licking wounds than on taking a step forward in fulfilling what is our own song. (Have I mentioned already that life is short?) If we look carefully at these and the many sources of our own wounds, we may find that these strong challenges can become our best teachers, leading us to find life’s purpose and mission. Yet, when I look back at my own life and, in particular, my academic journey, I also know that nowhere in my schooling did I ever find an invitation to really explore these experiences, to look at these values and events with the same curiosity and rigor of a text that held important keys to my own well-being.
Schooling for Silence and Conformity
In schools, heart and mind rarely came together for me. Even when studying poetry and literature, the notion of the personal entering the realm of the academic never quite intersected. For me, being in school meant turning my own outsider status as a recent immigrant. When I started college, I had only been living 10 years in this country, and my parents were not fluent in English. My parents, although intelligent and gifted in so many areas, had little formal education. Maybe this and my own introverted personality were factors in my feeling so alienated. But the realities seem more complex and intertwined. Nevertheless, I hold the adults around me, those who attempted to teach me; the schools I attended; the whole educational enterprise responsible for a large part of my inability to break through. After 20 years of teaching, I now realize that I was never invited to share, to look into my own life story as a source of knowledge, wisdom, and guidance for what I was supposed to do with my academic efforts. I know now that this was a loss, a lost connection, but not an anomaly.
For the most part, school was a place where I studied important subjects, the ideas of important people (mostly dead white men), and never quite broke through to realize that within me, I had an important treasure trove of information that might be essential for my own survival and well-being; that reading my life was essential. What I did not have at the time were mentors that could show me how this was done; people with the courage to model the act of looking deep within, not so much for the sake of introspection for introspection’s sake, but for the purpose of freedom and liberation. It wasn’t until I left college and began teaching that I realized how the significance of allowing the personal into the academy. I remember reading the work of bell hooks and being electrified at the notion that one’s inner life needed to be accessed, honored, and shared with others in order to tap into the full experience of transformative learning experiences.
Cracks in the System
Hooks’ words were transformative for me. For the first time in my life, I read someone’s work that actually expressed what was muddled within my own mind, that “. . .any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged” (1994, p. 8). But how can everyone’s presence be acknowledged if her story or his story is not the ground and source of that space? How can we acknowledge presence, when everywhere the academy itself is all about efficiency and productivity? Everyone is a number, an object: students, teachers, administrators. The challenges of turning away from the process of transforming humans into objects are monumental. No institution where I’ve been has engaged in this process. On the contrary, from the start of my educational experience, I was encouraged to cut out the personal and embrace the objective voice of the academy. The process for most starts in kindergarten, and by the time we finish college, most people have thoroughly been indoctrinated to believe that one’s personal life belongs deep within, and that if one is to be professional, the personal has to be cut out and left out. If we look carefully at the process of excluding the personal, for a society like ours to demand efficiency and maximizing profits would make total sense. With those goals, our educational journey must be built on a foundation of de-personalization. We can’t possibly honor the quirkiness of the individual; more significantly, we can’t possibly let young people believe that their lives, their stories are the source of wisdom and guidance because if we do, how could we control them? Acknowledging their individuality, their power to resist, their self-assertions, their digging for their lived truths clogs the wheels of efficiency.
The funding for schools is not set up for individual meanderings. When we look closely, we see a factory model where everyone who comes through the doors of an institution of higher learning is expected to come out shaped and marked, “ready to consume,” and “ready to support production,” a model that has served some people really well, while leaving millions without the ability to support even basic needs.1 I can still recall President Bush’s injunction two weeks after the 911 Attacks: “Go down to Disney World!” (CNN, 2004).
And although computer technology has exploded in the past 20 years, the tools created have moved us no closer to a personalized approach to learning. Schools buy the latest hardware and implement the most recent soft- ware, but the educational model is fundamentally unchanged. We continue to have for the most part what the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, (1996) called a banking model, one where students are seen as passive repositories where knowledge is deposited by those in control. Instead of creating a new paradigm where we can relate to one another in human-sized relationships, we create larger, so-called more productive classrooms and tout them as the next best thing that will save ourselves from irrelevance. We initiate online courses that enroll hundreds at a time. We design online degrees where one never has to meet another person. We have developed online K-12 state certifications, where a child for 12 years never has to see an instructor nor another student. We have prostituted education to support cooperate greed.
Yet, all is not lost and all is not terrible. The fact that I can look back and see the deficiencies of my student experience, and understand as a teacher how caught we are in a system, that by its nature de-spirits rather than inspires, means that there are gaps within that monolithic system. Crevices can open where we connect with others and raise our voices, read and write our stories, and learn from our experiences. Part of the challenge that we face is finding that wiggle room within our places of learning or employment, and do the kind of work that is invisible to most, unrewarded, and, sometimes, misconstrued—and may I say, dangerous.
Bad Advice
The greatest danger, however, is not from anything or anyone outside of our- selves. It is from within. There’s no guarantee where the process of self- exploration will take us and how much it will move us away from the beaten paths expected of us by those who genuinely love us and those who don’t. Both groups have very little sense of what is really going on within because they are operating in a world where those personal stories, desires, urgings, and callings are ignored or silenced. Lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” (Oliver, 1986) capture this dilemma: One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles (p. 38). The bad advice is not always intended to be so. It sometimes comes from the best hearts and intentions. Everything that I have said here about schools and classrooms, though, is not meant as a condemnation of those who are in education. We are all caught one way or another in a very powerful web that wants us to stay asleep. It is a web that refuses credence to the voice within that is whispering sweet pleasure, love, and liberation. That web refuses any promise to trans- form our path ahead. But as Mary Oliver says in her poem, one day we finally know what we have to do. Walk away. Step outside. The house is trembling.
References
Bush, G. W. (2004). Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families . . . Retrieved May 11, 2013 from CNN.com Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2nd ed. CA: Penguin Group. hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. p. 8. Oliver, M. (1986). Dream Work. Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press. p. 38. U.S. Census Bureau (2014). Poverty. Retrieved March 15, 2015 from http:// www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/