Black Ants and Buddhists: Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in The Primary Grades.

BLACK ANTS AND BUDDHISTS: THINKING CRITICALLY AND TEACHING DIFFERENTLY IN THE PRIMARY GRADES.

By Mary Cowhey. Stenhouse Publishers, 2006

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) dictates what happens in schools by threatening to close them or deny them funding. Organizations such as EdTrust provide consultants who tell teachers how and what to teach. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awards millions of dollars in grants to school districts willing to model themselves according to that foundation's vision. These so-called experts have managed to colonize much of our educational space. They offer simple answers to complex questions about learning, along with pat formulas promising learning for all. Mary Cowhey's book Black Ants and Buddhists works against the myth that the endeavor of meaningful teaching can be accomplished by following a step-by-step manual. Rather than a script to follow, Cowhey's book often primary teachers the possibility of developing an effective social justice curriculum that starts with children's questions and relies on teachers teaching into those questions.

Black Ants and Buddhists opens with a story of children discovering black ants in their classroom. Several children proceed to crush the ants while a few others are horrified. In this stressful but intriguing moment, Cowhey had myriad options for responding to the ant problem. She decided that the correct response was to nurture questions about the ants, to search for multiple answers to those questions, and in negotiate with her students about what to do about the problem. Most of the students eventually come to decide that they shouldn't kill the ants, but the questions and conversations that lead to this decision are invaluable because they highlight young learners in a process of critical inquiry and collective problem solving that engenders social responsibility.

In the chapter, "It Takes a Village to Teach First Grade," Cowhey uses community resources to respond to her students' questions. After learning about the recovery of the Nashua River in New Hampshire, Cowhey's students are curious about the pollution in their own river. They arrive at the obvious question: Where do the poops go? Instead of deeming this question inappropriate, responding with a simplified answer about water treatment, or pretending to know exactly where the poops go, Cowhey admitted to her students that she didn't understand enough about sewage and rivers. She confesses, "I was in way over my head. It was time to say, 'I don't really know, but how can we find out?'" (71) By owning up to the limits of her own knowledge (one of the most radical things teachers of young learners can do), Cowhey fosters curiosity in her classroom and, ultimately, empowers her students to discover and construct their own understanding of where it is the waste goes, on whose order it goes there, and who benefits from the designated waste route. Here Cowhey demonstrates two important points: 1) "learning through activism is powerful because the need to use vital academic skills for social justice motivates their [her students'] acquisition" (103) and 2) if we allow them to, first and second graders will develop sophisticated questions that can drive meaningful curriculum. In Cowhey's classroom, the students' question led to visits from expert speakers and student written requests for information, plus reading books about sewage and rivers, visiting the mayor, and learning relevant vocabulary.

Cowhey's book also cautions us to remember, however, that the work of building relevant curriculum out of children's questions is difficult and will not result in meaningful learning for students without a foundation of purposeful routines. Because children need the security of routines so that they can focus on taking risks with their thinking, Cowhey devotes an entire chapter to describing the routines that make her generative and spontaneous teaching style possible. In this chapter, she relates an anecdote about trying to teach math while milkweed seeds billowed around her classroom like fairies. Following the children's lead to the milkweed fairies, Cowhey postponed her math lesson and opted to teach science, writing, art, and observation (not to mention joy). She explains that she was able to switch gears because her students already knew the basic skills of group study: "We know how to line up and leave the classroom and stay together outside. We know how to sit under a shade tree and have a discussion.... We know how to use draft notebooks. We know, at least roughly, how to write scientific observations and poems."(39)

Experienced social justice educators may find themselves skimming through the sections of Black Ants and Buddhists that describe Cowhey's classroom. But teachers who have not experienced a classroom where students' questions drive curriculum will value the practical details of the classroom portraits that Cowhey creates, including the vocabulary charts that support second and first language learners in entering the conversation on equal footing, the captioned drawings that children use to demonstrate their questions of evolving sophistication, the picture books and poems that help young learners engage with their own big ideas. For this reason, Black Ants and Buddhists would be ideal for use in pre-service teacher education programs.

The critical teaching that Cowhey advocates in Black Ants and Buddhists is part of a learning process that values process over product and classrooms that question rather than support the status quo. This teaching does not lead to the instant or standardized results that bolster the corporations shaping education institutions today: It does lead to meaningful learning for students--learning that is built on their interests and inquiries. This is important and dangerous work because teaching young people how to ask questions and honoring those questions goes beyond the classroom, guiding them to also question the status quo and preparing them to negotiate the conflicts inherent to being an engaged citizen of the world. Through her book, Mary Cowhey offers herself as an ally to others doing this dangerous work. She encourages her students to ask, "Where could we look? Who would know more about this?" (70). When I need to know about critical teaching with young learners, I will look to Mary Cowhey.

REVIEWED BY KATHERINE JOHNSON