Developing Teachers for Social Justice.

Over one quarter of the public school teachers in the United States will be retiring in the next decade. This can provide a great opportunity for the development of energized young teachers who, as future leaders, might revitalize public education and redefine progressive education according to current needs and struggles. However, it can also be an opportunity to mold a new teaching profession that only knows increasingly parsed standards, high stakes testing, a rigidly structured Euro-centric curriculum, English-only learning, and a highly controlled punitive banking system education.

In California, the State Board of Education is aware of this condition and has consciously chosen to follow the latter option. Through directives, legislation, and the redefinition of teacher credential programs, the very words "bilingual education" will be formally eliminated from the vocabulary of schooling in California, replaced by "English language learning." Bilingual classes will abandon the use of first language teaching and students will be taught and tested in English only. Phonics is already the religion of the early grades, and multiculturalism is back in its place as holiday celebration time. There will be no more bilingual education credentials (called BCLAD credentials) and teacher education students will be subject to high stakes tests on phonics, English Language Learning, lists of standards, and even rigid forms of classroom management. The legislation of life in the classroom is being shaped by the makeover of teachers. The border between teaching students and testing is becoming increasing ly unclear and the performance gap is increasing. Many people already teaching are demoralized. In addition, there is an assault on the very enterprise of public education emanating from the Far Right. The "Small Schools" movement, a ray of hope in a slough of despond, is struggling along.

Any radical teacher education program in the State of California at this time has to consider the tension between developing critical, perceptive, skilled, and motivated new activist teachers and the grim realities and struggles they will likely face working in poor urban public schools. When I was asked by the Dean of Education at the University of San Francisco to develop and direct a new teacher education program, these realities were clear to me. It made sense to develop a program that was focused explicitly on issues of social justice as they relate to life in the school. This implied at the least developing anti-racist curriculum, working through what can be called the problem of "teaching other people's children," and confronting the damaging aspects of high stakes testing. It also meant helping student teachers develop the concrete skills that would enable them to teach to very high standards while they developed material that respected the knowledge and experiences of the students and the school's co mmunity. And finally it implied preparing, as much as possible, for them to be working against the grain and be willing to see themselves as agents of change and organizers.

Fortunately the University of San Francisco, which is a Jesuit university, has an institutional-wide commitment to infusing issues of social justice into all of its programs, and so the orientation I chose for the program was welcomed by the administration. Since I chose to be explicit about the goals of the program, it is very unlikely that any state supported institution of higher education in California would have touched it.

The Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at USF is now going into its third year. We had a cohort of twenty credential and Masters' students the first year, twenty-three the second year, and hope to have twenty-five, the program's limit for now, in the coming year. One of the goals was to develop each cohort as a learning community and a peer support group. I hoped that the students would see each other as comrades fighting similar battles, though likely in different schools. I hoped this sense of common struggle would extend beyond the students' time in the program and become a mutual support and organizing group through their teaching careers. As it turns out, this has succeeded beyond my expectations. The reason, I believe, is that it turned out unexpectedly that 90% of the students who entered the program already had from one to five years of teaching experience in Bay Area urban schools and were looking for a community of learner/teachers to support their own work. Coming into a teacher educ ation program with other students facing the same struggles they were already having in the classroom has created a strong bond among the students, one which has energized the whole program.

The development of the Center within the context of a Teacher Education Department that was initially indifferent at best (we are now, after three years, more fully and comfortably integrated) was a major challenge. I was very fortunate in being allowed to have an assistant, Mike Sahakian, who has become central to the operation of the organization and to the continual contact with students that has become characteristic of our work. It's not a one person job and more and more everyone engaged in working at the Center has been freed to do what they do best.

Initially, recruiting students was a problem, as it was agreed that the Center would not dip into the pool of students whom the University of San Francisco School of Education normally recruited into its teacher education program. In addition to that restriction, I decided to recruit students who had already manifested a commitment to social justice and provide a place for them to hone their ideas and develop practical skills that would enhance that commitment. The criteria used was not rigid, and our first group of students' involvement in issues of social justice ranged from environmental activism to youth media, community arts, and anti-racist work Others, who were already teaching, manifested their concern for social justice in the work they did in the classroom. A few of the students had studied critical theory in college with an eye towards acting for social justice. The common theme running through all of the students' applications was the desire for a more just world and a willingness to act to make i t a reality through work with children.

Finding students was my first major problem since I had no access to students who had already chosen to enter the School of Education at USF (this is no longer the case). I lost sleep and visited many schools and programs in the quest for students. In the course of one of my school visits, a third grader asked me what I was doing and I told her, "pounding the pavement for students." She asked me what I was pounding it with and I almost said "with my head."

My first student came to me from the radio. I was listening to a call-in show and one of the callers asked about teacher education programs that dealt with social justice. I called the station and left my name and the name of our program. Within a day I got a call back, held an interview and realized I had at least one student. He has just finished his credential program and is currently teaching in the San Francisco Unified School District. He is also an active member of Teachers for Change and Teachers for Social Justice.

Teach for America veterans provided a number of the other students in the programs. They were people initially recruited to teaching through Teach for America who decided to stay in teaching and struggle to reform public education after their original commitment was over. I have major reservations about Teach for America and its emphasis on teaching as social service rather than as professional commitment. However the students who entered teaching through Teach for America and applied to the Center's program had survived teaching in underserved urban schools for several years and remained committed to making public education work. I continue to recruit from this pool of people and don't worry about how they entered teaching.

Friends held house parties throughout the Bay Area for young people they knew wanted or needed teaching credentials. People who entered the program recruited their friends and colleagues, and some people who had read my work also joined in recruiting. What began as a seemingly futile quest for became organic and somewhat self-directing. What surprised me most about the first group of approximately 25 students was that with all but a few exceptions everyone was currently teaching on an emergency credential and had already completed from one to five years of public school teaching. In addition every one was committed to an integration of their concern for social justice with their desire for teaching excellence.

Now, after two and a half years, there are a number of other people who teach in the Center's program. Susan Katz is a tenured member of the USF faculty who has helped nurture the program from its inception and has become the Associate Director of the Center. She has been supervising our secondary credential students and our students have taken a number of classes with her, including Participatory Research and Bilingual Education.

Student teaching placements and supervision are done from within the Center, though our students rake some of the same classes as students from the other teacher education options at the School of Education. One class in particular is the Early Literacy class, which is well taught and focuses on phonics and other early reading methods mandated by the State of California.

However, my desire to shape the program implied that at least for the first few years I would teach as much as the University would allow and, within the guidelines of the state, be able to shape the content of these classes. The first challenges I faced were to develop a creative program that had a distinct identity while aligning itself to California standards, which in my view have become rigid and somewhat absurd. However, nothing prevented us from analyzing this absurdity and looking at ways to work within the system while working towards changing it.

The design of the classes was a challenge since the Center's students were overwhelmingly practicing teachers and had very different experiences, perceptions, concerns, and questions than students who enter education programs straight from college. In a way, they were young colleagues of mine having embarked on the same educational journey that I have been on all of my adult life. Therefore, the most important things were to marry theory and practice in all of the classes, to allow for their questions and concerns, and to build the cohort.

For the first two years the program was built around two required classes that met for two and a half hours each on consecutive days. One was formally titled "Philosophical Foundations of Education," the other "Psychology of Education." I taught these two classes back to back and tried to weave a number of themes back and forth across them, illustrating how philosophical and psychological issues related to each other and to the specific challenges of shaping teaching for social justice. One of the key texts was Nathaniel Higgin's "The Deforming Mirror of Truth," which allowed both of the classes to focus on constructing narratives and on the critical analysis of educational and philosophical theories of childhood, learning, and schooling. There was also an extensive use of the ideas of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, and Vygotsky, among others.

My orientation comes more from Myles Horton's work at the Highlander Center than it does from the work of Paulo Freire. Highlander and Myles' work is not as popularly known as Freire's. However, Highlander has been engaged in major struggles for justice in the United States since 1932, and has been a central force in the early CIO workers' democracy movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the environmental justice movement in Appalachia, and the struggle for poor people's and workers' rights.

Myles, one of the founders of Highlander, was a mentor of mine from 1977 until he died in 1990, and my wife Judy and I had the privilege of working with Myles on his autobiography The Long Haul. Central to Myles' thinking is the idea that people who have a problem own the solution to the problem. 'What I believe he meant by that is the knowledge of the specific nature of a problem, the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition and of one's own community reside within the community itself. His belief in the intelligence and ingenuity of people, no matter how they were oppressed, focused his work on the articulation and maximizing of people's strengths.

Freire's work is much more expert driven, involving people who work within communities and codify their experience for them or with them. My translation of Myles' thinking of work within schools was to emphasize listening, understanding children's ideas and thinking, and fundamentally respecting the intelligence of the students and their capacity to help you teach them.

Freire's notion of codification is also something we utilize in the program as it lends itself to visual representation, theater, and other forms of group expression. A codification is a representation of a problem within a community that can be presented to a group as a basis for critical discussion and the development of an action plan. For example, here's part of a simple codification, drawn from one of the main texts we use, Training for Transformation, by Ann Hope and Sally Timmel, which is the most detailed and useful exposition of the application of Paulo Freire's work that I have encountered:

Two people perform this playlet. One comes on with a great big grin and an open heart and mind. This actor wears traditional dress and has a false right hand hidden in the sleeve of his or her shirt. He (or she) opens her hand out to shake the hand of a second actor who comes on stage wearing European clothes. The European welcomes the handshake and then rips the hand out of the others actor's shirt and goes off smiling. A discussion of the effects of welcoming the Europeans ensues.

During the first year, in addition to Freire, Horton, and Training for Transformation, we used the work of Lisa Delpit and approached Piaget through Louise Derman-Sparks and Carol Brunson Phillips' Teaching / Learning Anti-Racism, which provides a developmental approach to the development of anti-racist programs in the classroom. In addition, we also explored Gareth Matthews's philosophy of children. The idea of centering the class this way was to introduce ideas of democratic education, critical and cultural analysis in ways that lent themselves to the transformation of the students' current classroom practice. My idea was that students would provide each other with the critical tools and the techniques of transforming ideas into teaching materials and strategies. Many of the assignments involved actually developing and testing what we were discussing in class within the students' own classrooms. Sharing the results of such work was very effective in developing ties among students in each cohort as they saw each other as creative workers working towards common goals.

To give a more specific idea of how the classes worked, the following are excerpts from the syllabus with some explanations and some of the assignments. The syllabi themselves are formatted in a traditional way as is the class schedule of the whole program. We are aligned to the California state mandated curriculum in order to achieve one of the major goals of the program: to provide students with California teaching credentials. However, within the context of a rather benign looking structure there is an enormous amount of freedom to shape the content and the structure of the program in a way that manifests its commitment to democratic education and creative pedagogy. The pedagogy is creative in that it evolves each year, but it does not adhere rigidly to any standard version of critical pedagogy, Freirean based learning, or progressive education. We utilize all of them, but are situational. That is, the program is formed with the intention of helping students understand their own creative role in drawing fr om many radical democratic traditions, their own experiences, and the voices from within the communities they serve to make an effective and excellent education for their own pupils.

INTRODUCTION TO THE IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY AS NARRATIVE

* Discussion of narrative and of alternative perceptions of events and ideas, such as the diverse views and understandings students are likely to encounter in their classrooms.

* Analyze Plato's Allegory of the Cave as an example of an attempt to create a master philosophical narrative. Read Huggins, Nathan: "The Deforming Mirror of Truth."

* Paper: Choose an event and describe it through different narrative frames examining the deformations that occur when stories are told and identified as absolute truth. Also discuss the power of narrative to confirm or deny social justice.

THE HIGHLANDER IDEA

* Topics: Myles Horton and the relationship between theory and practice in education, the philosophy of listening and learning from others, community resource mapping, learning from the students you work with and the community you work in, explicating the phenomenological and existential approach to understanding and social justice, Maxine Greene and the ontological role of authenticity and choice, the role of the teacher as philosopher and creator of educational theories, aesthetic philosophy and the role of the social imagination in learning.

* Texts: Horton, Myles with Kohl, Judith and Kohl, Herbert: The Long Haul. Greene, Maxine: Teacher as Stranger, p. 3-25, 267-302.

* Video: Bill Moyers Interview with Myles Horton and You Gotta Move: A History of the Highlander Center

* Paper: Develop a community map of a place you work in or know. Also project that map into alternative visions of organizing this community based on discussions of the social imagination.

PAULO FREIRE AND PROBLEM POSING EDUCATION

* Introduction to Freire and class discussion. Participatory activity in the development of codifications.

* Texts: Brown, Cynthia: Literacy in 30 Hours: Paulo Freire's Process in North East Brazil

* hooks, bell: Teaching to Transgress, p. 45-58.

* Hope, Anne and Timmel, Sally: Training for Trans formation.

* Kohl, Herbert: Paulo Freire: Towards the Splendid City.

* Paper: Develop a codification for the school or child related organization you work with or have worked with in the past. Develop exercises to use that codification in practice to examine and act upon a social issue in the school or in the classroom.

CHILDREN AS PHILOSOPHERS

* Topics: The Philosophical Thinking of Children, introduction and class discussion of questioning and how young people's philosophical questions can be integrated into curriculum and class discussion, the role of powerful ideas in understanding the philosophic foundations of education.

* Texts: Matthews, Gareth: Philosophy and The Young Child.

* Lippman, Matthew: Pixie.

* Wesker, Arnold: Words as Definitions of Experience.

* Paper: Describe some of the philosophical questions you raised as a child, have heard children raise or have pondered about yourself and create a dialogue about one of them. Also, develop a lesson on a philosophical issue that you can teach using significant ideas according to Wesker's model.

SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION

* Topics: An overview of the history and philosophy of education from the perspective of social justice. Discussions of the applications of philosophical ideas to the transformation of educational practice. Creation of social justice focused lessons in small groups in the class.

* Text: William Ayers, Jean Ann Hunt, Therese Quinn, eds: Teaching for Social Justice

OBSERVING CHILDREN

* Topics: Overview of the theories of growth, development, and learning we will be considering. Class discussion of Center students' current views about how children learn.

* Lecture with examples about ways of observing children when they are engaged in learning.

* Texts: Hawkins, Frances Pockman: "The Eye of the Beholder"

* Korczak, Janos: "Why Do I Clear Tables?"

* Paper: Write some reflections about how you learned to read. Try to do an imaginative recreation of the times and places and make them come alive for the reader.

SHAM, VULNERABILITY, SOCIAL ASPECTS OF LEARNING

* Topics: Examination of the way in which sociological concepts like sham, social performance, humiliation, and vulnerability can enrich classroom observation and transform classroom practice. Consider refusals to learn and resistance to learning as well as ways of overcoming them. Focus on how to write about children and learning.

* Texts: Henry, Jules: On Sham, Vulnerability and other forms of Self-Destruction.

* Kohl, Herbert: I Won't Learn from You.

* Redl, Fritz: When We Deal With Children.

* Paper: Describe how you see humiliation or conscious refusals to learn working in your class rooms or school. Be specific--do a case history.

OTHER TEACHERS

* Topics: Examine the role of culture, class, and race in human development. Consider ways teachers can observe themselves or other teachers, using strategies similar to those used for observing children. Discuss the issue of how teachers learn.

* Texts: Delpit, Lisa "Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator" and "The Silenced Dialogue" from Other People's Children.

* Paper: Describe racial and cultural relations among teachers and administrators at your school. This is a sampler of what is central to our programs. There are other classes and student teaching seminars as well. (Fortunately our students are able to do most of their student teaching in their own classrooms, meanwhile visiting other classrooms and getting support from master teachers. These are chosen because of their teaching excellence and experience working for social justice.

One of the goals of the program is to expose students to experienced people whose work in education and social justice has been effective. We have had a number of people work with the students. Among them are Arnold Perkins, currently Director of Health and Human Services for Alameda County and formerly Director of the Koshland Program of the San Francisco Foundation. Perkins talked to the students about issues of race, health, and the interface of the school with social services and communities. He also consulted on the question of developing alliances among schools, health professionals, community based organizations, and foundations.

Another guest of the Center was Betty Halpern, formerly Director of the Early Childhood Program at Sonoma State College and current Professor Emeritus at Sonoma State. She discussed the history and philosophy of progressive education and consulted with the students on how to develop curriculum that had a significant social justice component. We have been able to persuade Dr. Halpern to teach in the program as an Adjunct.

A third guest was Gary Delgardo, Director of the Applied Research Center in Berkeley and one of the founders of the Center for Third World Organizing. He demonstrated the School Report Card, which is used as an assessment of racial relationships at a school. The development of this report card, which was made available to the students in computer disk form, was sponsored by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute. Mr. Delgardo has agreed to continue to work with the Center as we develop a curriculum that has as a central focus issues of social justice.

We have a few more visits planned for this and the next academic year. At the end of the spring semester of 2002 we had a series of conversations with Joseph Featherstone on the future of progressive education, and a day long workshop with Dolores Huerta on education and activism. The latter was held jointly with TEAMS, the School of Education's Americorps program.

There were several student initiatives that will contribute to the further development of the Center. One of the students, a former Silicon Valley computer specialist and currently the computer specialist at Thurgood Marshall High School, set up a listserv for the entire class. Throughout the semester students have been communicating with each other on class readings and on the educational problems they face in their own classrooms. They have also shared ideas for class projects and papers and have become continual collaborators.

In addition several students set up a Sunday study group to discuss the class readings and reflect on class discussions. Participation is totally voluntary but has been continual and according to the students quite rewarding. The students have also made arrangements to visit each other's classes. This is neither for credit nor required but comes out of their passion for teaching and learning from each other. Our students are also involved in setting up discussion and organizing groups with their peers in the public schools, and a group of students are discussing setting up a small school within the Oakland Unified School District.

Each semester has culminated with the students' development and presentation of educational games, theatrical performances, CD's, murals, quilts, and other artistic representations of their individual and collective journeys taken in our learning community. We also have a residential weekend in Point Arena, California where I have developed an education library learning center, and mini-Highlander at my home. The retreat has no and every educational agenda imaginable.

The central aim of all of this is to have teachers work with their hearts, their minds, their eyes, hands and ears as they shape an education adequate to the brilliance and promise of their students. This is particularly important in the schools the students work in--in Richmond, Oakland, East Palo Alto, and San Francisco where the need for energetic, caring, moralized students is a desperate matter. It is particularly troubling in California, where state mandates have had the effect of suppressing bilingualism, teacher initiative, and multiculturalism. We have even faced a state mandate to eliminate the words "bilingual" and "culture" from directives issued to the schools.

Teaching under this kind of stress, and acting to create situations that are free of teacher proof programs, cynical and racist prohibitions that suppress students' home languages and culture, and institutional resentment of students who are considered failures, is difficult for the experienced teacher. Without peer support, a strong will, and dear convictions, as well as a large bag of tricks, thoughtful pedagogy, and an abiding love for children, a young teacher can hardly survive. This is just a preliminary report on a work in progress, but I personally find energy and renewal in the presence, commitment, and work of my students--a welcome antidote to the despair over the future of public education that overcomes me at moments. I sometimes feel uneasy supporting my students embarking on a life of struggle, but they tell me not to worry. They remind me of myself and other friends who after forty years of activism in education continue to confront the beast in-the service of the children and their communiti es. Their intelligence, passion, and energy, and their new way of defining problems and developing solutions, continues the struggle for justice in education in ways that inspire us older folk. There's nothing wrong with being a trouble-maker in a troubled world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayers, William, Hunt, Jean Ann, Quinn, Therese ed., Teaching for Social Justice (New Press, NY, 1998).

Brown, Cynthia, Literacy in 30 Hours: Paulo Freire's Process in North East Brazil (Alternative Schools Network, Chicago, 1978).

Derman-Sparks, Louise and Brunson Phillips, Carol, Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism (Teachers College Press, New York, 1997).

Delpit, Lisa, "Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator" from Other People's Children (The New Press, NewYork, 1995) pp. 11-20.

Delpir, Lisa, "The Silenced Dialogue" from Other People's Children (The New Press, New York, 1995) pp. 21-47.

Greene, Maxine, Teacher as Stranger (Wadsworth, Belmont CA. 1973) pp. 3-25, 267-302.

Hawkins, Frances Pockman, "The Eye of the Beholder" from Special Education and Development, S. Meisel ed. (University Park Press, Baltimore, 1979).

Henry, Jules, On Sham, Vulnerability and other forms of Self-Destruction (Vintage Books, NY 1973) pp. 82-105, 120-127.

Hope, Ann and Timmel, Sally, Training for Transformation: 3 volumes (Mambo Press, Gweru, Zimbabwe, 1984. Available exclusively in the United States from the Grailville Art & Bookstore, Loveland, OH 45140; 513-683-0202).

hooks, bell, Teaching to Transgress (Routledge, New York, 1994).

Huggins, Nathan I., "The Deforming Mirror of Truth" from Revelations (Oxford, New York, 1995) pp. 252-283.

Kohl, Herbert, I Won't Learn from You (The New Press, New York, 1994).

Kohl, Herbert, "Paulo Freire: Towards the Splendid City" (Rethinking Schools, Milwaukee, 1998).

Korczak, Janos, "Why Do I Clear Tables?" from Ghetto Diary (Holocaust Library, NY 1978).

Lippman, Matthew, Pixie (First Mountain Foundation, Montclair, New Jersey) pp. 1-5.

Matthews, Gareth, Philosophy and The Young Child (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1980).

Plato, The Republic trans. by Tom Griffith (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge U.K, 2000) pp. 220-251.

Redl, Fritz, When We Deal With Children (The Free Press, New York, 1966) pp. 461-466.

Wesker, Arnold, Words as Definitions of Experience (Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London 1976).

Videos (for information on both videos contact Highlander Research and Education Center, Rt. 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820).

Bill Moyers, The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly (PBS June 5 and 11, 1981).

You Gotta Move: A History of the Highlander Center (produced and directed by Luci Phenix).

HERBERT KOHL is Director of The Institute for Social Justice and Education at the University of San Francisco. He is a teacher and a writer. Among his books are 36 Children, I Won't Learn from You, Should We Burn Babar, and The Discipline of Hope.