Reading the Writing on The Wall: Troubling Community and Identity in an Urban Magnet School

Dissonance

I’d like to begin with an excerpt from my teaching journal dated January 6, 2000

On a cold January morning, teachers, and students arrive at school to find the building covered in graffiti. On the back wall, by the door and visible to teachers coming from the parking lot or parents dropping students off from car pools are the words $ Kill Suckers, $ kill j(w/skill)! free your mind, free mumia, stop slavery now. As I approach the building, I see a uniformed police officer who says, “You should see what’s on the front of the building.” Upon entering, I walk through the hallway to the doors which opened into a large courtyard where the middle schoolers play before entering the building for advisory. Large red and black spray painted letters cover the lower perimeter of the building on every wall. The messages read: Say no to U.S. $ in Ecuador. U.S loan $mil to Russian murder Chechnya $100 million by world bank, star strangled freedom. learn for college win debt/forget the truth; history repeats itself until learned. Then along a small vertical wall near the entrance: War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, Ignorance is Streghtn (sic) I watch the middle schoolers react, some staring at it and others yelling, “We’re all gonna die! They’re gonna blow up the school”

Questions

Last year, I taught at an urban magnet school located on the fringes of center city in Philadelphia. Approximately 1200 students attend the school: 800 in the middle school and 400 in the high school. All of the students are required to have excellent grades and superior standardized test scores; many are classified as mentally gifted and entitled to gifted support as required by the state of Pennsylvania. I teach English in the high school which is even more selective than the middle school. The student population is diverse; students come from virtually every neighborhood in the city. I transferred to this school a year and a half ago after spending nearly 20 years at a comprehensive neighborhood high school in the heart of North Philadelphia, an African American community.
On the morning that the graffiti appeared on the school’s outside walls, I had been teaching there for a year and a half and I still felt like an outsider. In order to understand the values and culture of this school, I had been spending a great deal of time listening to the students.
As I was walking through the hallways that January morning, and listening to students speak about this graffiti before class, and I was struck by the profoundly different “readings” I was hearing. Some admitted to being frightened by the sudden appearance of these scary looking words. “Violated,” I heard one say. Others laughed it off as meaningless, and still others took a sense of pride: I heard at least 5 times that morning that it was “smart graffiti for a smart school.” The fact that every senior in the past 5 years had been required to read Orwell’s 1984 as their summer reading fueled speculation that whoever did it had specifically targeted this school building. Few believed it to be random.
These students’ multiple readings of the text on the wall connected to questions which were emerging for me in my English classroom. The school has a diverse population, but students’ differences were seldom part of the school discourse. It was their similarities of high standardized test scores, innate intelligence and competitive spirits which were most often emphasized. When differences did arise in classroom conversation, they were often met with a type of unengaged relativism: “Well, everyone’s entitled to his or her opinion,” was a daily response to any possible disagreement.
I saw students’ different responses to this very public text written on the walls of the school building as an opportunity to explore and address the implications of difference within the school and classroom community. How do students read texts within and across their differences? What are the complex relationships among their knowledge of each other, themselves and the world?

Looking Closely

When the 9th graders arrived in my class that morning, I asked them to arrange their desks in a circle and to take out a sheet of paper. Following procedures adapted from one of Pat Carini’s documentary processes, the reflective conversation, I asked the students to think about the writing on the walls and to write down all of the different thoughts, ideas, feelings they had about the graffiti. After students spent ten minutes writing, we began the sharing, going around the circle with each student reading what he/she had written. This was Round 1. As they were listening, I asked them to jot down themes, patterns contradictions they heard their classmates say. These words they shared in Round 2.
Audre Lorde has written, “We teach others what we need to know ourselves.” I needed to know what my students were thinking about this text on our walls to offer me a better understanding of how they were making sense of all of the texts that we were reading in class together. Our collaborative reading of the writing on the wall was at once a pedagogical strategy – a teaching moment -- and a site of critical inquiry for me into the nature of knowledge, identity and community in my classroom..

There were many responses which addressed the meaning or purpose of the graffiti and others which were concerned with safety. But the most striking different responses were related to people’s individual locations, races and identities.
From a white student:
When I walked in, people said, “Are you Russian?” ( and I’m not Russian) But that made me think. Hey people are going to be accused of this.

From a Latino student:
At first, I didn’t notice the graffiti because it’s all over my neighborhood. But then Nate pointed it out to me. I’m not really taking this seriously.

And from two African American students:
Why is everyone worrying about it being this school anyway? My old school had graffiti and no one cared. My old school was in North Philly.

As I walked on my way to school this morning, I heard the shrill of anxious children screaming, “There’s graffiti on the wall! There’s graffiti at our school!” I shrugged and proceeded to read Chapter 6 in my Biology book. All I could hear were the little mumbles of “Did you see?” and I screamed inside. By the time I heard the principal’s announcement, I was highly disgusted. I thought to myself, This school is a building made of bricks, wood, etc. What makes people think this can’t happen to us? And why disturb my studies with such a dumb story?”

And from two white students:
I don’t know why. I was very disturbed because this is the first time it happened to my school. It made it seem dirty.

It does bother me that someone would do something like this, probably more so because I lead a relatively sheltered life. From 1st- to 6th grade, I attended a suburban private school. Coming from a relatively crime-free environment, and this background, I was probably more sensitive to these types of things than other people.

Students listened intently to one another, hearing perhaps for the very first time publicly, the wide range of perspectives on the meaning, purpose, and consequences of this text. In Round 2, students were asked to think about what they had heard, what patterns, contradictions they noticed and what they might mean for us as a community of learners in this school. Some samples:

I thought talking about it was a good exercise, because normally when something happens, we shrug it off.

It seemed different races had different feelings on the graffiti. Like L and M and I thought that it was just graffiti and get over it, but S who was raised in a totally different environment thought the graffiti was just appalling!

J, a white boy added a dimension which is seldom discussed in this school: social class.
One issue that related to me was what M. said. I also live in a lower class area in which graffiti is visible on every block. That might be another reason why this had no effect on me and why I didn’t give two hoots. I mean, I see more substantial messages on the sides of houses and school around my block.

The graffiti was removed from the building by the mayor’s Anti-Graffiti Network later that night. By the time students, parents and teachers arrived at school the following day, all that was left of the text on the walls were the traces where the paint had been sandblasted. However, the our reflective conversation and the perspectives it has opened remained in the minds of my students. As the year progressed, we came back to it as a point of reference as we shared our multiple readings of other texts together in the classroom.
My over arching pedagogical goal that year was to create an inquiry driven participatory learning community which was interactive, cooperative, dialogic, incomplete and uncertain. One of the major obstacles to the formation of such a learning community was that the students had seen no model for this kind of dialogue. In fact, the very nature of the school as a high performing highly competitive magnet school made the formation of such a community even more daunting. A school which valued high test scores promulgated a pedagogy which required uniform correct answers. A school which valued competition promoted debate and argument as the primary forms of classroom discourse.

Searching Broadly

For me the questions mounted. What are the implications of doing this kind of work at a school which is in a position of relative privilege? It is clear that the students who come to this school from working class, poor or minority communities have a clearer sense of the this school as a site of privilege and power. White, middle class students seem to expect the school to be a continuation of their home neighborhood environment. I am reminded here of Adrienne Rich’s (1986) “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” and James Joyce’s (1916) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where adolescents like the young Adrienne and the young Stephen Dedalus each draw themselves in the center of the universe.
In creating conversations in which students read not only the texts of the classroom, but each others’ multiple readings of the texts, how did they feel de-centered at a times in their in their lives when they might not want to be? When is it too destabilizing or threatening? Wendy Hesford (1999) in Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy writes that “we must constantly work to comprehend our own and our students social and political locations and how institutional relations are shaped by historical understandings and personal and generational biographies.” ( p.17) What are the implications for teaching and learning when ALL students not just the minority students are made to look at themselves through others’ eyes, in Hesford’s words, turn the “othering gaze” on themselves. Can they too develop the kind of “double consciousness” described by W.E. B. DuBois?

Making Sense

Issues of community and identity were not resolved in this incident --- rather they were made visible and problematic – as teacher and students confronted the nature of difference in the classroom. This event troubles notions of community. Whose community? The classroom community? The school community? The many neighborhoods from which the students come? The school’s reputation and position within the larger Philadelphia community?
While this incident represents one isolated event – the reading of one particular text – some of the differences and the significance of these differences revealed through this event can offer important insights for what happens whenever students and teacher read any text together in the classroom.

Taking Action

As the year progressed, and students became more familiar with the pedagogical strategies enacted in a critical inquiry classroom, their willingness to engage in collaborative inquiry grew. Reflective conversations and Quaker style meetings replaced debates. Group journals in which students read and responded to each others’ reactions to books, stories and plays replaced individual literature journals. Collaborative dramatic re-enactments of texts replaced individual oral presentations. Students began to see that learning was more than mere knowledge consumption: it was a joint project of knowledge construction. And as they engaged in these interactive forms of discourse, they came to see that inquiry was more than a teaching strategy or a classroom activity: it represented a conception of knowledge which was individual AND social, one in which difference mattered and in which multiple perspectives could not be ignored.
My original questions generated new questions. Is it possible to reconfigure the classroom as a community based on multiple perspectives and democratic practices? What are the particular challenges of trying to do this work at a magnet school for academically talented and mentally gifted students from across the city? In a multicultural classroom, how do the students read the texts, read the school, read each others’ readings of the texts and the school, read each others' readings of each other? Is it possible to allow for individual growth within a diverse community which respects and honors (not just tolerates) difference?
I share the view of critical educators who believe that engaging a full range of perspectives is not an argument for a particular position or ideology, but rather it leads us to recognize that there are multiple audiences and demands a willingness to strive to understand and make ourselves understood in speaking and acting across our differences.


Coda: The Writing Re-appears
I hadn’t heard any conversation about the graffiti incident for several months when suddenly it resurfaced. In the spring issue of the school newspaper, an editorial appeared which criticized the principal for cleaning up the graffiti instead of tending to other building maintenance issues. They accused her of only worrying about how the school would appear to the outside community. On the spring issue of the school literary magazine, there was a drawing of the school building on the cover. And written on that drawing was the text of the graffiti as it appeared on the building in January – right below the words emblazoned on the cover --“The Results of Public Education.” The dialogue continues as the students read and re-read the writing on the wall.


Works Cited

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Modern Library Edition. New York: Random House. 2003.
Hesford. W. Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1999.
Joyce, J. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Ltd. 1916.
Rich. A. “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” in Blood, Bread and Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986

Where We're From: A Collaborative Poem, by students from the School District of Philadelphia

This is a disclaimer.

A What?

A disclaimer.

For What?

To let them know.


Ohhhh.


Yeah.

This is a disclaimer to let everyone here know they will not see a poem about Philly being the cradle of Liberty

And by the time this poem is done you won’t hear anyone say “ The Liberty Bell is wher I’m from.”

This is a disclaimer to warn everyone that we, the performers will not talk about our experiences at the Kimmel Center.

Because I was only in the lobby the one time I entered.

We will not talk about the constitution center or independence mall

Or William Penn who stands tall on City Hall

And though we have nice flow

None of us grew up in the house of Edgar Allen Poe

Or Besty Ross – Yo!

You want to know why we talk about any of those places???

Because nobody lives there.


I am from hopscotch and jailbreak.

The Good Humor man and Tastycake

I’m from penny candy from the corner store

And bike rides through the park

I’m from capture the flag

From puppet shows and porch sales

I am from summers at the Jersey shore


I am from fire sprinklers and block parties in the summer

I am from skateboarding in Love Park to
Running full court ball till after dark.

I’m from Phillies’ games and \
Flyers!
Sixers! and
E-A-G-L-E-S- Eagles!!!


I am from visa papers

I am from Hong Kong
Not the ‘New York” of China” Hong Kong
But Hong Kong fading off of the mountain’s feet.

I am from summer visits to see family in Martinique
From the blue oceans of the Caribbean clean and clear for miles.

I am from beautiful Soeul Korea

I am from Ethiopia,
from Afghanistan,
India

I am from Europe,
from Ireland,
and Poland
From Germany

From Sweden and the white cold north

I am from Celts and
Teutons
Norsemen
and Slavs

I’m from Lithuania,
Albania
and the Ukraine

I am from the darkest bayous in the Deep South
to the biggest houses in the far northeast
And I am from everywhere in-between

I am from the departure from the West Indian soil
To the land of opportunity

I am from all over the world.
From South Carolina
to Jersey
Jamaica
and Honduras
And back to Puerto Rico.

I am from Columbia
and Guyana
Belarus
THE GOOD OLE U.S. of A!


I am from the hood
where the baws wear they jeans sagged low
and the girls they shirts tight

I am from the hood where you get used to gunshots
And often let them sing you to sleep.

I am from the Mummer’s Parade,
2 street, whiskey and steins of beer

I am from Aspen Farms Community Garden
From tall sunflowers and peach trees

I am from the weeds growing out of the sidewalk


I’m from playing hockey in the driveway till they noticed I was a girl.

I am from the “white trash” part of the city

I am from one way streets full of one way minds.

I am from U-city
West Philly
Kensington
Fishtown
Grey’s Ferry
Mount Airy
Center City
West Oak Lane
North Side
South Philly
Roxborough
Manayunk
and
THE GREATER NORTHEAST!


I am from good southern home soul food cooking

I am from Irish potatoes and gefilte fish

I am from ham and cabbage

Rice and beans

Curried goat and fried chiken

Humentashen and rye bread

Spagehetti and pizza

I am from tofu

I am from jerk chicken and curried goat

I am from empanadas and noki

from buryani and samosas to

MACARONI AND CHEESE!


I am from Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, AC/DC

I am from Lauryn Hill, India.Arie, Floetry

I am from pushto,
rap
and disco
from salsa,
reggae.
Hip hop
and R&B.

I am from rhythmic latin beats
And the sweet west Indian soul

I am from spirituals and gospel and
THE SOUNDS OF PHILADELPHIA!


I am from a place where I have to dumb down my language

I am from New Life Baptist Church and Sunday dinners

I am from onsies and booties, pampers and pull ups

I am from Similac and back hand slaps

I am from Sunday morning pancakes,
flowered dresses and little cups of grape juice once a month

I am from hot combs in the kitchen

I am from a strong black man and an independent black woman

I am from Grandma Vidella

And her delicious cookies and her soft quilts

And her husband who was shot by that white man

And her son who blames himself.

I am from cereal and orange juice every morning

I am from Batman and Spiderman

Action figures and remote control cars


I am from T-ball practice and American Legion games

I am from a seder every year and
Getting up in the morning to Easter baskets
Judah Maccabee on a Christmas tree

I am from prayers and God and Catholic school

I am from South America and the Catholic culture and the Spanish language

I am from fancy cigars and failed businesses

I am from my grandfather, the man in the casket I never knew

I am from the Black woman who doesn’t braid hair
and can’t fry chicken to save her life
( But makes great candied sweet potatoes)

I am from new cars and Negro League calendars

I am from the first African American homecoming queen

to yet another high school drop out.

I am from a world where everything is smoke and mirrors
From broken glass
to broken fingers
From broken families
to broken promises
From broken dreams
to broken hearts

I am from daddy’s little girls

To mamma’s biggest problem.

I am from the dinner table

Where these stories and more

ARE TOLD AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN….


I am from “Reading opens up a while new world.”

I am from “turn the damned TV off and read a book.”

I am from the “ I can’t believe they would do that’s
To the “girl, guess what I just heard!.”

I’m from “don’t this” and “don’t do that”
And “go clean your room now.”

I am from “Speak your mind”

I am from “Act like a lady.”

I’m from “Boys don’t cry”.



I am from Good Night Moon and the Runaway Bunny.

I am from Wonderland and Middle Earth
Oz and Fantasia

I am from the world of Harry Potter
From Quidditch games to chocolate frogs.

I’m from Grimm’s fairy tales
A princess who can keep from being rescued

I am from Roald Dahl and Stephen King

I’m from Alice Walker and Toni Morrison

I am from the library that wouldn’t let my mom take out
The diary of Anne frank

Because she was TOO YOUNG!



We are
from a place where flowers grow from cracks in the ground

We are
from people who made a way for us

We are
from fitting in and wanting out



We are
from all the things we believe

We are
From all the things that have happened to us.

We are
from the people that we meet

We are
from the teachers who have taught us.

We are
from peace.

We are
from war.

We are
from the streets that were once run by children
To a city that mourns the deaths of 24
No – 25 school children
to violence

( whisper – silence!)

We are from “been there, done that.”

We are from looking forward to getting away.

We are from different parts of the world.

We are from different frames of mind

We are from “ you can take the kid out of Philly
but you can’t take the Philly out of the kid…

We are from here.

Creating the "In-Between" A Playwriting Exchange Between Students in Philadelphia and Ketchikan Alaska

In her article “Evaluation and Dignity,” Maxine Greene refers to Hannah Arendt and her concept of the “in-between.” The in-between, says Arendt is a place where people can achieve their full humanity with one another. It emerges through a web of relationships woven through authentic disclosures. This concept is helpful in thinking about and reconstructing the complex and complicated collaboration that has transpired over nearly three years, thousands of miles, two school districts and three classrooms. PorTrait created the context for teachers from different parts of the country to get to know one another as people as well as educators. During the initial conference, the workshops and activities were structured to encourage teachers with similar interests and concerns to find one another and begin to raise the questions we would pursue in our mutual inquiry. We were able to build on that relationship during the school year as we communicated via email and through the BreadNet network. When the time came for the actual visits to occur, we already knew each other fairly well. During the visits, we stayed in each other’s homes, experienced life with each other families, schools and communities. We got to know what life was like in towns and schools very different from our own in ways that would not have been possible without those visits. The time we spent literally sharing one another’s lives helped to create an openness and intimacy between and among us. We had come to know and trust each other enough to create the context for our students to get to know one another as well. The nature of the PorTrait cross visitations made it possible for there to be authentic human disclosures among the teachers and subsequently our students.
During the first year of this project, I was a teacher on special assignment serving as Executive Director of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, an arts in education organization that taps the potential of youth and develops critical literacy through playwriting. The program pairs professional theater artists with classrooms teachers for the purpose of teaching young people how to write, revise and perform their own original plays. For the previous fifteen years, I had been a teacher in the program and my students at two high schools in Philadelphia had achieved extraordinary success: three students won the national playwriting competition, seeing their plays performed professionally off-Broadway. Dozens of other students won the local playwriting competition, seeing their plays performed by local universities and professional companies. In addition, I had written extensively about the ways in which teaching playwriting had transformed my practice as an English teacher and I had helped plan and implement professional development programs for teachers wanting to study the impact of playwriting on their teaching.
During the first year, most of my questions were about the playwriting program. Specifically, I wanted to know the impact of the classroom visits of the professional playwrights and actors as well as other elements of the program. After the first year and partly in response to my involvement in Dina and Rosie’s classrooms, I opted to leave the job as executive director and return to the classroom.


In the second year of the collaboration, the web of relationships became more complex as Rosie and I carried out our exchange. I had been to Rosie’s school and talked with her students, but she had not been to mine (the year she visited Philadelphia, I was not teaching – though she did attend a playwriting workshop run by PYPF that I had developed.) While I had more experience in the teaching of playwriting and drama, Rosie had developed expertise about on-line exchanges through her involvement with BreadNet and the Rural Teachers Network. Also complex was the nature of our very different contexts: Kayhi is the only high school on the island of Ketchikan (except for one or two religious schools and an alternative high school for struggling students.) Rosie’s classes included students of all achievement and ability levels. Masterman is a magnet school for high performing students located on the fringe of the center city and students come from every neighborhood in the city.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *



I found Ketchikan to be a unique combination of almost 1890’s frontier life and 21st century sophistication. While we were in Ketchikan, we saw a logging rodeo and a community theater production of Wit. We saw a performance by Japanese children visiting Ketchikan as part of an exchange program and a local talent show of sorts called the monthly grind. I have very vivid recollections of one of Rosie’s students, a Native young man who knew every single Beatle song ever recorded. Dina Rosie and I sat with him for over an hour one afternoon after school in the high school’s beautiful atrium – it was raining outside ( as it had been for almost our entire visit) but it was warm and bright inside as this young man played his guitar and we sang Beatle songs together. Not only was the school beautiful, clean and filled with extraordinary local art, the halls were neat and quiet ---Rosie’s classroom was also a lovely sight with carpets, new furniture, computers and colorful student work from floor to ceiling,. Even as I write this, I cringe when I try to imagine how my run down aging and crumbling classroom must look through Rosie’s eyes.
I had my own concerns about my students and my school. Masterman students score the highest in the state on all standardized tests. Virtually every graduate goes on to a four year college. This makes Masterman a very interesting place to teach. The students are bright, and very motivated to do well. And it can be a lot of fun. But this also has a down side. There is among some students and teachers an emphasis on grades and test scores. There is an air of competition that interferes with true learning and impedes the establishment of an authentic learning community. While it was difficult to avoid this kind of grade consciousness in my Honors English classes, I was able to try to establish a different atmosphere in my Drama and Inquiry Elective. In the course description I gave to the students in the beginning of the year, I wrote, “Over the years, I have come to appreciate the genre of drama as a powerful tool for investigating complex moral, ethical and cultural questions about human existence. In this course, I hope that we will become a true intellectual community filled with members who raise heartfelt and complex questions and explore answers together. We would do so by reading, writing and performing plays.
The central question driving my current inquiry has to do with the ways in which I was successful and unsuccessful in the establishment of that kind of learning community. I am particularly interested in the nature of response and responsibility in my Drama and Inquiry class and how the Alaskan exchange both brought into focus and called into question my practices concerning responding to student plays and the kind of moral, ethical and intellectual community I strive to establish in my classroom. As the community was extended beyond the walls of the classroom, how did seeing my students, my teaching practices and my school through Rosie’s eyes and the eyes of her students help me get a better understanding of what was happening in my classroom?
The exchange worked as follows. A week or two before Rosie began her playwriting unit, my students sent scenes from their plays to Rosie’s students. Along with the scenes, they sent short personal introductions, then brief descriptions of their scenes. Many of them also sent a list of questions they wanted their Alaskan reader to think about while reading the play and respond to in their email. We also sent a video that included introductions and some of the activities we did in drama class. Rosie’s students emailed back (to me who distributed the emails to the students… wrote back, including in their emails, personal introductions, and responses to the plays in progress. Shortly thereafter, Rosie’s students sent their scenes and a video to which my students sent their responses. The exchange ended abruptly at that point when Rosie ran into some flak from colleagues who questioned the efficacy of the project and complained to administrators in Rosie’s school.
There were many positive things I learned about my students from this exchange. I was encouraged and gratified by the number of students who responded to the Alaskan plays with thoughtful and respectful questions. This mirrored the kinds of responses I would give my students and the process by which I was teaching them to respond to each other. I was pleased to see reflected in these emails just how much my students had learned about the craft of playwriting – about the development of character and conflict, the use of the space on the stage and the importance of stage directions.
But there were some other things I saw in the email exchanges that raised questions for me about certain dissonances or conflicts in my own class of which I may not have been aware. One such incident related to do the different approaches students took to playwriting as seen in the following exchange. Bronwen, a student in my class sent her play to Andy in Alaska. Her play is about a teen age girl, her father and his lover who contracts AIDS.
Andy writes to Bronwen: “I thoroughly enjoyed your play. I am also writing a play about homosexuals. I view their rights or lack thereof as a big problem especially in small isolated Ketchikan.”

Bronwen replies:
It’s really cool that you are writing a play dealing with homosexuality too. It’s a really difficult subject matter especially when so many people are homophobic. When we workshopped my scene in class, I was really nervous and there was a lot of tension in the room. But something you said really sticks in my mind. I remember that you wrote something about my play being “about” homosexuality. It made me think that I don’t want my play to become like another after school special, you know? I don’t want it to be one of those educational plays that’s like, “now this is why we don’t discriminate against Harry the homosexual.” It’s like I have gay characters in my play but I don’t want that to be the ultimate focus.”

After the initial exchanges, we had a whole class discussion about our collective reactions to the plays we had received and the term “After School Special” took on a somewhat derogatory or condescending connotation when applied to a play. What is particularly interesting about this exchange and the conversation that followed in class is the way that it revealed dissension and fissures not with how my students were seeing the Alaskan plays, but how they were seeing each others. Indeed, many of their plays WERE about issues and many students were writing about actual events that happened in their lives. To hear their classmates deride some of the Alaskan students’ plays because of their supposed lack of sophistication made some of my students very uncomfortable to share their work in our class.

In an email sent to in the summer in response to the exchange project, my student Kathleen writes:

“Some in our class took on a “we’re better than them” attitude, when that was not the case at all. It was more of a we’re both different from different backgrounds. And I felt as though we as a drama class we should be trying to get to know and become familiar with something different. … because we had the professional playwright and more resources it made us have a better and more developed background into playwriting and more of a chance to lend what we have learned and give helpful suggestions because we were lucky to have access to such things. I learned more from my Alaskan pen pals than students in my class… and in fact I did use their suggestions because they made sense. I think the students in Alaska should have been hurt and angered by the comments that their plays were After School Specials and I said that in class. Who are we to tell them that? I felt very nervous from the students in Alaska who were on the receiving end of these emails. What may seem like an after school special to someone may be real life for someone else.”

It is clear to me that Kathleen was not only writing about the way some of my students responded to the Alaskan plays but how they responded to each other’s as well.

Another area of dissonance had to do with the difference in our contexts. There were two questions emerging simultaneously: How well had each playwright depicted his or her context and how well did each reader understand the nature of the playwright’s context. This became evident as students in both Alaska and Philadelphia made judgments about how “realistic” their partner’s play seemed.

Many of the emails from the Alaskan students to my students focused on the use of profanity and the “unrealistic” nature of the dialogue my students had written. Erin from Alaska wrote to Addie: I think that how the kids are talking and being so intensely sarcastic to the teacher is a little unrealistic.” Clearly, Erin didn’t understand the context of an urban magnet high school.
Two of my students were writing plays with overt Jewish themes – one set at a Passover seder and another in a sukkah at an Orthodox synagogue. They had some concerns about how their plays would be received and understood by their partners. While there were some Jews in Ketchikan (on my visit I had met the mayor, a singer in an aging rock band and the cooking teacher at Kayhi) there was no synagogue nor organized Jewish community on the island. It raised questions for them about whom they were writing for and how much responsibility they had to depict their particular Jewish context accurately.
While their counterparts didn’t respond to the Jewish themes, they did offer helpful feedback. The student responding to the Passover play said he could relate to way the children were bickering at the family holiday dinner and the student responding to the sukkah play asked for more dialogue and a longer conversation between the main character and the rabbi to flesh out the nature of their relationship.

One of the most wonderful moments in this entire exchange occurred when two of my students, Natalie and Ben, were acting out a play that had been sent to us from Alaska. They were having a difficult time with some of the vernacular and they were infusing their performance with undue melodrama. In the midst of the reading, Natalie stopped abruptly. She had apparently had a sudden vision of the students in Alaska acting out her play and getting it all wrong. The realization that the students in Alaska might not “get” the reality of the characters in the Philly plays, led Natalie to make a very important leap. She might not be getting the reality of their plays either. She would have to take a different stance in how she approached their plays, one in which she was the novice, the outsider, the learner.
The experience of receiving feedback from people so far away in a very different context and questioning the efficacy and usefulness of that feedback heightened the experience of reading and offering feedback to others. Many of my students shared Natalie’s epiphany. If their Alaskan penpal had misjudged or misunderstood the scene that he or she had written and sent because they were unfamiliar with the realities as well as subtleties of our context, it was then possible, even likely that they too misunderstood and misjudged the plays written by the Alaskan playwrights.
Drama allows people to imagine worlds and possibilities both inside and outside of themselves. It can provide a mirror in which we can see our own lives reflected or it can offer us a window into worlds and lives we never knew existed. But sometimes something magical happens and we get to see ourselves reflected in the unlikeliest of places… discover mirrors in the distant windows and re/discover new dimensions of ourselves. While this exchange was short-lived, it did open up many new possibilities for my students to raise new questions, to expand their notions of audience, to look at their plays and their lives through new and different eyes.

Crossroads Redux

On April 9th, several Crossroads Alumni and I will be doing a presentation at Bryn Mawr College in Jody Cohen's Critical Issues in Education Class in which we will discuss the impact of Crossroads on our lives 18 years after it was founded in 1991.
The alumni have all been educators for many years and are all currently working as teachers or professors. In this era of No Child Left Behind with the emphasis on accountability solely based on students' scores on standardized tests, what passes for teaching in urban classrooms is merely a decontextualized drilling of the skills measured on these tests. The lessons are devoid of meaningful content and they do not take the students' experiences, prior knowledge nor their humanity into consideration. Students are bored, alienated and often angry, because they keep hearing over and over again how poorly they perform on these tests, and how it's their fault because they don't work hard enough on these drills. Crossroads was a program that was founded in 1991 at Simon Gratz High School that was inquiry-based, multi-disciplinary; the teachers put the students and their needs and questions at the center of the curriculum. It is important for people today to hear about the ways in which this kind of rigorous but progressive approach to education had a positive impact on the students who were part of it. The presentation at Bryn Mawr is the first step towards making public the stories of the Crossroads alumni. In this blog entry, I am including a chapter from Jody Cohen's dissertation based on her study of Crossroads from 1990-1992. I hope that other alumni will find this entry, read Dr. Cohen's chapter then share their memories, experiences, thoughts and questions.

On tracks and things in high school

When I was a teen-ager, school was my salvation. It provided a structure and predictability that the rest of my life lacked. While some people hated the monotony of the routine, I reveled in the sameness of it all…. The same locker, the same classes, the same teachers, the same friends. Plus, I was good in school. It was something I could do – Get A’s that is… I couldn’t do much else – couldn’t keep my parents from divorcing, couldn’t stop the war in Viet Nam, couldn’t make my boyfriend stop doing drugs – but I could write a damned good paper on the stoicism of the Hemingway hero. And that felt good.

Anyway, I went to this huge high school where there were almost 1000 people in my graduating class. And what they did to control us was to divide us into tracks based on how smart they thought we were… there was the academic track, the commercial track and the vocational track. And if that weren’t enough, there were levels within the tracks…Academic A, B, and C, Commercial A, B, and C and so on.. you get the picture.

Well, I was in Academic A, but all of my friends including Randy and June were in Academic B. That meant I had AP classes along with all of the other “smart” kids. My friends were still college prep – they took algebra and foreign language (unlike the kids in commercial who took typing or bookkeeping or the ones in vocational who took shop) only they weren’t considered “smart” by some of the teachers. Never mind that Randy and June were two of the funniest and most clever people I had ever met and they were always exciting to be around.

My 11th grade French teacher, Madamoiselle Gitlin taught in all of the tracks. She of course preferred to teach in the A track and was always complaining to us about how much she hated teaching the kids in the B and C track.. One day she asked me to come to see her after school. I remember going to her office and feeling really strange… wondering what she could possibly want to talk to me about. She asked me to sit down and looked at me with this really earnest look on her face… like she really cared about me or something… Then she got all serious and moved in close to me and told me that I should stop hanging around with Randy and June. That they were bad influences on me and that I was being brought down by them and I should separate myself from them before it was too late.

At the time, I just stared at her dumbfounded. I was shocked and angry, but I didn’t say a word. I sat there in stony silence until she told me I could go.

Years later, when I became I teacher, I vowed that I would never talk to any student about any other student – and I would never question someone’s choice of a friend.
See what really bothers me about this story today is – why wasn’t she concerned about Randy and June? If she thought they were headed in the wrong direction, why didn’t she try to help them? Just because they weren’t good in French, they weren’t worth the trouble?

Duane and Me...Eleven Years Later .. With Love

Eleven years ago, I had an encounter with a student that stayed with me for years. In 2001 at a writing retreat for teachers, I wrote about that encounter. The essay entitled "The Stories They Tell" talks about a young man named Duane who has given up trying to complete a senior project he needs for graduation. I write about how I am afraid to confront Duane, afraid to reach out to him - he seems so angry. But, I do. It's a hard thing for me to do. And I almost lose courage. What happens next is what the story is about. The miracle of connection - the healing balm of stories -- the presence of hope and possibility. Ten years later, I get an email from Duane. He is in Afghanistan, serving in the military. While in the desert, he remembers that moment when he didn't give up and sends me an email from across the world to thank me. I tell him how important that moment was to me too, and I send him the essay I wrote. He reads it on a computer in the desert.

Today, Duane is back in the country. He found me on Facebook and we've chatted from time to time. Today, we were chatting and he told me about some poems he'd written. They were posted on his page. I read them and thought they were pretty good --- smart, informed and passionate. A few hours later, Duane chatted me up again. He said, I have one more poem for you to read tonight. Go to my profile. I did. And this is what I found there.

MRS. PINCUS

IT SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY
I USE TO CONSIDER MYSELF 1 OF MRS. URBAN KIDS.
FELT HELPLESS, CORNERED, AND TRAPPED LIKE KIDS IN THE URBAN DID.
THEY SAY "ALL THUGZ AND STREET RATZ WENT TO SIMON GRATZ"
AND ME BEING NAIVE I BELIEVED THAT WAS A DEFINITE FACT.
I LOOKED DOWN SHE LOOKED UP AND LOOKED ME SQUARE IN MY EYES
SHE ASKED GINGERLY " HOW HIGH ARE YOU WILLING TO FLY?"
SHE WAS EITHER BRAVE AND STUBBORN OR CRAZY AND HIGH.
SEE I WAS A BAD BOY AND BAD BOYS BECOME BAD ASS GUYS,
WE SLIDE THROUGH LIFE FAST AND DIE YOUNG HELL WE DON'T FLY.
SHE STOOD THERE STRONG AND FIRM THE EMOTION IN HER EYES
BANDAGE MY SORES AND HER STILLNESS ALLOWED HER TO TAKE A WALK WITH ME
THROUGH THE JOURNEY OF MY LIFE AS A YOUTH
SHE HELD MY HAND WHEN WE WALKED THROUGH MY PAIN
WE RAN THROUGH MY RAGE THAT RAN THROUGH MY BRAIN.
SHE LISTENED LIKE SHE WAS THE STUDENT AND I WAS THE TEACHER
I WAS THE RABBI I WAS INSTRUCTOR I WAS THE PREACHER.
HER SON WAS THE SAME AGE AS ME BUT SHE WAS BLIND
FROM THE VISION OF MY KIND
WHEN SHE OPEN HER EYES SHE RAN
AND REACHED OUT FOR ME LIKE I WAS LOSING GRIP
ON A CLIFF OF A BOTTOMLESS PITT.
LOL LITTLE WHITE LADY LIFT ME UP
THE PURITY IN HER SPIRIT GAVE HER THAT BOOST.
SHE PICKED ME UP VOICE SHAKING TEARS IN HER EYES
SHE ASKED "ONCE AGAIN HOW HIGH ARE YOU WILLING TO FLY?"
SHE DID WHAT MOST PEOPLE WOULDN'T DARE......SHE CARED.
AND FOR THAT I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU MRS. PINCUS!!!



The Stories They Tell

I remember my students by the stories they tell. For the past 33 years, I have been challenged, moved, and most of all transformed by the young people I have encountered in my inner city classroom.

There was Steve Woods whose angry outburst of “That’s whiteman’s bullshit!” during my introductory lesson on Cry the Beloved Country sent me on a decades-long journey to re-educate myself. Or Carlissa Russell who during a discussion of feminism and African American literature, screamed at me –“Mrs. Pincus – to you this is just political. To me it’s my life!” Or Terrance Jenkins whose nearly twenty revisions of his play Taking Control taught me that it is often their very lives my students are trying to control and revise.

Then there was Duane.

It is April 1998. Duane is not doing the senior project that he needs to complete in order to graduate. Duane has been struggling. He has taken to avoiding me, the mentor he has chosen to marshal him through this complicated research process. And even though I know it won’t be easy, I find the strength to confront him.

At first, he will not look at me. His head is bowed and his chin is dug deep inside his chest. I talk in what I hope are soothing tones, trying to encourage and convince him to do the work. Suddenly he jumps up from his seat. What’s the fucking use anyway? Bull’s out there crazy! They gonna kill you. I have no future. What’s the fucking use? What’s the point in doing this? What’s the point of graduating? I’m gonna fucking die!!!!!

When he finishes, he sits back down, assumes the same tucked position while his words echo in the silence.

Slowly, he begins to tell his story. It is one of violence and anger. He lifts his shirt to show me his scars and the terrible injury he has received.

I take a deep breath and try to gather the pieces of myself that have been shattered by his story. What can I, a white woman, a mother whose son is the same exact age as Duane say to him. In telling his story to me, his teacher, in school, Duane has transgressed a boundary and ripped through the silence that separates students from their teachers. He has made the call. I must make the response.

Duane, I say, touching his arm. Are you positive you’re gonna die? Are you so sure that you’re willing to bet your future on it? At least consider the possibility that you could be wrong here. You’re not always right, you know.

There is a long silence because I have run out of things to say. I am overcome by a desire to get up and run away and never see Duane again. Then through the silence, his response. Thrusting his notebook towards me, he says, Show me how to do this. Step by step. I’m confused.

As I reach across to Duane, I suddenly remember another story – one from nearly thirty years ago. It was the first day of school of my senior year in AP English and Mrs. Laskin asked us to write an essay –something like how I spent my summer vacation. My friend Steve had died from a heroin overdose one month to the day after his 18^th birthday on August 9, 1969 – one week before Woodstock, one month after men had landed on the moon as I watched the small black and white tv with a group of scagged out boys. I began the essay with the silent ride home from the cemetery, with his best friend Dock ripping the funeral sticker off the windshield. I wrote about my confusion and guilt – how I had spoken to him the night he died and he said he was just going to stay home and watch tv and how he must have changed his mind and how I should have known and been there for him.

Mrs. Laskin gave me a B-minus on that essay – a grade I now know teachers give when they don’t know what to say about a paper. It’s a safe grade. It will raise no eyebrows and cause no complaints.

Looking back, I wonder. What did Mrs. Laskin think of the young woman sitting before her who was in so much pain? How might my life have been different if she or anyone in that school had responded to what I was saying – the story of my life I was trying so desperately to tell her?

Teachers have a responsibility to listen to our students. We must make sure that we never give into despair. We must gain strength from our students’ stories of struggle, courage, hope and possibility. In urban classrooms today, the stories are all we have and they are what will save us.

Beyond Wiggle Room: Creating Spaces for Authentic Learning in a Senior English Class

Beyond ‘Wiggle Room’:
Creating Spaces for Authentic Learning in a Senior English Class

Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus

I would like to see a curriculum that is not so structured and restricting, with some wiggle room. I’d like to have a variation of different teaching methods and materials: a class that isn’t so predictable. I’d like to read books that make sense and have actual meanings. I’d also like to do different types of writing instead of just essays.
Bob

It is possible that my previous English classes restricted me from my constitutional pursuit of happiness and that my subconscious saw this as a violation of my inalienable rights. As you have not prohibited enjoyment in the class, I think you’ve already made English matter more than it has in the past.
Tiffany


The class would be more interesting to the students if we really had a say in the class. For example, most English teachers will force students to analyze every minor detail in a book because they feel that there are so many metaphors, symbols and motifs beneath the text. However, when this happens, students leave simply knowing those metaphors and motifs without really understanding the deeper concepts in the text. Thus, if we could really share our opinions on different books that we read in class without being confined to finding the symbols, the class would be much more meaningful.
Shelly

Prologue: The Last Act
As the summer of 2007 was winding down, I was preparing myself for what was to be my 34th and final year of teaching in the School District of Philadelphia and my 10th year at J.R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School. I was all set to teach the same courses I had been teaching for the past five years – two sections of an Honors English III class with an emphasis on American Literature and two sections of a popular senior elective entitled Drama and Inquiry. I was looking forward to a pleasant but uneventful school year to cap off an interesting and rewarding career when during the last week of August, I was shaken from my complacency by an email from my principal. In addition to my other courses, I was told, I would be teaching a section of English IV. This was not good news.
The comments above represent a sampling of student responses to the syllabus for the English 4 class that I taught at Masterman High School in 2007-2008. Masterman, a magnet high school for academically talented and mentally gifted students from every neighborhood in Philadelphia, is considered one of the most successful high schools in the country. By most accounts it is a desirable place to teach.
That is, of course, unless you teach seniors, who are notoriously difficult to engage. Under huge amounts of pressure and understandably worried about their finances and their futures, they spend the first half of the year preoccupied with the college application process. During the second half of the year, once their mid-year reports have been sent to the colleges and their acceptances start to come in, they turn their eyes toward prom and graduation.
As a successful and experienced teacher, it is hard for me to admit that I was cowed by this assignment. The last time I had taught the class was in 1998, my first year at Masterman, and I remember what a struggle it had been. Nearly half of the students in the 12th grade took Advanced Placement English. That meant that the students in the “regular” English 4 class either didn’t have the scores or the inclination to take AP English. It was either a subject they disliked or one in which they weren’t particularly skilled– or both. In addition, it is a gateway class – required by the state for high school graduation, making the stakes high for the students, who in turn, put pressure on the teachers to make the class relatively easy to pass. Knowing all of this, I spent the days prior to the opening of school obsessively writing and re-writing the syllabus and the nights having the kind of teaching dreams I hadn’t had in years.

Why I was so terrified of this class and what I learned in my attempt to create a meaningful and engaging course for these students in my final year of teaching is the subject of this inquiry.

Inquiry Across the Lifespan: “I Used to Be an English Teacher”

I used to be an English teacher. I taught vocabulary on Monday, grammar on Tuesday, literature on Wednesday and Thursday and composition on Friday. I taught well-planned lessons with behavioral objectives and specific learning outcomes. My students completed worksheets selecting proper tenses and placing commas in appropriate places. After reading a story, poem or novel, they would answer my meticulously developed literal, interpretive and evaluative questions. And my principal saw my work and said that it was good. (from my teaching journal, 1988)


When I was a beginning teacher, this conception of the teaching of English was the only one available to me. It was how I had been taught in middle and high school and it was how I was taught to teach in college. Every now and again, I would deviate from this schedule, prompted by boredom and a desire to try something new. In my first year of teaching, 1974, I invested ten dollars and bought a class set of S.E. Hinton’s brand new novel The Outsiders for twenty five cents a piece. Together, my eighth graders and I read this book, rewriting chapters from different characters’ points of view, converting parts of the novel into a stage play, drawing portraits of Ponyboy and his brothers, and writing personal narratives about family, friendship and violence. One day during this unit, my principal came to my door, announcing that he was here for my formal observation. He looked around the room and he saw 35 adolescents sitting in groups, some of them on the floor. Some were acting out their original scripts. Others were creating a giant collage. All were talking. All were engaged. My principal paused, and I watched him look disapprovingly around the room as he peered down at his clipboard one last time before saying with disdain, “I’ll come back when you’re teaching.”
The following day, 4th period, he did indeed return and I dutifully taught a lesson about parts of speech, complete with examples on the board, followed by a question-and-answer session with a skill sheet for reinforcement. My 35 rambunctious adolescents sat quietly in rows and politely completed the lesson. My principal sat in the back row taking notes and checking items off on the checklist and with a few minutes left in the period handed me a copy of his evaluation with my high scores.
For many years, I was troubled by that incident. While I didn’t abandon the kinds of activities that we did in response to The Outsiders, I did them less frequently and with more trepidation, despite the fact that I knew through my observations of my students’ written and oral responses that this kind of teaching was more engaging and effective. Additionally, I felt more engaged and alive when I was teaching in this manner, eager to see and hear the multiple ways in which my students were making sense of the novel, relating it to their own lives and raising questions about gangs and loyalty, violence and social class. Their responses sparked in me a genuine interest and as I learned more about them and how they saw themselves and the world, I was better able to understand what they needed from me individually and collectively as their teacher.
Unfortunately, during this period of my life and career, I lacked the confidence to value my own knowledge. I was grateful for my superior rating, and it never would have occurred to me to ask for an appointment to speak with my principal to discuss the evaluation let alone to explain and defend what I was doing in my class the day he’d announced that I wasn’t “teaching.” And it certainly didn’t occur to me to examine the items on the evaluation checklist to critique the conception of teaching embedded within. I lacked the experience and sophistication to understand that the evaluation tool was constructed by those in power and it perpetuated a particular teacher-centered, authoritative, skills-based approached to teaching.

Before a teacher can engage her students to live life consciously, she must find the courage to question and live consciously herself – face her own fears, analyze and understand her own desires and see herself as a living human being capable of doing meaningful work in the world. A teacher who has not be awakened to her own possibilities for growth cannot inspire such growth in her students. ( from my teaching journal 2002)

Interestingly, it was my time away from teaching that sparked my transformation. When my children were born, I took a two-year maternity leave. During those years, I would spend my days with my infant and toddler, watching them closely and figuring out how they were making sense of the world. I can still remember the satisfaction and pride I felt as a mother when I finally understood that the sounds of “bruh bruh bruh bruh” that my nine month old daughter was making as she toddled after her brother were not random. They represented her first word – “Brother.” When I took my two-year-old son to the zoo, I listened as he pointed to every animal excitedly calling each one a “Dog!” When we got to the elephant, he shouted, “Dog! Dog!” Another time, he pointed to the moon and uttered with surprise and wonder, “Egg in the sky!” This little two year old was using language to make connections based on size, shape and space and as his mother/teacher, it was my job to lead him gently to new words for concepts he already understood. Before I could engage my children in naming the world, I first needed to understand the ways in which they were doing it and see the patterns and logic of their systems.
Becoming a mother gave me the confidence in myself that I lacked as a teacher. I came to value my abilities to interpret my children’s needs and questions and respond to them in ways that would enable my children to grow. When I returned to the classroom in 1985 after my maternity leave, I was not the same young woman who had left two and a half years earlier.
Unfortunately, I encountered the same expectations for “good” teaching that I had left behind. Only this time, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with my role as the purveyor of the standardized curriculum and the literary canon. Upon returning to teaching, I was transferred to Simon Gratz High School, a large comprehensive neighborhood high school in the heart of the African American community. All of my students were African American and I, a young Jewish woman, often found myself questioning why I was surrounding the classroom with pictures of “great” American authors like Melville, Poe and Emerson and teaching books by Twain, Hawthorne and Fitzgerald.
During this period in my career, I experienced a great deal of dissonance between what I was doing in the classroom and what I wanted to do. I was still standing in front of the class lecturing about books I had assigned from the book list, writing study guides with comprehension questions and developing tests asking the students to identify literary devices. Yet, I was also listening to my students, asking them to speak and write about their lives and their dreams, trying to understand who they were and who they were hoping to become, much in the same manner in which I had learned to engage with my children. This gap between who my students and I were as human beings and what I was teaching them continued to widen in the months following my return and made me feel increasingly uncomfortable in my role.
I honestly don’t know how long I would have remained a teacher if I had not become a participant in the inaugural Summer Institute of the Philadelphia Writing Project (PhilWP) in 1986. A site of the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional development network dedicated to the teaching of writing, PhilWP was founded by Barbara Lytle, a literacy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and several teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. The NWP was founded on the belief that teachers are the best teachers of other teachers and that the teaching of writing was a complex process involving issues of language, power, culture, and identity. It was during the Summer Institute that I read the work of Paulo Freire for the first time and learned of his approach to literacy teaching and learning in Brazil. In the very first reading assigned during the Summer Institute, his autobiographical essay, “The Importance of the Act of Reading, (Freire,1987), I encountered for the first time the idea that language and reality were dynamically interconnected (29). One sentence in particular caught my attention and caused me to question my fundamental beliefs about teaching English:
In a way we can say… reading the word is not merely preceded by reading the world but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is transforming it by means of conscious practical work (35).


Maxine Greene (1973) writes that a teacher willing to undertake inquiry into her practice is “no longer content to be a mere cipher, a functionary, a clerk” (7). In this Summer Institute, I learned about teacher research for the very first time and how it was possible for teachers through “systematic and intentional” (Lytle Cochran-Smith, 23). inquiry into our own practice as a way of “reclaiming the classroom” (Goswami and Stillman, iii) from bureaucrats and policy makers thereby generating a body of knowledge that would enable us to learn from each other, improve our teaching, reform our schools and ultimately transform the lives of our students. This vision of an empowered teacher, intellectually engaged in the world, learning with and from her colleagues and her students to effect positive change, energized me and made me particularly excited about returning to my classroom in the fall.
At first I struggled. While PhilWP had given me the vision and the theoretical underpinnings, I still lacked the classroom practices to engage my students in meaningful ways that would honor what they brought to the classroom. Once again, I was incredibly fortunate. In 1987, I became a participant in the very first year of the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival (PYPF) a non-profit, arts in education organization whose mission is to “tap the potential of youth through playwriting,” The program pairs professional theater artists with classroom teachers in a year-long partnership designed to teach students to write, revise and stage their own original plays. From the moment J. Rufus Caleb, an award winning playwright and Philadelphia Community College professor, entered my classroom and introduced my high school students to playwriting, I knew that something special was happening.

In the playwriting workshops, students were able to tell stories that were important to them. They were able to create worlds and people those worlds with characters and give those characters dialogue to speak made up of the words and sounds and rhythms of their lives. I was struck by the way this enlivened students who had been previously unengaged – those students who sat quietly in the back of the room, doing just enough school work to earn a “D.” These students had been awakened by the playwriting process and through my observations of and conversations with them, I was able to have access for the very first time to their thinking about themselves as writers and the ways in which they could use literacy to impact their lives and the lives of those around them.
Terrance Jenkins, one of my Simon Gratz students in the early years of the playwriting program and winner of the National Young Playwrights competition in 1992 for his play Taking Control, initially wrote the first draft of his play because it was an assignment and he wanted to earn a good grade. As he continued to write and revise his play about a teen-aged girl from a shattered family trying to “take control” of the situation when her younger sister becomes pregnant, he shared emerging drafts with different audiences. From that experience, he developed a sense of himself as a writer and saw the possibilities for using writing as a way of bring about positive change. In an interview, for a documentary (Strosser and Patterson) about the playwriting program, he said, “I had a message to get across, I had a story to tell. I wanted people to see this [play] and I wanted them to make a change.” It was through this playwriting program that I learned the powerful impact that adults could have on young people simply by listening to their stories, voices, issues, concerns and questions and responding to them in thoughtful and respectful ways.
In the years that followed, I learned how to adapt the lessons I had learned about student choice, voice and agency in the playwriting program to other aspects of the English curriculum. I became more adept at designing projects that engaged students in the process of inquiry, structuring their interaction with texts and each other in ways that honored their perspectives and questions.
This kind of teaching contributed to substantive reform in some Philadelphia High School in the 1990’s. At Simon Gratz, I co-founded a school-within-a-school called Crossroads which joined 300 students from grades 9 through 12 with 16 teachers from all of the major disciples together into an academic community who stayed together for all four years of high school. Our program was interdisciplinary, writing intensive and inquiry-based. Each year, our curriculum was centered around an “essential question,” a curricular organizer we adapted from the Coalition of Essential Schools. Teachers worked together to make sure that our individual curricula addressed that question in ways that would allow the students to make connections across disciplines.
The first year of Crossroads, we, the teachers decided on the essential question “How does learning connect to your world?” This question worked in two very important ways: 1) it pushed the students to see how what they were learning could have an impact on their lives and 2) even more importantly, it forced the teachers to think hard about the sense our students would be making of the material we were presenting to them. After the first year of the program, students and teachers gathered together in June to evaluate the effectiveness of that year’s essential question and to engage in a collaborative process to select the question for the following year. Some of the questions we explored in the 8 years I was part of Crossroads included:
• How do people events and conditions influence change?
• What are the roads to the future?
• What is the relationship between power and inquiry?

Each question presented its own unique challenges; however, discussing and addressing those challenges throughout the year, became part of the inquiry process for teachers and students alike.
Students maintained portfolios of their papers and projects and were taught how to engage in self-reflective processes, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses and progress as writers and learners. As seniors, they presented samples from these portfolios to a panel of teachers, parents, community members and juniors as part of their senior exit project, which also included the writing of a substantive research paper relating to an aspect of the year’s essential question.
This reform effort has been documented in many places, most notably Michelle’s Fine’s 1994 book, Chartering Urban Reform: Reflections on Public High School Reform in the Midst of Change. The essays in the book illustrate the inextricable relationships between and among school reform, teacher inquiry and student agency. In order for meaningful, positive change to occur, teachers have to be willing to engage their students in a dialogue about issues that impact teaching and learning. At Simon Gratz, I learned how to interact with my high school students in the same ways I had interacted with my small children while on maternity leave. I learned to put their questions, concerns and desires at the center of the learning, accessing their prior knowledge then creating learning experiences in which they could pursue those questions in meaningful ways.
I transferred to Masterman in 1998, just as the new structures implemented by the reform movement of the 1990’s were being slowly dismantled by a new local administration and shifting national trend towards reliance on high-stakes testing as the primary measure of a school’s progress.
While the students at Masterman scored well on these tests, (after all – high scores were required in 5th and 6th grade for admission and again in 9th grade for re-admission to the smaller and more select high school), I immediately sensed an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the students. I soon learned that Masterman students would often begrudgingly comply with teachers’ assignments; they would less frequently actually engage.
My first year at Masterman, I tried to include the playwriting program in my English classes. I soon discovered that it was not a good fit; the academic requirements and the pressure for students to perform well on standardized tests did not allow for this kind of curricular “deviation.” I became dismayed by the implications of this kind of content-centered, grade-oriented competitive approach to teaching. My new students often told me that it wouldn’t take long for me to be “Mastermanized,” and succumb to the pressures of delivering a traditional curriculum with a teacher-centered pedagogy.
With the support of The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) I began to explore alternative approaches to what I was doing in my classes at Masterman. Using the terms “main stage” and “second stage” as they are enacted in the theatre as a metaphor for school reform, I developed a theory of “second stage reform” that I thought might be possible at a school like Masterman. Many theatres have two performance areas: a main stage upon which works are performed with a wide audience appeal and a second stage, sometimes called a black box, where new plays and experimental works can be developed. The second stage often serves as an incubator for main stage productions. In rethinking my approach to my teaching at Masterman, I developed an elective class called Drama and Inquiry that grew out of my decade long association with Philadelphia Young Playwrights and was consistent with my critical pedagogy approach to teaching and learning. While my English classes remained “main stage” productions, my elective became the alternative, experimental space: my “second stage” on which I could enact a different kind of pedagogy that might eventually have an impact on the pedagogy of the main stage.
The chart below illustrates the differences between the main stage practices I saw occurring in the major subject classes and the second stage practices I tired to enact in my Drama and Inquiry elective.
Main Stage Second Stage
Emphasis on answers Emphasis on questions
Individual achievement Group accomplishments
Lecture and Debate Dialogue
Argumentative Reflective
Competitive Collaborative
Knowledge Transmission Knowledge Construction
Certainty Uncertainty
Test Driven Process Driven
Anesthetic Aesthetic
Preserves Tradition Transforms Tradition

For three years of their high school experience, Masterman students follow a very rigid, prescribed academic program with little choice in their course selection. In their senior year, they are able to select from among a small number of electives that take the place of some of the more selective AP courses. The purpose of the Drama and Inquiry course as I stated to the students in the syllabus was to use drama to "explore questions about multiple perspectives, shifting identities and our co-existence in a diverse, complex and ever-changing world." It was my hope that we could "become a true intellectual community filled with members who raise heartfelt and complex questions and explore answers together in an engaged ethical dialogue."
In this course, we read plays by contemporary American playwrights that dealt with issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity and identity. Students wrote their own monologues and dialogues and eventually wrote and acted in their own one-act plays. They participated in alternative types of classroom discourse, including Socratic Seminars, collaborative inquiry, reflective conversations, and journal groups. In the early years of teaching the course, I was still required to create written mid-term and final exams, to be given by proctors during times designated by the administration. In more recent years, I was able to get permission for alternative assessments that were more compatible with the nature of the class. I was able to count the text of their original plays as a final exam and institute a series of in-class performances instead of written mid-terms. At the end of each year, we produced a “Drama Showcase” which consisted of original scenes, written, acted and directed by the students, performed for a small audience in an intimate space we created in our basement classroom or on the stage of a local theatre.
In “Learning from Laramie: Urban High School Students Read, Respond and Re-enact The Laramie Project,” ( Pincus, 2005) I document one class’s involvement with the course and discuss what happened when we read, researched and performed The Laramie Project by Moises Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Company. After seeing the work performed in my classroom, the director of the high school play decided to do the The Laramie Project as the high school play on stage in the main auditorium.. The performances were followed up with the Peer Educators leading workshops about homosexuality and homophobia. The play had literally made the journey from second to main stage
I would spend the rest of my teaching career at Masterman trying to infuse second stage practices into my main stage English classrooms.

Creating “Wiggle” Room – Designing the Course

In designing my English IV course, I had a little more leeway than I had in developing my English III courses because 12th grade is not a “tested” grade for either the state of Pennsylvania or the School District. And while I did have to adhere to English Department guidelines that had been approved by the District (we all agreed, for example, that every student would write a literary research paper in 12th grade), choose texts of literary merit from World Literature, and assign a range of writing, I was relatively free to design the course and select texts that I thought would interest and engage my students.
All of the students had read Orwell’s 1984 over the summer, so I selected novels, films, plays and non-fiction that I thought would enable us to continue to explore issues about language, power, identity and storytelling that 1984 was sure to evoke. I named the class “21st Century English Studies: Literature, Language and Lives in the Age of Globalization” and wrote the syllabus in the form of a letter to the students explaining my goals and rationale and soliciting their feedback. I included these questions as my guiding principles:

• How can we co-construct an English 4 class in an academic high school that engages the students in meaningful ways? How can we make English matter?

• What are the ways in which we can co-construct the curriculum of this course so it can better reflect the realities of human interaction in a global environment?

For their first homework assignment, I asked the students to respond to the syllabus, to tell me what they thought, raise questions, share suggestions and recount their past experiences in English classes.
The three responses that open this chapter are representative of the ones I received from all thirty-two of the students. Like Bob, Tiffany and Shelly, many expressed their disdain for the restrictiveness and predictability of some of their former English classes.
Mariah echoing the desire for relevance and variety explained, “I am really looking for a class that avoids the basic pitfalls of most English classes: tedium and boredom. A lot of English classes just have you read a story then write and essay on it. The simple response to this is to create a large array of techniques to tackle an objective. It can be research papers, skits, discussions, or whatever the students can think of…If the class reflects our wishes, we’ll be more willing to interact and get involved.”
Malik suggested a way to make the literature more meaningful to the students, writing, “My final suggestion is to sometimes move the ‘lens.’ When reading books, we don’t always have to focus on the book with blinders on. We can talk about what’s going on in the world and in our lives.”
Mariah added, “Even if you think that there are certain ideas the student must have about a book, you have to be willing to accept the view of those students who don’t see things your way or the way of the scholars. If you don’t accept those with opposing views, all respect will be lost and you’ll be forced to grade papers that just say what you said to your students. Never suggest that a student try and change his/her views, though it is acceptable to ask them to take a different viewpoint for a moment. It’s one thing to look through someone else’s eyes. It’s another to have your eyes replaced.”
Using metaphors of sight, Mariah and Malik offer powerful critiques of main stage teaching practices and echo Greene’s warning about teacher’s becoming functionaries and clerks in a bureaucratic system.
In going forward from here, there were three things that I did in response to the students’ letters:

• Organized the material into loosely structured inquiries into dystopias, language and storytelling;

• Varied the types of texts and writing assignments that I assigned to the whole class;

• Offered several opportunities for the students to select their own texts and/or the ways they responded to those texts.

In addition, I began our reading and discussion of every text by assigning a personal response. This way I was able to have access to and understand the sense the students were making of each text while they were reading.

Some Common Major Texts: Read or viewed by all
Orwell, George, 1984
PBS Video, American Tongues
Sophocles, Antigone
Fugard, Athol, The Island
Wiesel, Eli Night
Erdrich, Louise Love Medicine
Cruz, Nilo Anna in the Tropics
Eggers, Dave and Deng, Valentino What is the What?
Saptri, Marjane Perepolis


Some Common Papers and Projects – Completed by All

Film Scenario and Screenplay – Modernization of Antigone
Missing Scene from a Play – In response to Anna in the Tropics
Literary Research Paper - Formal research paper, student selected text
Collaborative Response and Research Journals – Love Medicine
Intellectual Autobiography – Long, complex personal narrative project
Final Exam – (in class essay with student-generated personalized questions)

Sample of Student Choice in Text Selection

Several times throughout the year, students were able to follow their own interests and select texts within the context of the organized inquiry units. The chart below shows the range and variety of texts read or viewed by several students. During these times, students often shared books or movies with each other and engaged in informal conversations about what they were discovering.

Chris Bob Kathleen Ryan
Dystopia Inquiry Republic of Plato A Clockwork Orange Wicked Escape from LA
Native American Storytelling Inquiry Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee Yellow Raft in Blue Water Doe Boy Genocide of the Mind
Literary Research Project On the Road Maus I The Secret Life of Bees Like Water for Chocolate


Moving Beyond “Wiggle Room:” The Intellectual Autobiography

Midway through the course, I sensed a trend towards disengagement among many of the students. The spaces I had opened in the syllabus for student choice of texts and student voice in response to those texts were losing their novelty and many students seemed to be going through the motions, not much differently from the way they would have had the curriculum and assignments been more traditional. I was very anxious to re-engage them to create assignments that would be personally meaningful to all. I thought back to my own educational experiences and recalled an assignment I was given in graduate school that really made a significant difference in my life: an intellectual autobiography in which we expressed our current philosophy of education, tracing our intellectual journeys and laying out the roadmaps for our future research and studies. This assignment prompted me to think long and hard about how my life experiences influenced my choices and how they connected to the books I had read and the questions I had explored in my academic work. I remembered how I had been galvanized the first time I read Paulo Freire, and how I found deeper meaning and purpose in my teaching life after reading Maxine Greene. More importantly, this assignment allowed me to discern the themes and patterns in my life thus far and gave me a sense of agency and purpose for my future, a way of integrating who I am with the kind of work I wanted to do in the world.
I began to modify this assignment for high school seniors. The students would each write a proposal for an intellectual autobiography of their lives so far, including a title, book abstract, annotated table of contexts in which they describe the contents of at least six chapters, one sample chapter and a book cover. Later, at the students’ request, I added an artistic component; these included paintings, poetry books, CD’s with representative songs, photography or web-sites.
The project was introduced slowly and was worked on over a period of three months. The first phase of the project was personal reflective writing in response to prompts I would give the class. The students would write their responses in their notebooks and would only share with others if they elected to do so. The prompts related to their literacy and educational histories. They wrote about learning how to read and write, their favorite childhood books, teachers who had made a difference in their lives, powerful learning experiences in and out of school and images they had of themselves as students.
Because the students had been together since 5th grade, they had shared memories of books and teachers. The conversations in class on the days we would work on these prompts were lively and engaging. Many of these reflections and discussions became personal as students talked about the impact on their lives of losing family members or surviving serious illness. It is important to note that this assignment in which the students were writing their about their own lives was done within the context of a year-long inquiry into language and story telling through the literature we were reading. While I deliberately did not make this connection explicit, many of the students began to comment on how their own writing was similar or different from Eggers’ or Wiesel’s or Erdrich’s. Still others addressed issues of language, culture, power and identity in their own reflections.
The final in-class activity we did before the students were assigned to write the autobiography at home was to look at a portfolio of their writing since 8th grade. Each year, their English teachers would have them select two of their best pieces of writing and write about how they had grown as writers that year. By 12th grade, they had 10 pieces of writing in their portfolios. Examining their writing portfolios in the context of the intellectual autobiography gave more meaning and purpose to what could have been a perfunctory activity.
For the first and only time during the school year, every single student handed in his or her intellectual autobiography on the day it was due. Kurt, who entitled his book Rounded, wrote about his experiences living in two very different contexts – a rural university town and a large urban city. He explored issues of language, race and identity in his own life. After the project Kurt wrote, “It was as though you let us go with all of the knowledge you taught us all year. The project basically wrote itself as we knew nothing else but to make the inevitable connections.”
In her chapter, Jasmine described surviving cancer as a child and how that experience inspired her to become a nurse. In an email to me after the school year had ended, Jasmine wrote, “I started forgetting about you as the grader and I started to really focus on me and my accomplishments, my hard times, the lesson I learned and the person I still wanted to improve on….. After completing this project, I felt a bit changed, relieved. Writing it was healthy for me.”
Another student, Kathleen, was inspired to write the entire book. Each chapter told of a significant event in her development. But what was remarkable about this work is that each chapter was told in a different way; Kathleen had experimented with her writing. She emulated the different storytelling techniques used by the authors we had been studying, writing one chapter as a play, another as a story within a story, another as a graphic novel, still another as a poem. Upon completion, Kathleen wrote, “The intellectual autobiography ... helped me create a place for myself in the world, or rather, helped me see the place I’ve simply been overlooking.”
As for Bob, the student who had asked for “wiggle room,” he too wrote a compelling narrative about his early years in school. In his chapter, he described an elementary school teacher who rewarded his students with money for answering questions correctly. Young Bob was very good at that game and continued to “play the game” right through middle school where he won academic awards at 8th grade graduation. By high school, he had decided to opt out, no longer motivated by extrinsic rewards. I am somewhat sad to say that I was not successful in motivating Bob to make his learning in my class more intrinsic; for most of the texts we read and essays we wrote, he continued to “wiggle” his way through them, relying on Sparknotes, in-class discussions, his native intelligence and excellent writing skills to fake his way through essays and other writing assignments. However, he did engage in the process of writing his intellectual autobiography and by reading it, I was able to come to a better understanding of who he was and what he needed (or didn’t need) from my class.

A Fitting Final – Student Generated Exam Questions

This past year, you gave us options, and different strategies to go about looking for the "right" answers to questions... and there was no one answer, it was whatever we thought the answer was, so long as we backed it up. Also, the fact that we could create our own essay topics that were used on tests and such kind of blew me out of the water. The fact that you had faith that we were smart enough to think of intelligent, well rounded, involved questions really made me think I wasn't as low on the "Masterman Scale" as I thought.
Barbara


At Masterman, all teachers are required to create final exams that are given to seniors during the first or second week of May. After having taught the class in a way that solicited their input into the texts and interpretations of those texts, it seemed inconsistent for me to create a “one-size-fits-all” final exam. Instead, I proposed that each student create his or her own essay exam question. The only criteria for the question were that it had to relate to one of the issues we had explored in class this year and that they had to include content from at least four texts ( whole class or self-selected) in their response. For those students who chose not to write their own question, I created three questions from which they could choose. Twenty of the thirty-two students chose to write their own questions. *
Barbara’s comments, shared above, address the way in which, just being asked to create her own exam question changed her image of herself as a learner. No longer was she “low on the Masterman scale,” one which ranks students by their grades and test scores, she was “smart” and “intelligent” and capable of completing this complex task. Because, I, the teacher had faith in her and classmates, they could reconstruct their images of themselves as valued learners, echoing Greene ( 1973) when she wrote, “The teacher who believes in stimulating and developing potential will be challenging – at least implicitly – the inhumanity of credentialing systems which sort and rank people according to market demand” (92 ).
And in a fitting outcome for me, the teacher, I was spared the fate that Mariah warned me about in the beginning of the year. The essays I read and responded to for their final exam were varied, interesting and enlightening, reflecting and refracting the course I had designed for them through their diverse lenses and perspectives.

Conclusion: Student Voice and Teacher Integrity,

Alison Cook-Sather (2006) has written that when students have the opportunity to develop a meta- cognitive awareness of their learning both in order to engage and as a result of engaging in serious dialogue with adults, they not only construct their understanding of subject matter content; they also constructs themselves anew. This reconstruction of self is evident in my students’ responses shared above. But what is the impact on the adult who so engages with her students? Greene finds the seeds of the answer in Martin Buber, whom she quotes: “In learning from time to time what this human being needs and does not need at the moment, the educator is led to an ever deeper recognition of what all human beings need in order to grow” (94). Including herself. A teacher who seeks this kind of dialogic relationship with her students will not need to move out of the classroom to grow professionally and personally. She will be able to find the work meaningful and challenging over the course of a lifespan.
Back in 1973, Greene railed against the bureaucracy that was paralyzing schools and forcing teachers into the role of bureaucratic functionaries. Thirty-five years later in the wake of NCLB, her words echo with pointed urgency as teachers once again are called upon to abandon their own goals, desires, beliefs and expertise, ignore their own knowledge about their students and what they need to learn in order to implement restrictive and often meaningless curricula designed solely to raise scores on standardized tests.
In a talk at the Carnegie Foundation, Director Lee Shulman (2008) discusses integrity in teaching. Teachers, he says, need to align their knowledge, purpose, design and action. I believe that it is impossible for a teacher to separate her true self, her values, her beliefs, her background, her experiences and her questions from her work as a teacher and remain in the classroom for any length of time. There have been times in my past where I have been forced to "teach against myself" -- that is, to present to young people ideas, texts, positions that I did not believe in. I've been forced to present material to them in ways that I know neither connected to nor engaged them. I have been forced to give them assessments that measured skills that are neither relevant nor necessary for real learning. When I have done these things, my actions have not been aligned with my beliefs.
I have struggled over the years to bring the two more in line. Of course, there has been no easy resolution -- only the tension that comes from trying to reconcile disparate ideas, perspectives, and approaches. I have tried to listen to my students and respond to their questions and needs in meaningful ways. The constant investigation into my own teaching and a serious attempt to listen and respond to my students’ voices, questions, and desires are the threads that can have held me together and allowed me to teach with integrity.

* To see the student generated exam questions and other materials related to this chapter, visit www.marshapincus.com/beyondwiggleroom


REFERENCES

Cochran-Smith, M.& Lytle, S. (1993) Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Cook Sather, Alison
Fine, M. (Ed.) (1994) Chartering Urban Reform: Reflections on Public High Schools in the Midst of Change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press
Freire P. (1987) “The Importance of the Act of Reading” in Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Freire, P & Macedo, D. (Eds.) Westport, CT: Bergen & Garvey.
Goswami, D.& Stillman, P. R. (Eds.) (1987) Reclaiming the Classroom: Teacher Research as an Agency for Change. Upper Montclair NJ: Boynton/Cook.
Greene, M.(1973) Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company Inc.
Pincus, M. ( 2005) Learning from Laramie: “Urban High School Students Read, Research and Reenact The Laramie Project.” in Going Public With Our Teaching: An Anthology of Practice. Hatch, T. et al (Eds.) New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Shulman, Lee S. (2008) Talk on Teacher Integrity. Carnegie Foundation web-site. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/files/elibrary/integrativelearning/assets/ilp_lsc lips.mov
Strosser, M. & Patterson, N. Videomakers (1993) I Used to Teach English. Philadelphia, PA: Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation. Executive Producers.