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[jhpsol]

The ICC Tower

[jhpsol]

Guide on how to navigate the blog:

There are a total of 14 posts for this project. To find each one, click on the tags at the bottom of the blog.

For example, the 1st post I’ve created will be tagged with “p1″ so you can choose to type in my blog’s name, and then /tagged, and then p1 like below.

https://jhpsol.tumblr.com/tagged/p1

You can also (this might be easier) just click on the tags at the bottom of the blog. There are 2 tags for each post that include the post # and the 4 digit day/month.

[jhpsol]

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12/15 Final presentations

A list I’ve compiled for future reference on lessons/classroom guidances I could run to create a more inquisitive, more unified group of students who will aim to be more socially conscious. Ideas are drawn from readings, examples I’ve seen online, and my own brainstorming.

Have kids write artist statements (helps them reflect and use language about the self in a meaningful way)

Giant collaborative poster (includes open interpretation prompts of who you are, where you came from, where you’re going)

As a medium, perhaps having students writing/drawing on glass (classroom windows?), on posters for the classroom wall,  or in letters addressed to a person of their choice (with recommendations from me)

 Making art without vs. with autonomy lesson

Allowing the students to brainstorm their final projects together

Making use of the outdoors for found material or as a canvas (scratching messages into the dirt, or studying the outdoors).

Creating a classroom mural garden with paper flowers and ways to be kinder/stop bullying written on them

Making open ended portrait projects of what they dislike, what they are, and what they want to be or desire.

Introducing students to identity poems and pushing them to write their own, then creating art around it

Showing a film in class related to social justice (does not have to be a documentary, can be a film with social justice themes and elements) and having students create art around their reactions

Character design project where students make a character that depict what they want to see more of in mass media. Branching from this into worldbuilding, 

Giving them a list of disabled artists to research and do presentations on for the class

Bridging the technical with concepts of power: discussing how certain camera angles and compositions can enhance or undermine the power relationships between two or more subjects. Bringing up specific examples to do this of destabilization, empowerment, power being stripped.

Facilitating discussion with students on the idea of fairness and  punishment/imprisonment/justice/vengeance vs. healing and making connections with what they see in the world around them today 

[jhpsol]

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12/08     NO CLASS - Studio Day

This week I’ve revisited “Toward a Queer Democratic Framework” while thinking about how I’ve seen it applied at my high school placement.

I’ll be going through the 3 key ideas in the reading and parsing out and how I’ve seen it applied.

Key Idea #1: Queering Ideas of Identity and Group Membership

- The PHS art department does their best to include queer representation when participating in art shows + competitions. 

- Bringing in artists who are queer themselves whether or not they make their work around gender and sexuality.

- Don’t invoke polarization, there’s no “other” when talking to students about themselves or about artwork. 

Key Idea #2: Going beyond Abstract Democratic Principles 

- Providing students with meaningful choices around classes (in part this is afforded by the gracious funding by the PTA)

- Informing students of queer scholarships, grants, and competitions they may apply to

- Allowing for time in the classroom to explore these options (time is an issue of accessibility in my opinion at the high school level)

Key Idea #3: Bridging the relationship between theory, policy, and practice

- Challenging students to readdress stereotypes through discussion and work

- Having students roleplay historical moments, and/or prompting indirect questions that would move them to do so (If this art piece were 3 adjectives, what would those be? What do you think the artist was thinking when she took a photograph of her finished work?) 

- Art prompts often have to do with the fluidity of identity and the changing of contexts (a perfect lesson that befits students who have come out of COVID)

[jhpsol]

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12/01     Book Club: Book Review Presentations

One of my favorite reads this semester was done outside of class, and a revisitation of a text I read in a different semester. I was reminded of it during our book club discussions around dealing with racism in curriculum and school environments because I felt that our presentations often centered around how to cope with policy rather than how to change. I also heard a lot of the word “decolonize” being thrown around, both in discussion and in my book. 

Here are some excerpts from Decolonization is not a metaphor by Tuck + Yang :

“One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences….which decenter settler perspectives.”

I am guilty of this. SAIC is guilty of this. I think it’s important to be reminded that decolonization has concrete goals, and the framework of these goals were formed around the repatriation of Indigenous land and people. Without these concrete goals, a lot of the talk around decolonization center a settler’s move to innocence. 

We see the term thrown around a lot in academia and school language (”decolonize student minds” “decolonize schools”) around social justice, civil and human rights campaigns, and self-care in ways that do not include or consider indigenous struggles for sovereignty or their contributions to the study and documentation of decolonization. 

“When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future.”

The troubling effect of not addressing decolonization as what is, is that the lines of solidarity become blurred and invites settlers to occupy native spaces and focuses the narrative towards assimilation. 

Any steps made towards liberation =/= decolonization. (Example: If we are to talk about the emancipation of plantation slaves and European indentured servants, then we must talk about how the U.S. government reparations included acres of indigenous land. If we are to talk about abolition, we must talk about the difference between self-ownership vs. land/object ownership.)

[jhpsol]

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11/17    Histories and Realities for LGBTQ+ Students and Teachers

I feel that one of the better ways to spread acceptance of LGBTQ identities in schools is to teach about how other cultures have come up with their own categorizations. This is pluralism, or looking at the range of multiple gender and sexual models in each society. (I would suggest looking into India’s “hijira,” Thailand’s “kathoey,” “bakla” in the Philippines, “two-spirit” in some Native American tribes, “TB” in Hong Kong, and “”mujerados” + “morphodites” in Latin American culture.

The more we study gender variance and share this knowledge with students, the more we can lessen the confinement of the gender definition. Introducing a wider spectrum to people who have grown up with the notion that gender is biologically pre-determined is important because even if they retain their identities as is, they can use these concepts to re-evaluate their view of others. 

This can expand into fields like public policy; leaders that previously did not think of bathroom assignments can make it so that bathrooms are more inclusive for transgender people. Gender variance is an important addition to cis-gendered studies also because it allows people to reassess their bi-gendered lifestyles. Women can ask themselves, “Why shouldn’t I break the rules? Why shouldn’t I go bald or grow out my mustache and armpit hair? Why shouldn’t I find a job in construction work?” While weighing the consequences in parting from masculinity or femininity, people will consciously control their own policing of others, hopefully to become more tolerant.

On the other hand, the rules themselves are also important to examine because people tend to put their own culture in the spotlight when thinking about gender. When we think about it, variance could be construed as “everywhere but here.” The term “here” could be someone’s idea of what gender is. 

Similarly, “anything but this” could mean someone’s culturally established norm vs anything else that differs, which is automatically a variant. Variance is something that is felt when you step from one country into another; there is already another set of rules that dictate how gender will be placed onto you. In this case, one must leave behind their Eurocentric lenses when studying the gender “variants” in other countries so that these communities will not be labeled “exotic,” or even worse, automatically grouped under the term transgender. This has often been done over the past; to cite one example, mujerados and morphodites were eradicated by European colonizers through containment and they were labeled as a third gender. 

[jhpsol]

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11/10    Educational Practices for Gender Expansive Youth

From the Anderson Ch. 2 reading--

“Barriers to healthy gender development:  1. Lack of safety 2. Failure to identify differences in threat/danger between private and public spaces 3. Lack of consensus among professionals 4. Disparities in the acceptance of transgender and gender expansive children in the larger community 5. Rejecting the gender affirmative model as disruptive to society”

I think if I were to add a 6th point, it would be “Failure to apply gender affirmative model to larger world.” Children consume a lot of media. It is unavoidable. We can provide rapport, they can find it in one another, but even outside of our community space they should have opportunities to explore their idea of gender.

Limiting their ability to do so is stilting at best and disruptive. If children are not able to witness the existence of queer relationships (platonic, romantic, etc.) outside of their schools and neighborhoods then they may feel distanced and intimidated to interact with society outside of their known circles. Knowing the difference between private/public spaces (2) is not enough, as that wariness of threat can easily transform into fear and paranoia. Proceeding without this nuance can be an act of harm towards the child.

Talking to queer students, I’ve already seen them seek out sources in media on their own. They will form community through social media apps such as Twitter and Tiktok and feel free to discuss gender there. However, as many online spaces are not formatted with the education and protection of children in mind, it is our job as adults to advise them in their navigation of these spaces. Online culture can often showcase polarized views on gender to children and present such information as fact. The danger of falling into these traps is one that children will not be adequately prepared for on their own. 

We as teachers can provide media sources-- artists, shows, authors, movies, media festivals, games, stories from both contemporary and old alike that show that queer people have existed all throughout history (even if they had not gone by the terms common to today.) There is value in the recognition they find in media outside of the recognition that drive them towards their friend groups.

[jhpsol]

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11/03    Disability Justice in Education

“There is also a related question around whether it is the child who is not ‘ready’ for the school, or the school that is not ‘ready’ for the child (e.g. having structures in place that help children feel comfortable in using the toilet in whatever way works for them at that time).” 

“Despite the apparent questioning of disability as a ‘protected characteristic’ here, later in the post the TA continues: ‘of course, if we’re talking about a child who genuinely has a disability, the school, health specialist, and parents, should write a care plan’. The mother in this situation can only be forgiven for the ‘accidents’ through diagnosis.”

-  Slater, Troubling school toilets: resisting discourses of ‘development’ through a critical disability studies and critical psychology lens.

Two things.

1. Schools are not ready for disabled children if they do not prepare for their needs first and foremost. Doing so will benefit all children because problem behaviors will no longer be seen as crimes. 

2. I find it troubling how much difference a diagnosis makes. It lends itself to the narrative that a medical label makes the difference in what is or isn’t tolerated. In extension, that labeling of a child is another term for “born this way.” If there is a diagnosis, then suddenly the child is “innocent” because they cannot help it, they were born this way. If there is no diagnosis, the child and/or the mother must be punished because the behavior can be controlled. The same “symptom” will be treated differently because of an adult’s perception on whether or not the child lacks ablebodied autonomy. 

I wonder-- why is that even relevant to a school’s responsiveness towards a child?

Why should a child ever be punished for needing help? 

What kind of message does that send out to the rest of the student body? I covered in a previous post how children model adult behavior and notice how adults socialize children and form their contexts. If children see problem behaviors being met with repulsion and a call to home, then they will act in kind. 

Even with a diagnosis-- why are diagnosed children talked about like helpless victims? Is it because the problem behavior is inconvenience to “the norm?” It creates a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type of situation. 

There’s a lot of intersections with this marginality and race, immigration status, class, and queerness but the one I want to point out once again is the “innocence” trap. If something is perceived as changeable, like hair, eating unhealthily, pronouns, or fidgeting, then it is a crime and the people around the subject in question are subjugated to their existence. If someone was “born this way” they are treated as the pitiful elephant in the room the teacher is ill equipped to handle because the student’s needs are not prepared for ahead of time. The diagnosis graduates you to being “tolerated,” in the loosest sense of the word. And even that-- that sliver of a right leaves people scrambling to prove themselves of their innocence. Just for a bit of scaffolding. 

The paradox lies in the fact that there is intersection. People born with disability often do not have enough financial assistance, black students often have curly hair, people of lower class are not able to always access healthy food, someone who identifies with a certain gender at an early age may change their identity label.  

It also sets the acceptable traits in society to what a proper “birth” entails. If you are born white, able bodied, cis-male, and straight with no identifiable behavior outside of the expected, you are born “correctly,” and with dignity. If you were born different, then you will forever be attributed to the idea that you are “inherently wrong.” 

Were it just a matter of misunderstandings, that would be easier to fight. But no, the fact that the pushback is systematic and creates barriers for a human  legally, in schooling, in job acquisition, in housing, in education, in healthcare-- it’s insidious. 

[jhpsol]

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10/27 // Anti-Racist Education

(TW depression) This is more of a free write than everything else I’ve written, I apologize if it’s not too coherent or readable. This is less about pedagogy, and more about my own frustrations with my local public schooling.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot post high school is how my core curriculum never taught me how to do research. Not really. 

We were taught to browse JSTOR for peer-reviewed academic papers published in the last 5 years, avoid Wikipedia, use articles published by news corporations, and aim for papers published by institutions such as Harvard or Oxford. We were never told the reason, only the fact that it made us more “legitimate.”

We were never told that writers, speakers, publishers, and institutions had intersecting intents rooted in money. We were never told to look into the person or the institution for their history. We were never given the time to do research into the other journals put together from the author we cited, and who they were politically sponsored by.

None of that seemed to matter. After browsing the various deep dive websites, I thought about my experience in AP Language, AP US and World History, AP Literature, Speech Club, BPA, Freshman + Sophomore English. So many opportunities for it to come up. It never did. 

The irony? My high school consistently ranked in the top 100, if not the top 50 in the U.S. 

It hurt when I realized my teachers simply did not care. I had to decolonize my mind alone, 3AM in my room my senior year finding out about the sanctions the U.S. put on North Korea, leading to mass starvation. It hurt when I read about the exaggerated lies defectors told for the cameras, given promises of financial stability. It hurt when I had to learn about U.S. imperialism during the Korean War putting farmers out of business, creating an insidious reliance on U.S. imports. I became obsessive about this realization in secret, compiling an excel sheet of news companies and how they were politically aligned on certain issues. It became apparent to me at the age of 17 that both the Red and the Blue in our democracy viewed humans like me and my relatives as capital.

I didn’t take any of my AP tests that year. I was working after school at my mother’s liquor store 5 days a week, and 10-15 hours on the weekends. It got vandalized 3 times that year, the local police did nothing about the broken windows, the perpetrator, or my mother’s safety. Her paranoia drove her to sleep inside the store for the next 4 years. I would sleep there with her, even on school nights typing papers on my phone. I was burnt out, and yet, still young enough to feel deeply hurt.

Senior year, I asked my English teacher for a recommendation letter and even knowing my situation she refused to give one to me because I didn’t take my AP test and I fell asleep in class twice. I asked my AP World History teacher, who had taught us that land rights is what caused the civil war (in agreement with my APUSH teacher), for a letter. You can guess the response.

I think I realized then that at my high school, being a lower middle class Asian student meant I was nothing. If I happened to be a miracle case following in the steps of my graduation class to an ivy league school, that would have changed their minds, maybe.

I don’t blame any specific individual nor do I blame my high school or my district. But the buildup of all of these instances and more weighed down my soul. Struggling against resignation was a labor of love for myself and my identity. That self-love radicalized me at 17. Under somewhat grim circumstances, maybe. But what did that mean for my financially secure teachers with decades on me who did not feel compassion because they did not care to do their research? 

I’m 25 now, I am still investigating my sources, and I still sometimes revisit that excel sheet I made as a child to remind myself not to commit these acts of casual cruelty as an educator. An abolitionist education is about freeing minds and creating spaces not incentivized by human capital, right? It’s crucial for teachers to be proactive with questioning the sources that form their moral views, because that is the basis of the pedagogy they inflict. 

It is not enough for a teacher to self-proclaim as a political side they have not investigated. That creates lessons and perpetuates a culture rooted in ignorance. No shade to anyone in particular, but I think we’ve all noticed how convoluted politics has become for our current generations (

We’ve been raised by and surrounded by white sources, so I think looking into decolonial records of world history is a good place to start-- U.S. sponsored coup d’etats, slavery around the world, imperialism, trafficking, sanctions, movements rooted in white supremacy. Published CIA records to cross compare. Readings from the communities that have been displaced in the community you live in. Then, activists across the world in our current timeline working on defunding the police, the prison complex, military exploits. Taking notes on labor strikes and their manifestos. Browsing congress.gov like the morning paper to see the legislation our government is pushing through under our noses. Paying attention to the stock markets and what people in power are investing in. Reading the white papers. Reading up on local construction and government legislation. Forming a structured pedagogy is last, I think.

I don’t know, even as someone who has 0 trust in our democracy, I don’t feel safe personally and I am anxious for my friends in other countries when I’m not tracking what’s going on. I sound obsessive and masochistic even to myself, but at the same time how can I not be? Knowing the pain of being rejected by the communities that raised me and the country my parents sought out for a better life, how can I not be? 

[jhpsol]

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10/20 // The Psychological. Sociological and Phenomenological Understanding of Identity

The Ford article is my favorite read by far. Discussing identity with students who have trauma from ableism, racism, and queerphobia is one of the elephants in the room when it comes to core curriculum. Are we qualified for this topic? Maybe, maybe not. Will we encounter it regardless? Yes, and we have to be vigilant as educators to respond. 

Empathy, compassion, a willingness to understand and accept that certain things may be out of our scope and hands. And yet, we need to do everything in our power to help students. If there is trauma coming directly from school, we must put an end to it. If there is bullying, we must act to protect the student, educate the perpetrator, and penalize the behavior. If parents are causing the trauma, we need to figure out the best course of action and use the student’s voice as the one of authority.

Perhaps even after that, we won’t gain trust and jump straight to open one-on-one discussions on identity. But it’s not necessary! We can offer support beyond words and direct counseling. It isn’t trivializing a student or avoiding the topic if we are using our lesson plans to allow for art-making on identity. 

I think when the topic comes up, it is also fair to do some sharing. Of course, gaining permission to speak on it by the student is important. We don’t want to cross boundaries and hurt their sense of autonomy. And if we speak on our own trauma, we must do so in hopeful and productive ways. There must be something related in the experience for the student to learn from, and perhaps feel comforted by. In terms of racial identity, I can speak to my own struggles with the idea of assimilation and the racism I’ve faced, my emotions towards the subject, how I coped, how I healed through taking action or through being with a community.

“Proactively request that higher education professionals offer courses and programs saturated with equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This was an advice from the article I can also pay attention to, even BEFORE I encounter a student who has shown their struggle. That is what it means to be proactive instead of reactive. 

If I know of a teacher who is racist outside of school, that means they are racist in school. I must bring it to administration, and see that action is carried out to either fire the teacher or put them through mandatory re-education on a leave of absence. 

If there is a lack of staff of color, I must bring that to the attention of the administration. Identity and emotional well-being is reflected in who we see around us. Growing up, the only Asian teachers I had were in high school and elementary school, and there were only two at that: AP US History, and Orchestra. Do you know what kind of message that sends out, in a community where Asians are 20-30% of the school population? 

I didn’t even consider teaching to be a viable option at the time because of it, because it was socialized into me that racism made it impossible. It was embedded into my subconscious. That is what heartbreak feels like: defeat.

[jhpsol]

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10/13 - Constructing Adolescence: Moving from Childhood to Adolescence

“Erikson’s (1963) view is that the ability to love marks the ultimate success of stage six – when relationships are meaningful and lasting.” - Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development Explained

To develop into an independent human being, Erikson says we need trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, and integrity. I think to love, we also need all of these things. I don’t just mean love in the sense of a relationship with a parent, partner, or a friend. 

It is a love with learning, I think, that marks our maturity. A love with ourselves,  to carry our healing, sense of safety, ideas of fairness, and ability to be compassionate. (I do not love that this is beginning to sound like a cheesy think piece.) The article says that adults desire “the feeling of being useful in life, accomplishing something, and contributing to society.” A love with learning and ourselves is the only way we can find that continuously throughout our lives and the only way for children to realize this as well.

His stages of development might contain a lot of holes, but I think the basic premise is something most of us can agree on. The question is-- how can we be attentive to these things inside of the classroom environment?

For starters, I think it would be good for children to see what these stages are. They may not connect with all of them, or have thought about them personally, but that is ok! They can be offered regardless, perhaps as a tool for children to identify them in the world around them. It pushes the idea that the adults around them are still developing beings, and that we all experience doubt and try to move forward and change for the better. 

We can show artwork and media done by different people ruminating on these different stages. Connect theory to meaning-making. Show through art and poetry how these different stages are impacted by our contexts. 

Take identity for example. This can’t exist in a vacuum, just as we can’t do so. Certain terms in identity have meanings tied to them, meanings that often change with time and cultural revolution. How we react to these changing contexts can also be a part of how we form our identities. Students can also learn through these examples that identity doesn’t have to be an instance of “born this way” to be equal to other identities. Differences aren’t crimes, changing oneself can be an act of celebration because we are developing our identity stage. 

As teachers, we can also openly discuss our own stages. I think one of the most underrated acts of love and learning as a teacher is showing vulnerability. If we are feeling stagnant, we can admit that openly. Allow students to show compassion and know we are human. Everyone has the RIGHT and is CAPABLE of growth and change. Who knows, a student might even be able to help out by giving suggestions and advice. Instead of lecturing at a student about a certain topic, we can ask for students’ knowledge on a certain subject matters. Asserting doesn’t have to mean ignorance! We are modeling consent and respect for others, and we are modeling an initiative to learn. 

[jhpsol]

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10/06    Theoretical Foundations: Traditional & Contemporary Understandings of Child Development

“Children are going to learn from what they are exposed to.” 

This quote pretty much sums up the Brain Matters documentary. To take it a step further, I’ve decided that for children to be active learners, the people around them have to be happy, well rounded, and proactive in their interactions with the child. 

Children are incredibly observant! And they mirror their environment. Our direct communication to the child is not the only way we inform them about the world. If the adults around them are unhappy all the time, angry all the time, or tired and hungry all the time -- the child sees all of that and processes that as the norm. Giving high quality schooling is also largely dependent on the caregiving. If parents in poverty are not able to provide time for their child, their child cannot prosper. As teachers, we can try to help parents seek out financial help so that they can be happy and rested with their interactions with the child.

“Because none of us can remember our lives before we were 2 or 3 or 4... it’s easy to think that there’s nothing happening in there.” -Al Race, Brain Matters Documentary. 

We have to be well rounded. As adults, if we are not constantly showing our own learning to the child, it not only signals that there is a stop-gap for discovery at a certain age, it also does not role model curiosity-- something essential in learning. It is not one-way. We learn, we teach, they learn from us, they teach us. By learning, we model how research and exploration can work. We display a healthy acquisition of ideas, and we introduce our children to spheres of knowledge outside of our own, and outside of their core curriculum at school.

“Language is our first symbol system, and everything builds on top of that.”

How we speak to a child is just as important as how we address others around the child. Being proactive with language is not only picking up a dictionary and loading ourselves with vocabulary, it is also speaking with kindness and respect towards others. For productive learning, we want to show encouragement and positive reinforcement. We want to treat serious topics with care, while also allowing the child’s curiosity to become an active participant in conversations. If the child feels excluded from talking, they will not ask questions. They may even shut down and actively ignore the conversation. 

Young children are experience deficits in learning prior to schooling. The brain has to come ready to be filled by the time children reach kindergarten. Play is also key to that, and can be a proactive activity. As adults, we can take children to different environments to engage with different motor skills and interactions. We can change up the classroom, and give time for fun activities. I might be gearing up to be an art teacher, but I don’t see why that means I should exclude any subject area from their learning. Cooking? Why not. The school has a cafeteria and it has ovens. P.E.? Children can wear bags on their feet covered in paint, and run around a canvas. They can dribble a ball with paint on it outside and cover a large swatch of paper. 

[jhpsol]

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09/29   Informal Learning Environments: The Power of Play

I didn’t go on the class fieldtrip, but the stories I heard from classmates saddened me. Not that parents being wary of adults around the play space is wrong, but in such a large public space I wonder if there’s some happy medium where adults who aren’t a parent can happily coexist with their child and engage in play. 

In the Lange reading, there’s a quote from Chapter 4 that struck me as insightful: “You can't keep children from climbing all over a piece of apparatus.” This is a quote from Karymore in an advertisement for a spinning wheel. And it’s true isn’t it? There’s a natural curiosity in children in the sensation and motion of play but I think it’s also something that’s been conditioned out of us as adults.

Have you ever heard of moving meditation? I don’t know if that’s the exact term for it, but a lot of research points towards a connected idea that humans learn and memorize better when there is physical association to an idea. Adults and children alike have been taught to separate their time into “free time/play” and “work time.” Sure, we can’t move around every time we need to draft a chart or type up a paper. But there’s also times we’ve been stilted by our inability to focus and simultaneously, our wish to play. And some view play time as sacred because it is allowing our brain to rest, but that’s the crux of the issue isn’t it? Why is work always so serious and tedious that we always need a break from it?

As someone with ADHD, I’ve learned that I function better when I treat my time as “do what I can manage.” And I do, but it’s become less about “managing” and more about “enjoying.” I enjoy working: I take walks while typing papers in my notes app, I present slideshows on theory with memes littered throughout when I’m hanging out with my friends, I do a really loose interpretation of yoga when I’m listening to ebooks of assigned readings, I sing to Nothing but Thieves lyrics while I’m doing studio homework. 

Learning should never be without joy and celebration. 

There’s a romanticism to the notion that mandatory education could function the same way, but why shouldn’t it? If playgrounds can function as a space for exploration, can’t we apply the same theory to core curriculum? Art? Music? P.E.? The reading made me realize that the playground is both the classroom and outside space.

In my future art classroom, I think it’d be such great fun to send the kids on “found material” scavenger hunts. They’d go searching for leaves and rocks to paint on, cut cardboard to take to their English classes so they can do their freewrites on them, rip up magazines or fold them into boats and learn their motions floating across water, manipulate cloth and make ropes around the classroom or wrap chairs into bundles that feel more comfortable to sit on or create props to roleplay characters from books.

Work doesn’t have to be associated with inactivity, nor dread. Socializing doesn’t have to be taught through stern lecture and admonishment. Core curriculum doesn’t have to be so distanced from extracurriculars. If the teachers at future schools are able to collaborate between subjects, then time doesn’t have to feel as segmented. Recess doesn’t have to exist solely to have kids “get it (physical energy) out of their systems.” Children shouldn’t have to grow into adults who fear work and loss of personal freedom or view exploration as a luxury. 

[jhpsol]

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09/22  Designed Spaces for Learning: The School & Classroom

Marjorie Allen was onto something y’all. Adults tend to get so inside of their heads when it comes to designing spaces for others. Liabilities, insurance, safety and health hazards, functionality, political insinuations (better playground = higher $$ neighborhood). 

Why are we thinking about ourselves when it comes to children’s play spaces?

Playgrounds and play time exist as a central reprieve for children going through institutionalized learning. Like many aspects of schooling, the playground is constructed in a way that gives authorities the greatest control over children and their spaces. The playground is mostly open space so that they can be surveilled at all times, and made of durable material so that children will not be able to cause damage to the equipment. It is also reserved for a designated portion of their day, generally an hour for kids to run around and expend energy that wouldn’t have a place in the classroom.

Here’s my vision of an ideal playground space (yet to be reviewed and assessed by children). I think they might appreciate the inclusion of these three things:

1. Engaging the five senses  

Sight; Color, scale, light, 

Touch: Drops, plush and hard ground. Wardrobes and fabric to manipulate.

Smell: Different scents in objects. Incorporating nature during different hours of the day.

Hear: Allowing objects that can be used acoustically (empty buckets, long rubber bands.)

Taste: Letting lunch and recess happen at the same time. Doing picnics. Going to forests and teaching scavenging to kids.

2. Interaction: 

Climb, make/manipulate.

3. Wonder

Mysteries + Fantastical elements!

Making structures whimsical.

Teaching them different games that involve  problem solving so they can later choose to incorporate this into their play if they enjoy it.

With these models in mind, I want to clarify that my utopian vision of the playground is inseparable from the classroom. Without changing the construct of the classroom, the playground will always exist as a controlled break for children. Simply changing the physical model of this place would not suffice. 

I don’t even think it should be one place like The Land shows us! Children spend 6-8 years at the same primary institution. If we prioritized children, we would have no problem putting funding into their spaces, and that includes allowing for frequent travel outside of educational fieldtrips. 

The impact of COVID-19 highlighted how restless children get when boxed into one space. Socializing them into behaving is how we’ve traditionally raised them, but I think that perhaps this limits them more than it helps them.

[jhpsol]

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09/15 // BLACK EDUCATION IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19 & SYSTEMIC RACISM

Things that jump out to me from the BERC covid report:

“Nearly one-third indicated they were “extremely worried” about their safety and the safety of loved ones (after the January 6th riots at the capitol).”

“Nearly 60% of survey participants had a member of their household who was an essential or frontline essential worker working in unsafe conditions, underscoring the disproportionate impact of the pandemic recession on Black employment, housing, food, and other necessities.“

“Nearly one-third  of all survey respondents lost a family member (11%), or a friend or community member (20%), to COVID-19.“

I really have no words. Like I genuinely don’t know what to say that would ever come close to being enough in response to this ghastly report. I can’t summarize it-- I don’t want to. It is awful. It needs to be read in full. I cannot imagine how one could comfort a black student, their relatives, and communities still, still  grieving. Talk about radical joy from the Dunn et. al article? No, no. Joy is a radical emotion I can address when it comes to abolition and social movements, but not in response to data about people losing members in their families.   

I can say that we need to keep donating to black communities. I just, I don’t know how I, as a student teacher in training, can talk about education in response to this that isn’t offering empty platitudes. Money is the best thing I can offer, and pedagogy is the 2nd in a way that doesn’t even come close to the first. 

It might sound like a cop-out for a post from me, but this is my sincere belief. I am a student teacher. I have my education from SAIC, one of the most expensive schools in the USA. 

What can I offer that doesn’t come off as distant outsider commentary? A lot of these issues can be helped out with money. Mental health? Money for therapy. Mass trauma? Money towards communities to afford going to clinics and wellness centers. Displacement? Money. Economic destruction and exploitation? Money. Cultural dispossession? Money towards schools so they may hire more staff and parents so they can spend time at home comfortable with their children.

[jhpsol]

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09/08 - Covid, trauma, and their implications on pedagogy

Is it a reach to say that it’s impossible to be a stranger to trauma at this point in adulthood? Whether or not you’ve lived with supportive relationships and a warm setting, trauma is a phenomenon that can be accidental and, as we’ve learned with covid, out of our hands. 

Reading the common reactions to trauma article has reminded me of the different ways my friends and family have coped throughout covid, and even before it. As much as I’d like to avoid being maudlin, to me these reactions don’t speak to our resiliency. Suffering and enduring consequence in the face of events we should never have to prepare for isn’t something I can spin into a good thing no matter how much perspective it offers us. Trust me-- I could link all the science articles on how trauma induces irreversible damage on our brain cells, or books on why humans aren’t built for elongated periods of stress on a hormonal level. 

A lot of my reading on that subject though, laughably is another reaction to trauma isn’t it? A manifestation of anxiety and my seeking to understand if what is happening is as bad as it seems if not worse. And this is what a freak-out looks like in my twenties, eerily calm hours of research. 

What would it look like for a student at the high school age? At the middle school or elementary school stage in life? Children are incredibly receptive. Children of trauma, sometimes even more so. What does this mean for children especially in this day and age, with open access to the internet? 

Three years and counting is an incredibly long period of time for people to experience trauma. While we might think that people are getting used to the pandemic by now, changes in response to community needs, healthcare, and schooling are still being made in response to the new strains and vaccine availabilities. Changes that, with the swipe of a screen, are being broadcasted every minute into all social networks, all online press and mainstream media, and all video hosting websites.

That means that for children, change (read: a lack of stability) looms at every corner. Maybe I’m reaching for too many strings, but I feel as though many of our relatives have felt similarly in times of war and political instability. For my grandparents and their parents, it meant escaping borders and laying low. It meant survival above all else, and that’s what my parents eventually ended up learning. 

Survive. Survive. Survive. 

A lot of that intergenerational mentality took genuine mental labor for me to get out of. I no longer want to clench my teeth and think about the future as some conditional verb tense, and I am still convincing myself of that. 

Question is, how can we avoid passing this onto children during a time of collective trauma when we ourselves are going through it? 

I’d like to think I can reduce it to... don’t do what our parents did. Don’t narrow their options into the survivable ones without letting them figure it out for themselves. Don’t speak at large about how weak they are, and how there’s danger everywhere without bringing up a way to mitigate the isolation of it all: support groups, distractions to turn to for recalibration, peers and sources we can introduce children to, our history and how things have gotten better even though it might’ve taken work. Don’t ignore everything, but don’t extremize what is already suffering. And most importantly, stress how necessary it is to help others beyond yourself. 

If covid has given us a collective trauma, then we must work towards a collective healing.