I Answer with My Life

Life Histories of Women Teachers Working for Social Change

Kathleen Casey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351705158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1993. This book shows, through the oral histories of ordinary women teachers, that effective prescriptions for change do not come simply from policy-makers. The author focuses on the narratives of three groups of teachers in the USA: Catholic nuns; secular Jewish women; and Black women. For each of these the individual teachers' narratives have been examined for constructions common to the group and these patterns are assembled into a discourse. Teachers' self-identities are considered, as are their assessments of the institutions in which they have worked, and their relationships with the pupils. The text examines how the social role of the teacher is constructed by the lives of these women. Incorporating this perspective of diversity into the educational debate, this book argues that these less dominant but important voices shouldn't be ignored.

1

Introduction

Imagine that, through some sophisticated communication system, you could hear every word spoken on the subject of American education over the last several years. Millions of utterances would simultaneously enter your ears, creating an unbelievable babble.

But, suppose that some remarkable unscrambling device allowed you to begin to sort out these voices. Then you would certainly hear echoes of a particular set of sentences—being outlined by Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel laureate in chemistry; being drafted by Gerald Holton, Harvard physicist; being debated by members of a national commission on Excellence in Education; and being “printed millions of times and in a host of languages” (Olson, 1988: 1)—the opening lines of A Nation at Risk:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves…. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983: 1)

You would also probably pick up the sound of the Secretary of Education, William Bennett, proposing solutions to this crisis: “Hire principals who are tough. Get serious about the use of class time. Nobody’s for mindless school work in elementary classes. We have to find out who is in charge of the schools” (Bennett in Posner, 1986: 14).

If your auditory system allowed you to listen more carefully, however, you would begin to realize that these were the loudest, but not the only, voices. In the background, for example, you might be able to hear a faint chorus of children, singing in playgrounds, “Watch the schoolhouse burn to ashes….”¹

If you had access to different, less powerful, wavelengths, you would be able to catch the voices of anonymous women teachers. You could hear them discussing the schools in which they work.²

And the reason I left was that I didn’t agree with a lot of the philosophy in the school. I really believe that a school is a place where people come together, and form some kind of community, and it’s not a prison, and if it’s likened to anything, it’s likened to a family rather than a prison. And my experience in that school was that it was much closer to a prison.

You could tune in on them talking about the students they teach.

There were times when I said, “if you skip my class, I’m coming down to the mall to get you.” So sometimes, I would go down to the mall, and it would be a big scene because the class would be waiting there, anticipating my coming back with these six-feet, you know, men. And I would get down to the mall, and I would say, “Hi, John!” “Uh, Hi!” You know. They were always really surprised. I said, “Well, we come to get you.” And they looked, “We?”

And, you could listen to their political ideas.

There isn’t a good term for those of us who sort of…. You know … are still motivated by the civil rights agenda! You know, the unfinished agenda of those years. And that’s how I identify myself. As one of the people who’s still motivated by that unfinished agenda.

There are indeed millions of words on the subject of education in the air these days. But the flurry of discussion is not as chaotic as it might seem. The style of particular speakers is not merely idiosyncratic, and the attention paid to specific proposals is neither unpredictable nor arbitrary. The ongoing educational debate, as I show in this book, is a struggle over meaning, one in which, based on their own experiences, particular social groups formulate their own understandings and interpretations of education, and try to put their own values into practice.

This is, therefore, a work about language, politics and education in contemporary America. It is based on the premise that language and politics are inextricably intertwined. Language is here simply defined as the way in which human beings make meaning, as well as the worldviews which have been socially constructed in that process, while politics are understood as relationships between groups with different worldviews, and the processes by which they contest each others’ perspectives. And these contestations are not limited to the verbal level; my definitions assume that words and deeds, policy and practice, are also inseparably linked.

As we know, some of the most intense, even violent, social battles in American history have been fought over schools; within living memory, we have not only seen national guard troops standing at the schoolhouse door in Arkansas, we have watched soldiers shoot students on American college campuses. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War appear in this work; so does Vatican II, and the launching of Sputnik, all in connection with educational issues. But each of these events has a different degree and kind of importance in the discourses of the particular social groups who talk about them. In the conventionally political sphere, as well as in the politics of knowledge, different social groups in this country speak distinctive languages for valuing education.

In a deliberate reversal, I move the most prominent speakers in the contemporary struggle over education to the edges of my analysis.³ This marginalization is meant not to underestimate, but rather to undermine the overpowering influence of dominant conservative discourse. At the center of my study are ordinary, anonymous authors whose ideas have, until now, only been known in their immediate social circles. The purpose of this book is to celebrate their alternative progressive versions of education, and in doing so, to recreate the possibility of public debate which has actually been suppressed by the national reports.

Of course, we cannot expect to see progressive perspectives on education praised by their adversaries. But it almost seems at times as if they did not actually exist. Although it has regularly been described as a national debate on education, the ideological initiative started by A Nation at Risk, and sustained by subsequent national reports, has never taken the form of a dialogue. Indeed, even the various voices which were solicited at scheduled public hearings have been silenced by the self-described “strident” (Seaborg in Olson, 1988: 22) assertions of the written reports.

One of the teachers who will speak in a later chapter told me she appeared before one of these panels; another prepared a document for a child advocacy group to present as testimony. Yet I cannot hear these women’s descriptions of children living in poverty in any of these reports. The voices of teachers have been systematically edited out; a handful of token representatives have been unable to prevent the development of a regulatory and punative posture, as each successive report seems more concerned with evaluation and enforcement.

Women teachers’ own understandings and interpretations of their experiences have been, until very recently, “not only unrecorded, but actually silenced” (Popular Memory Group, 1982: 210), in educational literature, as well as in the larger public domain.⁴ This book represents one attempt to remedy that situation. In Chapters Three, Four and Five, women teachers are presented as authors—of their own life history narratives, of their own lives, and, of social change.

Chapter Two sets the scene for the presentation of my original research and analysis in subsequent chapters by situating that work within a theoretical, methodological and political context. I show how the ideas of the Popular Memory Group have influenced my collection of the oral history narratives of women teachers, and how Bakhtin’s theories are important for my analysis of these texts. I discuss the actual procedures employed in planning and implementing this project, and I consider the social relations of research. This chapter also outlines an overarching model for understanding the multiplicity and diversity of various discourses on education in both contemporary and historical contexts.

In-depth analyses of three groups of teacher-generated texts are presented. In Chapter Three, the narratives of Catholic women religious, nuns, are introduced; these women have taught in parochial schools, and have been politically involved in “social justice ministry.” Chapter Four concentrates on the life histories of secular Jewish women, who have taught in inner-city schools, and whose political projects are connected with the “Old” and “New” Left. In Chapter Five, the stories of black women teachers are presented; their personal, professional, and political lives are committed to “the uplift of the race.”

In each of these chapters, individual teachers’ narratives have been examined for constructions common to the group, and these patterns have been assembled in the form of a discourse, a consistent system of controlling metaphors, notions, categories, and norms which develop and delimit its speakers’ conceptions. Teachers’ self-identities are considered, as are their assessments of the institutions within which they have worked, and their relationships with the children they have taught.

In the concluding chapter, I situate these speakers’ narratives within the progressive traditions to which they refer, and I discuss the theoretical significance and the practical importance of these women’s life histories in a time of conservative triumphalism. Hopefully, by the time readers have finished this work, they will have a clearer understanding of the ways in which various social groups in this country talk about education; they will be able to place the several quotations which begin this introduction into their ideological contexts; and they will be able to situate themselves relative to the political perspectives which have been discussed.

2

Theory, Methodology, and Politics in Discourse Collection and Analysis

In the metaphor which introduces this study, I imagine the reader of this book as part of an audience tuned in on recent pronouncements on American education. But listening or reading, are not passive, neutral activities. We engage in a dialogue, whether we are in an actual conversation with another person, or watching the television, or reading a newspaper. While we read or listen, we continually make judgments on what we see or hear; we make sense through a process of selection and rejection. And what we select and reject very much depends on who we are, who is speaking to us, what they say, how they say it, where and when we are listening.

In this chapter I identify myself as a researcher and I locate my research project in a specific social context at a particular moment in time. I briefly discuss the ways in which my own personal, professional and political experiences have shaped, and have subsequently been shaped by, this book. I situate myself theoretically, acknowledging my intellectual debts to the Popular Memory Group and Mikhail Bakhtin; and I describe the actual procedures I have used in the collection and analysis of the narratives in this book. I also comment upon the ways in which participants actively influenced both my procedures and my final conclusions.

My Own Identity As a Woman Teacher Working for Social Change

Let me introduce my discussion of the theory, methodology and politics of this research project with a brief life story, one which focuses on the ways in which my own modes of interpretation have been influenced by my personal relationships and lived experiences. I should begin by saying that I come from a family of teachers, seven at the last count, including myself. I tell my students I was genetically determined to be a teacher!

My father was teacher-as-worker.⁵ He taught in an all-boys’ vocational high school, and was employed as a skilled draftsman and sheet-metalworker in school vacations. I remember my father boasting that he could make “square into round” ducts, complaining about the Board of Education (“One Ten Livingston Street”), and bringing home stickers which said: “I am an underpaid New York City school-teacher.” Because my childhood coincided with a particularly intense period of labor history, I recall the angry suspense of teachers’ and sheet-metalworkers’ strikes, my father at home, hammering plasterboard, or mixing cement, arguing with the news on the radio.

Yet this is not an uncontradictory set of memories: my father building the United Nations one summer; teenage boys breaking their teachers’ windshields with baseball bats; my father’s endless evening classes at City College, because he did not have a college degree; union medical benefits paying for my open-heart surgery; sheet-metalworkers’ union scholarships contributing to my siblings’ college tuition; and that same union being forced by the Supreme Court to admit black apprentices.

My mother engaged in “labors of love”: creating family; being pregnant; mothering six children, which included keeping the sickly one (me) alive; making children’s and dolls’ clothes (which I can still describe in minute detail); really cooking; always cleaning; washing and hanging out clothes to dry. When I was in second grade, hearing the squeak of clothesline pulleys outside the classroom window made me homesick.

My mother always worked; she always taught; but, before she was married, and after my youngest sister went to school, she was paid wages to teach other people’s children. My mother worked in the school with the lowest reading scores in New York City. Sometimes children were only enrolled for one month, until the rent came due. Her students came to school in December without jackets. Families were constantly getting burned out of their apartments. The administrative solution was prepackaged curriculum; “dis star, dat star,” I mocked it.

These were my mother’s other children. At home she told us stories about their lives. One year she had a girl she called “my black Kathleen.” As long as I can remember, my mother cared about poor children. I cannot recall exactly what my mother said as we rode on the elevated train, looking through cracked windows into apartments of black and Puerto Rican families. Was it then that we talked about migrant farm workers’ children, and Janey Larkin’s blue willow plate (Gates, 1940)?

When I worked in the Headstart Program in Bedford Stuyvesant, I came home with stories too. I found out about Ebony magazine when the black teacher with whom I worked showed it to her class. There was a silent, watchful little girl; one day she surprised every one by talking into a toy telephone. There was a little boy who did not know what crayons were for. I can still remember Sandra, the two Deborahs and Enrique after twenty-five years; when my (black) daughter visits the high school where my brother works, and meets the young black women he teaches, I wonder what those young peopl...