Freedom at Work

Language, Professional, and Intellectual Development in Schools

Maria E. Torres-Guzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259497
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores the freedom to use the language resources we have at our disposal to learn to our fullest, to engage in inquiry about learning and teaching, and to go beyond the surface in topics of schooling and education. Within a particular school context, the author explores how these freedoms came into being, how they took shape, and what they meant for the individuals involved. She shows that the individual and social freedoms in which the teacher and the learner operate within schools are important measures and outcomes of intellectual development. In connecting language, culture, learning, and intellectual development as freedoms in her own life, the author explores a new way of seeing the role of multiple languages in education and the freedom to learn.

1

ENMARCANDO/AN INTRODUCTION

This book is about freedom in education. Freedom is defined within as a state of being as well as a social measure of how we are living our lives. Freedom is defined very concretely within a particular place and at a given time. This, in part, is a reaction to the talk about freedom that is never defined. We think about freedom as important to how well we are doing. However, when we measure how well we are doing, we tend to look at the individual’s or group’s income or at the GNP of a nation. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, proposes that we stop and think about what we mean when we say we are living well. He proposes that instead of income or GNP we use the concept of freedom as a measure of development.¹ Since freedom is so vital a human desire, Sen proposes we may get further in understanding our existence in this world by actually measuring freedoms instead of money. There is a basic freedom that he calls substantive freedom, which roughly speaking is what Roosevelt called the freedom from want—the freedom to be able to get basic human needs such as flood and shelter. instrumental freedoms are associated with social opportunities, such as education, health care, employment, voting and political campaigning, and the like. Sen proposes that to guarantee what an individual wants and values, freedom needs to exist in the institutional structures, in our cultural ethos, in the human relationships we establish. Freedom is a social construction and, thus, to guarantee individual freedoms we have to create social freedoms that support them. Therefore, there is an essential relationship between individual and social freedoms.

Sen goes further. He proposes that freedom cannot be seen just as a process but needs to come into existence as an outcome as well. Freedoms, whichever they may be, must result in the expansion of freedoms. In other words, as we individually step into our freedoms, we have a responsibility to bring along others with us so that as a community we can sustain the way of life we want. Expanding those freedoms is development.

In today’s world, however, many of the freedoms we have enjoyed are under siege. Some of the freedoms that teachers enjoyed in the past have been thwarted in the name of standardization and accountability. My experience with a New York City administrator and a teachers group working to transform a school brought me to question the effects these movements have on limiting freedoms in schools.

What I learned as the school ethnographer was that it was precisely in the freedoms the principal afforded the teachers within the school, and into which individual teachers stepped to take ownership of their own professional development, that the enthusiasm for creating a better educational world for the children rested. Looking back at the ease with which I observed teachers entering the principal’s office to have a conversation with me or with the principal about what they had experienced in the classroom, to share a display of what the children had accomplished, or to get our opinion about something they were thinking about doing is not an everyday sight in many schools, especially schools with large populations of diverse language and cultural minorities living in poverty and in the inner city. On the contrary, what we tend to see in the high-poverty and minority schools are closer scrutiny and more rigid controls.

The story within, of Public School 165² in the Manhattan Valley of New York City, challenges the effectiveness of the forms of scrutiny and controls we are required to follow within our low-resourced and low-performing schools. within, I will provide the evidence for my assertions.

Rather than focus on the standardization of school curricula, that is, on making what we provide children in schools uniform and conforming to what is measured on tests, the work at PS 165 taught me that we ought to spend more time and effort in assisting children in understanding the knowledge we already have and in helping them make it their own. Furthermore, rather than focus on the sum of test scores as the measure of accountability of the teacher, we need to speak about the adult world’s sense of social responsibility and how it might appear in the individual and social worlds our young experience.³

The point is, we can talk about standardization and accountability as a way of achieving equity but we have ample evidence that the freedoms within the curriculum, what is taught and what is measured, are curtailed, and the outcomes are greater gaps.

Within, I highlight how a leader’s resolve on language equity and her moral imperative of social justice—that not only included the culturally and linguistically diverse populations, but that made them the center of all the school’s work—injected a school with new possibilities even when it was under the threat of closure. The ease with which the teachers and I entered Principal Ruth Swinney’s office was reflective of our trust of each other, and this trust was based on a shared understanding of our social responsibility with respect to the children and their communities. Our social responsibility and trust in each other created an atmosphere that did not hold up the traditional boundaries that individual roles and status called for. The boundaries were blurred and/or made seamless in the spirit of our goal—to turn around an environment of miseducation⁴ to one where the very same children could thrive. The tasks were not easy, as the school was in disarray physically, emotionally, and intellectually. The state’s threat to close the school was looming over it when Ruth arrived at its door as principal. yet, six years later, when she retired, those of us that stayed could say that the school had survived, persisted, and flourished to the point of being acknowledged for what was going on in its instructional and administrative arenas.⁵

When I thought about what was accomplished and the legacy Ruth left, I could see that what occurred could be identified as emerging from one kind of development—professional development, as it was organized as a freedom. It was organized as such because the school was faced with the task of developing the teachers’ capabilities to work with the culturally and linguistically diverse student population. It would have been efficient to organize staff development in traditional ways, but there were issues of theory development and appropriateness of application, of having sufficient staff developers with the specific expertise needed, and of having sufficient funding in an atmosphere of decreasing budgets that made alternative structures necessary. The more powerfully democratic route was to encourage the teachers to take on the ownership and responsibility for their own and their colleagues’ development. The path was based on a deep understanding of (and faith in) human beings and their motivations. It was also based on an understanding that creativity, which is what this complex educational situation called for, required a level of freedom to engage in professional work. The work of bilingualism was at a new stage; we were then experimenting with different components—the organization of the school, the philosophy toward an underprivileged group, the use of multiple languages, the development of teachers, etc. The outcome of the school personnel’s work would be the result of much more than technocratic complacency. It was not sufficient to learn new methods, the process of transformation in the school required passion, enthusiasm, and creativity. The entire school community would reap the benefits of having a teacher community that was excited about its work. The teachers felt they were in the driver’s seat every day because they were valued and treated as truly worthy of wearing the badge of teachers. It was the ethos of professional development as freedom that gave room to the developments that took place in the school—those that I could later describe as language and intellectual freedoms. Freedom was, thus, generating even more freedom and the freedoms were in two areas key to education—language and intellectual development.

It was in this context that I worked with individual teachers like Lo-raine Lagos, Peter Richardson, Victoria Hunt, Belinda Arana, Amanda Hartman, Berta Alvarez, Estrella Magnam, Isabel Fletcha, Peter Kenzer, Rebecca Madrigal, Estrella Magallan, Rachel Bard, Aida Cajas (later Genovese) and many more.⁶ Some of them were my former students; quite a few were not. They were each individually committed to the education of bilingual learners,⁷ language equity, and social justice. They individually and collectively contributed to this book by what they did daily in their classrooms, by what we did together during the slivers of time we met during the school day, before and after the children’s presence was felt at the school, and by what we did on Saturdays and during the summers.

As individuals and in groups, they taught me what thinking deeply about the education of bilingual learners means; how to think about the linguistic freedoms that are necessary for full intellectual development; and how to sit down with colleagues in total freedom to speak about their wants, desires, accomplishments, and failures. My work with them contributed to my own professional and intellectual development. I propose that the needs of bilingual learners need to be placed in a conversation of freedom because their intellectual developmental processes call for learning to be at its fullest, and to do this the teachers need to have the freedom to access all the resources (linguistic, social, and cognitive) at their disposal.⁸ Anything less will not provide them with an optimal learning environment. The intellectual and the linguistic go hand in hand. We construct much of our thought, beliefs, and values through and with language. Thus, we must take all the linguistic resources into account when we think of developing students cognitively and socially. In this context, my own desires were satiated and wanting at the same time. I enjoyed my work in the school context but I had to think of ways of extending freedom in other domains of my life. I needed to create an extended professional community in my own work place at the College and in academia while extending academia to the schools. In spite of the fact that I was a faculty member at Teachers College, the work of the college and my work in the schools seemed to be miles apart. At the school, I was always engaged in trying to understand and connect with prevailing theories, particularly those theories promoting reflective practices and collaboration with schools. At the College, I was always testing new ideas I read and heard about in the context of the lived experiences at the schools with which I worked. There were times when I believed the twain would never meet, although I always felt that what I was experiencing was the classical case of disconnect between theory and practice: I just did not know how to bridge it and bring my colleagues into the conversation. The book before you is one of the ways I felt I could begin to bring some of the tensions of theory and practice into the academic world in which I also live.

FROM GRAY TO COLOR: THE WHY OF THE STUDY

Six years had passed since I first went to the school. I remember the day Ruth invited me to Public School 165. Ring, ring! it was early September when Ruth called. PS 165 was about ten blocks away; we made the appointment. Upon climbing the stairs and going through the institutional gray doors at the school, I found barren walls and desolate hallways. The walls in the classrooms did not have much life yet. Around the corner, I found the principal’s office. Ruth Swinney was waiting for me. She stood up and we began walking down the hall. “I call this the Savage Inequality Tour,”⁹ she said. I would soon learn why.

We went up stairways with electric cables hanging from the ceilings, the tiles on the floor of the first floor were missing, and the auditorium was in shambles. The building was a 100-year-old elegantly designed structure by Charles B. J. Snyder¹⁰ that was in a complete state of decay. Since her appointment as principal at PS 165, just a month or so before school began, the then New York City Board of Education was facing the biggest asbestos clean up in its history. I had read about the asbestos problem in the New York Times. One of the articles mentioned not just the asbestos problem but also the roof leaks and other symptoms of long-term neglect of the buildings.¹¹ Ruth had almost immediately gone public, as asbestos was only one of the school building’s concerns. In addition, there were roof leaks and many, many maintenance problems.

“I had just enough time to put the furniture back into the classrooms once the asbestos was removed,” she told me. The water leaks, peeling paint, dangerous stairways, and loose wiring were still a common sight when the children walked in the door that fall. Abandonment and lack of commitment to the upkeep and maintenance of the physical plant were the best descriptors of the state of affairs at the school. Beautification of the physical plant meant that Ruth had to deal with the closed circles of the city’s janitorial staff. “Oh, did she have work ahead of her,” I thought. It reminded me of Freire’s questions when he first visited the Sao Pablo schools.¹² “Why does [the educational] rhetoric not include hygiene, cleanliness, [and] beauty? Why does it neglect the indisputable pedagogical value of the ‘materiality’ of the school environment?”

Ugliness, unhappiness, and hopelessness were not just present in the physical plant; they were the essence of the intellectual fabric of the school. Ruth told me that the academic performance of the children was amongst the poorest in the city. Only 17 percent of children at the school were reading on grade level. The challenges were many. The school had a 97 percent poverty level amongst its student population, 60 percent was non-English speaking, and their mobility rate was 33 percent. “it is a SURR¹³ school,” she said. Listed as a school under review by the state meant that the school was in danger of being dismantled as a district school and reopened directly under state control. The school district had been slowly giving in to the dismantling of the school by placing two growing alternative schools in the building. This was Ruth’s reference in naming the tour after Kozol’s legendary book, Savage Inequality. She wanted each visitor—city mover and shaker or educator—that went through this tour to be disturbed by what was seen and imagined.

The contrast was on the third floor. Upon entering this doorway, a flush of color gave way to a different reality in the school’s alternative elementary school. Walking in, the new children-size furniture on this floor was a stark contrast. The stimulating, bright colored rugs on the floor and displays of children’s work appeared almost immediately upon starting school. A furtive look inside of the alternative schools’ classrooms gave the visitor a sense of quality academic environments where boys and girls, as individuals and in groups, engaged, and were engaging others, in learning activities. Within the same building, mostly white, middle-class, ivy-league families (from the Columbia University and Bank Street College neighborhoods close by) had a haven for the respectful treatment of their children as learners.

On the fifth floor was a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Enmarcando/An Introduction
• Part One: Language Development as Freedom
• Part Two: Professional Development as Freedom
• Part Three: Intellectual Development as Freedom
• Index
• About the Author