What We Would Create? 5-20-2014
When I began my practice as a teacher educator, I wanted to create an atmosphere for my students that would reflect the possibilities and potential in education. I was drawn to Patricia Carini’s book, Starting Strong: A Different Look at Children, Schools, and Standards, which has a chapter with the same title. This poem and chapter has acted as an invitation to my students and myself to explore how medium, inquiry and humanity intersect.
The poem that holds a central place in this chapter is by Karen Brodine:
it’s like being sick all the time, I think,
coming home from work,
sick in that low-grade continuous way
that makes you forget what it’s like to be well.
we have never in our lives known what it is to be well.
what if I were coming home, I think,
from doing work that I loved and that was for us all,
what if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets,
knowing they were in accord, not set against us,
what if we knew the powers of this country
moved to provide for us and for all people–how would that be–how would we feel and think and what would we create?
–Karen Brodine, “June 78” (Brodine, 1980, p.58)
This poem, unpacked by Patricia Carini, brings forward several powerful ideas:
“This loved work Brodine speaks of I recognize as related to a strong recurring thread in conversations with friends and colleagues, quite a few of whom have found their jobs unsettled and unsettling. For several, their livelihood has been, or is right now, threatened, and for others it has been necessary to lower their standards of living to match pay cuts. Striving to make jobs more than just employment has been a preoccupation for some.
This is what Brodine is talking about. Reflecting back on these conversations, I hear us struggling for words, searching for a vocabulary to talk about work of a kind that is loved. Work that calls and has an answering power. Work that has the power to delight, to satisfy, to lead on, to lend meaning to life and being, for us-and for all.
For many in this room teaching is that work, the medium that satisfies and frees and contributes.”
(Carini, 2001, p.110-111)
Carini proceeds to speak about the institutional and societal barriers that prevent many people, including teachers, from being able to fully participate in their loved work. For those in education today, these barriers include institutional racism, a war against unions and women’s work, corporate takeovers of schools, high stakes testing, poverty, and top-down standards. In response to the current educational environment, Carini asks us to bring forward what we value as educators:
“Collectively, as parents, teachers, citizens, we can speak out in the language of these definitions, conceptualizations, and visions. Collectively, we can work to create classrooms that in turn create the conditions for effortful, loved work. Collectively, we can gather the stories of these enactments and document the classrooms that create these opportunities. Collectively, we can act and speak from these powerful premises to an enlarged vision of work, the worker, the workplace, and of schools and education in relation to them. Collectively, we can drive a wedge in the economic wall that blocks these vitalizing visions of what society and the schools can be and do.
So I wonder to myself: What if we did chart our course by these values? What if we did do the work of inventing classrooms and workplaces for the explicit purpose of creating space for making things and for loved work? What if we did that, understanding that we are by that same action creating the conditions that make it possible to recognize the maker in every child, in every person? What if we did that with the aim of carving out the space for a community of makers? What if we did all this? Then I wonder, indeed: “What would we create?” (Brodine, 1980, p.58)” (Carini, 2001, p. 120)
After 10 years as a teacher-educator, I am ready to share my past and ongoing work in answering the question above. It is my hope that this blog will inspire teachers, teacher educators, principals, parents, and those involved in educational policy to ‘join with’ and, while speaking out against that in education which threatens childhood and personhood, to also speak to what can be created in its place.
Kathleen Kristin Ruen
Citations
Brodine, K. (1980). June, 78. In Illegal Assembly. New York: Hanging Loose Press.
Carini, P. (2001). Starting Strong: A Different Look at Children, Schools, and Standards. New York: Teachers College Press