As part of my duties for the Small Schools Coalition, I am grateful for my unfettered access to voluminous data and global authorities, like Dr. Stuart Grauer, that make such a solid case for the Small Schools Movement. I am also privileged to see firsthand the enormous impacts these intimate learning communities have in the lives of their students.

However, like many people of my generation (later Gen X’er here), I never had the opportunity to step foot in a small school, or even inside a unique educational environment once I left preschool. After that, and no matter which side of the country I lived on, or what grade I was in K-12, every school I attended and class I took was pretty much the same. The schools themselves were tough, impersonal and at times, flat-out dangerous places. The best I could hope for most of the time was to virtually disappear, because it seemed like whenever I was recognized things never turned out well for me. And that is what I thought was “normal” in terms of education for the first chunk of my life.

In fact, I did not enter what could be considered, in the spirit of the Small Schools Coalition definition of the term, a “Small School,” until I was a graduate student at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. I will never forget the first Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy (FALA). There were only around 300 children in the entire school. That figure was less than the number of students in my high school graduating class by 50%! To see how those children interacted with that teacher, who was more of a guide than authoritarian figure, rocked my world. That was the first time I could begin to wrap my mind around rethinking what education could be.

Let’s spend a little bit of time rethinking what education could be, based on what many people, myself included, grew up being taught was “normal.” Then, let’s take a look at how a few Small Schools Coalition members are helping their students and communities prepare to succeed in our constantly evolving “new normal” that large, traditional schools like mine were never even designed to address…

The One Best System for Education
During my time with the SSC, and on more occasions than I can count in the recent past, I have found myself rethinking what education is and could be based on one internally-posed question: What if small schools were normal? Meaning, what if I had grown up in a society that had not abandoned small learning communities over a century ago now, for what Educational Historian David Tyack called “The One Best System?”

Of course, what any of us human beings consider to be normal, and for that matter abnormal, is based on both formal and informal educational processes. Whether learned in school, at home or on the streets, we create and sustain our everyday realities based on what we are taught that reality should be much more so than what it could be.

I lived on both coasts as a child, and a state or two in between. No matter where I lived, the schools I attended, and the classes I took, all bore a striking similarity to each other in form and function: Large and generic. That is not by accident, but rather by design. But where did this design come from?

To understand this, we must venture back to the mid 1800’s. Until that point in American history, schools and their governing boards were ethnically invested in their constituents, and were comprised mainly of neighborhood inhabitants that shared cultural similarities and community interests. This included small local schools based on religious and/or ethnic affiliation that taught children needs more specific to their communities, such as agriculture or basic technological and mechanical skills that would help students meet the needs of their societies’ when they are ready to go to work.

The Centralization of Education in the United States
The influx of immigrants coming from places like Ireland, Eastern Europe and Russia, began to ranckle the Western European Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigrant community for several reasons. First, these immigrants had strange customs and languages. They did not act like the English immigrants. Or, as Educational Historian David Tyack put it, “Perceiving a decline in their social authority and an increase in sin and disorder, Protestants waged a vigorous campaign to inculcate their morality in a society becoming increasingly pluralistic” (Tyack, 1974, Pg. 105).

Second, members of those Western European immigrant cultures were primarily responsible for the proliferation of industrialization in the United States during this time. Immigrants were only viewed as potentially worthwhile if they could be indoctrinated into a capitalist economy. This economy did not value artisans or musicians nearly as much as textile plant workers. Public education was considered to be the most effective means of socializing future workers to “The new modes of production, attuned to hierarchy, affective neutrality, role-specific demands and extrinsic incentives for achievement” (Tyack, 1974, Pg. 73).

Seeing Beyond Liberalism and Conservatism
By the end of the 19th century, a cadre of wealthy businessmen, Protestant clergy members, and influential politicians planned for an education system vesting political power in small committees that would ensure the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon culture. Among other things, they ridiculed the “exceedingly democratic ideal that all men are created equal and urged that schooling be adapted to social stratification” (Tyack, 1974, Pg. 126). These men believed that their cultural and religious upbringing made them favored over other human beings, which allowed them to have wealth and success at the expense of others.

This was called “The Gospel of Wealth.” It was, and still is based on an interpretation of the New Testament that some interpret or translate to mean those with wealth and social prominence are closer to God. Schools were designed to replicate this exclusive heaven on earth, where the people in charge are meant to serve as a bridge between God and the common man.

The Gospel of Wealth is not a liberal or conservative thing, but a Protestant one used by both liberal and conservative influences during this time to justify the divine nature of their plan. In the United States, “liberal” originated as a largely economically deterministic point of view of some Protestant people who believed the bible should be interpreted based on economic principles and specifically, industrial capitalism.

Important to note is that there were no “conservatives” at that time in the United States as they are defined now, because up until that point Protestantism had always been interpreted from a largely religiously deterministic point of view. So, in the Protestant community back then, conservatism was just normal Protestantism. As Professor Eliot Eisner exhaustively documented in his life, this influence directly affected schools.

On one hand, schools are places where lack of individual control reinforces an eventual future where workers will enjoy relatively little if any autonomy. Specifically, principals and administrators are the owners/CEOs, teachers are middle management and students are hourly employees who punch a clock (i.e. ring a bell) to move from station to station during the course of their workday. They learn just enough this way to be able to function on a production line, or in a shop somewhere. This represents the liberal influence behind centralization.

On the other hand, schools are designed to be places where subservience to authority reinforces a present where human life is believed to result from sin. The only way to overcome this sin is to create a covenant with the Protestant-Christian God. Specifically, principals and administrators are God, teachers are clergy and students are parishioners who, it is assumed, are pre-dispositioned to cause trouble because that is their nature. They learn just enough to favor Protestantism as a behavioral code if not religious practice. This represents the conservative influence behind centralization.

Standardized Education Spreads Nationwide
These larger, standardized school systems were in place throughout the United States by the 1930’s. It really did not matter to the people in charge if students in these large, formal schools were Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu or Pagan. It did not even matter if they had learning difficulties that were not obvious enough to keep them institutionalized, like in the cases of people with Down Syndrome and other severe disabilities.

All that really mattered to this cadre of influential people is that children go to school to fulfill the larger economic and social cues every person who is not already benefiting from the gospel is assumed to lack knowledge of. These cues are meant to supersede any individually existent characteristics and behaviors that might otherwise conflict with them (like native languages and rituals). They were canonized in textbooks by scholars like 19th century Professor of History at Columbia University David S. Muzzey. Muzzey believed that Americans, or Us. were people like himself; land owning, genteel Anglo-Saxon Protestant Western Europeans.

To Muzzey, Them were the immigrants, the masses that were causing society to become too pluralistic. Muzzey believed the burden of Americans such as himself was to “Assimilate and mold into citizenship them.” He also felt that failure to assimilate them risked “an undigested and indigestible element in our body politic, and a constant menace to our free institutions” (Fitzgerald, 1979, Pg. 63). By indoctrinating his foreign elements (i.e. human beings), Muzzey and those he represents are able to manufacture a status quo that relies on the health of the established economic and social systems to maintain.

In this context, the entire “melting pot” ideology, historically seen as neutral or equal for all American citizens, is really a metaphor for everyone becoming “Us” in behavior and/or performance. In the process of “becoming,” any behavior, lifestyle, ritual, practice or point of view not considered acceptable to Muzzey et. al was to be buried deep down inside, and kept out of sight at all costs (Pai. Adler and Shadiow, 2006). That is how the “status quo,” or mainstream norm in our industrial society was manufactured.

Education for Maintaining the Status Quo
The status quo being ever-changing, the textbook industry has done its best to keep up with the current discourse and ideology of the time period. According to Frances Fitzgerald, a movement in the early part of the 1900’s through the 1930’s would influence curricula in a liberal way. This included heavily stressing economic individuality and mobility tied to Capitalism as a marker for achievement and equality.

In the 1940’s, things moved toward a more conservative social discourse around the events of WWII, which left curricula stressing the moral seriousness of being an American in a conservative manner. This included a push towards unity against a common enemy and self-sacrifice for the better of the nation. The late 1940’s/early 1950’s brought an even stauncher morally conservative, anti-communist and at times, overtly religious social agenda. This conservatism was supported by liberal representation stressing consumerism to support Capitalist economic and financial institutions in the name of Freedom and Democracy.

The 1960’s and 70’s saw heightened distrust of capitalism and the government, which caused a slight “burp” in curricular delivery where educators, scholars and some parents began challenging the narrative schools had been espousing since the turn of the century. But the 1980’s successfully reasserted materialism, and the 1990’s brought the rigidly standardized No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This resolidified the status quo (for the time being at least), while also resolidifying the trend began in the 40’s toward passive consumerism as an extension of active patriotism.

This form of economic one-upmanship to display successful societal participation remains prevalent in both schooling and society today. Or, we are taught to strive for success solely by supporting the system the way it is based on what we learn in school, and don’t rock the boat too much otherwise. This warning is silently (or not so silently) lobbed toward individuals across many disciplines, industries and social circles. It also applies to ideas and institutions themselves that challenge widely accepted beliefs… like many of the researchers, administrators, teachers, parents and students in the modern day small schools movement.

How a Small School Benefits Everyone
Despite this, many small schools are successfully merging the history of intimate, community-involved learning (i.e. small schools); with the present day circumstances resulting from 150 years of schools, districts and oversight agencies like the US Department of Education taking schooling in general, and school size in particular, in an entirely different direction.

Whereas the entire idea behind the melting pot was that there is indeed one best way to do things, and everybody should mold their reality to that way, small schools resemble something more like a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, all ingredients (people) retain their distinct individuality or flavor, but come together equally to enhance the overall experience (society).

The success of the following schools and their students testifies to the fact that there is never one best way to do anything in education… at least, not if schooling is going to benefit everyone in their own life-affirming way, instead of just a relative few at the expense of many others.

Take, for example, The Arbor School of Central Florida. The Arbor School provides customized, therapeutic education for children with high functioning Autism, Dyslexia, Down Syndrome, Asperger’s and other Learning Disabilities. Instead of hard desks and cold chairs, Arbor uses fitness balls, bean bags and other sensory-based approaches to provide an environment in which students can learn, grow and thrive.

Like Arbor, the Otto Specht School in Chestnut Ridge, New York provides a variety of educational programs designed to meet the needs of students with developmental delays, social and sensory sensitivities, and learning challenges. They provide developmentally appropriate academic and artistic curricula in small, individualized class settings. Artistic activities including speech and movement. Visual and musical-based methodologies are integral to classroom activities, as are practical skills such as cooking, weaving, wood- and metalworking, farming and animal care.

It is important to note that both Arbor and Otto Specht fill dire needs in our society for children who grow up to be adults with conditions like Down Syndrome. Historically, these children were separated from their peers and families and placed in institutions. Eventually, they were integrated into large schools and the curriculum/structure that already existed was modified slightly for their needs. But that curriculum was not custom designed for them, nor can it ever possibly come close to replicating the success and quality-of-life of a curriculum that is.

How about the Community School in New Hampshire? At the Community School, students in grades 6 -12 and their teachers collaborate in small multidisciplinary classes, at community meetings, and on the school’s farm and forests. The school’s mission is to build a healthy local community that contributes to a sustainable world. Unlike rural country schools’ long gone now, however, the Community School is focused on trying to help get our planet back into better balance because industrial capitalists did not take environmental sustainability into account 150+ years ago.

The Grauer School in Encinitas is also spearheading sustainability on and off campus. Boasting LEED Certified sustainable buildings, farm-to-table agriculture and a handful of other green initiatives, Grauer is at the forefront of the small schools sustainability movement. But Grauer School also specializes in cultural sustainability and preservation. Specifically, its expeditionary learning programs allow students to venture out locally, nationally and globally to interact with the world around them. Expeditions celebrate diversity by respecting each person, group and culture as they are; instead of trying to coerce or force them to adopt Grauer School norms, values or customs for acceptance and equality.

As amazing as all these schools are, there is no more fitting example to drive home the potential of small schools in rethinking the school experience than the Waiahole School located in the Waiahole farming valley on the island of Oahu. The school celebrated its 130th anniversary in September, 2013. As one of the oldest and smallest schools on Oahu, Waiahole School is the heart of the Waiahole-Waikane community.

Not only does it stress academic achievement, Waiahole also places equal importance on cultural preservation and heritage. As a result, students leave 6th grade with not only a solid academic foundation, but just as importantly a solid understanding of what makes them unique and important that is based on other things than prevailing societal cues like material accumulation as markers of successful citizenship.

Put the Spotlight on the Education System

It is no secret that large mainstream schools, like the elementary, middle and high schools I attended when I was a child were not designed, structurally or curricularly speaking, to provide the kind of student-centered learning experience these small schools do. And this is a problem.

We can point fingers at teachers, students or parents for the failures of mainstream education in recent decades. But the problem is the system itself. It was never designed to accommodate or evolve. While our global society has evolved, and nations continue to overtake us in educational performance relative to modern trends and needs that go beyond production line capitalism, we have made only small surface level changes to a system that was created solely for that purpose.

At the same time, while our society has become even more diverse than it was then, mainstream education is still largely geared toward delivering an experience that teaches students, as Tyack recalls former New York City educator Leonardo Covello putting it, that “Italian (or Irish, or Jewish, or African, or Hispanic, or disabled, etc.) meant inferior.” Anything more than surface level changes to the original curricular structure or content are still not tolerated at this point… at least not at the mainstream level.

And that is why small schools are so vitally important. The schools above are just a brief glimpse of the schools that should be celebrated for doing their own thing to the benefit of their students and communities. Personally, I have learned to celebrate them whether or not the school’s curriculum is aligned with my personal, private beliefs and goals. I celebrate them all equally regardless, because their shared passion for intimate, student-centered learning supersedes any differences in their missions and values. Can you imagine what our nation would look like populated with thousands upon thousands of small schools that serve and celebrate their native, local and national communities and cultures at the same time?

Meet the New Boss…
Okay, so the past 150 years have bestowed upon us a nation of large, cold institutional campuses that can just as easily be confused for prisons as schools in many cases. This refers to both the architecture and curriculum. Like many other people, I was an inmate at those institutions. I did not have a choice other than to play hookey, which I admittedly did quite a bit.

So I know firsthand that subjects like ‘readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic are standard no matter when, where or what…. while subjects like music, the arts and even physical activity and exploration are treated as fringe benefits at most. And it is these pursuits that help us truly define ourselves as truly alive human beings, not merely living functions of profitability.

It is obvious that if small schools like these are going to work on a large scale, people need to work together on grassroots-community levels in most if not all cases, versus trusting the interests of those in power to guide their educational destinies. This concern refers directly to privatization of education based on the shortcomings of the current education system.

Privatization is an ongoing bipartisan effort. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is attempting to do this under President Donald Trump, and previous secretaries including Arnie Duncan (liberal Democrat) and Rod Paige (conservative Republican) have attempted to do for presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush respectively. In fact, privatization attempts over the past 30 years are nothing more than a governmental backlash to diversity from all sides.

This is why, under current circumstances, government-promoted privatization and efforts to use federal dollars as a way of influencing departments of education will make things worse — and they will not promote what’s best about small schools, public or private. It will continue to primarily only financially and socially benefit relatively few already wealthy people like the DeVos family, and those (like politicians) their wealth influences.

This is actually a huge part of the problem with privatization in general, in that it simply allows those who already have control over societal processes to regain and/or gain more of it without direct competition. Of course, these people also maintain very strong motivations to ensure curricula maintains existing control individually and/or culturally speaking.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly currently than in Arizona. For the past several years, charter school budget money is being used to heavily pad the pockets of state lawmakers who own the companies that run private charter schools for profit. And just like DeVos is attempting to do on the federal level, some of Arizona’s money is also going to schools that discriminate toward people who do not look, act and think like Muzzey and his friends.

Meet the new boss, same as the old, right? Unfortunately, for every upstanding small charter school like FALA, more and more investigative research indicates Arizona, and many other states like it, has exponentially more compromised ones like Benjamin Franklin Charter Schools.

Pondering the Future of Small Schools in our Large World
Is mainstream education nationwide locked in this large, general, relatively narrow trip for the rest of eternity? There really is no easy answer here. Do true Small Schools work? The ever-growing body of “real-world” research indicates yes the definitely do. The anecdotal evidence from scores of parents, students and community members supports this research.

Could they work on a larger, more inclusive scale? Yes, they could. But, would it be easy to rethink the educational experience from the ground up at this point on a large scale, and whether or not that begins on the grassroots or governmental levels? No, and only a fool would assume otherwise.

Barring an educational revolution, which has successfully occurred at least once in the past century just as point-of-fact, those of us who have been positively affected by small learning communities have the responsibility to make sure small schools continue to be represented in both the educational arena and curricular discussion. As organizations like the Small Schools Coalition continue to grow in membership, coordination and influence, who knows how far small learning communities can venture toward the mainstream middle?!

I was already beginning to understand that on some academic levels before that day at FALA. But what I saw in that classroom, which was much more like a community rec center than any history class I ever sat in when I was a kid, shocked me to my core. That might have been the first time I was actually educated about anything in a K-12 classroom in my entire life. Not taught something to memorize without thinking critically about it. No, I was actually able to teach something to myself. This helped me reconcile how I saw the world until then with how I then saw the world could actually be from then on.

Needless to say, that shock is all it took for me to begin rethinking education for myself. My hope is that there are many others, regardless of their cultural background, political affiliation, religious upbringing, or societal authority, who are willing to experience a little shock themselves… and in the process, realize that “normal” does not have to be what came before; especially if that was based more on the best interests of the few than the many children and communities education should serve locally, nationally and globally speaking.

If you would like to discuss the power and potential of small schools for rethinking the educational experience for students and communities everywhere, or to inquire about a complimentary membership to the Small Schools Coalition, we welcome you to contact us!

This article was originally published by our partners at Small Schools Coalition.

References

In addition to any in-content links to other reference materials/articles on and off-site, the following material was either directly quoted, or factual content in this article came from direct knowledge of information contained in these sources. For more specific citation information, please contact us directly….

1. Adler, S., Pai, Y., Shadiow, L. Cultural Foundations of Education. Pearson. NJ, 2006
2. Apple, M. Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality. 2nd edition. Routledge. NY, 2006
3. Apple, M., Christian-Smith, L. The Politics of the Textbook. Routledge. NY, 1991
4. Berliner, D., Biddle, D. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Basic Books. NY, 1996
5. Eisner, E. Educational Imagination. Macmillan Publishing Company. NY, 1979
6. Fitzgerald, F. America Revisited. Little Brown & Company. MA, 1979
7. Friere, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum. NY, 1993
8. Giroux, H. Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling. Temple University Press. PA, 1983
9. Green, J. The World of the Worker. McGraw-Hill. NY, 1980
10. Tyack, D. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Harvard University Press. MA, 1974

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This article was originally published in The Journal of Folklore and Education, by our partners at Local Learning.

Latin@ heritage language learners (HLL) carry with them a wealth of experiences related to race, immigration, and language. The use of ethnography and oral history with heritage learners of Spanish allows educators to create opportunities for engaged teaching and learning practices when students invite their families into classrooms as knowledge producers, fostering creativity and self-confidence. This article builds on the foundation of the importance of using students’ voices and experiences in heritage language instruction (Carreira and Beeman 2014; Roca 2000), but we also look at how HLL are rarely asked to consider their lived experiences as rich cultural and historical knowledge outside the HLL classroom. Furthermore, in our work as educators and teachers of HLL, we have the opportunity to model inclusion and engagement of students’ literacy pluralities centered on their families’ heritage and also their own experiences as Latin@s. In doing so, we show the importance of recognizing and honoring their unique backgrounds, and we, as educators, also participate in the transformation of thought by becoming a community of learners along with our students.

In the same vein, Deafenbaugh (2015) writes about including aspects of folklife and folk arts instruction that encourage educators to include students’ personal experiences and knowledge of their community in the classroom as a way to recognize the importance of understanding different perspectives. She comments, “Allowing community knowledge and ways of knowing into the classroom requires teachers to be learners and reflective about their own practice” (Deafenbaugh 2015, 77). Moll et al. (1992), use the term Funds of Knowledge to talk about the resources in our students’ and their families’ communities and homes. Indeed, intentionally incorporating students’ lived experiences challenges deficit models of language learning and use, both found in their own communities, that remind them that their Spanish is not good enough, and the majority English-only population who point to English as the revered (valid) American identity. By centering students’ socio-cultural and socio-linguistic knowledge, we challenge existing views that promote English as the language of success or that stigmatize U.S. Spanish.

Judith Flores Carmona and Dolores Delgado Bernal (2012) identify using oral histories in the classroom as a pedagogical practice that encourages solidarity and integrates culturally relevant educational practices. Their study focuses on an elementary school project in which Latin@ students work with their families to collect oral histories and family stories. They note that engaging students in this work encourages qualitative research methods and the creation of “intergenerational knowledge that centers the epistemologies of their families” while working collaboratively with others (Flores Carmona and Delgado Bernal 2012, 3). We agree, and students confirm our assumptions, that this is also happening in our classes. For instance, Verónica reflected at the end of the semester, “I really liked taking this class because I was able to learn more about my culture and other cultures from Latin America. I like hearing the different accents from the various countries and seeing how they are similar to or different than those of my country. It was great to hear that so many students had come here with the same cultural experiences.”2

Verónica’s reflection reveals the solidarity that is created within the classroom and the joy that students find in examining their own culture while also learning about others that are similar. Sebastián had a similar experience as he announced, “Learning about other cultures in the Latin@ community made me appreciate my own culture so much more.” Collecting oral histories allowed these students the space to delve into their cultural knowledge and create a sense of community with students from similar backgrounds. Since our students attend universities in the Midwest, the campus community makeup often differs from where they grew up, so they welcome a chance to encounter others with comparable stories and begin to form a new community.

We center our analysis and description of using family histories in the writing classroom using Critical Race Theory and Latino Critical Race Theory (Delgado Bernal 2002; Solórzano 1998; Solórzano and Yosso 2002; Yosso 2005a, 2005b), approaches that have thus far not been considered in the analysis of heritage language courses, because both “acknowledge that educational structures, processes, and discourses operate in contradictory ways with their potential to oppress and marginalize and their potential to emancipate and empower” (Delgado Bernal 2002, 109, italics ours). HLL, an often-racialized minority, carry with them a generational wealth of experiences related to race, immigration, and language. Yet rarely do they have the opportunity to see these experiences as cultural capital — borrowing Yosso’s term — in the classroom. Educational systems in our K-16 schools often fail to center experiences of minoritized students as knowledge producers, and culturally relevant curricula and classes for HLL are limited and frequently dependent on whether there are enough students enrolled. W

hen classes for HLL are cut, it continues to reproduce White privilege and erasure of the Latin@ student experience, since they are often put into second-language learners’ classrooms where their unique needs are not addressed. Certainly, inviting students to integrate the epistemology of lived experiences in connection with those of their families makes them creators of new knowledge and in doing so we are attempting to dismantle unequal structures of power and privilege, often enjoyed by the White majority. In his 1998 article, Solórzano identified at least five themes in research and teaching approaches to Critical Race Theory in education. Those are: 1) the centrality and intersectionality of race and racism; 2) the challenge to dominant ideology; 3) the commitment to social justice; 4) the centrality of experiential knowledge; and 5) the interdisciplinary perspective. We believe that each of these themes is present in the work our students do in documenting family history. We use Solórzano’s themes with a focus on Latin@ identities, to analyze and demonstrate how using ethnography through pedagogy produces individual stories that then become part of a collective consciousness. These family stories lead to greater understanding of a larger historical and social context for developing research and creative writing assignments while also focusing on transferable skills that will help students to be successful throughout their time in university and beyond.

There is a growing trend for preserving and documenting Latin@ life across the U.S. Archives such as Voces Oral History Project (Rivas 1999), Borderlands Archive Cartography (Álvarez and Fernández 2017), Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio (Foulis 2014), and others demonstrate the need to collect the unique history and contribution of our communities. In the classroom, we can assign interviews and documents from these archives so that our students learn and understand more about their heritage, their own communities, and the diverse experiences of Latin@s across the country. We also have the opportunity to teach and empower them to begin collecting their own family histories.

We begin our courses by helping students recognize that they bring a wealth of linguistic knowledge of Spanish and that our goal is to help them use Spanish in different contexts and writing genres. For example, for most of our students, this is the first heritage language course they have ever taken, which already signals to them a different experience. They are in a class with other HLL with similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds and they are asked to explore further these identities as points of departure and engage in collaborative learning with their peers. One activity they are asked to complete is to talk about their names, their family names, and the pronunciation of them. They are asked to reflect on whether the names were anglicized, and whether this had any influence on their identities and Spanish language use. This initial discussion and activity help students see their histories as places of knowledge.

In our work as educators — and bringing our own lived experiences of native and non-native speakers of Spanish, first- generation college graduates, immigrants, women, and mothers of heritage language speakers — of HLL of Spanish in intermediate to advanced writing courses we aim to support students’ learning journeys that intersect with issues of race, gender, immigration, and, central to these classes, language. Furthermore, as Delgado Bernal (2002) concludes, “To recognize all students as holders and creators of knowledge, it is imperative that the histories, experiences, cultures, and languages of students of color are recognized and valued” (121). Through their work on their ethnographic projects, students begin to recognize the importance of their experiences and cultures and know that their stories are worth sharing.

Planning and preparing for an ethnographic interview entails planning, writing questions, recording the interview, transcribing, reporting, and composing drafts, all done in Spanish. Lynch (2003) suggests that by using Spanish in diverse situations outside the classroom, students are more likely to acquire and continue using the language. This ties in nicely with our goals: 1) to develop critical writing skills and expression; 2) to develop a historical consciousness about the Latin@ presence in the U.S.; and 3) to document the experiences of Latin@s in the U.S., all of which begin with the interview assignment. Each step requires that students make critical choices about language (i.e., is it formal or informal language, address forms: tú vs. usted), coding for transcription, summaries, identification of keywords, themes, and organization. The diverse use of Spanish allows students to realize the benefit of knowing and communicating in another language, thus contributing to their sense of confidence. While students are not told to interview a specific family member, most choose to interview a parent, grandparent, or mentor who, for the purpose of this class and goals, must be a Spanish speaker. While most of the interview is in Spanish, we understand that part of the family’s experience of living in the U.S. involves language contact, so we advise students to allow their narrator to speak in both English and Spanish, if that happens organically. This too is part of documenting family history, and it is part of creating trust and rapport with the narrator.

Additionally, this allows the students to reflect on bilingualism and code-switching (changing between one language and another [Poplack 1980]), themes that are often discussed in our classes, not in the abstract, but rather in real-life situations. Indeed, allowing code-switching in the classroom and studying code-switching as an organic form of communication in their families pushes students to consider their bilingual or multilingual abilities, given that code-switching happens among those who are not monolingual. This is not to say that it is not a stigmatized practice — a view fueled on racism and exclusion — but by allowing it to happen spontaneously, we enact the counter-storytelling tenant of Culturally Responsive Teaching. We present the project as one that focuses on the centrality of experiential knowledge (Solórzano’s fourth theme) because we want to affirm and be inclusive of family epistemologies that can inform us about relationships, (im)migration, language experiences, gender practices, and cultural traditions, among other themes or topics.

Often students do not start the project with a theme in mind, but we provide students with some examples and encourage them to think about what it is that they want to know more about from their family. We emphasize that they are documenting history and family folklore, and they might discover something they did not know. Through oral history, students are collecting their families’ histories, dialoguing with the past and actively engaging in public memory (Frisch 1990; Hamilton and Shopes 2008). Alessadro Portelli (1990) explains that in oral history, the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee is one where two subjects recognize each other as such, which “stimulate others, as well as ourselves, to a higher degree of self-scrutiny and self-awareness; to help them grow more aware of the relevance and meaning of their culture and knowledge…” (43).

Yet, when HLL conduct oral history interviews they are also acting as an ethnographer who already has many insights into the family culture and their histories — and perhaps secrets — which is why we choose to talk about this assignment as one that engages in both practices. In ethnography, as an ethnographer collects and later composes a narrative based on their observations, they become a social analyst (Rosaldo 1993) because they are a “positioned subject” who is “at once cognitive, emotional and ethical. She constructs knowledge through contexts of shifting power relations that involve varying degrees of distance and intimacy” (180). Reflection and interpretation are a key component of ethnography (Marcus 1998; Geertz 1973) and this is what happens in the writing process of this assignment.3

The Art of the Interview: Oral History and Ethnography
While we use the terms ethnography and oral history interchangeably in this article, we are aware of the differences. We do not use the term ethnographic methods because we believe many of the family members who our students interview are in close proximity or live with them, therefore, their research aligns more with that of an ethnographer who spends a significant amount of time with their interviewees. At the same time, as Hamer (2000) describes, “The folklorist’s perspective, as an outsider, is explained as helping people to see the value of that which is normally overlooked” (57). Although the student researchers are not outsiders when interviewing family members, they are charged with demonstrating the value of the traditions and experiences that have been undervalued by their own families or by society. However, the student is only capturing a period of time of the family member’s life (oral history), or, sometimes, a specific practice such as a celebration, a cooking tradition or cultural practice (i.e., curanderismo) that might be identified as folklore. Therefore, we see so many similarities between ethnography and oral history in the work our students do because each interview allows meaningful encounters to exist organically. That is, as cultural insiders, students are not only observing someone else’s culture or behaviors, they are getting at a deeper understanding of who they are in relation to their families’ histories.

As we talk about this work with students, we point out that collecting family ethnography or oral history involves interviewing the family member to get an inside perspective into what it was like to live in a particular time and region(s); hence, they are preserving a piece of family history. Ethnography allows close encounters with family history because students in their roles as researchers get close to the everyday experiences of other people and use of Spanish in non-academic settings; this requires a deeper immersion into the narrators’ (interviewees’) world, even when they might be family members, to understand what others consider meaningful and important experiences for them. Although Núñez (2012) uses ethnography and writing in the service-learning context, her findings align with the work we do with HLL, for example, when she notes, “The act of reflecting upon personal observations also creates opportunities to reveal the meta-cognitive aspects associated with thinking about the ways in which we relate to the world we live in and the people we interact with” (86).

For instance, several of our students reflect on the hardships their parents have gone through so that they could one day enroll in a university. This reflection makes the students recognize and become more appreciative of all their parents’ efforts. Additionally, we find that ethnography of family plays a key role in the development of HLL awareness of their own culture and identity formation. Furthermore, students are documenting experiences from different racial and socio-cultural perspectives (Solórzano’s fifth theme), for example, those of working-class backgrounds, varying generations, race (black, indigenous, mestizo, white), or gender. Through the use and practice of oral histories, HLL gain knowledge, document family life, use their Spanish language skills outside the classroom, and learn to preserve and celebrate their heritage.

Since we are working with HLL college students, and the focus is writing, after the collection of their ethnographies we discuss how best to capture speakers’ emotions, points of view, and use citations. Furthermore, we agree with bell hooks (1994), that we must not ask students to take risks we are not willing to take. “Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive” (hooks 1994, 21). When we assign this project, we have already established a rapport with students, we have shared our own narratives of language learning, family language, experiences with immigration, and gender roles. For example, students read the article “Belonging and Accents: Salvadoran Diaspora in Mexico and the U.S.” (Foulis 2017) in which I talk about my experience of having family members who identify and speak differently than me. We explore the concept of identity as related to birth, and as one that complicates our histories when we carry multiple heritages. hooks continues, “When professors bring as a part of a class project. narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators.

It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material” (1994, 21). She identifies this as engaged pedagogy, one that not only empowers the students to own their story and experiences, but we, too, as professors, are being transformed by each student we work with and, certainly, by each story we read. Moreover, we provide the space for students to understand the self through shared knowledge (Freire 1970) when the classroom becomes a place of dialogue centered on the experiences of all: students, family (community), and teacher. One way we have done this is by sharing a family interview we conducted, a published personal essay or poem we authored, a family video, or stories of our individual and family experiences.

One foundation of teaching HLL is that we honor students’ experience and knowledge of the language (Spanish) and add to their repertoire by pushing them to use Spanish in different contexts and in all the skill areas (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) (Colombi and Roca 2003; Lynch 2003; Potowski and Carreira 2004; Schwartz 2003, among others). Hence, drafting questions, recording, and transcribing give students additional practice with language mechanics and an opportunity to interpret and be creative in the way they compose their essay. Crucially, the assignment is broken into smaller, more manageable tasks and students receive feedback at each step. For example, after deciding who they want to interview and why, students are asked to draft questions for the interview so that they are prepared, while at the same time keeping in mind that the natural flow of conversation may lead the interviewees to elaborate more or less on certain topics. Part of composing questions is deciding whether these questions are appropriate and sensitive for the person they plan to interview, that is, we highlight that being insiders of the culture and family does not mean we can ask anything. Strategically, this preparation work is accomplished and revised early enough in the semester so that students are ready to complete the interview during a mid-semester break, when many students will already be visiting family. We do not assign this project as the first writing piece of the semester. Although we teach different levels, and some of our assignments vary, we have students first write an autobiography. We ask that students focus on their linguistic background or an aspect of their Latin@ heritage. When they get to this assignment, we want them already to be thinking of their identity and experiences as a source of knowledge and as something worth writing about. Building their confidence, both linguistically, in their language skills, and of their identity and feelings of belonging, is an important aspect in both our classes.

Although Solórzano’s themes four through five happen at different points throughout the process of planning, practicing, and developing questions, we find that the opportunity to explore 1) the centrality and intersectionality of race and racism; 2) the challenge to dominant ideology; and 3) the commitment to social justice happen in the writing process. For example, as students transcribe, identify themes and keywords, and reflect on the narrator’s perspective, they might begin to see and recognize their family members’ language use (i.e., education level, dialectal variation, attitudes, discrimination), their experiences with immigration as tied to race and class, the privileges that come with citizenship, and gender roles and dynamics. As they then decide what the focus of their essay will be and what citations they want to use and highlight, they see their writing as an emancipatory vehicle that honors their family history. Tere, in the advanced writing course, decided to interview her mother about running one of the family’s restaurants. She initially thought she was going to learn about the restaurant business, but she realized that being a Latina business owner, with primarily male employees, has many challenges. During our meeting about this essay, we discussed the content and developed an outline. In our conversation, I pointed out that her mother had achieved and overcome so much, while also supporting and encouraging her female employees. Tere wrote, “A woman that is willing to get an education and see what’s ahead of her, without regretting the sacrifices and challenges that exist, has the resources she needs to achieve her dreams. Marisela [student’s mother] advises women that want to own their own businesses to reach the highest level of education possible, because ‘education is key.’ She highlights that before starting this enterprise, one must have a strategic plan in order to be successful.” The ability to read and listen to the interview again — often multiple times — gives students valuable moments of reflection and an opportunity to go over their notes and to pay attention to the speakers’ inflection as they are also trying to include the speaker’s tone into their essays. Students are asked to write a three- to four-page essay in two columns, draw out two to three key quotes from the narrator and place them in between the columns, and include a literal (narrator) or metaphorical picture. Family ethnography writing allows us to curate the life of our narrators, one that is at once accurate and aesthetically pleasing.

Furthermore, we find that students’ engagement and incorporation of lived experiences is similar to what Leeman, Rabin, and Román-Mendoza (2011) find in the role of HLL in critical service-learning pedagogy. When they go outside the classroom, we encourage students to exercise “their agency by becoming language activists engaged in shaping the language policies and practices in the society in which they live” (Leeman, Rabin, and Román-Mendoza 2011, 483). Because students spend a longer time on this assignment and it involves several different steps, there is time to reflect on the collected content and to see that their work creates primary sources. Foulis (2018) identifies the work of oral history in the service-learning classroom as one that “allows the student to reflect on their own lived experiences in relation to others, providing them with enough context to have interpretive authority over their own learning” (121). For example, Dani decided to interview both her grandparents at the same time. This, as we later discussed during our writing workshop, adds a level of complexity because we must be clear about who said what during the interview. The student commented on how difficult it was to keep them focused on the questions and minimize their side conversations, but she also incorporated the peculiarities of interviewing couples who often finish each other’s sentences or intervene to “set the record straight.” The student wanted them to tell the story of when they met, and she wrote their responses in this way, “There was a town celebration and that’s when he saw her for the first time. He recalls asking my grandmother if she wanted to be his girlfriend. My grandmother immediately corrected his statement, saying that he did not ask until the next day. That day, there was a parade with a band, and my grandmother’s family hosted a party at dawn. She invited José and right there, in the middle of the street, he asked if she wanted to be his girlfriend.” The way she composed her narrative is both personal and distant. It is clear that she is composing their story, but she also wants the reader to know that this is part of her story. As shown in this example and throughout her larger essay, Dani distances herself from the story by using pronouns like “they” or saying “my grandparents/grandma/grandfather” to write their history, but she also uses “my grandparents/grandma/grandfather” to write herself into this history. She is, indeed, weaving her history with theirs. Writing family ethnography is creative writing and is deeply personal. Indeed, this project demonstrates a greater connection and commitment to ethnographic essay writing.

As we have mentioned previously, an additional benefit to using ethnographic interviews in the classroom is the engagement in the language and culture on the part of the student. Although Robinson-Stuart and Nocon (1996) worked with students learning a second language (L2) rather than HLL, their findings are relevant to our students. The authors point out that ethnographic work is beneficial because it is versatile and “more than just a cognitive process, the use of ethnographic interviewing techniques to interview live target language speakers engages the learner affectively as well as cognitively” (Robinson-Stuart and Nocon 1996, 437). Thus, these types of projects can be assigned and adjusted to different levels of HLL classes, from beginners to more advanced students, and tend to affect the students’ behavior and attitudes. For example, in a beginner course, the focus of the interview might be solely on family language use and the connection of the student’s own use of Spanish. For a more advanced course, it would involve broad topics such as their family’s immigration story or a significant experience — positive or negative — with using Spanish or English as non-native speakers in public, again, always offering students the opportunity to reflect upon their own identity. Moreover, both their L2 and our HLL experienced a stronger desire to continue using and learning the language and researching more about the culture. For instance, Verónica commented, “I love to learn about my culture, and I want to learn the language better so that I can improve my communication with my family.” Although Verónica was already speaking and writing at a more advanced level, she realized the importance of improving so that she could continue with these types of insightful conversations with her family members.

Finally, we believe that engaging in ethnography and writing about it prepares students for writing other types of research assignments. Through the process of recording, researching, preparing, interviewing, and organizing the materials collected, students have gained numerous skills including working with multiple sources and analyzing and synthesizing data that they themselves have gathered. This is especially important for HLL who tend to have stronger oral capabilities than writing skills (in Spanish). As Schwartz (2003, 251, her emphasis) proposes, “It is important that we include instruction and practice on writing strategies” in classes that focus on writing.

Because of the step-by-step nature of the ethnography project, students are able to contemplate their writing goals and receive feedback at several stages throughout the course of the semester.
Thus, through the use of ethnography and oral history our HLL refine and improve their writing skills, which will help contribute to their continued success, both in future classes and in their careers. Meanwhile, as students collect and curate each family story, they create new primary
sources that put family experience at the center, allowing them to recognize and acknowledge the value of telling our own histories. Through this work, we provide students a safe place to embody a new personal script and we are inviting them to feel comfortable and to be active agents in the creation of new knowledge. Furthermore, through the many in-class activities, students create community with each other, and this solidarity is especially important in the Midwest, where they many not encounter as many Latina/o/x peers.

About the Authors
Elena Foulis is a student-centered educator with BA and MA degrees in Spanish and Latin American Literature and a PhD in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. She is interested in reaching non-academic and academic audiences through her writing, presentations, and public humanities projects. She is author of the eBooks Latin@ Stories Across Ohio and Mi idioma, mi comunidad: español para bilingüe and is host and producer for the Ohio Habla podcast.

Jennifer Barajas holds MAs in Spanish and Hispanic Linguistics and a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. She is an Assistant Professor at Bradley University. She created the Spanish for Heritage Speakers course at Bradley and engages students in and out of the classroom. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, and U.S. and heritage Spanish.
All photos courtesy of the authors.

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Weaving Our Histories: Latin@ Ethnography in the Heritage Language Classroom was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By LUCINDA MEGILL LEGENDRE

For a middle-school student who is just starting to learn English in the United States, myriad factors can contribute to a sense that one is beginning an insurmountable task. Not only is the English language unwieldy, wild, and unknown, but many students in the Stars Program at the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS) in Philadelphia also come with limited schooling, traumatic experiences — or both — in their past or their present. They are not just learning grade-level reading, writing, math, science, and social studies in a brand-new language, they are also learning to navigate and interact with an educational system and peers in a new culture. The prevailing atmosphere of xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy demand a particularly meaningful education for these marginalized students, one that will strengthen and empower them. In the Stars Program, students are not only learning the use of ethnographic tools and habits of mind to build their efficacy and sense of empowerment, they are also effectively gaining English proficiency in a short amount of time.

Serving immigrant students and English learners is at the core of the mission of the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School. FACTS was born from a long history of advocacy and service to immigrant communities in Philadelphia. Local nonprofit organizations Asian Americans United and the Philadelphia Folklore Project worked together to design a school that would be a safe and joyful place for immigrant students, and all students. After years of work and planning FACTS’ charter was approved in 2005. FACTS worked to build a school that would integrate the community knowledge and folk arts of the surrounding Chinatown neighborhood and those of other groups in the city as well. The founders created daily and yearly rituals that allow for reflection and celebration of our shared values. Many of the shared values are summarized in the school pledge. “We care for one another and learn together. … Our elders know important things and we take time to learn from them… All people have a right to use their own language and honor their own culture,” are just a few of the lines that students and teachers recite and refer to regularly. Through the hard work of founders, teachers and students FACTS has received many awards and recognitions not only for the academic success of our students, but also for our caring and safe community. We know that folk arts education and the practices that value community knowledge are keys to our students’ academic success. Seeking to serve a diverse immigrant community, the founders of Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School had long envisioned a special program to support students who were new to English in middle school. Finally, in early 2017, we received permission for an expansion that included a special class for beginning English learners (ELs). In September 2017, the Stars Program welcomed its first class. Fourteen students from ages 11 to 15 completed the first year. These students came from many different countries and backgrounds, including refugees from Syria and Central Africa and immigrants from Asia. Some have had six or seven years of schooling, some fewer than three. Some students are confident with academic tasks, others long to develop skills that will allow them to accomplish their goals in education. This June, the second year of the Stars Program finished with 20 students.

Stars students are in our main self-contained classroom for our morning community-building time, followed by English, math, science, and social studies. They travel from our classroom to study art, music, Chinese, and PE with our specialist teachers. In addition, a special folk arts class has been designed for them to experience different folk arts from our community. Stars students join other middle schoolers for lunch, recess, and extracurricular folk arts ensembles. The program design is that by being mostly self-contained and sheltering grade-level content within the larger task of English learning, students may increase the speed and depth of their language learning, more so than if they were simply supported in the general education classroom.

As our school’s name suggests, folk arts education and ethnographic research are core to how we provide all our students with a high-quality, 21st-century education. As we designed Stars, it was particularly important to us to use this same educational approach with all its tools and practices to provide newcomer students with a high-quality educational experience too. We are guided by our intent to design effective education that also serves to break the paradigm that students who are learning English are limited or lacking because, in fact, we know that immigrant students bring many gifts and experiences that enrich their education and those of their classmates.

Why Ethnography?
In many newcomer classrooms students receive workbooks and textbooks to introduce and allow students to practice basic vocabulary and language structures most used and needed in English. Good programs blend academic English and beginning social and instructional language. In many programs for middle-school newcomers, teachers’ guides recommend that students conduct dialogues or interviews, often pre-scripted or using circumscribed vocabulary or structures. One may gather from the structure and sequence of these curricula that students new to English need specialized, limited practice with English until they may be ready for harder, more challenging or real-world tasks. Practitioners and researchers have, however, found that the opposite is true. As Celia Roberts found in her book Language Learners as Ethnographers, students learning another language were able to complete meaningful ethnography research (2001). Roberts states, “Our experience and those of others (Jurasek 1996) is that those students with the most advanced language skills do not necessarily undertake the most interesting ethnographic projects or produce the best ethnographic assignments” (2001, 5). With her case study of undergraduate language learners in Europe she found that, “introducing an ethnographic approach can contribute to enhanced language learning” (Roberts 2015).

Others who work in the field of second language acquisition have argued that meaningful context is powerful to successful language learning, as opposed to learning isolated lists of words separated from their use or meaning. This research-based theory shows that students will learn and remember more vocabulary if words are embedded in meaningful context (Brown 2012). The Stars Program uses the cultural contexts that students find themselves in. Our classroom, school, neighborhoods, and families become the contexts for learning and using new and vital language. As Roberts succinctly asserts, “cultural learning is language learning” (2001, 5). Scholarship about ethnography and language learning have been foundational as we have developed a curriculum that goes beyond the workbook-based curriculum typical for newcomer programs.

In developing Stars, we have also been informed by the research and practice centered around trauma-sensitive schools. In a particularly practical book Susan E. Craig and Jim Sporleder lay out numerous recommendations for supporting students who have or have had trauma experiences (2017). Based on new understandings of not only trauma’s impacts but also adolescent brain development, they recommend practices that demand a curriculum that goes beyond the workbook. A few highlights include: “Get to know your students. Find out what matters to them and integrate topics of interest into content instruction… Design instruction that works with the brain’s plasticity to strengthen neural pathways associated with higher-order thinking” (30); and, “Use flexible groups for activities that involve student collaboration to help teens gain insight into the complexity of their behavior and that of their peers” (Craig and Sporleder 2017, 86). Based on this and other research, Stars middle-school students are not only developing English proficiency but also engaging in fostering higher-order thinking through ethnography that investigates culture and its complexity. Our meaningful ethnographic inquiry and research are supported by specific techniques to scaffold language learning. Students are able to conduct scaffolded ethnographic research that allows for authentic use and practice with social and academic language.

Curricular Design that Centers Ethnography
The curriculum we designed and have begun to implement for the Stars program is rooted and centered in building the capabilities and capacities of ethnographic inquiry and folk arts education. Centering ethnography allows the program to meet its objectives of accelerated language learning and also provides a supportive environment for students with past or current trauma. Centering ethnography includes beginning the year with investigations of people and places in and around our classroom and school community. These investigations replace the workbook-style memorization and limited application of classroom and school vocabulary (although workbooks and other printed materials are used for introduction or supplemental practice). More typical curriculum for middle-school newcomers would consist of a textbook page with large, labeled images focused on grammar teaching points or new vocabulary to be developed. There may be charts and examples with explanations. Then there is a series of questions for the students to answer. Good textbooks provide ideas for other extensions and interactions that teachers can lead to deepen learning, and they try to reflect the ethnic and racial make-up of modern English learners. However, no textbook can provide the interactive, higher-order thinking and collaborative work that teachers who know the students can. Centering ethnographic inquiry and folk arts education happens in our social studies and English language arts curriculum. Throughout the two-year curriculum cycle, students research components of neighborhoods, foodways, and public transportation. In the unit about Philadelphia neighborhoods students develop inquiry and research skills and also engage in meaningful use in context of both everyday social and academic vocabulary to describe people and places in neighborhoods. Again, this hands-on research replaces the very limited exposure and practice found in many curricula for newcomer English language learners while providing the collaborative and higher-order thinking recommended for trauma-sensitive schools.

The Stars curriculum has been designed to teach to the tangible skills and intangible habits of mind as Linda Deafenbaugh lays out in her chart on Teaching Ethnographic Inquiry in Folklife Education (forthcoming). The process of ethnographic research provides meaningful opportunities to develop necessary English language skills and vocabulary and allows for supportive practices for students with trauma, such as collaborative learning, investigation of interests, and research into complex behavior. For example, the first step of ethnographic inquiry, data collection, is very important and relevant for middle-school language learners. By building the tangible skill of observation, students are purposefully acquiring the language to label and describe their new environment and expanding the cognitive groundwork for deeper exploration and investigation of norms and culture. A community of respect and support is built by making time for and teaching to the skill of observing the objects and people in the classroom, the school, and the neighborhood: skills that the students must have to survive. The recognition of the work they are already doing to interact in a new cultural context helps students gain confidence without feeling bored and belittled by simple memorization and book work. It also puts them into a position of decision making and control. Instead of filling in the blank within a sentence on a page, students are asked, “What do you notice?” This kind of open-ended inquiry allows for student creativity, voice, and autonomy to be centered in instruction.

Middle-school language learners are involved in a constant task of data collection by monitoring their environment trying to understand the names of people, places, and things, as well as learning and adjusting language and behaviors to fit (or defy) perceived cultural norms. Making this culture and language learning part of the curriculum and giving it an academic frame recognizes their daily work and provides the classroom community as support in this shared task. Ethnography centered in the curriculum also conveys a message greatly valued in folk arts education, the everyday is precious and worthy of study in school. Other examples of data collection centered in English learning are interviewing classmates and teachers in the building. At the beginning of the year, asking classmates about their background and interests is beautiful territory for authentic language learning and meets developmental social needs to build a caring community. Here again, the recognition of the work they are already doing teaches that our classroom is a place where your needs are seen, respected, and valued. The practices of folk arts education and ethnography are centered in the Stars classroom because they are effective for language learning and essential for building a supportive community to allow students with trauma feel safe in the classroom environment (Craig and Sporleder 2017).

Working through the next steps of ethnography — data analysis and re-presentation — also provides benefits. In the first few weeks of school, students interview a partner from a country different from their own and then report to the class their analysis of ways they are similar and different. This activity is powerful and sends a message that builds community while supplying meaningful language practice. Building community by getting to know each other allows students with trauma to feel more comfortable.

Conducting Ethnography Using Language Supports from the WIDA Framework
Vital to the successful teaching of English learners is an understanding of the progression of acquiring a new language. Most states and districts across the country use the research-based standards and assessments developed by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) consortium. WIDA research and frameworks are anchored in the philosophy that “Children and youth who are linguistically and culturally diverse, in particular, bring a unique set of assets that have the potential to enrich the experiences of all learners and educators. Educators can draw on these assets for the benefit of both the learners themselves and for everyone in the community. By focusing on what language learners can do, we send a powerful message that children and youth from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds contribute to the vibrancy of our early childhood programs and K–12 schools” (Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 2018). This philosophy has guided the research and creation of tools for teachers and families that describe what students can do at the various levels of English language proficiency. By learning the characteristics and possibilities for language understanding and use, teachers can design meaningful and engaging activities for students at any level of English language proficiency. This is also true when it comes to designing and guiding students in folk arts education and ethnographic inquiry. The WIDA Performance Definitions for the Levels of English Proficiency in Grades K–12 guides teachers to understand what types and forms of language can be expected in levels of English language proficiency (Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 2018).

The first two levels are where most Stars students are along the continuum of language learning. Consequently, when designing activities I know I can expect students to be able to use “words, phrases and chunks of language” independently to talk about and write about what they are seeing and understanding. Students in the first level need and can use “pictorial or graphic representation of the language in the content areas.” It also means that if students need to do more than these types of responses they will need support and scaffolding, such as providing sentence frames to allow students to begin to form more complex ideas, or encouraging students to use translation to their first language to access more sophisticated language for complex concepts or ideas.

Another helpful tool for thinking about the language abilities of English learners are the Can Do Descriptors also published by WIDA (2014). These are more specific to the various language domains and key uses of language and provide helpful information to guide teachers in supporting student learning. The descriptors detail supports for language learners in the beginning levels and a vital support is found repeated throughout the descriptors and visuals. For example, students at Level 1 can “Indicat[e] relationships by drawing and labeling content-related pictures on familiar topics” (WIDA 2014, 7). Or at Level 2 students can “Sequenc[e] illustrated text of narrative or informational events” (WIDA 2014, 5). In the two years leading the Stars through these units, I have found that when students have access to and use visuals as part of their data collection, data analysis, and re-presentation, they are able to engage more deeply in conducting rich ethnographic inquiry.

Applying Linguistic Supports and Frames When Conducting Ethnographic Inquiry
Within days of arriving at FACTS in September 2017, Stars students embarked on their first journey into ethnographic inquiry. We began by studying the people and roles in the classroom. After practicing and generating some shared vocabulary for actions and behaviors, students were given vocabulary cards of the keywords with visuals. They were encouraged to translate the words into the language of their primary literacy. We practiced using and acting out these words. We read and wrote about these words. Then I asked students to conduct observations and record their analysis of the different roles in the classroom (students and teachers, in this case). Students used a Venn diagram to show their findings. They then went to re-presentation and created classroom movies with narrations and visuals to show the actions of different people. Each student wrote their own script, but the project required them to work together to create photographs of the behaviors they observed in the classroom. Using Windows MovieMaker, students imported and labeled their visuals. Using a voice recorder on our tablets they recorded the narration, then they added the audio track to their movies. After the movies were finished, we watched them all. While watching, students took notes about the similarities and differences in what data various students decided to include.

Instead of completing workbook pages with cartoon images of different actions and people in the classroom, the students had just conducted their first, scaffolded ethnographic inquiry. They were able to proceed through the steps from data collection, analysis, and re-presentation (and some additional reflection and analysis at the end). They were supported to use and understand general classroom words, phrases, and simple sentences as outlined in the WIDA Performance Definitions. We used translation to students’ primary language, visuals, and multimodal practice to develop understanding in the ever-present context of our classroom to support effective language learning. And potentially most importantly, we built our classroom community through a collaborative project of posing for and directing classroom action photos. I think back fondly at the teamwork and determination of the students to show the verbs we had been learning, helping classmates hold their arms just so or stand in the best place in the room to show the meaning. I still hear the laughter and nervous giggles of middle schoolers getting their pictures taken. These experiences, along with supporting each other to record and edit their narrations, help to build our community and make a safer space for students with trauma.

After exploring the classroom, we moved on to the school community interviewing and analyzing data about who is in our school, their roles, and what we have learned about our school. The Stars students’ re-presentations for this inquiry were books that they shared with first graders. In one student’s book she wrote, “Everyone at FACTS cooperates,” and then explained by using evidence from our research, as seen here in the page from her book (Figure 1).

For this project the students went out in teams and took turns interviewing teachers in the school. They recorded the interviews using our tablet voice recorders so that they could be transcribed into a chart in a shared Google doc. Once all the data had been entered, students set out to analyze the data and come up with a thesis to support with evidence from the research. Some students, depending on language proficiency, were given sentence starters to help guide their thesis writing. Once they had a plan, they created books using Google slides into which they inserted Google images or photographs they had taken. Finally, they read their books aloud to small groups of first graders who were also engaged in a social studies unit of study of the school community and roles of different people in the building.

In this project you can find similar centering of ethnographic inquiry to propel language learning and create a trauma-sensitive learning environment. Students worked with an additional tool of ethnography: interviewing. We developed questions together as a class and the students took turns conducting interviews after they had practiced with each other in the classroom. In a typical curriculum for newcomers there may be an activity to “Interview a classmate using the question words.” This is lovely practice, but it is not as meaningful as asking real questions to get real answers from the principal, the social worker, and the custodian. Practicing wh- questions ahead of time with a classmate does help students who are ambivalent, even terrified, about approaching and interviewing an adult they may have seen but do not know. Luckily FACTS staff are very patient and supportive, which helps the students doing this task. Thus, not only do students learn new skills and vocabulary, they discover what a resource our caring staff is. Taking the safe but scary risk of conducting an interview is far more powerful than just being told “all the adults in the building are here to help you.” I could have also told the students that many of the staff in our school come from countries other than the U.S. or that people in our school also speak more than one language, but these important facts were more meaningfully learned by students analyzing their own data and coming to those conclusions themselves.

In this school interview example, you can see how the three elements of our curricular design are intersecting and overlapping in important ways. Dividing the work of transcribing interviews was done as necessary and meaningful collaboration — we got much more done together than we could have by ourselves. Analyzing data required some real higher-order thinking in pattern finding and meaning making. Higher-order thinking has been identified as important for helping students with trauma backgrounds, but it is also important for using academic language. Finally, the re-presentation of reading our books to first graders enforced a guiding principle of our school’s design, multi-age community building. And, of course, conducting interviews chockfull of vital school vocabulary, listening to them, and then transcribing them is a natural way to expose students to new vocabulary many times over. Students then analyze these ideas, write them, type them, and provide images to illustrate them. And, finally, they rehearse and then read those words to an authentic audience! The amount of meaningful practice with real-life vocabulary that is both useful and valuable in their daily context is far more valuable than filling out 25 workbook pages.

Expanding Inquiry into the Larger Community
Our use of ethnographic inquiry in the Stars classroom has not been limited to the basic social and instructional language of school. In the 2018–19 school year, after conducting interviews of classmates and then teachers in the building, students produced a directory for parents. Next we ventured out into our city to explore the neighborhoods. A guiding principle that I have employed in designing inquiry for my newcomer students is to set up a framework that centers around a core group of vocabulary words. In the classroom project, it was a list of classroom verbs. For our neighborhoods inquiry, it was the key ideas from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1958). These ideas helped us understand and explore the idea that neighborhoods help people take care of their wants and needs. The keywords of shelter, safety, community, belonging, medical care, and others helped guide our inquiry. We set out first on foot into our school’s Chinatown neighborhood and then via public transit to other neighborhoods to explore how different neighborhoods help people get their wants and needs. We also explored how different aspects of neighborhoods make us feel. Embarking on this exploration can sound complex and unwieldy, but we took the ethnographic inquiry step by step and used the tools and techniques outlined in the WIDA framework to support language learning. During the whole process we were engaging the strategies and understandings of trauma-sensitive schools to support students’ needs.

There were many steps and aspects of the inquiry, but I outline a few here and explain how they were used to support language learning and learners. Our first task was developing and teaching to this core list of vocabulary and ideas. We spent days exploring, showing, acting out, and translating the keywords like community, safety, and shelter. We then practiced our observation and note-taking skills by visiting the cafeteria to see how the cafeteria was providing for students’ needs. I can’t tell you the joy that leapt from my heart when a student sketched and labeled a teacher supervising a group of tables in the “Safety” section of the chart (Figure 2). It was proof to me that with the right supports (language practice, time, and a clear task) students, even those with minimal English, could really make use of ethnographic tools and make meaning about their daily lives. And then like popcorn, the brilliant ideas and insights just kept coming: Another student sketched the circle tables and identified that they provide community, and on and on. Now that we’d had our practice in the confines of the school cafeteria it was time to take the show on the road.

Students selected different aspects of the hierarchy of needs to investigate the streets in Chinatown. Their task was the same as in the cafeteria: Observe the neighborhood to find examples of how it might be helping people meet needs. Their tool was the same, a chart with their need and a large box to sketch or describe the things they were seeing. Students could sketch or take notes in English or the language of their primary literacy (Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, etc.). For some students this tool worked well, for a few it was too much to keep track of. Those students were equipped with a tablet and tasked with taking pictures of the things they saw for their needs group so that we could sort the photos later, back at school. We went out in small cooperative groups in which the students were working together to assess the diverse needs people have.

The next day we needed to compile and sort our data. We used the very sophisticated technology of large pieces of chart paper. The students sorted and labeled their findings onto the chart paper (Figure 3). They noticed the things that many people noticed and explained to their peers and to me why the fire hydrant, for example, was added to the safety group. This was in a way re-presentation and in a way a tool that allowed for analyzing. We were able to see which needs Chinatown was very obviously able to meet (food!) and which needs you could also see if you looked closely (community and belonging).

We repeated these steps in other neighborhoods, adding additional research techniques and interviewing. Always speaking, listening, reading, and writing the same centering keywords (obviously adding more vocabulary for students who could), always making and collecting visuals, and always working in supportive, collaborative groups.

When students were finished, they turned their inquiry to their own neighborhoods to observe and analyze the ways they do or do not meet their needs and what can be done about that, either to celebrate or make change. The student work, posters or letters, showed they had an understanding of the core vocabulary by providing examples and explanations from their observations and analysis. It was exciting for the class to compare their neighborhoods with those we explored together and discuss their opinions about what they and their neighbors need. I was surprised by how many students decided to choose something to praise about their neighborhoods — celebrating the ways where they lived provided for their wants and needs.

This was a complex unit. But it further proved to me that ethnographic inquiry could be used to meet the core goals of our Stars Program: providing meaningful and effective language learning while building the community and academic skills. Ethnographic inquiry also allows us to meet so many of the goals of our school using folk arts education to provide students the space to explore and analyze, critique, or celebrate their community and their cultures.

Goals for Future Study

Now that we have completed the two-year cycle of our curriculum, it’s time to do more research and analysis. With the data we receive from this year’s WIDA ACCESS for ELs 2.0, we will be able to assess the ways in which our curriculum is meeting our language proficiency goals and the areas that we need to strengthen.

Qualitative data collection about how the students feel and understand the purposes and methods is also very much needed. I have many theories about how students are experiencing different aspects of our practices and our curriculum based on observations, but more systematic data is needed to get a more complete picture of what the student experience is with this curriculum. Is it as empowering as we intend? Are students able to see how they are building their skills and their community? Do students feel successful and engaged in asking questions about their cultural contexts?

And, finally, long-term, what are the effects of this curriculum? Are students building skills that will guide them in high school and college with cooperative and project-based learning? Are students able to use observation, analysis, and meaning making as they move through different cultures and contexts? Will they use their voices and their data to share their important perspectives?

Lucinda Megill Legendre has been teaching at the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School in Philadelphia for ten years, as English Language Development teacher and now as the teacher for the Stars Program. She also serves as the Social Studies Coordinator.

Works Cited

Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. 2018. Mission and History. WIDA, 2019, https://wida.wisc.edu/about/mission-history.

Brown, H. H. Douglas. 2012. The Key to Learning a Language Is Context. Language Seed, February 24, https://languageseed.com/2012/02/24/the-key-to-learning-a-language-is-context.

Craig, Susan E. and Jim Sporleder. 2017. Trauma-sensitive Schools for the Adolescent Years: Promoting Resiliency and Healing, Grades 6–12. New York: Teachers College Press.

Roberts, Celia. 2001. Language Learners as Ethnographers. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Maslow, A. H. 1958. A Dynamic Theory of Human Motivation. In Understanding Human Motivation, eds. C. L. Stacey and M. DeMartino. Cleveland, OH: Howard Allen Publishers, 26–47. doi:10.1037/11305–004.

WIDA. 2014. WIDA Starter Pack. Madison: Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, on Behalf of the WIDA Consortium.

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WIDA Can-Do Descriptors: https://wida.wisc.edu/teach/can-do/descriptors

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Supporting English Learners Through Ethnography Projects  — The Stars Program at Folk… was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our purpose in this piece is to go “behind the scenes” of the ethnographic interview to illuminate some of its distinctive features, as well as its value as a tool for learning about shared human knowledges, expressions, and experiences of today and the past. Although, it cannot be denied that conducting ethnographic interviews–and ethnography in general–can be daunting, especially for those new to cultural research and documentation, but even for the most experienced. When undertaking ethnographic projects, we typically are talking with and learning from people we do not know, or do not know that well–whether during casual conversation or in more formal, prearranged interviews. In this light, ethnography courses and workshops really ought to be called, “Talking to Strangers 101,” to borrow from the folklorist Elaine Eff!

Despite this potential awkwardness, however, If there is an “art” to interviewing, it is safe to say that it is best honed through practice, trial and error, and honest self-reflection. Of course, having the chance to work with and be guided by a more experienced ethnographer could only enhance this process.

So, how does one teach it, and what is most significant to impart? In the spirit of ethnography, where the qualitative, personal perspective frequently shines, I thought that a good way to get at this “art,” in all its up-close and messy glory, would be to learn how my colleague Guha Shankar defines, practices, and teaches it. He has conducted countless ethnographic and oral history interviews, dedicating a large part of his professional life to ethnography and cultural documentation and guiding others in navigating it, so I looked forward to talking with him about his ideas on the topic.

Guha first joined the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress in 2004 and quickly became the Center’s resource person for community and place-based education projects, as well as oral history projects, such as the Civil Rights History Project, a U.S. Congress-authorized initiative led by the AFC and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Significantly, Guha has organized, facilitated, and taught numerous workshops in ethnographic research methods and skills-based training in field documentation in a range of communities and institutions, where the art of the interview is featured. In 2003, he earned his PhD in Folklore and Public Culture from the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin. From 1985–1993, Guha served as Media Production Specialist and documentary film producer at the Center for Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

As with most one-off interviews, it is difficult to capture it all, and the text below has been edited for length and readability. Nonetheless, my aim was to focus on some core components, or “ingredients,” of ethnographic interviews, and then to learn how Guha approaches the teaching of them to instructors, students, and community members alike. Importantly, he does not only highlight practical considerations for ensuring that an interview goes smoothly, and that it is recorded successfully and easily accessible for the future, but also values, such as respect and transparency, that all interviewers should honor. We touch upon the ethics of interviewing and the difficult and sensitive topics that it can bring to the surface. Moreover, Guha discusses the benefits of interview training within intensive ethnographic field schools and the work of the AFC in supporting this endeavor throughout the U.S. and beyond.

Michelle Stefano: Hello, Guha, let’s first get into what brought you to ethnography and its methods…

Guha Shankar: My undergraduate degree in radio, television, and film at [the University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill is a foundational basis for the work I’ve done for the last…however long it is…and I don’t want to name the years as that would make me feel very sad and old [laughs]! So, we were exposed in classes to theories, concepts, and the technical language in media and film studies. We would talk about people doing ethnographic work, we would look at documentary films and listen to documentary audio, and so on. We also had some hands-on training in shooting film and making audio recordings, principally in a formal studio setting. But the practical experiences–and this may get to the notion of “ethnographicness”–in producing field recordings were by and large absent from our repertoire, simply because of time and resources. You know, in a department of 155 people, there was not a lot of equipment to go around, so you’d take your training where you could get it.

That experience, as limited as it was, got me into freelance jobs and TV crews when I came out of school and moved to Washington, DC, in 1983. I had gigs like production grip and occasional audio engineer. And then came a longer gig: the Smithsonian’s then Office of Folklife Programs, from 1985 to 1993. I was principally hired as a film editor and general media production specialist. There, I had this amazing experience of on-the-job training in ethnographic documentary production, and I’ll talk about three different ways in which that taught me what I know about ethnographic interviews, and ethnography in general.

First of all, I listened to hours of raw, uncut interviews and conversations…and you’re doing that in order to listen–well, this is how it works for me–for the content of the recordings and what they illustrate about the cultural and historical context of the film, right? So, from a research and scholarly perspective, that’s one hat we put on. But then you’re also listening to what piece of audio–or voice, cultural expression, dialogue–you think ought to be subsequently distilled and edited into a final product, and that’s from a production standpoint. So, at the same time, I was learning to think in both those registers.

Then, a second training ground was the [Smithsonian Folklife] Festival, and I worked every summer at its stages and got to listen to truly remarkable and sensitive folklorists conduct interviews and solicit stories on the festival grounds, on the narrative stages, during demonstrations of craft and cooking, and with a range of community members. I got this invaluable front-row seat to Alicia Gonzalez, Betty Belanus, Lynn Martin, Jim Leary, my boss Tom Vennum, Nick Spitzer, and many others engage in the art of conversation and structure it for a public audience. I was able to understand how folklorists mediate between particular community perspectives and the broader audience: the notion that you’re going from the unknown to the known, from that world of the hidden and obscure to a broader [public] audience, and that was pretty eye opening. And you had to do it within certain constraints of time and space in the festival setting.

The third training ground was accompanying scholars and folklorists out into the field on documentary film and radio productions, as production coordinator, driver, grip…you know, chief cook and bottle washer, as we often do [laughs]. I experienced firsthand what “deep hanging out” really means, right? And “deep hanging out” is a better way for me to think about what ethnographic practice actually is. These settings allowed me to see how people merged deep hanging out with journalistic sensibilities. I watched, learned, and sometimes I was able to participate in a field shoot, and observe expressions, events, occupational practices, and behaviors among and between cultural community members. I listened to my senior colleagues inquire and probe, and get into the nuances of what was going on around us.

Specific examples that were formational for me were going out with Bob McCarl, specialist in occupational folklore, on a production with DC’s firefighters for the Smithsonian Folklife Studies monograph/film series; this was the late 1980s and that project ended with lots of footage, but regrettably no completed documentary (for complicated reasons, shall we say). I worked with Frank Proschan on his research documentation with Khmu refugees, resettled in Stockton [California]: people who came to California from Southeast Asia. The last thing I worked on as production coordinator at the Smithsonian was with Frank Korom and John Bishop on a project with communities of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. That effort resulted in Hosay Trinidad, both a book and a film, and led to my subsequent dissertation research in Jamaica. While in graduate school, I went on to work with Jake Homiak (at the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives) and Rastafari communities in Jamaica. In those instances, I was principally the production coordinator, and the scholars did most of the interviews, but they were really generous and asked for my input not only on technical matters, but also in terms of enabling me to participate more fully in the research process, such as asking questions in the course of our filming. That was a pretty heady experience–“wow” moments, really–for someone who was used to being way behind the camera and/or microphone to get such hands-on experience in the research process.

I took these experiences with me to grad school, where I ended up doing my fieldwork in Jamaica, completing my dissertation on race, citizenship, and belonging among South Asians in the diaspora. Interestingly, grad school is not a place where people necessarily get any technical training in doing interviewing and/or ethnographic fieldwork. So, my professors found out that I had this background in ethnographic production and they’d get their students, my fellow classmates, to come and talk to me…and ask, Hey what do I do in terms of equipment? What do I do in terms of going out in the field to do a recording? This was good for my long-term practice and got me back into media documentation in a way that I hadn’t had much of a chance to do during my first years as a graduate student.

So, more recently, the AFC was where I got the chance to expand on the teaching aspect of ethnography. I was able to do that by taking the principles and methods I learned earlier and formalize them in a teaching setting, under the umbrella of the annual AFC field schools in cultural documentation training, shaped by David Taylor, former Head of Research and Programs at the AFC (my immediate boss at the time). He gave me great insight and invaluable guidance on how to translate and teach esoteric concepts that we as fieldworkers have imbibed–that is, we’ve naturalized (to invoke Bourdieu) certain ideas and skills over time and through repetition, to the extent that our practice and our methods go without saying because they come without saying. Yet, in the context of a teaching situation, you have to translate–get those esoteric techniques and approaches out of your head–and articulate them publicly and in ways that beginners will understand, practice, and reproduce in their own work.

The other key thing I learned is the crucial need to develop and record metadata–that is, the notion of developing metadata as a sustainable set of information to accompany one’s field recordings. This is not something that folklorists are trained to do, let alone scholars and professional counterparts in other fields and disciplines. It’s a pity, because if we call ourselves ethnographic practitioners, then we need to know what we’re doing with the products of our research–how to categorize and describe them to make them sustainable and useful for subsequent generations. That this is not taught as a regular part of documentary practice is no one’s fault, but this gap is what the AFC field schools addressed: integrating the methods and approaches established by those wonderful field survey projects that the Center conducted back in the 70s and 80s [e.g. the 1977 Chicago Ethnic Arts Project and the 1979 Montana Folklife Survey Project, among others]. A large, critical part of the training that AFC did during the field surveys, mostly under the guidance of Carl Fleischhauer, and Mary Hufford in several instances, was to expose fieldworkers to the concept and practice of how to contextualize and capture the “scene,” by means of documentary media, and the accompanying metadata.

And that’s what stands out about what we do at the AFC in terms of raising metadata in importance…and we do so because it makes our collections a hell of a lot easier to use and find. Maggie Kruesi, former AFC cataloger, was great at cementing that in my head when we did field schools together–that need to develop and record metadata in the field and to ensure that that step is adapted as a core principle and practice and, as such, is not ancillary or an after-thought to the documentation and the interview. So, the first thing I lead off of now in my presentations, thanks to Michael Taft [former Head of the AFC Archives], is the principle that the fieldworker is the first archivist. And now, in the digital age, as I’ve worked in the field schools for the last 15 years or so, there is this corollary that the fieldworker is the first digital content manager, because everything digital now has to be managed in some shape or form, and without that there is no product, no oral history, etc.

MS: OK, well, let me jump in. And I already feel bad, so I need to stamp this as March 26, 2019, a Tuesday…just adding in the metadata [laughter]! So, I’m going to back up a bit and unpack some of the things you’ve said. I’m using this term, “ethnographic interview,” which I think is rather broad; nonetheless, you brought up these really interesting ideas of “deep hanging out,” “conversations”…and I know there can be differences between the ethnographic interview and “oral histories.” So, can you walk us through how you define these interview types?

GS: For me, the interview that takes place in an ethnographic setting, or with an ethnographer, is only one aspect of a complex of practices, right? So, the formal sit-down interview that we’re having now occupies an hour or two of our time. But, what do you do for the other 40 hours of being out in the field? What you do for the rest of the day involves the process of deep hanging out, or “participant observation.” Every one of those moments of interaction and communication comprises ethnography, when looking at it from a broader viewpoint, and the interview is one communicative act among many others. Where I see ethnographic practice differing is in the informal give and take, and the unstructured occasions–such as over a meal, after the work day, over a beer, when you’re out with somebody who is doing subsistence farming or shucking oysters, playing music, singing. Those are the moments when greater insight into a sense of community is actualized and made apparent, right? So, ethnography approaches documentation and information gathering from a perspective attuned to nonverbal communication, embodied expressions, movement, all of which are far different paths to understanding socio-cultural life than you get by means of the oral history interview alone.

For oral history practitioners, the oral history is the focal point of the encounter. Over the course of two hours or more, they are going to conduct an interview, and that interview is going to formulate the basis of–or buttress, supplement, augment–received understandings about events that they have knowledge of through deep research, previous publications, and other sources. And the interest lies in understanding what individuals experienced and what they remember from particular moments in time, with reference to larger political, cultural phenomena. So, for the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP), we might situate an interview in the context of the principal question: What did you do during the March on Washington in 1963? What brought you to that moment? Tell us what your days were like helping organize the event. While this approach yields rich details and amazing reflections, large parts of people’s lives are less documented, simply because of the form of the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, and the subject focus, which does not provide the space to do more. In this regard, ethnographic practitioners center attention on the practice of everyday life, as much as the grander questions of history, such as Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell? Here, we also ask: How do you do things, where do you do them, who did you learn from, what are the community interactions…who are your people? Those are the kinds of things that the ethnographic interview asks about in ways that maybe other disciplinary methodologies don’t, or at least not all of the time.

Having said that, my impression, based on personal observation, is that there is a strong resonance between the types of interviews employed, meaning that both ethnographers and historians are quite comfortable with semi-directional interviews and are on the lookout for stories, rather than the “data” that a heavily structured interview might yield. Although, it is possible to say that the ethnographic approach is more eager to pick up on the tangents, the esoterica, and the deeply local ways of doing things that often surface in interviews. I mean, the interviewee recalls something quite intriguing, and while that is off the point of the ethnographer’s main interview topic, you pick up that nugget or thread and you follow it where it leads, to the extent possible.

It may be obvious, but I would also point out that ethnography is a multimodal documentary practice. While ethnographers are also invested in the efficacy and importance of eliciting memories and historical and cultural reflections by verbal communication and oral narrative–the interview format–we have other tools in our toolkit to draw upon in the technical realm, such as photography, drawings, mapping, and field notes.

MS: So, in this broader sense of observing and talking to people about a wide range of their experiences and expressions, I wonder if you could speak about the changes that can occur when bringing recording equipment into the research and interview setting–whether we are talking about a camera or an audio recorder, or an oral history or ethnographic interview. I often talk to students about how that can change the dynamics of the interview, and I’m sure you have thoughts on that.

GS: Sure. You introduce recording equipment and people shut up. Or, you introduce the equipment and you might as well have placed, you know, a cup of water on the table, because people don’t care. In all those situations, however, the thing that may present itself as an obstacle only becomes that if you present it as an obstacle; if you make more of it than it actually is…like, if you infuse the recorder with some sort of manna that it doesn’t have. I use recorders and cameras as instruments, tools, and my approach is not to hide them or minimize them; rather I point them out and say: We want to make sure we get a really good, clean recording (or a good image) and this is what we use to ensure that outcome. Today, there’s nobody anywhere anymore who is surprised by recording equipment. I have had situations where I pulled out all this bulky gear and they go, oh, my niece interviewed me the other day for a school project and she had this cute little phone–you don’t have one of those? Oh, geez! So, that’s something [the ubiquity of digital recording devices] that has certainly changed people’s perceptions of recording equipment.

As for the very act of documentation, people certainly see interviews on TV, and they have been explicit in stating some variation on the theme of don’t do to me what they do on TV, by which they mean edit the interview to make them look stupid or show them up. This was especially the case in Trinidad, where people were very sensitive to this issue of misrepresentation due to a general mistrust of negative, media portrayals from the past. And this suspicion was apparent enough that we needed to let them know that we, the camera crew, were not journalists there to do some kind of investigative hit-piece, because they knew full-well they didn’t want to be a part of that sort of thing. So, we had to tell them more than once that the project [to document Indo-Muslim public performances] was different, that it was for scholarly purposes, and so on. The privilege of working at the Library, or any cultural institution, is that I can say, what we really want to do is make sure that we add your voice to the public record, and I want to make sure that I get the best recording possible. And that’s what Bob McCarl calls “documentation in full view of the community.” Alternatively, I like to say that we’re not documenting from behind a duck blind; meaning, we’re conscious of and conscientious about letting people know what the recording is for and why we’re there. Every interview is situational, so there are no direct guidelines that have worked for me other than being open about it, because 95 percent of the time, the interviews worked fine, and the five to ten percent of the time when they don’t, I take it as my fault.

MS: So, we are getting into ethics, and I’m thinking about documentation and editing. I always wish, in an ideal world, that the person I interviewed will be in the editing suite with me, telling me where to make cuts and what they would like the finished product to say, but that is often too difficult, logistically speaking. How do you feel about the post-interview interpretation that can take place when making a short film, or whatever else–you know, the editing, interpretation, the cutting and pasting of things that didn’t happen that way in real time?

GS: Again, it’s about how transparent you are about what you’ve done, letting people know at the very beginning what’s going to happen. Most often, people are interested in making sure that you’re going to give them a fair representation. That fair representation is not something that is guaranteed in advance by you, but the more time that I’ve spent in the field with people, the more confident they are that I will represent them not just accurately, but that I will be true about the things they share. Yet, I’ve had people who say reflexively, Well, you’re gonna get a different story from somebody else, so don’t take my word for it. So, they have a sense that if I’m going to do a documentary, all those different voices will be included…and they can then decide if they’re comfortable with having all those different voices included. And, yes, you’re absolutely right this notion of “co-voicing” and collaborative editing should be the norm, but practical issues can make that too difficult.

CRHP provides a great example of where it works for us on a small scale, where all interviews we put online are full, unexpurgated interviews–although, I make a few cuts here and there to stitch together digital segments, and I have occasionally bleeped out the excessive number of “f-bombs”…you know, one or two is fine, but 25? Not so good, because the teachers [using the videos for educational purposes] would all complain! After that, what we do is return the transcript and DVD and let the interviewee know: This is what’s going out online; is there anything you want to take out, redact? Is there anything that you didn’t want to say or be made public?

During CRHP, there was an instance when we were interviewing an African American family down South. And they told us a story from the 1960s about their involvement in civil defense actions and, as many people do in the South–black and white, many different ages–if you’re old enough to shoot for food, you carry guns around, and you carry them for self-defense, as well. It’s the opposite of the KKK’s purpose of going out to kill black folk. So, this family had guns in their car, and they were being chased by police…they had to flee an event…it was a very exciting story, with different people chiming in about how they had to evade the police, because they would get all the heat for possessing firearms, whereas white folks would not. Some time after the interview, I produced what I thought was the final cut and sent it back to them with the transcript. We then got a call from our colleagues at the NMAAHC, who said that the family was very concerned about that story. They didn’t want it going online, because there might be repercussions. My first thought was, that was 60 years ago, what repercussions could there possibly be? It was a head-scratching moment, but about three weeks later, I heard that their house had been fire bombed, because white racists knew that they were being interviewed about their civil rights activism and still resented them for it. The lesson is that the consequences that people are going to take on [because of an interview] are not going to be yours since you are removed from the community, but you have to try and be aware of them and respond appropriately. So, the notion of editing, redacting, being aware of the community’s sensibilities and trials — that’s important. And you’re not going to know that without somebody guiding you through those nuances, right?

MS: Yes. Let’s continue with CRHP. I can imagine that highly sensitive, challenging, and emotional stories and experiences were often shared with you. What’s your approach to handling what are sometimes called “difficult histories,” even if that’s too light a term for some of the horrific experiences of racism and dehumanization during the fight for Civil Rights?

GS: We tend to think of “difficult histories” as coming up on issues of profound moral or political problems, such as Black Lives Matter or the Me Too Movement. But, we often don’t know what the hard histories are until we get into the middle of them. We don’t know what questions are going to trigger the hard-hitting emotions, and so the hard history is revealed right there on the spot, you know? However, that’s a reason to do this work, since we are learning all the time. It’s about the stories that people are willing to tell you, and remaining open to all of that. The only thing that I do, really, is to be as open as possible. We are not neutral recording machines; we are not the camera. The camera is recording something that we’re experiencing. We are seeing through it, so we are a mediating point, and we are giving voice to those difficult histories. Understanding that everything is situational, you listen. That’s what you do. It’s amazing…one of the sobering things that I learned through the CRHP is that PTSD is not only a condition resulting from having been in a war in some foreign corner of the world. Being on the front lines of the freedom struggle in the South was like being in a war: The trauma individuals suffered from seeing and hearing about colleagues and friends being brutalized and killed was intense and long-lasting. When you hear strong, older women with immense dignity and courage tell you that they started watching a documentary on the Civil Rights Movement and had to turn it off and go to bed, and then stayed in bed for three days because of all the trauma it brought up–after 50 years had elapsed? I mean, that’s serious!

I think it comes back to ethics. When doing the interview, or engaging the ethnographic process, there’s the golden rule to do no harm. So, in the course of an interview, you may want to ask yourself this question, Does this person really want to share this story in this particular way? And one practical consideration is to say, Can we just stop for a second? We are getting into deeply personal subjects here, maybe we can come back to this a little later. You’re giving people the chance to reflect upon whether they really want to be saying these things, because if not, then you may have to redact the story, or edit it out later, which can be challenging. But that’s part of the ethical responsibility you have: Listening to stories of trauma, or situations that are just fraught. But you don’t know in advance what’s fraught, so you have to be open to it.

I find this with students, who can get overwhelmed when someone’s sharing a deeply personal story. You need to ask, How did that person deliver or say that story? You need to read the situation, read the context. And by no means publish the story until you have a chance to tell that person what the story contains. This is just standard practice; it’s for the protection of the individual giving the story, and for the student. As an instructor, you don’t want the student to wander into trouble…and also what this might do to subsequent relationships between that person and the community, and researchers who might come after you to work in that same community. So, the idea of teaching difficult histories is about the idea of listening to them. It passes through you as the first person hearing them, and then you have to try and put that out to the public in a way that is respectful and illuminates and expands upon our historical memory.

MS: Since you’ve brought up teaching, let’s shift the conversation to the AFC and its educational mission to train people in ethnographic methods and cultural documentation.

GS: The longer story is that it’s written in the DNA of the Center’s mission, which is to provide opportunities for the expression of folklife, cultural traditions, and to provide opportunities for folklorists and others to document, present, and represent their communities. So, documentation has always been a part of it. For instance, the field surveys [mentioned earlier] go back to the early days of AFC documenting, in an interdisciplinary fashion, cultural traditions from around the world. And it’s one of the seminal efforts of the Center: To train people in ethnographic documentation methods and also sustain that cultural record by providing descriptions, a template for people who are not well-versed in librarianship principles and archiving, to enter into that field with some degree of confidence, and to train people to do that. So, Carl Fleischauer, Elena Bradunas, Peter Bartis, and others, set that standard over 40 years ago.

I think the concept of [AFC] field schools was raised during an early, 1980s AFC Board meeting, when the question Would the Center undertake training in documentation? was posed. It was felt at the university level that folklorists were going out in the field with no training, formal or otherwise, in field documentation. Thanks to David Taylor’s work as the main organizer of the field schools, they started out as partnerships between the AFC and an institution of higher learning, and remain so for the most part today. So, the first few years it was Indiana University for two field schools…our colleague Howard Sachs at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, did one field school…and Mario Montaño did field schools at the University of Colorado and University of New Mexico over the course of two summers. Many others have participated since then including the latest one in 2018 with the University of Wyoming and Utah State University. They not only trained students, but also academy-based folklorists themselves, in field methodologies in an experiential setting. I should add that about ten years ago we used the field school model to provide documentary training to Indigenous people, the Laikipia Maasai of Kenya and Rastafari and Maroon communities in Jamaica, in partnership with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). And presently, the AFC provides skills-based methods training for North American Indigenous community scholars through collaborations with the Sustainable Heritage Network, out of Washington State University.

MS: If I may interrupt–for those who may not know, what is a field school?

GS: Well, the [AFC] field school in cultural documentation is about teaching a comprehensive set of [ethnographic] methods including technical training in various aspects of field documentation. Let me put it this way: Basically, the field school is an intensive ethnographic boot camp for three weeks. Classroom instruction is for about two weeks, which entails hands-on instruction where we take students out for two, four, six hours a day, teaching them how to turn the recorder on and off, manipulate the controls and so on. Quite literally, we shove the tape recorder into their hands and say Here’s your field kit, here’s what you’ve got in here, now I want you to do a five-minute interview and tell me all that you did and didn’t do, and then we’ll listen to it. So, from the very beginning there’s this notion of pushing people into the deep end, having them learn things they didn’t know, and unlearn things they thought they knew in terms of technical set-up. So, you have people teaching audio recording techniques using, as you are, a digital recorder…back in the day, it was a cassette recorder and before that…not quite a hand-crank Victrola, which is the gesture you are making with your hands right now [laughter]…but all of that combined with, say, photography. (As an aside: when I began teaching in the field schools in 2004, we were still doing photography with single-lens reflex, analog cameras…we still have a bunch of them sitting up in the stacks somewhere, which all went away almost as soon as the digital age hit.)

And during the field school, you’re taking them through the process of a fieldwork project, which has been determined by the instructor at the university and the AFC. So, when we worked with researchers at Utah State University (USU), we [AFC] say [to the instructor], How does this help you with your research on refugee communities in Cache Valley, Utah? This is because the university researcher/instructor has already built rapport and trust with community members who will be interviewed by students during the field school. So, instructors Randy Williams and Lisa Gabbert worked with folklorist Nelda Ault to get together members of three distinct resettled, refugee communities and to bring them into the school environment. The instructors’ goal was to also demystify the school itself and try to get the children of refugees to start thinking of USU as a place where they are welcome. And one way to do that was to involve the communities in the documentation efforts and to say to them, Now that you’re here in Utah, what are some of the things that you would like to document about your community’s traditions?

Going back to an earlier concept you brought up, how involved is the community in shaping their own representation? That’s a big part of these field school projects. We rely on these community members to be our interlocutors, guiding us through their cultural concepts and how they represent themselves as cultural beings in this new setting [e.g., Utah]. And, in an ideal sense, the things you look for when putting together a field school is, first and foremost, buy-in from the community. Who is going to be doing the work on the ground? The students and the instructors. And then we [AFC] come in (after already working with the instructors to shape the field school program) to teach alongside the university instructors.

MS: So, getting a little narrower in focus, what are the key elements, or ingredients, in teaching the art of the interview to field school participants?

GS: There is a list of 24 tips for doing a guided interview that we give to the students. They’re tips and guidelines, not that you need to do them in order, but they need to be taken into account as a whole. For instance, what you just did: “stamping” that it’s March 26 on the recording…

MS: And I’ll ask for your consent at the end!

GS: That’s right, because you didn’t ask for my consent at the beginning [which is recommended].*

* Despite our joking, I asked for Guha’s consent, or permission, when setting up the interview weeks prior. During this process, which happened via email and in person, I provided the reason for the interview (i.e., to produce this written piece) and the general topics about which I would ask him (e.g., interviews and teaching interviewing). As Guha and I are colleagues working in the same place and, thus, often in contact with — and trustful of — each other, the process of obtaining his consent was very informal. However, while the consent process can unfold in various ways, it is always a serious step in ethnography and/or interviewing. In my teaching, students learn to create written consent forms, where the aims of their broader research projects, as well as corresponding interview objectives, are laid out, and interviewees are encouraged to discuss and agree upon the conditions and other elements of the interview ahead of time. In addition, as folklorists, we often also use release forms, which grant researchers access to the recorded event and permits its use for non-commercial purposes, as explained further in the AFC’s Folklife and Fieldwork guidebook.

The guidelines are about demystifying the interview process–that is, to say that the art of the interview is, at base, a conversation. And how do you enter into a conversation with people, and what are the things you have to do to get ready for the conversation, and what to do when you’re in the middle of the conversation, and what do you do after? And this is quite antithetical to standard ethnographic practice, which would be practicing deep hanging out before you even turn on a tape recorder, right? So, we point out these contradictions, because a field school is a very short burst of intense activity that exposes you to certain principles…and, from what I’ve seen, it spurs students to want to do more. And that’s pretty cool.

Of course, there’s also space built in for reflection after interviews. We start each morning off by asking, What did we learn yesterday? What happened during the course of the interview that you want to find out more about? What were you completely unprepared for, and how will you ensure that won’t happen again? I mean, do work and find out who it is that you’re going to be working with [and interviewing], so that would mean that you take the background materials and readings the instructors prepared for you, and you make sure you understand who these people are. For example, let’s take John Roberts, son of Helen Roberts. What is John’s day-to-day job; what is his standing in this particular community? If it’s a ranching community, does he manage the ranch? Is he a cowboy? And what is it that you want to ask him about that? What do you want to know is always the first and most basic question you ask yourself. This is because you, as a mediator, have a duty to, first, the community whom you’re documenting, since you will be turning over these recordings at some point and giving them copies. Even if they are not that interested in hearing themselves speak, cousins, daughters, spouses, and so on will be interested in hearing them speak. And you want it to be as exemplary a recording as possible for their benefit, as well as for anybody else’s. Second, it does further the research agenda of the instructor (and/or institution) for whom you’re doing this work. Third, you should be keeping to that principle of “do no harm.” You don’t want to “poison the well” with your interactions and the questions you ask, because you have a long line of people who will come after you who will want to interview these people, and if you were disrespectful, well…it will be remembered.

Going back to the tips: Practice careful listening. I always tell students to do what I do, which is to not just listen to the conversation you’re having for the cultural and historical content, but to listen as a producer, too. Make a great recording because that’s what’s going to bear the test of time; that’s what’s going to help you to put together a podcast, or a written blurb on a project’s website. The usual procedure is that one student is conducting the interview, and her partner’s the recordist, and then in the next interview, they switch roles. This leads to discussions about the responsibilities and different ways to listen, depending on the role you assume. For instance, I stress the necessity of “listening to the room,” because you’re teaching students how to listen for extraneous or unwanted sounds that may end up in the recording–that is, getting them to think about putting on both their producer and research scholar hats at the same time. And all of this is reinforced with, at least, two to three days of practice, over and over again, and we critique constantly…we listen to each other’s recordings and pick them over.

You’d think that students were all chatterboxes, but they’re not [laughter], so it’s important to demystify the process and say to them, You know, you are allowed to make mistakes, but try and make them outside the interview situation, here in the field school, the so-called safe space. There are also other ethical considerations, such as if you promise something over the course of an interview, you fulfill that promise. If somebody asks you to come back, you say that you will try your best to, but you also explain the constraints. And, above all else, represent yourself as a member of an institution and a team, as well as a whole discipline in terms of practice. Be aware of the harm that you may do in this particular time and space long after you’re gone. Your responsibilities are not just to your co-workers in this project, but to all of the community and to people you may never even know. At the end of the day, these conversations that participants are learning to facilitate can enable connections, and it is gratifying that the work we do can lead to such connections and transformations …and maybe the students are inspired to go on to do something that’s larger than themselves.

MS: Thank you, Guha. Based on your rich experiences and thoughtful advice, I think there are many important takeaways here. In terms of teaching, it seems that the immersive, out-in-the-field field school model can be highly conducive for critically engaging with the theories, ethics, and methods of ethnography. Field schools attempt to mimic, as much as possible, the more organic ways in which cultural research and documentation projects unfold in general practice. The AFC schools you describe make space for reflecting on the making of mistakes, or at least discussions about potentially negative impacts of poor technique and behavior on source communities–and making mistakes is certainly a part of interviewing! As you note, field schools can also foster the development of meaningful relationships between participants and the community members they get to hang out with and learn from, and a sense of the importance of the overall project–and ethnographic fieldwork in general — can emerge. However, it is also true that planning and facilitating field schools are logistically challenging and require great resources–financial and otherwise. So, if a proper field school setting is too difficult to achieve, it can be helpful to think of creating field school-like experiences in other formats, such as less intensively over a 16-week college semester or in terms of shorter workshop events, to name a few.

And as you stress throughout, what is most important to know–and, thus, teach in any format–is the notion that community members/interviewees are the true experts of the interview topics–that is, of their histories, memories, stories, and their cultural knowledges, skills, and traditions. And so, in terms of training one to actively recognize and honor this expertise, it becomes an exercise in learning how best to ensure that their stories are being told by them in their words and on their terms (and with keeping an ear and/or eye on making sure that the recording will be as good as possible).

Finally, you bring to light the broader dimensions of the ethnographic interview–that is, its relationship to the future. You stress the notion of preservation, in that these interview “products” (recordings, videos, documentary films, among others) can also be important as part of the historical record–years, decades, and centuries from now (if we are so lucky). Accordingly, they need to be made discoverable and accessible for future researchers, the public, and source communities through the conscious planning and use of metadata. Significantly, though, you also shine a light on the legacies interviews and ethnographic research experiences can have in the future–that is, the good and potentially bad repercussions of our work. Here, the notion of respect is not just crucial in the present, but can extend to people we may never know–the future communities, descendants, neighbors, and friends of those we have been so fortunate to interview today.

About the Author: Michelle L. Stefano is a Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. She earned her BA in art history from Brown University, MA in international museum studies from Gothenburg University, Sweden, and PhD from the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University (UK). From 2011–2016, she was a Maryland State Folklorist for Maryland Traditions, the state folklife program. During that time, she led the partnership between Maryland Traditions and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was also Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage (2017), Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities (Boydell & Brewer 2016), and Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (Boydell & Brewer 2012).

Additional Resources

Civil Rights History Project: https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection

Hosay Trinidad Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) by Frank J. Korom: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13848.html

Hosay Trinidad (color, 45 min, 1999) by John Bishop, Frank J. Korom: https://store.der.org/hosay-trinidad-p788.aspx

Chicago Ethnic Arts Project: https://www.loc.gov/collections/chicago-ethnic-arts-project/about-this-collection

Montana Folklife Survey Project: https://www.loc.gov/collections/montana-folklife-survey-1979/about-this-collection

Civil Rights History Project: https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/

Civil Rights History Project: Dorie Ann Ladner and Joyce Ladner oral history interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier in Washington, DC, 2011–09–20: https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0054

Civil Rights History Project: Courtland Cox oral history interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier in Washington, DC, 2011–07–08: https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0030

Cultural Documentation Training for Indigenous Communities: https://www.loc.gov/folklife/edresources/ed-indigenoustraining.html

Sustainable Heritage Network: https://sustainableheritagenetwork.org

The AFC Field School in Cultural Documentation: https://www.loc.gov/folklife/fieldschool/index.html

The Utah State and Library of Congress Field School in Cultural Documentation: https://archives.usu.edu/folklo/fieldschool2015.php

Suggested Guidelines for Recorded Interviews (“the 24 tips”): https://www.loc.gov/folklife/edresources/edcenter_files/interview-guide.pdf

Folklife and Fieldwork: An Introduction to Cultural Documentation (American Folklife Center, 2016) by Stephen Winick and Peter Bartis: https://www.loc.gov/folklife/edresources/edcenter_files/interview-guide.pdf

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It’s About the Stories that People Are Willing to Tell You: An Interview with Guha Shankar was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The successful models gleaned from a long-term endeavor can stimulate and support educators’ interests in exploring community while meaningfully connecting to curricula.

Student: Is there anything you miss from the bad old days of the neighborhood?

“I now own a business on Seventh Avenue and when I moved here, Seventh Avenue was filled with businesses like mine, mom-and-pop stores. There were wonderful diners and butcher shops and bakeries and card shops and candy stores and almost all of them are gone because it’s become so expensive, so expensive to live in this neighborhood and to run a business in this neighborhood.”
~ Excerpt of an interview with Ezra Goldstein, co-owner of the Community Bookstore, Park Slope, Brooklyn

We are sitting in the back of the Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with Ezra Goldstein, the store’s co-owner, as he participates in a model oral history interview. Alongside owning this community anchor, Ezra has lived in the Park Slope neighborhood for over 30 years and has a thoughtful approach to discussing changes he has witnessed. His small, independent bookstore is a community touchstone and staple for area residents, but for many students visiting from a neighboring high school, Park Slope Collegiate (PSC), it is often an unrecognized storefront passed by to or from school.

This interview is part of a process for teaching students to conduct their own oral histories, one piece of a curriculum implemented by the Urban Memory Project (UMP). UMP has been working with these students and their social studies teacher for the past month studying the history and current issues that shape their Brooklyn neighborhoods. Students have built background knowledge through field documentation and text-based research and are now preparing to enrich their understanding of their communities through talking with the people who live in them.

The Urban Memory Project is a New York City nonprofit with a mission to strengthen the vital relationship between city residents’ personal histories and their city’s history. Founded in 2005, UMP has worked with more than 2,000 students and 300 teachers in NYC public schools. Using the research and documentation tools of urban planners, historians, folklorists, and artists, students develop tools to document and analyze the layered history of neighborhoods and consider issues affecting their daily lives and those of all New Yorkers. UMP’s goal is to cultivate new generations of informed and civically engaged citizens who see themselves as part of their neighborhood’s and their city’s unfolding story.

One of our favorite examples of the interview modeling method is the conducting of an oral history with Ezra. To interview him, students walk from school to his bookstore, one class at a time, and arrange themselves in seats in the cozy children’s book section. Ezra and the UMP educator sit on stools facing the students and are sometimes joined by the bookstore’s notorious and grumpy cat, Tiny, to whom the students joyfully respond. We begin by reviewing interview protocols together and testing our recording equipment. Then we engage in a series of questions designed to encourage Ezra to discuss what brought him to Park Slope from Ohio in the 1980s, how the community has changed, his thoughts on changes, and what it is like to run the bookstore.
Interviewing Ezra accomplishes a number of our teaching goals. Aside from modeling the process they will undertake, our conversation with him deepens students’ understanding of history’s impact on individuals. His personal experiences enrich their awareness of how a community’s past informs its present. Bringing students out of school and into the bookstore engages their curiosity. Meeting Ezra and hearing him discuss his life and neighborhood awakens their empathy and develops the historical reasoning skills of understanding multiple perspectives. Finally, their experience of their school’s community becomes more welcoming and expansive. The visit often becomes the first of repeat visits to the store.

Student: I was wondering, what was it like living here for you at that time?

Ezra: Well, it was very exciting and uh, and there was a lot more happening here than in Ohio, let me tell you, so…(laughs) it was a lot of fun. And we actually…found a rent-stabilized apartment up by the park and it was really beautiful. So, from then on, you know, I fell in love with the neighborhood right away.

Real-World History and Civics
A UMP school program is a community exploration done in partnership with teachers and students. Each project is custom designed to meet the needs of the specific school, teacher, and class. Teachers and UMP educators collaboratively develop units and lessons around current issues, teacher interests, and the needs of the school. A project might look like a fieldwork and oral history research project in a quickly developing Brooklyn neighborhood, or an examination of the legacy of mid-century urban renewal policies in today’s South Bronx. In addition to writing research papers, students might curate a photography exhibition, a panel discussion, or a presentation of policy memos.

At the end, teachers have a complete curriculum of lesson plans and resources as well as a set of new strategies for maximizing student engagement with the local community, based on real-world history, humanities, and civics. Students end with an argument-based research paper, practice in several research methodologies, a developed set of tools for participating in their local communities, and portfolio pieces to submit to colleges.
Why Oral History?

Oral history has been a foundation of UMP school programming since our beginning. We believe it is a tool with the power and potential to engage students to connect with issues beyond their immediate lives in a highly relevant manner. Many political, economic, and social trends affecting students are presented to them in school on a macro level that feels removed. We believe that to engage students in civic conversation they need to see the direct relevance of these trends on the lives of real people.

Our programs work with young people ages 12–18 who, even if they have lived in one area their whole lives, do not have the same context and perspective that older residents present. We find it continually meaningful and rewarding for students to talk with people who have seen the places where they live change over time. The process allows for a dialogue between the students’ experiences and the lived experience of others.

The interview process elevates student engagement. Students are in charge of preparing for, conducting, and processing the interviews. They choose pieces of an interview to illuminate a story about their communities. This ownership and rigor increase students’ commitment to the process and are reflected in their work products, whether a podcast, an exhibition panel, a video, a blog post, or the basis of research toward a Socratic Seminar or paper.

Zion: What would you say to this generation about making something in the neighborhood for ourselves?

Royston Antoine: …If the people get themselves together instead of trying to give up, see what happens is they give up on themselves too much. I didn’t give up, I’m still here, I didn’t give up, no, I’m still here. But people give up on themselves and they figure there’s nothing in Brownsville [Brooklyn] for them. There’s something here. Why other peoples coming to Brownsville? Because they see the vision is different from their vision. Their vision is “Oh, Brownsville is finished,” and they running. Where are they running to? And what are they going to run towards? Other neighborhoods. No matter how rich I become I don’t want to run to another neighborhood. I want to build this neighborhood.
~ Excerpt of a student interview with Royston Antoine, former Democratic Candidate for District 21, Brownsville, Brooklyn

Methodology
We introduce oral history after students have developed some general background knowledge about the community we are studying. By this point students have gathered and processed information illuminating the complexity of a community’s history and issues through fieldwork involving neighborhood observation and photo documentation walks as well as text research ranging from newspaper articles to research guides by local institutions such as the Brooklyn Historical Society. The students are now ready to grapple with the concept of community stakeholders. Teaching students to conduct and present oral histories is an important process. Through trial and error UMP has developed several methods we reliably implement to engage students in working with interviews. These methods are organized into prepping for, conducting, processing, and presenting oral histories.

At UMP we use oral history to:
• Teach that history is more than a static set of generalized events but rather a collection of experiences that influence different groups of people in different ways, depending on their circumstances
• Connect young people to the role that neighborhoods play in the lives of New Yorkers, including their own
• Develop curiosity and engagement
• Spark empathy
• Give students ownership
• Reveal that individuals’ lives are significant
• Deepen understanding of historical change through personal experiences
• Broaden historical reasoning skills and develop and deepen historical context
• Make history come alive

Model, Practice, Prep
Modeling how to conduct an interview is a key UMP best practice. We enlist the volunteer services of a long-time community member who can speak to the impacts of community change. This might be a local resident, a parent, or a teacher whom the students are surprised to see in a different capacity. Students observe the UMP educator conduct an oral history and take notes on a worksheet organized into three categories, Information Notes, Question Notes, and Demeanor Notes, to help students critique the process. After observing the interview, students have a Q&A with the interviewee and then a turn-and-talk with peers to discuss observations they made on their charts. We then share as a class about the new neighborhood information we gathered and new research questions that emerged. Together we create a list of interviewing best practices. The debriefing discussion intentionally addresses each of three categories from students’ notetaking sheet in turn to ensure that students have time to process how the use of questions can open up or shut down a conversation, how demeanor and professionalism affect the interview, and how learning someone’s personal story enriches understanding.

Individual, Small Group, and Community Interview Days
After the model interview, we might structure some informal time for students to practice interviewing each other back in the classroom, or we might be ready to move on to students’ conducting oral histories. There are several shapes these interviews can take depending on the project. Sometimes students are engaged in independent neighborhood research. In these cases, they use a structured series of steps to choose an interviewee, develop questions, and conduct their interviews. At other times students and their teacher are engaged in the study of one community. In this case we often organize a Community Interview Day when we invite a number of local residents to the school for a morning or afternoon of concurrent interviewing. A Community Interview Day invites us to partner with local organizations, like the Park Slope Civic Council or Brooklyn Historical Society, which have helped us to organize interviews, bolstering our relationships and resources.

A general hubbub permeates the teachers’ cafeteria of the John Jay High School campus, a building housing the consortium of four secondary schools that includes PSC. Groups of students cluster at tables of four or five, each engaged in an interview of a long-time neighborhood resident. Adults circulate the edges of the room, observing the process, which is entirely student-led.

Jeffrey: You’ve been here all of your life?
John: Still here.
Jeffrey: Wow.
John: I sit outside almost every mornin’, winter and summer, watching all the neighbors pass by, they all know me. But we had a store in the neighborhood. My dad and I had a fruit and vegetable store here. Ah, we had the store over 90 years. And I retired about 12 years ago….
Jeffrey: You have a lot of people respect you in the neighborhood.
John: Oh, as I said, you can’t find a finer neighborhood. Everyone seems to know everybody. I can sit outside my doorway and everybody comes by. They hug me, they kiss me, how do ya feel, how do ya do?
~ Excerpt of an interview with John Cortese, long-time resident of Park Slope, Brooklyn, conducted by PSC students during a Community Interview Day

To prepare for their Community Interview Day, student groups receive a bio of one interviewee and, referring to our model interview and question prompt lists, together develop and vet a series of questions. They decide who will be the main facilitator, who will be in charge of recording equipment and other logistics such as ensuring that waivers are signed, and who will ask which questions. We work with the school to arrange for a room large enough to host a number of groups at once. We order refreshments for a relaxed mix and mingle when the interviewing ends. After logistics have been accounted for, the actual day feels like magic. Students’ independence in preparing and the event’s formality ascribe a heightened significance, and students take their responsibilities very seriously. Additionally, the act of interviewing a community elder or long-time resident awakens their empathy and curiosity. That each group is engaging with a different person and their story creates a feeling of specialness to the interaction, one that is built on later in class through sharing the experience. Students gain new knowledge and experience the deepening importance of multiple perspectives. History comes alive.

Processing Interviews: Transcribing and Editing
Transcription can be a tedious and challenging task for many of us who use oral history in our work, and students are not immune to this struggle. We combat this fatigue with our students in two ways. First, we frame processing within the context of their final project. Seeing where the work is going and how it contributes to their project creates purpose. Second, we provide time for students to process and transcribe their interviews during class. This takes the pressure off to do this work on their own. Students are given a sanctioned opportunity to have their headphones on in class, which provides its own kind of thrill. It is always enjoyable to see students huddled over their class computers, intently listening and jotting notes with time signatures and keywords.

Teaching students to process interviews is straightforward. We give them a handout with very clear steps to take so that they can move at their own speed. As in the interview modeling, we also model how and why to transcribe by sharing examples of a transcription in process. We use the text of the model interview we did as a class to illustrate how this works We also show students several examples of finished student projects that incorporate oral history so they have concrete ideas of where their interview work could lead.

Destiny: Have would you say the neighborhood has changed since you moved there?

Lucia: When they built these buildings 100 years ago they were really made for workers. People who could afford to buy these buildings. The building that I live in and next from me were owned by the same families. The woman that lived below me was born in the apartment, not even the hospital.

It’s absolutely amazing. It’s just unbelievable. When I moved here working people could afford the rent and that was before condominiums, they didn’t have condominiums, so they had rental apartments, and affordable housing for people doesn’t even exist anymore.

~ Excerpt from an interview with Lucia Bruno, long-time resident of Park Slope, Brooklyn

Sharing Work: Exhibitions, Podcasts, Videos, and More
UMP school programs combine city exploration with action research to broaden students’ community understanding and deepen their connection to the places where they live. This research becomes the basis for students’ interpretations of controversial and complex issues facing their local communities. To end a project, students synthesize their research into formal presentations to share their knowledge and ideas with the larger community. Students’ oral history work becomes integrated into various projects combined with their field documentation and other more traditional text-based research. UMP uses real-world project models for students to present their work. Student projects have included in-school, student-curated, two-dimensional exhibitions of photographs, interviews, and text; podcasts and videos; and policy memos, panel discussions, or Socratic Seminars that construct arguments about what should be preserved or changed in their communities.

Exhibitions
Many projects end in student-curated exhibitions. Students are broken into committees, each with a group leader, to take on one of the exhibition tasks. Students select, edit, organize, and mount the exhibitions themselves with guidance in the form of facilitation by their teachers. Students committees sift through photographs to choose and mount for display, or read through writing pieces and oral histories. At the end of the preparation period we invite the community to visit the exhibition in a celebration at the school.

UMP has had a partnership with PSC since our founding. Over 15 years students have researched the changes affecting their borough through close examination of their own neighborhoods and their school neighborhood. PSC has served as a lab site for UMP’s teaching practices and its students and teachers as active collaborators. With their input and experimentation, we have codified our programming and implemented it at schools across New York City. The school remains committed to the work year after year and students have presented their shifting understandings of their borough through numerous projects, archived both at the school and through UMP’s website. This collection has created an historic record of the recent past to which a continuing cycle of students refers and enriches in a continuous loop of research and documentation.

Podcasts
Technology has dramatically developed in the 15 years since UMP began. Students are often much more tech-savvy than UMP staff are, resulting in new presentation formats. An example is seen in the accessibility of podcasting software for students, which provides them the challenge of synthesizing their interviews into an aural story.

Students Manuel Brito and Franciely Paulino worked with their English Language Learning teacher, Louise Bauso, and Paul Allison, coordinator of the youth writing blog Youth Voices Live, to learn the skills of podcasting. They applied these skills to an oral history presentation for their UMP project, embedded in their senior social studies class. Students used podcasting to capture the recollections of Eduardo Rosario, a long-time Brooklyn resident who has witnessed neighborhood change over many years, asking him questions about the neighborhood’s character, its population, and the eff

UMP’s programming stems from our experiences teaching in the social studies and humanities disciplines. Our projects encourage students to think historically to become civic actors in today’s world. We incorporate much of the thinking on the forefront of social studies instruction today, specifically the work of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and of Bruce Lesh, history teacher and author of Why Don’t You Just Tell us the Answer? Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7–12 regarding the teaching of historical thinking skills and historical reasoning. Working with oral histories gives students practice with these tools, specifically regarding the consideration of multiple perspectives, examining continuity and change, and understanding cause and effect. In synthesizing their interviews into larger projects, students must consider their sourcing information and the context in which the speaker is speaking. Seeing the interview as a primary source within a much broader study makes concrete to students the methods that historians use to analyze and interpret history. An additional goal is for our projects to promote college readiness. Engaging in oral history asks students to activate research, develop speaking and listening skills, transcribe, analyze, synthesize and summarize information in formal presentations. These are skills that will transfer to work in various subjects and projects as they move forward with their education. ects of gentrification.

A

t the start of their podcast the students state,
“Throughout history, Park Slope has experienced periods of highs and lows and we are going to study them by the voice of people that have been living here since the late 60s until now. Change is what makes everything interesting–if it wasn’t for the changes that happened and the changes that continue to happen, we wouldn’t be exploring this question: How do you preserve what you value in your neighborhood in city that is defined by change? I am Manuel Brito and this is Park Slope Then and Now.”

Elevating Teacher and Student Experience
“I see it [the neighborhood] as a whole, and not just fragmented, like me just going on with my own life. It’s livelier. I see Brownsville’s value. These are people with lives. That’s what built the community. When I’m walking down the street I see people, everyone walking around, it’s connected. If something were to happen we would all come together.”
~ Zion Leban, PSC student

Finally, the work resonates on a more poetic level. Students get the space to slow down and connect with someone else, a person whom they might not have recognized as a part of their community or to whom they have not listened closely before. This experience opens them up, at least temporarily, to think about someone else’s experience, listen, and empathize. They have an opportunity to recognize history’s dynamism through hearing the experiences of others and, possibly, experience themselves are as part of their neighborhood and their city’s unfolding story.

Finally, the work resonates on a more poetic level. Students get the space to slow down and connect with someone else, a person whom they might not have recognized as a part of their community or to whom they have not listened closely before. This experience opens them up, at least temporarily, to think about someone else’s experience, listen, and empathize. They have an opportunity to recognize history’s dynamism through hearing the experiences of others and, possibly, experience themselves are as part of their neighborhood and their city’s unfolding story.

About the Author: Rebecca Krucoff is a former social studies teacher and museum educator who is on faculty at Pratt Institute where she teaches courses in education, museum education, and public history. She
holds an MS.Ed from Bank Street College of Education and an MS Historic Preservation from Pratt Institute. Alongside her teaching and consultancy work, Rebecca is co-founder and director of the Urban Memory Project, an education nonprofit that encourages city residents to explore the vital relationship between their personal history and their city’s history.

Acknowledgements
This article is indebted to the work of the amazing teachers and students of Park Slope Collegiate
in Brooklyn, particularly Michael Salak, and Principal Jill Bloomberg, who has championed UMP
since its founding. I am grateful as well to the numerous NYC residents who have volunteered
their time and stories, allowing us a glimpse into their personal cities.
All photos published with permission of Urban Memory Project, Inc.
URLs
http://www.urbanmemoryproject.org
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/teaching-strategies/socratic-seminar
https://www.brooklynhistory.org/research-collections/research-guides
https://parkslopeciviccouncil.org
https://www.brooklynhistory.org
https://www.youthvoices.live/2018/01/10/park-slope-then-and-now
https://sheg.stanford.edu
https://www.stenhouse.com/content/why-wont-you-just-tell-us-answer

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Students Listen to the Voices of the City with the Urban Memory Project was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Naomi is an alumna of CWI’s Summer Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability. She is Dean of Environmental Learning at Prairie Crossing Charter School, in Illinois.

I spent an intensive week this summer with a group of K-16 and community based educators at CWI’s Summer Institute. And, OK, I have to admit that right now — after spending over 2 weeks hiking in the English countryside — The Institute seemed like another lifetime and another world. But that, in some ways, is a benefit. What I think now, what I remember now about The Institute, really is salient!

In the big picture, I think the most important thing that I took away from CWI’s Summer Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability was sort of a general perspective on the social and economic aspects of sustainability. My work and my passion revolve around environmental issues and that particular aspect of educating for sustainability. My colleagues and I at our school have viewed the other aspects of the triple bottom line of sustainability as challenge areas. We know that we need to do more with crucial issues including equity and access, eco-justice, cultural relativism, etc.

CWI’s Institute got me interacting with people who were entrenched more in these ideas than in the “green” bit, and it got me thinking about different perspectives and ways to approach this. (I’m still grappling with how to deal with some of these issues with younger students.) We talked about David Sobel’s work with the age appropriateness of different environmental topics, and what Sobel calls “Ecophobia” — the need to start from a place of respect and awe before any doom and gloom come into play. So how does that translate to things like poverty and racism when you’re working with a second grader? We’re simply not going to easily have the conversations that I heard my colleagues at CWI’s Institute talking about having with their high school students.

My school, Prairie Crossing Charter School is a K-8 school with an environmental focus. We strive to use a hands-on, integrated and rigorous curriculum that incorporates outdoor learning. We have joined the Green Schools National Network Catalyst Schools, which means that as a model green school, we are undergoing a multi-year process of working to set and achieve goals and share best practices with other schools that want to be “green.” We have identified two main goals. The first goal is Prairie Crossing Charter School will demonstrate growth each year on all academic standards through an integrated curriculum grounded in Education for Sustainability, Service Learning, and place-project-problem based learning (P3BL). Our second main goal is to commit to an inclusive culture of sustainability and caring for self, others and the environment — today and tomorrow. I am the chair of the curriculum (goal 1) committee, responsible for ensuring that all staff has an understanding of P3BL, Education for Sustainability and Service-Learning. I am also responsible for helping teaching teams create and implement curriculum that embraces all of these.

Personally, I came to public education from an environmental education background. I was drawn to my current position specifically because it allowed me to incorporate these environmental education principles. It is important in my life to be connected to the natural world and to be sustainability minded in my choices and lifestyle. I feel I have multiple purposes in my work. I believe that this type of education is best for students and prepares them for their futures. I also believe that students can have a very effective and positive effect on the environment, helping us to magnify and model the impact of eco-friendly ethics.

I arrived at CWI’s Institute hoping to gain tools to work with my teaching team, providing them the professional development and resources to implement Education for Sustainability (EFS) and Place Based Service-Learning in their classrooms. Specifically, my teachers would love to see exemplars of units that meet EFS as well as content area standards, are grounded in place, and employ service/problem-based learning. People at my school really want to see what strong units look like that incorporate all of those elements.

One of my concerns was that I was attending The Institute alone and so if I learned something that shifts my thinking or changes how I think we should be doing things at Prairie Crossing, no one else would have been here with me to have shared that experience. So I knew it would be up to me to communicate this to all the other stake-holders and decision-makers at my school. An obvious challenge we all face somehow is resistance as we work to make crucial pedagogies standard within our schools. We have full administrative support at Prairie Crossing. We know that we don’t want this to be isolated to the classrooms of the teachers that are, for a variety of reasons, more quickly passionate and motivated.

We know that some teachers in all schools are reluctant to give up control and leave behind their more familiar or traditional teaching methods. Most schools also have the challenge that some teachers want the same Service-Learning projects to be able to happen the same way year after year, becoming a predictable part of the curriculum. This doesn’t work, since in some cases, once the “service” is done, it doesn’t need to be done again.

The same learning objectives could possibly be met by a similar or related project. If you’ve gotten Round-Up banned you don’t need to do that again. In other cases, our students want to approach problems differently. This is of course a good thing, but it can also go against some teachers’ desire to have the predictable curriculum. When the curriculum becomes too predictable students often want to do the exact same thing — not truly engaging in the process — just copying what they saw the class before them do because it worked. There is also of course the large need to work on authentic student voice.

Though our school has, as one of its visions, “We keep the environment at the center of everything we do,” when the students leave for the summer, the Round-Up comes out. I tried to get alternatives implemented by working with adults, but there was little interest in spending any additional time or dollars into more fully living out that vision statement. So, I put the bug into the ear of a classroom teacher who I knew was like-minded. We worked with her class and the kids got so involved. The teacher remarked that the thing had taken on a life of its own, she was amazed. The kids presented first to the school’s director and administration as well as the maintenance staff, and were then invited to present at the school board meeting. The board will vote at their next meeting on a policy that dis-allows Round-Up and other similar herbicides on our campus, and our director believes they will vote to ban these chemicals based on feedback he’s heard.

I have been participating in a working group for the Green Schools National Network developing core beliefs. So, I actually have been engaged in trying to develop a collective vision for education. After spending so long immersed in the thought processes and wordsmithing we came up with the following set of statements of belief. “Education should be student-centered and growth-mindset oriented. It should focus on the whole student (all aspects of wellness, not just intellectual wellness!) It should be place-based and culturally relevant. And it involves meaningful participation in the “real world”. Learning should be joyful.”

At any rate, just immersing myself in thinking more about those issues during CWI’s Institute was good for me and expanded my thinking. On a very personal level, the Collaborative Ethnography project we did in the streets of Brooklyn also caused me to grow. I conquered fears and did things that made me initially uncomfortable with very meaningful and positive results.

Before we started I was pretty nervous about the whole experience. I had a working group that was very nice and seemed like they would be good to present our work with, but they were either super confident with it or even more nervous than I was…but this ended up being really good for me. I was very proud of myself because I stepped up and approached people and had really good conversations. I felt very brave.

I think as much as anything I heard or learned, just the experience of going out of my comfort zone and doing something that was challenging and a bit scary even, and succeeding, changed me. We always talk about wanting that for our students, and the persistence that can result but as adults we don’t always have to take risks, or we choose the ones we do take based on the rewards we think will make it worthwhile. Our street based practicum with ethnography isn’t one I’d have done on my own.

As my small group of educators-ethnographers roamed the rapidly changing neighborhood of Gowanus in Brooklyn, I had some impactful interviews as well. My interview with Marcus, a very sincere young black man in his mid twenties was probably the most impactful. Marcus let us know he is homeless, though you wouldn’t guess it to look at him. He has a shelter bed right now so he wasn’t carrying his belongings and he was well groomed. He told us about his situation a little bit. He’s unemployed, couldn’t find work in Connecticut where he’s from, so he came to New York where he thought it might be easier. But he hasn’t found work here yet either. He said it was very humbling, the shelter system. He told us it doesn’t matter where you come from or your race. Four months with no income and any of us could end up there, especially without family support, which Marcus clearly didn’t seem to have.

I didn’t get the story of Marcus’ family, but I wish I felt comfortable asking about it because something definitely seemed to have happened there. I say this because because he told us that, “Humans aren’t capable of unconditional love. All love is conditional and all love and all people are selfish. You gotta grab yours. Sometimes you get robbed and sometimes you’re the robber.” He went on, “And with this economy, it’s not pretty. Once you’ve been in people’s place, you realize it’s not a clear picture, it’s not black and white.” Marcus clearly didn’t get served first, and he clearly had some experiences that made him not trust his fellow humans. Yet he seemed open and friendly and proof that you can have an important human interaction, at least for five minutes in the park.

Our ethnography experience at CWI’s Institute was just really sobering and really real. Because it’s not like I learned anything I didn’t cognitively already know about access and the human condition and whatnot. I don’t know, it was just sometimes sad, and honest, and always real. I actually think I would have liked this project more if I had focused more on people’s stories instead of trying to learn about Brooklyn. A lot of people had a lot to say about Brooklyn but is seemed almost superficial — everyone EVERYONE, everyone said “gentrified”. “It’s getting gentrified.” Some people thought this was good and some thought it was bad but it was definitely the buzz word.

So I take our experience doing ethnography with me although I’m still considering how I can repeat this experience with my students in our particular semi suburban setting. I am still toying with the idea of translating the concept of gentrification as the main change/theme to the concept of urban sprawl as the main change/theme for an ethnography project. I likely won’t do person-on-the-street style interviews as part of this.

I would, rather, have people come into the classroom that have diverse perspectives. Farmers, both old school and more recently-arrived organic; families newly arrived and those who have lived here for a long time. I think place-based education and using the community as a classroom is a strength of ours at Prairie Crossing and this will be a natural way to use a person, place, event or phenomena as an entry point and learning experience.

I also took away some ideas from CWI’s Institute around how to increase experiences like this for our students. For example, I’d like to work with our PSO (parent group) to create a database of parent/family members who have different areas of expertise, experiences and backgrounds that are willing to come in and work with classes. We have a lot of this happening on an informal basis, but it’s usually dependent on who’s in a specific teacher’s class that year. (Mrs. Smith has a family from wherever, so they come in and talk about that to Mrs. Smith’s class) But a lot of these parents, grandparents, etc. would be willing to do this for other classes that their kids aren’t currently in, especially if it advances the curriculum. Eventually, we could start a resource list for non-family members, too, as a lot of times these connections are made because one teacher knows someone, but if they leave, connection lost! I’ve thought we could even do a parent speaker series.

There were a lot of other things at CWI’s Institute on Place Placed Service-Learning and Sustainability that were impactful to my thinking and that I plan to use. Among these are the idea of “windows and mirrors”. I think this is a great metaphor — and can apply to a lot of things, even simple things that aren’t big sustainability topics. For example, a poem. How does the poem explain the world, what is its context message and how does it help you understand yourself better? Or an animal, how is it adapted to survive. What can you learn about an animal scientifically, and what can that help you learn about yourself? How do you see yourself reflected in those adaptations? As well as, of course, the big sustainability things!

I really liked the whole idea of belonging and mattering that permeated The Institute. A guest faculty member shared a presentation on how the brain works around such things that was great and had a lot of useful ideas. We also talked about the notion of deficit lens vs. asset lens, along with attributional retraining. I think a lot of these concepts will be really important to a classroom teacher or social worker. I see students but I often don’t get to know them as personally as a classroom teacher. I think the understanding is very important for program design. It also gets into how we communicate in general, and I hope to also pass that along to my colleagues.

During The Institute we also discussed the difference between “outreach” and “in reach”, along with “Where are you from?” The redefinition of that question “Where are you from?” has really become pervasive in my thinking. We talked about the idea of thoughtfully ordering what are actually very personal and complex questions. “Where do you live now?” and, “Where have you lived that has been significant to you?” “Where are your ancestors from?” “Whose land are you on now?” related to our call to acknowledge native lands. An accompanying question can be “What is the history (and future) of your place?” Interestingly, this idea of “Where are you from?” also came up on my trip to England after The Institute, as we were joined for five days by a friend who moved to London last year. He’s originally Peruvian, and has an accent. Latino or Hispanic people are not that common in rural England, and he spent most of his life living in the Chicago area. He lives outside of London but doesn’t identify with that yet. So he told me he gets a lot of “Where are you from?” And it’s not a question he can answer with “Peru” or “Chicago” or “Sussex” so he appreciated that explanation of the complexity of that question.

Finally, I think CWI’s Institute got me thinking about the idea of stories — their validity and importance. And the idea that everything has a story, not just people. How do we get at the people’s stories, and validate them? How do we get at the plants’ stories, and the animals’ stories, and the stories of the water and land? I just like the idea of stories as a unifying thing — meaningful to all, across cultures and species. I’m currently reading Barry Lopez’s new book Horizon, which is long but excellent, and related to a lot of these topics — sustainability, place and the unique characters of different places, colonialism and capitalism and stories. I’d recommend it but I’m not going to lie and say it’s a fast read!

About the Author: Naomi Hershiser Naomi is an alumna of CWI’s Summer Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability. Naomi is Dean of Environmental Learning at Prairie Crossing Charter School, a multi year US Department of Education Green Ribbon Award Winner located in Illinois. Prairies Crossing is an accelerator school with Green Schools National Network and is also a USGBC/GSNN 2017 Best of Green Schools Award Winner.

CWI Institutes are Transformative Professional Development learn more

© copyright 1995–2019, Community Works Institute (CWI)
All rights reserved. CWI is a non profit educational organization dedicated to engaging students and teachers with their local communities through integrated learning projects. We work with educators and schools across the U.S. and internationally. email us to bring a CWI event to your school or organization.

CONTENT USE POLICY All materials contained in this web site remain the sole and exclusive property of CWI, or the author as designated by arrangement. We strongly encourage re-publication, but we do ask that you properly credit, and then share your re-publication link with us directly. contact us

An Educator Goes Deep, From Sustainability to Collaborative Ethnography was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Regina is a Lower School Science Teacher and the Sustainability Coordinator for the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York. She participated in CWI’s Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability.

I am always looking for ways to make learning more relevant and impactful for my students. As a science teacher, I try to find ways to connect what we are learning to my students’ lives outside of my class and beyond school. I would also like to empower my students to become change makers within their communities. Additionally, I worry that my students rarely see beyond the privileged bubble we have created for them within our school community. I want to help them see and relate to the larger world — to find and use their voices and their resources to help make the world a better place.

My time working with Community Works Institute at their Summer EAST Institute in Brooklyn truly broadened my view of service-learning and strengthened my commitment to and enthusiasm for this work. Moreover, it provided me with a plethora of resources and contacts from which I can draw inspiration and support. At the Hackley School where I teach, we have Diversity, Sustainability, and Service Coordinators for each division (Lower, Middle, Upper School). Through Place Based Service-Learning, I really feel like we can unify our missions, goals, and projects in order to better facilitate our students’ learning, connections to community, and identity formation.

In attending CWI’s Summer Institute I was hoping to learn how others are including service work in their teaching and school communities. I wanted to get ideas about how I can incorporate Service-Learning into my science curriculum, my sustainability work, and even my Lego robotics teams. I am only at the beginning stages of learning about and looking at how I can incorporate service learning into my teaching.

I know there will be challenges. One challenge that I face is my limited time with my students. As a specialist, I only see my students for forty minutes at a time, 2–3 times per week. The lack of flexibility and time within my schedule will be a big challenge for me as I try to incorporate more meaningful, real world experiences for my students. It would be ideal for me to find ways to collaborate with colleagues to create cross curricular experiences for students that maximize our available time. As I approached The Institute I knew there is still so much for me to learn about how to build relationships within the community. Like many schools, so much of what we’ve already done with service-learning and sustainability have been “one offs.” So, I was hoping to gain insights into how to develop a more comprehensive, integrated, sustainable program rather than a series of singular experiences.

On our second day of The Institute CWI’s founder/director Joe Brooks launched us, following a workshop on Collaborative Ethnography, on a street based practicum in the nearby neighborhood of Gowanus. During the week, as we moved through the different challenges and experiences during the week at CWI’s Institute, I was struck by how many opportunities there really are for using Collaborative Ethnography in my teaching. I had gone into The Institute thinking mainly of the students in my sustainability group, hoping to come up with ideas for them to be more impactful within our community.

But hearing from the many different K-16 educators in our Institute group helped me to see possibilities for engaging all of my students in different grade levels in ethnography work. While I still find it daunting to take elementary students out into the community and “set them free” in the way that we approached our ethnography work as adult teachers in Gowanus, I am embracing the idea of bringing the community to my students. While I was still at The Institute, I reached out to the Tarrytown Environmental Advisory Council and subscribed to their newsletter. I’m hoping to make connections and build relationships with leaders and concerned citizens within our community, so that they might be willing to engage with my students. My colleagues and I are also reaching out to the local farmers’ market, since that may be a good starting point for our students to engage with the community and do some ethnography work in a more contained, yet authentic, setting.

The idea of Collaborative Ethnography was initially intimidating and unnerving to me as a shy introvert. The entire idea of spending a whole week at The Institute talking with new people and sharing ideas was also somewhat overwhelming.

When I was randomly sorted into a group of fellow introverts to complete the Collaborative Ethnography assignment, I felt a bit stressed and overwhelmed. And, against the odds, our group turned out to include ONLY introverts. This became obvious as our group found ourselves in near silence, surrounded by other more gregarious groups who were quickly actively planning and sharing ideas for their afternoon’s work in the street. But we all quickly stepped out of our comfort zones and set out with determination and positive attitudes.

As our initial trepidation waned we were able to complete our task successfully by taking a perhaps slightly different approach from our colleagues in other groups, utilizing our strengths and finding an approach that worked for us. This helped me to realize that my students will be able to work successfully in partnerships, and I might not need to plan out every pairing the way that I am tempted to. Sometimes, random pairings can lead to students discovering new strengths or solving problems in a way they might not have otherwise. This was echoed the next day during Natania Kremer’s presentation on a project around exploring gentrification. Her students were grouped based on the type of presentation they wanted to create. I’ve already implemented this with my summer students, allowing their interests to dictate groupings rather than pairing them up based on who I think will work well together. Of course, I do take personalities into consideration a bit, but I’m leaning now more toward giving them choice and autonomy.

During our ethnography work on the street we found that splitting into smaller groups for the initial approach of people, and sometimes for the entire conversation, was more comfortable for us as well as the people we were getting to know. We mainly approached people in shops or businesses who seemed able and willing to speak with us, so as not to impose on busy schedules. We only approached one person who was sitting outside. I think we all felt as though we didn’t want to impose on anyone’s time or space and we felt more comfortable speaking with people whose jobs involved speaking with the public.

The person who most impacted me during our Collaborative Ethnography project was a gluten-free baker we met. My Institute colleague Joseph, from a public school in Indiana, and I entered a door that said OPEN, but when we got inside, it was a tiny space, not at all what we expected from a bakery. But the owner, Pedro, immediately welcomed us, seated us in his small office, and asked about our gluten free needs. I shared a bit about a family member’s battle with systemic inflammation. Pedro then shared his story. He is originally from northern Spain.

He was diagnosed with Celiac at twenty-six during a routine physical. He only weighed 115lbs, but he loved to eat. The doctor knew something was wrong and ran tests. Once he was diagnosed and changed his diet, he actually grew several inches, gained weight, and even had to buy new shoes! He was finally getting the nutrients he needed. He came to Brooklyn with his wife and worked for 20 years as a mechanical engineer. But he had memories of baguettes from his childhood and desperately missed the bread. Every gluten-free product he tried tasted awful.

So he used his engineering skills to create his own recipes for breads that he could eat. He said he focuses only on making a delicious product. We asked about the changes he’s seen in the neighborhood of Gowanus and he mentioned that all of New York has changed. He wouldn’t say that change was bad; change is just change. But he mentioned that there used to be lots of mom and pop shops and beautiful independent bookstores, and now there are hardly any. That, he said, he misses. Pedro offered us cookies and we ultimately bought a few bakery items.

Speaking with Pedro made a deep impression because he was so kind and open about his life. He was eager to share and make connections. We didn’t even have to ask much because he had so much he wanted to tell us. Where I had been so worried about bothering people, imposing on them, he was welcoming and eager to learn about us and share his story.

I really love the idea of taking a social justice approach to our Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability work. Throughout the week, I was seeing so many connections to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social justice work. It was really helpful to see this approach fleshed out within a specific unit of study (on gentrification) when CWI faculty member Natania Kremer shared her work with ninth graders at Brooklyn Friends School. Natania is the Director of Service-Learning & Civic Engagement at Brooklyn Friends.

During the class-project “Service & Justice Seminar: Understanding Identity, Power, and Privilege” Natania’s students engaged in an Immersive Exploration of Gentrification. Students researched gentrification in their Design & Technology class and designed websites focused on the impact of gentrification in neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn. During the first week of May, they learned more context about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn, and they engaged with community partners doing meaningful work related to gentrification. They also connected with Brooklyn-based community organizers, and artists.

Brooklyn Friends takes the approach of building accountable, reciprocal relationships in the community (CARE). The CARE acronym particularly resonated with me and seems like a really accessible way to frame the work for my students. I appreciated hearing again that our students are not supposed to be leaders in this work within the community. Rather they are supposed to learn from those leaders already established and working within the community. This seems right and encourages a sense of humility which my students may sometimes lack. At the same time, students can seize opportunities to act as leaders within their own SCHOOL community, reflecting on their experiences and sharing their work with their peers and the school community at large. I agree that amplifying student voice and allowing them to take the lead in sharing their learning with the community is a way to increase buy in, as well as providing a broader platform to share the importance of the work of our community partners.

I am so grateful for my experience at CWI’s Summer Institute, and I think it will definitely shape my pedagogy. I’ve come to realize that the best way to reach my students and impact them is to develop strong, personal relationships with them. I now believe that this needs to extend beyond the classroom and into the community. Through cultivating strong relationships between myself, my students, and the greater community, I will help my students not only to learn and grow, but also to help create a better world.

About the Author: Regina is a veteran Lower School Science Teacher and the Sustainability Coordinator for the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York. She participated in CWI’s Institute on Place Based Service-Learning and Sustainability and continues to use ethnography in her work with students.

CWI Institutes are Transformative Professional Development learn more

© copyright 1995–2019, Community Works Institute (CWI)
All rights reserved. CWI is a non profit educational organization dedicated to engaging students and teachers with their local communities through integrated learning projects. We work with educators and schools across the U.S. and internationally. email us to bring a CWI event to your school or organization.

CONTENT USE POLICY All materials contained in this web site remain the sole and exclusive property of CWI, or the author as designated by arrangement. We strongly encourage re-publication, but we do ask that you properly credit, and then share your re-publication link with us directly. contact us

Overcoming Obstacles: Shaping Pedagogy Through Experience was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am a high school art teacher and artist. I recently attended CWI’s Summer WEST Institute at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles (I am also a graduate of Otis College’s MFA program). Over the course of the week, the most significant way in which my thinking changed because of my experience at CWI’s Institute is that education can and should be a collaborative process. It is also clear that being able to tie a state standard or teaching objective to something tangible and relevant to the everyday lives of my students enhances their learning.

In the past. I’ve invited guest speakers to my classes and actively sought community involvement in school projects. The most helpful new way of thinking that I immediately got from the training and planning work we did at CWI’s Institute was through the outline of a focused process for achieving high quality Place Based Service-Learning. This process included focusing on Academic Integrity, Student Voice, Reciprocity, Compelling Purpose, and Reflection.

First, a key learning objective is stated by the teacher, then the students and teacher collaboratively make a plan that achieves that learning objective. The students then propose ways to achieve the learning objective through projects that immerse them in community involvement. Finally, some kind of reciprocal community event or end cap project that demonstrates learning and positive community benefits finishes the process. My own version of this process relied too much on me as the teacher carrying the load with the students as passive participants. I also very rarely did any sort of end cap project. So, the importance of student voice, real reciprocity and having an audience became clear to me as crucial.

I’ve taught Beginning Art, Advanced Placement Portfolio Art, Graphic Design, Yearbook and Journalism for eleven years at Holtville High School in California. I am also the advisor for our school’s yearbook, and art club. The HHS journalism class has their work published bi-monthly at the local newspaper, The Holtville Tribune, during the school year.

Holtville High School is located twenty miles from the U.S/Mexico border. It is a Title 1 school with 600 students attending grades 9th-12th. The city of Holtville, California, where HHS is located, has a population of 6,500 and is part of the primarily agricultural/desert area of the Imperial Valley. Significant cultural events that happen throughout the year are the Holtville Carrot Festival, The California Mid-Winter Fair and various local farmers markets that occur throughout the year when the weather permits. These events allow a venue for artists to showcase their work to the community. The artists of Holtville High School regularly show their works at these events. The Museum of the Desert located in the city of Ocotillo which is 60 miles east of Holtville, has given workshops and lectures to HHS students on coil pot building and the history of the indigenous Kumeyaay people who would migrate from the coast to the desert of what is now the Imperial Valley. A major work of folk art, Salvation Mountain, is located 40 miles north of Holtville. The Juanita Salazar Lowe Art Gallery, located at Imperial Valley College, is 15 miles east of Holtville. HHS students often attend Imperial Valley College after graduation. The art gallery at Imperial Valley College has hosted works by high school students in the past and HHS students were among those whose works were exhibited.

The strategies on the first day of the CWI training helped me figure out a better strategy to incorporate Place Based Service-Learning, student lead learning, and hands on learning in my art classes. The fifth California Standard for the Visual Arts is Connections, Relationships and Applications of the visual arts. I think that Place Based Service-Learning ties right into this specific standard and can help students connect what they are learning in my classes to the wider world.

During our Collaborative Ethnography project, a street based practicum we did during the Institute, I was taken out of my comfort zone. While I was wandering around downtown Los Angeles working with a small group of Institute participants, I was also trying to figure out how to relate this type of experience to my students. How would I integrate this type of learning experience in my class, and in the small rural community of Holtville where I teach. My biggest take away over the course of our time doing ethnography assignment was how people on the street tend to react positively when they are approached and asked to share their story. Letting people feel important, honoring their story, by simply showing interest in who they are was an eye opening experience for me personally. I myself felt positively impacted by being able to help the people we interacted with to share their story.

Logistically there are of course big differences in what is allowable “in the street” for high school students and for adult professionals, as we were at The Institute. The community of Holtville is a rural agricultural setting while downtown Los Angeles is the exact opposite. But, looking closely at the community of people in a place and connecting with them is something that could be applied anywhere. If I were to do a version of this specific type of project at Holtville High School, I would first talk with my students about the community of Holtville and get their thoughts and move forward from there. My biggest take away from the our ethnography project at The Institute is that we all have agency that we are not aware of and don’t use.

I go to professional development workshops to learn what I can do to improve my high school arts program, and of course to steal ideas from other teaching artists and educators. The biggest challenge I’ve faced while trying to implement place based learning strategies at my high school has been the potential for creative professional stagnation due to being the only visual arts educator at Holtville. We artists steal. But teaching artists out on their own in the middle of the desert don’t have other working teaching artists easily available to steal from. I had the opportunity at the Institute to speak with K-16 teachers, some of whom were teaching artists, who had already been utilizing Place Based Service-Learning. I hope to steal their ideas and put them into practice. A strategy that I plan on using is collaborating with other teachers and their programs in my school so that we can enhance what we are doing in our classes. We already put up a Day of the Dead Altar at Holtville High School. This is a collaborative effort with the art and ELL class.

My biggest take away from our Collaborative Ethnography project at CWI’s Institute is that we all have agency that we are not aware of and don’t use. I would hope that doing a version of the ethnography project with my own students would make them aware of their power and the positive impact they can have on their community. I can also see CWI’s Place Based Service-Learning process being utilized in my own teaching practice based on the content and population I teach.

Our high school art club recently completed a glass tile mosaic that will be displayed in front of the school. Previously the HHS art club created a mural in the high school cafeteria and another mural in the art room. Artwork by HHS students is often used by local community groups such as the Holtville Chamber of Commerce and the Holtville Fire Department. Student artwork has also been shown in the HHS yearbook and various HHS sports and activities. I’ve also discussed Otis College of Art and Design’s Report on the Creative Economy with my students to show them what creative careers they could pursue if they choose to do so. Otis alum, Mayuka Thais, has given video conference lectures to my classes about her work as a teaching artist. And I’ve had working creative professionals from the Imperial Valley give lectures to his classes. A Day of the Dead Altar is set up in collaboration with the English Language Learner class every year. It is so important to tie the visual arts to culture that is relevant to the community and the population of students that are being served.

One of my big goals this year is to bring more positive attention to the art program at Holtsville High School. Vanessa, another Institute participant, gave me the idea by to create “pop up” art spaces that showcase student artwork. Vanessa suggested speaking with the ASB adviser and creating opportunities for students to use these “pop up” art spaces so students can take selfies and hashtag the pictures on social media. Vanessa also suggested creating a twitter account to document student artwork and to go through the whole CWI process of having a standard, student lead project, project completion and end cap. The big take away from the training I received at CWI’s Institute is that the process of having a learning objective, a process that achieves the learning objective, and integrated community component, and an end cap is kind of like the basic structure of a story. Hopefully that will make learning experiences more relevant to students.

About the Author
Alfredo Guzman recently attended CWI’s Summer WEST Institute and is a graduate of Otis College of Art and Design’s MFA program. He has taught Beginning Art, Advanced Placement Portfolio Art, Graphic Design, Yearbook and Journalism for eleven years at Holtville High School in California. Alfredo is also the school’s yearbook advisor and art club advisor. The HHS journalism class has their work published bi-monthly at the local newspaper, The Holtville Tribune, during the school year.

CWI Institutes are Transformative Professional Development learn more

© copyright 1995–2019, Community Works Institute (CWI)
All rights reserved. CWI is a non-profit educational organization dedicated
to engaging students and teachers with their local communities through integrated learning projects. We work with educators and schools across the U.S. and internationally. email us to bring a CWI event to your school or organization.

CONTENT USE POLICY All materials contained in this web site remain the sole and exclusive property of CWI, or the author as designated by arrangement. We strongly encourage re-publication, but we do ask that you properly credit, and then share your re-publication link with us directly. contact us

Finding the Agency We Need to Use as Teachers: An Adventure in Professional Learning was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By STEPHEN MUCHER

Resentment (noun) — bitter indignation at being treated unfairly.

The two central public education trends in my lifetime have been the rejection of racial desegregation as a worthy democratic policy goal and the gutting of school funding for our nation’s poorest urban and rural communities. Alternatively, elite leaders in both parties with ties to industry have focused instead on radical privatization, dismantling the teaching profession, raising the personal burden and opportunity cost of obtaining a college degree, and celebrating a small number of well-marketed success stories designed to disprove this chaos.

You’ve seen those sentimental viral videos emphasizing the poor kid who learned coding online or graduated from a “break-the-mold” charter school with a celebrity founder and donations from Walmart and who got into Harvard, right?

As a result, our policies have ensured three modern realities: 1) If you are poor, you probably went to school surrounded by people of the same race; 2) If you are poor, you got a substandard education; 3) If you are poor, you were inundated with media messages blaming you for your lack of educational progress.

Ask the white third grader outside Huntington, WV who sees teachers on food stamps as his neighborhood becomes big pharma’s favorite opioid dumping ground. Ask the black middle schooler in Memphis who may not realize her per-pupil funding goes directly to a large charter school network and its well-paid CEO, but who knows full well her third teacher quit last year while administering another standardized test. Ask the Mexican-American immigrant teen attending an Arizona high school that eliminated language learning resources, who can’t meet minimum university admission requirements, and who worries any completed FAFSA might expose an undocumented family member.

Each of these students is subsequently flooded with heartwarming examples of other kids who successfully overcame similar obstacles and is accusingly asked, “Why can’t you be more like them?”

Meanwhile their resentments boil, justifiably. And they become adults. This is not simple white resentment. This is not simple black resentment. These are kids who, despite tragically few opportunities to obtain the analytical, writing, and critical thinking skills you take for granted, astutely intuit that they deserve something better. And unless you are working for their liberation, stop judging how that resentment manifests (even into adulthood).

Because here’s a fourth modern reality. If you are poor, a politician is telling you this is all a zero-sum game. If you are are poor, you are being asked to rally your indignation in favor of a particular candidate who knows nothing of your lived experience. If you are poor, you are are expected to believe the lie your poverty is primarily the result of another group of poor people getting more than they deserve.

Trump’s path to reelection requires that we buy into these carefully calculated and highly-charged racial categories. And no small part of the Democratic Party fundraising base benefits from and promotes this same framing. Those maintaining power, after all, have always needed racism much more than the poor (see: “The Southern strategy”).

The political value of these categories rests on the assumption that human beings, as categorized, are immutable. It requires you to view pre-categorized strangers, especially the poor, as static rather than dynamic. After all, why waste your time talking to someone who has their mind made up?

But you aren’t the same person you were at 18. You’ve had moments of fresh consciousness. You’ve had new information and experiences change you. You’ve had all this happen in the most unexpected moments.

So what then makes you so certain your opponent doesn’t share these same human qualities? And if you aren’t talking or listening compassionately to your neighbor’s resentments, how will you find out?

About the Author: Stephen Mucher directs the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program in Los Angeles. A historian by training, Stephen’s research and teaching explores intersections of history, policy, pedagogy, human rights, and the liberal arts in relation to teaching, teachers, and teacher training. His commentaries on education, immigration, religion, and politics have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, Education Week, La Voz and Sojourners. Stephen is an member of the History of Education Society, the National Council for Social Studies, and the National Council for History Education and previously taught in the Bard MAT Program in New York, the Bard Prison Initiative, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and the Institute for Writing and Thinking. Stephen began his career as a high school teacher in Honduras and in Micronesia before spending a decade in secondary and post-secondary positions in metro Detroit. He has consulted on professional development projects for Los Angeles Juvenile Court Schools, New York Department of Education, Harlem Children’s Zone, Los Angeles Unified Schools, and schools in Oakland, Sacramento and Detroit. His more recent work focuses on cultivating civic engagement, fostering student activism, promoting human rights, addressing trends in the criminalization of youth communities, and seeking humane treatment and legal rights for immigrants and refugees. He is active in the Los Angeles Promise Zone Education Working Group and a member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE).

CWI Institutes are Transformative Professional Development. learn more

© copyright 1995–2019, Community Works Institute (CWI)
All rights reserved. CWI is a not for profit educational organization dedicated to engaging students and teachers with their local communities through integrated learning projects. We work with educators and schools across the U.S. and internationally.

email us about supporting your school or organization.

CONTENT USE POLICY All materials contained in this web site remain the sole and exclusive property of CWI, or the author as designated by arrangement. We strongly encourage re-publication, but we do ask that you properly credit, and then share your re-publication link with us directly. contact us

Connection Happens in Unexpected Moments was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have had the privilege of walking into many many schools over my career, all over the world, and in a variety of capacities. If there is one constant that I know to be true is the end of the year burnout and the overwhelming feeling that educators experience. No matter what the role, I have heard educators say “I am feeling so tired” when it comes to the last few weeks. From moving up ceremonies, to celebrations, to graduations, to summatives, to grading, to reports, just writing this is enough to send me burying in my shell. I will admit, I am no expert myself at pacing. I often come in the start of the year firing on all cylinders, and by the end am barely puttering across the finish line. I recently asked a teacher from our school who is retiring for some advice around this, and she commented to me that in over 30 years in education, she did not have a magic solution, and always felt tired at this time of year. So upon reflection, I have come to determine that yes, we may always have the feeling of being tired at this time of year, but there are definitely ways to make the end of year a positive and rewarding experience. Here are some of my tips:

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

Many great writers on education and leadership speak to relationships. George Couros dedicates an entire chapter to this in his book The Innovator’s Mindset. Even though he is a huge proponent of technology and innovation, he knows that it all starts with relationships. Another leadership guru that I admire is Simon Senek, who states: “We need to build more organizations that prioritize the care of human beings. As leaders, it is our sole responsibility to protect our people and, in turn, our people will protect each other and advance the organization together.” As we start to feel tired and lose focus, it is really important to reach out to others. We may feel that we don’t have time, or they are too busy as well. But taking just a small moment for a five minute conversation, can re-energize and refocus our efforts in ways we did not imagine. I love what Brene Brown says about connection:

Connection is such a deep part of relationships. Being able to feel heard and valued is so important when we are feeling exhausted, and just want someone to truly empathize with us, not just listen. Relationships drive everything in schools, especially at this time of year.

Move!

We all know that exercise is good for us. At this time of year, we probably don’t feel like getting up for a run, or going to the gym, or heading to yoga class. But exercising can be one of the best things for us to do, in order to alleviate stress and actually give us more energy to make it through. If you need convincing, here is a short article from the Mayo Clinic on Exercise and Stress Management. If you read this and are still having a hard time getting there, why not invite someone to exercise with? You can work on your relationship with that person and exercise! And keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be long. Even a short walk everyday is great for the body, mind, and spirit.

Accept Responsibility

This is the tough love part of the blog post. So there are certain responsibilities that we all have and must be completed before year end. As I mentioned above, these may include report cards, comments, grading, attending certain year end events, and others. When I say accept responsibility, I mean just that. Get yourself a prioritized list and get yourself organized. This can go a long way in terms of accomplishing all of your tasks. There are lots of great apps out there to help you keep focused and organized. Here are some of my favorites: yes, I am a Google fanboy, so I encourage you to use your Google Calendar or Google Keep to keep organized. Another couple of tools that I have found useful when working in teams are Trello and Slack. Trello is like using digital boards, cards, and lists, and can really help with personal or team organization. I personally use it with my team, to keep us on track with projects. Slack is great for collaboration and can act as a hub for projects and tasks. Slack integrates well with Google too. I recently used it for a team project with group members spread around the world.

Teamwork Makes The Dreamwork

So we used to say this in elementary school right? Well it still applies. What are you responsible for or working on at the end of the year that you can collaborate on? We teach our students to be good collaborators and teammates and we should do the same. Not only does this reduce our workload, but it gives us an opportunity to work on relationships. In case you still don’t believe me, here is a great article from the Washington Post entitled Why Collaboration is Vital to Creating Effective Schools. This article cites some solid research, and I love the way it connects teamwork, trust, and relationships.

Remember Why You Are Here

It is easy to forget when we are run down and stressed why we are in the building in the first place, especially for those of us that are not in classrooms! Remember the kids! Take a moment, stop, and breathe. If you must check emails, do it on the playground, and absorb the sounds of the kids. Read to an elementary class for 10 minutes, see them, hear them, remember, we are there for them. Have a conversation with some high schoolers about a summative they are working on, or just chat with some awkward middle schoolers!

Think Creatively About Your Events

This one might seem like a no-brainer, but when you are in the midst of it all, it is sometimes difficult to take the balcony view. Move from the actual work, and step back and think about what is really going on. Here is a great article from the Harvard Business Review, speaking about this concept, entitled, A Survival Guide for Leaders. We know you are going to have moving up ceremonies, can you place them on the same day, at different times, so parents with multiple children only have to come once? Are there multiple musical showcases that you can combine? Are there any events that can be pushed to the beginning of the following year?

Consider how you can use technology to engage parents at this time of year. Like you, they are tired and overwhelmed too. What are the ways we can leverage technology to support those who just can’t get to school for an event. Consider social media accounts that your school may have and the ways events could be posted and shown there. Student blogs that showcase learning can be broadcast out, or videos highlighting student work. If your school’s social media presence isn’t quite where it should be, here are five tips to increase your school’s social media presence;

1. Automate your posts
2. Be real
3. Make it interesting
4. Be aware and spontaneous
5. Don’t forget your brand

Social media can be a powerful tool if utilized correctly. It can increase your brand, engage parents, and act as a storytelling device.

This in itself may all feel overwhelming to enact. So why not choose one idea, as an area for improvement, as we head into these last few weeks. For me, my goal is to make the last few weeks the best weeks that I have had this school year. I would love to hear from others as to how you deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed at this time of year.

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It’s The End Of The Year As We Know It! was originally published in Community Works Journal: Digital Magazine for Educators on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.