Conversations about NCTE18: Finding (and defending) student (and teacher) voice, part 2

... continued from part 1.

Our session, “Gatsby, A Raisin in the Sun, and Inequality Today: Nurturing Student Voices About Equity and Justice,” was full of engaged, thoughtful teachers eager to think about how we can use these classic, canonical texts to help students think about equity and justice.

We asked our audience members, using our newest favorite tool, Mentimeter, to share their thoughts about inequality.

We also asked them to consider how often/successfully we were making space for conversation about equity and justice in our classrooms.

Those yellow and green bars reflect those who are often making space, but not always successfully or sometimes doing so. Only a few (3) of our attendees were confident that they were making space often and doing so successfully. 

We aren’t there yet, but, for most of us, we are trying. In an active and energetic session, full of interesting questions, interjections, and comments from the audience, we talked together about making space for these conversations.

We started with our ideas about using Gatsby to think about xenophobia and racism (vis-à-vis the rant from Tom Buchanan about the threat of immigration to the continuance of what he sees as the rightful dominance of the white race). We also talked about using social psychologist Paul Piff’s work in relation to Gatsby to unpack the question of whether money makes people (like Tom) mean, i.e., whether entitlement breeds bullying, greed, and unethical behavior. Finally, we talked about using a report documenting the violence surrounding the desegregation of the Trumbull Park homes in 1953 Chicago to help students connect A Raisin in the Sun to the broader context of violence involved in housing desegregation.

If you missed our presentation and want to see more about these and other ideas, please check out our slides. Our work is also available in our books on Gatsby, Raisin, and Mockingbird from Rowman and Littlefield.

We do this work because, for us, teaching language arts means teaching students to think carefully and critically about how a text works, about the language it uses, and the current and historical resonances of the ideas at play in the text. Our job in the classroom is to help students read and unpack Tom’s white nationalism and male privilege. Our students need to think critically about the ways in which Hansberry’s play is undergirded by a climate of violence, despite the limited references in the text to bombs and the oddly optimistic ending of the play (in contrast to an alternate ending Hansberry had considered, featuring an armed Younger family awaiting violence as they spend their first evening in their new home). 

As always, we are grateful that our audience at NCTE was full of amazing teachers – wanting to think with us. One teacher, for example, shared that he felt empowered by our presentation to continue with his approach to Gatsby as a text about whiteness – a text that can allow students to interrogate who does and does not count as white and the kinds of privileges that accrue to and need to be defended by those with that “status.”

It is invigorating to be a part of a community eager to help students think through the ways in which our world is structured by privilege, educational inequality, educational inequality, voting restrictions, and poverty. 

And yes, we know there are obstacles. Many.

To inspire us to face these obstacles, NCTE featured a thrilling keynote address by the charismatic Chris Emdin, author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. Emdin reminded us that that we don’t give voice to students (many NCTE speakers made this important point): “we create the conditions to allow the genius in them to come forth.” He also asked the attendees: “Do you know what an educator is?” Emdin’s answer: “A rebel, a revolutionary, an activist.”

Perhaps.

Certainly, for us as English teachers, many of the writers we teach were rebels, revolutionaries, and activists. They were engaging big ideas and doing so in provocative, interesting ways. That’s why we read them.

And certainly, as teachers, we want to make room for those rebellious, revolutionary, and activist voices in our students. We need our young folks to think critically about the big ideas and help change the problems in our world.

So, perhaps we traffic in a revolutionary world, but that’s simply the nature of our discipline. We aren’t necessarily revolutionaries. We are just doing language arts. For many of us, that’s what we love about it. At least at NCTE, we are in good company with many, many people who share that vision.

Conversations about NCTE18: Finding (and defending) student (and teacher) voice, part 1

Over the course of this past week, Audrey had the occasion to have two conversations about the NCTE Annual Convention. Do they ring true for you?

The first conversation was with George Salazar, one of the winners of the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English’s Teachers for the Dream Award, whom Audrey spoke with in her capacity as president of NJCTE. The NJCTE Teacher for the Dream Award affords (in collaboration with NCTE) support for the two winners to attend NCTE. George had asked what to expect at the convention, and Audrey found herself gushing about the opportunity to be in a community of teachers sharing ideas and seeking inspiration. For those able to afford attendance at NCTE (which isn’t everyone), the convention represents a unique opportunity to get outside the bubbles of our classrooms and schools and connect with teachers from every level and every part of the U.S. (and even abroad). We (Audrey and Susan) always leave feeling empowered, invigorated, and excited. Speaking with George and thinking about his plans to attend his first NCTE in Baltimore in 2019, Audrey was reminded of the power of the convention.

Audrey’s second conversation was with Lauren Zucker, a new NJCTE board member and an active member of NCTE. We (Audrey and Lauren) found ourselves commiserating about how the inspiration and excitement of NCTE seems to slip away, in part because of the convention’s timing. Leaving behind our institutions for the convention, only to return for those hurried few days before Thanksgiving, to then turn away for the holidays, we finally return again to our schools in the waning days of November as the crush of the end of the year weighs down on us. Despite whatever planning we attempt, those days away – for NCTE and Thanksgiving – always seem to come back to haunt us: to make us feel overwhelmed, discombobulated, frazzled. It’s hard to hold onto the inspiration and excitement of NCTE, to remember those new ideas we wanted to try, strategies we hoped to employ, tools we were thinking of experimenting with, as we try to catch up and catch our breath.

Surely, the answer to the latter predicament is to take good notes at NCTE and to spend some time during and after the convention writing – putting our thoughts, ambitions, and inspirations onto paper or the computer screen. That way, we can return to them, but at a later date when we have the space to breathe.

So here are some of our thoughts from NCTE 2018:

For us, the convention was an odd and tenuous combination of hope and anxiety – perhaps reflective of the state of our nation. The first session Audrey attended on Friday morning seemed to capture that: “Awakening and Activating Hope in Divisive Times.” 

Even the theme itself of the convention – "Finding Student Voice" – seemed to reflect that conflict: a focus on finding voice seems to admit the loss or absence of voice. How did we come to be in a place where we need to pay attention to finding student voice, especially in the English classroom of all places? How did student voice come to be submerged, repressed, or absent in a discipline all about ideas, voices, and expression?

The issue, even tenuousness, of voice – of free and open debate and discourse – however, is so omnipresent at this moment. We face issues in the media about fake news/truth and our NCTE convention was taking place during the fracas about the revocation by the White House of CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press credentials.

We ourselves had a tiny taste of this issue of voice and free discourse. Just prior to NCTE, we presented at the New Jersey Education Association’s convention a session called “Teaching Inequality to Encourage Students to Speak about Justice,” which was in keeping with the social justice theme of the convention.

As we previously wrote about here, our session was called out as part of an editorial against the NJEA convention published on the NJ101.5 website by Jeff Deminski.

There we are, from 9:45-11:15, talking about teaching inequality and justice. Thankfully, we were not called out by name or institution. And we are both employed with relative security. But is this kind of public condemnation for doing the work of our profession as educators what we all have to look forward to in the future?

Are these the times we face? Deminiski’s critique - why not just teach language arts? – is underwritten by a threat (you aren’t entitled to your voice) about the legitimacy of our work (you aren’t doing the real work of the discipline). These sorts of threats have serious consequences in our current climate, and they diminish all our voices.

Amid these undercurrents, the NCTE convention was, as usual, a soothing balm, a calming oasis, and an energizing infusion. More about that in part 2 ...