I just spent two full days attending the Dufour conference on professional learning communities and I really believe that the presenters, who are recognized education icons in the education industry, felt strongly about these significant processes designed to support learning in schools. I kept thinking about my dissertation content throughout the presentations and had to reflect on just how much I also bought into the Dufour concepts over the last several years. The Dufours kept reinforcing the importance of making sure students who didn't quite learn "essential skills" for any content and the bottom line to solving this problem is to make sure additional time and support were provided. As I listened I kept thinking is this a good thing? How do professional development with good intent, which in this case is very successful, is not be enough in the language of social justice?
After I had spent my time in three presentations listening to the Dufour, husband and wife team, present messages of building strong learning communities among teachers and overcoming resistance to the nay sayers, I decided to attend another presentation by Jack Balderman on how to motivate disengaged students. In this particular presentation, I felt like I was in a vacuum of the same rhetoric I had heard in years past. The presenter kept engaging the teachers to talk about what they were doing to engage and motivate students. I was expecting him to give us something unique and different, isn't that why I go to conferences? We did pay $629. Instead, I was thinking, "Here we go again....another day of rhetoric and self glorification of how another white teacher (there were very few teachers/administrators of color there) was going to share his/her pearls of wisdom on how he/she motivated one student." I wanted to get up and leave, but the teacher I was with, was completely enthralled and was soaking up the ideas and because she is a white female teacher I just couldn't leave. Everything inside of me, came to a screeching halt in my own personal judgement of the process, and that I had failed to recognize that I was acting in the position of "inclusion" meaning I already knew this language and took for granted that everyone else did too. But here, right next to me was a teacher, who like so many other teachers who were also present was experiencing a moment of empowerment and inclusion that I had taken for granted.
My training of how to motivate students was significantly different from those who were struggling with unmotivated students in their classrooms. I realized at that moment that I needed to be a moral leader who recognized that not everyone had the same skills of inclusion and motivation which I took for granted. It is this same skill that I continue to fail to be able to transfer because it is so automatic. My struggle in the transfer is evident when I see myself in the elementary position of writing down simple sentences in my proposal as I attempt to speak on a subject that matters so much to me. I want to be a leader who can awaken teachers and help them find the answers they seek to help students who are very different from them. I want to help them to develop strong relationships with students and teachers in order for authentic learning to occur from the position that diversity is central to our humanness.
I want to have a voice and give voice to other principals who do not look like me and who have not had the experiences I have had of straddling both the world of white and the world of color. I want to make a significant contribution to the significance of different and diversity while operating in the framework of common and conformity. For some reason, I believe this is possible.
Although, the conference was a good experience, I came away thinking about my own learning process during my experience as a graduate student. What kind of student was I in my graduate class? Yes, at first I felt empowered to be able to speak of my varied education experiences and I acknowledge that I would be considered a success story. Then why did I not feel successful in this graduate experience? I recall thinking that I needed the experience of critical analysis and the language of theory that was never part of my comprehension. My mode of learning while successful for the most part, lacked in the ability to recognize the language in textbooks and articles were biased to represent an opinion. I was a sponge that lacked the ability to discern the various power and powerless language which over time I finally can see, but the process was long and drawn out and did not fit the timeline of a graduate degree. This is what I face now. But with this recognition also came the understanding that I am finally getting it, or finally beginning to make the connection that I couldn't make in the past, because I somehow did not recognize the codes/connections of voice. I was quickly reminded that I was a victim of silence and didn't really see it. Or maybe I did see, but didn't know how to navigate the change in a manner that was suitable for me. But am I too late? I wish I could do a dissertation on this topic at times just because I am comfortable speaking this. But I want to speak about the disruption I feel because I believe there is a convergence of my experience with the experiences of other students who can also lend their voice to the solutions sought after in education.
The one experience today that made sense to me in this Dufour conference was Balderman at the front of the room, pointing to a chair and said, "This is the smart chair. Students who sit in this chair are the ones who struggle and who are eager to learn and who are willing to ask questions until they got the answers they needed to move forward in education. Anyone who sits in this chair, is smart."
Pondering this comment, I believed that I did not sit in that chair on purpose. I was not trained to question the information that was handed to me. Therefore, I was handicapped in my learning. Although, I learned and eventually found the courage to let someone see my inhibitions, at this graduate level of learning. I still believed that I should not have these struggles. But while I am struggling, it is not the struggle of "I don't get it." It is the struggle of, "How can I make what I feel and see and experience transparent and transferable?"
I have learned more in these last few weeks about myself and what I want to question. The perceived drawback which is related to limited time to meet my deadlines is that each time I get more information, I keep evolving. I feel like I am a moving target that I cannot pin myself down because I am changing at a rapid pace but not necessarily in the manner that I should as a graduate student as has been modeled for me. At times I wish I was like the other students, but then I only see their products and not their struggles, so this wish is probably an assumption that cannot be validated.
In my proposal I talk about neutral language and how it suppresses race dialogue. I then find that I have competing emotions about the national trend of common curriculum, standards, and assessments because I believe there are good pieces to this shift. As an instructional leader I can see the value of common standards and assessments in order to measure some level of progress.
But after this conference and all my reflections of the day, I still experienced frustration. I returned to working on my section of diversity this evening, and I think to myself, "Here I go again, reading and regurgitating, but I just don't feel it." So I went back to my first paper on deracialization and saw some good pieces, but I am still not satisfied. Why? So I reread the Grause article on which I wrote at the top "My cornerstone article" because this was the article that really hit at the heart of what I believed, but somewhere between my initial writing of deracialization and diversity I just felt that I had missed some connection. This sensation is beginning to become very obvious to me because I found myself experiencing sleeplessness and significant anxiety because I was grinding my teeth again. I really hope I have my teeth by the time I graduate. I do plan on graduating, but the elements of what I value has to be addressed if I am going to be able to defend in June.
In this search for what was wrong, I found an article by Shields on Dialogic leadership for social justice that finally helped me to make an important connection between what I thought was good in education such as Professional Learning Communities and also what was missing in these conversations which was the significance of diverse relationships and the role that leaders must play in establishing a critical moral and democratic environment for the building of these relationships that allow students and teachers alike to be included in all curriculum conversations that lead to the learning of essential skills. So my conversation about deracialization and diversity and the move for conformity all have to converge. I cannot sacrifice one for the other because I believe that both are relevant.
In this discovery I found the balance I was looking for as an educational leader. You see, I could not, in the many reform initiatives believe that teachers didn't care about their students, I could not accept in all my training that administrators were working hard just to satisfy district policy and expectations. I am in the heat of all these administrative daily demands and wanted so desperately to make a difference that would work within the system of change. And although I really believe that the language of neutrality does serve the dominant group and particular political agendas, I keep thinking that we, those who are being left behind, need access to this world of economic gain and that there is a need for our voices, languages, cultures, classes, and other diversities.
The key seems to be on developing leaders who are able to balance social justice on the concepts of democracy, diversity, and moral relationships. How to analyze textbooks for these concepts leading to developing moral leaders, forces me to sit in the "smart chair" and I am a student again while I feel the pressure to be the expert, otherwise, why write a dissertation?
My thinking process led me to believe that while the language of neutrality was centered on the political agenda of global marketization there was the conflict of the call for more diversity. How is it possible to seek for diversity and difference if the process for learning called for common, sameness, and conformity? It just didn't compute until we as social justice leaders infuse the language of diversity through the building of strong moral relationships of inclusion of difference, the inclusion, of safety to discuss our differences in thinking about concepts, the inclusion of self and how our past and experiences of economic strife and cultural dissonance can be a point of awareness and valued in better solutions than have existed in the past?
I believe this is where I need to center my dissertation topic. But now the task is to get my heart that is in this blog onto the paper that I must write. It is here that I must sit in the "smart chair."
