By Louanne Jacobs and Kelly Russell The Passover Seder contains a section known as “The Four Questions.” The central question is “How is this night different from all other nights?” The response is something like, “On all other nights we ______ but on this night we _____.” The premise is that the order and the content and the methods of participation on this night of celebration will be different from all others. Such could be said about the inaugural STEMMING the Tide workshop. It was different in form, in content, and most importantly, in intent from any teacher workshop the two teacher-educators in the group had ever attended. It was refreshing, invigorating, empowering, and oh so different from all other workshops. How was our workshop different? It began with the familiar “here is who we are, and here is the background information.” While this part of the day was intentionally brief, the audio-visual setup of the room resulted in the accompanying PowerPoint being unreadable to most of the audience. We could sense that the audience was still trying to figure us out: Who were we? What was our gimmick? What was our ask? Was this worth their time? Why were professors from Birmingham talking to them about 5E lesson plans and learning theory and trade books? Where were the lesson plans and the materials and assessments that these teachers were going to be asked to incorporate into their already overwhelming workload? You could almost see these questions as thought bubbles floating above the teachers’ heads. Teachers have learned to be skeptical when they are asked to participate in workshops as participation, often, more closely resembles compliance. This is one of the important ways in which this workshop was different from all other workshops – the curriculum, the plans, were to be co-created with teachers and students at the center. The familiar introduction format established the groundwork for creating a community of practice by presenting our strengths and areas of expertise and then inviting the teachers to join the community bringing THEIR expertise – their knowledge of the school, the community, the existing curriculum, and, most importantly, their knowledge of the students who would be at the center of the project. As we broke into working groups comprised of teachers, community partners, and professors the teachers came to realize that there was no curriculum – they were being asked to look at content standards at their grade level and discipline and bring their own expertise to designing individualized needs-based curriculum. They were in the driver’s seat of curriculum design. The vast array of expertise in the room had the potential of making it hard to energize folks toward our project, but we are learning that this diversity of players who care about the same thing (Alabama’s gulf coast) is a defining element of a Community of Practice. The dance of the project is going to be honoring all voices at the table. As the first breakout group began, the teacher-educators in the group were still sorting out our role in this dance – we soon realized that our role included that of convincing teachers that all other members of the group were there to support the development of curriculum, not direct it. One group consisted of Kelly Russell, an education professor at BSC, Alexandria Carter, a science teacher at MCTS, and Nate Carr, an AmeriCorp environmental educator who works with the Mobile Baykeepers. One thing Nate said while talking about his work stood out as being key to why we were all there. He explained that his job consisted of going around to schools in Mobile County, “but this year [I] didn’t get around to MCTS.” He wondered aloud why it might be that that school might have been inadvertently “last on the list.” It was an opportunity for Alexandria to talk about how amazing her students are and how they and the teachers often perceive that they are “last on the list” and how excited they are to be at the table for this project.The large round table and the way we had situated ourselves put Kelly at a distance that allowed her to observe. She was far enough away that it was easy to be a sort of fly on the wall of this early exchange of ideas. She decided to take notes on what she was hearing and seeing. She heard things like, “When you said that, it made me think…” and “Let me show you what I use with kids when I come into classrooms.” In the picture, Nate has pulled up a presentation with images of local sea life. He and Alexandria discussed several that they had found students didn’t know well. Alexandria shared her knowledge about what her students knew and didn’t know about coastal wildlife, and this led to discussions about why kids don’t know about the creatures around them. “They live near the water, but they don’t get the chance to really know what’s there.” Louanne’s group included Darrius Barnes, social studies teacher, and Heaven Pollard and Ellena Balcom from CHESS. Darrius is new to MCTS but not new to the area or the profession. He chose to focus on map skills for 7th grade based on his previous experience. He talked about how his students had little understanding of basic map skills which grew into a conversation about roots and wings and the concept of place in geography. The group pulled Ramsey from MEJAC into their constellation to talk about mapping using a weather balloon and all the geography concepts and skills students could learn by placing themselves, their school, and their neighborhood at the center of an expanding set of balloon launches. At the center of this discussion was teacher expertise and student need supported by a growing community of practice. This, indeed, was different than all other workshops. Finally, this workshop was different from all other workshops in that it was rooted in love. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), argues that education can be a practice of freedom and portrays teachers as facilitators of that growing emancipation through their love of students and learning communities. The common element at the core of each working group table was love: we do this work because we love the earth, because we love the communities, because we love the school, because we love our neighbors, because we love justice, because we love our coastline and our waterways…and above all, because we love these students.
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AuthorThis is a collaborative blog with multiple authors from our community of practice focused on the community of Africatown in Mobile, Al. Archives
August 2023
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