First steps...

This is a republication of my first  progress report to the Omprakash Foundation.

In just a few days, PASA workshops (the Spanish acronym for Promoting Improved and Sustained Learning) have gone from being a potential to being an exciting eventuality. Despite some trouble getting to El Porvenir (missing flights) and a day of school closures lost to a teacher work stoppage (in remembrance of the coup three years ago), I managed to turn only three full working days into successful first steps in setting up this pilot project.

It wasn’t easy, and I could not have done it without the wise advice and help of several people from Honduras Children. In all, I was able to:

• meet with and gain the support of the district’s superintendent and several important community leaders,
• arrange for the use of the municipal building as a workshop location,
• visit with teachers at 15 primary schools and 9 kindergartens,
• connect with 3 more primary schools and 7 more kindergartens that I couldn’t visit (several were closed on the days I visited), and
• visit 13 of the 15 townships in the municipality (only missing the last two because of how difficult it is to access them due to distance and poor road infrastructure).

The plan and budget is to work with 30 teachers of kindergarten and first grade in the Municipality of El Porvenir (15 rural townships along the north coast of Honduras) to identify and address common instructional challenges. Interest among teachers is so high that I worry I may find myself turning away participants! I will have to begin looking at options for expanding inclusion and/or which factors to use to decide who gets to participate, with both project objectives and equity being important. After all, the poorest schools may need the workshops the most, but bringing together a mix of schools is part of the plan’s structure to foment change and community building across the demographics.

 My discussions with teachers and observations of classrooms brought home to me many of the challenges the teachers face and that I will be facing in my delivery of the workshops. Honduran culture can be very status-oriented and hierarchical. Education is very much based on the “banking” model, in which students are passive recipients and teachers are the givers of knowledge. Teachers are members of a school culture that follows guidelines and curriculums without often comprehending the reasons why particular aspects thereof may or may not work. Students are responsible for learning, and failure to learn is their fault rather than that of an unresponsive educational system. The realities of child development are poorly understood, motivation is extrinsic, and the usual challenges of any classroom are compounded by poverty and poor health.

All that said, I found many teachers who were eager to improve their practice and gain access to greater knowledge and the potential to change. That is the aim of PASA, keying into that motivation to make a difference and providing the tools to do so in sustainable ways. As I begin the process of laying out a plan for the workshops and for more in-depth work with the teachers, I find myself focusing on how to help teachers get kids more deeply involved in the learning process. This seems to be breaking down into two sub-themes, (1) how to use a deeper understanding of child development to help teachers use children’s learning patterns as an asset rather than a deficit, and (2) how to teach in ways that actually avoid problematic behaviors by children (what I see as a more empowering spin on the idea of “classroom behavior management.”)

I also know that talking about different practices will do little to foment change; instead, the different strategies, from choral response to graphing to using the inquiry process, will have to be built into the workshops themselves, along with opportunities to reflect alone or in small groups. Understanding the cultural nature of teaching and what these teachers are up against in their efforts to improve their own practice is also requiring me to begin mapping out strategies not just for classroom practice but for the motivation and maintenance of the change process, perhaps a simple self-reporting system to help teachers monitor their own progress over time.

I’m excited to keep moving forward with the background research now that I have more exact knowledge of the issues on the ground and the perspectives of the teachers themselves. I’m especially excited to have been so warmly welcomed into the community of educators and I look forward to deepening the relationships I have begun to build.

Experiencing how the political is personal

"The personal is political." It's a beautiful adage from the feminist revolution. And it goes the other way. The political is personal.

Here in the U.S. we often think it odd the way world events can suddenly collide with daily existence. But every time it happens to me, I realize again to what extent the seemingly impersonal political and economic and social issues of this world are actually personally experienced realities. The Honduran teacher strikes are students missing out on their right to public schooling. The economic recession is a child going to live with grandparents when his parents’ house goes into foreclosure. And the strife in any number of countries leads to a family leaving their home and trying to grow and succeed in a place where they don’t know the culture and don’t speak the language.

That’s why I got into international education. My work abroad has allowed me to help students prepare themselves to face their lives with the resiliencies and skills they need, as well as providing them with the chance to comfortably and securely gain cross-cultural understandings and skills. My work here in the U.S. allows me to do the same, with the extra facet of being a bridge for my students to understand and access the culture that surrounds them, hopefully without losing any understanding, access, or membership in the culture of their home.

Today the world celebrates the democratic emergence of a new nation, South Sudan. I reflected on this coming event yesterday while I sat with a young Sudanese girl, L. (Because I respect the privacy of my students and issues of confidentiality, I will from now on refer to students anonymously.) She is attending the summer program at the family literacy school where I teach, although she is not in my class. That day we were on a field trip to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall. We had walked through the Peace Corps themed activity area, where the kids had received “passports” which were stamped when they took part in each activity. We built a wall with bottles like they are now building in Guatemala. We helped paint a world map (that included South Sudan as clearly separate from Sudan!), and we made Malian mud cloth bracelets.

As we recovered from the heat and enjoyed a brief cool breeze under one of the dining tents, L struck up a conversation with me about her “passport.” We talked about all the activities in which she had taken part and I helped her pick out words she didn’t know in the booklet. We came across the blanks in the front cover that called for her name and nationality. I explained that nationality is where you are from.

L: Where are you from?
K: I’m from Texas.
L: I have a cousin in Texas!
K: You do? That’s great!
L: But I don’t know where Texas is.

So we looked at the world map in her passport booklet, marking DC and Texas.

L: I’m from Sudan. Well. (Pause.) Hang on.

She turned to her mother and spoke with her in their home language. There was some back and forth. Her mother, pregnant and tired, was also interacting with her 2 year old brother and 4 year old sister. L was obviously repeating herself to make sure her mother really understood her question. Finally satisfied, she turned back to me.

L: Yes. I was born in Sudan. (Her emphasis. I had not asked. It can be a complicated question for any child, especially an immigrant child.)
K. Okay. Let’s look at where Sudan is on the map.

So we marked the general location of Sudan with an X (it wasn’t a big map, thankfully). L wanted to label it the way we had labeled DC, but she didn’t know how to spell it. I spelled it out loud, and at her request I wrote it down so that she could copy it. After spelling it successfully several times in random places on random pages, she finally turned to the front cover and wrote “SUDAN” on the previously empty line for a nationality.

L’s personal experience was a mixture of culture, identity, literacy, and all the underlying structures and skills that support these facets of development. And there I was, to some extent experiencing it with her. The day before millions of her former countrymen got the chance to have a very similar experience.

From estadounidense to US-American

I have struggled with my geographical self-definition for many years now. Ever since I learned the word “estadounidense” in Spanish.

Unitedstatesian.

Finally, I had evidence that there could be a word to replace “American” as a descriptor for a person from the United States. After all, it seems usurping to describe ourselves as Americans, when we are hardly the only nation in THE AMERICAS. Nor are we the largest. Sadly, being the richest seems to make us entitled to taking what we want, at least it has in the past, and so we came to describe ourselves as “Americans,” forcing all the other americans to define themselves differently.

But “unitedstatesian” hardly rolls off the tongue.

I’ve tried a lot of different phrases.

North American. But we aren’t the only North Americans. It could make sense to the extent that Canada and the U.S. are very similar, but there are also vital differences between us. Canadians (and Mexicans, especially) might resent my describing myself and my values and culture as North American.

[Brief geography lesson: Here in the US we teach that there are 7 continents, and Central America is technically part of North America. In Honduras, they teach that there are 6 continents, with the Americas being one continent split into three regions: north, central, and south.]

I didn’t give up. I tried “US Citizen”…but there are many who aren’t citizens who do identify as residents of the U.S.

US Resident…but there are many who reside here without feeling cultural ties here.

And, finally I hit on it. US-AMERICAN. So simple. So clear. Borrowing from the way we structure our self definitions within the US (African American, Irish American, Native American, Latin American, etc.)

I am US-American.

In English.

But in Spanish I am still estadounidense.