Journal Entry 2: June 25...later pondering

How about a radical notion…let’s give school a spin…let’s re-think it…orient it around its primary beneficiaries…students! Whom do students need to invest in their empowerment and equipping?  Well, teachers come to mind, as usual, but teachers are only 17% of the influence on learning outcomes, if I recall my research correctly.  Factors outside of school contribute fully half of influences on learning achievement. The most salient social influence on kids’ lives is, obviously, the family--especially parents. So they HAVE to be fully invested in kids’ learning if we want the kind of rich learning and teaching experiences we are talking about.

I have heard many lengthy lamentations about how difficult this is to achieve from other teachers, and we all have bemoaned the perennial problem of unsupportive parents. It seems to me, however, that we have to confront and rethink our hidden and hierarchical perceptions of us and them. We have to embrace the paradigm in my class motto: We’re all learners, and we’re all teachers. We want life to be a learning and teaching adventure for all of us…all of society, really.  

Sure, we are the socially entrusted educators who have been professionally prepared in pedagogical practices (sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?).But we are NOT the most significant teachers in our students’ lives…we cannot be.  We haven’t taught them the transcendent lessons of life and survival and values and norms…we enter the process long after it has begun, and must work with what has already been taught and learned, and what self-perceptions and foundational beliefs and dispositions they bring to us and to our classrooms. There does exist the possibility, however, that working alongside those self-schemas, we might engage them for moments and become the other voices in their heads, hopefully positive ones.

The point is, what if we work more organically, more authentically, with the primary voices in their heads? What will that look like? What if we open up our schools to be holistic communities where parents and family members, even certain local community servants and members, are encouraged and expected to engage at whatever level they can in parallel processes of adults facilitating identity formation and self-actualization in their children? Obviously, parents have the seminal interest in those processes. What if we re-conceptualize ourselves as educators as the ones who come alongside them to achieve our shared goals?

At DVA, we are making a valiant attempt to create such a community of learners and teachers. It is definitely messy, and sometimes difficult to negotiate the human relationships and varying levels of involvement and intensity, but I think it is going to be worth it. No, I don’t find it comfortable to be this exposed, this vulnerable to judgments and to the unresolved negativity of others (and then my own in reciprocal fashion!).  And then I ask myself, what is my goal??? I want to EMPOWER and EQUIP and INSPIRE –to breathe LIFE and HOPE into middle level learners. Is that more powerfully done in synergistic collaboration with other significant adults in their lives, or working as the educational “professional” in an artificially constructed classroom that is not meaningfully contextualized in students’ lives?

 I honestly don’t know what this adventure will look like. I do believe, however, that our aims are worth the efforts involved, and the discomfort and the risks of exposure.  For me, it is not just a job, or a profession…it is a mission. If pioneers are willing to cut the trail, won’t it be easier for others to follow? Maybe it won’t have to be a mission for everyone. Maybe we just need to show it can be done.

Regardless of the outcome, it is worth the work and the risks to validate families, to validate the heart and effort of everyone who cares about educating our kids. It is worth saying, however we can say it, that we are ALL important in this effort, that we are ALL learners, and ALL teachers.  

--Lianna Nix