1. A History of an Afterschool Program in 100 Objects

Object 1

Permissions Packet in Spanish, Fall 2013

Written in Spanish and presenting two contrasting messages about our afterschool program, this packet, colorful, aspirational, and utilitarian, is full of promise, even artistic promise, and also formal requests for order.  In it, one of our program's students is the star of the show, her mixed-media self portrait greeting the reader with a wry smile and inviting color.  She's followed, in the pamphlet's long second act, by a more mundane review of boxes, lines, and blanks meant to secure a semi-formal contract between our program and the children who attend it. One of four versions -- in French, Korean, English, and Spanish -- this permissions packet from Fall 2014 is the first object in the series "A History of an Afterschool Program in 100 Objects."

Page 1 of the packet.  The result of many meetings and email exchanges, this list of goals represents the most united statement our team wrote prior to the 2013-2014 school year.  As often as possible, this flyer was printed in color.

The front page of the packet, printed on plain white paper of the kind found in nearly every school's industrial-sized copy machine, features color. Composed by an older elementary student from our program, daubs of teal, brown, purple, and bright pink form a patterned border for this self-portrait.  The facial expression on the portrait -- playful, smiling -- complements the bright colors of its border.  This is a place where kids have fun, says the portrait.  The portrait says something else about color, too:  in our elementary school's culture, African-American identity is both common and also unpronounced, ubiquitous but invisible.  Most of its students are African Americans, but its curricula and programs often seem whitewashed to many, defaulting to a white and middle-class idea of education and childhood.  I think that the inertia of public schooling has erased most opportunities for our elementary school to cultivate cultural and racial identities of its students and families.  To many of the coordinators of our program, this erasure is most significant when it comes to African-American students and families.  The packet's face is recognizably African American:  the student who made it has used knitting yarn that unspools in waves, of very dark brown or black color, to make a halo of hair like that of her own, and brown paint to outline her face and the upward curve of her mouth to match her skin's tone.

The accompanying words on the page mark culture along another axis.  A translation from English by a graduate student studying foreign language, the Spanish is almost academic (like its English counterpart), although it points to very community-driven goals: to help students make new friends, to honor individual cultures and talents, and to help with homework.  These goals of our program, the result of many years of wrangling over the differing perspectives and diverse, yet specialized expertise of its coordinators, marked a significant intellectual turn in our program.  We would not (at least I would not) see the true value of these modest but significant goals until the late fall of 2013.  Pitched to an academic audience, and attempting to encompass diversity with a very wide definition, these goals tell readers that the program's writers are addressing them from an intellectual place, although it is one with a beating heart.

In the next three pages (which you can see by scrolling down)  the packet uses a familiar language of permissions.  It is composed of earnest appeals for useful information and red tape in equal measure.  Page two of the packet adopts the language of our elementary school's behavior expectations, aligning its ideas about behavior with the school environment that families and children, it hopes, are already familiar with.  This alignment gives some cover to our program, in the case of unexpectedly disruptive behavior.  It also gives our program an umbrella of expectations.  Often, coordinators and volunteers operate independently -- from day to day and activity to activity -- and these bulleted rules act like an agreement and a guide so that the adults in the program seem like a team, and not capricious in the ways they manage their activities.  The seeming isolation of these rules on the page, like a shy and lonely child left to play by herself at recess,  echo a certain distaste for them by our team.  We have yet, to this day, to agree on what "the rules" are, or even whether or not to call them "rules," or "expectations," or "boundaries," or any number of things.  Like that lonely child, though, we are sure, as teachers, that she is an integral part of our program.  Not forgotten, the behavior expectations for our program, as their insular location here indicates, have yet to be fully adopted by our program.

The more utilitarian space of the permissions pages (pages 3 and 4 below) presents its readers with requests:  for names, ages, and contact information.  It asks for two names of not "parents" but people who might also or only be "family" or "guardians," too.  Here, the ethos of our program -- to anticipate and value relationships of all kinds -- is both visible and a vital part of the program's function.  Tell us who is responsible, the form says: we don't much care what label you give them.   In these spaces, our elementary's students list grandmothers, aunts, moms, dads, and people who reside at the same address. They are, in fact, often nuclear "family" in a normalized, middle-class sense of the word, but they are also often something else that even this procedural document can invite and recognize.

This part of the packet also asks for permission to use the faces and names of our program's children for purposes of advertising the program.  We have never published a name and face together, even on our closed Facebook group: our program's stance is to protect children's identities.  At our elementary, custody battles have increased everyone's sensitivity to the availabilities of children's locations and identities.

Finally, this packet is in Spanish.  If you have been to a familiar yet foreign place -- an airport, bus station, restaurant, a home -- this form looks like something universal like a schedule or menu or the layout of a house, regardless of the language that fills it.  If your child brought it home from school and you did not read Spanish, you might be able to complete it without too much trouble.  As a parent, you have filled out forms like this half a dozen times before your child enrolls in kindergarten.  But this program wants to meet its families on their terms, as much as possible, and recognize, as our Korean friend describes it, everyone's "right to speak" in a language that is comfortable to them.  Though tied too closely to the idea of "foreign language" as the key to communication, this form does create a space for Spanish as a primary language, or at least one equal to the English that is the default setting for our elementary.

On the whole, this object of our program reveals many characteristics of the program's greatest hopes as well as some of the realities it has confronted over the years.  A smiling face, a clearly articulated desire to be diverse culturally, linguistically, and socially -- the packet invites its readers into a program whose values have been negotiated and crafted by a team with formidable intelligence, heart, and energy.  Its less aesthetic qualities -- the places where it seems out of joint -- manifest in the ways it announces rules and requests information.  These formal and rote pages suggest that there are files to be filled, spreadsheets to be configured, even insurance companies to be consulted.

Charging out of the gate with a smile and a colorful promise to be a different kind of place than our elementary school, this packet never quite escapes that bureaucratic world, where diversity, color, accent, and the non-normal have to be, even if it is a matter of safety or necessity, seen as parts of a taxonomy or a system with homogenizing rules.  This packet is an artifact of a group working for our elementary's health, even if it means adopting some of the realities -- of organization, rules, legalese -- that are making it sick.  Does, in the end, a little girl's smile imbue the bureaucracy of public education in a micro-urban community with new life?  Do the forms and realities of an institution -- even a small one like our program -- wash away the color and vibrancy of its communities?

Page 2 of the packet.  This page attempts to align our program's behavior expectations with those of our elementary.

Page 3 of the packet.  Contact information for our students becomes important during pick-up time, but we have never had a medical emergency.

Page 4 of the packet.  Many students walk home from our program, and many are picked up by multiple friends and family members.

Diary: Carnival and Telos – My Memories of Our Program’s Beginning

My earliest memory of our afterschool program in our micro-urban community is the spring of 2011.  I had deposited my dissertation in the previous year, and was warming to the idea of a complicated and long-term project.  I was talking to a friend from Korea who studies educational policy and curricula, himself a graduate student at the time, on the playground of our elementary school during its annual spring carnival.  We were helping to set up an outdoor arcade of games – ring toss, a mini-basketball hoop, lots of bean bags and targets for them – and talking the confident, easy talk of researchers who have turned the corner, receiving that critical mass of approval from their advisors that makes you pretty sure you’ve got yourself a viable idea.

His work was on Asian students at Illinois.  Mine was on literature in the nineteenth century.  He’s Korean.  I’m from Indiana.  His kids were born in Korea and New York.  Mine were born in Illinois.  We shared these facts and looked around at our elementary school’s carnival – a stubbornly diverse place, our elementary school -- and I began to think that this scene looked like what I realize now was a childhood fantasy.  Our elementary school is a place in a Midwest town much like the one I grew up in, but with the lucky and rare difference of being a place where the world has come to learn.

African-American, white, Latino/a, Korean, Korean American, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Egyptian; Chicago, central Illinois, Dominican Republic, New York, Mexico, Belize, Democratic Republic of the Congo; Spanish, French, Korean, dialects inflected with race and region: all these ways (that I could see then) to identify, talk, and locate are part of our elementary school’s family’s lives.  The school’s ESL program is expanding exponentially, and it boasts a majority population of African-American students in a school district that underserves the town’s African-Americans.  But the school is failing, and I had the impression then and know today that these potential strengths are thought of as problems by many of our elementary’s administrators, teachers, and families.

I must say, that, at the time, I had focused my intellectual energy on language – defined in the way a university would describe foreign language – as the common link between all these groups.  A big mistake, as it turns out, but, then, I was thinking big.  I’ll say also that the many people I work with likely have different memories of our afterschool program’s origins.

They’re right!

That spring, in 2011, having finished an arduous and successful research project, surveying the scene at our elementary as families flowed into the playground to play and eat, I was like the happy Whitman, wasn’t I?  Or, more pessimistically, like Conrad’s sepulchral empire-builders, thinking that what saved it was the idea?  Perhaps I remember the spring Carnival as the starting place for our afterschool program because of its unpredictability and delight, not the rationalized discourse between my friend and I that aimed at harnessing the potential of our elementary towards ends I could envision. 

Look at them play!  Look at them run and eat and ask their parents for more cotton candy!  What a school this is! 

As my friend and I discussed the condition of ESL students at schools – both university and elementary – I began to understand in a new way that the promise of a second-language was unfulfilled at American schools.  I believed that I could help fulfil that promise by working with our elementary to bring its diverse students together.  I was right in principle, and very wrong about the particulars, which I and a team of brilliant, warm-hearted, and tireless people have been working out for the past three years. 

Lesson Plan: Reading for Audience in Antebellum America

This exercise introduces novice writers to the idea of audience.  Often, students doing research imagine the audience as a kind of amorphous, faceless, everyteacher, "Big Pedagogue" who knows all and sees all.

Bah!  Even know-it-alls have personalities, and you should know them before you write.

Using Harriet Beecher Stowe's wonderfully imperfect saga of antebellum America, I ask students to think about their readers by thinking about the readers of Uncle Tom's Cabin.  If you know your readers as well as Stowe knew hers, you just might make your mark on the world.  

Try it yourself by reading the classroom activity below.

Who is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Audience?  How can you tell? Read this excerpt from Uncle Tom's Cabin and then freewrite your answer.

"It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate and forlorn than Eliza, when she turned her footsteps from Uncle Tom's cabin.

Her husband's suffering and dangers, and the danger of her child, all blended in her mind, with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running, in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered. Then there was the parting from every familiar object,--the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days, by the side of her young husband,--everything, as it lay in the clear, frosty starlight, seemed to speak reproachfully to her, and ask her whither could she go from a home like that?

But stronger than all was maternal love, wrought into a paroxysm of frenzy by the near approach of a fearful danger. Her boy was old enough to have walked by her side, and, in an indifferent case, she would only have led him by the hand; but now the bare thought of putting him out of her arms made her shudder, and she strained him to her bosom with a convulsive grasp, as she went rapidly forward.

The frosty ground creaked beneath her feet, and she trembled at the sound; every quaking leaf and fluttering shadow sent the blood backward to her heart, and quickened her footsteps. She wondered within herself at the strength that seemed to be come upon her; for she felt the weight of her boy as if it had been a feather, and every flutter of fear seemed to increase the supernatural power that bore her on, while from her pale lips burst forth, in frequent ejaculations, the prayer to a Friend above "Lord, help! Lord, save me!"

If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning, if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o'clock till morning to make good your escape, how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom, the little sleepy head on your shoulder, the small, soft arms trustingly holding on to your neck?"

Lesson Plan: Sojourner Truth's Biography and Activities

This lesson plan represents the pinnacle of one kind of programming at our afterschool program.  It involved, if I recall, a head injury due to the cramped space I used, lots of confusion for volunteers, and the most intellectual, creative, and insightful participation from our afterschool program's students.  This participation is of a kind I particularly value: critical thinking, connecting parts of a story into new configurations, and multiple intelligences at work in multiple modes of activities.

During this activity, our kids moved and played, took notes, spoke many languages and dialects, taught each other about slavery, drew pictures, and learned about a pivotal character in US history, Sojourner Truth.

However, these successes came at a high cost:  this lesson plan assumes an ordered, boundaried classroom space and that volunteers are seasoned veterans, comfortable refereeing many activities and behaviors all while teaching a lesson plan about Sojourner Truth.

I am reproducing my notes and also the presentation I used.  You can find them hosted on the Lesson Plans page to the right.

Literary Approaches: Prison-Education Literacy--Reading is Harder than You Think

In September 2006, Marjorie Gillis, in an Op-ed in The New York Times, widely broadcast a particularly arresting correlation between literacy and prison.  Many of us might have suspected that, as she argued, "The discouraging outlook for low-performing students is reflected in the high incidence of reading difficulties among the prison population."  However, what she claimed next strained the credulity of many education-reform and community-action stalwarts: "Some states even estimate future prison populations based on third-grade reading scores."  In this editorial, widely disseminated in full and in part on the web, Gillis was pushing for the appointment of a "Reading Czar" to oversee reading instruction in Connecticut.  Though long empty, the position had been given new life by a legislature shocked by the rapid fall in literacy rates in its state.

The predictive nature of literacy rates doesn't surprise, but a state's use of literacy figures to budget for prison construction astonishes.  So does Gillis's final thought on prison and literacy, in which she measures bureaucratic cynicism using simple arithmetic.  It costs, she notes, twice as much to imprison an adult as to educate a child:

Thus not only do reading problems affect students, but they also have a host of negative effects on the economy: the average cost to educate a child in Connecticut is close to $11,000 annually while the average cost to house an inmate here is about $28,000.

In an epigram of a kind found in much of American public debate -- from Franklin to Emerson, to Truth and Cady Stanton -- she encapsulates a depth and breadth in educational and social economies in a well-earned and simple figure.  To borrow from another popular version of this form, she's telling us: "if you think education's expensive, take a look at the alternative."

And boy, have we.  Here's just a sampling of the rampant and sometimes willfully naive ways we discuss literacy rates and prison-planning.  The Educational CyberPlayGround cites an Arizona Republic article from September 15, 2004 in order to insert fact-finding into the literacy-prison connection.  In June of 2008, discussants at Oprah's online home took a third-hand account of a conversation with someone who "runs a Federal Prison" in Texas and turned it into a familiar banner: "3rd grade reading scores = Number of Beds for Fed.Prisons!"  In 2010, a more editorially-vetted article at OregonLive! by Bill Graves, quotes officials from California's and Oregon's Departments of Corrections who dismiss the direct correspondence between "reading scores" and "prison beds."  In the same journalistic vein, in 2009, Maria Gold and Rosalind S. Helderman at The Washington Post, out national and Virginian politicians who repeat the "bogus claim" that third-grade reading scores are used to predict prison populations.  

It is Graves, a journalist of social issues and a writer of a book-length examination on education reform, who reminds us that while there is a deep connection between failed literacy education and crime, it isn't the simple and oft-repeated connection between literacy rates and state prison budgets.  His is the voice of, we could say, complexity, in this sometimes one-note conversation.

Now, I don't know exactly how states use literacy rates to project crime or prison populations.  However, as Graves notes, in our public discourse, no one else does, either.  Graves reports that prison officials claim to use "complicated formulas" to make such projections, and in doing so suggests that there's a story here, parts of which are yet to be uncovered. 

Unfortunately, then, lost in the echo-chamber of Gillis's most startling claim is everything else she had to say -- about Connecticut's past high achievements in literacy, budget downturns, renewed interest in schools, and a few key legislative cheerleaders.  Given this cast of characters and the tension that high-stakes educational policy produces, isn't it strange that we don't often ask, "What happened in Connecticut?"  We might also ask a lot of other related questions, if we didn't want to strangely avoid the topic at hand.  We could join a conversation about schools and reading by asking questions like "Do incarcerated adults learn to read?  What if they do?  What if they don't?  What are the best ways to teach them?  How do they describe the transformation they undergo when they become literate?" 

We can answer these questions about Connecticut by reading legislative and news stories in Connecticut's newspapers, or by talking to its parents and children.  We can answer questions about literacy and prison by mining a dozen studies done in prisons by scholars and state institutions.  If we did, we'd have a mess of data, claims, events, stories, and people.  That would be a great thing.  But instead we keep revisiting Gillis's throwaway line -- "Some states even estimate future prison populations based on third-grade reading scores" -- because it allows us to say, "I knew it all along."

What we don't always do is figure out what we didn't know, those inconvenient or complicated stories that stick like fishbones in the narratives we've built about education as it relates to crime or anything else.  Bureaucrat and activist, wonk and community organizer, we'll need to be able to think and act differently.  If we want to move forward, we'll need to see, integrate, and re-frame stories about our schools and communities if we want to make changes, to see not just received truths or even "complicated formulas" of education, but the real people whose stories make up the vast and, I'm afraid, often unseen field of teaching and learning.  This blog begins by considering the reading-prison fallacy because it is a striking example of a truth that few examine with fresh eyes, and because, even when wielded by reformers, it re-installs a host of prejudices about people and educational policy that weigh particularly heavily on the Stratton community.

Diary: Disney's Bright Stars

In a former life, I worked with children in South Scottsdale, an area that evolved from

Bedroom-community suburb of Phoenix to

Forgotten satellite of the system of exclusive resorts that line the desert in Scottsdale to

An archipelago of slum and blight.

I loved it. 

I got the job as a lucky break – I had coached swimming for two years and taught swim lessons, but had never been in a classroom environment with kids – and many of the people I came to like (and who came to like me) were suspicious of my potential.

They were right.  Many environmental-spill-like paint and glue messes, stern-talkings-to, trainings, and failures later, I got the hang of it.  Then, we put on Shakespeare with six-year-olds, painted murals, and took a hundred kids to water parks.  The list of failures that preceded and accompanied those high-water marks could fill a book, but I seem to remember only the brightest parts now.

One particularly wonderful experience – itself mired in uncertainty, cursing, fear, and staffing issues, I'm sure – came to mind recently as I listened to our local public radio.  On “Here and Now” last week, Ron Suskind discussed his book Life, Animated, a Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism.  In it he recounts, among other things, how Disney and its characters became an integral part of his family’s vibrant life.  A story, in my reading, about the possibilities of children and reading and movies and love, it is touching and fascinating on its own; but it recalled a child and people I knew from my days in Scottsdale.

Although I won’t tell you too much about this child, I can say that, though he was very young and sneaky and charming when I knew him, he is most likely not alive now.  His condition was terminal.  I can also say that although he and his parents very much appreciated our programs – which included dance, the arts, lots of play, and lots of socializing – he “fired” me and many of my staff on more than one occasion.  “You’re fired!” he would often shout, when asked to sit with a group or walk to lunch; and then he would make a grand exit, much like an exasperated Joan Crawford or a righteous Jimmy Stewart.

We all loved that guy.   He was so much trouble!

And he, like Ron Suskind’s son, Owen, often used Disney to communicate with us.

He had a taxonomy of heroes and villains, but he often called the program staff “Brunhilda” in a dismissive way, especially when his behavior was our focus.  He referred to himself as Peter Pan when he was climbing on bleachers and trees and cafeteria equipment.  Many other kids quite naturally played in this world of superheroes, lion kings, and princesses.

We, that is, the staff who worked in these programs, did too.  We had seen these movies – during this time The Lion King had become a Broadway and cinematic sensation – and we were young and imaginative and not too well-versed in critical pedagogy or behavior management or behavioral psychology.  It was such a florid time for me as someone who works with kids.  The group – of exceptional and giving young people – I worked with was so flexible, and their energy so limitless, that folding Snow White into an art project or dodgeball game seemed natural.  One of our more inspired staff created an entire dance program using a Disney CD that I recall had a rappin’ Mickey.  Another, who became an after-school care provider for this child, simply immersed herself in the world of Beauties and Beasts and Mice.

Looking back -- it has been almost twenty years – with my focus on the array of laughs and strategies and activities and decisions that center on this one child, I realize that the child himself is what makes the memory seem so rich, positive, vibrant.  In the years closer to today, I tend to focus on the debates, procedures, and theories that surround these kids we work with. 

It is a much darker and more confusing world! 

This child and the team I worked with, and Disney, and Suskind and his family, are very bright suns in the universe of working with kids.   They illuminate us.  The dark corners, or perhaps the force of gravity that governs so many other acts – permissions forms, funding, procurement, the politics of community partnerships, the research – in this place seems to me often to fill the present, but it shouldn’t be the only thing there.

We should remember the kids we work with and for, as often as we can.  All those Peter Pans who invite us into their worlds, where life is new and strange and worth cultivating.