Look What's Happening Up the Street

Today is a snow day here in Maine for most of our schools. One of the few happy remnants of our tenacious hold on the anachronistic agrarian calendar!

At NSDC Parker Palmer encouraged us to take back our profession and do what we know is right for our youth. Another keynoter, Jennifer James, also fomented revolution - a call to the Volunteers of America (and the world).

Jennifer is an urban cultural anthropologist whose main message is, "Civilization is ultimately the long process of learning to be kind. Take good care of yourself so you can take care of the rest of us." Before she began talking about schools in particular she created a context for the upheaval in which we find ourselves and our world. Jennifer defined culture as a tapestry that we constantly weave and unravel and re-weave. She said that currently the pace of change has been so fast and our leaders so focused on the short-term that our tapestry is in tatters. For us to have hope we need visionary leaders who can help us to see the new tapestry as we weave it, and who guide us to develop new wisdom traditions. Visionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela unwound the old tapestries of their cultures and showed people what it would look like when we aligned our lives with our values. King had been to the "mountaintop" and had seen the "Promised Land." He knew he may not get there with us but was sure that we would. We wove a new tapestry and created a new culture. The roots of King's wisdom tradition grew from his faith, his values and his integrity.

Jennifer said that the "pace of change is robbing us of our wisdom traditions and we must bring them back -- we must be honest brokers of knowledge." She said that when we learn to concentrate our energy -- through technology, the economy, hierarchy -- we will begin to make real change. We can begin to change our belief systems, our mythologies, our culture. "When the peasants learn to read the kings lose power," she said, speaking broadly yet also referring to our current focus on corporate wealth. And, conversely, "the more you push poor people off the edge the more they will burn down the cities." This current wave of greed must be neutralized with compassion and the path of the heart.

Her message to us as educators was that we cannot in good conscience sit by and watch as the tapestry unravels. She sees teachers depressed, anxious and frightened by the learning curve ahead of them. As leaders in education we could learn from the leaders in the nursing profession, who, over the last generation, raised their own standards and pushed each other to meet them, and thereby elevated themselves to true professionals. Jennifer challenged us to give up tenure in exchange for professional respect, to demand higher salaries in turn for greater results -- and to take full responsibility to become more competent on our own. She challenged us to make reform through strategic partnerships with business and ocmmunity, and to not let what she called the "teaching lodge" (establishment) get in our way.

Lastly, in Jennifer's new book, Cultural Intelligence, she will teach us how to develop this skill critical to surviving and thriving in the 21st century. I am getting ready to read her book, Thinking in the Future Tense, while I await the new one...

...and while I join the rest of you in the street.

Put the Heart Before the Course

This is my first post for a while -- I spent the last week in Dallas at the National Staff Development Council Conference, immersed in professional learning with people of like mind on topics about which we are passionate. One of the reasons I went was to hear again one of the finest teachers I know, Parker Palmer. Parker's message resonates with those of us for whom teaching is a calling, a vocation, not simply a job. He speaks from roots in his tradition, that of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, and its testimonies. The Quaker testimonies are based on the belief that there is that of God in everyone and that "worship and social action, the sacred and the secular, have no dividing walls between them." (retrieved from http://www.quaker.org.uk) This divinely inspired view of society grows from silent worship that waits on God and listens for Guidance, a mystical and practical approach to life.

Parker spoke to over four thousand people in Dallas, in a cavernous conference center surrounded by four huge screens that projected the speaker's image. He began his keynote by asking us all to join him in the Silence. I slipped into it, feeling enveloped by Love and full of admiration for this man who audaciously said to those to whom he was to speak, there is Someone else to whom you should first listen. The whole crowd quieted, and sat for many moments without speech.

Parker began quietly, naming our teachers as "culture heroes," those who are taking on all of the ills of society and doing it with heart and courage and little support. And, he spoke about how our government has increasingly foisted on schools mechanical solutions to complex problems, further taxing and demoralizing our teachers. Parker pointed out, as he says in one of his books, that: "Teacher-bashing has become a popular sport. . . . Teachers make an easy target, for they are such a common species and so powerless to strike back. We blame teachers for being unable to cure social ills that no one knows how to treat; we insist that they instantly adopt whatever "solution" has most recently been concocted by our national panacea machine; and in the process, we demoralize, even paralyze, the very teachers who could help us find our way." He spoke long and eloquently about how we need a revolution in America, a revolution that en-courages all of us in schools to share our hearts and souls with one another, to rise above the mandates and commit ourselves to the Light of learning and teaching. None of us can truly teach or learn unless we bring our whole selves to the process, and only then will we fulfill the promise of our society.

"I lift my lamp beside the golden door," says the Statue of Liberty. The golden door to the promised land is free quality public education for all. How can we, today and every day, honor and challenge ourselves and our colleagues to fulfill this promise by improving our art as well as our craft?