The Ghost of Charleston: Mississippi School Holds First Interracial Prom

Can schools change communities? Is it their responsibility to do so?

One High School in Charleston, Mississippi may have begun to change the community by agreeing to hold their first ever interracial prom on school grounds as NPR reported on Thursday.

As it turned out, it was not due to the activism of the school's administrators that this historic event was able to take place. Rather, it took a Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman and actor Morgan Freeman to initiate the process.

Charleston High School was able to turn a blind eye to the issue of segregated proms by letting parents take over the organization of separate proms and hold them off school grounds. Many parents believed it was in line with "tradition" to have segregated proms.

So the tradition lived on until this year when filmmaker Saltzman heard about the issue. He found out that Morgan Freeman had offered to pay for an integrated prom at Charleston High School back in 1997 and that this offer was refused. Saltzman contacted Morgan Freeman this year and they both went to the school board and the senior class with an offer to pay for the event and capture it on film in a documentary Prom Night in Mississippi.

Salzman explains that some white parents could not get past history and did not allow their children to attend the integrated prom.

But the school has agreed to fund the integrated prom for next year so that it was the students that prevailed and made the integrated prom the new school "tradition". As student Chasidy Buckley proclaimed in a sound bite about the successful event:
"We proved ourselves wrong, we proved the community wrong because they didn't think this was going to happen."

In the end, it was the students, the school and the community working together that made this change possible. But could the school have played a larger role in being a catalyst for change? Is it not their responsibility as an institution to open the doors for change and leave the ghosts of the past behind?

Original article, Photos and Audio interviews

Community as Intellectual Space: Aesthetics as Resistance

The 4th Annual Community as Intellectual Space symposium is being held this week at Paseo Boricua in Chicago, June 13-15. Events will start at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC), 2739/41 W. Division (near corner of Division and California).

This year, the focus is on Aesthetics as Resistance: The Act of Community Building. There will be artist-led tours of the beautiful murals found throughout the neighborhood, the annual People's Parade, a delicious Puerto Rican dinner, workshops on community-education activities as diverse as urban agriculture and computer programming for children using Squeak, meetings with local Humboldt Park/Paseo Boricua community and government leaders, including Rep. Luis Gutierrez and Rep. Cynthia Soto, and panels on liberatory education. [Click to enlarge the poster or follow the link above for more details.]

Aesthetics as Resistance promises an active dialogue on art, identity, and cross-cultural community building with community leaders, artists, educators, librarians, activists, students, and residents. It expresses the PRCC's vision to build community grounded in cultural practice, including murals, poetry, music, and the People’s Parade. These practices are both creative and political acts to develop community out of local funds of knowledge.

Paseo Boricua has a motto: 'Live and help others to live.' It is known for its multigenerational and holistic community activism around human rights and social change. Education is structured around the belief that ‘the community is the curriculum,’ reflecting the ideas of Paulo Freire and providing a contemporary version of Hull House.

With its many academic partnerships, Paseo Boricua also provides an outstanding example of university-community collaboration in research, teaching and public engagement. For example, last year the community hosted a tour and visit for the John Dewey Society. This furthered dialogue around how the community answers Dewey's call for critical, socially-engaged citizens, for an active public, and for education as lived experience.

[Note: I also posted this on my own blog.]

Scholar-Teacher Dialogues On Social Issues: Some Thoughts from Harriet Cuffaro

Harriet Cuffaro writes:

The absence of teachers' voice is long standing in academic discussions and research projects. There's been improvement with the literature on narrative, teacher talk, etc. In part, how problems, questions, dilemmas are lived, faced daily in the classroom, is quite different from an "outsider's" more distant view or discussion.

Both in curriculum and Foundation courses I taught at Bank Street, we talked about Dewey, Progressive Education, democracy. At some point I would ask, "How would you live democracy in a classroom of three-year-olds?" "Five-year-olds?" "Nine-year-olds?" and on. Such questioning is not different from Dewey's definition of democracy or his statement about "democracy as a way of life." My aim was to move from words to action . . . to translating ideas into daily classroom life, mindful of age, culture, and children's experiences

She adds that as many potential authors of Social Issues have access to classroom life and work with teachers, they might invite a teacher to join in a post, making it into a scholar-teacher conversation. For example if an author's topic is technology how are his/her ideas lived as seen from a teacher's perspective, how do they translate, what insights may surface, etc.

Harriet invites further conversation about this idea.

Guidance for Writers from J.K. Rowling

Caroline Miller at Positive Psychology Digest provides an inspiring post on the Harvard commencement address of J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.

In addition to a link to a video of the address itself, a video which will certainly be endlessly viewed in the coming months, Miller provides a very useful summary.

Briefly, Rowling hit on the following themes:

1. Don’t be afraid of failure. Rowling described herself as an utter and complete failure as she set out to write the only thing she’d ever wanted to do – tell an engaging story about a young boy named Harry Potter. At that point, she was extremely poor, a single mother, and a disappointment to herself and her parents, who had not wanted her to experience the same poverty they’d experienced, as well. With nothing left but her authentic heart’s desire of writing, Rowling said that she went after her dreams with gusto because she’d already lost everything external, and there was nothing left to lose anymore.

2. Treasure your friends. Rowling implored the audience to tend to the friendships they’d made at school because she noted that these relationships were what sustained her.

3. Use your imagination to have empathy for others. This part of Rowling’s speech was the most powerful and memorable by far. In moving terms, she described her job at Amnesty International when she was in her twenties, and how she’d seen courage and compassion exhibited by the Amnesty International workers on numerous occasions. She asked everyone in attendance to use their intellectual talents to do more than accumulate money or possessions, and to instead imagine the pain and plight of those less fortunate to be generous with their time and energy.

Many academic authors long to have a wider audience for their thoughts, and an opportunity to make a real difference in life. We need to turn our souls from the very real but limited allure of academic recognition and start learning how to write for those wider audiences.

Making SOCIAL ISSUES a Useful Blog

Chris Garrett, a trustworthy source of blogging advice, offers very helpful tips about how to make a blog useful .

He notes that some readers will be regulars, while others will have come to the site through a link while searching for:

1. Specific information
2. A solution to a problem
3. News and commentary about current events
4. Ideas, concepts, tips, education
5. Further details of the information they have found
6. General information on the subject area

Keeping this in mind supplies us with a checklist of six types of useful posts.

Chris adds that to make the visitor happy, a blog post should:

1. Promise benefits in your titles and headlines and actually deliver on it.
2. Make your navigation suit the missions your readers are on.
3. On your homepage provide links for first time visitors who want to explore and long time visitors who read via the web and not RSS.
4. Individual articles should provide the content they promise, then provide links to more on the same subject.
5. Add clear signposts to all your best or most publication-defining "flagship" posts, while keeping your visitor on the scent of their hunt with series, related articles and category links.

The Delights and Dangers of Cookbook Education

I found a nice simple discussion of cook book teaching today at the Positive Psychogy News Daily blog.

Sherri Fisher writes:

I don’t know about you, but I get bored making, serving and eating the same old-same old. . . .I’d be the first to agree that cookbooks perform a vital function. Especially in an age when it is unlikely that children and grandchildren are in the kitchen soaking up the traditional family recipes, cookbooks allow people the ability to perform in a kitchen with a reasonable amount of self-confidence.

In education there are a number of cookbooks. They may be called “curriculum frameworks” or something similarly sturdy and substantial sounding. Some have actually been around for years despite being touted as the outcomes of education reform. They serve the same purpose as kitchen cookbooks (attempting to guarantee a consistent outcome) and as such are bound by the same limitations. However, in an education system which is under fire from many quarters, cookbook education can sometimes rightly be seen by administrators in charge of “making the numbers” as the most easily defensible program a system can take. A school of educational thought, based on educational theory, develops a highly structured program that is as close to”fool”proof as it can be made. The program is presented to teachers, who are then expected to present it to students. Voilà, education happens. That is supposedly the delight of cookbook education.

Rote cook booking is essential for the novice. One who cooks every day, though, gains the kind of confidence to deviate from the cookbook, to improve the recipe, to adapt the recipe to individual circumstances and ingredients. Ideally, this happens to teachers, too. In fact, the better a teacher is, the more likely it is that the recipe will be improved for the students in her or his classroom, naturally shaping it to the strengths of students by using a teacher’s own strengths.

Good teachers are often acutely aware of the drawbacks and limitations of the educational recipes they are given. When educational systems insist on cookbook education, they may alienate their most creative teachers, their most experienced teachers, their most effective teachers.

One area of promise from positive psychology research in the field of education that addresses this is collective efficacy, the belief of a faculty that as a group they can execute the positive courses of action required to successfully educate students (Goddard, et al., 2004).

Collective efficacy represents a level of confidence in the ability of a group to reach a shared goal. It influences common expectations for action, supports creative problem-solving, and results in resilient goal attainment by influencing the effort and persistence necessary for academic achievement. No cookbook needed!! Perceived collective efficacy facilitates collaboration and the willingness to accept challenges to teaching in the face of difficulty (Goddard, et al., 2004).

Goddard, R.D., LoGerfo, L. & Hoy, W.K. (2004). High school accountability: The role of perceived collective efficacy. Educational Policy, 18(3) 403-425.

Robert F. Kennedy, 1925-1968

I'm sure that many of us, especially in the United States, are today thinking of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated forty years ago.

I am a bit too young to have lived through the very-public event of his death, as well as that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of John F. Kennedy. However, growing up in a moderately-progressive Democratic Catholic family, the Kennedys in particular were a prominent part of my childhood political mythology.

I'd like to pose a couple of specific questions, and especially invite those who did experience this period, to share their wisdom.

1) While I grew up in the first post-Vietnam generation, these deaths and that war were still very present and raw in the minds of my mom, of my teachers, and most of the adults around me when I was a kid. Now that the second post-Vietnam generation is in college--what is the experience of teaching these events to them like? Is it just old, dusty history? Interesting in an old, antiquarian way like the death of Lincoln would be? Though this particular topic hasn't come up in the social foundations class for which I served as a TA, I feel that the civil rights struggles of the 60's had that same antiquarian feel for my students.

2) There are still many people who are not convinced by the official stories of the three shootings. Plenty of others are happy to call that group "conspiracy theorists," and group them together with alien abductees. Historians-as-public-intellectuals have a role in communicating to the public their best understanding of what-happened. Philosophers-as-public-intellectuals perhaps have a role in helping individuals recognize and respond to doubts they have in the face of official explanations of public events, and fashion an appropriate path of inquiry to respond to those doubts. I would submit that the philosopher has that responsibility to the doubter, whatever their own stance regarding the event in question.

3) The most troubling question concerns the present. There's a small, but not insignificant, fear that the hope and charisma of a contemporary young progressive Democrat will end with the same fate. Will teaching the events of the 60s lead to greater fear, and to a cynicism that "all the good ones get shot," so it's not worth trying to change the system?

Blogging in a Silo

Susan Gunelius asks this key question: are yoiu blogging in a silo? She writes:

There is a term used in business and marketing called the “silo effect” which refers to a lack of communication or coordination between business units and/or marketing efforts. Instead of working together, each team focuses solely on their own goals with little regard to everyone else’s efforts. It occured to me this week that bloggers should ask themselves whether or not they’re guilty of the silo effect on their blogs.

There are many blogs expressing progressive viewpoints on social and cultural issues. Many individual academics and scholarly socieites have blogs or newsletters. The question is: how effectively are they cooperating to get their ideas in circulation beyond the academy -- or in some cases, beyond their authors' field of vision?

Most scholarly socieities do not have an "engaged scholar" mission written into their mission statements. The Dewey society does. For this reason it can be a useful partner for engaged scholars and engaged members of scholarly societies.

After reflecting on the report about the March workshop at AERA Barbara Stengel writes:

I'm wondering about generating/investigating a network of "Deweyan" blogs, i.e. blogs that already exist out there that would "sign on" to the set of principles or whatever gets developed. Then put the JDS logo on the blog and put the links to other Deweyan blogs there as well. This might help folks find similar sorts of analyses of other issues and create a sense of community in the bargain. (If we looked for blogs with a Deweyan tone, we might even be able to recruit new members who didnt' know about the society . . . So add this to the list of possibilities.

So the task is for SI to stop blogging in a silo.

Please comment on any individual or organizational blogs or newletters with which we can partner in this way.

The Kings of New York

The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top HighSchool Chess Team by Michael Weinreb should interest all progressive educators and members of the John Dewey society.

The Kings is a profile of the national championship winning chess dynasty at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, New York. Murrow is a magnet school for gifted kids that provides a lot of protected space for its students to 'do their own thing'. The founding principal, Saul Bruckner, transferred to Murrow from John Dewey High School in Coney Island, a school with a project-based curriculum, where the students did not receive grades. Murrow went even further in the 'progressive school' mode, providing lots of free time by having each class meet only four days a week and looking the other way if kids hung out in the school yard or smoked in the bathroom, or even cut classes for weeks on end. As the principal of this school for its first thirty years, Bruckner became something of a cult figure in New York high school circles. Surprisingly, Diane Ravitch has praised the school, perhaps because of the great achievements of many of its students.

The chess coach, Elliot Weiss, had a scouting system for chess talent that makes major league sports look, well, minor league. By placing himself on the board of the organization running chess tournaments in the New York region, he had early notice of promising elementary school kids. And even though competition for admission to Murow was very stiff, Weiss could get these kids into Murrow even if their academic performance through Junior High was terrible. And chess prodigies, obsessed by the game, are notoriously poor school students.

An organization called Chess in the Schools (CIS) had funded chess instruction at several New York elementary and middle schools, and one, PS 318, had become a chess dynasty because its instructors were high ranked master players. 318 became, in effect, the farm team for Murrow.

Kings chronicles a couple of years in the life of the team members as they pursue their national championships. The players include Russian and Lithuanian immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and African-Americans. Each is a kind of troubled genius with a fascinating life story.

What stands out is how a considerable number of selfless heros (I do not use this word lightly) including Bruckner, Weiss, the funders of Chess in the Schools, the chess instructors, and a few private benefactors, made this incredible story possible.

Even when you add up how much they all had to give in time and effort and money so that a bunch of misfit geniuses could develop their unusual natural gifts, however, you realize that a rich country like this could provide something as wonderful for everyone needing it and capable of gaining from it. If, that is, the entire culture were not so slanted to selfishness and greed and if accountability schemes would stop driving them out and destroying schools like Murrow.

The book documents the steady changes in Murrow school brought about by No Child Left Behind, as well as by draconian school security measures imposed by the Bloomburg administration that have eliminated free time, hanging out, and cutting classes.

CSI Workshop Notes and Next Steps

Notes from Social Issues Workshop, John Dewey Society, Wednesday, 3/26/2008

The Commission on Social Issues of the John Dewey Society held a Workshop on Wednesday, March 26, 2008. Participants included Robert Boostrum, A.G. Rud, Liz Wiley, Virginia Benson, Virginia Jagla, Chad Lykins, Eva Hultin, Deron Broyles, Meryl Domina, Hongmei Peng, Barbara Thayer-Bacon, Kathleen Knight-Abowitz, Barb Pelz, Stefan Hopmann, Jim Garrison and Larry Hickman. Craig Cunningham organized the workshop and Leonard Waks chaired it.

At the beginning the chair set the workshop agenda in the context of the missions of the Dewey Society and the Commission: The Dewey Society has a primary mission to contribute to society’s intelligence in contending with its contemporary issues. The Commission seeks to engage members of the Dewey Society in making that contribution.

The chair stated that interest within professional and scholarly societies in promoting public communications is becoming widespread. He cited similar sessions and workshops at the fall 2007 meeting of the American Studies Association and the 2008 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. The AAACS session, led by Tony Whitsun of the University of Delaware, cited the work of the Dewey Society’s Commission as a model to follow. The PES-GB has taken a leadership role in this regard by publishing its series of IMPACT books. The Dewey Society has a built-in advantage in pursuing public efforts, however, because unlike most scholarly societies, we have public communications on social issues as an explicit primary mission.

The chair also noted that Jim Garrison, as President of the Dewey Society, had organized the 2008 Dewey Lecture and Dewey Symposium at AERA in alignment with the public mission of the Dewey Society, by focusing on “un-cloistered scholars”. Jim Garrison then asked the Commission members to assume further responsibilities in planning subsequent Dewey lectures and symposia, to begin to institutionalize the Society’s public mission.

Past-President Larry Hickman reminded the participants of the forthcoming Dewey Sesquicentennial in 2009. This event will provide multiple opportunities for public speeches, symposia, and publications. Hickman also noted the formation of Dewey Study Centers in several countries including Turkey and China among others.

The members then introduced themselves and shared their ideas about how the workshop might help the Dewey Society and the Commission in pursuing these missions.

Two main questions were discussed, first in small groups and then in the general meeting.

(1) Would it be helpful to the work of the members if the Commission laid out some general principles or guidelines to shape the public communications of the Society’s members?

And

(2) What sorts of communications (e.g., blog posts, op-ed articles, articles in journals of opinion, policy reports) should the Commission encourage and support, and how can it provide incentives to the members so that they will make these communications?

With respect to (1):

(a) Participants agreed unanimously that the Commission should not state extensive philosophical principles to be “applied” to contemporary issues. Participants felt that such principles or guidelines would be unhelpful and would miscast practical intelligence as a matter of deducing practical conclusions from theoretical premises.

(b) Instead, they thought that contributors to Commission-sponsored communications should be urged first to think directly and concretely about the contemporary issues themselves, referring back to philosophical and theoretical ideas -- from the Dewey corpus and many other sources – only as the need for and relevance of such intellectual inputs surfaced, and only insofar as they were seen as practically useful helping to resolve the problematic situations addressed.

(c) Some participants felt that a simple “pocket guide” to progressive democratic ideas, on the order of Dewey’s “My Pedagogical Creed,” might be useful as an heuristic to stimulate some initial thoughts after a problem situation has initially been identified. Eva Hultin, a school principal from Canada, shared that non-academics in the Dewey Society might be especially helped by such a statement, as unlike academic professionals, they do not have occasion to rehearse and interpret such ideas on a daily basis.

(d) Craig Cunningham suggested, and participants agreed, that Dewey’s conception of “democracy” might serve as the basis for such a “pocket guide”.

(e) Barbara Thayer-Bacon and Kathleen Knight-Abowitz suggested that for certain publications, such as Commission-sponsored “white papers” on policy issues, a “style sheet” of the sort used by encyclopedia editors would prove useful. Such a style sheet could have guidelines regarding form, content, and point of view. The “pocket guide” considered in (c) might be situated within this style sheet for authors. Barbara said “These kinds of style sheets already exist; we don’t have to re-invent the wheel!”

(f) Along the way, several current issues surfaced as requiring attention in Commission-sponsored communications, including high stakes testing, educational rights of illegal immigrant children and the disabled, school resegregation and diversity, home schooling, and charter schooling, problems facing teachers (e.g., threats of violence), and others.

Turning to (2),

(a) Participants agreed that members would have more incentive to contribute communications for Commission publications if they counted as peer-reviewed.

(b) One way to make that happen would be to appoint a board of editors or a board of readers for Commission publications, from who reviews would be solicited.

(c) Stefan Hopmann urged the Commission to assign writing tasks to JDS members. The chair or some other officer of the Commission, that is, should actively solicit specific communications from specific members on a regular basis, because academics are most comfortable working within a framework of assignments and deadlines, and are unlikely to take time away from busy schedules to make spontaneous contributions.

(d) Matt Pamental suggested that “how to” guidelines for writing blog posts, op-ed pieces, and articles in journals of opinion would be particularly useful for younger scholars, especially for graduate students. Such guidelines would be along the lines of the “style sheets” mentioned in 1(e) above. He said that we shouldn’t “make it a mystery” how to frame up such contributions.

(e) Kathleen Knight Abowitz stressed the importance of connecting the work of the Commission with that of other professional and scholarly associations, such as the ASA and the AAACS mentioned above. PES-US is also exploring an out-reach mission at this time

(f) Participants then spoke about the value of forging connections to make common cause on social issues across borders, e.g., with PES-GB. The various Dewey societies and study centers are also natural allies.

(g) Different kinds of publication formats were seen as appropriate for issues with different “time scales”. Some problems arise and demand immediate attention. Some are enduring. Some come to a head and become ripe for consideration by policy makers.
Andrea English noted that many issues develop slowly, surfacing in the public eye again and again over time. Through this process, simple blog entries with links to news stories and other information sources might be sufficient. Then as a problem ripens, a “white paper” would be valuable to organize the elements of the problem and frame it as a policy issue in terms appropriate for policy makers.

(h) A.G. Rud called our attention to the notion of “scholarship of engagement”. He noted that Purdue had held a full-day workshop covering the “what,” “why,” and “how” of this kind of scholarship. This notion might be useful in providing incentives for academics to make public communications, by providing a language and context for recognizing them as scholarly activities appropriate as resume items. (Waks and Rud followed up this suggestion. See: http://deweycsi.blogspot.com/2008/03/scholarship-of-engagement.html

(i) Several members spoke of the potential usefulness of a clearing house of exemplary public communications such as blog entries, op-ed pieces and articles in journals of opinion that could serve as style templates for JDS members. Craig Cunningham said that a “ning” is a good digital format for such a clearinghouse and volunteered to create one for the Commission. (He has subsequently done so).

The most important after-meeting action steps appear to be these:

(1) The creation of a short “pocket guide” (perhaps 1-2 pages) of democratic progressive ideas, grounded in Dewey’s conception of democracy (1c).

(2) The creation of a style sheet for Commission white papers, with items regarding form, content and point of view. The pocket guide above may form part of this style sheet (1e).

(3) A list of contemporary problems and public policy issues calling for attention at this time (1f).

(4) The appointment of a board of readers for conducting peer-review of Commission white papers (2a, b).

(5) Actively soliciting members of the Dewey Society (and others) interested in communicating with various publics and policy-makers under the sponsorship of the Society, and assigning tasks for them to do (2c).

(6) Preparing brief “how to” guidelines for blog posts, op ed pieces, articles in journals of opinion and white papers to assist younger scholars and graduate students by taking the mystery out of these forms of communication (2d).

(7) Forging alliances with other scholarly societies in the US and beyond to collaborate in working on social issues (2e, f)

(8) Encouraging university leaders to commit to taking the ‘scholarship of engagement’ seriously as an important kind of scholarship with its own forms of peer-review, to be appropriately considered in assessments for promotion and tenure (2h).

(9) Forming a clearinghouse for public communications to serve as exemplars for engaged education scholars including members of the John Dewey Society (2i).

The chair wishes to thank all of the participants for their contributions.

The first next step is to prioritize these nine steps and discover JDS members interested in working on them.

Please comment on this report and express or amplify your own ideas so that I can include them in a more complete report of the Commission. And please let me know which of these action steps you are willing to work on along with other JDS members.

Leonard Waks, chair
Commission for Social Issues