Skip to main content

Unity without Uniformity

Today, three students and I traveled to the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor to visit campus and hear Dr. Marc Lamont Hill. If you aren't familiar with his work, check out his website here.

I have to say that I chose those three students intentionally. They didn't know each other, they spanned grade levels, and they all had never been to the university. In the weeks ahead, I'm excited to continue talking to them about the experience and what we took away from Dr. Hill's speech.

Here are some of the words and phrases I scribbled in my notebook:

  • radical listening
  • contradictions
  • coalitions
  • dangerous truth-telling
  • complicating our narratives
  • succumbing to the analysis of others
  • paralysis of analysis
  • act bravely
  • obsession with remembering vs. willful forgetting
  • unity without uniformity 
Dr. Hill spoke about how there is so much talking but very little listening. He talked about the need to tell the truth and how the truth can isolate you and make others feel uncomfortable. He spoke about the need to act bravely, and that acting bravely means that you might be working alone. And on top of all of this, he spoke about the ability to unite without being the same. We need not conform in order to make change; we just have to see our common thread. 

Right now, I'm thinking about my classroom and education. I'm thinking about the needs of 32 diverse learners in every hour and uniting my students as readers, as writers, and thinkers. They don't need to share the same values, but I can help them see how their values, their goals, and their needs can connect. We can take risks, engage in meaningful dialogue and learning, and act bravely without the fear of retribution. 

I can listen radically to their needs and not to the prescriptions of others. I can radically listen to their interests in a world that would rather make those decisions for them. I can embark on a journey of dangerous truth-telling and share the complicated narratives--an idea that I'm thinking much about as I prepare a journey into Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird over the next few weeks. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.
1 comment
Read more

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo
1 comment
Read more

Past Secretaries of Education

After last night's hearing with nominee DeVos, I decided to research past education secretaries. Senator Alexander talked a lot about "precedent" when it came to procedures regarding the HELP Committee. Let us remember that the first education secretary was appointed in 1979. That's the same year that Congress created the department under Jimmy Carter. This is also the same department that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish. Even the first education secretary had experience in government. Shirley M. Hufstedler was both a federal and state appeals court judge. I'm going to say that because of that experience, she's probably familiar with law and how laws work. As we saw last night, when Betsy DeVos was redirected a question because her answer implied that states could choose to implement federal law or not, she might need a refresher. Then we had Terrel Bell, who was a high school teacher, bus driver, and served in the Marines. Again, a long list of public
2 comments
Read more