Teamwork and People Power: Liberatory Teaching in the Elementary Classroom (Amerasia Journal) The Second Year The good news about the second year was that I started getting an idea of what I was doing in the classroom. The bad news was that I started realizing all the things I wasn’t teaching the kids. It was depressing. A feeling not unknown to teachers. I did do a lot of reading and searching for answers. I read books like Herbert Kohl’s The Open Classroom, Carrie Ayers Haynes’ Good News on Grape Street, and Paulo Freire’s and Ira Shor’s Teaching to Liberate. I read lots of articles from the LAUSD District Internship Program where I was getting my teaching credential. Most influential was The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Position Statement on Developmentally Appropriate Practice in the Primary Grade Children 5- Through 8-Years Old. Here it describes the idea of starting with the students’ developmental and active learning needs: "The curriculum is integrated so that children’s learning in all traditional subject areas occurs primarily through projects and learning centers that teachers plan and that reflect children’s interests and suggestions. Teachers guide children’s involvement in projects and enrich the learning experience by extending children’s ideas, responding to their questions, engaging them in conversation, and challenging their thinking." So with more insight and lots of desire, I started off each semester with high hopes. But the daily grind of teaching would slow me down. I’d soon feel unsure if I was doing the right thing by my kids. I’d tell myself, "I want to bring in a community activist to talk to the kids, but maybe I should be doing what the other teachers are doing. I gotta get these kids to read and write." Slowly, I found myself falling back in line with the rest of the teachers. Probably the biggest obstacle to teaching for justice was picturing what it looked like. After observing experienced teachers, I had seen quality, child-centered, print-rich and engaging teaching. But it wasn’t enough. I still didn’t know what a primary grade activist or liberatory classroom might include. I reasoned, good teachers got their students to learn, but what were students really learning about? Was it enough to know how to read and write if you were unable or unwilling to use them meaningfully to contribute to society? Part of the problem was my narrow view of what student activism was supposed to be. For me, getting my students active meant seeing them do all the things I’d done as a community activist: picket nonunion hotels, write newspaper editorials, and march against racist California Propositions. But these were adult activities and I couldn’t picture my six year old students doing them. It was somewhere between my second and third year of teaching that I made a breakthrough regarding student activism. Only after reading Anti Bias Curriculum, Tools for Empowering Young Children by Louise Derman-Sparks and the A.B.C. Task Force, did I understand that children should take part in activities appropriate to their age and development. In Chapter Nine, Activism with Young Children, they write: "Young children have an impressive capacity for learning how to be activists if adults provide activities that are relevant and developmentally appropriate. Through activism activities children build the confidence and skills for becoming adults who assert, in the face of injustice, 'I have the responsibility to deal with it. I know how to deal with it, I will ideal with it.' ...In every classroom and community, issues arise that can spark activism activities. Since these activities must be concrete and meaningful in the life of each group of children, there are no exact recipes. Each teacher has to create his or her own activities using the principles discussed in this chapter." For me, this passage opened up a whole new way of thinking. I started approaching issues with more confidence. With reflection, I knew that Ruby’s letter was successful because it came out of the students’ lives. For six year olds, the simple card and message were age-appropriate ways to communicate. In the same way, using picture books was effective because it built on students’ concrete understandings before moving them to more abstract ideas. Back Next