Abstract
As good anthropologists, in order to move ahead with the work, they sought to get the permission of the tribal elders. The researchers set out to see an elderly Navajo medicine man, Sam Yazzie. Although the researchers only presented an outline of the conversation, this is my picture of what happened:
A dust-covered pickup truck makes its way down the long, unpaved, perfectly flat road and stops in front of a hogan. Two young white men, dressed in jeans and a little worse for wear, get out of the truck and greet the old man who has come to the door. They've spent time on the reservation, so they know the proper etiquette. They enter the hogan and the three sit at the table. Only after pleasantries have been exchanged and hot tea has been sipped during long periods of amiable silence do the visitors lay out their plan.
The old man sits quietly as they explain their project with the excitement of researchers who've hit upon a novel idea. After they stop talking, the old man is silent for many minutes. Finally, he asks slowly about their proposed research: “Will it hurt the sheep?”
“Oh no!” one of the younger men responds quickly. And both proceed to explain that filming can in no way damage anyone or anything.
The old man sits quietly again with his eyes closed. Finally, after many more minutes, he speaks again: “Will it do them any good?”
This time the researchers are quiet. They glance at each other nervously and finally one says haltingly, “Well, no, not really.”
The old man opens his eyes and looking directly at the two younger men says, “Then why do it?”
Why do it? As I think back on my university career to date, I have been trying to identify what I have learned that has assisted me in my quest to keep trying to help the sheep. There are three major lessons that have guided my personal path:
Be Courageous
Today, Bob leads a new Civil Rights Movement—Quality Education as a Civil Right. Through the National Algebra Project, which he founded, Bob seeks to provide quality education in mathematics to the young people who have been failed by the education system, who have up to this time been given what he refers to as a sharecropper education—an education fit for those who are least valued in our society. In this new role he still exudes courage, speaking truth to power—from school system administrators to the U.S. Congress—and pushing school systems to turn their attention to the children many do not want to see.
The Algebra Project is designed not only to ensure that the most disadvantaged students in our country have the opportunity to learn higher-order mathematics but also to learn how to advocate for their educational rights. Bob asserts that in our present society, learning mathematics is crucial to achieving full educational citizenship. Students who do not advance in mathematics are predestined by middle school to be excluded from the possibility of attending college. And education is the new civil rights agenda.
As a part of his Algebra Project, Bob worked with a group of students in Mississippi who initially scored in the lowest quartile of a low-performing school. These young people were representatives of the “throwaway” class from whom school systems expect little. After much negotiation with the school district, Bob became their regular mathematics teacher for four years, from ninth through twelfth grades. Under his and other committed teachers’ tutelage, all but one member of that “low-performing” class entered college.
Bob subsequently worked with a class of students from a high school in Miami, again students identified in the lowest quartile of the lowest-performing school. These students were primarily of Haitian origin; many were new immigrants, most with parents who did not speak English. No one in the larger society has had many expectations for these young people. As a part of Bob's work, he insisted that the students not only learn mathematics but have the opportunity to be exposed to many advanced topics. A part of his plan was to organize a summer institute for these young people and some additional students from other low-performing high schools. The program, organized through the Center for Urban Education and Innovation, which I directed at the time, allowed the Haitian American, African American, and Hispanic American students to stay on our campus at Florida International University for the six-week program. The young people spent ten-hour days working with Bob and other instructors in mathematics, language arts, linguistics, sociology, and the creative arts. Students from the Mississippi program, now young college students, came to Miami as counselors for their younger peers.
Although the adults in charge were run ragged by the end of the six weeks—keeping up with forty fifteen-year-olds for twenty-four hours a day is no easy task—the young people begged to stay longer. Despite their earlier homesickness and initial status as low performers, they were excited about learning new things, and all indicated that they, as one young man declared, learned more in six weeks than they had in nine years of school. The specific topics they tackled were impressive: language variation in the African diaspora, the geometry of art, ethnography, critical race theory, filmmaking, and computer programming.
At age seventy-four, Bob went in every day to teach math. He had the same challenges as most teachers. I remember on the first day, when the students didn't know the adults, and certainly didn't know Bob, they talked and played during the presentations about the program by the other adults. When it was Bob's turn to speak, he stood in front of the twenty-five teenagers without saying a word. Silently, he stood there for at least ten minutes. As he stood, the young people eventually became silent and looked at him. One could have heard a pin drop when Bob finally said, quietly, “I don't expect you ever to talk while we are trying to tell you something again. The people here care about you, and you need to listen to them.” He went on quietly to present the program to them. I can't say that the kids never talked again while we were trying to teach, but they never interrupted Bob! That took courage to stand quietly in front of twenty-five antsy teenagers!
Those young people have recently graduated from high school. They are amazingly articulate. They have grown physically, emotionally, and intellectually. They are working, through the Young People's Project, to tutor elementary school children in math. Recently, Tommy, who in 2010 was arrested at a protest for better schools, and Cherlynn, whom we thought we might lose when she became pregnant in tenth grade but who came back a week after having the baby and brought the baby to closing ceremonies, spoke at a research conference to adults. They talked eloquently about how the children they tutor don't believe in themselves and how they are victims of high-stakes testing. They said that they are doing for these elementary schoolchildren what they had hoped would have been done for them when they were younger. They spoke with reverence about Bob Moses and said that he believed in them and taught them to believe in themselves. They said he wouldn't give up on them, so they won't give up on the younger kids, even when they find themselves frustrated trying to teach them.
It is Bob's courage that has kept the program going. Many times the principal or the school district or the university wanted to close it down. Without ever raising his voice, Bob Moses brought the power of his belief in the children and their potential to the systems that affect their lives, and to the children themselves.
Like Bob Moses, we teachers must take up the cause of those children who are so often dismissed by the system. That means never giving up on them; refusing to accept failure; being their advocates and pushing them and the systems that block their success. It also means having the courage to find like-minded people—on faculties, in the community, wherever they may be—and joining together to do this difficult work. One person cannot change the world alone. We all have to step out of our personal comfort zones to create courageous, united efforts.
Learn Humility
When I was a second-year teacher, I had Darren Roberts in my class—that bright, energetic, can't-sit—still, can't-stop-hitting, little first-grade boy that you love but who can quickly wreak havoc. I literally had to hold his hand all day in order to try to prevent other children from being hurt.
One day, Darren's dad came into my classroom. He had clearly been drinking and was shouting at me that he was going to have my job. He was upset because I had “allowed” another child to hit Darren “back.” He was raving and furious. Upset and fearful, I sent a child to get the principal. The principal came in and ushered Mr. Roberts out of the room.
About an hour later, the principal asked me into his office. Mr. Roberts was there and had calmed down. The principal asked me to sit while he asked Mr. Roberts what he wanted for Darren's future. Touchingly, Mr. Roberts spoke about the poverty he had grown up in, about how he wanted something more for Darren. He talked about how he had sacrificed to get the very best for his son, how he would do anything to make sure Darren was successful in school, how he wanted Darren to be the first in the family to go to college.
The principal asked me what I wanted for Darren. Mostly, I said the same kinds of things. Then we were able to have a conversation and create an alliance for Darren's future. When the principal asked the right questions and helped me learn to listen with humility, we were able to find the necessary common space to create a new reality.
Look and Listen for who is Missing
Even when the group present is representative, who is not speaking? What can be done to find out why? Getting that perspective added frequently means having a private conversation with the silent person or group and asking what can be done to get their opinions on the table. Frequently, they have been alienated, and often those doing the alienating are not even aware that they have created an environment in which the marginalized black or poor or immigrant or gay or female people feel unsafe to speak.
Another invisible aspect that should demand our attention is culture. It's often easy to see that a different culture exists, but it is not easy to see one's own. One's own culture is to humans as water is to a fish—we are completely unaware of our culture until we are taken out of it. Those Americans who are part of the dominant culture are seldom outside their own culture and are therefore seldom aware of their culture at all.
Those who bring different experiences to schools are viewed as deficient when assessed through mainstream norms. We are told that we must find out what kids know and don't know so that we can remediate them. The problem, as the great Asa Hilliard once wrote, is that there are two types of questions we could employ. The Type I question asks: “Do you know what I know?” The Type II question asks: “What do you know?”
The first question, “Do you know what I know?” is the culturally charged question that is usually asked in our schools and colleges, the question that makes invisible the culture, the home, the knowledge of the young person in front of us. The very process of trying to find out if a child knows what the school values limits us greatly in seeing our students’ abilities.
The second question, “What do you know?” is the question we have to learn to ask. This is the question that will allow us to begin to see all that is invisible in the child before us. This is the question that will allow us to begin, with courage, humility, and cultural sensitivity the right educational journey. This is the question that will help us learn to “help the sheep.”
These are the lessons that inform my life's goals and that I have continued to learn over the course of my career. But I have also learned another lesson. We cannot accomplish our personal goals without also devoting attention to how to attain these goals within the institutions that so govern our ability to achieve them. This is the question I continue to ask myself. What can I say about the purpose of my life within the university? What does being a professor of education at an institution of higher learning mean for me as an African American woman, daughter of a man who received a GED diploma in his fortieth year—a year before my birth—and who died of kidney failure at the age of forty-seven because the “colored ward” was not provided the use of the new dialysis machine in pre-integration Louisiana.
What does it mean for me as a college student of the 1970s, whose political and ethical perspec- tives were forged against the backdrop of the larger struggle for black liberation and the personal struggle to reconcile the American dream with an American reality as tragic as my father's story. If we aren't here to help the sheep, then what's the point?
When I look at what I spend my days doing, I have to wonder: Am I here to publish in refereed journals? Am I here to read tenure files? To go to meetings? To figure out how to input grades into the new computer program?
Of course I do all those things, but what deeper purpose am I serving? I've come to understand that for me, there must be at least two reasons for dedicating my life to the work I do in the institutions where I do it. The first is that we in education, at universities or in K—12 schools, are charged with preparing the minds and hearts of these who will inherit the earth. I view this as a sacred trust. I believe that, through our students, we shape the world of the future. I further believe that through our teaching we must not only provide technical knowledge, but we must also assure that we fill our students’ hearts and minds with the potential for envisioning a future better than we ourselves can even imagine.
Benjamin E. Mays, president of the prestigious, historically black Morehouse College for over twenty-seven years, proclaimed that the purpose of a college education is not only “to train the mind to think, but the heart to feel … the injustice of mankind; and to strengthen the will to act in the interest of the common good.”
The second purpose of education, I believe, is to build bridges across the great divides, the so-called achievement gap, the technology gap, class divisions, the racial divide. If we do not find a way to bridge the divide between the haves and have-nots, between white and black, between native and immigrant, then we are ensuring our ultimate demise. We are all part of the whole, and no part can be affected without affecting the whole.
Dr. Rudy Crew, former superintendent of the Miami school system, once said that if we are not able to give all of our citizens a future, then the disenfranchised will either implode and destroy themselves or explode in our own front yards and most assuredly destroy us. Education, the potentially great public common ground, can foster the kinds of conversations across cultures, across ethnicities, across classes that can lead to the American ideal we have yet to see realized. Education can un-silence dialogues that are critical for our mutual salvation.
Perhaps uniquely among our public institutions, universities have the potential to help bridge some of these gaps. In his 1869 inaugural address at Harvard, Charles William Eliot asked: “And what will the University do for the community? First, it will make a rich return of learning, poetry, and piety. Secondly, it will foster the sense of public duty— that great virtue which makes republics possible.”
I have been pleased to work at universities that define themselves as urban institutions, and at some that even take that role seriously. But there are tensions at many colleges and universities around the country between the desire of faculty and administrators for a larger purpose committed to the needs of the urban community and the actual day-to-day functioning of the educational institution.
Although great individual attention is paid to the important academic work that scholars hope to accomplish, American higher education has not yet found a way to integrate seamlessly the larger purposes of serving the community with individual faculty members’ research and scholarship. We haven't, for example, found a consistent, university-wide reward mechanism for building a connection to community and serving those who are technically outside the academy but in whose broader interests universities and all public institutions are actually meant to function.
At Florida International University, as at many universities that serve primarily local populations, the failure rate for freshman algebra is very high: 70 percent. This is not surprising, since many of FIU's students are members of some of the most vulnerable communities in Miami. As the size of freshman classes increases at FIU and other urban universities in response to the economy, we risk raising that failure rate even higher. But what if some of the professors and the grad students who typically teach the labs for larger classes were to learn some of the strategies for teaching algebra that have been so successful in teaching so-called at-risk high school students?
What if some of those freshmen who were challenged by algebra were paid to become college math literacy workers, as in the Young People's Project of Bob Moses's Algebra Project? Wouldn't they have a much better chance of reviewing the algebraic concepts if they were put in the role of teaching the strategies to high school students? What connections could be made between students, faculty, and the community with such a project?
Ernest Boyer, the late president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, proposed that
the New American College would organize cross-disciplinary institutes around pressing social issues. Undergraduates at the college would participate in field projects, relating ideas to real life. Classrooms and laboratories would be extended to include health clinics, youth centers, schools, and government offices. Faculty members would build partnerships with practitioners who would, in turn, come to campus as lecturers and student advisers.
Can you imagine what such institutes might be like? Can you imagine the power of using the community itself as a classroom? As a laboratory? The entire faculty could participate with colleagues across disciplines to focus, with students, on issues facing the microcosm of the world we live in. What would our students learn? That they were connected to the world, that they were important in solving the world's problems. And faculty members would feel a greater sense of humanity and purpose as we pursue our academic goals.
Could the reward system of the university be swayed to value collaboration over individual attainment? Articles that shared information about problems solved with other cities and other communities would be recognized over solely theoretical treatises, for example. In the same vein, I've wondered why we don't have stronger connections among the colleges that address human services. After all, those in the Departments of Education, Social Work, Juvenile Justice, Law, Nursing, and so forth, are often working with the same clients. What could happen if we had an interdisciplinary course in which students from each discipline were exposed to professors from the range of disciplines in a yearlong, community centered, problem-solving course that would gather knowledge of how the client's needs might be addressed from each discipline's perspective? Just think of the models such endeavors could provide for how university students, as future practitioners, might collaborate to solve problems once they are in the workforce.
Elon University in North Carolina initiated what they called Project Pericles in 2002, when Elon became one of ten universities to accept a challenge from the Eugene Lang Foundation to provide a learning experience that would “instill in students an abiding sense of social responsibility and civic concern.” In the Periclean Scholars Program, students take part in a series of courses (one per school year), culminating in a class project of global or local social change. Each cohort defines its own project. The class of 2006 chose awareness of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Namibia, Africa, as their project. The class of 2007 chose malnutrition in Honduras. From 2007 to 2010 the students worked in Ghana to improve access to health care and to promote sustainability development. The class of 2011 chose to develop environmental education programs in Sri Lanka, and the class of 2012 will devote its energies to India.
Elon also sponsors service sabbaticals, which allow Elon employees to take part in Project Pericles and to contribute to the community in a significant way. Full-time faculty or staff can apply to be relieved of their university duties for up to one month in order to work for a community organization. Course enhancement grants of a thousand dollars each were awarded to about forty professors to incorporate civic engagement into their classes.
When she was vice president of community involvement at Wheelock College in Boston, Theresa Perry worked with the mayor's office and other institutions in that city to implement a series of faculty-sponsored, interdisciplinary talks and panels about real community problems. Readings were provided for community members and the sessions were advertised in public service announcements. By the third event, there was standing room only in the audience, and community members requested that the series go beyond the few initially planned presentations.
As we seek to institutionalize our commitments to a purposeful university, I believe we must establish an overall plan to engage ourselves with each other, with our students, and with our community. I believe we will come to an even greater understanding that our work can be meaningful only if we figure out how to “help the sheep.” As J.C. High Eagle, a Native American leader, has said, if we live life right, we truly understand that we are but spokes on the great wheel of life and that which endangers one spoke endangers the entire wheel. Our work is to strengthen the wheel by strengthening each individual spoke. We are all a part of the wheel. And we are all a part of the flock.