Educating with Love

“I define love as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”                                                                                                                                                               –bell hooks

I participated in the “Models of Urban Educational Reform” Immersion Project during Spring Break. During our stay in Baltimore, we led an after-school program--the College and Career Institute--at Midtown Academy, a charter school in Baltimore. We worked with 7^th or 8^th graders, aiming to help them to look into options for their futures. Last Thursday, the group of students from Midtown Academy visited Gettysburg. 

Many relationships I built throughout the Baltimore visit have inspired me. But I would like to spend time here talking specifically about one I built with Ellie*, a 7^th grader at Midtown. When I led the after-school program at Midtown, I designed activities that encouraged my students to reflect on their past experiences, their passion and aspirations. In the first session, I asked them about the things they enjoy doing and encouraged them to bring anything that relates to their interests into class for the next session. Some brought drawings. Some showed their poetry pieces. Ellie, who had spoken about her interests in fashion and design, brought a pair of miniature jeans she sewed. I asked her to pass the pair of jeans around so anyone who wants can take a close look at it. I was very impressed by the little piece of work. 

In addition to being artistically talented, Ellie is also mature and reflective. When I asked them to write down three things they expect to do when they would come to visit Gettysburg, she wrote that “I want to meet someone who share my interests and can give me good advice.” Unlike some other goals such as to eat at SERVO, I was not able to guarantee Ellie that her wish would come true. But I take on the responsibility as the teacher and put in my effort to create opportunities that may help her to realize the vision.

One thing I planned for Ellie was visiting our art gallery on campus. After lunch on Thursday, I took Ellie and another student to the art gallery, where some students were working on installing their senior project. It was a very dynamic scene. The moment we stepped into the gallery I heard Ellie gasped: “This is so cool!” with her eyes wide open. The artworks opened up conversations among the three of us. We talked about our feelings, memories and emotions evoked by the artworks. By sharing the emotion and feelings we projected onto the same artworks, we were able to connect with each other emotionally. By the time we walked out of the gallery, I felt our relationships had opened up to a new front. They became more comfortable sharing their ideas and started to ask me questions. Growing up without having this type of cultural enrichment due to the lack of resources, never had I known the power of art in education till this gallery visit with my students.

What was more exciting was the Gettysburg student whose fashion work was displayed in the gallery happened to be in the art class I arranged for Ellie to visit later that day. Ellie had a great conversation with the student, exchanging ideas and asking questions. At the end of her visit, I asked her if she enjoyed the art class. She told me that she really enjoyed talking to the student who had given her some good advice and suggested some books for her to read. In seeing Ellie fulfilling her wishes and they way that the visit had turned out to be a meaningful one to her, I see the purpose of my work in education, aka making human connections with love.

What fascinates me about education has always been this process of connection-making. The loves for knowledge, expansion of experiences, and mindful awareness and compassion, which cannot be quantified but can only be achieved through human connections, are the reason why I want to devote myself to the process to foster such growth within individuals as well as communities. 

*Name changed. 

We Make the Road by Walking

Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one the "Little Rock Nine," who, under the gaze of 1,200 armed soldiers and a worldwide audience faced down an angry mob and helped to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1953, spoke at Gettysburg College last Wednesday.

I was not sure what to expect going into Minnijean Brown’s lecture. Although I have read the excerpt from Warriors Don’t Cry, in which her personal narration vividly recreates the tumult experience of that historical episode, I feel that I know little of her as a person except the couple of days of her life, which have been enshrined in the nation’s history. Coming out of the lecture, I was impressed by her casual demeanor and conversational style of presentation. Despite her humorous way in presenting her points, the lecture provoked me to think about what social change means to her as well as to me.

She opened up the lecture by asking us to imagine ourselves as fifth graders, not only because fifth graders are cute and can say funny things without caring too much of what others think, but also for the sake of rewinding the socialization process we have been engaging in throughout our lives and unlearning the assumptions we have developed consciously or subconsciously. When talking to adults, Minnijean maintained, we are trying to change people’s mind. When talking to children, however, we are trying to help them to learn—not so much “what the world is like” but “how we are able to see the world for ourselves.” But being a fifth grader was not an easy task. It is a constant process and struggle to keep our assumptions in check and navigate the world with a critical and open mind.

Curiosity was another concept she brought up that tied neatly to the idea of being a fifth grader. The state of being curious urges us to pose questions and to interrogate history as well as the status quo. Minnijean Brown used the example of Thomas Jefferson’s view on slavery to enlighten us of prejudice embedded in the nation’s long history and its founding principles. By understanding where we come from, we are able to see a clearer picture of what we believe in and why we do so at present. While it took the oppressed prolonged struggles and a civil war to dismantle the institution of slavery, we are still grappling with the more subtle and engrained means of oppression in our society. The list of issues, Minnijean Brown pointed out to us when answering a student’s question of which contemporary issues she is concerned with, seem daunting. But it served the purpose of keeping us away from complacency, with so many unfinished tasks need to be accomplished. And only with a curious mind, we can start the journey.

To achieve social change involves the process of retrospection, but more importantly, it requires bold action. “We make the road by walking,” the poem of Antonio Machado Minnijean Brown cites, encapsulates the spirit of progress and fearlessness. None of the Little Rock Nine or any of the civil rights activists who fought the hard battle for justice and freedom had the ability to predict future. They walked in darkness without knowing if their work was going to give birth to a better future. They, however, were not deterred; nor did they give up facing all the adversities and frustration. They persisted by charting a terrain that had not been explored. One of the greatest figure in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881-1936), whose work has reflected upon a time of profound social change in China and in the world, has sent similar messages: “I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.” This idea of making the road by walking transcends cultural boundaries and leads the change agents to work towards a more just and free world.

I was greatly inspired by the lessons Minnijean Brown gave at the lecture, in addition to her personal participation in one of the most iconic episodes of the Civil Rights Movement. Her life and continuous involvement in social work have showed us that we are far from arriving at an oppression-free (or post-racial) society. Much work is left to be done by us.

Me, as a Schooled Person 2.0

I was born in 1992, thirteen years after Deng Xiaoping had initiated the “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) scheme to reassert the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legitimacy as the ruling party through a restructured, market-oriented economic system that brought us prosperity. It had also been three years after the 1989 unrest when student protesters propelled by patriotism and democratic values were brutally suppressed by the regime. The twelve years (1998-2010) I spent in public schools coincide with an era when cultural institutions, specifically schools, have been widely employed by the state to impose the dominant ideology upon people. Structured to reproduce CCP’s political power and dominance, the education system carries out the task through its authoritarian, centralized, and top-down school mechanisms and culture.

Run by the paralleled apparatus of the ruling party and the state, the National Ministry of Education oversees provincial and lower-level Ministries of Education that have the authority over determining public schools’ calendar, curriculum, enrollment, teacher-training programs, and hiring processes. Subjected under such a centralized system, all Chinese students in public schools, including me, have to take Thought and Values (Sixiang Pinde), a moral education course in elementary school. From third to sixth grade, the large chunk of time my Sixiang Pinde class devoted to study “the War of Patriotic Resistance against Japanese” (the Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945) turned me into an avid patriot. I remember trembling and fuming over the pictures of horrific war-time atrocities Japanese soldiers had done in China and writing essays condemning the inhumane crime of the Empire of Japan. One time when I found out that one of the local schools was hosting a group of Japanese students who were visiting my city, I told my mother that I wanted to seek them out and interrogate them on the issue of Japanese nationalist efforts to whitewash Japan’s invasion of China.  

Devised by the authoritarian ruling party, the patriotism-saturated curriculum was designed to indoctrinate. Painting the image of Japanese as evil and cruel invaders yet the soldiers and leaders of the Eighth Route Army, the group army under the command of CCP during the Second Sino-Japanese War, as the fearless patriots who sacrificed their lives to protect our country’s sovereignty and our people’s lives, the narrative legitimizes CCP’s political dominance that had emerged out of the conflict. Without the guidance and skills to critically explore the complexity of the history and to understand the nature of knowledge (truth) being socially-constructed, culturally-mediated, and historically-situated; twelve-year-old me read the single-sided narrative in my textbook and accepted it as the truth. 

With the curriculum being further bifurcated and fragmented, middle school (seventh to ninth grade) continued to coerce me to categorize knowledge into oppositional cases through the school’s intensified version of banking education and hyper-instrumentalized standardized tests. In seventh grade, the first history test I took taught me a lesson of how to “behave myself” within those constraints. I scored 87 out of 100 on the test, which was not bad. But what baffled me was a zero I got for a short-answer question that worth eight points. The questions asked whether the wars fought during the period of Warring States (475 - 211 B.C.) were for the causes of justice and why. It was supposed to be an open-ended question that both sides would find substantial evidences to back up their arguments. In my answer I posed both sides’ arguments and provided supporting evidences respectively. I was surprised that I did not get any credit for the comprehensive and thoughtful answer. I went up to the teacher asking for an explanation. She looked at my answer and said: “No. That is not how you answer this type of questions. The correct way to do it is to first pick a side and then argue only for that one side you picked.” She threw me a sheet of paper with the "correct answers" on it and looked at me with a satisfied smile, knowing the fact that she just enlightened an ignorant seventh grader. In this dichotomized relationship, the teacher, confusing her professional authority with the authority of knowledge, not only closed the door to let me critically examine a piece of historical knowledge but also dismissed my agency as an active learner who could potentially pursue understandings of the world on my own terms. 
  
The dichotomized interpretation of complicated and controversial issues was not a singular phenomenon. It turned out later to be a reoccurring theme throughout my secondary school years. Endorsed by high-stake standardized tests, authoritarian teaching practices, and the-party-sponsored curriculum, this simplified view of the world dulled students and dismissed the historicity of knowledge. The senior high school’s (ninth to twelfth grade) counterpart of the Thought and Values course, Thought and Politics (Sixiang Zhengzhi), further promulgated the dominant ideology. A major part of the curriculum that deals with philosophy presents us two schools of thoughts—materialism and idealism. Without any context, I was taught those two schools were antagonistic and that materialism, upon which Marxist theories were built, was right and idealism was wrong. Without any chance to explore the historical contexts that gave birth to the different schools of philosophy, neither was I given the freedom to investigate in the boundaries of the historical events that gave rise to the formation of our curriculum and education practice in school. I was forced to memorize the “facts” about materialism and idealism and pen them down in order to score high on tests. While discouraging critical thinking, the education system produces docile rather than active citizens who dare to criticize or, in their words, “pose threats to” the ruling party. When I tried to challenge and raise concerns about the dichotomized worldview, I often heard people saying, “Why do you waste your time over-thinking so much? All I care is getting a good score on the test. You can do that by memorizing the correct answers. I don’t understand why you always make things so complicated.” However frustrated and disheartened I was, onward I charged.  

The awakening moment that has been supplying me the strength and grit to keep questioning and clinging to critical thinking occurred in the summer after eighth grade. When I was hanging out with my best friend, whose father worked for the military and happened to obtain certain sensitive materials through that route, we discovered the documentary on her father’s computer that told the story of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Completely uninformed of the incident before watching the documentary, I was shocked by my own ignorance as the result of the society’s silence on this significant episode of history. Not only were internet sites, media and our textbooks censored, it was also a social taboo that does not enter people’s casual conversations. From that moment on, I began to question the assumptions I had about the world constructed under the patriotic worldview, become aware of the "regime of truth" controlled by the ruling power, and read the world with the with “sociological imaginations” in order to live together with our differences and open spaces for people to reach beyond where they are. It has been a hard, painful, and incessant process. But I will not give up.