Hey folks! Sorry for the hiatus. I wanted to get a few weeks under my belt before I shared my thoughts on teaching in comparison to my work with the union. Week 5 of back in the classroom is now in full effect. I
have a few observations that jump out from the recent experience of working at
the union and now that I'm back in the schools.
Most importantly, young people invigorate, challenge stale
assumptions, create new brain pathways and generate nausea in the adults
charged with engaging them in the strange practice of learning about the world
in a hermetically sealed classroom environment. Nonetheless, it’s magical, wonderful, hard, and worthwhile intellectual work. Something the union movement
could definitely benefit from. As my students were leaving class Friday, there
were engaged in a passionate debate about whether the MS13 represented a global
terrorist threat to American security or reflected a Frankenstein of our own
creation. That’s the miraculous transformation of a good education… drawing us
out of our monastic social media captivity into the realm of civic action and relevant political praxis. In a Socratic Seminar comparing the views of Plato in the 'Allegory of the Cave,' Blackhawk's surrender speech (1832) and Childish Gambino's 'This is America', a student remarked, "Like in the 'Allegory of the Cave', shadows controlled our perception and some prisoners chose the cave, just like white folks choose to embrace a caricature of Blackhawk as their Indian mascot."
The importance of instilling a sense of resistance,
rebellion, mutual fate and responsibility, learning by doing, and collective
agency are more important now than ever. Teachers and their students alike
will play an oversized role in the fate of our society and the extent to which
everything from the Jason Van Dyke trial or the Kavanaugh appointment, Global Warming, or nuclear war will nullify or reflect the will of the people.
Now onto a few more mundane observations:
1. Culturally Relevant and Germaine Curriculum
We need relevant critical pedagogy, and the union has a role
in getting its members to share and discuss this extraordinary times we are living
in and how we translate breaking news into constructivist educational lessons.
I’ve been provoked by how many people in our caucus, union and allies
appreciate the basic materials I’ve put together for students around the Laquan
McDonald case or the Kavanaugh hearings. There is a hunger, a need and desire
for educators to have more meaningful conversations and networks about how we
teach the world and open doors for students to have more agency in developing
their own interpretations and responses. Professional Development led by
experts isn’t sufficient. The thousands of experts in our midst have critical
insight and a wealth of experience we will all benefit from if a simple
communications system was in place.
2. Technology
Teachers and CPS are ahead of the union in terms of
technological savvy, capacity, communication, and utilization. At the CTU, we use
Microsoft Outlook and the folder/archive system which is clunky and underutilized.
Therefore, there is a constant tendency to request copies of documents that are
just a year old and no easy way for staff to find them on the cloud.
In CPS, we have Google Suite which allows us to link documents, comment on forms, access easily searchable folder systems of shared drives and lesson content. There is an endless panoply of digital documents, that with some clear nomenclature, documenting etiquette and structure, could make union life much easier and more efficient.
At our department,
grade-level and school-wide meetings at Back of the Yards, we have a Google
linked agenda that is altered, modified and updated in real time during
meetings so that everyone can follow along and be kept accountable to group
decisions and processes.
The Union’s technological backwardness also has its
advantages too. The Google Suite can be a bit overwhelming and over-utilized at
the expense of direct conversations, attentive interactions during meetings,
and creates a needle in the haystack dynamic since there is so much volume. There
is also a tendency to reduce the importance of our work to documentation when
we are inundated with emails and attachments. My union inbox got a bit that way
when I sat at my desk and sent emails instead of getting up to talk to a
colleague face to face, usually a much more productive and effective form of
communication.
However, at the end of the day, the benefits of adopting these
technological innovations outweigh the disadvantages. There is just too much
skill and utility among the membership to communicate and capture work in new
and different ways for the union to remain in the dark ages. CTU needs to get
on the same page with the membership. Not unlike the innovation the union made
to reorganize our school outreach efforts to correspond with CPS’ Network
geography. We now have to realign to the district’s digital landscape as well.
This also means all school based union and school staff and students need
laptops to be able to engage in real time linked documentation, tool-kits
distribution, note-taking, and next step campaign planning designed to address
school issues.
2. Collective Endeavors
At the CTU, we’ve been somewhat spoiled by working printers,
copiers, etc. At my new school, the administration ensures teachers have
whatever they need in that respect. It
is absolutely essential for our systems to operate at a high level logistically
and all schools and union work require this minimal infrastructure. One
important difference is that operating with optimal resources has resulted in a
tendency for some staff to want their own offices and ideal work areas, etc.
This isn’t prima facie unreasonable but at a closer look differs in important
and under-appreciated ways from school life. At my building, we occupy every
space and our classrooms are utilized every period. Staff fits personal
belongings into nooks, crannies, shared file cabinets, etc. We have department
meetings in a small room we share with the Art Department that resembles more
of a large walk-in closet than a conference space, and man is it refreshing! We
actually sit around each other during prep periods and have meaningful
conversations about the work. As a result my colleagues seem to possess a
greater collective sense of purpose and identity as a team. Conversely, when push
comes to shove, teachers are often like Leibniz’ monads, or separate and
distinct entities left on our own to navigate separate tracks in a big
universe. At the CTU, despite our relatively luxurious space allotment, spoiled
expectations and plentiful office furniture, I spent most of my days talking
and scheming with other adults to realize our shared goals. The need for that
kind of work to advance our mutual interests cannot be underestimated and
schools, generally, don’t seem to be set up to allow for it. Yet another reason
union work deserves to be preserved and appreciated for the contribution it
makes to our collective well-being and practical needs.
3. The Work and Those Who Benefit from it
One of the biggest conundrums of the union movement is the
extent to which the work of the members is overwhelmingly separate and distinct
from the work of union staff. When the majority of on duty time is spent, not
so much observing union work rules, but ensuring that our students get the
love, attention, strategic support, and constructivist engagement they need to
fully develop academically, socially, emotionally, there is an inevitable
disconnect. Teachers desperately need more time to do this absolutely essential
planning work. Otherwise, our first units will always be our best with
diminishing returns from that point forward.
When the brunt of union staff work is dealing with district
management, contract negotiations, parent and community engagement, outlier
principals, solidarity work within the labor movement, helping to address out
of control policies and contract violations in the schools, everything related
to the political arena, and even professional development, it creates cognitive
dissonance. Not only is it necessary to explain, connect and develop praxis
around student/educator realities but for member/ union staffer work-lives to
become more aligned and fluid. This goes to some of the radical futuristic
ideas for work generated by economists Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their
book ‘Participatory Economics.’ They conclude that as a society we need new job
complexes that spread understanding, skill and variety in our work lives that
posit the myriad of labor and production needs in society. To figure this out
would enable us to evenly distributing the mundane or hazardous jobs with the
intellectually creative ones. There is already a model for this in the teacher
union movement. Many small suburban and rural locals already have presidents
that are on part time release for union work while they teach a scaled down
schedule. Maybe they are onto something.
