Learning: Innovators
Reading, Writing, And Rising Up

Helping students connect writing and justice.

Students often change their writing to make a grade. But some Jefferson High students in Portland, Oregon use their writing to make a change. That's because Linda Christensen, author of the recently released Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word, has created a literacy-based social justice curriculum that moves student writing into the realm of social action.

Jefferson High School is located in a working-class community where students of color make up 85 percent of the school's population. For years, Christensen has worked to reach students by helping them reflect on their personal experiences and connecting them to the world of language, literature, and society.

"Students who see what's happening in their neighborhoods, who feel life is pretty unfair, are more interested in school when you can begin naming problems and figuring out how to change them," notes Christensen, a language arts coodinator and K-12 writing project director.

Students now respond to newspaper articles reporting that parents fear sending their children to Jefferson. They've written essays about their names and how, throughout history, oppressed peoples have been denied them. And they've submitted for publication "Essays with an Attitude."

Even correcting assignments becomes an object lesson.

"Instead of just marking errors, we talk about the politics of language," says Christensen. "Standard language is about power--who has it and who doesn't."

Reading, Writing, and Rising Up contains these exercises, along with Christensen's essays and student writing.

Impact:
Students who previously shunned school have been published in national magazines. Some have pursued journalism and film careers. Says Christensen: "The students I was most successful with didn't feel they had a sense of privilege--but felt that, through writing, they'd become empowered to change that."

For More:
Contact Christensen at Lchrist@aol.com. To order Reading, Writing, and Rising Up ($12.95), call 800/669-4192 or visit www.rethinkingschools.org.

Dealing with 'Bang,Bang, You're Dead'

Jane Katch has taught five- and six-year-olds in central Massachusetts--and audiotaped her efforts to deal with the violent fantasy games that some boys seem to love to play. Katch, who has worked with Bruno Bettelheim and Vivian Paley, wrote Under Dead Man's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play (Beacon) about what she learned.

How did you handle violent fantasy play?
There are two issues here: what the fantasies are about and how the boys treat each other. Boys can have violent fantasies and still play them cooperatively.

But there also were rules about the fantasies. They couldn't be too explicitly gory, for example, because some people didn't like it--not because I as the authority figure decided for them.

How did they arrive at these rules?
I insisted that they talk until they came to a compromise. Most of the time, we used a consensus model rather than voting. I prefer this method because then they have to listen to everyone.

Any surprises in your study?
I didn't expect the connection between violence and exclusion. At first, I was cutting out everything that had to do with exclusion because I thought it was off the subject, but it kept coming in.

A child who is excluded sometimes feels justified in feeling violent. And the children who do the excluding seem to feel justified in violence toward the excluded child--it's okay to hurt him because he's not one of us.

The only incidents in the book that involved real violence, rather than fantasy play, had to do with exclusion.That's what really made the kids angry.

For more:
Order Under Dead Man's Skin, $17.60 plus s&h.

Sports Make the Grade

Innovator:
Jomills Henry Braddock

Job:
Director of the Center for Research on Sports in Society and professor of sociology, University of Miami

Bright Idea:
For kids, sports and school are a winning combination. So finds Jomills Henry Braddock, who's just completed a three-year, $350,000 research project for the Department of Education. Some 14,000 eighth graders were surveyed on their in-volvement in school sports, and they were tracked for six years.

The results?

Student athletes were less likely to drop out of school and, in class, showed more effort, were better prepared, and tended to complete homework. Their parents were more involved.

"Athletes are more likely to develop a stronger sense of personal worth," Braddock adds, "and feel they have more control over their fate than those not involved in sports."

Sports, the Center research shows, produce other benefits as well.

One example: Sports offer youth the opportunity to travel, and this travel helps build youngsters' "cultural capital."

"And because adults tend to pay more attention to student athletes," notes Braddock, "these students form a social circle of adult networks and mentors that fosters personal success."

The data are consistent among major ethnic groups and across gender. Next Steps: The Center has created an elementary school curriculum, using sports as the context for instruction in reading, writing, and math. The curriculum will be piloted in four Florida school-based, after-school programs.

For More:
E-mail Brad-dock at braddock@miami.edu and visit the Web at www.as.miami.edu/crss/.

Publisher Leaves Room for Kids

Innovator:
Lisa Funari Willever

Job:
Publisher, Franklin Mason Press

Bright Idea:
Willever created a publishing company for children's books that includes a story and artwork created by children in every volume published. Her purpose is to nurture kids' natural enthusiasm for the arts.

Willever is an elementary school teacher at Joyce Kilmer School in Trenton, New Jersey. She had already written two children's books when she first got the idea of adding a child-authored story and a child-drawn illustration at the end of her books.

"My students were always writing stories and asking me, 'Can you help me make this a book?'" explains Willever.

But when she brought her idea to publishers, they turned her down.

"The small publishers felt they couldn't do it, and the big ones didn't need to," she says.

So Willever and her firefighter husband, Todd, started Franklin Mason Press.

The couple organized a contest to get contributions from children aged six to nine. Several hundred contest entries later, they chose their first child author and artist. Their work appeared at the end of Lisa's story Maximilian the Great, about a magician who couldn't quite get his spells right.

Impact:
Franklin Mason Press's second contest drew more than 500 entries from as far away as Louisiana. The winners are being published in The Easter Chicken, due out this month. In schools where children have taken part in the contest, more children are now writing without being "told to."

For More:
Visit www.franklinmason.com for information on future publishing opportunities for young artists.

Teacher Training, Hands-On Learning

Innovator:
Sylvia Seidel

Job:
NEA staffer in Washington, D.C. working on teacher preparation issues

Bright Idea:
What's NEA doing to support innovation in teacher preparation? Just look at the work of Sylvia Seidel and the fall 2000 issue of Teaching and Change, the NEA journal that's a forum for teachers, at all levels, to explore change and innovation.

The fall issue is devoted to NEA's Teacher Education Initiative and its five-year, research-based study of professional development schools.

These schools, modeled after the medical profession's teaching hospitals, bring the university into the classroom, allowing the wisdom of actual practitioners to improve the university program.

The Teacher Education Initiative sites also bring a unique element to the school-university partnership concept.

"Our requirement that the NEA local affiliate be one of the institutional partners in the professional development school sets these sites apart from other collaboratives," says Seidel, who coordinates the project for NEA's Teaching and Learning unit. "It's key to surmounting boundaries and creating learning opportunities for all professionals."

The Teacher Education Initiative experience has also provided insights into:

• what makes an effective clinical/field experience for preprofessionals

• why effective teacher training needs to focus on student learning

• how professional development schools enhance leadership skills.

For More:
For a free excerpt from this issue of Teaching and Change (vol. 8, issue 1), go to www.nea.org/technology/thompson.pdf. To subscribe to Teaching and Change, contact Corwin Press, 805/375-1700, E-mail info@corwin.sagepub.com.