In response to parent requests, this the first of three posts about my whirlwind three-day visit to the Habla school down in Merida, Mexico. I participated in an idea forum called Beauty in Failure: Experimentation and Risk in Education, where I was shown The Big Idea - that while we need to oppose budget cuts and save our programs, the question ‘why are our schools failing us?’ is much larger.
Part One
"If a nine-year-old is doodling pictures of birds during class, what do we see? Do we see the seeds of artistic genius, or do we see a child who is off-task? Possibility? Or punishment?" Kurt Wootton, co-founder of Habla: The Center for Language and Culture, makes a wide gesture with his hands. We are artists, journalists, teachers, educational leaders and parents, packed into a large conference room and seated in two concentric circles - almost as if The Big Idea was hanging right there in the air before us, and we wait at its feet.
"Flor has obvious artistic talent, but what I want to talk about is her literacy level. She struggles at reading and writing in both English and Spanish. How can we engage Flor in the classroom?" Wootton's specialty and interest is in using the arts to teach literacy; before moving to Mexico three years ago, he directed Brown University's ArtsLiteracy Project and integrated both performance and visual arts into reading programs throughout Providence's public schools.
He turns to Flor's birds. Because she should be doing her spelling words when she's doodling her beautiful birds, does this means she’s failing at the task at hand? Is she bored? What is failure, anyway? Is it possible to take the drawings of the birds – her scribbles, really - and learn from them? Can Flor learn literacy from her magical birds?
Wootton goes on to explain how Flor’s teacher takes Flor’s doodles of birds and turns them into a project for the whole classroom. They are blown up, and the children color them, then create characters based on their birds – and a performance arises out of these characters. With costumes. The children show the performance to their parents. They write colorful stories about their birds, incorporating vocabulary words they are working on in class. Flor’s birds, once doodles in the margins of her “real” assignment, are now the centerpiece of learning – the project is complex and involves critical layers of reading, writing, vocabulary usage, organization and observation (not to mention all the artwork). At the end of the project, Flor’s literacy improves dramatically: where she was once using one-word utterances in her writing, she is now attempting full sentences. They’re beautiful.
At this point, I have a fleeting thought: I remember walking by my oldest son’s kindergarten classroom two years ago and watching all the children, identically uniformed and quietly wiggling in their chairs, heads down, struggling to complete large stacks of black-and-white photocopied worksheets.
Draw an a... A, a, a... A is for apple.
I look up at his PowerPoint, slides full of children holding up gorgeous pictures of colorful birds on sticks, holding up their books, filled with description and action.
After Wootton finishes speaking for a crisp fifteen minutes, he opens up to the room and asks questions meant to provoke conversation: How do we create space where kids can fail and try again, and they feel comfortable failing? How do we lead them on a search for meaning in their assignments? How do we help students develop an ethic of excellence?
These are big questions about education, much bigger than I was planning on thinking about when I started this blog. I started this blog to be a source for Texas parents confused about the public education debacle going on right now – where’s all the money going, why are we rewriting the textbooks, how do we organize, how do we save our teachers, this sort of thing. I still think each one of these items is a high priority, for sure. When I signed up to attend this conference, mostly looking for stories to sell to magazines, I really didn’t know what to expect. Now the room vibrates with the spirit of ideas.
Questions from the group begin with, “I wonder…?” Incomplete thoughts worthy of becoming instant aphorisms (or even better Tweets) float. Opinions from some of the most prominent education thinkers are phrased as jokes. I think of that Eleanor Roosevelt quote:
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
These are some great minds; I’m just trying to keep up and not say something stupid.
The discussion breaks into smaller groups, where we hash out both the large and the small points - wanting to expose children to passionate people; a teacher should have a light touch, be a guide; students should know why they’re learning what they’re learning. And of course, the depth of the learning going on with Flor's birds.
By the end of the first day of the Habla forum, I’m exhausted from so much high-energy thinking (and notetaking). But in my head, I’m sure that my accidental activism – I’m nothing more than an angry parent who started a blog, really – has exploded, turned inside out. It’s more than the budget, I keep thinking, as I speed back to my beautiful Spanish inn in the heart of Merida, it’s more than the budget. We have bigger issues to address in our public schools. And Habla is going to help me find out how.
In addition to the idea forum, Habla offers classes in Spanish, English, and teacher/educator development of all kinds. Photo courtesy of Habla website.
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