Paul’s words

I really enjoyed today’s class.  I’m glad we got to talk about immigration, interact with kids, and talk to former gsu grads.  Each subject deserves further discussion, but I thought the conversation with the former grads was especially telling of the obstacles we will face…and I’m not talking about our workload as grad students. 

To be honest I was kind of dissapointed to hear that the former grads were not as organized to work collectively to advance social justice issues within the school and in the communities in which the children live.  It’s clear that they try to implement the culturally sensitive pedagodgy into their individual classes (the Blood Diamond activity is one example), but I got the overall impression that there was not much discussion between the teachers about how to address social justice issues during their second and third years of teaching. 

There also seemed to be consensus that the school administration was not responsive to their overall concerns.  Outside of the woman who was the appointed 2nd grade teacher rep, it appeared that teachers had almost accepted the limitations of the administrations resources.  It was nice to hear that the teachers worked together when it came to discipline issues, but I wonder if they could have done more to act communally to address their communal concerns besides just attend the “required staff meetings and grade level teacher meetings.” 

I am not saying that they are not hard working and dedicated teachers.  I would not necessarily expect a first year teacher with grad school night classes to be out in the community all of the time.  Neither would I expect first year teachers /grad students to be organizing non grad school teachers and parents during their non existent free time slots, but I wonder if more collective action can’t be part of our second year of studies.  I wonder if the grad school teachers feel that they will have more time to work collectively their 2nd and 3rd years of teaching.  Will they work to make sure the state and local school district hear their concerns about end of grade testing and lack of playground space?

All I know is that we as a community will have many oppotunities to practice collective action during our time in this program as well as after this progrom.  We will not always agree with each other or be involved in the same movements, but we as a group will have countless opportunies over the next two years to act collectively in ways that start to address the issues we are already expressing concerns about in class.  I just hope that as a community, we continue to keep the drive to work proactively to address the issues talked about in this class… Here we go!