I Liked how Bethany tried to situated herself, here I try to do the same...
In Teaching to Transgress: Educating as the Practice of Freedom (1994), bell hooks reminds us that “our lives must be the lived example of our politics” (p. 48). Despite their diversity, critical educational theorists share a “dedication to the education and development of individuals and society through a commitment to democracy, diversity, and social justice” (Heilman, 2003, p.248). Though I am not yet prepared to accept the title of critical educational theorist, as my experiences, analytical tools, and thought processes need to develop further, I share the commitment to educating individuals and society for democracy, diversity, and social justice. As such, my teaching is an attempt to live the example of my politics. The following is an attempt to explain how my life experiences have merged with critical educational theory to inform my practice as a teacher.
Life Experiences
My most concrete memories of childhood center on my parents’ struggle to provide food and shelter for our family. In the mid 1970s and my father, an Army Captain and helicopter pilot, was involuntarily released from the service do to post-Vietnam force reductions. Luckily my father had vocational training outside of piloting helicopters on which to fall back. Unfortunately, in the era of oil shortages, he was a Teamster truck-driver. Irregular employment prevented a steady income. The differences between our family and the affluent families in our town were readily apparent. At a young age, I could not figure out why our lives were so different from the people in our neighborhood and our church. The confusion did not turn to anger until my father was offered a new job. After years of trying to regain employment as an Army aviator my father’s dream finally came true when I was nine years old.
Our family packed up and left our day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence behind and moved south for the opportunity that changed our lives. From the moment that we drove onto the military base in Virginia, I knew we were in a different world. Because of my dad’s new position, our family was met snappy salutes and obvious signs of respect, instead of the usual furrowed brows of contempt that we were accustomed to as a poor family in a wealthy town. I still remember wondering why people treated us differently. We had not changed; we were still the Walsh’s. I was mistaken. My dad’s uniform, his title, and our income, changed. Perhaps most significantly our address changed, we now living in Officer’s Quarters – the good part of town. I did not fully comprehend it at the time but, for the first time in my life, I had experienced the effects of class differences.
Our move forced me to confront race for the first time in my young life. Before moving to Virginia, I spent considerable amounts of time with my extended family in Cambridge, MA. There, my aunts and uncles were undeniably shaped by the struggles of our working-class backgrounds and the ongoing forced school bus situation occurring in Boston and had developed strong anti-minority feelings. “Nigger” was a word that flew from their mouths without hesitation. My only experiences with the Black community, until I moved to Virginia, were through the hateful words of my extended family who believed that all “other” were criminals intent on stealing their jobs.
My concept of “others” was challenged the first moment that I stepped onto the playground at my school. That morning I was being harassed by a tough White student. The only person to stand-up to defend me was a Black student named Ronnie. He jumped to my defense and, for reasons that I still do not understand, fought the White student. It was one of the most brutal school yard fights I had ever seen. In the end all three of us were called into the Principal’s Office in order to receive our discipline. The sound’s of the Principal’s paddle striking Ronnie still ring in my ears. This kid had fought for me and had taken a beating from the principal because he stood up for a White kid from New England. Every day from then until the day I left Virginia, I was fully accepted by the Black students and ostracized by the White students. It is still not sure to me what race had to do with that school yard fight or what it had to do with Black students teaching me everything I needed to know about surviving as an “other” in a rural southern school. What that experience did teach me was the experience of “otherness” and the humanity of students I would have otherwise defined as “other”
Eye opening experiences like these affected me through out my life. My father died a couple of years later and we left the Officer family’s elite lifestyle to return to the role of the poverty ridden family in a wealthy town. I attended an all-boys Catholic high school where racist, sexist, elitist, and homophobic themes were usually, if not always, the undercurrent to the formal and informal curriculum. The American Dream was the mantra yet it did not resonate with me because my mother and father both worked hard yet, do to circumstances beyond our control, my family lived in poverty. When I reflect on adolescence I begin to wonder if my poor performance in school was because the curriculum did not reflect my life experiences. I wanted to figure out why the world was unjust but explanations usually followed Catholic Doctrine. Why there was such a thing as second class citizenship? Why was a family considered different simply because of the father’s occupation? Instead I received a steady stream of the dominant ideology that did not mesh with reality. My reality did not match the rhetoric of the Reagan Administration which labeled welfare mothers as shiftless lazy women intent on bearing more children in order to collect more government assistance. I became one of those students who quietly rebelled by non-compliance. For years I resigned myself to learning how to play the game. Rather than expose myself as the type of inferior person who was a drain on society I joined the chorus of voices who condemned the poor, minorities, women, and homosexuals.
Years later, when I was a young adult living in San Diego, I was forced to further consider issues of “otherness” and injustice. First, I was challenged to reconsider previously held notions of homosexuality. Living in, working in, and socializing in a gay community brought me face to face with my own homophobia and heterosexism. These experiences with openly gay, lesbian and transgender people again transformed my understanding as “others” as I experienced the warmth, friendship, openness, and caring of people who I would have previously ignored, or worse ostracized and ridiculed.
Second, I worked as a cycling coach teaching inner-city youth how to race bicycles. I saw reflections of myself in these students, I saw Ronnie, and I saw students trying to figure the world out around them despite being force fed the dominant ideology and the goal of the American Dream. I knew from my interactions with them that they did not believe the adages “if you work hard you can make it” or “if you’re poor it’s your own fault.” It was then that I knew I could no longer continue to play the game. I was possessed by the need to figure out how to transform the world. It became apparent to me that change had to start in the schools. Even though I had no conception of critical pedagogy at the time I instinctively knew that students’ experiences in school need to be closely connected with the realities that they had experienced in their own lives. Education needed to be empowering. To me education became a means of establishing a just and democratic society.
Professional Experiences
I left San Diego and moved back East intent on returning to school to become a teacher, and begin the work of making the world a better place. While going to school I had the opportunity to work on a number of political campaigns that added to the experiences I had while growing up. While working on these campaigns my frustration grew. Voters believed that they had little or no voice. They gave up on the system. When I engaged them in issues that mattered to them suggesting were ways to contribute to society, other than voting, I met resistance. They were not empowered. They simply believed that the world was the way it was and there was little that they could do to change it. Their resignation strengthened my resolve to empower children through my own teaching.
A few years later, after completing my teacher education program, I landed my first teaching job in an urban high school in Massachusetts. During my first year of teaching I was persistent in asking my colleagues “Why do we do what we do?” I did not think that this was a difficult question to answer. If we did not know why we were teaching how could we plan our teaching? Unfortunately my questions were met with blank stares. Few people had even considered the question and fewer could answer it. I held the belief that education should serve to empower students so that they could affect change but I needed to further develop my thoughts.
The process of working through my thoughts usually took place in the office of my department chair. I had the fortune of having a department chair who was the same age, had a passion for teaching, was reflective, and most importantly was willing to help me work through my thoughts. We had the same planning period and would usually spend one to two hours a day discussing topics and issues that related to teaching and why we teach. He came into the office one day, after a vacation, very excited about a book he had come across. He was visiting his sister in New York City and discussing teaching with her friend, she showed him a book that she was reading in her teacher preparation program – Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Everything began to make sense to me the day that he shared passages of the book with me. The transformation was not immediate but gradual. Over time, my personal and professional experiences merged. I read and re-read the book and the realities of the world became clearer and clearer. It was not long after that I joined the doctoral program. I began the process of figuring out the things I needed to learn in order to provide better educational experiences for students so that they could become active participants in changing the world.
