Remarks for Opening Assembly ~ September 5, 2018 Rosemary McNaughton Hartsbrook High School

Transcription

1 Remarks for Opening Assembly ~ September 5, 2018 Rosemary McNaughton Hartsbrook High School Intro Last year we began our year on the theme of service, of orienting ourselves in the world with an attitude of seeing the other and serving the other. And so we set out to serve, and we did, at the Triform Camp Hill community, at the Survival Center, at Brookfield Farm. we served with paint brushes, sewing needles, clay in our hands, and I personally had the privilege of joining the senior class in Puerto Rico building an Earthship community center resilient against storms. And through our efforts to serve, we became better at seeing, too: seeing and being with those whose experiences may differ from our own, and not just in idiosyncratic, individual ways, but in ways that mark people for disadvantage based on what group they are members of. In these encounters we find in our hearts a desire for inclusion, in our thoughts an appreciation for diversity, and in our deeds a motivation to strive for equity. These are the aims of Hartsbrook s newly official IDE Committee, helping us talk the talk and walk the walk of social justice, which is the topic I want to address this morning. My Teaching, Part I Now, you might be wondering how this all relates to my teaching work, since my subjects are math and physics. To tell you the truth, I have been wondering much the same myself! Since I began teaching over 20 years ago, I have questioned the relationship of my teaching to social justice. For years I had thought simply in terms of the representation I could offer in the history of science (the contributions of female Nobel prize winners or shoulda-been" Nobel prize winners, the gifts of the Islamic world to mathematics, the successes of the Chinese or Brazilian or Israeli space programs ). But I didn t see how the real core of my teaching had the slightest bit to do with social justice. When I looked to other disciplines, I could see that representation was only a baby step into what could be a radically transformative process, but it seemed to me

2 that a discipline like physics, say, based on testable hypotheses about objective physical reality, couldn t admit much discussion of cultural awareness, the experience of various groups, and different ways of knowing. Leave it to the humanities teachers to take it deeper, I thought. With some relief, honestly, I thought I would get to stick with the universal truths of physical forces and mathematical relationships. But I d like to share with you a bit about how my thinking has begun to shift on that question, thanks to a summer conference, our high school summer read, and a Labor Day weekend trip to a cabin nestled in mossy woods. AWSNA Conference In June I attended the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America s annual conference, held in the DC area. Teachers and administrators gathered from the US, Canada and Mexico. The topic was social justice in Waldorf Education, and it was both exciting and terrifying to see all that has been and has not yet been done to align our work in Waldorf schools with the work of social justice. The path was clearly laid out beyond mere representation to equity and finally to decolonization: decolonization of the curriculum, and decolonization of our minds. Much could be said about colonization, but with my science teacher lens, I could perceive it best as a model externally imposed: a way of being that is transferred from one culture and planted by force onto another without care or concern for what is being obscured and obliterated by the imposed culture the ways people in a culture might eat, dress, worship, raise children, govern societies, manage resources down to the language they speak. A keynote speaker from New Zealand, the country known as Aotearoa in the Maori language, brought us much inspiration about the work the members of the colonizing European culture are doing along with the Maori indigenous peoples to decolonize their shared present-day society. Between the World and Me But I could also see the resonances here with our summer read of Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me. Colonization in its broader sense has taken place on the very bodies of black people in this country. Coates describes how the model, the vision of the American Dream rests

3 on the bodies of black people, how racism is a visceral experience we must never look away from that we must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. He speaks about how he always wished to escape into the Dream to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But falling asleep in the Dream would mean giving up a chance at freedom, and he awakens to ask the question instead: How do I live free in this black body? One place he finds freedom is in the library. In his words he was made for the library, not the classroom. Well, why not the classroom? The classroom, he found, was a jail of other people s interests. Other people s interests there is the model externally imposed! But for him: the library was open, unending, free. It was a place to liberate oneself from the Dream. The Dream, he said, thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. He goes on to say this is even true for the dreams he conjured to replace the Dream given to him. You cannot replace one model with another and achieve freedom. At the same time, a key message from the AWSNA conference was to not mistakenly allow the freedom to be seen as individuals and judged as individuals to override the necessary task of seeing and dismantling a system of privilege and oppression. A choice to ignore privilege and oppression is just another part of the Dream that is enacted on black bodies (and female, and Latinx, and queer, and trans, etc ). No, we need to also see the question of freedom clearly for what it is and not substitute a fervent wish for freedom and equality for the reality that we are not all free from oppressive forces and injustice at work in our society. But how do we learn to see more clearly what is and not just see what we assume there is with our preconceived stereotypes and models? Gathering Moss

4 I was delighted recently to find some answers in the book Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and researcher who brings to bear her Native American heritage in understanding the 22,000 species of mosses. Kimmerer speaks of building an intimate connection with the nature of mosses: Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, she writes. She emphasizes building a relationship by naming what is observed, as well, believing it a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it. Words and names are the ways we humans build relationships, not only with each other, but also with plants, and, [w]ith words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see. This past weekend, I was in New Hampshire at a friend s cabin I ve been visiting for years, and every year we have walked in the surrounding woods, which are magically rich with mosses. But how much more magical they became when I saw them now with newly opened eyes, alert to their forms, their distribution, their different states of reproduction and decay. I did not go with an identification guide in hand this time, but instead inspired by Kimmerer s words: I had no will at all to name the mosses in this place, to assign their Linnean epithets. I think the task given to me is to carry out the message that mosses have their own names. Their way of being in the world cannot be told by data alone. They remind me to remember that there are mysteries for which a measuring tape has no meaning, questions and answers that have no place in the truth about rocks and mosses. My interest and curiosity about the mosses led me towards seeing their ways of being, their messages. They looked like miniature pine trees, fuzzy stag horns, hemispherical hedgehog blobs, sea grasses, coralline fronds of spruce-blue leaves, tufts of sea-foam-green blossoming out of a kelly green background. They were growing on edges and ledges, running up the north face of trees, shrouding rotting logs, missing in raw spots torn out by foot falls, and marching along seams in rocks at the pond s shore. They grew in solitary species, in pairings, and in cornucopias of species side-by-side.

5 To start to know what to look for, what to name about each moss s way of being, this gave me an intimacy with them that brought me into real relationship. I yearned to know more, to see so much more, to listen to what the patterns of moss were speaking. I was seeing them as they were, not dismissing them with my quick and easy mental model oh it s just more moss, that fuzzy green stuff, keep walking. My Teaching, Part II And there on a walk through the land of the mosses, there is one little step towards decolonizing the mind. The reverence I begin to experience for these most primitive of plants builds a capacity for attending faithfully. My skills grow at attending to what is for phenomena in the natural world and attending to what is for the forces at work in our society, for the experiences of my fellow human beings. When I teach science in a way where we give our attention first and foremost to the phenomena as they are rather than teaching a preconceived model, I am also training capacities to see all things for what they are, and not to impose a mindset, a model, a bias, onto what is seen. A practice of looking to and naming the phenomena is also empowering. The educational philosopher and social activist Maxine Greene wrote in the essay Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life: I am suggesting that, for too many individuals in modern society, there is a feeling of being dominated and that feelings of powerlessness are almost inescapable. [ ] such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them, to interpret the experiences they are having day by day. Only as they learn to make sense of what is happening, can they feel themselves to be autonomous. Only then can they develop the sense of agency required for living a moral life. When we see phenomena for what they are, we help liberate others from the bondage we have imposed through our assumptions, stereotypes, models. And we also empower each other to autonomy, to more than just a freedom from oppression, but a freedom to be who we are, to

6 live free in bodies that are black, brown, white, Asian, and to act freely in ways that liberate us all. In my classroom, then, and in the classrooms of my colleagues here and our colleagues in spirit in the wider world, we will seek not to create the jail of other people s interests, but that open, unending, free place of inquiry. Sometimes we will look directly at the human experience through history lessons, literature, current events and give the peoples of this world the respect of naming their experience, but in every subject from art to world language and yes, to physics and math, we will seek to truly see what is, beyond the stereotypes, the assumptions, the models. We will educate actively toward freedom, toward our mutual liberation.