Building Relationships for a Learning Environment

Fantasy

Last semester I constructed a STEMS2 unit I was really excited about; Kokua Honua: Education for Sustainability. It is about reconnecting our youth with the natural environment and to traditional culture of Hawaii. It is about how to enhance sense of place and stewardship of environments through STEMS2 curriculum.  I knew that going into a teaching line that was already mapped out and strictly high school English, would challenge my ability to implement my E for S unit, but what I didn't know, was that the classroom environment I stepped into would hinder me from doing any sort of instruction, at all.      

Reality

A little background; while on sabbatical, a student teacher was in charge of my classes, at a high school - which shall not be named - where I had never taught before. The school is located in a densely urban area, where many of the students live in government housing projects.  The English department there was losing teachers by the bundle, due to the fact that, according to the principal, they didn't "get" the students there. They didn't "get" the desk throwing, the classroom fires and in one case, being locked inside a closet. I admit, I chuckled at that last one. But as I soon learned, this was no laughing matter, especially since now I was the teacher, aka the enemy. I would be going through a lot of abuse in the days to come. 

Day one, there is a giant hole in the asbestos ceiling of my classroom, there are boarded up doors and windows, dark hallways spotted with black globs, decades of gum.  The campus sounds like a verbal war zone, you can hear students hurling F-bombs and other choice verbal abuse across the campus, this I come to learn, is the "white noise" of the place and never stops.  
My students come barreling into class stuffing their faces, yelling, "We're aloud to eat!" food and trash showering around them.  They claimed their last, much beloved teacher, had allowed them to listen to music and use their head phones in class, "when appropriate" which, as it turns out, was all the time. Worse, a particular clutch of extra loud students, never stopped talking or more accurately shouting out in strings of explications that would make a sailor blush.  I couldn't get a word in edgewise. The students were completely defiant, in my face and methodically peppering me with personal insults - trying to break me down. They did not want me there.

 The next day as I tried  to bring some order and structure into the classroom another English teacher from down the hall, came in to yell at them and told me not to quit, but alas, by day three, I felt like I'd been hit a truck, probably had PTSD and ended up crying on the phone to the principal, who also urged me, not to quit. There was nothing more I wanted to do than drop everything and run away.

Intervention

On this day, that I had decided I no longer wanted to be a teacher, I also had a 4:00 appointment with my advisor. I tried to maintain composure while relating the events of the last three days to her. Rather than making me feel inept, she shared some of her, equally hair-raising New York stories with me.  It was here, we decided I needed to change my Plan B. My Plan B assumed that I was stepping into an already established learning environment and I had assumed that because I was the teacher, the students would listen to and respect me. I was operating from prior experience, no longer relevant here.  It was clear to me, that content, whether STEMS or ELA, was not entirely the issue,  but the creation of a space where students could become positively engaged with content, ideas and each other, was what was needed. But how? How can I foster relationships for building a learning community? 

Perspective

"My brother's locked up. My sister's locked up. I'm 14 years old. There's five more coming up after me." 

Sione T.

I mentioned before that my students are from the projects. Most are Polynesian,  Filipino or a local mix of many ethnicities.  Not one of them is Caucasian. Many are from homes where parents or siblings are addicted to drugs, locked up or dead. Some are from extreme poverty.

In shock at first,  I've come to realize that the aggressive language and behavior, so distressing to me, is their social currency. Toughness gives stature, swagger ensures popularity. Kids come in everyday with another fight story, they love to talk about it. I heard about someone getting slashed last week. Today we had a bomb threat. This has become the cultural landscape of the students at this school. 

I'm beginning to see that part of the problem is what Chilisa (p.7-8) refers to as the "colonization of the mind",  a process that strips formerly colonized and historically marginalized groups of their ancestral culture, (and knowledge) replacing it with Euro-western culture. (Fanon, 1967; Ngungi wa Thiong'o, 1986). Furthermore, the naming and replacement of what is deemed "knowledge" by the dominant culture, is perpetuated by our educational system. 

What is deemed knowledge by our English department this semester, is the ability to write a critical style analysis of a novel. The novel itself is good and written from the perspective of a displaced Native American teen, however, the fact that students have to style analyze it, bothers me. It bothers me to have to deliver lessons that I feel are not relevant to them, nor for the most part, useful. Having to make the students do something I don't see the value in, is not the best way to build report with them - I would rather hear how they relate to the novel instead and allow them to tell their stories. To hear them, to get them to delve into their history, share knowledge that comes from family, culture, homelands, place, there will have to be connection.

My research question is concerned with connection. It has to do with helping the students feel that the classroom is a worthwhile place, wherein something genuine is offered which they can benefit from. Ideally a classroom would be a completely new and neutral zone where surprising and unknown elements from any of the students lives can be brought in and viewed with fresh eyes. So much of what we now see is through a lens of not only western-European culture, but also of popular culture via the all powerful cell phone which also foists unexamined assumptions upon us all - another form of "mind colonization".

 As stated in Indigenous Research Methodologies,  part of the decolonization (of the mind) process involves restoring and developing cultural practices, values and ways of thinking, that have been suppressed, but are still necessary for the birth of new ideas and the empowerment of historically oppressed and presently marginalized people. (Smith, 1999, 2008)

Operating on the assumption that educators need to know what is relevant for students in order for them to value their learning environment, I believe the bulk of my research would be qualitative.  Strategies of inquiry used in the qualitative method include, narrative research, phenomenological research and case studies. These strategies include study of the lives of individuals, through personal narratives, endeavoring to understanding lived experiences, using a variety of data collection procedures, in the end, combining the views of the participants life with the views of the researcher's life to construct a collaborative narrative. (Cresswell, p.13)
A collaborative narrative, and some common ground are needed to establish a learning community. Further, on developing research questions, Maxwell states, there are two goals when articulating your question; intellectual and practical, the former being, what you want to understand and the later being what you want to accomplish. (p.76).

 I want to understand how to interact with this group of students effectively- to help establish a beneficial sense of place, a sense of community and of purpose. WE have only four walls and time - I hope to make good use of it - bring the world inside and watch the students grow.

References

     Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous Research Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE                  Publications

     Creswell, J. (2008). Qualitative Research Designs: Selection and Implementation. The                Counseling Psychologist, 35 (2), 3-23

     Maxwell, J. (2013) Qualitative Research Design, Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets.