Written by Jennifer Thomas, Sharon English High school
Despite being a teacher for the last ten years I continue to be plagued by this question at different points in my professional life. I work with school students and with adults but I am not sure what kind of a teacher my students perceive me to be. Am I the strict and rigid one or am I the soft spoken but firm one or am I something else? Every time I am in a class with a teacher, I find myself looking for shades of the kind of teacher I want to be. This summer I got yet another glimpse into the kind of teacher I would want to become thanks to my dear friend and collaborator (on other projects), Sujata.
Sujata is a seasoned library educator but I often think of her as a very humane teacher, first. Though I have known Sujata for almost as long as I have been a teacher and also co-taught with her, this summer experience was different. Sujata, along with Anandita and Nayan at Bookworm (as she fondly calls them her ‘library lions’ of patience and fortitude), ran an incredible Guided Reading Program for a group of students (standard 7 to 10) at our school (Sharon School, Mulund). As someone deeply interested in issues of literacy and literature, I was lucky to be able to sit in on the nine sessions which spanned through the month of May and ended on June 9th, 2021 with a remarkable closing session hosted by the children. Though I didn’t teach on the program, the opportunity to sit in for all sessions has left me feeling like I did an apprenticeship project with Sujata and the Bookworm team. Apprenticeship is when “apprentices learn to think, argue, act and interact in increasingly knowledgeable ways with people who do something well, by doing it with them as legitimate, peripheral participants” (Lave 1998). I have come to believe that no amount of educational theory can be a substitute for good models of teaching. Good teachers are because of wonderful mentor-teachers. Thank you, Sujata for being one such mentor to me. From this point on, you refers to Sujata and the team that facilitated.
My participation in the Summer Guided Reading program also coincided with my reading chapters from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher who criticised the banking model of education where students are often considered to be empty receptacles (with no consciousness) that must be filled by an all knowing teacher. In this model of education, the teacher presents reality as something static, compartmentalised and predictable. Narration is the primary tool that the teacher uses to give information to students and the ‘sonority’ of words (“2 times 2 is 4”) is the highlight, not the transforming power of words. There is extreme polarity in the teacher-student relationship where the teacher considers himself to be superior and is seen to bestow the learner with the gift of knowledge. According to Freire, projecting such absolute ignorance onto others is a characteristic of the ideology of oppression as it seeks to maintain status-quo in society. The banking model of education is built on the idea of a submersion of consciousness where reality is anesthetized and creative power is inhibited. Freire charts out another model of education which he calls problem posing education which supports an emergence of consciousness among learners through a critical intervention of reality. My summer apprenticeship gave me a peek into how a teacher could bring the world closer to students through the ‘word’ and help them examine that the ‘world’ is not static but a reality in process and in transformation. I see many strands of the kind of pedagogy Freire argues for in your teaching practice and I felt compelled to document it in some way to consolidate the experience for myself in the hope that they will become cornerstones of my own teaching practice in the years to come.
The book chosen for the Guided Reading program was Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. It is a master piece that opens up difficult themes of war and death in powerful and poignant ways for adolescent and adult readers. This act of book selection itself, an important starting point for the program , taught me a lot. Why this book? High quality literature allows educators to move towards an expanded vision of literacy where readers not only understand what they are reading but also come to see its relevance to their lives and are able to “use, critique and navigate” written worlds effectively (Menon, 2017). Literature also provides students and teachers opportunities to have rich and meaningful discussions around themes that are usually not spoken of, in classrooms (friendship, love, death, war). Lastly, good literature introduces readers to the aesthetic dimension of language use – word play, metaphors, literary devices (foreshadowing, irony) and art as well. The Book Thief met all these criteria.
We were reading this book at a particular time in the history of our lives in India. There were many parallels between the book-world and our world where propaganda is used excessively for political reasons, where we wake up to new impositions every day and hear about muzzling of the constitutional rights of different social groups. And of course, there was a raging second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India and death was all around us. Typically, death is a topic that we rarely talk or discuss openly with children or adolescents. And here was an educator, picking a book whose narrator is Death himself/herself.
Bring the world into the word, gently
Through this thoughtful act of book selection, you brought the world into the word. In the banking model, there is a dichotomy between the human and the world with the educator often trying to conceal reality. The human is in the world but is often not with the world or with others in the world. You didn’t conceal anything but showed them how there was a reason and place for everything.
From the first day of the program, readers were invited to enter the worlds of the characters through a presentation which included character descriptions drawn from the text. Readers were invited to choose one character and journal about them on a daily basis as they encountered information about their character in the text. As the program progressed, you wove in World War I & II histories seamlessly, through presentations, audio visuals and story books like Lily Cupboard, The Butterfly, Rose Blanche and Best Friends. The world was not dichotomised from the word, and world history, geography or even politics wasn’t compartmentalised from ‘English’. We were always cognitive of the world of the characters and the world around us.
There were smaller tasks designed by you that allowed us to bring our world into the class – we were encouraged to add a word after our screen name to describe our state of mind/ feelings after reading sections of the book. Another day we brought objects from our worlds that represent a fond memory for us just like Liesel brought thirteen gifts for Max in the text. Just like Max paints the Mein Kampf in white, students were asked to take a newspaper article that evoked negative feelings in them and paint over it to design book covers of other books we come across in the novel. We went deeper into the characters’ world towards the end when each one dressed up as a character and we played Hot Seat, where we answered questions in our character roles. There were fun and frivolous ones but also deeply moving ones which showed how much our readers had moved with the story and through the program.
Have profound trust in people and their creative powers
The trust that you had in students was palpable from day one when you asked students to list their expectations and the group of students together arrived at a consensus. You went back to this list quite regularly in the sessions, signalling to students that their opinion mattered. Trust also shone through in other smaller acts like encouraging students to address you on a first name basis, without the ‘teacher’ or ‘ma’am’ tag, having everyone take turns in reading aloud, and encouraging text –chatting with the educators. You, in a sense were truly partners of students and this relationship was quite different from typical classrooms where teachers are at a distance or on a higher pedestal. Here, there was a quest for mutual humanization. Rarely were things “taught” in class. You presented things for their consideration and you listened to them. You listened very carefully. In listening you also reconsidered your earlier considerations as students expressed their ideas. For example, Moksh’s observation about Death being a foodie stayed with all of us till the end. In reading and recognising poetic sentences each one of us became a critical co-investigator. There was none of the passivity we usually see in classes. There was also very less narration that you did. As a result, everyone was cognitively engaged. Quiet ones like Anuradha and Rajashree showed us that their silence was not passive – their sharing of journals and book covers showed us how the rigour of your sessions had infected their ability to think and reflected in the creativity of their art work. Ryan’s extracts of poetic sentences presented as slides and his ability to put together everyone’s work in creatve digital formats bear testimony to this.
It was marvellous that you achieved all of this by never once using your teacher-voice or raising your voice or changing your tone. I realised that when a teacher has clarity on her objectives and a carefully crafted plan, she doesn’t need these crutches. All she needs is to communicate.
Communication brings meaning to life
You created a safe space for the group within the first few days, almost effortlessly. However, I realise it was not that effortless. You listened very carefully to them. I remember early on in our conversations, a few students inched towards discussing the issue of smoking cigarettes and Liesel rolling cigarettes for her foster father, Hans. “Doesn’t that make Hans a bad man? Why is Liesel in his house? Will she be safe?” In deferring the moral on smoking to the time period the book is set in, the weather in that context, the understanding of society about smoking; the dialogue you had with them showed students that they could ask risky questions and they will not be judged. In fact, they were likely to get more information and make more connections.
There was careful planning, collaborating and meticulous execution that you did. There was a follow up email after every session and I am sure you were in constant email communication with those who reached out. The Sunday check-in circles you opened up for those who were interested cemented their trust in you. They could log in if they wished and you were there to help them with questions on vocabulary, plot or any clarifications they wanted on tasks. You opened up multiple channels of communication for the group. I am amazed at how you even used India Post quite ingeniously to communicate with them via letters! Consistency is a word that comes to my mind. You never dropped the ball and the students knew you were present for them.
During the class you created a classroom culture that would allow anyone to share without feeling judged. The games we played like Bingo, Hangman, Hot Seat, Word Hunt, among others also added to this sense of a safe and happy place. While you reasoned and laughed with them, you also accepted silences. You never imposed your thoughts on them but egged them to think in authentic ways about the book-world and about their worlds. The constant dialogue raised students’ consciousness not only as readers but also as thinkers. Unlike usual classrooms, there was little transfer of knowledge and much more cognition. You believed that students came in with experience and knowledge that mattered and through the discussions and story read alouds you held a few mirrors and you cracked open some windows.
Both are simultaneously teacher and students
I am left with a sense that none of us are the same after this shared experience of guided reading. The contradiction of the banking model, where the teacher considers himself superior was diffused in these sessions as sometimes we were teacher-students and other times we were student-teachers. True education is when teachers and students are influenced by the process of education. You rarely told them how to think but you often thought with them. You rarely showed them what to do or make but you did things with them (reading, games, role-play, quiz, art). Your sharing affected them as much as their sharing affected you….if not more. Doing things with students is such a simple yet powerful thing to do to show that as teachers, we too continue to be learners. This in fact takes us one step closer to reconciling the contradiction of the banking model that Freire talks about. Students too educate the teacher.
Thank you for opening yet another window to literature and literacy practice for me and showing me what kind of a teacher I can be. In the way you facilitated the sessions, you reminded me that above everything else, education must be a humanising experience. The collaborative poem based on Charles Causley’s work I am the Song, that the students composed, reaffirms for me that teachers are always learners and it is possible to practice this at all times.
References
Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum
Lave, J. (1996) Teaching as learning in practice. Mind, Culture and Society, 3(3)
Menon, S. (2017) Supporting Early Language and Literacy through Children’s Literature. Early Literacy Initiative Blogs. http://eli.tiss.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2017/08/BhashaBoli_English.pdf
Zusak, M. (2007) The Book Thief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
