Search

This issue of the Bank Street "Occasional Paper Series" is authored by an allgirl/womxn cast who brilliantly offers insights into possible futures, considering opportunities to rethink education and abolish the patterns of harm too-often enacted in and by schooling as it currently exists. This special issue begins with four articles authored by Black and South East Asian women who describe researchers' reimaginations of education that center the humanity and ingenuity of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of Color. Next, the issue turns to 10 teachers who identify as Black, Indigenous, and of Color (Latinx and Asian American), as well as a White co-conspirator. They reflect on their practices, identities, and priorities through a North Star logic. In the final section of this issue, five children--Amelia, Fiona, Jojo (Johana), Lela Joy, and Sara--offer their thoughts on what it was like to be schooled during the pandemic. Their work demonstrates that authoring extends to numerous dimensions and modalities beyond letters, words, and other symbols typically associated with literacy in schools and schooling.

For this edition of the "Bank Street Occasional Paper Series," educators were invited to share stories from their practice: times when they utilized children's literature and conversations to address real life; the difficult topics that children experience through the mirror of their own experiences or the windows of their peers, communities, or world. These stories are the stories of educators who have tried, and sometimes stumbled, and are showing their vulnerabilities. In each story, there is profound learning from the conversations that emerge from books. In the range of stories offered in this issue, there is one commonality: teachers are responding to the challenges that students of all ages face in their lives. These include concerns about gender and sexuality, racism, death and grief, climate change, police brutality, class issues, trauma, family insecurity, and mental health challenges. The essays are arranged in pairs by age/grade levels from preschool, to early elementary, middle elementary, late elementary, middle school, high school, and college, however, every one of these authors offers thoughtful guidance to educators (and non-educators), no matter the level with which they most identify.

Social, emotional, and affective experiences are impossible to separate from thinking, doing, and being in the world. Increasingly, schools and community-based organizations are recognizing this truth through the adoption of programs that focus on the emotional lives of children and youth, especially when emotions are fraught, and lives have been difficult. Programs such as social emotional learning (SEL) frameworks and trauma-informed practices (TIP) are not only popular, they are deemed "essential" in almost every corner of the social services sector. The authors in this issue suggest that these programs often focus on those who are marginalized through race, class, and/or experiences of violence, including family violence, while ignoring the social conditions that create marginalization and its effects, and neglecting the many strengths and strategies deployed by these children and youth. This focus can lead to labeling and/or silencing legitimate expressions of resistance and difference in a quest to elicit specific types of behavioral and cultural conformity for students to be deemed "learning ready." This issue explores the sometimes troubling beliefs and assumptions at work in popular social and emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogies as well as some of the impacts of this new attention. This special issue begins with five articles that describe how implementations of SEL and TIP shape not only the systems they are set in, but the lives of children and youth who are served within them. The subsequent six articles move toward envisioning how educators and practitioners can rethink this work with and for the children and youth who are most profoundly impacted by SEL and TIP frameworks.

Each of the papers in this collection offers a much-needed antidote to the forces that disconnect educators from the places in which they teach, learn, and live. Together, they provide an opportunity to reflect on the power of place in education. This issue offers an opportunity--an invitation--to embrace all that the places both in and outside the classroom have to offer. Individual essays in this paper include: (1) Reclaiming the Promise of Place: An Interview with David Greenwood (Roberta Altman); (2) Playing in Literary Landscapes: Considering Children's Need for Fantasy Literature in the Place-Based Classroom (Sarah Fisher); (3) Guggenheim for All: Museum Education for Students on the Spectrum (Chiara Di Lello); (4) Curtain Up: Place-based Teaching & Learning in the New York City Theater District (Peggy McNamara and Bryan Andes); (5) Place-Based Education: (Re)Integrating Ecology & Economy (Mark T. Kissling and Angela Calabrese Barton); (6) Discovering Place-based Education in the Foothills of the Himalayas (Monimalika Day with Doug Hernandez); (7) Learning Naturally: An Inquiry Study of Streams in Hawaii (Becca Kesler); (8) Nature Preschools: Putting Nature at the Heart of Early Childhood Education (Ken Finch and Patti Ensel Bailie); and (9) Preparing Teachers for Place-based Teaching (Amy Vinlove). Individual essays contain references and figures.

Guest editors Gail Boldt and William Ayers have asked 14 leading educators to address the politics of the teacher accountability movement in America. Who benefits and who is hurt? What is gained and what is lost? How can we move forward with a more hopeful and inclusive vision of our educational future? All of the contributors are motivated by an abiding commitment to democratic ideals and respect for the complex work of teachers even as they encourage the reader to take back the conversation about school reform in America. This publication begins with a preface by Gail M. Boldt and an introduction by William Ayers. Part I contains: (1) Accountability and the Contemporary Intellectual (Greg Dimitriadis and Marc Lamont Hill); (2) The Teacher Accountability Debate (Diane Ravitch); and (3) Educational (Reform) Revolution (Peter Taubman). Part II contains: (4) Racing to the Top: Who's Accounting for the Children? (Celia Genishi and Anne Haas Dyson); (5) "If We Look to Buy the Cheapest Paper, Why Not the Cheapest Teachers?" (Fred Klonsky); (6) Schooling of and for Democracy (Deborah Meier); and (7) The New Orleans Reformed Public School System: National Model? (Raynard Sanders). Part III contains: (1) Silver Linings (Gil Schmerler); (2) Creating the Schools We Need (Pedro A. Noguera); (3) A Glass Half Full (Jeff Duncan-Andrade); and (4) Flip the Script (Kevin K. Kumashiro and Erica R. Meiners). "Coda" by Gail M. Boldt is also included. Individual papers contain references and footnotes.

This paper tells the remarkable and compelling story of Leonard Covello, a ground breaking progressive educator who worked tirelessly to shape public education in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. Covello was the founding principal of Benjamin Franklin High School (BFHS) in East Harlem in the 1930s. The author invites everyone to explore a little known part of the past and frames a critical discussion about what the future might be. The major objective of this study is to examine Covello's work within the twin frameworks of educational leadership and progressivism. It begins by providing a biographical sketch of Covello and then explores his professional and personal philosophy and the way that these played out in his roles as educational and community leader, sociopolitical activist, and community ethnographer. It then examines BFHS as a new paradigm for educational institutions, with an emphasis on its pioneering work in developing student leaders, engaging in community activism, and promoting intercultural education. Finally, it looks at the larger implications of Covello's work in an era of increased emphasis on testing and standardization. By looking back to Covello's work, the author locates the problems of our present situation in schools' retreat from a core progressive goal--the development of social capital within students and community members. (Contains 3 footnotes. Introduction written by Patrick Shannon.)

Teacher leadership is "hard." Many of the reasons are obvious: Teaching is a highly labor-intensive profession to begin with, leaving little downtime for work with other adults. School schedules are notoriously stingy with space for adult collaboration. Teachers are rarely paid to exercise leadership; when they are, they are never paid enough. This volume is a modest attempt to restore the issue of teacher leadership to the prominence it deserves and requires. Although there is considerable overlap among the essays, they have been organized loosely into three categories: "mentoring," to address the essential question of teacher helping teacher; "transforming school culture," to reflect some of the many ways teachers make a difference in the environment immediately beyond their classrooms; and "advocating" for change, to spotlight the voices teacher leaders find ways to project in the interest of creating broader and more enduring change. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Becoming a Teacher Leader within Your Classroom: A Dialogue (Nayantara Mhatre and Jill Stacy); (2) Walking a Hall of Mirrors (Kami Patrizio); (3) Ask Not What FHS Can Do for You, But What You Can Do for FHS (Jessica Endlich Winkler); (4) Empowering Teachers: Developing Meaningful Leadership (Jennifer Groves); (5) Making Sense of Distributed Leadership: A Conversation Among Teacher Leaders (Kathleen Dickinson Rockwood); (6) Leadership and Agency as a Novice Teacher (Clare E. Tin); (7) BETLA Teacher Leaders: An Unselfish Sense of Purpose (Lillian Hernandez and Cristian Solorza); and (8) Leading Without Permission (Robin E. Hummel). Introduction by Gil Schmerler is also included. [This issue of Occasional Papers was supported, in part, by Bank Street's Adelaide Weismann Center for Innovative Leadership in Education.]

Concerned that various reforms promising greater professional autonomy and status as well as student success are actually disempowering teachers, impoverishing intellectual life in schools, and serving as a portal for the marketization of teaching and education, editors invited teachers to respond to the ways in which the proliferation of standards and testing combined with their own loss of professional control is altering the landscape of American education. The editors' goal was to raise questions about whether and how educators are balancing the demands of high stakes testing, scripted curricula, and a focus on performance outcomes with the emotional complexity of classroom life. Selections include: (1) Squeezed, Stretched, and Stuck: Teachers Defending Play-based Learning in No-nonsense Times (Karen E. Wohlwend); (2) Invisible Ink: A Psychoanalytic Study of School Memory (Lisa Farley); (3) Imaginary Stories in School: First Steps towards Literacy (Gillian Dowley McNamee); (4) In Defense of Playfulness (Peter Nelsen); (5) Mouthy Students and the Teacher's Apple: Questions of Orality and Race in the Urban Public School (Alyssa D. Niccolini); and (6) Confounded and Compounded by Language: English Language Learner and High Stakes Testing (Elizabeth Park). (Articles are footnoted and referenced individually.)