A Task Force of Her Own: Interview with Refuse the Silence’s Morgane Richardson
Morgane Richardson
Morgane Richardson has a mission to change higher education for women of color as we know it.
A 2008 graduate of Middlebury College, Richardson started her work supporting women of color as an activist and mentor on campus. Throughout her college years, she made herself available to women of color as they navigated issues of race, class, and gender. Determined to change the campus climate, she also sat on Middlebury’s Task Force on the Status of Women, which continued the work of earlier task forces on issues of gender at the college from 1990 and 1997 respectively. The original 1990 report, which came to be called the “Gender Report,” was “undertaken in the aftermath of an incident in which a mutilated female mannequin was hanged from the front of a fraternity house during a party at the close of the 1987-88 school year.”
Upon graduating, Richardson became inspired to change the climate for women of color at elite liberal arts colleges, institutions whose histories of tradition and privilege generate cultures of racism, sexism, and homophobia, leaving women of color erased from the conversation, both academically and socially. Today, Richardson is collecting the stories of women of color at elite liberal arts colleges to create an anthology made up of narratives, letters, essays and videos, which will be titled Refuse the Silence. These stories will be used to design a set of actions that will be sent to leading college presidents and administrators to create the kind of change we’ve long been waiting for. Read more…
What My School is Reading This Summer
The faculty at my school recommend book circle selections as part of our annual summer reading tradition (photo courtesy: Laura Hahn, LREI).
At the school where I teach, there are two summer reading requirements: one for English class and one for our school-wide book circles.
The first requirement is for our ninth and tenth grade yearlong courses. For students entering our ninth grade World Voices course, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, is required. For sophomores entering our American Dreams, American Experiences course, students read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
The second requirement is my favorite. All of our high school students select another book based on faculty recommendations. Each fall, the entire faculty—yes, that includes science, math, history, English, foreign language, art, music dance, theatre, technology and media teachers—leads a book circle discussion with students who selected the book that teacher recommended. Selections are presented during an assembly in the late spring just before students head off for the summer. Read more…
Summer Reading Picks Criticized by Conservative “Watchdogs”
In an effort to engage students in a shared reading experience on today's most pressing issues, colleges across the country are assigning summer reading.
I recently wrote a summer reading post for Care2 listing ten must-read books on issues of education and diversity. One of the comments I received was not typical of all the responses, but certainly echoed the current national backlash against addressing diversity and inclusion in schools and colleges:
Sounds like the bs from the far left progressives, esp. when I hear the prefix ‘trans’ . . . lets [sic] stick to teaching the kids solid basics. This country is becoming more stupid each year and the teachers are to blame.
Sadly, myopic attitudes—whether they be racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, or transphobic, like the one above—about diversity in our schools have become the norm when attacking inclusive education. From Arizona’s banning of ethnic studies to Texas textbooks eliminating the word “slavery” for the term “Triangle Trade,” education is suffering from hateful slings and arrows.
To add further insult to our work as educators, a new study, “Beach Books: What Do Colleges Want Students to Read Outside of Class?,” from the National Association of Scholars “found that 70 percent of the summer reading books assigned to incoming college freshmen in the U.S. show a liberal bias and are not academically challenging.” Read more…
More on Maddow’s Smith Commencement Speech: What I Didn’t Get to Include
I’m still pretty ecstatic about having interviewed Rachel Maddow just minutes before she delivered
Rachel Maddow at Smith Commencement 2010 (photo: Jim Gipe/pivotmedia.com).
this year’s Commencement speech at Smith College to the class of 2010 on May 16. As a Smith alum from 1997, I was thrilled to cover the event for the Women’s Media Center in New York, which was co-founded by fellow Smith alum Gloria Steinem ’56. Here’s the piece I wrote for them last week, which includes an exclusive quote from Maddow on feminism.
But there were some moments that I didn’t get to talk about in my WMC post, namely the covert lesbian joke that Maddow made to a knowing crowd, the lively live tweets from swooning alumnae; and photos of Maddow that will knock you out.
Students Enthralled By Morrison at PEN World Voices Festival
My Toni Morrison seminar students (photo by Cecelia Martin).
This weekend I took the junior and senior students in my Toni Morrison elective to hear her speak alongside South African writer Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah, President of the PEN American Center. The event took place at Cooper Union’s Great Hall as part of the annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.
During the talk, Morrison declared Niekerk’s novel Agaat, “exactly the most extraordinary book that I’ve ever read in a long time . . . you must read it.” Agaat won the prestigious Hertzog Prize in 2007; the prize recognizes the very best in Afrikaans literature. Read more…
Exposing the “Master Narrative”: Teaching Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The following post is second in a series on teaching paired texts in high school classrooms. It is cross-posted at Equality 101.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye lends itself to rich conversations with students about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Throughout our teaching of this text, my colleagues and I have used a variety of additional texts, images, and videos that help students understand the novel from both personal and analytical perspectives. The following post provides ideas for sources to pair with the novel including teaching the term “master narrative,” discussing images of Shirley Temple and American girlhood, as well as analyzing media images and their connection to self and body image. Read more…
Teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Memory, Imagination, and the Narratives of Slavery
The following post is first in a series on teaching paired texts in high school classrooms. It can also be found at Equality 101.
Toni Morrison (photograph copyright by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)
Every spring when I teach my high school junior elective on Toni Morrison, I start with the same anecdote about the time I was grading papers in a café after school, when I decided to take a break and started reading The New York Times. Flipping through the pages, I noticed an ad that listed Toni Morrison as the featured speaker that very night at the New York Historical Society. She was giving a lecture as part of a series of talks that complemented the powerful 2005 exhibit “Slavery in New York.” Upon reading the ad, I quickly paid my bill and jumped on a subway uptown to the NYHS.
However, once I reached the museum, the event had already been sold-out. Behind me, a generous woman offered to sell me her absent friend’s ticket and I was in.
This passion for Morrison gets the course started. Once I enter class on the first day, I know I am not alone with my love. The students who take this upper level course all read The Bluest Eye in tenth grade. When I ask them to reflect on their reasons for taking a single author course on Morrison, students consistently cite their admiration for The Bluest Eye as their primary reason for wanting to read more of her work.
The course is titled Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Memoir, Imagination, and the Narratives of Slavery. In class, I often use the metaphor that Beloved is the “sun” or central text of the course and other readings that we study throughout the trimester are surrounding “satellite” texts. All of these satellite or paired texts serve a purpose: to demonstrate Morrison’s merging of rich literary, oral, and musical traditions throughout the novel. These traditions are: 1) slave narratives; 2) spirituals; 3) and modernism.
I have found using slave narratives, spirituals, and the history of modernism helpful in framing Beloved. As we move along in the novel, students appreciate this framing, as it provides touchstones for interpretation and understanding. Perhaps you will find these satellite or paired texts useful as well. Read more…
“I Constantly Innovate My Teaching”: Jaime Escalante Dies, Vision Endures
I’ll never forget watching the film “Stand and Deliver” in 1988. I was in eighth grade attending a public school on Long Island and had only had one Latina teacher in my entire educational career. Watching the film, I was amazed at Edward James Olmos’s portrayal of Escalante. A struggling math student myself, I was not a little envious that the students in Escalante’s real class at Garfield High School in Los Angeles were pushed to excel by one of their own.
Jaime Escalante, innovative and inspiring educator, dies at 79. (Copyright, 2005: Jaime A. Escalante)
It wasn’t until seventh grade that I had an inspiring and challenging Latina teacher for my honors history class. I always strove for an A and always came up with an A-. Even the students rallied behind me and said,”Why don’t you give Ileana an A?” She would always say: “There’s room for improvement!” I strove and strove and finally got that A at the end of the year. I wanted to impress her not only because she was my teacher but also because she was one of my own.
Later, in high school, I was taught by a Spanish teacher from México. He always found new ways to engage us with the language, especially by playing his guitar and singing songs. He was one of my own.
Above all, these teachers succeeded not only because they were able to inspire one of their young Puerto Rican students, but also because they were innovators in their profession. Read more…
Part 3: Teachers Are Always Working: Sabbaticals Refresh Hearts and Minds
In the weeks since I’ve first posted about teacher sabbaticals there has been response from both my fellow bloggers at Equality 101 (one post from Adam Miller and one post from Cathy Gilbert) as well as comments from readers of this blog.
We talk a lot about sustainability in schools—everything from recycling paper in our classrooms to serving organic food at lunch—but we also need to talk about sustaining teachers for the creation of healthy schools. Here are two ways in which I see sabbaticals as a form of self-care, student-care, and school-care.
• First, teachers should use sabbaticals as a form of self-care to refresh and to conduct research
• Second, schools should use sabbaticals as a retention tool to reward teachers and to keep them committed to the profession over the long haul Read more…
Part 2: Your Thoughts on Teacher Sabbaticals
The following post can also be found at Equality 101.
In an effort to continue the conversation about teacher sabbaticals, I have gathered some resources for further thinking by readers. I invite readers to peruse these sources so that we can expand and enrich our understanding of how sabbaticals can be used as professional development that sustains self-care, student-care, and school-care. Please also feel free to use these sources as a jumping off point to respond to the questions I posed last week:
• How are sabbaticals implemented at your school? Are they paid or unpaid?
• How many years must a teacher serve at your school in order for a sabbatical to be taken?
• What have teachers done at your school during their sabbatical and how has that contributed to their classroom practice, curriculum, and or larger school program? Read more…
