Teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Memory, Imagination, and the Narratives of Slavery

5 April 2010

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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. Continue reading →

“I Constantly Innovate My Teaching”: Jaime Escalante Dies, Vision Endures

31 March 2010

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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. Continue reading →

Part 3: Teachers Are Always Working: Sabbaticals Refresh Hearts and Minds

30 March 2010

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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 Continue reading →

Part 2: Your Thoughts on Teacher Sabbaticals

22 March 2010

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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? Continue reading →

Readers Respond: Your Thoughts on Teacher Sabbaticals

15 March 2010

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The following is cross-posted at Equality 101.

As I enter the end of my thirteenth year of teaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about sabbaticals and how they should be a much more widespread practice in schools. To me, sabbaticals are a form of not only self-care but also school-care and student-care.

Teachers need sabbaticals in order to embark on a variety of professional development endeavors: research, coursework, teaching-related travel, writing and reflection. At the end of a sabbatical, we are able to give back to our school communities with rejuvenated energy and intellectual re-invention as thinkers, writers, and scholars. Students benefit from sabbaticals as well, as teachers return to their classroom with new ideas, different texts, and fresh perspectives. They also allow students to see teachers as professionals who have taken time off to learn more about their field. Continue reading →

Going Beyond International Women’s Day in Our Classrooms: We Are All Responsible

9 March 2010

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The following post can also be found at Equality 101.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day across the world. Were you able to observe the day in your classroom or school in some way?

Depending on the school and its mission, a variety of schools across the U.S. celebrate National Latino Heritage Month in September; National Coming Out Day in October; Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January; Black History Month in February; the Day of Silence in April, and many more important dates of observance.

But how many schools observe International Women’s Day? Probably not many schools, if any at all. Continue reading →

Justice is Sweet: Astraea’s Funding the Fight for Queer People of Color

8 March 2010

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The following post can also be found at Equality 101 in honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2010.

The Astraea Foundation funds LGBTI social justice activism both in the US and globally. (photo courtesy of Astraea)

Do you know who is funding the fight for queer social justice in Africa?

Do you know who is funding the fight for queer social justice in Latin America?

Do you know who is funding the fight for queer social justice right here in the US?

The answer to all of these questions is Astraea. No other public foundation is working harder for sweet justice than the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, the world’s only foundation solely dedicated to funding LGBTI organizations in both the United States and internationally.

For more than 30 years, Astraea has been a major leader in the social-justice-feminist movement. Astraea began in 1977 in New York when a small group of women created a multi-racial, multi-class, feminist foundation in order to address the lack of funding for women—specifically lesbians and women of color. According to Executive Director Katherine Acey, the founding mothers—including Stella Alvo, Audrey Barnes, Nancy Dean, Barbara Grant, Joyce Hunter, Roberta Kosse, Cynthia Long, Achebe Powell, Joan Watts and Leslie Kanes Weisman—“believed that even the smallest of gestures, when combined, could create, nurture and strengthen significant social change. And they were right.” Continue reading →

Feministing Blogger Miriam Pérez Visits My LGBT Literature Class

4 March 2010

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Activist, blogger, and doula Miriam Zoila Pérez. (photo by Ileana Jiménez)

“Our society is so intensely gendered in ways we don’t even notice.”

Wise words from Miriam Zoila Pérez who visited my Queer Identities: LGBT Literature and Film class earlier today. Miriam is one of the editors at Feministing and is also the founder and sole blogger at Radical Doula.

I invited Miriam to visit the class to talk about her trajectory in the reproductive justice movement as well as to share her personal story as a queer Latin@.

At one point, Miriam joked: “Ellen Degeneres was the only inkling I had of what it meant to be a lesbian and since I wasn’t attracted to her, I figured I couldn’t be a lesbian.” Continue reading →

Fighting the Good Fight: Students and Teachers of Color Working Against the ‘Isms

1 March 2010

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Yesterday I had a talk with a former student who is currently a first year student at an Ivy League university. Since her freshman year in high school, we have connected on our common Latina background, mine Puerto Rican, hers Dominican. Now that she is in college, I continue to feel connected to her as she forges her way as the first in her family to attend college.

During the course of our conversation, she interviewed me for a women’s studies class project on which she is currently working. As we talked, we shared common experiences of facing racism and classism during pivotal moments in our lives. When my family moved from the Bronx to Long Island, I faced racist epithets such as “spic,” “nigger,” and “afro” from children on the playground. The teasing and the bullying didn’t end there though. After our move to Long Island, my Bronx relatives started calling me “white girl.” I was suddenly living in two worlds that didn’t accept me.

Continue reading →

“Leading Ably from Difference”: Honoring President Ruth Simmons on Presidents’ Day

15 February 2010

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Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons

Each year on Presidents’ Day, we examine the narrative of US presidential history.  While important, it also seems worthy to expand the conversation to consider the various ways in which one can assume the office of a president, especially if that president is a woman.

Last fall, a Forbes article reported that the American Council on Education indicates that 23% of college presidents are women. While Americans know we have never had a woman President, how many of us know that half of the eight Ivy League universities are headed by a woman?  Harvard is led by Drew Gilpin Faust, Princeton by Shirley Tilghman, the University of Pennsylvania by Amy Gutmann, and Brown by Ruth J. Simmons.  How many of us look to these women as models of leadership for issues that are important to us, especially as educators? Continue reading →