Strategies for Change

Julia Albertson

April 9, 2017

Professor Cohen

EDUC 266

Strategies for Change

Accessibility in Education

            Throughout the semester questions about accessibility in the classroom have been central to our class discussions. From the extent to which a student may access the resources necessary for social or professional gain, to the level at which a teacher may access the cultures of his or her students, accessibility in the broad sense fundamentally informs the success of both students and teachers in schools. I would like to explore strategies for breaking down the barriers to access in classrooms, looking specifically at what has been done previously that has either succeeded or failed.

            I would begin to deconstruct those barriers at the classroom level. It is in the classrooms where the most change can be effected, and where the policies that could be theorized at the higher levels of education hierarchy will be implemented. Thus, to be more expedient and productive, change must come from those present in the classroom each day: teachers and students.

            Several strategies which appear to be the most promising have been expressed in the readings from the last few weeks. First, there is the notion that students can serve as both learners and educators. In City Kids City Schools, activist educational writer Linda Christensen describes how important it was for her students to have a space to openly express their frustrations and realities of their lives outside the classroom. At first when she created that space she was concerned that “inviting students to write about violence might glorify it,” but quickly realized how much her students “needed to share that fear” (CKCS, 65). More than share it with one another, Christensen found that her students had the potential to serve as incredibly powerful speakers for other students how had experienced similar levels of violence in their childhood. She arranged for her students to speak with students younger than them about very serious topics, such as gun violence and gangs (CKCS, 72). In doing so, she enabled both her students to practice serving as peer educators, while simultaneously exposing younger students to a powerful lesson at a very personal level. Personal student narratives are also central in films like Freedom Writers (2007) and Entre les Murs (2008), acknowledging the power they can have as a teaching moment. Lessons like this are crucial to developing a study body that knows how to learn and how to teach. Avoiding Pablo Freire’s notion of simply filling students with information, we should alter our approach to engaging with students about information, facilitating a two-way learning model for both teacher and student. By demonstrating to students that we as a society value what they have to share, we are giving them access to becoming educators themselves simply by valorizing their own experiences.

            Second, as argued by Education Professor Jeff Duncan-Andrade in his article, Visions of Teachers Leaving No More Children Behind (2008), we as an educational community must actively shift the rhetoric of viewing students cultural and geographical communities not as a hindrance but as a strength. Indeed, school should be advertised as a “way to return to their communities” well-informed and motivated, “rather than as a strategy for escaping” their home and background (Duncan-Andrade, 116). By consciously pursuing this strategy for change, teachers will alter the view of local communities as something to overcome, and move instead towards believing they are something on which to build.

            Both of these strategies for change are simple in ideal, but there must be reasons why they have not yet been implemented. Would all students be open to sharing their personal narratives? Is this exploitive? If not, then how can we still encourage them to learn from them and to employ their history in teaching others? Is changing one community’s perception of another too difficult now that those biases are so ingrained?  Where do we even start if we wanted to change that perception? At the core, I believe all these questions belong to students and teachers themselves. It is a teacher who knows their students’ narratives, not a district board or an educational think tank, and it is a student who knows their community, not a textbook company or a city government. Thus, to implement these two strategies for change we must begin by going directly into the classroom and, by a significant amount of trial and error, see what could make a difference in the level of accessibility students have to control their own stories and cultures within their learning.