Prior to becoming a pedestrian, elementary science classroom under the euphemism "inquiry center", the Workshop Center for Open Education was the ideal space for exploring the world as a material space as well as a world of ideas, rythmns, the self and the selves . A poet or a scientist, a behaviorist or developmental psychologist, a socialist or a capitalist, a homosexual or a hetero person were always welcome there.The Carl Rogers and Luis Iglesias' book titles, Freedom to Learn and Didáctica de la Libre Expresión, express very well the principle that guided the place. And in the Center, a unique and delicious vegetable, plantain -closely related to the banana fruita- was explored and served, while studying its relationship to ideas on race, economics, slavery, colonization, cultural values, memories, desires and curricula.
Ideas discussed by authors such as Aristoteles, Socrates, Luis Iglesias, Carl Rogers, Simón Rodríguez, Jean Piaget, Emilia Ferreiro, Weber, Perrone, and quite a few other educators that wrote on the importance on methods and student-centered curriculum, were studied and discussed using plantains as the springboard for further discussion. Many stories, poems, constructs and procedures were presented or saw their genesis in the place that Lillian Weber founded and directed for a long time. This essay is in honor of Lillian, who for so many of us stands, and must continue to stand as the ideal educator. This recognition is not because of some kind of cult adoration, or personality superiority or perfection of hers, since we had quite a few yelling sessions. We also shared cheap dinners in an Italian pizzeria: often, after quite a few class sessions, the two of us went out to dinner and continued the exploration of ideas as well as some gossiping on the College. .
As an educator, one can point to those instances where goals are achieved with gusto, providing a great sense of satisfaction. If aiming at specific objectives, a traditionally organized classroom can serve as the space where these objectives are met. But if the purposes are larger than taxonomies, hierarchies or the rigidity of the traditional disciplines, then a different kind of view of the world and space is needed. There must be a place, physical and ideological, where multiple possibilities to understand, construct, formulate an idea, a theory, a construct, a poem, bodies and languages, and that was the Center that Lillian founded.
And in that place, plantains were, before I was asked to leave and forced to walk around with my bags of limited resources, one of the most liberating sources of knowledge a teacher educator can have, to study and appreciate the search for “wisdom”. Yes, plantains were an integral part of the course that for many years I taught at the Center. The vegetable that looks like its related fruit, bananas -but is not a fruit-, has not only been a source of nutrients or the ingredient for recipes, it is also the symbol of slavery and survival, racism and stereotypes, and, unfortunately, a source of some form -as strange as it sounds- of personal and ethnic shame. It is not an accident that some European fans and soccer players use them to "put down" African and Latin American players.
Most of the students in the course discussed in this essay were of Caribbean backgrounds, and plantains were/are part of their daily diet, history and economy; but rarely, an object to be studied in schools. As Paulo Freire argues in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a great deal of what people know is completely absent from the highly organized, controlled and digested bodies of knowledge covered in traditional classrooms (for empirical evidence gathered in the NYC area supporting Freire’s idea, go to the study of learning environments and related curricula by Roger Heart as explained in one of the booklets published at the Workshop Center).
When students are placed in situations where these curriculum hierarchies or qualities are questioned or reversed, they react like all humans do when facing destabilizing situations. During the first session, as the students came into the kitchen area and saw the large amount of plantains on the tables, the discussion and expression of diverse ideas, cultural values began, and not in the traditional form: sitting and talking by turns. No at all. Freedom to learn ruled. Sarcastic comments, statements began to come out from their mouths once they entered the room, as well as their nervous laughs at what many considered to be an item better left at home, hidden from the more cultured characters that rule the world of knowledge and propriety.
The goals at that point were set up by the participants. Without betraying the fields of history, science or economy, the students entered into other related issues: their own sense of self-worth and inherited cultures, of slavery, the economy and diets; and since in the Caribbean each type of banana (and there are more than two or three) has a different name and many particular ways to cook them or eat them, the organization and conceptualization of knowledge, its relationship to particular cultures and histories became a route to study, follow and connect to many other themes, artifacts, scientific, artistic and literary expressions, with the resulting nervous laughs moving into the realms of curiosity (a quality killed by much of traditional curricula), and the worlds of multiple epistemologies.
The total didactic experience was --to use a famous improvisational theater approach popular during the sixties-- a happening. A pedagogical happening in the Center involving plantains.
Certain educational practices are geared towards mastering specific bits of knowledge, and different new fads are continuously suggested to meet the “saecula saeculorum,” unadulterated curricula. Rarely, the procedures and methods used by the disciplines or the intellectual frameworks, or the belief systems underlying the concepts or ideas being studied, were/are covered or analyzed in such rigid educational spaces. Sufficient room is not provided for different voices to be heard. This was not the case, however, at the Center when she directed it.
When dismissing the educational fads or the petite classroom goals that characterize much of USA education, Lillian, while swinging her arms in order to give weight to her pronouncement and critique, always used a phrase that remains with me when recalling the richness of her soul, her brain and actions: “That thing or that other thing” -- a constant and direct phrase, to be followed by long, hearty and heavily substantiated discourses.
Plantains at the Center were not reduced to specific concepts, ideas, or tiny, very tiny objectives. They were thoroughly studied, intellectually schematized, and then served in an escabeche sauce, cooked as mofongo, mangú, fufú, or pasteles, or fried as tostones or patacones or amarillos fritos, and eaten. Yes, we also ate as the palate is another learning resource.
The students had to explore the plantains themselves, their possibilities, histories and function within the curricula, and, because of the approach, their own responses to the vegetable. No more nervous laughs, no more discomforts with those aspects of histories that some would have preferred to leave home, inside their minds and souls, that were once -and for many, still are- parts of colonization, discrimination, slavery.
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Ramón Frade, Puerto Rico, 1875-1954: El Pan Nuestro de Cada Día
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