|
teacher’s comments: IDEA Inclusion Project 
This section collects the various Teacher's Comments that have appeared as pop-up options in the Project Story and Student Reflections segments of this exhibit.
Enabling contagion
On streching semesters
On the gifts a gifted dancer can bring
"This is our law"
On Knoxville College
B. Collected comments on student reflections
On starving artists
On cognitive apprenticeship
Enabling contagion
One thing I am beginning to learn is that exciting projects can inspire and energize later students if I can find ways to capture and pass on knowledge of the earlier projects. Occasionally the inspiration is purely abstract: one interesting project will suggest an idea for another. At other times, there is a more concrete or direct connection.
In Barbara's case, when she happened to stop by my office that
day and we began to talk, she was excited in a general way about
using the arts to communicate about legal rights. She saw
a way she might link work in my course to a dream that she and
her husband had already been independently exploring. But
she was also particularly inspired when I showed her some materials
about the Mobility Project -- an unusually creative undertaking
by a former student who had worked with a local dance company
to choreograph and perform a dance about issues of physical mobility
and access to public spaces. As I showed Barbara some pictures
from that performance and reminisced about how the project had
unfolded, Barbara started to wonder right away whether she might
be able to work out some kind of collaboration with the same dance
company, this time focusing on children with less visible disabilities,
and on their right to an inclusive education. As things
turned out, that is precisely what happened.
In other cases, I have had students who wanted to work with a
particular community-based organization because they had heard
from a prior student about the group and its mission, because
they could see how a prior project could be extended with additional
input, or because a particular story or image or artifact from
the previous work had somehow caught their imagination.
Similarly, community organizations sometimes come to me because
they have heard about a project where a law student's contributions
helped another group to advance its goals or educate its members
in a way it would not otherwise have been able to do.
An important motivation for me in building this website has been
my growing appreciation for how this process of cross-fertilization
works -- that projects can build on each other or trigger related
experiments, that enthusiasm about possibilities can be infectious,
that adventurous students (or community members) can egg each
other on in productive ways. These connections can be wonderful,
but they don't always get made. Project artifacts get lost
or destroyed, my own memory and eye for correspondences is not
always the best, the course descriptions I write get overwhelmed
in the shuffle of other course and registration materials in the
law school's administrative offices, and in any event, students
who don't happen to drop by my office on an opportune day like
Barbara did that afternoon, may never hear the story that could
get them thinking. I hope that this website will allow
me to capture evocative information about a range of suggestive
projects, and that it will allow me to make that information more
readily available to successive generations of students and collaborators
than has been possible by relying on the patchy methods of the
past.
On stretching semesters
A chronic problem with community fieldwork is the serious limitation imposed by the length (or as one of my students once said, "the shorth") of the semester. Few good projects can easily fit within a 14-week frame. This is so even in cases where the student and the community collaborator are already paired and ready to go at the very start of the semester, and even when unanticipated delay and interference do not arise during the term. In fact in the vast majority of cases, it takes a while for students to find their projects, and unanticipated delay and interference often do arise. Further, the allures of procrastination are always at hand.
Given these constraints, I try to take advantage of any head
starts that I possibly can. I try to get the word out that
students can come and talk to me ahead of time about projects
they might undertake. If I find a student like Barbara
who is a strong self-starter and already seems to have a vision
of what he or she would like to do, I strongly encourage the student
to go ahead with significant preparation before the semester begins.
In the case of the Inclusion Project, the foundation that
Wayne and Barbara laid, and the relationship she began building
with Mark Lamb during the summer, were part of the reason why
the Project came together as well as it did, and why they were
able to pull off the performance and installation before the semester
was done.
At the other end of the process, I have been known to work with students beyond the end of the semester to tie up loose ends or go the extra mile for a deserving community collaborator. But I have learned the hard way that this is a route to be avoided unless the circumstances are truly exceptional. Some students will continue to work with their community partners, of course, because that it is what they want to do. But their decision in that regard is a separate matter from their work for credit in my course. My own responsibility as teacher is to work with students and with their community collaborators to explain realities, clarify expectations, and push for appropriate closure by the end of the semester.
I can tell you that this stance is not an easy discipline for me to embrace, since my personal tendency -- in this as in many other spheres of my life -- is to resist closure to the last. But it is not good for any of the parties involved to allow creeping expectations of additional work beyond the end of the semester. In most cases such expectations are unfair, and in any event they are usually unrealistic, even when students genuinely believe they will continue working or continue putting final touches on the project.
Sometimes it is possible to find a way for the student to expand
work on a project into the following semester for credit, and
if the student is interested, this is usually a better option
than pipe-dream volunteerism. In some years, I have taught
a course in the spring that was flexible enough to accommodate
some students from the fall who wanted to extend and elaborate
their projects. Occasionally I have agreed to supervise
a student in a directed research or independent study project
that would allow continued development of a project begun in an
earlier course. All these options may run into the problem
of competing demands on students' time. They are having
to juggle many factors, including bar exam preparation, required
course sequences for certain "concentrations" that many students
at my school pursue, etc. But doing additional work for
credit does offer one avenue of relief when a project could use
an additional segment, and the student wants to pursue it.
On the gifts a gifted dancer can bring
I wasn't able to attend the introductory session that Barbara describes here, but I have been present when Mark did a similar exercise with a room full of law students and community collaborators, and I can report that it was really magic. As people went around the circle answering a question that one of the facilitators put to all of us, Mark unobtrusively took quick notes about a gesture and a word that each of us made and said. At the end of the circle, he gave us back our words and gestures, and then invited all of us to practice repeating them for each other as a group. The exercise worked as an engaging way of helping people get acquainted, and it served as a vivid demonstration of the communicative power of simple movement. We had people in the group who had limited English proficiency, and this exercise was highly inclusive and welcoming for them as well.
Whenever Mark does this exercise, he makes a special point of telling everyone as they perform each other's gestures that they are now "dancing." So in this way the exercise also works to demystify what "dancing" is all about, and to offer a democratized and non-threatening experience of what "dancing" might mean in a community education context.
"This is our law."
One of my strongest memories of this project comes from the evening
when it was installed and performed at the downtown Hilton Hotel
in Knoxville for a meeting of a group of parents and educators
called "FAST: Families and Schools Together." This annual
conference was co-sponsored by a parent group called STEP and
another group called "The LRE for LIFE Project," and the audience
that evening was heavily salted with parents of children with
disabilities.
Before the performance began, all was in readiness: Wayne's beautiful panels were standing at the front of the banquet room. India and the other children who were going to dance were jiggling around happy but nervous in the wings, and Carrie and Fletcher, the Dyers' two other children, and Tim Kondas, a friend, were managing video cameras that were set to record the proceedings. I think one of the conference organizers had just announced a prize to be awarded to a parent who had worked exceptionally hard or had achieved some particular success over the past year, and the feelings of camaraderie and fellowship were palpable in the room.
Then Barbara and Mark Lamb stood up to introduce the program.
They explained the (somewhat complicated!) context and
told a little about the dance that was to come. Then Barbara
turned to say a few words about the visual installation.
She was standing directly in front of one of the two panels that
contained the text of the IDEA. She gestured up toward
the text and said with shining eyes, "This is our law,
this is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act."
My memory is that the audience broke into applause. Maybe
I invented that detail, but I can say for sure that a glance around
the room showed that people knew what Barbara meant, and resonated
to her words when she said with such pride and affection, "This
is our law."
It may sound a bit like people were reifying alienated words on a giant page in a way that might not be a helpful or effective way to think about a civil rights statute. But I don't think for a minute that was the case. This was a room full of people who knew only too well and up close exactly how weak the IDEA is unless parents and concerned educators work and fight to make it real. Nevertheless, the people in the room were also fiercely proud of the law's existence and eager to show it respect.
The installation did a good job of embodying and expressing this ambiguity. On the one hand were the honorific panels just described, which set out the full text of the law in celebratory fashion. On the other hand, one of the most powerful panels Wayne created was not a celebration at all, but a sharp critique. In eye-catching large-font text, that panel displayed key passages from a report on IDEA by the National Council on Disability, including statements to the effect that after "more than two decades of federal monitoring and enforcement of compliance with Part B of IDEA," the Council had been forced to conclude "that federal efforts to enforce the law over several administrations have been inconsistent, ineffective, and lacking any real teeth." (National Council on Disability, "Back to School on Civil Rights: Advancing the Federal Commitment to Leave No Child Behind.")
So neither the installation nor the audience that night were into misty-eyed romantics about the efficacy of the IDEA standing alone. Far from it. But in many ways, people's evident realism about the politics of law made it all the more remarkable and moving to see how pleased they were to see "their law" accorded public honor and respect, as expressed in Wayne's aesthetically satisfying panels.
On Knoxville College
Knoxville College is a historically black undergraduate institution in Knoxville, founded in 1875 by Presbyterians as part of the effort by a number of Protestant denominations from the North to build up black educational institutions in the South in the wake of the abolition of slavery. The College provides a home to Carpetbag Theater, the lead sponsor of Knoxville's American Festival Project, so it has become a natural gathering place in semesters when some or all of my students are involved in collaborations with AFP or Carpetbag. The administration at the College has been very gracious in allowing my students and their community partners to take advantage of the facilities for many gatherings, trainings and meetings that we have held there over the years. I have found that many of my African American law students are especially glad for the opportunity these field courses have sometimes given them to learn more about Knoxville College and to connect with students, teachers and staff there.
One of the most excruciating things for me as a law teacher about
working with artists is the shameful state of funding for the
arts. Here I sit with tenure and a law professor's salary,
working with students, many of whom are anticipating income that
falls at least somewhere in the "professional" range, and we are
asking for help from people who may quite possibly lack even health
insurance. Often they are piecing together their rent and
groceries from a patchwork of underpaid jobs and small grants.
It is clear that artists can bring inestimable kinds of added value to projects in law-related education. And in most communities there will be local artists more than happy to work on projects that involve law students (or other kinds of students) in community-based educational projects with disadvantaged and underserved populations. But such artists cannot live on air.
Under these conditions, I believe university-based teachers and students have an obligation to be thoughtful about how they structure collaborations. For instance, we should avoid making any assumptions about whether artists can volunteer their time with us. We should find out how they are supporting themselves first, and offer to strategize about ways to get funding for their contributions. Then if it turns out they are independently wealthy or have a pot of grant money at their disposal, that's great. If not, then maybe we will have to get in there and help scrounge.
For instance, professors can write letters of support for grant
proposals. Many funders want to see that arts groups have
partners who value their services and can help them reach out
to new constituencies. A law school connection is non-traditional
and might catch a funder's eye. Sometimes arts groups need
"humanities advisers" for proposals directed at humanities funders.
Law counts as a humanity in its jurisprudential reaches,
so law professors can help out in this regard, as can professors
in many other disciplines. Some universities have internal
funds that could support this kind of collaboration if properly
packaged. With advance planning, a professor and community
arts groups could write a joint grant proposal to a local or national
foundation to support an artist's work with students.
In the case of the Inclusion Project, Barbara applied for support to Knoxville's American Festival Project, and was thereby able to pay Mark a pittance for his work on the project. At the time, Knoxville's AFP had a fund for micro-grants to support exactly these sorts of collaborations.
The problem of equitable partnerships is not limited to work with artists, of course. Grassroots community groups are often struggling on tight budgets. If a teacher is asking a community organization to contribute its time and expertise to a student field project, the teacher should recognize the time sink that endeavor will entail for the organization and should initiate express conversations about the resource questions that will be embedded in the enterprise.
Nevertheless, though the issue extends beyond the arts community, I think artists are the ones who sometimes encounter the most resistant assumptions from the rest of us. Don't they somehow survive on nectar from flowers? Haven't they committed themselves to a bohemian life that needs no filthy lucre? There is a story about Woody Guthrie that I sometimes recount to myself in this regard. Reportedly, Woody had been asked to sing a benefit concert for a local organization. He said he would be happy to do so, and then explained that he would expect to receive payment for the concert. The person from the organization said, "Well, I understand that the amount you are asking for is modest, but we were hoping that you would agree to sing for free. After all, this is for a good cause." The story goes that Woody laughed and said, "Well, yeah, I realize that. You know, I don't sing for bad causes."
On Cognitive Apprenticeship
The remarks that Barbara makes at this point in her reflection offer an insightful observation about the educational component of her work with families. She recognizes here an implicit dynamic that takes place in one of the important forums where she does her work: the face-to-face meeting between parents and school authorities. As it happens, my reading in the literature on teaching and learning has given me better tools for appreciating just how valuable her insight might be, and how she (and I) might build upon it.
On the surface, one might describe Barbara's role in parent-school meetings as classic "advocacy." Although these meetings do not involve a formal courtroom or a hearing procedure, and although there is no requirement that those accompanying parents to such meetings be attorneys, the role that the accompanying person plays can certainly be likened to traditional legal representation. In such settings, Barbara often speaks for the family based on preceding consultations she has held with them in preparation for the meeting. One of the main things she brings to the setting is her familiarity with the law governing the relationships involved, a familiarity that is immediately evident to the educational professionals at the meeting. She enters into the interaction with that law intensely in her mind, and it would not be at all unusual for her to make frequent reference to legal requirements during the course of the meeting. She may engage in explicit or implicit negotiations on behalf of the family during the course of the meeting. All of this looks a lot like what we law teachers would call "representation" and "advocacy," not "education."
But Barbara has noticed here that a related but quite different
dynamic is simultaneously taking place. In the parlance
of current educational theory, these meetings with authorities
are functioning as a kind of "cognitive apprenticeship" for the
families that she accompanies. Studies of the learning
process have flagged cognitive apprenticeship as one of the best
ways for learners to build competence and understanding in complex
fields. It turns out that learners demonstrably benefit
from being put in situations where they can observe and interact
with an expert -- watching that expert encounter a problem and
begin to make sense of it, seeing the expert's moves, and having
an opportunity to absorb something of the expert's way of thinking
about the problem. An important component of this process
is giving learners a chance to practice their own moves at the
side of the expert and under his or her friendly gaze, perhaps
supported as they do so by various kinds of cognitive "scaffolding"
arranged by the expert. Much of this practice activity
may take place well before the learner entirely understands the
nature of the problem. Apparently, learners best advance
to understanding of complex matters by growing into it through
cycles of supported practice and reflection carried out in fruitful
"proximity" to the expert mentor/teacher.
Barbara's observation makes me want to examine other examples of attorney-client relationships (or attorney-client-like relationships), looking for places where cognitive apprenticeships may be taking place, but where they could be strengthened if the attorney (or attorney-like teacher) were more conscious about the apprenticeship aspect of the activity and more familiar with the relevant literature on teaching and learning. I wonder how we might better encourage and prepare more lawyers to be "teachers" of their clients in this sense, able to work with them toward an outcome of greater independence and autonomy, at least when that seems suitable.
One good resource on the subject of cognitive apprenticeships is Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, & Susan Newman, "Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Crafts of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics," in L. B. Resnick (ed.), Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1989) pp. 453-494. |
