"Teachers are obligated to get the realities of others into their consciousness," declared Maxine Greene, professor emerita at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of Releasing the Imagination.
Reading literature can help teachers gain insight into others' experiences and ways others may be oppressed, Greene said. American literature is full of metaphors linked to oppression, she noted, "from the image of Hester Prynne on the scaffold in front of the prison door; to the windowless Wall Street office that compels Bartleby the Scrivener to say, I prefer not to'; to the steamboat charging down the river in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and plunging right through the raft; to the empty sky above the lifeboat in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat."
"When I hear talk about reform and change and hopelessness," Greene said, "I can't help referring to texts that surge up in my mind, because over the years they've made me notice barriers our society sets up, not only to fulfillment but to learning itself, to real learning, to the very idea that experience holds more than can possibly be predicted, to the hope of seeing and moving beyond."
"Student achievement should be defined by local communities," asserted Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association. "In some local communities, student achievement may be [defined as] increasing the retention rate between 8th grade and 12th grade for African American males. In some communities, it could be reducing teen pregnancy. In some communities, it will be the percentage of high school graduates who get into the Ivy League Schools. . . . But whatever student achievement is in your community, that's what we need to benchmark, that's what we need to rally the community around."
"To raise student achievement for all of our children—for children in the worst Bronx school and for economically privileged children in Greenwich, Conn.—it will take a community that cares about those children and those schools," Bryant said.
"How can we create this community that is suddenly going to come alive and support our schools?" she asked. By having important stakeholders in the community come together to discuss their vision for the local schools. "I think that school board members can be the conveners of that community conversation," Bryant said.
"Teachers need subject matter knowledge that is deeper and more flexible than what you need to know simply to follow the textbook," Linda Darling-Hammond of Teachers College, Columbia University, told her audience at the annual Cawelti Leadership Lecture.
"We need teachers who can come up with many representations of ideas, using many modalities—visual and auditory, graphic and verbal, and so on," Darling-Hammond said. Teachers also need to be able to discern where students' misconceptions come from and find ways to address them. "That means [teachers] have to have a substantial knowledge of the core concepts and ideas in the field and how they arise, as well as how to present information. They've got to be able to connect ideas and paint that grand conceptual map that kids can hang facts and other ideas onto.
"And they've got to know how to do science and history and writing and mathematical modeling, not just how to talk about it. That calls for a different kind of preparation in the subject areas; it [also requires] opportunities in professional development for teachers to go deep in subject matter."
Rosa Parks was not just a tired seamstress who happened to set off the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement, James Banks of the University of Washington, told his audience. Parks was already an activist, and the group of women she worked with actually began the movement, said Banks, an expert on multicultural education.
Citizenship education must include learning such stories, Banks said, and he recommended David Garrow's book The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Other books Banks recommended included William Wilson's When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, Diane August and Kenji Hakuta's Improving Schooling for Language Minority Children, Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children, and Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
Only by knowing about dark chapters in our history such as the decimation of the Lakota and the Japanese-American detention camps, Banks said, can we "deconstruct the notion of the other" and appreciate our shared humanity.