Sabbatical Project: The Beginning

“Not infrequently, training course participants call attention to ‘the danger of conscientizaçao’ in a way which reveals their own fear of freedom. Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic.”

––Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

There are voices I’m meant to keep with me, insights to hold as I embark on a seven-month long pedagogical journey to identify best practices for teaching incarcerated college students and anyone else my rural community college campus serves. These are the people of the forgotten and more impoverished southern Silicon Valley. Our students, like any students, hope to earn certificates, transfer to four-year institutions, or more fundamentally still, learn about the world, their place in it, and the potential each holds for transformation, creation, and how to best establish safety at a time when life is uncertain for many.

"Why teach using different cultural practices?" someone urges me to find the answer. "What are barriers to experiencing our authenticity?" asked another. Such questions emerged during brainstorming sessions I facilitated during the final weeks of the spring semester. I gathered tutors, teachers, and incarcerated and non-incarcerated students alike to anonymously frame questions and remind me of what to keep in mind as I explore four pedagogical approaches:

• Social Justice and Liberation Pedagogy
• Trauma Informed and Safety Seeking Frameworks.
• Improvisation and Play
• Mindfulness and Contemplation

You need to include more Latina activists, someone wrote. Remember to teach courage is the virtue that validates all others, wrote someone else. Personal stories are powerful and motivating, says a fifth. 

Each idea is expressed on a single post-it note. They clung, one to another, like flower petals, a riot of color in unruly clumps that settled at the bottom of the canvas bag within which I carried all this thought. It awaited organization and order, which I dreamed would appear come summer when I had the time to put each idea into place.

"What is the best way for trauma-effected people to learn trust?" they asked. "How much support does it take?" "How long?" "How can the scars of history help us appreciate the present?" "How does a teacher’s whiteness impact what happens in a classroom?" "Is it easier for students to enter conversations about race through a gender lens?" "What resources are available for helping facilitate anti-oppression activities?" "What do we say to those who don’t want to think in these terms?" "Is it OK to get up and move around during class?"

The college where I’ve been teaching English for 18 years has gifted me with this opportunity to explore these diverse and inter-related approaches, approaches that have shaped my teaching to lesser and greater degrees over the last two decades but within which I have never truly felt entirely grounded. 

My purpose is two-fold: to gain insight into best practices and program possibilities for the college’s inmate education program and to learn more about establishing good learning foundations for students who will be enrolling in our transfer level English classes, without the remediation we are used to providing. Our California state funders will no longer support the old model and now every community college is required to accept almost every student at the transfer level within the first year.

To answer the questions my sabbatical has generated and meet its objectives, I’ll visit other California community colleges, prison programs, and culturally rich community based projects and museums across the country. I’ll interview educators and experts who are leading voices in understanding how the ethnic, class, and gender identities of students and teachers alike affect classrooms, creativity, self-expression, and success. I’ll attend dance, improvisation, and mindfulness conferences and workshops to gain insight into the relationship between the mind, the body, and learning, and I’ll read and re-read books such as Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed(which provided the epigraph above) as well as Gilda Ochoa’s Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap, and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. 

My plan is to post what I learn here. Perhaps along the way you’ll want to share your own insights and questions, which will further enrich this anarchic exploration. With that in mind, let the image of this blank post-it note be your inspiration. 

Share your ideas and your voice, too, will be one I keep with me as I journey. 

Fresh Words from the Writers of San Benito County Jail

"Priceless is what comes to mind when we think of our Gavilan College classes .... Respect, gratitude, and genuine human caring is what this program has brought our community. Our writing becomes a part of our healing."

––The writers of A & C pods  

The writers of San Benito County Jail released two publications this spring: Creativity Takes Courageand Me, Myself, and Dopey: Lost and Found Expressions. Celebrations marking these publications are also a time to celebrate Gavilan College’s expanding inmate education program. 

At the jail, Gavilan offers classes in such things as GED preparation, creative writing, and career and personal development. Alongside the classes, there is a college counselor in place to help students set up long term education plans and help maintain their focus and hope while locked up. 

Having a place to land on the outside can make it much easier to avoid coming back, which is why across the state community colleges and universities are being supported to build programs like Gavilan’s.

According to students themselves, the program has already made a difference. For example, Eddie Kaufman, who attended every creative writing class available to him this semester, managed to overcome his fears about bad spelling and grammar long enough to get his voice on the page––a first for him. 

 “I have come to the point in my life, along with other inmates, that enough is enough. We have hit rock bottom and need to change,” said Kaufman, in his first college essay “Hunger for a Future”. “In Fall 2018, I’ll be attending classes on the Gavilan campus. For once in my life, I am excited. I can walk out of jail as a free and productive man, who can contribute to his community.”

To read more of Kaufman’s work and hear from other writers’ published in Me, Myself, and Dopey: Lost and Found Expressions follow this link and watch this blog for more information about its publication alongside its sister journal Creativity Takes Courage at BenitoLink.

Forget Me Not: For Alice who Lived and is Remembered

    "The gentleness of that moon-fish face told me at once: the old woman had just got out of prison.

     'She's a thief,' I said to myself. As I walked away from her, a kind of intense reverie, living deep within me and not at the edge of my mind, led me to think that it was perhaps my mother whom I had just met."––Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

I never met Alice. She chose not to attend San Benito County Jail’s weekly writing classes, so until she was dead, I hadn’t known she existed.

After her death, however, I learned of the great love students in my class held for Alice. One Wednesday, their sudden lethargy and irritability marked the room. Usually, writers arrive buoyant and ready to experiment. That day it was their sadness they brought with them. I wouldn’t have known of their loss had I not asked what lay behind their grim faces. Even so, it wasn’t something they expected me to understand. It was something between friends. A loss others might dismiss, so why risk talking about it. She’d been released. Soon afterward they learned she died. A friend was gone in a manner that touched on the fears they had about their own lives.

Alice was an elderly homeless woman, sometimes given to outbursts. Before her release, she had argued with not only jail guards but her cellies too. Cellmates, however, understood that anger wasn’t all there was to Alice. They loved her for her humor, her optimism, and her friendliness.

This is the Alice celebrated and written about in Forget Me Not, the latest collection of poetry and prose from the writers of San Benito County Jail. We hope you enjoy this work. Let it open your eyes and your heart to the stories of others like Alice, people in struggle, yes, but also people that bring meaning, connection, and light to those who look closest.

Please click here to learn more about Alice and the people who loved her: Forget Me Not.

Wilhelm’s Dream: God is on our Side

“If God is for us, who can be against us?”

––Romans 8:31

Last week, my good friend Brigita, who was back home visiting family, reached out via Skype, wanting to share her cousin Wilhelm’s dream. She believed it would convince me to let go of anger. She calls that my problem and Brigita is the type of person who wants only to help, which in itself sometimes makes me angry.

When Brigita and Wilhelm were children, she dreamed one day they would marry. Now she says she can hardly stand him. According to Brigita, he’s become a womanizer and a cad. When he visited her here in the states a few years ago, she paid for his every entertainment and washed his every dish, or so she said.

Still, she was driven to share Wilhelm’s dream with me. For her it was no mere dream; she called it a vision. “A warning,” she said, “for you.” Her pale skin seemed almost blue in the frosty room from which she spoke. “I’ve recorded it all right here, in English, on my phone. It’s your own future if you don’t change.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll listen.”

Brigita knows well I have a tendency toward self-righteousness and deep despair over the outcome of the US elections, a despair with which I can only endure by taking action, more and more action. I have marched; I have called; involved myself in repetitious discussions. Yet the newspaper headlines, which create in me the deepest anguish, go on reproducing and morphing into new more horrible realities at rapid and terrifying rates.

“Here,” said Brigita in response to my latest categorizing of the good and the bad, the sinners and sinned against. She pressed play and held the phone close to her computer’s mic.

For a moment, her face appeared to be float over a lavender sky. A painting, which hung on the far wall of the family study, glowed strangely behind her in a piercing morning light. It made Brigita seem further away than ever before; thus it was easier for me to consider Wilhelm’s words.

Suddenly––his voice. I’d met him exactly once. Indeed, we’d flirted. He’d bought me drinks with what turned out to be Brigita’s money. But the voice travelling via routes I only barely understand––is it via satellites up in the heavens or via cables under the sea––sounded more settled than I remembered. Sand in a masculine throat. A seductive forceful sound but for his accent, which was thick, and had me recalling, if only fleetingly, the Muppet character Swedish Chef. After that particular neural pathway was carved, everything Wilhelm said sounded like half prophecy half joke. An experience I could never share with my friend Brigita.

I will now transcribe Wilhelm’s words as best a Skype connection, her phone’s recording function, and my own memory allow.

“Well, if you insist.” I heard him say. “I will tell it again. Say to your friend hello. Yes. I remember her. Hello friend.”

“Stop it,” Brigita interrupted. “It’s not for that. Not everyone falls for your charms.”

Wilhelm sighed. Already my heart softened; I listened more intently. Brigita can be unnecessarily stern, and thus I was naturally on Wilhelm’s side. 

“Okay,” Wilhelm continued. “So it was two weeks ago. I waited for Yvonne to return to bed. Half-asleep. Yes. Overcome by this strange, well, dream. Yes, a dream I will call it because I was half slept.”

“Your vision,” Brigita replied. “It’s a holy vision Wilhelm, nothing less. And when visions arise it’s time to chase the women from your bed not wish for their return.”

“My wife, Brigita. Yvonne is now my wife.”

“I haven’t met her yet, and so you say.”

Wilhelm groaned but continued. “So, I waited. Yvonne, who you will meet, was somewhere down the hall. But I must have been asleep. Then, like a dream, I saw, no, felt myself rise over a crowd of––um––people, many people. Lifted heavenward. So, this must be a dream, no? A feeling of being lifted heavenward over a sea of, hmm, humanity below me? Yes! Humanity. The word I look for. A float sensation. Then I was given golden armor. Do you know about this? Remember? Oma’s icons. St. George and the Dragon? But it was me, of all people, lifted into heaven, given the golden sword, a helmet, a shield. No harm could be done me, I knew. I tell you, the light of heaven shone upon me. Then, down on a battlefield I went with heaven’s rays over me. I saw I was twice, no 10 times the size of other men. My men. Soldiers doing battle. Slewing enemies. Banners blew all around us, like in a movie, and horses kicking dust. We sliced through them all, enemy hordes at every side. Mountains of men. Horses too, falling. They made mountains around us. Soldiers climbed corpses to fight, going heavenward on the enemy’s back. My men they too cut down at times, but we were winning. I was sure of it. The light on me was strong. The enemy arriving. I slaughtered, wielded my sword in a glorious light. A brutal battle, yes. Losses on all sides, but while the slaughter continued, I held not one doubt. Our cause, my cause––a righteous one. No question. It was easy to kill. I did it easily. Then, suddenly, the fighting stopped. We––no––I had won. No one left to slaughter. The enemy at our feet. All their bodies broken. Survivors, my army, me, we should be rejoicing, no? The light dissipated. I felt this horrible awakening. The golden sky it was cloudless and gray. For a moment, I stood alone on that field, Brigita, surrounded by carnage, which was my inheritance. The bloody field––my prize. The world as I had known it, everyone I could have ever loved wiped from Earth. My soldiers and me, we had made a new world, and we stood upon its foundation. The bodies underfoot. All that loss that was our victory, a terrible victory. Yes our enemy defeated, but loss that’s what we’d won.  Our brothers; our family; our humanity gone in the fighting. I understood then, God was on our side because God is on all sides at once. God goes where we go, Brigita. We cannot be without God. This is why we must be careful. Go where ever we go with love, so the world we create will be beautiful in his––”

“In her,” Brigita interrupted.

“Yes. All the Gods. So the world will be beautiful in Gods’ sight, we must go with love, Brigita. Do you understand?”

“Yes, of course. I understand! It’s why I’m recording. Do you understand? From now on, you are meant to lead a chaste life.”

“Oh, Brigita. I’m not sure you do understand. There is nothing wrong with sensuality. We have these bodies––

“Is that what you call it sensuality when you lie to women, when you make them cry?”

“I never lie, Brigita. I…”

But she huffed in such a way he shut up. He took a breath. “I am not sure you understand this,” said Wilhelm, “this dream I had.” Years of the cousin’s old enmity leaked into his voice and then a whiff of an old flirtation too. “Your friend, she will understand?”

“My friend,” said Brigita, more cross than I have ever heard. “She will hear your vision, and if she is smart she will make good use of it. But you should be given no credit for having it. It only passed through you, Wilhelm. Don’t go thinking it means anything special about you.”

The voices suddenly stopped.

On my screen, Brigita’s face frozen in a less than beautiful state. I waited for the technology of the ages to catch up with time itself. For surely in that other far off place, Wilhelm had gone on talking and Brigita would have had something more to say to me about her cousin Wilhelm’s dream.

Briefly the Skype connection sputtered back to life. Momentarily, Brigita’s face bounced about the screen, appearing first on one side then the next, but I couldn’t understand a word she said. The pace of her voice was out of sync with the movement of her lips.

“Brigita,” I called out. “Say nothing. I can’t hear you.” Once again that face of hers froze in place, but this time the frosty room’s light shone upon her just so. The painting framed her head in such a way that she looked like a painting herself. She was my Brigita. Lit up with urgent love for me and, I suppose, for Wilhelm too. She was a pleasure to look at, glowing in a distant light. I took my breath and waited and adored.

*A note to readers. This story, like all stories is based on some truth. Brigita leaped into my consciousness some time ago and Wilhelm soon followed. They help me explore things that might otherwise be difficult write about and share.

Hope and Fear

"We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize."

––Thich Nhat Hanh

Each day, two white boards in a peer-tutoring space at the rural community college where I teach, record students' hopes and fears. 

Recently, one anonymous hopeful someone longed “to make a million” while on the other board somebody else wrote, “I need to see a doctor, but I’m not sure I can afford it.”

In reading these boards, you learn a lot, especially about students’ fears. Nowadays some, indeed, are afraid. “Will ICE be knocking on my door today,” wrote an anonymous someone a few weeks ago. Those words sat beside another’s fear that they hadn’t left enough time to finish an essay. “I’m so hungry,” wrote somebody else.

Seeing fears written in a public but mostly in an anonymous way somehow makes them more visceral, something I wanted to capture in this post. But I also wanted to document the ways in which the space and the people in it have made hope more tangible too.

One day not long ago, just outside my office door, a young man and woman reflected on a book they were reading for one of their English classes. These Chicano and Mexican American students named all the ways they related to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, expressing surprise and delight that a book written by an Haitian American academic told part of their own story as well. A second young man joined the discussion and together the three talked about masculinity’s challenges and traps and the need to open to the feminine and the feminine within the divine, which was something they felt connected them to their indigenous ancestors.

Only a few feet away, the newly organized Literary Society club meeting was underway. From across the room, I could hear laughter and sensed the joy it contained as the group made plans for a new student journal. This club had been inactive for about ten years, so it was quite a feat that suddenly more than a dozen people were willing to come together and spearhead a project with so much potential meaning on our campus. 

Only a few minutes later, a young man––an international student, perhaps the only one with this formal designation on our campus––came to my door expressing interest in the glitter jars that decorate tables about the room. They are like homemade snow globes and are there whenever anxiety or a need for delight overtakes someone––lift, shake, watch the glitter settle, and feel a bit more settled yourself.

Like many schools, our college has developed this international program to collect big student fees. We imagine our campus populated by foreigners, foreigners with pockets deep enough to save us from whatever looming financial crisis may be on the horizon. But it’s hard to imagine why any one rich enough to fly to the US would choose this tiny underfunded campus when close by are larger cities with the kind of well-funded colleges one sees on television programs America exports overseas.

Nevertheless, this young man chose us, and he is far from home in every way. The jars help him, he said, whenever he feels distressed. 

It was a pleasure to receive his gratitude as the jars mean a great deal to me too. I encouraged him to watch the short film Just Breathe (available on youtube) to learn more about the jars' origins and purpose without telling him I tear up every time I screen it for myself.

He smiled and made a suggestion. You should have bowls of fruits too, he said, and nuts, on the tables to feed hungry students and the smell of the fruit the textures and so on, it would excite the senses and help people with their writing.

Yes, I thought, what that would be a beautiful thing to do.

Early that morning I’d gone for a run, a practice returned to my life after a two-decades absence, and now, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I can’t get enough of it. I could run for hours, it feels, all around the town. Lately, there is the scent of the sea even up in the old neighborhoods, and at this time of year blooming cherries. Peregrine falcons fly high overhead, and old women walk by with dogs who sniff my ankles. I rub the dogs’ heads and say good morning to the ladies knowing one day, if I live, I will be old because we only ever go one direction.

The memories of these runs sometimes come with me to school, and I feel the blood pumping through my body as I look out at the students working away on their essays or talking with friends, and there is purpose in their focus. They are at it. They are here. I think, yes, there are things to fear in the world right now and so many reasons to hope.