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Editor’s Introduction

2022; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/719203

2153-0327

Andy Kaplan,

Evaluation and Performance Assessment

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Introduction Attention as OpportunityAndy KaplanAndy KaplanEvanston, Illinois, United States of America Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMy good friend Gene Garver made a remark years ago that at first seemed daunting and has since become a guide to ambiguity and choice: “Opportunity and danger are the place of action.” What’s daunting is the implication that action occurs at an intersection of forces, and beware the fool who is not mindful, like a pedestrian looking in only one direction when crossing the street. The fool may get across safely, but then again might not: the outcome may have more to do with the alertness of a good driver or the luck of a timely red light. The remark leads beyond caution to invitation: if we want to act responsibly, we need first to respond to the fullness of the place we’re in. The place is formless until we choose to define it by paying attention, observing it in detail, drawing back from it to note context and circumstance, becoming mindful of what lies within and what shapes it from without. The place of action is a place in the world outside as well as a place in the mind. The act of paying attention draws us into this place, in some ways altering it: attention is a way of participating. When we participate, we establish a share in this place, and in this participation, we are both responding and becoming responsible. Opportunity and danger are the moral extremes of any choice we make. Awareness of these extremes makes us responsible for the action we take.We begin this issue with a symposium in honor of Patricia Carini and the discipline of Descriptive Inquiry that she created, practiced, and taught for so many years at the Prospect Center for Education and Research in North Bennington, Vermont. The title of the symposium is “Attending with Care.” The words are simple, but the connection is profound. I glance, hear, smell, taste many things, but the sense experience is transitory, and I move on. I may stop for a moment at one thing or another, but the moment is not yet meaningful, not unless something more, something soulful occurs. When I attend, something very different occurs. In her loving tribute to her lifetime partner Mary Malone Cook, Mary Oliver describes what she learned about attention from observing Cook’s work as a photographer.It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness—an empathy—was necessary if the attention was to matter.(Cook and Oliver 2007, 72)Attention begins with the report of the senses, but it flourishes through attraction and investment. Byron Will, my first photography teacher, insisted that when we came upon something we wanted to compose into an image, we needed to approach it from every side, from near, from far, observing and trying to capture the way a person, a thing, a place is present. It is so much easier but so much less satisfying to settle on the first impression, the initial report. As Byron insisted, we don’t take pictures, we make them. We make a satisfying image by careful attention to the possibilities of angle, perspective, light, contrast, and shadow. First impressions can be dangerous because we may be missing something, perhaps something beautiful, and only careful attention can reveal and overcome that danger. Composing the image in just this way in just this light then presents a new set of dangers and opportunities when we develop the image; and if the developing work overcomes the dangers of too much shadow here or too many bright spots there, there are further opportunities and dangers awaiting when we print the image at a certain size on a certain kind of paper, when we choose a frame, when we find the right place to hang it. An action resolves the tensions of opportunity and danger, but it also creates new opportunities and new dangers. Gerhard Richter was once asked how he knew that he was finished with a painting. He replied, “When there are no more problems to solve” (Belz 2011).Pat Carini developed attention into a discipline that she applied to a wide variety of educational topics. I first met Pat at a conference held in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of The School in Rose Valley in 2004. The discipline of Descriptive Inquiry was central to the conference, which began that fall and continued the following spring. Pat was a featured speaker at the beginning and again at the end of the fall conference’s second day. There had been many presentations and discussion groups on the first day. More than 200 participants from schools across the United States had given us glimpses of programs and experiments. One school (I’ve forgotten the name) featured a four-year curriculum cycle of central subjects, which meant that a student in first grade might study China and then return to the same subject in fifth grade. At our host school, woodworking was the essential subject that each student engages every year. At another school, block building was the ongoing central subject. One of the practices that I could only wish my own school would adopt was a long-standing feature of the Miquon School. Once a month, Miquon held an all-school assembly called The Good of the School, inviting all members of the school to speak about whatever they deemed imperative for the school to do to address problems and improve the school. The array of practices was brilliant. I envied each of these schools, but there was so much here that I ended the morning in some confusion. Like Emily Dickinson’s hungry person presented with the sumptuous meal she’d for “all the years” marveled at from afar, “The Plenty hurt me—‘twas so new” (Dickinson 1999, 203).In the afternoon of that first day, the participants broke up into small groups for Descriptive Inquiries. As a high school teacher, used to being the only adult in the classroom and rarely coteaching or working with colleagues on curriculum, these sessions were my initiation into a process of cooperative inquiry that was familiar to my colleagues who taught younger children. For many of my high school colleagues, autonomy was a virtue. Whatever else was going on at school, they could close the classroom door and be in control. For me, autonomy was merely isolation, and closing the classroom door (required by the building code) felt mostly lonely. That first day was exhausting and exhilarating; in honor of our daughter Sarah who has given our family so many gorgeous neologisms, I told my wife that night that I was “exhaustalated.” What to make of all these presentations, all these inspired and inspiring peers from so many schools, all these practices and ideals? Enter Pat Carini.In my editor’s introduction to the Schools issue that featured the work of the conference, I noted her effect on a bedazzled participant.I had heard of the Prospect Institute from my colleague Joan Bradbury, who had sung Pat’s praises for years. Now, anyone who earns Joan’s praise is certainly worth noting, but I had never seen Pat at work before this conference. What she did that day confirms all that Joan has said, and for me, Pat Carini is my hero, one of America’s essential educators, a woman of vision, compassion, and sublime intelligence. Twice on that final day, she brought together the themes, issues, problems, and possibilities of 200 people, and she did it in a way that I would call sensational, except that Pat is so modest withal that I’ll settle for inspirational.(Kaplan 2005, 16)Pat described her work that day as “pulling threads.” To start that last day of the Fall part of the conference (which continued in April 2005 with follow-up work), Pat ranged over the reviews and the ideas she had listened to the day before. She insisted on the power of listening: hearing each other empowers us to speak. The Descriptive Reviews we had heard embodied a range of issues, schools, and ideas. But the thread that Pat pulled that morning was the common ground of educators listening carefully to children. She called that listening the polar opposite of the current (alas, still current) urgency to put children into categories and tracks. When we divide learners, we divide learning; having made the division, we often find it’s impossible to put the child or the learning back together. Pat urged us to move ahead with the work we had shared. She urged us to forgo certainty and instead embrace complexity. Whatever self-styled reformers might assert, the goal and practice of education is not efficiency. Education, she told us, finds its reward and guides its practice in the beauty of the particular.At the end of that long day, a day of collective exploration and planning in breakout groups that the organizers called “learning circles,” we assembled one last time, and Pat helped us assess the work we had done and survey the paths that lay ahead. Pat applauded the work of the Descriptive Review sessions as exemplars of what she called “embodied knowledge,” the kind of experience-near awareness of children and schools that Clifford Geertz had declared essential to anthropology. When we seek to fix or control children and schools in the name of standardization, we work against that kind of knowledge because we willfully ignore the differences, the uniqueness, and thus the humanity, of the persons and institutions we standardize. If we ran a school according to the mandates of No Child Left Behind, Pat declared, we would not have a school at all. Our presentations, discussions, and planning at the conference demonstrated a willingness as well as a capacity to educate children in spite of often absurd, usually restrictive, ever-repressive regulations. She praised us for making it possible for schools to function, and she extolled the variety and willingness to engage students as our greatest strength. We showed a willing disregard for quick fixes or indeed anything fixed—instead we searched relentlessly and intelligently to create the experiences and the schools that our children deserve.Pat’s speech was boffo improvisation, and it left me breathless but deeply energized. I was now ready for the next stage of the struggle. I liken the feeling that day to the first time I saw the movie Casablanca in a screening at my college. Toward the end of the movie, the French denizens of Rick’s café suffer a rousing chorus of “Deutschland Über Alles” from a group of rowdy Nazis. The other patrons listen in dismay, but then the singer with the house band strikes up “La Marseillaise,” a gesture of defiance that the patrons slowly but steadily join. By the time the song reached “Aux armes, citoyens,” I was on my feet in that auditorium, singing at the top of my lungs. That was the feeling that Pat roused in me that unforgettable day. Now it’s my turn to pull threads.We begin this issue with the first part of a symposium in honor of Pat Carini. The symposium will continue with parts 2 and 3 in subsequent issues. The symposium began with an outpouring of sorrow and gratitude after Pat’s death. Friends, colleagues, and protégés mourned her passing and celebrated her many gifts to classroom teachers and teacher educators. I heard about these tributes from Joan Bradbury and Cara Furman, and I asked them to become guest editors of a symposium in Pat’s honor. Joan and Cara sent a call for papers to people associated with Pat and the Summer Institutes she ran for so many years. The response was welcome, enthusiastic, and overwhelming. Joan and Cara encouraged the 27 respondents to share their work over the summer of 2021. Then Cara organized a Zoom workshop in the fall of 2021. She created smaller working groups for the day, so each member could read the contributions of the other members. On the workshop day, group members took turns leading a review session of each article. It was my first experience of a remote workshop, and though I still yearn for a day when we can meet together safely, the day was invigorating, intense, and highly productive. When the revised articles from that day came into Schools for review, they were already excellent. Joan and Cara then selected the articles that would form the first part of a symposium that will continue in future issues.We start with the republication of an excerpt from Pat’s own work, an eloquent introduction to the meaning and the value of Descriptive Inquiry. In “Meditation: On Description,” Pat illustrates the power of description as a creative process that puts us into relationship with the subject we attend. She charts the rhythm of drawing near and detaching to contemplate, to take in, to appreciate. Description is a discipline of inquiry that is both intellectual and moral. It is a discipline that creates value as well as humility: description opens vistas without end, because for all we learn about a subject, we also learn that there is more to the subject than we can ever learn. This attitude of respect and humility characterizes the contributions to the symposium that follows.Charles Ragland provides an invocation for the symposium with “Patricia Carini: A List Poem.” Ragland calls to mind Pat’s presence, at once formidable and inviting. He sketches both the warmth and charm of a curious educator and the relentless dedication of a powerful intelligence to discovering the great gifts of others, especially children. In “Valuing Children—Each and All: Pat Carini’s Call for a Humane Education,” Margaret Himley enlarges Ragland’s sketch to a series of portraits based on her 40 years of learning from and collaborating with Pat. Himley describes the important elements of Pat’s practice through careful and vivid examples of Pat in her interactions with children and in her many important writings. For several of those books, Himley was a coauthor. Himley illustrates the ongoing power of Descriptive Inquiry, ongoing because the more you are able to describe, the more you see, and the more you see, the more you realize there is still to see. She presents each of the published works in some detail, emphasizing the distinctive contribution each of them makes to the world of Descriptive Inquiry. The beauty of this world is the beauty of the particular. I’ve called these detailed descriptions portraits, and the overall effect is that Himley has created a gallery in which we can glimpse the radical humanity of Pat’s career.Gina Ritscher shows some of the ways that descriptive practices shape the pedagogy of classroom experiences. “Teaching to Children’s Capacity: Play and Phenomenology” focuses on three children Ritscher has worked with in public school settings. Acknowledging the difficulty of working within a curriculum and testing regime imposed by a school system, Ritscher connects instructional moments to the strengths and interests of her students. The grounding in phenomenology that Pat had taught and nurtured in Ritscher’s graduate program is the underlying resource that Ritscher draws on to attend closely to her students. As an intervention specialist, Ritscher sees students who come to her with supposed deficiencies. Inspired by Pat’s teaching and mentoring, Ritscher attends to her students carefully to discern what they can do, not what they can’t. Her efforts aim at finding ways to encourage children to play, the vital core of all meaningful learning.Louisa Cruz-Acosta fondly recalls the attraction and influence of Pat’s work in “Letter to Pat, HOME Away from Home.” She sketches the joys of participating in the Summer Institutes for much of her career as a public school teacher in New York. There was great intellectual stimulation because the disciplines of collaborative inquiry opened up a new world of pedagogy. More than that, Cruz-Acosta celebrates the comradeship that developed as she learned and grew along with a group of educators from so many different places and backgrounds.Bruce Turnquist came to Descriptive Inquiry with a lifelong fascination for words. He writes about one of the descriptive processes he learned from Pat in “Care with Words: Reflective Conversation Weaving through a Teaching Life.” The descriptive process of Reflection on a Word extends beyond definition to collaborative inquiry that expands personal reflection in conversation. When he limited himself to definition, words had fixed meanings, and that meant as a teacher that Turnquist was not attending to the weight and valence of specific words in the lives of the children he taught. He illustrates the broadening and empowering experience of Descriptive Inquiry with examples from across his many years of participating in the Summer Institutes. These examples of collaborative inquiry help us see the ways in which complexity emerges within the descriptive process, beginning with the dedication to listening to each voice and the spirit of wonder that reflective conversation encourages.Jeffrey Frank focuses on Pat’s philosophy of education rather than the practice of Descriptive Inquiry in “Labeling Students as a Form of Epistemic Injustice: Descriptive Review as a Practice of Freedom.” The focus is important, Frank argues, because we need to appreciate the ways in which philosophical thinking becomes the foundation of teaching practice. If we want to reform and improve education as a practice, we need to pay attention to the connections between thinking and acting. In particular, Frank asks that we think about the ways in which we label the students we teach and then interact with them according to those labels. Recent scholarship has alerted us to the dangers of this unreflective labeling as a form of prejudice against certain groups and kinds of students, an epistemic injustice. Descriptive Review begins with a dedication to disciplined attention as a prerequisite to any meaningful evaluation of what a student knows and can do. Frank calls Descriptive Review an epistemically just practice, a reparative and healing pathway to free both teacher and student.The remaining articles in this issue open further vistas of attention. In “Performing Good Teaching: Principles of Pedagogical Progressivism in Classroom Observation Reports of New York City, 1923–1953,” Lizabeth Cain has made use of observation reports on classroom teachers to illustrate the practice of good teaching by progressive teachers in midcentury America. Cain’s remarkable study of these reports draws on observations of six New York City public school teachers, all of them women and all of them subsequently fired for violations of a recently enacted state law forbidding the employment of anyone associated with the Communist Party. The observations show us classroom practices over a period of 30 years, teachers engaging students in activities and discussions that mark moments of authentic learning. These are teachers who took chances, who created conditions for study and participation, who gave and thereby earned the respect of their students. The poignant fact of that dark moment in American history, however, is that these reports of exemplary practice failed to persuade administrators to retain these teachers.The next three articles focus on the ways in which two years of global pandemic have altered attention and the capacity for care in the dynamics of schooling. As every teacher and student well knows, distance learning is inevitably distant from learning. How do we pay attention to the dynamics of a classroom that only exists on a screen? What are the compromises and alterations that we must make in these conditions? In “Realities of Implementing Community-Based Learning during Lockdown: Lessons from a Troubled Year,” Raunak Chaudhari, Smriti Karanjit Manandhar, and Bertram C. Bruce examine the fortunes and misfortunes they encountered implementing a program at King’s College in Kathmandu, Nepal. They had conceived the program as a meaningful experiment in education reform, an effort to connect classroom learning to the needs and desires of the world outside the university. Although the onset of the pandemic seriously altered the original design of the course, the course provided many valuable experiences as well as an important example of how the ambitions of integrated learning create conditions of adaptability that are well suited to emergent and emergency circumstances.Schools all over the world have had to withstand and then tried to overcome the obstacles and inadequacies that have bedeviled schooling practices. Although situations have varied, the pandemic struck especially hard in Palestine. Mahyoub Bzour, Muhamad Shakirin Mispan, and Fathiah Mohammed Zuki present the experiences of teachers, students, and parents in the Occupied West Bank in “Teacher, Student, and Parent Experiences of Virtual Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine.” The injustices, destruction, and suffering imposed by Israeli rule have severely compromised education in Palestine for many years. The shift to virtual learning stretched limited resources beyond the breaking point for most schools and families. Without reliable access to computers and internet, and with inadequate training in the technological skills that a new pedagogy required, teaching and learning suffered greatly.Liat Goldman Douglas and Rhianna Casesa describe the effort to guide four young children during a period of home schooling. Douglas was their teacher as well as the mother of two of them. Douglas and Casesa, colleagues in a school of education, look at the ways in which these young children develop and demonstrate empathy. In a time of enforced isolation such as few of us have ever known, interconnection and interdependence have become the great challenge of our time. “Building Back Better with Poems: Exploring Theory of Mind/Reflective Functioning, Emotional Literacy, and Poetry in a Pandemic Pod” features the drawings as well as the poetry of these children. Their engagement with metaphor illustrates the capacity that even very young people have to pay attention to—that is, to care for—others.“A Call for Action: Making Space for Religious Rhetoric” by Ginger Barnhart and Elise Olan argues that educators need to pay attention to the ways in which students’ religious identities lead to ways of thinking and judging. They ground their argument in a description of what happened when Barnhart encouraged her eighth-grade students to consider the impact of religious rhetoric on the ways we think about and discuss the Holocaust. The authors speculate that one of the reasons Americans find it so difficult to disagree without being disagreeable is that we do not understand or even want to deal with the ways in which religious faith guides the thinking and feeling of so many. They describe the effects of exploring religious rhetoric with this group of students, and they hope that broadening the conversation in this way becomes part of a larger curricular practice that gives students the tools and the experiences of civil discourse.Paul Michalec reviews Reimagining the Call to Teach: A Witness to Teachers and Teaching. Michalec praises the power and scope of a remarkable book, finding much to ponder and learn from in Hansen’s reworking of the book he wrote 25 years ago, a book he had to reimagine because the world in general and teaching in particular have changed so much. Michalec respects the enterprise, and he gives us many excellent examples of why every classroom teacher and teacher educator should read this book, but he also does much more. Michalec illustrates just why the book is so compelling by describing what happened when he taught it this past semester in a teacher education course.ReferencesBelz, Corinna, dir. 2011. Gerhard Richter Painting. Berlin: Zero-One Film.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarCook, Molly Malone, and Mary Oliver. 2007. Our World. Boston: Beacon.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDickinson, Emily. 1999. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKaplan, Andy. 2005. “Reclaiming Schools as Places of Promise.” Schools: Studies in Education 2 (2): 7–22.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Schools Volume 19, Number 1Spring 2022 Published in association with the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719203 Views: 345 © 2022 Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.