school

Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

mandy — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0000

By Meghan Huppuch, Mandy Van Deven, Joanne N. Smith

Difficulties concentrating in school, shame, depression, guilt, fear, low self-esteem, poor body image, and powerlessness are just some of the repercussions that victims of sexual harassment at school experience, according to research conducted by Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). This Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization works to “improve gender and race relations and socioeconomic conditions for [the] most vulnerable youth and communities of color.” Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Megan Huppuch of GGE have collaboratively written Hey, Shorty!, which tells GGE’s story, while providing a model for teens to teach their peers what constitutes sexual harassment and how to prevent it. The book also gives activists, educators, parents and students a hands-on guide to combat sexual harassment and violence in their schools and neighborhoods.

In September 2001, just a few months after GGE had started meeting to play basketball, an 8-year-old girl was raped on her way to school in the area. In response to the victim blaming that GGE founder Joanne Smith heard, she decided to discuss gender stereotypes and discrimination with the girls in the league. This evolved into Gender Respect Workshops, developed and facilitated by Mandy Van Deven with male and female students in the classroom. She discovered that sexual harassment was a major issue in the lives of the students, particularly girls and LGBTQ youth. Soon after, the Sisters in Strength program was born, and today it has become a paid year-long internship for teen girls of color to advocate for the enforcement of sexual harassment policies in New York City public schools through workshops and direct action.

Sisters in Strength’s first task was to raise awareness about the problem in the community, which led to their making Hey... Shorty!, a short film that later won Best Youth Documentary at the Roxbury Film Festival. They screened their film at the Street Harassment Summit, where they shared what they had learned with other members of the community.

A second Sisters in Strength project involved hands-on participatory action research. The teen interns collected information through surveys, focus groups, and slam books, or notebooks with written prompts that students can respond to anonymously. After compiling their data, they concluded that sexual harassment was rampant and normalized. Their research results were presented at GGE's Gender Equality Festival to other community organizations. Under Meghan Huppuch’s leadership, GGE went on to form the Coalition for Gender Equity in Schools with more than twenty other area organizations.

The work of GGE may well have given us the solution to bullying that we have so desperately sought. When we are sexually harassed, we believe we are alone and somehow deserve this treatment. In other words, we internalize our pain and suffer in silence. But from GGE’s research and community action, we see that this pervasive problem lies not within the person being harassed, but with the external forces that perpetuate and enable sexual harassment to exist in our schools and on our streets.

GGE is an empowering initiative for teens, our future leaders, and Hey, Shorty! is an essential resource for parents, teachers and community leaders who want to take action against bullying and sexual harassment in their communities. Chock full of capacity-building activities and ideas, Hey, Shorty! is indispensable for anyone who wants to create an environment where everyone thrives.

Written by: Heather Leighton, April 30th 2011

Arcadia Falls

brittany — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Carol Goodman

Ballantine Books

Meg Rosenthal needs a fresh start after the death of her husband. She gave up her career as an artist when her daughter Sally was born, but when she is left with virtually nothing except for a barely functional car, she finds a job teaching folklore and English at a small boarding school for young artists in upstate New York. Sally, now a teenager and a promising artist herself, is admitted to the Arcadia School where her mother will work. Meg hopes that this new career will not only allow her to research the school’s founders—Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt—for her dissertation, but perhaps she will also find the daughter she once knew instead of the sullen girl who hides away with her iPod and drawings.

The Arcadia School is the perfect setting for a gothic campus novel, having inspired its creators to write and illustrate many of their own fairy tales. This book is replete with many signature fairy tale elements: a cottage in the woods, an orphan, a murderous villain, and even a Prince Charming of sorts. However, the fairy tales of Arcadia Falls are not the stuff of Disney movies; rather, they are more akin to the Grimm Brothers’ darker stories. Perhaps the darkest element of the school’s past is the tragic death of Lily Eberhardt, who fell into a clove while allegedly leaving the school to run off with her lover, her body missing for weeks before anyone realized that she had never made it off the school’s grounds. Shortly after Meg and Sally arrive, a student falls into the same deep valley during one of the school’s many Pagan rituals. It does not take long before Meg and others at the school begin to wonder if this death was truly an accident.

Carol Goodman’s Arcadia Falls is reminiscent of her earlier novel, The Lake of Dead Languages, a similarly dark boarding school story in which there are mysterious recurring deaths. In this rendition, Goodman delivers a rich and fast-paced novel that moves fluidly between the history of the Arcadia School, the changeling tale written by the school’s founders, and Meg and Sally’s contemporary story. Passages from the changeling story and from Lily’s journal add depth and authenticity to the novel. Keeping the facts straight in this complex, multi-generational plot line can be difficult at times, but ultimately Goodman achieves a thought provoking comparison between the lives of female artists in the mid-twentieth century and today.

While there are numerous subplots built into the book, the overarching question Goodman asks is whether a woman can be both a mother and an artist. The Arcadia School’s founders were required to sacrifice family life for the sake of their careers, while Meg initially did just the opposite. Yet, in rebuilding her life, Meg comes to realize that if she wants to teach her daughter the virtues of being a strong, independent woman, she must find a way to juggle her responsibilities. This is a message that will resonate with many modern readers questioning whether the paths toward family and career must be mutually exclusive.

Written by: Melanie Goodman, April 8th 2011

Teacher at Point Blank: Confronting Sexuality, Violence, and Secrets in a Suburban School

alicia — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Jo Scott-Coe

Aunt Lute Books

When Jo Scott-Coe began teaching in the same suburban California high school she’d graduated from four years earlier, she had to overcome her reluctance to call former teachers by their first names. Once that was accomplished, she set out to bring new life to the literature and writing classes she was assigned.

In seventeen essays Scott-Coe lays bare the disappointments and frustrations that marred her eleven years in the classroom. While the book is highly anecdotal—and cannot be read as a general indictment of the educational system--she does hit several general themes, including the way educators—eighty percent of them female—are mistreated by Boards of Education, parents, and students.

To begin, Scott-Coe notes society’s “schizophrenia of reverence and contempt” for teachers. On one hand, she explains, teachers are presumed to be “angels,” long-suffering nurturers and enablers of youth. On the other, they’re treated with contempt, disparaged as overpaid civil servants or lazy paper pushers. The real issues they face—in terms of educational policy, pedagogical proficiency, and their own personal and professional development—never see the light of day in these discussions.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an essay called "Recovering Teacher." In it, Scott-Coe painstakingly chronicles the decline, and then death, of her colleague Neil Webb. A scholar who began his career as a Latin and German instructor, Webb was arbitrarily reassigned to another discipline once the district gutted language programs in the late 1980s. Scott-Coe posits the shift as the administration’s way of emphasizing “the interchangeable nature of subject matter while also disrespecting his primary expertise.” Whatever the bureaucracy’s motivation, the end result was the same: Webb had no choice but to accept the transfer if he wanted to retain his job.

Still, after the shift ,Webb’s peers and students noticed his discernible decline: He lost weight and, always a heavy drinker, began coming to school drunk. When his driver’s license was suspended, they snickered, sidestepping conversations that might have addressed his out-of-control behavior. When he was finally terminated, people breathed a sign of relief, as if his firing was inevitable.

Somewhat later, his home burned down; not long afterwards he was found dead, alone in a seedy motel room. “I still wonder what might have happened if the school staff, as a community, had confronted Webb,” Scott-Coe writes. “We might have seen him as a struggling human being instead of scapegoating him as the problem employee, the exotic and tortured genius who would never fit in, or the pathetic colleague who made us feel less bad about our own problems.“

It’s a painful, if moving account.

Scott-Coe also writes of sexual tension in the classroom, and of the violent undercurrent noted by most of the teachers she worked with. That she and her colleagues had no forum to discuss these issues is absurd. Even more ridiculous, when legitimate questions were aired, administrators served up meaningless platitudes in lieu of practical advice. On top of this, Scott-Coe had to contend with preparing her students for a multitude of constantly-changing standardized tests and had to counsel them—with little-to-no prior training—for personal problems, from eating disorders, to cutting, to domestic abuse.

Small wonder that Teacher at Point Blank is angst-filled. A deeply personal and sad narrative, Scott-Coe lambastes the enormous commitment that is expected of teachers. It then begs the question: How can their stature be elevated while preparing them to cope more effectively with complex classroom and bureaucratic issues?

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, February 17th 2011

Learning to Behave Naturally

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Directed by Tamarah Cohen

Learning to Behave Naturally is a seventy-six-minute documentary based on a series of interviews in a language class at the University of Western Japan. A cross-section of students and faculty of diverse ages, gender, race, and social classes talk freely about childhood experiences regarding their gendered roles, interests, and behaviors. The film re-affirms our stereotypical divisions between boys and girls, and confirms our “accepted truth” that young children in any country and of any social class, race, or gender play happily together without being aware of any differences between them until conscious parents, teachers, or other adults teach them to be view and participate in society though gendered roles.

All participants state that boys in any country wear blue colors while girls wear pink, that this has been the norm for centuries. Japanese elementary school children will be placed in a “boys only class” or a “girls only class,” with boys being the “chosen people.” They have to be strong, are allowed to be “wild”, and can go out at night. They can play football or basketball, and appear controlled and powerful. Boys are not allowed to cry from an early age as it is not a “manly” emotion. Girls, on the other hand, have to be sensitive, graceful, and play with their Barbie dolls. They play while learning to be homemakers.

This gendered identity is decided by parents and society at the children’s early age. The rules and traditions of adults make children aware of their differences and, in fact, curb their freedom to behave naturally. Therefore, the title of the video is very appropriate to the message conveyed in it. We learn to behave in certain ways because of our conscious society, not because we are made up this way. Cohen’s film can serve as a valuable visual source in a sociology or women’s studies class at any university in the world.

Written by: Anna Hamling, June 3rd 2009

Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in American Schools

admin — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:19:00 +0000

By Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfeld

University of Virginia Press

This dense volume brings together a wealth of scholarly essays that address the topic of integration in American schools in the early twenty-first century. The book is the fruit of a collaborative research roundtable convened by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Harvard University in 2004.

2004 was also the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka that led to the end of legal segregation in American schools. However, fifty years after Brown the authors of these essays look deeply into what is working, what is not working, and what has been forgotten since the desegregating schools was a serious project. Many of the essays put the focus squarely on the damage wrought by President Bush’s education agenda and No Child Left Behind, particularly the lack of bilingual education and the focus on high stakes testing.

Written by a range of researchers from developmental psychologists to education professors the essays in Lessons in Integration provide a range of scholarship that supports education policy makers and practitioners who are advocating for strategies that value students cultural backgrounds and make schools and classrooms welcoming, safe learning environments for all. Many of the chapters, with their charts, graphs, and formulas, may be overly scientific and dry for the casual reader, but this book will be a valuable resource for those in education studies.

Two of the most compelling essays break out of the scientific style employed by the other authors and focus on case studies. "Desperate to Learn: The Schooling Experience of Latinas in North Carolina" by Maria Teresa Unger Palmer documents the mismatch between secondary schools structure and the needs and expectations of immigrant students. It does so by documenting the experiences of thirteen Latina students over the course of several years. The students’ voices in Palmer’s piece remind readers what the authors of the book aim to do: better serve students from a range of backgrounds and provide quality education for all.

"Preparing Teachers for Multiracial and Underserved Schools" by Christine E. Sleeter focuses on the need to train a more diverse group of teachers and teachers who are prepared for the challenges for the multicultural classroom. She argues that novice teachers must be in training programs that are diverse and that these programs should admit students that want to pursue cross-cultural learning experiences, have maturity to fully consider their students backgrounds and learn from them, and possess academic ability.

Taken together, this volume provides a framework for educators, administrators and researchers to take leadership roles in ensuring that American schools live up to the promise of high-quality, accessible education for all. While much lip-service has been paid to the multicultural vision of America perhaps best represented by the election of President Barack Obama, Lessons in Integration provides strong research of what schools and educators must do to actively serve and support America’s diversity.

Written by: Eleanor Whitney, April 11th 2009

The Peace Tree

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 12:24:00 +0000

Directed by Mitra Sen

Sandalwood Productions

The Peace Tree is a heartwarming, informative movie by producer and director Mitra Sen. There are funny, touching and beautiful moments throughout this compelling movie.

At school, all different religious holidays are discussed and celebrated. I learned about Eid, the Muslim celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. But what happens at home is another story. Old prejudices are difficult to transcend, and parents are reluctant to allow their children to participate in the traditions of other faiths. The persistence and sweetness of two Muslim sisters and their Christian best friend finally win over the cautious parents.

The end of the movie is happy, with the children being honored by the mayor of their town. Despite moments of conflict, nothing bad happens beyond the exchange of a few sharp words. The Peace Tree would be appropriate for the entire family and probably most appreciated by 6 – 10 year olds.

This movie has created a movement: the international celebration of Peace Tree Day. It serves as an introduction to Peace Tree Day and could be useful for any group just beginning to celebrate the holiday.

At times, the dialogue does not ring true, but this movie’s heart is always in the right place. With lively colors, gorgeous clothing, and joyful music, The Peace Tree has a great deal of charm and appeal. It can bring diversity and cultural information to your home during the holidays or any time and encourage respect and unity among all people.

Written by: Laura-Marie Taylor, April 24th 2007