Our next speaker I think is the University of Rochester mission statement in a human
package.
She works at the Warner School of Education so she's got "Learn" covered.
She's discovered new ways of teaching science to marginalized students that helps heal some
of the gaps in their educational opportunities.
Her creation of the Get Real Science Program has taken off in the Rochester community and
it's, it's truly making the world "Ever Better".
So please join me in welcoming April Luehmann to the Mel Talk stage.
Good afternoon.
It's a real honor to be here today and wow right after Omar's talk right we should be
in a standing ovation for another hour I think.
Hopefully some of what I want to share with you today can be seen in some of the work
he's doing.
Today I would like to share some ideas with you about what it means to "Get Real" in the
important, how important it is to get real in the work that we're doing if we really
want to make a difference and I want to give you some powerful ideas of what that getting
real could look like.
First I need to start by outlining the sort of fundamental principle about learning that
will undergird all the things I say.
So learning is situated.
It happens in particular places and spaces.
It happens with particular people using particular tools for particular purposes within particular
cultures and all of those particularities, they aren't just backdrop for what's going
to happen like a set is for a play.
They actually define, shape, determine the learning that happens.
These settings, these people, these norms of participation so if we're going to nurture
learning and make a difference it's important to think about those things.
So, we're going to start with settings.
What would it look like if people were fully involved and fully invested in the messiness
of their work?
A little indulgence.
I'm going to take you back to my childhood.
When I started school I attended a two room schoolhouse in a town of two hundred and ninety
five people.
My dad was the principal and he taught the upper grades.
In the basement of the school was the bowling alley and at the end of the bowling alley
was a bench.
It was the job of the principal's kids to sit on that bench, reset the pins and send
the balls back when the adults bowled.
Similar to that on days off of school or on weekends or any random Thursday night's when
the doorbell rang, we were called to work again setting up chairs for people's weddings,
distributing mailings.
I don't even know if you know what that picture in the top right is but it's a mimeograph
machine, right, to make copies and my favorite of the tasks was on the bottom right, on New
Year's Eve we all piled in the car in our pajamas and got to go to the church up in
the bell tower and pull those ropes twelve times to welcome in the New Year.
When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I wrote I co-owned, I co-authored a letter so in fifth
and in sixth grade I was one of three girls in a class of sixteen and we co-authored a letter
that I clearly wrote.
It started Dear Dad.
We the girls of the fifth and sixth grade class protest the way girls are being treated
in this school.
You see only boys were dismissed from class to get the kick balls off the roof and that
is just not fair.
My dad changed his ways.
I often wondered why I felt empowered to write such a letter.
There was no talk of social activism in my tiny little farm town so where did I get that
idea?
I think I believed the school was in part mine because my dad had insisted that we engage
in the full messiness of that ministry, I in turn owned that school.
Now I run a program at the University of Rochester called Get Real Science.
It's in it's fifteenth year.
It's a teacher education program designed to nurture professional identities of secondary
science teachers as social justice agents of change.
We do this by giving teachers many, many practice opportunities to do the change they want to
see in science education and each of these opportunities are situated in real context,
real, with real kids doing real science with a real purpose.
One of the people I love and admire whose work I admire is Na'ilah Nasir and she, this
work is her work.
She studies the learning affordances that are available at authentic rich studies versus
those that we offer, give to our kids in schools
and you can see that the things, these are
learning affordances that were given to teens, teen boys playing basketball when they were
doing statistics in-service of the game and the decisions of the game.
Right, they have access in authentic settings to more activity, more agency, held accountable.
They have access to expertise and feedback and recognition for what they do.
Our master's students get to do the same thing with me as we run an after school science
club every year at East High School.
Together we, they recruit and facilitate a lab team of five to ten kids over the course
of a long term science or engineering challenge that is interesting and relevant to kids.
They study things like "What's the chemistry of the ideal chocolate chip cookie"?
How many windmills would it take to power our school?
What's the science of teen depression?
Beyond pedagogy they're learning to teach,
my master's students have to call families.
They carry snacks.
They have to negotiate bus passes.
They orchestrate a community wide showcase for the kids.
For many of my students the messiness of Science Stars is where ownership over urban education
is born.
The second idea I would like to share with you is that Getting Real to make a difference
is peopled work so being a paper carrier when I was a teen actually laid the foundation
for me to start to get my head around the complexity of that concept.
Getting Real to make a difference is people work.
You see I had to go collect two dollars and eighty five cents from each of my sixty five
customers at the end of every month.
It became a amazingly clear to me how varied everybody's stories are as well as their needs
even of a paper carrier.
One woman in particular when I would knock on her door she would bring me all her money
and hand it to me in trust that I would take two dollars and eighty five cents because
she was mostly blind.
These and many other experiences set me up to hear a challenge that I would later hear
to academia from a senior anthropologist named Fred Erickson.
Are you guys already for our paradigm shift? Ready?
People make sense and our job as researchers or as people who want to make a difference
is to understand the sense they're making.
People make sense.
How would that change the way we heard a teenagers outburst in class when she said " You suck!"
Maybe we would hear instead what she really intended to say which is I am so scared I'm
going to fail again and I don't know what to do about it.
Or if we pick up our car from the dealership and they messed up our repair and gave us
this amazing inconvenience, maybe we would see instead that they hired somebody who perhaps
lacks some experience but needed a shot.
If we start to look at the people around us as historied and cultured people who make
sense we actually have to look past what, what's immediately visible for us to see.
We have to be able to see the power of poverty.
We have to be able to see the way of discrimination.
We have to be able to see the brokenness of systems and institutions that have, are supposed
to be looking out for those who are most in need but Getting Real as people work to make
a difference doesn't just involved looking at each other differently.
It involves looking inward differently.
Matthew Diemer from Michigan State University writes about this awful group think that is
going on in our society right now called Social Dominance Orientation.
People, people think this is sort of a way of looking at life where the myth of meritocracy: we
get what we deserve.
Social Darwinism: those who are most fit are the ones who are successful therefore
if you're not very successful you're just not fit. Or, the world is unfair, or people of color
are less in some way.
All of these horrible discriminating concepts, right, and he writes, Matthew writes something
so widely learned and pervasive suggests a pattern of active, unlearning for those who
don't endorse this ideology.
In Get Real science we do this active, unlearning work all the time, every day in critical self-reflections
on the realities and relationships of what it means to learn and teach in urban settings.
This is hard.
This is personal but this is core to what it means to make a difference in schools and
in society.
Lastly, Getting Real means thinking about what it means to lead differently as when you lead
in certain ways, different voices get heard or different voices get silenced.
In education we're working really hard to transform classrooms into communities and
communities not just where kids ideas are heard or valued but where kids' ideas actually
define the trajectory of our unit, define the trajectory of our learning and in these
communities the teachers are at the elbows of the kids participating as learning members
in the community.
Now we all, all of us here, are teachers in someway, right?
Think about where you're a teacher, whether it's being a parent, whether it's teaching
people at your work how to do something, leading a team maybe at your work.
How might this look different if we created collaborative spaces that truly invited critical
discourse and critical questioning?
Please ponder with me the power of the implications of this quote.
I just love it.
Horizontal relationships enable participants to escape the roles and rules that normalize
or even oppress them in other social spaces. Here's the best part: to disclose their individuality and begin
something new.
How do we level our groupings so we can hear all voices?
In Get Real science we have a saying that says" Go Team Go."
It's sort of our like our mantra.
We end almost every e-mail with it, every meeting with it.
We end a text with it, GTG and when we write we're saying a number of complimentary things.
We're saying we share a mission and vision together; that science education can be socially
just.
We say it to say hey, you totally got this or we say to say you're important to this
work and sometimes we say it to say we got this.
We're going to do this.
This vision of team has energy and it has inertia and it checks us on our daily decisions
about whether we're keeping our, our, our real, true, we're walking our walk, right?
This level of transparency and sincerity is necessary if you're going to invite diverse participation
that's really going to make a difference.
Here's the thing though.
Maybe you shouldn't tell my graduate students where that saying came from because Go Team
Go is actually something I read on a poster ten years ago in which Miss Piggy was dressed
in a cheerleading costume and the real science says Go Team Go or I'll break all your arms!
Getting Real is core to realizing change in schools and in society.
It is messy.
It is peopled and it requires different ways of relating.
I'm going to show you a short video to end my talk and I challenge you as you watch this
video to not just see the authenticity in the work that we do in Get Real Science but
also I challenge you to see where you can do it in your own.
Finally tonight Our Bright Spot says Get Real and that's exactly what this summer learning
experience is all about.
Teaming up graduate students from the U of R's Warner School with middle school students
from the Freedom School to determine why Ontario Beach is often closed to swimmers.
We're using bags to collect algae.
Second scope to see how deep it is, the algae is.
A mutual learning experience that allows learning by challenging inquiring minds.
To have them more hands on and more activity based so that they will learn to enjoy the
sciences. And enjoy it they did.
Because we get to use all this technology.
We get to be, we get to be scientists for like a week so it's really exciting to be out here doing
what they do on a regular, by using their equipment that they do just to have the learning
experience because when you get older you may want to do it as your career.
So tonight our Bright Spot shines on a summer opportunity for students to Get Real about
science.
They really put it all together and summed it up for us.
I would like to finish by just inviting you to Get Real with us if you'd like on [October] 26th,
the Science Stars are going to show off their engineering projects about how to make green
bus shelters and external people coming in make the authentic audience makes it a really
big deal so we will be there at East High from 4:45 to 6:45.
Go Team Go!