Raising Children with Moral intelligence

Now that i am a father of a soon-to-be 10-month-old (as well as a step-father these past two years to a teenager and an 8-year-old) i find that all that i do, read, see, and know gets immediately evaluated for its relevance to the kids. Ahhh, parenting.

My thoughts this week have turned to the teaching and learning of the young. Robert Strange McNamara's death has evoked an outpouring of renewed anger at the role he played in sending tens of thousands to their deaths as well as the murder of millions of Vietnamese (during the US's still-"undeclared" war). Joseph L. Galloway of McClatchy Newspapers wrote this scathing commentary that has drawn much fire (and i recommend reading the comments which moved me with the intensity of the hurt and anger that persists so many years later). Galloway's pithy assessment of McNamara is a cautionary note to us all: "McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing."

It was Howard Zinn's words in this Democracy Now piece that pushed me to think about what we are teaching our children:

Well, assessing the legacy … It seems to me one things which we should be thinking about, is that McNamara represented all of those superficial qualities of brightness and intelligence and education that are so revered in our culture. This whole idea that you judge young kids today on the basis of what their test scores are, how smart they are, how much information they can digest, how much they can give back to you and remember. That’s what MacNamara was good at. He was bright and he was smart, but he had no moral intelligence. What strikes me as one of the many things we can learn from this McNamara experience is that we’ve got to stop revering these superficial qualities of brightness and smartness, and bring up a generation which thinks in moral terms, which has moral intelligence, and which asks questions not, “Do we win or do we lose?” Asks questions, " Is this right? Is it wrong?" And McNamara never asked that question. Even when he was leaving, even when he decided he had to leave the post of Secretary of Defense, even when he left, his leaving was not based on the fact that the war was wrong. His leaving was based on the fact, well, we weren’t going to win.

Looking at and assessing report cards is a relatively new thing for me. Grading, in particular, is something i've managed to avoid since i was in highschool. But i have had to grade almost 500 undergrads this past season. And i find myself looking at our kids report cards for some insight into exactly what they are learning. It's easy to understand the marks for math and science and such. But what of their moral intelligence? It seems to me that our institutionalized mass education system still privileges those "superficial qualities of brightness and intelligence" that Zinn's point out McNamara had in abundance. And i think of Hannah Arendt's assessment of Eichmann (Nazi 'architect' and manager of the Holocaust) in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil - perhaps not as highly educated as McNamara, but arguably a "normal" person (according to many psychologists who assessed him) Eichmann proved capable of horrifying war crimes. McNamara's education and greater intelligence (according to Arendt, Eichmann was not that intelligent) did not stop him from committing war crimes.

So i wonder about our expectations for our children when it comes to excelling in school. And just where and how are we teaching them moral intelligence, as Zinn suggests is so important? I've plucked Robert Coles' The Moral Life of Children (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) off my bookshelf for a re-read (a couple of good summaries of Coles work can be found here and here). Coles has been a great inspiration to me over the years (not least because he's simply a wonderful writer). He talks about his work with Ruby Bridges, a young black girl who, when school desegregation laws were implemented in her town in Louisiana, famously attended class alone for many months as the parents of white children refused to let their children attend school with a black child. Ruby was six. Coles wrote:

Why not, too, think of the child as moral protagonist or antagonist - as in the South's racial conflict? Ruby, at ten, looked back at four years of somewhat unusual school attendance. A black child, she walked past hostile mobs at age six to enter a once all-white school in New Orleans... Her view of her experience? "I knew I was just Ruby," she told me once, in retrospect - "just Ruby trying to go to school, and worrying that I couldn't be helping my momma with the kids younger than me, like I did on the weekends and in the summer. But I guess I also knew I was the Ruby who had to do it - go into that school and stay there, no matter what those people said, standing outside. And besides, the minister reminded me that God chooses us to do His will, and so I had to be His Ruby, if that's what He wanted. And then that white lady wrote and told me she was going to stop shouting at me, because she decided I wasn't bad, even if integration was bad, then my momma said I'd become 'her Ruby', that lady's, just as she said in her letter, and I was glad; and I was glad I got all the nice letters from people who said I was standing up for them, and I was walking for them, and they were thinking of me, and they were with me, and I was their Ruby, too, they said." (p. 9)

It's easy to romanticize kids and their capacity for a seemingly "natural" wisdom. But Coles makes the point well that context and environment are as significant as whatever psychological capacity a person might have. Not that it is the context alone. But rather a perhaps more mysterious alchemy of personality, environment, family, etc. Zinn drives home this point about environment when he says:

Yes. Listening to Jonathan Schell and Marilyn Young about McNamara’s, well, his anguish and all of that, I understand what Jonathan is saying about the fact that you can’t find anybody in the Vietnam War or in other words, anybody at that level who is going to do anything in dissent, who is going to speak out. So, what does that tell us? I mean it’s true, it’s absolutely true. But what does that tell us?

I think it tells us that once you enter the machinery of government, once you enter the House of Empire, you are lost. You are going to be silenced. You may feel anguish and you may be torn and you may weep and so on, but you are not going to speak out.

A sobering warning. And i wonder how any of us would do in such circumstances. The still-controversisal Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, for all their contradictions, still present us with humbling challenges to our self-conception.

I am interested in the links between popular education (which i consider a profoundly moral pedagogy) and child-rearing and children's education. I can't help but feel that mostly we are doing things profoundly wrong. Already, at the age of 8, our daughter has developed a dislike for school and many of its ways (even while she loves the time she gets to spend with her friends). I hate how we teach our children to fear and loathe learning. And i suspect that this loathing that we are so good at passing on is instrumental in creating characteristic opinions of incapacity, e.g. "I don't know how to draw", "I can't sing", "I'm not a good writer." It doesn't have to be this way.

So, to conclude these meandering thoughts, a story and a quote from the abundance of jewish wisdom:

Once, the great Hassidic rabbi, Zusya of Anipoli, with tears in his eyes and fear in his voice, spoke to his followers: "last night i had a fearsome dream in which I learned the question that I will be asked after i am dead about my life. Though I had lived my life as i thought Moses had, i will not be asked, '‘Why weren’t you like Moses, leading your people out of slavery?' And though I had been the most devoted of teachers I will not be asked, ‘Why were you not a Solomon, sharing your wisdom?'"

His followers asked, “What will you be asked?”

He answered, with a trembling voice, "I will be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

Finally, Rabbi Hilllel, over 2000 years ago, said, "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?"

Naming the Moment & Community Development

I thought i'd write a fresh intro to the Naming the Moment process looking at it from the point of view of community development.

Naming the Moment is a popular education method for doing social change and community development work.

There are two fundamentals upon which NTM is based:

1. Creating just relationships (i.e. anti-oppression alliances, coalitions, etc.) for the long term necessitates making LEARNING a central feature of social change
2. Change happens in society both incrementally (e.g. through institution-building, education, etc.) and suddenly when there is a conjuncture of various forces (political, economic, ideological, etc.) in a moment of crisis. (Naming the Moment sprang in large part from a process known as conjunctural analysis developed from the work of Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci and others).

Naming the Moment is a means by which people can learn to “read” these conjunctures (and the flows of forces that lead to them) and to predict to some extent the occurrence of and nature of such conjunctures.

Naming the Moment is a popular education method and thus a participatory and collective approach to learning that is based on social justice values and anti-oppression principles; it explicitly resists oppression and any unjust use of power; it seeks to build solidarity amongst individuals and groups resisting oppression; and it is a form of capacity-building for groups and individuals. It typically involves groups of people who share, in common, either geography, class, work situation, or some other form of identity (or set of these) and who therefore have the possibility of collective action to change the world in which they live. Popular education resists the structures of learning and teaching that create authoritarian experts and passive non-experts. Through democratic dialogue and using a diverse set of means of creating knowledge (e.g. talking, of course, but also including the use of art forms such as drawing, murals, ‘zines; popular theatre forms such as skits, sculpture, sociodramas, Theatre of the Oppressed; structured learning exercises of many kinds, etc.) popular education puts the tools of resistance into the hands of so-called ordinary citizens. It is a means of sharing power or practicing “power with” and of resisting “power over” as Starhawk suggests.

Naming the Moment has four steps or phases: Naming Ourselves, Naming the Issues, Assessing the Forces and Planning for Action. Each of these represents distinct goals and objectives for the collective work of sharing and analyzing experience and knowledge.

Naming the Moment is a dynamic process that grew from roots and connections between Canadian and Latin American educators. Developed within the Moment Project and led by Deborah Barndt (a ten-year effort within the Toronto-based Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice) it has continued to evolve as has its cousins in Latin America.

The Catalyst Centre, a popular education worker co-op in Toronto, has developed Naming the Moment by identifying and naming previously implicit steps creating a seven-step process dubbed Seizing the Moment. The steps include: Setting the Stage for Democratic Communication, Naming Ourselves, Naming the Issues, Crafting Meaning, Planning for Action, Taking Action and Evaluation. In Latin America – Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, et al – a similar process has been developed and is called sistematizacion. A difficult word for English speakers and difficult to translate as well, nonetheless, the concept of systematizing knowledge is one that is also key to Naming the Moment.

Systematizing is a crucial aspect of popular, participatory processes that desire to have positive impact on the world, i.e to advance positive social change. The strength of popular education participatory processes is the success these have in drawing out people’s experience, sharing this in a creative and even compassionate manner and affirming the struggles that individuals undergo. Not surprisingly, this is also the weakness of participatory processes. A common mistake is to facilitate a wonderful sharing of experience and to leave it at that. This is called go-aroundism: everyone gets their few minutes, shares their two cents, it gets noted on flip chart and then the facilitator thanks everyone for coming and the meeting adjourns. Lacking here is the struggle to identify patterns in experience (allowing for agreements, challenges and dissent), to explain those patterns, critique them and then to negotiate and affirm those patterns that are consistent with our values and resist those we deem oppressive.

This identifying and explaining of patterns is nothing less than theory-making. However, to call it this often relegates this practice to the domain of academics and intellectuals. Popular education processes recognize that everyone makes theory all the time. Anytime we answer the “why” of things, we are venturing into theory-making. Popular education recognizes that theory can be made through dialogue (i.e. democratically, critically, creatively). But more than that, when we make theory this way, informed by social justice values, anti-oppression and anti-colonial politics, we make better theory! Finally, this theory-making need not happen only in the halls of academe, far from the messy and noisy streets of our lives, but can happen – in fact, MUST happen – in the midst of life.

This is what Naming the Moment and sistematizacion is all about: the making of transformative theory from the raw material of shared experience and collective knowledge and doing this within the messy challenges of life (including feeding each other, providing daycare, licking envelopes, making phone calls, providing assistance to those who need it in order to participate, and so on). Systematizing means that we do not simply accept everyone’s understanding of their own experience as the ultimate truth of that experience. If we are going to find patterns that connect and that can change things for the better, then sometimes we need to challenge each other’s understandings (even of our own experience). Doing this with compassion and respect is a fundamental popular education ethic. A key challenge is to move from the simple collection of anecdotes to the systematizing of that experience in order to tell the stories of those patterns that connect. Systematizing isn’t merely a fancy word for theory-making. It is democratic and participatory theory-making for social justice.

But, as noted, sistematizacion is a mouthful for an English-speaker. It’s not a word that runs trippingly off the tongue. Nor does conjunctural analysis help matters much. Thus the phrase “Naming the Moment” which has the advantage of being understood quickly in a common sense sort of way. But it also acts as a powerful metaphor and statement of intent: one goal of Naming the Moment is precisely to identify the patterns of change and to name what is going on such that it can be changed: name the moment, as it were.

The Catalyst Centre’s development of Seizing the Moment merely fills in some of the pieces, locating the original four phases of Naming the Moment in the more complete cycle from planning and preparation to implementation (of whatever actions were developed) and evaluation. Seizing the Moment also encourages a stronger action footing than “naming” suggests.

So what’s this got to do with community development? A popular education approach to community development has several distinct advantages and at least one very powerful (and often deal-breaking) disadvantage.

First, the disadvantage: it takes time. A popular education approach to community development takes a great deal of time. And the structure of society, the structure and availability of funding, the urgency and magnitude of the work that needs to be done, most often compels organizers, activists and agency personnel to seek faster more expedient solutions. Put quite simply, a democratic and participatory process of social change that treats with equal value the means and ends is one that needs time. Information can be shared quickly - and all the moreso in our hyperspeed, hyoer-wired world. Learning, however, takes time.

The advantages of this approach are numerous especially given that it accomplishes a number of things simultaneously: relationship building, collective analysis, theory-making, policy development, skills training, and much more. It is community development for the long haul.

One final thing to call attention to is the role of documentation in all this. Naming the Moment has always put great value on documenting the process well. This is important both for practicing democratic communication as well as preserving a collective memory over the years. Thus the documents that follow:

• Revisiting the Boats and Canoes by Deborah Barndt
• ‘Naming the Moment’ - – a participatory process of political analysis for action by chris cavanagh
  
• Seizing the Moment - 1-page intro
• Seizing the Moment - 2-pager
• Seizing the Moment and the Spiral Model
• A 'zine about Seizing the Moment (print it double-sided and you can fold and staple it into a booklet)
  

Newsletters from the 1991-1992 Series of Naming the Moment Workshops:

1. Oct 1991
2. Nov 1991
3. Dec 1991
4. Jan 1992
5. Feb 1992
6. March 1992
7. April 1992
8. May 1992

Popular Education and Pop Music

My mum sent me this video (thanks, mum) knowing that the cleverness of the "rainstorm" would appeal to me. As it turns out the hand-rubbing, finger-snapping, thigh-slapping, foot-stomping sequence is an activity that i have done with groups for over 20 years. I've always used it as a focusing or calming exercise. It works wonderfully as a way of closing a workshop and it has many other uses, i am sure. This Slovenian choir's use of it as an intro to their cover version of Toto's Africa is inspired. And the foot-stomping which each of the rows does sequentially is outstanding. And i confess a fondness for the occasional pop song.

Here's a downloadable activity description of "Rainstorm" which you can use with groups. Try it. It's a moving activity, one that i always find connects me with a deep stillness in the world.

Popular Education Workshop on Immigrants and Precarious Employment

This popular education manual for workshops on precarious employment contains a dozen basic activities plus a handful more in the appendices. You can use some of the activities as workshops unto themselves (e.g. jobology, precarious work wheel) or use them in combination to support workshops of between three and six hours. Produced for the Immigrants and Precarious Employment Project, which:

examines the opportunities and challenges faced by immigrants in the new, knowledge-based economy. We interviewed 300 workers from Latin American and the Caribbean who arrived in the GTA between 1990 and 2004. In our research, we asked:

• How are newcomers affected by broader trends towards precarious employment? · What strategies do they implement on the job and as families in order to meet these challenges?
• What patterns of contact (or lack of contact) with social institutions and community organizations mediate immigrants’ early settlement process?

Public Outreach and Education

Our Public Outreach Project is designed to draw on the research project findings to generate and distribute knowledge of immigrant employment trajectories and early settlement strategies beyond academia. Our two main products will be:

• A policy report based on our findings
• A popular education manual on immigrants and precarious work for frontline workers at immigrant service agencies (Produced with the consulting support of The Catalyst Centre).

There are two files: The complete manual at 168 pages (3MB) and the 30-page Participant Kit (700K - and which you will find in the complete manual as Appendix A.

Community Mapping on the Move!

A community mapping workshop at PARC (the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre on Queen St.) was a great success this week. With 40 people attending from both the neighbourhood and across the city and including members of the PARC community, we spent two and a half hours talking about food, our experience of getting it and doing some community mapping together. You can read the proceedings of the workshop as well see pictures of some of the maps produced by downloading the newsletter here (it's a 2MB PDF).

This is part of the West End Food Co-op's Community Food Mapping Project taking place this summer in the Parkdale/High Park neighbourhood in Toronto. A second workshop will take place on Thursday June 25th followed by community outreach work and a concluding workshop in September. You can download the flyer for the next workshop here (a 360K PDF) as well as an information kit about the project here (a 2MB PDF).

There has been a steadily growing interest in community mapping as a community development and popular education tool in Toronto (see previous post). And the Toronto Star's environment reporter Catherine Porter was there covering the event and she wrote an excellent article which you can read here. (the photo, above, accompanies the article by Toronto Star photographer Adrien Vezcan).

Popular Education Bookshelf - 4: Community Mapping

Community mapping is a practice that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. This 'zine, featured here (it's a 4 meg PDF), is the project of a graduate student at York University. Hannah Lewis is in the process of researching community mapping practices in Canada and she has turned up an amazing diversity of practices and theory. Research from which i am learning a great deal.

In 1986 i learned about the Ah Hah! Seminar, a popular education method developed by GATT-Fly, a Toronto-based, ecumenical, economic justice group. Ah Hah! drawing is a method of representing the experiences of workshop participants by developing a large picture on the wall. Like all popular education methods it is a means of democratic dialogue, analysis, and action planning. I have always loved this method and practiced it for many years. But i kept coming up against the same problem: for the method required that the participants share a common class identity, i.e. they were all workers for the industry (e.g. fishing, forestry), or they were all people on social assistance or poor, and so on. Whenever the group was mixed (i.e. so-called middle class, upper middle class and poor and/or workers) it proved almost impossible to agree on where various economic actors belonged in terms of where to put them in the picture. The complexities of the mix of economic locations (i.e. class) proved too great to be represented with Ah Hah! drawing. Now, that was in the late 80s and ealry 90s before neoliberalism had really started to reshape the Canadian economy in earnest. I wonder what things would look like now? Here's a couple of articles from that time about the Ah Hah Seminar:

• Drawing Conclusions
  (New Internationalist 122, April 1983)
• Ah-Hah! GATT-Fly (New Internationalist 122, April 1983 - Scroll to second half of page)

And here's a couple of pictures i stumbled on of Dennis Howlett (one of the creators of the Ah Hah seminar) leading an anti-poverty workshop:

• Dennis Ahhah
• Dennis Ahhah 2

As i've learned about community mapping i have come to see Ah Hah drawing as one method of a large set of participatory mapping processes. Thanks in large part to Hannah i now know dozens of examples of community mapping (a surprising number in British Columbia) and we are now part of a couple of projects here in Toronto applying community mapping to the situation of food security in various neighbourhoods.

As Hannah writes in her 'zine: "Maps are powerful. Maps have interests or an argument to make. Maps are socially constructed." There exists, not surprisingly, a massive literature on mapping. But i would risk the educated guess that it is a literature largely devoted to understanding how to wield this tool in the interests of the powerful. But, while community mapping is still a young practice, a significant aspect of the practice is the challenging of dominant power relationships. Some community mapping uses the new technologies of GIS (geographic information systems) and GoogleMapping - technologies that require a fair amount of training. Though not to exclude popular use of such technologies, my interest in community mapping is as a popular education tool - one that is committed to resisting oppression, promoting critical thinking, building solidarity amongst the powerful, developing popular knowledge. Here's a couple of sites devoted to community mapping:

• Community Mapping Centre (UVic, BC)
• Common Ground Community Mapping Network

A closely-related practice, if somewhat different, is asset mapping, most strongly represented by the work of Asset Based Community Development in Chicago. This practice has also been picked up and developed by the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. And here's an excellent article by Alison Mathie and Gord Cunningham (also available as a PDF here). Finally, here's a description of asset mapping from a youth conference site: Capable City.

Happy-making

I remember this video from 2000 and i was enchanted then by the choreography and mildly, self-mocking dancing by the band members. I'm delighted to see it show up on YouTube. This is one of my favourite pop songs, second only to my favourite pop song of all time (a carefully guarded secret).