Moving from Archive to Action
I’d like to celebrate an archive of learning emerging from an energizing class I taught in spring 2018. I wish I could open up and read entries from the digital folders where I’ve filed their exciting texts. You’d find distinctive voices. Analyses grounded in thoughtful interviews and site visits. Careful re-readings of literary texts to …
Continue reading Celebrating an Archive of Students’ Writing to Learn
“Americans.” This single-word naming of a new exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) tellingly links up with a crucial claim staked out both by the museum’s very presence on the National Mall and by this exhibition. Specifically, the NMAI rightfully asserts, Native Americans are indeed “Americans,” people whose lives and social …
The posters for special events tied to Black History Month start appearing several weeks ahead, and I mark my personal calendar. I try out multiple tactics for encouraging my students—most of them white—to attend. But I’m also seeking ways to support learning about Black history and culture at my predominantly white institution (or, in shorthand, …
Continue reading What Can White Teachers Do to Support Black History Month?
What appealed to me about Stage West’s current offering of Like a Billion Likes wasn’t only the production’s biting critique of social media’s troubling influence on teenagers’ lives today. Certainly, that dimension of Erik Forrest Jackson’s script is both engaging and timely. For me, however, what pushes this inventive production into more complex territory is …
Giving directions to two French tourists as they puzzled over English-only signs to a car rental center. Lifting bags off the luggage carrousel for a young mom, traveling alone with her baby. Giving up a seat on the airport monorail to an exhausted-looking fellow rider. Holding the elevator door open and calling out a jovial …
Continue reading December Journeys & a 2018 Resolution: Looking Out for Our Fellow Travelers
I’m listening to the Code Talkers. They tell a story about America that I want to hear. "My name is Peter MacDonald," said a righteously proud, now ninety-year-old leader of "the thirteen surviving Navajo Code Talkers" at the White House recently. In a ceremony that should have focused on the pivotal contributions of these Diné/Navajo …
Continue reading Listening to the Code Talkers: Whose Story-telling? Whose Artifacts? Whose Spaces?
Anxiety. That’s one of the main feelings emanating from DC this week and engulfing many of us, almost to the point of being too overwhelmed to imagine better days. We’re trying to process a growing surge of negative—even scary—news. North Korea’s nuclear weapons are increasingly capable of destructive force, the Pentagon tells us. We’re struggling …
