speach tree

In an effort to try to clean up the house - get rid of old papers etc - I came across a little pad of paper from Free Minds Collective days. We must have been brainstorming some ground-rules or something. Here is the list: confidentiality speak from personal experience, not from sweeping generalizations step up, step back respect support have an open mind: don't be thinking about a response while someone is still talking reflect keep the goals in mind check your body language Here are some other notes... Interventions: 1. use positive reinforcement 2. make the student a leader 3. provide choices 4. deal with sickness, not symptoms 5. build trust but don't confuse building trust with being friends 6. find and encourage passion 7. know the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards 8. sometimes you have to be tough - a mommy (??) [sometimes my own notes confuse me.] Responding to different learning styles: 1. kinesthetic - with your hands 2. present the same concept in di...

RACIAL PROFILING – Bike Safety & Repair Program, Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp @ William Wirt Middle School & Center for Educational Partnership Riverdale, MD (Prince George’s County) July 2007 1. ASK: what is racial profiling? (See definition below) Have you ever heard of the phrase “DWB”? Driving While Black/Brown definition: (From an education website: http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/02/lp252-05.shtml ) racial profiling is the practice of targeting a person for criminal investigation based on his or her racial characteristics. Profiling can also be based on other characteristics, such as age (YOUTH) or gender (MALE). Discuss the following statement from ACLU: “A July 2001 Gallup poll reported that 55 percent of whites and 83 percent of blacks believe racial profiling is widespread.” 2. How is this related to bike-riding? (BWB – Biking While Brown???) 3. ASK questions below – how would you feel etc.? Ask students: Have you ever been stopped by police a...

July 19, 2007 I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I finally got to talk about it with GC and DW last night, which was very helpful. But first, I should start with the problem, which is that: I tend to get more or less flustered when one of my students asks me to talk about something that I have complicated feelings about. It hasn’t always been easy to ask people about their feelings or about their families, or where they come from; but now I find this much easier than to talk about feminism, or white supremacy, or immigration. The other day one of my students (IJ) asked me about the shirt I was wearing – depicting a Zapatista with a bandana around her mouth and braids down the sides. Below, the letters EZLN. He was like: - What is that – EZ…L…N? Is that like a gang? I ended up saying something like - Well, … they’re more like… freedom fighters. To which he replied: - So are we gonna fight? And I said: - Uhhh… well, first you need to know what you’re fighting for. - We fight for...

a lot of these come from various anti-oppression workshops, but we just did these recently at the Free Minds Collective "Educator's Institute" - a 28-hour anti-oppression training for educators in the Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp 2007. the educators come from various backgrounds: me from brown u. and japan and suburban VA. WF (teaching bike repair with me and AS) from the Dominican Republic by way of the Bronx and now Greenbelt MD. Ms JM from 30+ years of teaching in the public school system. CC raised and educated almost entirely in Prince George's County... i would say that of the 30ish educators who attended the institute about 8 are college students at the University of Maryland, 9 are high school interns from the area, and maybe 9 or 10 are teachers who have been in the system for anywhere from 4 to 30+ years. Then there were a few random recruits from craigslist (the photography teacher, from El Salvador by way of FL) and other networks, like the...

(from the Free Minds Collective Yahoo Grps "Description"): "The Free Minds Collective is a summer enrichment program at the Center for Educational Partnership and William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale Heights, MD. Educators are teams made up of lead instructor(s), a University of Maryland student, and a Parkdale high school student working with middle school students. Programs include breakdancing, photography, bike repair, organic gardening and cooking, drumming, drama, capoeira, spoken word, and mural painting. We value multicultural, peace-centered, democratic education." I am really inspired right now by how this model is happening for us. I've been talking to a lot of people about what inspires me and what frustrates me about this experience - so forgive me if you've already heard a lot about this. I just want to post periodically throughout the rest of july about some experiences here, in the hopes that these experiences might be useful to others tha...