Moving Onward and Upward—

Impressions of No Teacher Left Behind: A Practitioner’s Conference

by Daniel Godston - dgodston@sbcglobal.net

No Teacher Left Behind: A Practitioner’s Conference was held on Friday, March 23 and Saturday, March 24 at Brown University. The NTLB Conference brochure says, “We believe teachers have the power to create transformative experiences for their students and their schools,” and the conference offered workshops and roundtables that focused on arts and literacy connections, content/subject area, technology, diversity, and induction and retention. There were 100 presenters, 40 volunteers, and at least another 150 participants. The NTLB Conference’s participants came from a wide range of backgrounds—many teaching artists, classroom teachers from New England, graduate students and academics from colleges and universities, and people who run arts organizations attended and presented. The NTLB Conference was put together with the coordination of experienced organizers. It was co-chaired by Bil Johnson, Director of Social Studies/History Education in the Teacher Education Program and Kurt Wootton, Director of The ArtsLiteracy Project. Wootton, Johnson, Meg Springer, Jori Ketten, Alexis Scott, Angela Richardson, and the other organizers did a remarkable job of making sure the conference ran smoothly.

“The conference was sponsored by both the teacher education program and ArtsLiteracy for a specific reason,” Wootton said. “We feel like quite a bit of what is going on in our public schools these days does not honor the work of creative teachers leaders. Teacher leaders are educators who do things like volunteer to present their work at conferences, read the latest education theories and practices, stay late at night at school in order to refine their lesson plans for tomorrow's classes, and collaborate with colleagues in dynamic ways. They are the teachers we hope we graduate from our teacher education program and they are the kind of teachers the ArtsLiteracy Project collaborates with in pubic schools.”

Deborah Meier’s keynote speech on Friday evening was wonderful. Much of it centered around the work of Ted Sizer, who was later given a lifetime achievement award. Meier made many memorable statements in her speech, such as, “A good school doesn’t confine us.” Part of her speech zeroed in on her disgust toward the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy, and how the current war in Iraq has been affecting students here. She made this stunning assertion, as our current political climate relates to education—“Lower the rhetorical crisis so we can have a conversation about the world.” Inversely, much of the work she has done over the past several decades has been created in a truly democratic spirit, and she implored audience members to do the same—“Look for the metaphors that capture the spirit of democracy.” One of the strongest images and metaphors of Meier’s speech was “Make angel wings—that’s the best a school can do.” This came at the end of a story she told wherein young students were walking through Central Park on a snowy day and were told to stay in line, but many of them walked off the path into the snow to make snow angels. This beautiful metaphor also cleverly critiqued the No Child Left Behind policy, which seems to have been arbitrarily designed to insist on uniformity.

After the conference was over, Wootton commented more on themes that resonated with Meier’s keynote speech—“We all know about the increased emphasis on testing students as part of the NCLB legislation. But increasingly in the last two years I've been finding schools and districts have been mandating uniformity and the standardization of teaching and learning at the teacher level as well. Urban superintendents have been emphasizing uniform scripted curriculums and programs at the cost of programs that are not ‘systemic’ like ours, the ArtsLiteracy Project. I've seen fantastic dance programs, around for over 20 years, wiped out in one year because ‘it serves only one school and not all of our schools.’ Our literacy work, is not seen as systemic, because it cannot be easily purchased for every teacher in a district.

“We felt the need for, especially in today's climate, honoring the work of these teachers, and creating a forum for: gathering, supporting each other, and sharing innovative teaching practices. The themes included areas such as arts integration, technology, and diversity because we wanted to challenge our thinking, as a community, in these critical, rapidly changing areas in the field of education,” Wootton said.

Several times, while attending the conference, I was preoccupied with a certain problem. It’s a problem that conference attendees sometimes have: being confronted with an overabundance of excellent choices during concurrent sessions. You sit on a chair in a hallway before a given session, and you circle and highlight and bullet point all the sessions you’d like to attend in a few minutes. It becomes a tough toss up when it comes to two or more compelling sessions that happen simultaneously. Here are several highlights of sessions I was able to attend—

• In the “Addressing Student Literacy Through Arts Integration” session, Susanne Burgess, Marissa Nesbit, Joel Baxley, and Scott Rosenow from the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts created informative presentations on the work they’ve done with young people in schools, and then Nesbit facilitated an engaging and interactive movement activity for the participants.
• In the “Intercultural Interdisciplinary Arts: An Active Way To Develop Literacy” session, Alesh DuCarmo helped participants work in small groups to collaboratively create performed pieces that extrapolated themes from folk tales. 
• Keith Catone, founder of the New York Collective of Radical Educators, facilitated a lively discussion about ways by which teachers can make meaningful connections with the communities in which they work to deepen the impact of the work they do, during the “Educator as Activist” session. 

I’d flown into Providence from Chicago, and was scheduled to facilitate a workshop based on some of the work I’ve done as a teaching artist in the Chicago Public Schools. This workshop would focus primarily on the arts integration residencies I’ve done with poetry in math and science classes—through the Center for Community Arts Partnerships’ Project AIM. That was a fun session, and the participants offered great ideas about outside-the-box connections that can be made between poetry, math and science—such as a cube-shaped poem that contains haiku about numbers.

Saturday morning’s panel discussion was great—it involved Curt Columbus, from Trinity Repertory Company; Donald W. King, from the Providence Black Repertory Company; Laura Maxwell, from Hope High School; Ewa Pyotowska, from Central Falls School District; and was facilitated by Kurt Wootton. They talked about partnerships that can be established between arts organizations and public schools, exciting theater projects that teens in Providence have developed, and so on.

After the post-lunch workshops and roundtables, the BIG NAZO puppets entertained the audience, and two hilarious actors wearing giant heads with spectacular noses asked random audience members about their experiences, using retorts, verbal sparring, and vaudeville-style musical outbursts evocative of Marx Brothers schtick. A pair of green skinned monsters danced around onstage. BIG NAZO was a hoot.

The conference’s final event was a screening of Sam Lee’s amazing and moving documentary The Perfect Life, which followed five students that Ms. Lee taught at The Children’s Storefront School in Harlem. The documentary was riveting, alternatively exultant and heartbreaking. After the screening Ms. Lee fielded questions about her film and the young people whose stories captivated the audience.

What will happen at next year’s No Teacher Left Behind Conference? Wootton said, “We hope to have many more participants at the national and international level and our goal is to have Brown be a gathering point for teacher leaders around the world in the future.” 

Brown University has a beautiful campus. I love campuses with old greystone buildings, such as those found at The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (where I did my undergraduate work), The University of Chicago, and Brown. For me, the installation made of branches, designed by Patrick Dougherty and built with the help of Brown University students, that stands in front of University Hall was one of the most eye-popping images in Providence. It looked like a leaning jumble of wicker dice rooms that a tribe of giants had woven, and it contrasted nicely with the surrounding buildings’ plumb vertical lines.

It was fantastic to experience all the engaging talks and sessions that facilitators had led, and the networking opportunities amid veggie and fruit munchies and refreshments were an added plus. I was reflecting on the conference experience as I was walking up Prospect Street back to my rented car. Soon I’d be driving to my aunt Ruth, uncle Dave, and cousin Sarah’s home in Boston. That walk was like a mini-walk through history—there were so many striking old buildings, and it seems that many of them had historical landmark status. Piles of snow were on the sidewalks from the snow that Providence had gotten the week before. I kind of felt like making a snow angel but there wasn’t enough snow left to do so.   

To find out more about the ArtsLit Program and the No Teacher Left Behind Conference, visit www.artslit.org.

Daniel Godston teaches through The Center for Community Arts Partnerships, Snow City Arts Foundation, The Poetry Center, and at Columbia College Chicago. His writings have appeared in Chase Park, Versal, Drunken Boat, 580 Split, Kyoto Journal, after hours, Teaching Artist Journal, and other publications. He also composes and performs music.