Professor Paulston

This is not my usual blog theme but it's about the power of teaching and I needed to speak to it.



Yesterday, April 9, we held wonderful ceremony in the School of Education, Pitt, to honor and remember one of our fallen lecturers Professor Emeritus Rolland Paulston, who died from leukemia two years ago. What a tremendous experience it was as past students and his colleagues tell their stories about him and their interaction with him. We had asked for students with stories who could not make it to send them in , We had stories from China, Finland, Dominica, Nigeria, South Africa, and all over the US. It demonstrated the power of the influence of a teacher and reminds me that teachers should never take their jobs lightly and its not about the money. It's about influencing lives. There were real tears from students who did not get to say goodbye and who recalled the unflinching support he gave during their dissertations. He loved students voices. He always wanted our points of view on what we read and discussed and he was the master social cartographer. He mapped ideas, thoughts, discourses and debates and in so doing he mapped minds and that is why he became a master at shaping them. He knew them and so he knew how to make them. Yesterday, you should have seen those minds he shaped. As a policy analyst, meta-discursive mapping became useful as I trying to develop options for responding to policy problems in education, understanding first, the thinking and ideas of policy makers. Once I approximated these, it became easy to structure my approach in sync with their ideas and thoughts. It worked every time - seeing the world thought the eye of others and with other text. Simple but he made it powerful. I was pleased to know that his work is being taught in Harvard and UCLA. That says something about Pitt, doesn't it (this is me, gloating). Dr. MCClure reminded me "he was influential because he was compassionate" This is what every student needs "a teacher with compassion." He taught me during his final semester prior to retirement in 1999 and I said to him, that "he would never really retire because parts of him that he had passed on to his students would remain to be passed on to generations and so who is and what he stood for will live on. It was like Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 1986 said, " I touch the future, I teach."

Bomb threat at the Cathedral of Learning

Yesterday, I received a Pitt alert on my cell phone and email that there was a bomb threat in the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt and that I should tell the rest of my class so that we could evacuate the building. Luckily we were not in the Cathedral but there were about 20 of us in the class including our lecturer. Unfortunately, I was the the only one who apparently received the alert. The others may have had their phones turned off. So I told them. I could have walked away but as a student of education in emergencies, I had the responsibility to let them know that there is the potential that we could be in danger. It is these simulation-like exercises and real threats (This was was real. I saw the police with flashing lights and their dogs) that prepare one for the really real one and yesterday proved that many students may not have been prepared and that continues to bother me. What if. we were in real danger? What if we were in places without that alert? What if there was no way to get out and what if all our phones were off?



Safety is important and things fall apart when we are not precautions. We think it may not happen to us until it does and hindsight is always 20/20. Good job to the alert team but alerts work best when people cooperate and collaborate. Sign up for an alert. It may just save your life and that of your friends, colleagues and lecturers. This one came home to me. I was happy the way it came and I remain aware that it does not always come in ways that make one happy. Sign up for an alert... NOW

Disasters of another kind

Last night there was a fatal fire in which a mother, a family friend living with them and their eight children and grand children died. Their gas had been turned off since 2005. They could not pay for it and according to the news report, they used space heating to stay warm. It has not been confirmed but the speculation is that it may have set the house ablaze while they slept. This seems like a simple mishap but the news item showed a pattern of these disasters occurring because utilities are turned off when people cannot pay. A situation made worse since the law was changed. I think of the eight children and the one little body who described the hard time one of them had been having at school and that nobody was nice to him. A child should never have to walk away feeling ostracised. Our schools need to become gentle, kinder places. We need to purposely seek out the hurting ones, the ones on the fringes of our institutions and reassure them that the world is not a bad place. After all Children still learn what they live. They give us what we give them. And please do not think I am about to set up a child rights movement. I want only a child caring movement because every small human being deserves to be loved, cared for and to feel wanted and appreciated. When home is not what it should be, for every child a school should be a soft place to fall. I am sure you feel that way. Children need us to teach them how to become adults. This is probably the best learning we will ever provide. The worse kind of disaster is to wake up and find the next generation never learnt to care for each other because we never "showed" them how to care.

Dismantling Neighborhoods

Children are entitled to good schools, whatever, you take good to mean. It's a function of your expectation and your socio-cultural environment in which case schools are neighborhood entities. There was a time when children could not wander across school districts. Besides keeping education cost down, that policy ensured, though unintentionally I am sure, that there remained a connection between schools and their communities. We knew the teachers and the teachers knew the parents and the children. They went to the same church, rode on the same buses and each knew where the other lived. The teacher was everything to everyone in the community. It was easy to ask about the children and how they were doing at school, often in casual-on-the- phone or by-the-street conversations. We knew instinctively, it seems, that the school was the gateway to society. It was there the next generation was nurtured, taught and socialized how to live with, share with, work with and look out for their peers in society and it became easy because they lived on the same street, or three streets down or around the block. They met at church, at school, in the park, on the streets. School was a natural extension of that camaraderie. Getting along amid looking out for each other came naturally it seems until vouchers and charters came along worsening what was already going bad (Could gangs have been a response to the school-community relations demise or a deepened manifestation of efforts to resist that shift?). I am nt sure but that was me thinking aloud on that last question. By removing students from their neighborhood schools and commuting them like refugees, we have effectively dismantled them from their neighbors and destroyed whatever connections they had. This movement creates the first step in alienation and in the disruption of the very values that are essential to communities in the face of crises, emergencies and disasters. Coordination, Communication, Collaboration and Cooperative are relational conceptions. They best exist and come natural in environments where relationships among individual are held intact and schools have a remarkable way of building and maintaining relations. This is why sororities and fraternities are so powerful. They are the creatures of schools and powerful manifestation of the relational debates. School are not just places for learning and education, they are the basis of community relations and construction. It is in schools societal values are passed on. They are the building block of society. This is one reason why the contestations surrounding education can be so intense and animated. So next time you are offered a dollar to take your child across town or someone sets up a charter as a carrot of academic options or excellence ask them to give the dollar to your child's existing school or build the charter in your community. Because, when it the time comes to work together as neighborhoods and communities, it should not surprise you to find your children are across town if your accept that dollar or send them off to a charter.

Children, Education and HIV/AIDS

Here is another emergency issue that gets hidden in the data and which treats 15-18 year olds as adults preventing us from seeing the true picture. What should we call this one - The Hidden Faces of Disaster? Children are dependents, children can't vote, children are not breadwinners. Is this why we take them for granted. HIV/AIDS and the stigma it presents are real issues for children who are inflicted with the disease through no fault of theirs. Many of them have and will lose their parents, their Friends and sometimes their teachers. They are often ostracised and many are not in situations to articulate their hurt and pain or the alienation from which they suffer. Many of us think the last twenty years have changed us. Has it?

I am writing a paper, publishable, I hope. My professor believes I should think of it, seriously. Its about Education and HIV/AIDS in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The purpose is to identify the impact of the disease on the education system in Nicaragua and Costa Rica as comparatives.

I am discovering that the education related data just isn't there. Where it is, it is hidden in data on adult. Little is said about the children - inflicted or orphaned. The data presented is mostly about women, gathered from testing them during pregnancy and feminizing the disease in the process. If this is when they are tested and it forms the major data source, what happened to the babies? Did they get the disease? Were they treated in time to protect them? Were the therapies even available? If they were could the parents afford them or were they free? This is were poverty and HIV/AIDS become a deadly mix. To know it is available yet inaccessible is the hallmark of being poor. Its like higher education for minorities. Not being able to protect the next generation from disease and death, often not of their own making is indictable and everything we learnt about sustainability goes out with the baby bath.

The chilling tales of street children and HIV/AIDS in some of these third world cities are still waiting to be told. Maybe, just maybe if children could vote or work; if only they had a voice; if only they we not so vulnerable, we would think twice about their welfare and how our follies affect them and their education. Education may be for many their only hope for a "voice"

Can we make school safer?

From Northern Illinois to Oxnard, California, our schools are again emerging as unsafe places. It seems we can no longer drop our children off at school and walk away. We can no longer watch our children walk through our doors and know for sure they are not concealing some deadly weapon. If children cannot be safe at school where can they be? It used to be, we were worried about safety in high schools and colleges. Does it mean we may have to begin to worry about middle schools? School is supposed to be fun. We are supposed to look back on our school days and reminisce of friends and fun, laughter and joy, of scared knees and nicknames, of field trips and birthdays. What has gone wrong? It does not have to be this way. How can we make schools safe again? Researchers tell us that schools are the still the safest place to be. Then we need to make the perception match the research. What can we do? What can you do? Any ideas on how we can improve safety at school? How can we make teachers and student feel safe? How can we make parents feel safe?

Children and school safety

Schools are where children spend much of their time. Their friends are there and this is where they learn to live in the general society as they interact with people outside their kin. Because children are vulnerable, we need to ensure that they are protected both from within and from outside. Feeling safe from harm and danger at school is important, but violence, bullying and the like can disrupt that. I believe we can begin to deal with the root cause and at least reduce the incidence of bullying and we should begin by dealing with the bullies and that which makes them bullies in the first place. Any ideas? Have you ever been bullied or described as a bully?