I recently (as in, moments ago) retweeted Shay Stewart Bouley, executive director of Community Change Inc., Boston, saying, "Shutting up is actually a skill that is worth practicing. If the topic isn't your lane, it's ok to be quiet." In the second half of thread, she elaborates: "The world is larger than your views." Now, this may seem totally random -- but I think in light of this week's readings, from "Coteaching" and the narrative writing section in Teaching for Joy and Justice, it's incredibly relevant.
The teachers in each of these readings seem to agree that allowing students to shape their learning is integral to their growth not only as students but as people. For example, the process of a read-around, where students share their own personal narrative writing, is in itself a student-centered activity where the teacher sits back and listens. And by encouraging students to tell their own stories, Linda Christensen found that she got "more honest discussions" when she used "literature and their lives"... as she writes, "I set the scene for them to make their own discoveries, to learn their own lessons without teacher lectures about how they are pawns in a society..." (Christensen 71). Students learned from one another by sharing pain, shame, anger, and joy through narrative storytelling; not only did they learn good writing techniques but they learned from the content of the stories themselves about each other and the larger world that Bouley referenced in her tweet.
The idea of students teaching each other is expanded upon in "Coteaching," and this is where the sitting down and being quiet that Bouley mentions comes into play as well (just tying it all together). As teachers, it's scary to admit that we don't know how to connect our content to our students, especially when the culture and language and backgrounds of the students we have is so vastly different from our own!
But by giving our students an opportunity to teach their peers something, translating a lesson into their own language, terms, allowing them to use their own interests to shape it, we, by keeping quiet (unless absolutely necessary) learn something, too, something far more valuable than trying to repeatedly beat students over the head with the same, redundant talk that we believe is the right and only way because that's the only way we've seen the world (so far). With coteaching, students play with material in a way they probably can't just by sitting at a desk, in the same way that using literature and writing as a mirror to strengthen student voice promotes critical engagement with not only the worlds of their peers, but their personal worlds as well.
Honestly, I think the goal of teaching should be to reach that coteaching point, where students can take material and teach each other, because it signals a certain level of mastery. Not only have they read it or performed the task, they've had to flip it on its head and look at it from all directions in order to keep their peers interested and involved as well. The idea of allowing students to tell their stories and teach them as well, so we can catch more glimpses of that "larger world," is a great one. Scary? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
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