Since the end of August I've been working as a garden teacher for kindergarten to 4th graders in a New Orleans elementary and middle charter school. It's my first time teaching and first time working with young people, and it's been both immense joy and ongoing challenge. The next few posts will document some of my experiences, and the resulting conflicts and thoughts, as a teacher. Names and references will be changed so I don't get fired.
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What are the boundaries of a culture? Where does it end and begin? Can you trace it down a street until you reach an intersection? Can you look at it on a map and pencil in a line?
At the New Orleans charter where I teach a garden class, we operate under the assumption that a culture can be bound by bricks and mortar, extending only as far and high as the walls and ceilings of a building. We cultivate that culture by repeating several catch-words - community and leadership, for example - over and over again in the hopes that they'll stick in students' minds.
Teachers and administrators are the arbiters of that culture. We're expected to emulate those cultural values at all times and oversee the students every moment of every day to assure compliance. We have a points-based system of discipline and affirmation that tracks how each individual student reflects those values on an ongoing basis, and each student can track how they're doing that day based on what color tag is next to their name on a board in class: red, yellow, green, or black (in ascending order).
The school intends its culture to be simple, with clearly defined expectations and overt methods of feedback. In other words, everything that culture is not.
In my senior thesis I drew upon Dr. George Gerber's idea of culture as an "invisible web" of "stories and messages that govern our conception of life and our behavior (watch the clip - it's worth it).
Gerbner's idea of culture is that it's complicated. Cultures are the results of so many stories, told over such a long time, interaction and combining in infathomably complex ways. And each person experiences that culture slightly differently. Untangling the web of culture that forms a person is consummate to separating a glass of water into each individual molecule and examining them one at a time.
So what does it mean to ask 600 students and teachers to cultivate a culture from scratch, one whose lines are supposedly as clear as the stroke of an architect's pen on a blueprint? Each person will begin from a different starting point, entering with years of cultural learnings embedded deep into their psyches, from our four-year-old kindergarteners to our fifty-something teachers (though most are younger than 30 - more on that later). Some may already think and behave in ways that align with some of the school's values. Some understand the culture in theory but their own cultural backgrounds have taught them a bit differently. Some will find it totally unfamiliar and have difficulty falling into line - sometimes literally so (more on this, too). None will emulate that culture in all the right ways all of the time because no human culture has ever existed in such specific and delineated terms.
Nor is there such a thing as "from scratch" when it comes to culture. Even the educators who designed such a system have their very specific interpretations of what each of the catch-words mean and what they're supposed to look like in action. A sub-culture can't help but be the product of the larger cultural webs they're woven into. The culture at our school is not value-neutral, not historically neutral, not politically neutral, and therefore not culturally neutral. And yet the implicit message in our school is that our culture is contained, that it does not interact in any way with the cultures around it. Or that if it does, it benefits the students and their communities unquestionably (more on that later, as well).
We often talk about cultures on a small-scale: school cultures, family cultures, organizational cultures. Sub-cultures happen everywhere. But no place is "everywhere," and this place is New Orleans. If cultures are collections of stories, then New Orleans has a library unlike any other place in the United States. The histories, the human landscapes, the food, the celebrations and music, the way people interact: it means something very specific to create a school culture in this context. And yet the conversation surrounding education in New Orleans focuses not on the particularities and strengths of the local culture, but how to develop an educational culture external to it.
This is the logic of many of the schools the New Orleans public charter system: based on millions of data points and analysis, create school cultures that help prepare students from marginalized communities to engage with the broader world; to allow them to think of achievement as a norm and college as an expectation rather than an exception.
It's noble-sounding. Yet it's being carried out in some dubious ways: by non-profit and for-profit management companies with business-minded frameworks, experts and administrators with little or no background in education, and teachers like me who, having replaced thousands of local educators, have never lived in New Orleans, are fresh off the elite-college circuit, have no intention of making education into a career.
It's all well-meaning, but is that enough?
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