The Literacy of Listening in Manila

An Ear Towards Students

A national curriculum with national teaching modules for every unit.  The same pay scale for every teacher for every school.  It sounds so restrictive so canned so unresponsive, and yet, schools in Manila were anything but unresponsive to their communities.  The private school was outside of most state mandates, so it was not surprising to find a creative system there.  What was surprising was the power of the student in the private Catholic school.  I imagined the priests, administrators, nuns and teachers as having the power in a religious school.  I imagined strict discipline and frowns.  I imagined wrong.  St. Paul College was anything but restrictive.  The plaque on the back of every seat in the auditorium read:

Student leaders were in charge of work like taking attendance, setting up tutoring for students, planning field trips, and gathering make-up work in each class.  The student leaders were elected in each classroom and worked with the teacher to manage the class.  The student council was called the “Supreme Student Government” and they had real power.  Students and administrators worked together to create a gifts program built off student interests.  They higher community specialists to head up the gifts programs:  artists, engineers, Olympic level coaches,  and the like.  Students shared their program with student leaders in other schools and helped them create similar programs.  The students felt and acted quite empowered at this beautiful school.  We visited regular classrooms and lab classes.  We visited classes where the teacher was absent but the students sat at their desks and completed seat-work without prompting!   This school maximized resources and had the only semi modern computer lab of the three - with a Mac Lab for design and music composition.  Listening to students was an art at this heartwarming school and students responded with passionate engagement and respect.

Turning Towards the Community (My Favorite School Visit so Far)

We visited a poor and rich public school in Manila yesterday.  What beautiful children and hopeful teachers!  The poor school has a 99% proficiency on national tests.  I"m going to say that again - 99% proficiency AND a 1% dropout rate.  Yep, I typed that right - 1%.  More than amazing, they are inspiring.  There is no other way to say it than to say that the teachers are TIRED! but doing so much with so little.  Such creative hands-on lessons with so few resources.  I watched students deeply engaged in a physics lab using only tiny mirrors and copy paper protractors (not even on card stock!) and students engrossed in literature lessons reading the novels chapter by chapter from HAND WRITTEN chapters on poster sized paper taped to the walls.  See my Facebook page to hear this beautiful children sing! 

I was most impressed with their response to the community.  The Philippines are in the midst of adding two years of high school to their entire system across the board.  I can't imagine telling my at-risk students that we have changed the school system and they will not graduate this year but have two more years to attend!  I can only imagine the desperation and defeat in their eyes if I gave them that news.  This school petitioned the government and is able to give their students real vocational certifications after grade 10 so they can leave the school and get a job.  Then they added an open high school program where students can attend classes at various times of the day/night while working to move towards their actual degree, but they do not have to.  The other way they respond to the community is by the actual electives that they offer.  The skills prepare students to enhance local industry immediately.  The businesses don't have to train students for their jobs.  The students are prepared to work in actual industries that exist.  

They offered garment making and housekeeping, appliance repair and cooking for resorts along with a dozen other practical work based programs.   These students took some rigorous core classes two or three times a week but studied their vocation every day!  By the end of the 10th grade year they could take a national skills assessment in their direct field and be certified to work a "real" job.  The electives were so central to the community needs around them.  I think of all the entry level jobs in the industries around my high school and see several opportunities to train students past that entry level position, so they could leave high school with skills that our local businesses actually need.  It would save the industry money as well as be beneficial to students to work this direction.

Hearing the Future

"We can find good teachers.  Dear students, be our scientists and engineers.  The nation needs you to be scientists," urged the beautiful young superintendent when one of my US colleagues asked the students at this public science high school why none of them wanted to be teachers.  When you saunter through a state of the art brand new high rise high school with 8 or more floors and hallways that resemble huge balconies guided by articulate adult-like teenagers, it's hard to believe that you are in a developing nation.  Looking out the windows instead of off the balconies, you remember that you are.  

In the midst of this kind hearted, rigorously alive and loving community is the acute awareness that most of these people live every day with scarcity - food scarcity, health scarcity, safety scarcity, water scarcity.  Yet the nation is not imprisoned by poverty but rather emerging from it like a caterpillar resting in a cocoon eminently aware of it's changes - the beautiful wings and velvety body that had replaced the slick skin yet not quite breaking free of the humble wrappings that ensnare it.  A colleague and I addressed a room full of 8th grade students.  Their teacher was still in the lounge.  They were waiting for class to begin.  I introduced myself enthusiastically as a history teacher.  They audibly groaned.  David introduced himself as a math teacher and they literally pumped their arms enthusiastically and couldn't control their "Yes!"  We were taking aback.  David turned on his video. "If you don't mind, could you please do that again?  I 'm going to introduce myself and you respond the same you just responded?" and they did.

This school has remarkably more resources than it's counterpart vocational school.  The building, a stipend for students who attend, smaller class sizes, but, as our host Alex stated over and over, our greatest resource is our students.  They have the luxury of having students apply and being able to send students away who do not perform at the 85% level.  (He noted this was good for the students as well because if they leave the school and go to another, they will be the valedictorian there.  Yet, it still does not have the resources of our poorest school.  The drafting class does not have drafting tables to think CAD programs.  Emasculate just constructed book shelves wait in a tiny library to be filled - just like this nation waits for her children to accomplish both her and their dreams.  Put your ear to the ground, you will hear them coming.  Observe the cocoon; it is moving; a wing is breaking free. 

Imperialism

"The Spanish gift to us is religion, and the American gift is education," explained our guide and teacher today as we sat in the luxurious conference room sampling sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves and dragon fruit.  Not all colonizing is equal.  The Spanish colonized the Philippines to benefit the Spanish yet, according to our Filipino instructors, the Americans colonized to benefit the Filipinos.  The Spanish did not educate the Filipinos.  They didn't organize the nation.  They didn't teach the Filipino Spanish or offer any benefits to help the Filipino climb the economic ladder.  They feared that education would strengthen the Filipinos causing them to unify and eventually rise up to defeat the colonizers.  It proved to be true.  When the Americans won the Philippines in the Spanish American War, they sent in teachers (called Thomasites after the ship they arrived on).  An educated Philippines has risen up to demand freedom and democracy.

Our first day in the Philippines felt like two or even three.  Of course their is the jet lag parasite draining energy from our beings, yet we stuck it out and completed a full day.  I was greeted by not quite forgotten tastes and scents - savoring my favorite Filipino food (Pancit Canton), sticky rice, fresh mangos and pineapple.  In the morning to ILEP alums taught us Filipino history.  The diversity struck me even deeper as I looked the political history of this nation.  I was so impressed by their trek towards democracy - rising to a freedom level of 3 (1 is best and 7 worst - http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2013/philippines#.U6r0c41dXew) and fighting corruption (what they call plunder) in their legislature and other government offices.  The battle for the South and negotiations with Islamist insurgents reminded me that again this area that is threatened by Al Qaeda influence does not want Sharia Law or any of the Al Qaeda goals.  They wanted to be treated fairly and to have access to the education and healthcare that the majority enjoy.  They are exhausted from oppression and prejudice.  When an earthquake shook the ancient building where we ate dinner and watched a cultural show, I became acutely aware of the fact that these stone megaliths had withstood more than 4 centuries of earthquakes, typhoons, and hurricanes.  The Spanish and Mexican imprint on the evening was greater than the buildings though; they echoes in the music, dance and food - again I had the best flan ever from a Filipino kitchen.  

So many stories.  So many imprints.  So much immigration.  I am anxious to increase my knowledge of these stories so I can piece together a more complete picture of this diverse people.

Quest for a Story

• “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard.  
• “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca.
• “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”  - Henry Miller

These quotes tossed me into the mix of educators seeking an opportunity to travel with Teachers for Global Classrooms to other nations, other schools, other cultures to become better equipped to prepare their students to join the journey towards global competence.  I embark tomorrow.  So much has occurred between the day that I used those quotes to explain my desire to go on this journey.  I actually could never have imagined the year's experiences that would flood my life with change: real, deep, permanent, nothing-will-ever -be-the-same change.  Yet, here I am.  Soft, moldable, in transit.  

Yes - I am in transit to the Philippines - to sunshine, rainforests, beaches, the city of smiles.  Look at this beautiful 5 star hotel that will welcome us to Manilla where we will meet with embassy officials, Philippine education officials, and teachers who have begun the journey to global competence through their own teacher exchange in the US:

Then I will travel to the "City of Smiles" - Bacolod City - for almost two weeks of immersion in their school system and cultural experiences.

I will work with a very friendly and hard working teacher named Donah at the Colegio San Agustin

http://www.csab.edu.ph/beta/

We will travel to the interior a bit to experience a hot springs and mountain resort one weekend and enjoy a beautiful white beach the next weekend:  

http://mambukal.negros-occ.gov.ph/

http://www.sipalay.com/

The Philippines is a perfect place to investigate my essential question for this trip:  How do our unique stories reflect and shape culture?  I am especially interested in stories that appear to have been lost or are threatened to extinction by the encroachment of the modern world or the popular world or the politically correct world.  Whose stories are vital to the depth of the world culture?  Whose unique voice must be preserved or reawakened for the depth of humanity to be represented in the global culture that is gradually engulfing every nook and cranny, crowded city, and isolated thorofare?  How can we preserve stories and not let the powerful overtake the weak?  How can we preserve diversity?

Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the UN once said, "The longest journey is the journey inwards."  Of all the quotes that led me into this journey, this is the one that urges me through it.  I have a story.  It is as diverse as the family that nurtured me, places I've traveled, friends I cherish, choices I've survived, and treasures I have both found and lost.  My journey across the ocean will drive me closer to myself in that all important journey inward....

Reading My Spaces

Is literacy just about reading and writing - pen and ink - words and, well, words?  What does it mean to be literate?  I stepped in the daunting doctoral direction this week.  My first stop is a discipline based literacy course that began with an analysis of the texts that we manage in different spaces.  Looking at my life from that perspective, my concept of literacy has grown.  Is a text only written?  Can it be a picture?  an expression?  a backroad?  an antelope?  a sigh?  What does it mean to be literate? The simple definition of literacy is the ability to read and write, yet somehow that definition crosses into another definiton that somehow encompasses and fully expresses the first definition:  competence or knowledge in a specific area.  We must be fully literate in the spaces we occupy to be successful.  The world is a space we occupy, a space where we compose texts and read or ignore texts.  I did discover I ignore the texts of broken faucets and toilet seats in the space I occupy most. Others respond efficiently to those texts.  I step over them, adjust them so I can use the sink and toilet awkwardly but get the job done.  What texts do we ignore, can we ignore and still be successful and literate in the spaces we inhabit?  Am I willing to confront the fact that I do not just inhabit my hometown but inhabit the world?  Am I willing to conquer global literacy or will I adjust the seat or put a cup under the leaking faucet to manage the global texts I face each day?

The Essential Story

The call for students to develop Global Competency frightens some and inspires others.  Some rush to its promise of increased quality of life, freedom to create, adding to a world narrative. Others cower in fear of their identity and values being swallowed by a wave of diffusion that waters down all uniqueness to some standardized global culture.  It seems the world is inching ever closer and that precious Western, outdoorsman culture is threatened to extinction by outside influence that doesn't understand what they are pushing us to give up.  How do we preserve our unique heritage in a sea of voices when it seems our voice gets smaller every day and other voices appear amplified.  Do we build a wall of protection or shout our story louder?  

Stories have always been preserved by being shared.  The world narrative is diminished each time a story is extinguished never to be heard again.  Our stories are invaluable as tools that reflect and mold both us and our societies.  When I visited the Philippines in 1987, I visited an island nation that conquered diversity with conformity.  Over 400 years of imperialism had left them with a common language that was not their own...English.  In an attempt to join the modern education movement, they adopted that language as the language of learning so all children learned all subjects in every classroom across the islands in a foreign language.  Their ability to speak their native dialects diminished and their stories dulled to a whisper until someone noticed the loss of their essential story and schools are now different.  Early education in the Philippines is now presented in native tongues.  Stories are being shouted instead of whispered.

I've been inspired by the reestablishment of the Crow voice locally.  Our little town has been sheltered by Heart Mountain since it's inception.  I've heard the story of homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and even of the misplaced Japanese Americans who were placed in a relocation camp there during World War II.  I've studied the Plains Indians and heard Lakota stories from nearby hot springs, but was completely unaware of the Crow heritage in our midst.  A nature conservatory has preserved the natural ecology of the mountain and has invited the Crow to restore their spiritual heritage.  Their stories have now become intwined in mine.

We all have a story and our story will only be preserved if it is shared, so I am embarking on a journey to the Philippines.  I will be an ambassador, a story teller, preserving our values by sharing them, enhancing our values by learning about the values of someone else.  Developing Global Competency involves learning how to preserve our story and make sure our values aren't reduced to a whisper in the world narrative.

Healing Rose

Healing Rose

My most vibrant memory from my trip to the Philippines in 1987 was 24 hours of feverish hallucinations and trembling chills under a thin banana cloth blanket in a sparse, stone hostel room outside Carmel on the island of Bohol.  My team partnered with three college interns, two male and a female.  I woke momentarily to the concerned gaze of my Filipino friends.  They shared a legend, a story about a girl who was ill but was saved when her lover hiked to top of a precarious mountain to pick a magical rose that healed her.  A few hours later one of the workers stood beside me with sweat matted hair and a wild pink rose that he had plucked from the top of one of the Chocolate Hills.  My fever had broken and pink roses became my favorite.  They speak to me of healing and friendship and faith and the stories that cross cultural boundaries.  Stories of hope and love and miracles rise from the roots of every culture and from the souls of broken people everywhere.  

I shared that story with my son who held it in his heart and cherished giving me pink roses not just for my birthday, Mother's Day, Christmas or other special occasions, but on tough days when I was grouchy, frustrated, and tired. He would change the aura of the entire house by showing up with pink roses.  The healing touched him, my daughters, my students, everyone I was in contact with on those difficult days.  Today my heart aches for my beautiful son.  I buy myself roses and wait for their healing touch and look out to the places in the world that hurt like I do...places like Carmel that was rocked by an earthquake not so long ago and Syria that is overcome with the horrors of civil war and I offer them a rose and a story.

How about you?  Where would you lay a rose today?  At the feet of a child weeping for his parents after a typhoon destroyed his home?  or in the hands of one of the lost children of Ukraine or at the door of the Brazilian woman whose home was demolished to make room to transport the world to the upcoming World Cup? or at a child's grave or before the child's mother who longs desperately for her son?  The magic in the rose is not in the rose itself, but in the love and in the stories and compassion flowing from them interlocking hurting people with each other, so we can find the strength to keep loving and hoping and offering healing to everything that is ill in our worlds.  The question is if we are willing to walk precarious mountain paths to pick the healing roses for our world?

Room in the Truck

There are so many ways to travel...horseback, plane, bicycle, train, subway, taxi, car and then the favorite for rural Wyoming folks ... the truck.  Of course we fight over the comparable value of Chevys and Fords, but given the choice we'd climb in any old pick-up for an important journey before settling into just about any other mode of transportation.  A truck will get you there.

And so begins my journey, a journey back to a place that awakened my love of adventure and appreciation for people...all sorts of people.  It's a perplexing journey to the Philippines, a land I visited in 1987 when I was young and thought I had some amazing, American truth to share with the world but discovered the world had some amazing truths to share with me and that I needed the world more than maybe the world needed me.  So my Teachers for Global Classrooms appointment to the Philippines took me by surprise.  Back to the Philippines?  hmmmm?  huh?  sigh.  

Yes.  Back to the Philippines but first my inaugural journey to our nation's capitol.  Shyly I boarded a plane feeling very alone leaving my comfy country home for a bustling metropolitan conference filled with strangers who I was certain were more professional, more experienced, and higher caliber than me.  I was not so certain I would fit in the blend of educators waiting at the end of the runway and a shuttle drive, but I did.  Beautiful, caring professionals met me at the Fairmont and welcomed not just me but my ideas and my people into their conversation.  They made room for me and I began what turned out to be a very long journey home.

After an uneventful flight to Denver, I was greeted by a plane full of unhappy passengers who discovered along with me that our flight home was canceled.  I weighed my options and headed to wait on the standby list for a flight to the nearest airport to my home.  That wait left me flightless and motelless, so I bedded down in a quiet spot at the airport and woke to standby some more.  Finally, I was on a plane to a destination two hours from my home with several others who would be two hours from their destination.  It was storming back home and the roads were precarious at best.  

As I deboarded the plane and walked down the stairs to the baggage area, I was greeted by a young marine with a camo cap and cowboy boots.  The generous hearted 24 year old had driven on ice to come get me and was already tossing bags and extra passengers into his truck for the 2 hour journey back.  This dear lady who I had just met stood near me in shock as the rental car company told her that it would cost $400 to rent a vehicle to drive to my home town.  The Ford already had four adults and a teenage girl packed in it, but the young man approached the lady with a grin.  "It doesn't make sense for you pay $400 when we are going to the same place and have all this room," he said pointing to the 8 inches of seat still vacant in his truck if we slid together.  She handed him her suitcase.  He tossed it in the back and she slid in beside me.  Knees scrunched almost to our chins we settled in for a bumpy ride filled with stories and the generosity of strangers.

And I thought about my upcoming journey.  Yes, there is room in the truck for strangers and time in the journey for stories, lots of stories.  Even in the homogenous, rural area where I live there is room in the truck for perspectives that are not our own and for a world of people with valuable stories, identities, and contributions.  There is room in the truck as we embark.