on youth work and teaching
Little Beaver
I sent my mom two photos yesterday. The first is a photo I found from my teaching last year. The date is April.3rd, 2019.
I know this because I am standing at the front of the carpet pointing to the “3” on the homemade calendar that is the size of a bulletin board.On the board I’ve written “Today is Wednesday April. 3, 2019.” A sentence that we will read together, if we haven’t already. The kids are in front of me sitting on the carpet. Immobile, criss-cross, and each on their individual squares, you can only see the back of their heads. Most of them are looking up towards where I am pointing, and inevitably, teaching them something about the date or how a calendar works. I know that a few of them have no idea what is going on, but they are learning how to sit still, predictably branded as self-control and skills for the “real world.” The world that we create and recreate everyday inside of schools and out.
The second set of photos is from my job as a youth worker. In the first I am lying on my belly on a scooter in the gym. Two kids, who are cousins, are holding my feet in the air, one foot each. All three of us are looking at each other and laughing. I have a basket in my hands and they are going to push me so I can collect as many roaming balls in my basket as I can. The human version of Hungry-Hungry Hippo’s.
The second photo is of me and two different children: Little Muskwa (bear) and Little Amisk (beaver). Little Amisk and I spent at least an hour going through a Cree dictionary learning and writing all the words with “amisk” as the root on our wall sized chalk board. Each of us analyzing the language and ideology as we went. Me sharing what I knew with her, her learning how to spell the words and recognizing patterns. Little Muskwa is named after her love of bears, a connection and spirit teacher we share together. I remember her telling me her story of when she was in her home community with her Kokum and they “adopted” a bear cub. The cub was little and followed her everywhere, the cub killed and ate a chicken, the cub hurt their leg and they had to drive a long time to take them to the vet. Her imagination and willingness to foray in a world where more-than-human animals and humans could spend time together was unadulterated childhood, an expression of her Cree spirit.
We had just finished our meal together when Little Muskwa had gotten into a bit of an argument with her older sister, as siblings do. In an effort to distract, I convinced little Muskwa and Little Amisk to read some books with me and pulled out my Mary Poppin’s bag of books. As she always does, Little Muskwa asked for tea. Because she is no older than 8 years old and wants tea and honey after every supper we share together. Sipping on her tea, together we all read “The Day the Crayons Quit” and “The Day the Crayons Came Home.” They pointed out the overlap between the two books, that white crayon is naked, that the leaning tower of Pisa looks like it’s going to fall over, that blue crayon is almost extinct. The moment was pure, and effortless, and rooted in relationship. I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of us. All of us smiling toothy smiles, some of us with less teeth than others, Little Muskwa bringing her Care Bear into the picture too.
The third is a photo of at least 15 kids laying on the floor of the gym, lined up head to toe to demonstrate the length of the paperclip chain that they had built. It was at least double the length of them lined up head to toe and spanned the entire length of the gym. Their excitement, cooperation, determination, and focus is what comes to mind when I remember this evening. I didn’t sit them down, stand in front of them, or give them a set of criteria and instructions. They spontaneously choose to build this with one another and even proceeded to color code the paper clips, building their individual chains and connecting them along the way to build one large, colour coded chain. I helped, I guided, I joined in, but I did not dictate their learning.[LC1]
The fourth photo is of five kids in the kitchen together. And while I was on the floor with my colleagues dealing with the mayhem that ensued that night, my colleague in the kitchen had an impromptu baking and cupcake decorating session with 5 of the kids. They were siblings, neighbours, friends, and cousins decorating and eating cupcakes together. Wearing aprons several sizes too big for them, chatting with one another. A blob of dark blue icing on one cupcake, light blue on the other, a third full of sprinkles. A fourth illustration of kids living their lives as kids do, in the most natural way.
If I look back at the first photo I sent my mom, I have several other photos just like that. Photos of me standing in front of, not alongside or as a witness to the kids and their individual and collective learning. Discussions and talk among other teachers about self-control and learning, discipline, work ethic, and the ‘real world’ that center the children as deficit. Discussions that rarely, if ever, are had as a youth worker among my collogues. And when we do, it’s strength based, it’s from a place of empathy, compassion, and understanding of the structural inequalities that live in these children lives. Not framed as something to fix or impart, as an individual deficit, as is so often the case in Education. Of course we have structure, discipline, and teach life skills. We focus on work ethic. But we do not neglect the realities of their lives. Our solutions are rooted in understanding. Understanding that is too often absent in the schools I have been in. In youth work, challenging behaviours are the symptom of what is happening in their little lives. In education, challenging behaviours are meant to be fixed in isolation of what is happening in their lives. The ultimate goal is to produce a child that demonstrates appropriate behavior so they can resume in a classroom setting. In education we focus so much on getting them back to a state of learning that we neglect the reality of their emotional experiences outside of school. As a teacher, I understand this pressure well as every day I was in the classroom I felt it myself. The system is so smothering it’s difficult to see a new way of functioning and relating.
When I reflect on the paperclip chain I think of how those kids took control of their learning. It was not an adult who decided to embark on this task, but they came together as children and decided to hook hundreds of paperclips together. This required them to collaborate, to plan, to slow down, to communicate, and they did it well and of their own accord. Something that is strived for in schools every day. I do wonder if it would have been recognized as such in a school, or, if there would have even been the opportunity for them to create their own learning experience.
From my experience teaching, I have photos of me helping children individually, imparting knowledge, albeit knowledge from the mandated program of studies. There are photos I took of them at center time, playing with one another, but this is a privilege that kindergarten is afforded that most other grades are not. When I sent my mom the first photo she responded with “Love this, send more.” When I sent her more, I sent her the photos from work. When we talked on the phone, my parents commented on the photos from the youth center. They could see the stories and relationship inherent in those experiences that are not visible in the photo of me teaching. You can say that this dilemma I encounter is a problem of my teaching. That it is my choice to stand in front of kids. And you would be right, but you are also wrong. The experiences and relationships I shared with you from youth work are genuine. It is learning and development and growth in its most natural sense. These experiences are rooted in relationships. It’s the teaching of patience, love, fitness, respect, life skills, math, literacy, humility, kindness, relationship and more. They are teachings we share with each other, they’re reciprocal. I am not an expert, imparting knowledge of facts, dates, events, or ideologies on my kids. I am in relationship with my kids and we continually consent to build that relationship and learn together. When something goes wrong, and it often can, we have the luxury of slowing down, of meeting the kids where they are at in that moment.
The setting I work in and our communal goal to love, support, build relationship, and mitigate harm allows us to learn and develop relationships in this way. It’s some of the most healing learning I have done. I work embedded in a community. Where kids are neighbours, friends and family that play with each other in the streets and in their yards. They are siblings and cousins and of all different ages. This does not hinder our learning, it bolsters it. These relationships are the foundation to all the learning that happens here. They don’t sit in desks, line up silently, walk between rooms at specific times in silent line ups, or regurgitate knowledge from a program of studies that is drastically removed from their lived realities, interests, histories, and families. A curriculum that is often harmful and pushes a particular agenda about what type of person you are supposed to be in-line with capitalist values. A null curriculum that fails to address complexities and accuracies of “Canadian History.” They aren’t segregated into rooms based on nothing but their age and left to the devices of one teacher whose job is to teach a provincially mandated program of studies. Within this mandate, we forget about the humans and the relations we have in front of us. Within this mandate, the children can never come first.
In the last semester of my education degree, I read in one of my textbooks that “getting kids to do every day things that they do not want to do is a pretty good summary of what teachers have to do every day (Truscott & Crook, 2016 ). It was framed as if this was an inevitable consequence of teaching. That in order to accomplish the important work that is expected of us, children were going to dislike it and we must have the discipline, foresight, and control to do it anyways. This is diametrically opposed to how we function in a youth center. Yet our learning is whole and real. The kids like and choose to come to the youth center. As both a teacher and a youth worker, I oppose this sentiment because I have lived a different reality. As teachers, how can we say we love children and simultaneously believe that our job is to continually force them to do things they do not want to do? All this under the guise that it is essential and important for them as human beings? Who says what is important? Leanne Simpson writes:
“My experience of education from kindergarten to graduate school was one of coping with someone else’s agenda, curriculum, and pedagogy, someone who was not interested in my well-being as a girl, my connection to my homeland, my language, or history, and my Nishanaabeg intelligence. No one ever asked me what I was interested in, nor did they ask for my consent to participate in their system. My experience of education was one of continually being measured against a set of principles that required surrender to a assimilative colonial agenda in order to fulfill those principles” (Pg. 149)
Whether we like it or not, how much do we perpetuate this as teachers in the system as it currently stands? Whose agenda are we teaching, and how do we feel about this? When our first responsibility is to teach the curriculum, how are we to center the little humans in front of us first? When there is one teacher to 25 or 30 children, how are we supposed to have moments like I have had with Little Amisk and Little Muskwa? If we are to “teach”, share, and live in Indigenous ways of knowing and being, how are we to do that in the confines of a curriculum whose very premise is to erase and discredit those ways of being?
When I go into work as a teacher, I know my role and I can do it “well.” I can stand in front of my kids, get them in a line up, make sure they are quiet and respectful. When I do these things, I am told that I am a great teacher. That I have great control. That these actions and controls are largely what make me a great teacher. The space exists for me and them to operate in this way. Teaching otherwise is possible, but it is difficult and it is active resistance because the system is not set up to teach otherwise. When I teach, the system ensures that these relationships are not the first priority, and often, do not have to be a priority at all.
When I go into work as a youth worker I spend time with my kids, we play games, read books, build paper clip chains, make a tofu scramble together, talk about life, play hide and seek, play basketball and learn the most valuable of life skills like cooperation, patience, team work, and sportsmanship. We have a team full of colleagues and we share this work together. We don’t have our own kids and classrooms, we don’t feel fearful to comment on what we can all do to better to improve for the kids, we do it together and we welcome feedback. I can only have moments like I did with Little Muskwa and Little Amisk, or play hungry-hungry hippos because our team is there to supervise and play with the other kids. When I am creating these memories and relationships, they are creating their own.
As a youth worker, my income less than one third of what I can make teaching. But that is a small price to pay for the relationships, love, support, and holism that I am proud to be a part of. Schools can look different, they can function in a way that prioritizes children and holism, they can look more like the youth center I work in. But first, we must reflect as teachers and school staff on the hard truths of what our teaching currently looks like in order to change it to what it can be. We must ask ourselves how schools are physically and socially set up and whose needs and values they serve. The children’s or the adults? Children or institutions? And then we must ask why. We must ask ourselves the role we each play in either changing this, or contributing to it. While I know teachers who would love to stray from this, I also know teachers who love and thrive in this system. We must ask ourselves what our goals and priorities are as teachers with children in our care and if the system we work in contributes to, or takes away from that goal.
For now anyways, it is very easy for me to choose youth work. There are things I love about teaching. I love the kids. I love learning, I love learning with them. I love when they experience success and improvement and feel proud of themselves. But I am getting all of the same experiences as a youth worker, as are my kids. For now, I choose to be in a place where children, cooperation, teamwork, and relationships are embraced and encouraged. Where novelty and the ideas of staff that challenge the status quo are supported, not seen as deviant or threatening. Each of our kids goes to school. They also attend our center. But in my experience, how we relate to them could not be more different.
References
Daywalt, D., & Jeffers, O. (2013). The Day The Crayons Quit. New York: Philomel Books.
Daywalt, D., & Jeffers, O. (2015). The Day The Crayons Came Home New York: Philomel Books.
Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Truscott, D., & Crook, K. (2016). Ethics and law for teachers. (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON: Nelson Education.
