While reading this book, I couldn't help but wish I had been in Gaughan's class when I was in 9th grade. I mean, Mrs. Thomas was nice and everything, but for some reason I feel a bit cheated.
Gaughan's classroom promotes the kind of democratic ways of being I want to nurture in my classroom. Teachers who are committed to the well-being of all students must begin to reflect and rethink how and why they teach. Gaughan's book highlights the need for teachers to be aware of the multiple voices in the classroom. By envisioning the classroom as the intersection of multiple ideologies, we begin to become aware that teaching and learning are never neutral. This awareness allows us to engage in conversations that surface underlying assumptions. However, oftentimes, we are pushed by outside forces to focus on the content instead of the person, but Gaughan's book illustrates how powerful engaging students in the academic conversation can be. Gaughan doesn't shy away from the difficult topics and appears to enjoy teaching within "the contact zone." Gaughan's way of teaching is messy and unpredictable, and I fear that for many teachers it is by far easier to hide behind the curriculum then to connect with students in the ways Gaughan suggests.
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Yup -- It would be a great class to be a student in. It just make so much SENSE to teach this way. I'm wondering how to embed more articles and poems and mini-lit circles into a must-read curriculum like in P-ville. I was fortunate to have glimpes of this as a junior and senior at Murray Road Annex of Newton High School which was a teeny, 100-student experiemental sattelite school. We did stuff like Concentration Week: students would pick a topic and then, in groups, live and breathe that for solid week. Once I chose Theater and a grad student director from Yale came up and we did theater of the absurd -- and performed in a Cambridge park. Yup. Fortunate.
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