Creativity and Chaos , livre ebook

University of Georgia Press - Suhor Charles , Davis Millie

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

132 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In Creativity and Chaos: Progressivism in New Orleans Public Schools and the Nation 1967-1977, Charles Suhor brings to life the bold challenges to the status quo in education during a decade of national turmoil. The regimentation and rote learning of traditional schooling could not have escaped the restless temper of the timesVietnam war protests, racial strife, assassinations, hippie communes, the sexual revolution, an emerging drug culture, and daring innovations in pop/rock music. Suhor describes his immersion in post-World War II popular culture of New Orleans as a rich backdrop for his years as an impassioned educational reformer at local and national levels. A risk-taking teacher and district supervisor of English, he plunged headlong into controversies over black literature, censorship, ebonics, the new grammar, faculty integration, testing, standardization, and computer technology. He demonstrates how the sweeping national trends often took quirky, distinctive turns in a city that delights in marching to a different drummer. Suhors engaging account takes the reader into classrooms as well as the intrigues of central office politics and national leaders disputes on how to best teach students in a time of change. In no sense a doctrinal liberal, he lambastes the errors and excesses of the progressive moment and traces its decline and the backlash demand for a return to basic skills. Suhor concludes with an update on innovations that have waned or persisted in todays schools.

Sujets

USA

History of education

Education

États-Unis

Informations

Publié par	University of Georgia Press
Date de parution	30 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781588383938
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0498€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

C REATIVITY AND C HAOS
A LSO BY C HARLES S UHOR
The Growing Edges of Secondary English ( ED . WITH J OHN S. M AYHER AND F RANK D A NGELO , 1968)
American Dream ( ED ., IN R ESPONDING TEXTBOOK SERIES , 1973)
Gallery ( ED . WITH O LIVE N ILES AND J. J AAP T UINMAN , IN S IGNAL TEXTBOOK SERIES , 1977)
Speaking and Writing, K-12 ( ED . WITH C HRISTOPHER T HAISS , 1984)
Scholastic s Composition Grade 11 (1980; AND ED . OF THE SERIES )
Dimensions of Thinking, with Robert Marzano, et al . (1988)
Teaching Values in the Literature Program: A Debate in Print with Bernard Suhor (1992)
Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970 (2001)
The Book of Rude and Other Outrages-A Queer Self-Portrait ( ED ., 2007)

NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, Alabama 36104
2020 by Charles Suhor
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, 105 S. Court Street, Montgomery, AL 36104.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Suhor, Charles, author. | Davis, Mille, author.
Title: Creativity and chaos : reflections on a decade of progressive change in public schools, 1967-1977 / Charles Suhor ; foreword by Mille Davis.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018015 (print) | LCCN 2019981428 (ebook) | ISBN 9781588383921 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781588383938 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Public schools--Louisiana--New Orleans--History--20th century. | Progressive education--Louisiana--New Orleans--History--20th century. | Educational change--Louisiana--New Orleans--History--20th century.
Classification: LCC LA297.N4 S85 2019 (print) | LCC LA297.N4 (ebook) | DDC 371.0109763/35--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018015
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981428
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by Versa Press
N EW S OUTH B OOKS : Suzanne La Rosa, publisher; Randall Williams, editor-in-chief; Lisa Emerson, accounting manager; Lisa Harrison, publicist; Matthew Byrne, production manager; Beth Marino, senior publicity/marketing manager; Kelly Snyder and Isabella Barrera, editorial and publicity assistants; Laura Murray, cover designer.

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future .
Dedicated to all who lived in this country during the decade of social upheaval and educational change, with special gratitude to classroom teachers and other colleagues whose wisdom, energy, and friendship were inspirational over the years. Notable among these were Kathy Behrman Weitzner, Shirley Trusty Corey, Edwin Friedrich, Peter Gabb, Robert Hogan, Lou LaBrant, James Moffett, Betty Monroe, Alan Purves, Malcolm Rosenberg, John Simmons, Cresap Watson, and Velez Wilson .
Contents
Foreword
Preface
1 Up from the Ninth Ward: Grow as You Go
2 Contexts for Change
3 Change Agents in New Orleans
4 Literature: Life After Silas Marner
5 Grammar, Usage and Oral Language
6 Writing
7 The Media Movement
8 Mass Testing: The Battleground
9 The National Decline: Backlash from the Right
10 The Decline of Progressivism in New Orleans
11 Update: The (Non-)Persistence of Innovation
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits and Notes
Index
Foreword
M ILLIE D AVIS
I don t know how to separate the person from the work or the prevailing circumstances from either. Creativity and Chaos: Reflections on a Decade of Progressive Change in Public Schools, 1967-1977 doesn t try. It offers one an insider s view of education in this era of progressivism, a delightful tapestry of Charles Suhor s personal experiences woven together with what was happening in education in that decade, nationally and in the city of New Orleans.
Charlie s fluent, readable, and clever style makes this book anything but an educational policy snooze. Yes, it s an educational history, but it s also a memoir, sprinkled with remembrances of real people and events.
I was fascinated to read of a Charles Suhor I didn t know in 1989 when I first came to work at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), where he was deputy executive director. Initially we were two employees working in the same building, and my impression of Charlie was of a scholar who spent a good deal of time in his office drinking chicory coffee, editing papers, and directing the governance mechanisms of NCTE. But at some point Charlie became my supervisor, and we began a different collegial relationship, working on handling censorship challenges and spreading good will to affiliates-things I still do since his retirement.
The Charlie Suhor of this book, unlike the one I knew, is a bit of a renegade, with understandings of and feelings about his school district superiors that, frankly, mirrored feelings I had experienced as a teacher trying to do what was ultimately best for students and teachers. He notes:

Progressive leaders needed to be research-savvy teacher educators. They had to be both aggressive and humble in selling new programs and methods. They needed to select and train teachers in the new concepts, then observe how they were incarnated in the classroom.
I m awfully proud and grateful that Charlie brought these qualities to share with NCTE and with me.
Reading Creativity and Chaos from the teacher s perspective, I was fascinated to get an insider s view of progressivism and how it played out in the work of an English supervisor. I also appreciated Charlie s deft comparison of the particulars of what did and didn t happen in New Orleans because of its culture or because of his and others intervention when similar education wars were being fought elsewhere.
New Orleans and districts across the nation experienced not only educational waves that changed what was taught and how, but also swings in the central office personnel that made or broke programs. Over the decade of the late 1960s through the 1970s, districts struggled with how to handle oral language skills-Standard English versus Nonstandard English-what literature to offer, how to open up the canon of mostly dead white men to authors of color, and what to do about testing and how to make assessment meaningful.
Fresh out of teaching in a high school English classroom in the Richmond, Virginia, public schools when I arrived at the NCTE, I had lived many of the philosophical changes in education that Charlie describes in Creativity and Chaos . I had suffered and, as much as I could, worked around the back-to-the-basics push that our large district prescribed, opening my eyes and practice to writing process and urging me to attempt to diversify the old masters curriculum in a district that was at least 90 percent African American. Ironically, or not, these are topics that are still prevalent in education today, making true now what James Fleming Hosic said in NCTE s 1912 English Journal inaugural editorial: The fact remains, nevertheless, that there are numerous unsolved problems of English teaching; witness the discontent.
Ah, politics and the ever-changing and re-changing of programs within the system were the norm! In Creativity and Chaos we witness the tension between doing the right thing and rocking the administration s boat, all through the bird s-eye view of an English supervisor caught in and working through the mechanisms and hierarchy of a big-city school district administration. This on-the-ground account of the changes in education circa 1967-1977 demonstrates that what goes around and comes around does so mostly because of, or despite, the individuals involved.
But then, isn t all of education an assemblage of individuals views of the subject, of teaching communities sharing their knowledge within central office politics and local and national education policy?
And isn t education something that changes and changes back again, echoing one of George Santayana s more famous statements: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Millie Davis is former Senior Developer, Affiliates, and Director, Intellectual Freedom Center, National Council of Teachers of English .
Preface
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of tumultuous social change. Those years saw the Vietnam war, widespread racial strife, assassinations of national leaders, hippie communes, the sexual revolution, a rapidly emerging drug culture, and a new radicalism in popular music.
Parents of the baby boomer generation were aghast. After World War II, they wanted a calm, secure, squeaky-clean Ozzie-and-Harriet lifestyle. They didn t know what to make of the youth counterculture that challenged their most cherished values. Indeed, the term generation gap leaped into popular usage in the 1960s. 1
What would become of the boomers? Timothy Leary was urging youth to turn on, tune in, drop out. 2 Civil rights leader Jack Weinberg warned them, Don t trust anyone over thirty. 3 The iconic phrase, sex, drugs, and rock roll, came to characterize countercultural values. 4 To the older generations, the nation s social fabric, restored so painstakingly after the Great Depression and the World War, seemed to be unraveling.
When I turned thirty-one-that untrustworthy age-in 1966, I was the father of five children and in my seventh year as an English and history teacher in New Orleans public schools. Neither I nor my students had an inkling of where the increasing social unrest would lead, but there was prophecy in Robert Burns s poem To a Mouse in our grade twelve textbook: Forward, tho I canna see/ I guess an fear! 5
Of course, the challenges to traditional values did not start in the elementary and secondary schools. But longstanding conservative education programs and practices could not avoid the wave of change that