Climate & Culture of Commitment at DMPS Summit
Eager teachers swap ideas and impressions on Day Two of the DMPS Summit on Climate and Culture at the Iowa Events Center.
The DMPS invasion of the Iowa Events Center continued unabated Tuesday on Day Two of the first, but officially not last, Summit on School Climate and Culture. Thumbs were up all over and so was enthusiasm among the 1,200 attendees as the inaugural conference of educators completed an ambitious agenda featuring three keynote speakers, 80+ breakout workshops, a panel discussion involving all of the event headliners and a tour of the nationally renowned facilities at Central Campus and Scavo High School.
One of the Tuesday afternoon breakouts was entitled The White Savior Complex: The Myth, Our Role & Tools to Dismantle. The presenters were DMPS teachers Kristopher Rollins and Emily Lang and part of their material was brought back with them from workshops they attended last month at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival in Washington D.C. where their student-poets competed with 60 other teams from around the world.
“I wanted to teach so I could go to inner city Chicago and save the kids there,” Rollins told the group. “Me, a white kid from rural Indiana…”
The point was that even well-intended people and whole systems can be patronizing without realizing it. Rollins and Lang, who grew up in rural Iowa, have learned a great deal from their students, and that has made them more effective teachers.
“We try to first create safe spaces for our kids that later become brave places,” Lang said.
Listeners participated eagerly in a series of exercises. Virtually all of them were white. 83% of teachers are, they were told, even though minority students have become the majority in American public schools as of 2014. DMPS is a “majority-minority” district and that’s not going to change. But curricula and best practices are.
They only had an hour together in this workshop but you multiply the sparks that were struck times the 80 other sessions times the 60+ DMPS schools and the 180 days in the upcoming school year and you can feel a fire starting. You could sense it in the buzz during breaks. Josh Griffith is a vice-principal at Callanan Middle School. “I’ve been so impressed by this conference,” he said, a reaction that represented a clear consensus among attendees. “I am already looking forward to next year’s.”
Speaking of which, event coordinator Jake Troja confirmed Tuesday afternoon that one of next year’s keynote speakers will be Dr. Christopher Emdin, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology at Columbia University in New York City. If the short video of him that was included in the White Savior workshop presentation is any indication, and Rollins and Lang assured their colleagues that it was, Emdin is a dynamo with a burgeoning expertise For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood (the title of one of his books).
The last of the four breakout sessions spread over the two days was followed by a panel discussion moderated by DMPS Superintendent Dr. Tom Ahart. Participants included keynote speakers Erin Gruwell; founder of the Freedom Writers Foundation, Randall Lindsey; professor emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles and a consultant specializing in issues related to equity and access and Reuben Jacobson; the Deputy Director for the Coalition for Community Schools in Washington D.C. Also on the panel were Tim Lewis (Professor of Special Education at the University of Missouri), Joelle Hood (Senior Consultant with Collaborative Learning Solutions) and Brian Mendler (author of the book That One Kid).
The panelists fielded questions that were tweeted during the conference by attendees. One of them was whether education careers were a job or a calling.
Mendler’s response to that was both candid and convincing.
“I thought I wanted to be a sportscaster,” he said. “But that meant working on nights and weekends. I got into teaching so I could have summers and weekends and holidays off.” And that’s how he discovered his passion and gift for working with special education students. “When I went to my first teaching interview they asked me why they should hire me. I said I didn’t know if they should, but if they did I wanted to work with the kids that nobody else wanted.”
Mendler also mentioned something a colleague told him early on that he’s never forgotten. “I told him I was having a bad day,” he said. “And he told me that if I said something to the next kid I saw that made that kid feel better, even for a moment, then the day would count as a good one.”
It’s too bad that school doesn’t start tomorrow. Because there are thousands of teachers in town who can hardly wait for the good days ahead.
