Gerri August, Making Room for One Another

Gerri August’s book, Making Room for One Another, is an interesting narrative about the research project she conducted on how a child fares when raised by lesbian mothers.  In the text we meet a kindergarten teacher and his students primarily during circle time in the morning.  The teacher is committed to running his class in a democratic fashion as he tries to include the children’s lives outside the school in most of his lessons.  Also, the teacher moves comfortably between dynamic dialogicality, designed dialogicality and monologicality.  As with many of the other authors we have studied, I found myself relating to the material while I did not connect these constructs to my teaching in the past.  What I mean is that I move between these constructs in my classroom but I did not think about the associated terms August mentions.

I really like how August uses Alice in Wonderland as the analogy of an adventure in the classroom.  One of my favorite books, it reminded me that school is, and should be, an adventure.  I need to remind myself of that as I stress over teacher evaluation, common core and new common tasks, as well as, still prepare my sophomores for the NECAP they will take next year.  Although the students mentioned in August’s text are five and six years old, my teenage students are as eager and as impressionable about the world around them.

August mentions that the student she was following, Cody, not only has lesbian moms but Cody also is adopted.  Right away, when this is revealed my first thought went right to the fact that he was adopted.  He does not look like his moms since he is from Cambodia and is dark skinned.  I predicted that this was going to be the larger issue for Cody over the fact that his mom’s were lesbians.  My cousin Julie and her partner Karen, had their son Luke via artificial insemination.  Luke looks just like Karen who birthed him and he looks a little like Julie as well.  The moms are white as is Luke.  The fact that he has two moms has been irrelevant in my family and he has been embraced from the moment we found out Karen was pregnant.  Of course, the three of them have dealt with a few problems over the years (Luke is 10 now), however, any discrimination they received was short lived and considered “part of life”.  Now, my friends Maria and Steve adopted two children from Columbia.  I have found that one of the kids, Zackary, has had a much harder time than my cousin’s son Luke.  Zackary does not look at all like Maria and Steve, which is often the topic of conversation by ignorant people all the time.  When Maria was alone with Zackary, especially when he was very young, people would say how cute he was and that he must look just like his dad.  Ugh!  Also, Zackary (now 16) has had a really hard time regarding the fact that he is adopted.  He went through a phase where he was obsessed with the fact that his biological mom (no one knows anything about his biological dad) would give him up.  August mentions abandonment a number of times in Chapter Six and my limited connection to these two types of families brought me to the prediction at the beginning of the story that Cody’s biggest struggle would be over his adoption.  This is emphasized in the penguin story his teacher reads to him about the two dads that adopt him.  It does not matter about the fact that Tango had two dads.  The abandonment was the bigger problem.

But, of course, August’s book was much more than a story about a little boy’s family dynamic.  I liked how August looks at the teacher’s classroom with a critical lens at the type of dialogicality he moves between.  The teacher is good at designed dialogicality as he designs his lessons around a curriculum that is inclusive of the world in which the students live.  However, he jumps into dynamic dialogicality quite well when he needs to connect to the world in a way that was not anticipated.   At times this shift is not perfect, but when is it ever perfect when a teacher has 15-25 students in front of him and thinking quick is the immediate need?  August made the teacher human and not a perfect, unreachable person, which was appreciated.

The following is a video in which leading educator, Lucy West, talks about the stages of collaborative groups and the importance of further questioning a student even when the answer given is a correct answer.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC7CSj7uvwU

I thought about Shapiro’s “laboratory of democracy” as I read about the teacher’s classroom dynamic.  The teacher is focused on empowering the students with connections to their everyday lives.  He focuses on how we can look different, speak different, live different, but still get along and work toward a peaceful existence.  Like Shapiro, the teacher in the text seems to focus on educating his students to be more humane.  Also, I could not help but think about the “Teaching Tolerance” survey when August says, “But treating each ZK student the same, regardless of their interests and needs, would also be unfair.  Zeke knew this” (pg. 176).  The teacher avoids cultural blindness by accepting each student for their individuality and NOT ignoring the fact that he has students with lesbian families, darker skinned families, single mom families, etc.  The teacher tackles these issues head on by reading a variety of texts in order to allow conversation to happen.