Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Introduction Teaching and Learning as CommunityAndy KaplanAndy KaplanFrancis W. Parker School, Chicago, USA Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn one of the articles in this issue’s symposium in honor of Vivian Gussin Paley, Sarah Sivright presents a letter in which Paley quotes from her book, Wally’s Stories.“Are you really Mrs. Paley,” Lisa asks.“You know that I am Mrs. Paley,” I answer her.“I thought you just call yourself that.”(Paley 1989, 18–19)There are so many ways in which Paley encouraged, influenced, and guided other educators, and this issue of Schools is dedicated for the most part to the witness and wisdom of some of these people. Coming upon this passage in the course of editing these pieces, I laughed, heard myself laughing, and wondered why. Several weeks later, I understood that it was a laugh of recognition: I had laughed not only with the child at her witty riposte but also at myself—well, a younger version of myself. It’s a laugh with great poignancy, a recognition of just how difficult a struggle I had to become not just a teacher but a whole person whose calling is to teach.One of the lessons I learned in seeking an advanced degree was what you might call the objectivity imperative. To establish a place in the academic community, it was important to cast away the merely personal. My academic training suggested one basic truth underlying the power of an insight, the beauty of an image, the force of an argument: each and all intellectual efforts derived meaning aside from and even in spite of the person uttering or creating them. I began teaching to support my work in a doctoral program. I was 22, far younger than my students in an adult liberal arts program. I wanted my students to take me seriously, so among other things, I wore a jacket and tie to every class. In this and in other ways, I signaled to myself that teaching was a role I was playing, a version of myself that was not really false so much as apart from the rest of me.When I began teaching high school, I continued for a while in this same vein. The jacket and tie were once again imperative, this time because I looked so young that I didn’t want to be mistaken for a student. But I dressed the part for more profound reasons. There were parts of me that didn’t seem to fit this role of teacher or at least I didn’t know how the teacher in me could accommodate these other parts. I was married with two young children, I was finishing work on a PhD, I was the lead singer of a string band, and I had recently directed a professional theater project. Unsure how any of these other parts fit into my teaching, I enacted for a time what Freud called the curse of intellectuals: I compartmentalized. At the end of my first year of high school teaching, I completed a dissertation on the rhetoric of autobiography, but aside from taking off for two days, one for my oral defense and one for my graduation, my scholarly endeavors seemed to belong to a different life. All those years of intense study and scholarship were at once fulfilled and irrelevant. And I soon felt even more keenly the wrongness of trying to bring other personal elements into my school life.At the end of my first year, I brought the string band to my school for an assembly presentation, and all I can recall now are the dangers of that show. Backstage before the show began, the bass player lit a cigarette as we were tuning. I rushed over to him and told him this was a school, we were on an auditorium stage, and smoking wasn’t allowed. He objected, “I can’t play if I’m not smoking.” I managed to convince him, but my worlds were clearly on collision course. By the end of the performance, I had already resolved that the band wouldn’t ever play at my school again. But worse was yet to come. After the performance, I was making my way back to my classroom when two of my students stopped me in the hall. “Oh, Mr. Kaplan,” the two girls gushed, “that was just so … good!” And the look in their eyes was not something I wanted to see. I didn’t want to be a rock star at school; I wanted to be a teacher.It took several years before I began to find ways to integrate myself as a whole person into my teaching life. These were transformative years, and the changes all came from a widening awareness of the depth and complexity of teaching as a profession and as a calling. I had begun with just a part of me, the intellectual part. I had focused my teaching on content, on the texts and the skills I knew well. If I had been directing my classroom as a play, my role would have been Smartest Kid in the Room. My students saved me from this silliness: I quickly found out that I was not nearly as smart as Claire or Jon or several others who astonished me on a daily basis with extraordinary talent (and these were ninth-graders, really just beginning to show their brilliance). But this was just one part of a revelation: Teaching was not about me nor was it about my mastery of texts and skills. I began listening to my students, paying close attention to the ways in which they experienced what we were doing and reading and discussing, and the variations and differences left me humbled and amazed.My teaching became a discipline of paying attention, of nurturing relationships, and of developing classes from student experience rather than teacher-imposed goals. I was no longer playing a part; I was becoming a part of each class. For most of my first year, I accepted the classroom arrangement of individual student desks arranged in rows, but the more I listened to my students, the more I wanted to broaden the conversation so that students were talking to each other and not just to me. This led me to move the desks into a circle, which was fundamental to me and completely at odds with the teachers who shared the same classroom. Because I wanted my classes to honor the voices of all students, I constructed lesson plans that alternated small- and whole-group activities. My goal for each class was to engage the interest and hear the voice of each student. It was a goal I rarely achieved, but participation and inclusivity had become my measure of meaningful classroom activity.That measure made me raise a steady stream of questions about the way students experienced the design and daily operation of a course. What makes a class period go well? Why does a lesson plan that works so well with one section fail to animate another section? Is there something more or something else that I should be doing to engage the students who do not participate? In an interview with American Journal of Play that we republish at the beginning of this issue, Paley describes the best way for a teacher to answer these questions. “Writing is the means of having visible conversations with ourselves. This would be valuable in any profession, but the teacher is in the best position to follow through in hour-by-hour, day-by-day interactions. It can be a euphoric experience. One gains the ability to focus on specific issues and to collect anecdotes and commentary to support one’s interpretations, questions, and doubts. Writing about one’s own classroom is an ongoing process that provides continuity, purpose, and context” (American Journal of Play2009, 134). For Paley, writing about her work in the classroom was an extension or another part of being a teacher: It was, she says in the same interview, another form of play. For me, writing about classroom experience was an extension of the project of listening to my students, of trying to understand and then further engage them in the experience of learning.For Paley, teaching and writing were mutually reinforcing, seamlessly connected in the joint project of understanding and encouraging the cultivation of play. Jane Katch, in an article in this issue, describes this connection as a habit of inquiry. “I was ready to take on the other suggestion Vivian had talked about for many years—to look for a question, one where I did not know the answer and that I really wanted to understand, and to write about it. I did not need to have the answer to the question before starting to write. The process of writing, she assured me, would lead to both more questions and to possible answers.” Katch describes here a process that defined my teaching career. Early in my career, I came upon the book Classroom Questions: What Kinds? The book defined and organized a wide variety of questions, but I decided that for me there were really only two kinds of questions, one bad, the other good. Bad questions have right answers, but the right answer is a dead end. Good questions have many answers, and each one of them carries the prospect of leading a conversation onward. The bad question is the one I know the answer to. The good question is the one that I ask because I don’t have an answer: It is a genuine question, animated by curiosity, and it reconstructs classroom teaching as a discipline of inquiry.For 20 years, I organized a yearlong course in American Literature around an opening question that remained central to the reading, writing, listening, and looking my students did. The question was, What does it mean to be an American? The opening essay in response to that question became each student’s benchmark for the year. Each work that we encountered that year became cultural news from our collective past, and at various times, I would ask students to go back to their first essay and ask themselves how our recent work supported, challenged, and altered their original views. For each assigned homework reading, students took turns selecting passages from the text to read aloud and discuss in class. In response to the poetry we studied together, students wrote their own poems. In response to the work of American painters, students wrote short stories. I published many of the poems and stories in an anthology at the end of each year. Anthology titles often quoted works students had read and admired: “The Mores You Know” (Alexis de Tocqueville), “Visions Gone Down the American River” (Allen Ginsberg), “Our Kind” (Anne Sexton). At the end of each week, I projected the words of an American song on a screen, playing the guitar and singing along with my students. All of the parts of me had come together in the community of my classroom.The habits of listening that I cultivated as a teacher then became the foundation of my work as the editor of this journal. When we started this journal nearly 20 years ago, Vivian Paley was one of the first people we contacted to serve on our editorial board. Her contributions to the teaching profession and to the larger responsibilities of a democratic citizenry for the well-being of our children have guided me and so many others. In gratitude for her passionate dedication to the teaching life and in honor of the high moral standards her eloquent writing invoked, we humbly dedicate this issue of Schools to Vivian Gussin Paley.Most of the articles in this issue focus on the direct and indirect impacts of Paley’s career on the teaching of young children. The symposium begins appropriately with the words of Paley herself. American Journal of Play conducted an interview with Paley in 2009. In this extensive coverage of her career, Paley emphasizes the central importance of fantasy and play in the lives of young children. Referring to many of her 13 published books frequently, Paley explains how she developed her sensitivity to children’s experience through a methodology of paying attention. She outlines the discipline of listening in the classroom, taping an hour of each day, transcribing the tape in the evening, writing her own reflections and questions based on the transcription, and then applying the results of the nightly inquiry to the next day’s practice. It is a moral as well as intellectual discipline, one that focuses on her relationship with her students as human beings. It is a discipline that opens the adult teacher to facing herself more clearly in that relationship: It helps the mature person in the room see ways to change, adjust, confront, and transform what the immature persons experience.In 2012, Paley was asked to deliver a speech at a conference in South Carolina. Due to a health concern, she never delivered that lecture, but she did give the notes to Gillian McNamee, who has carefully transcribed and edited those notes in our second work in From the Archives. In this lecture, “The Importance of Make Believe: A Nurturing Common Ground for All,” Paley argues that the classroom is fundamentally a community and that the classroom achieves community through the curriculum of storytelling and story acting. Paley herself is a consummate storyteller, and it is through those stories that we witness a pedagogy as it develops. This is a pedagogy that emerges locally, attuned to and building on the imaginative play of a particular group of children gathered in a particular classroom on a particular day. There is no handbook or set of rules that other teachers may follow: rather it is a curriculum that emerges from following the lead of these children on this day.The symposium in honor of Paley’s work began last year when Miriam Hirsch volunteered to become the guest editor. It has been my great pleasure to work with Miriam on these articles. Her sensitivity and alert responses to early drafts have helped each author achieve the results you read here. The symposium continues with reflections and descriptions of Paley’s influence on seven educators who began their careers as Paley’s protégées, four of them as Paley’s assistant teacher. Gillian Dowley McNamee describes the ways in which Paley showed her how to become a teacher, not only how to become an effective adult presence in the classroom, but more important how to experience the joy of working with young children. McNamee helps us appreciate the genius of Paley’s teaching, giving us a sense of both its complexity and its simplicity. The challenges of mastering complex skills of managing the classroom were daunting, but McNamee describes the overarching lesson that Paley showed her as an elegantly simple goal: Paley showed McNamee how to have a good day in school.Jane Katch also began her teaching career as an assistant to Paley. In “Who’s Afraid of the Bad Guys?,” Katch reflects on the ways in which Paley has helped her think through the difficult problems associated with violent play. Paley showed Katch how to approach classroom problems as opportunities rather than dangers. Instead of being fearful of doing something wrong, Katch learned to pose herself questions, to treat the problem as invitation to inquiry, with special focus on questions for which she had no ready or certain answers. I can’t imagine a more valuable lesson for all teachers to learn. It is so difficult to raise questions about your own practice, so hard to open yourself to looking honestly. Katch learned from working with Paley that the habit of this kind of inquiry cultivates a willingness to change. Katch shows how the habit of inquiry and the willingness to change helped her move from an intuitive response filled with fear—I hate violence and don’t want it in my classroom—to a place of curiosity and a more nuanced understanding of what violent play means to children and how to organize and make use of that play in constructive ways.Sarah Sivright entitles her article “My Teacher,” a relationship that began when Sivright, then a school secretary, read Paley’s books and started a correspondence. Typical of all her relationships, Paley encouraged Sivright, responding to Sivright’s gratitude for Paley’s books by thanking Sivright for the support and understanding of an intelligent reader. Sivright then became Paley’s assistant teacher for three years, and later they continued their relationship through correspondence. What struck Sivright early on and continued to amaze her during their years together was the classroom atmosphere. Paley was restlessly experimenting and often improvising, but the classroom always felt safe and supportive for all and each.In “Lifelong Lessons with Vivian Gussin Paley,” Nisha Ruperal-Sen begins with the two years she spent as Paley’s assistant. It was a fortunate beginning to a fulfilling career, and like the experience of so many others, Ruperal-Sen enjoyed an extensive and fruitful relationship through correspondence. Paley showed Ruperal-Sen the great advantages and opportunities of a curriculum based on children’s fantasy play.Yu-ching Huang first met Paley through Paley’s books, two of which she had translated into Chinese before they met when Paley visited Taiwan. In “Writing, Thinking, and Teaching: My Journey with Vivian Gussin Paley,” Huang brings to life the generosity and kindness that Paley brought to her relationships with teachers. When they first met in 2002, Huang had taught young children for many years, but Paley opened up new dimensions of the early childhood classroom in showing the power of play as the center of classroom activity. Huang presents her relationship with Paley as a journey, with Paley guiding her first steps into storytelling and story acting. Paley encouraged habits of inquiry, especially the habit of writing about the classroom, which supported and encouraged Huang. The journey continued for many years, a lively and inspiring conversation that Huang presents in excerpts from their letters. The stories are rich and vivid testimony to the ways in which Paley both led and accompanied others.Like Huang, Trisha Lee’s first acquaintance with Paley came in reading Paley’s books. In “Pieces of Magic,” Lee recounts their relationship in a letter, a way of conversing with Paley even when she is no longer there to reply. As in the other stories, it’s striking to note the intimacy of friendship that occurred in a sustained relationship with Paley. With great affection, Lee describes the flowering of a friendship that led to a brief but intense collaboration at a workshop. Paley began the workshop with a demonstration of storytelling and story acting with a group of children she had just met. For Lee, what ensued was truly magical. Paley’s wizardry was not just in developing stories with these children, it was a profound magic of including every child in the play, even an otherwise difficult and disruptive child whom the resident teacher suggested Paley might want to leave out of the lesson.Jane Paley writes about her beloved mother-in-law in “Blessed Are the Peacemakers.” Paley celebrates the attitude of careful listening that characterized every interaction in which she saw her mother-in-law engage. It is high praise indeed to be a good teacher, but her daughter-in-law shows us that Vivian Paley was still more: a moral, caring, exquisitely good person.Margaret Katch was Paley’s student for two years. In “Princesses, Purple Dresses, and Pretending,” Katch recalls the ways in which Paley empowered and honored a young child’s fascination. Katch describes the power of pretend play as a complete immersion, far deeper than acting a part. Paley gave Katch the opportunity to transform, to become someone else.Chaya Gorsetman made extensive use of Paley’s work in the courses she began teaching in the early 2000s. In “The Continuing Development of a Veteran Teacher,” Gorsetman first “met” Paley when she assembled materials for an elective course on the importance of play in education. Videos of Paley in the classroom and several of her books became central to Gorsetman’s course as well as transforming her view of play. Gorsetman provides a wonderful example of the dynamics of play by describing an interaction with her granddaughter in which the five-year-old describes how she will construct, furnish, and finance a nursery school.Patricia M. Cooper concludes this symposium in “Teaching as a Moral Act: Vivian Paley and a Manifesto of Children’s Rights in the Early Childhood Classroom.” Cooper summarizes key elements of Paley’s thinking and writing as the basis for an educational bill of rights for young children. Cooper argues that Paley’s authority derives from her role as a classroom teacher and that because Paley knew young children in such a unique and significant way, we can generalize from Paley’s own work to develop a sense of what children have a right to expect from their schooling. Although Paley might have demurred that she had a theory of education, Cooper argues that Paley’s insistence on fantasy play as the meaningful curriculum of the early childhood classroom is all the theory we need to create the kind of classrooms that children deserve.Community is central to the life of teaching and learning both inside and outside the classroom. Although the symposium on the work of Vivian Paley focuses on the ways in which play organizes the classroom, our last two articles focus on the ways in which teachers experiment with new ways to teach and create new opportunities for students to learn in very different settings. In “An Unexpected Journey: Sharing Collective Shifts toward NGSS,” we hear the voices of teachers in a Wyoming high school who collaborated with each other and with professors at a nearby university to understand and enact the recently adopted Next Generation Science Standards in their classroom practice. The teachers describe a three-year period of professional development as a journey as unexpected as it was highly rewarding. The sustained and collective emphasis of the project helped the teachers confront and in many cases alter some of the bedrock assumptions of their practice.Kathlyn Elliott, Grinell Smith, and Heather Lattimer describe the ways in which the kind of work that Vivian Paley pursued for so many years amplifies the voices of classroom teachers. In “Power in Schooling and Research: The Role of Action Research,” they describe that power as essentially disruptive. When classroom teachers develop inquiry based on their own practice, they also challenge the long-held grasp of college and university educators as the only credible academic voices about policy and practice. That challenge is vital to the ongoing project of democratic education. If schools are essential to democratic life, then we need to pay attention to ways in which we can recreate our schools to be more democratic as institutions. The authors argue that action research is a powerful instrument to develop and use in pursuing that goal.We close this issue with reviews of two books written by authors familiar to Schools readers; coincidentally, each one is or will be guest editor of a symposium in these pages. Miriam J. Singer reviews a book by Miriam Hirsch, who among other notable accomplishments is the guest editor of the Paley symposium in this issue. Singer praises Hirsch’s Teach Like a Human: Essays for Parents and Teachers for her ability to make eloquent use of many years as a classroom teacher and administrator. Singer finds this book especially useful because it so carefully delineates the roles of teacher and parent as partners.Stephane Barile reviews Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice: Cultivating Practical Wisdom Through Descriptive Inquiry by Cara Furman and Cecelia Traugh. Furman and Traugh have each published recent articles in Schools, and Furman will be the guest coeditor of a symposium on the work and influence of Patricia Carini planned for Fall 2022. Barile describes the power of this book as an introduction to a mode of inquiry that anyone seriously concerned about education should know about. Barile also recommends this book for the political and moral context that the authors provide. Descriptive inquiry gives educators a powerful alternative to modes of assessment that have for far too long reduced teaching and learning to scores and results. Barile gives several examples of the ways in which this important book can help us reconceive and reassess the practice of education.ReferencesAmerican Journal of Play. 2009. “The Importance of Fantasy, Fairness, and Friendship in Children’s Play: An Interview with Vivian Gussin Paley.” American Journal of Play 2 (2): 121–38.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPaley, Vivian Gussin. 1989. Wally’s Stories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Schools Volume 18, Number 2Fall 2021 Published in association with the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716603 Views: 369 © 2021 Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.