Home > Fall Forum > 2001
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's Opening Remarks
Fall Forum 2001
What a beautiful opening statement. Thank you so much. I don't know that I've ever been happier to come to any place to speak. I think I've been waiting to come to speak to the Coalition of Essential Schools since it ever began, waiting for this invitation. So thank you for finally inviting me.
The title of my talk this evening is "Will anybody know who I am: On witness, justice, and respect." It is hard to begin any speech, any conversation for that matter, that refers to teaching, learning, and development, that speaks about the human experience, without marking the tragic, cataclysmic events of September the 11th, the moment when we were suddenly made to feel helpless, vulnerable, victimized, when our tears expressed our deepest anguish, fears, confusion, and rage. When our democratic values and civil rights seemed to be under assault. When, in our adult confusions and impotence, we struggled with finding the right words to support and guide our children.
During the weeks following the massacre, we educators, our society's public adults, have felt a particular challenge and responsibility to take care of the children in our charge, to help them come to terms with this awful, cruel event and it's aftermath, to find a precarious balance between mourning and moving on, grieving and getting busy. During these past several weeks, I have, of course, felt my share of fear and anguish, rage. I have had my share of terrifying nightmares. But on my best days, I know that I must find a way to work more intensely, more wisely, and generously. That I must cut though the trivia and distractions of my everyday life and do things that have purpose and meaning that will make an imprint, that will give forward to the next generation. More than ever, I have felt committed to enacting our democratic values, to supporting the coexistence of educational excellence and educational equity. If we are to live in this world that grows smaller and smaller, we educators must recommit ourselves to building schools that are truly inclusive. You put it so beautifully in the title of this forum, we must work to create "schooling on a human scale." We must develop rigorous standards and goals for all children and provide the supports that our students will need in order to be successful in reaching them. We must develop relationships with all of our students that inspire their trust, challenge their intellects and that will have mutual respect at their center.
In the shorthand language taken from four of the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools: We must create educational communities whose goals apply to all students, where our relationships with students are deeply personalized, where democracy and equity are primary goals, and where a tone of decency and trust prevail.
We have said these things for a long time, with the best of intentions. But over the years, our rhetoric about justice and diversity has begun to sound stale and over-rehearsed, much too facile. The events of September 11 and their aftermath can help us to recognize how very precious and fragile are our democratic principles. And how very hard and complex the work of authentic inclusivity turns out to be.
It may not surprise you that the core values and ambitious goals that most of your schools strive for and that bring us together this evening, are also themes that have been central preoccupations in my life and in my work. I've also worried a lot about how difficult those goals are to accomplish both institutionally and interpersonally, about the great distance between our expressed values and our daily habits. And I've worried about finding new ways of addressing our chronic laments and our tired rhetoric. The opportunities and casualties of our quest for diversity and equity then, have been major and minor notes in my siren song, particularly for the past few years as I have explored in my research and in my writing the contours and dimensions of respect.
As I have tried to shape a reconstructed view of this beautiful term. I believe that respect is the single most important ingredient in creating authentic relationships and building healthy communities. I remember feeling the power and majesty of respect and the deep connections between respect and justice in an unforgettable moment of grace. It was April in 1986 at the burial and requiem for my father, Charles Radford Lawrence II. My brother Chuck gave the eulogy, his intimate and loving view of a very public man. My brother Chuck's voice cracked as he recalled one of our father Charles' loveliest qualities. And now I'm quoting from my brother.
Our father, Charles, had a natural air of authority about him. He commanded respect without ever asking for it. In high school, my rowdiest friends, the guys who stole hubcaps and crashed parties, were perfect gentlemen in my father's presence. They would say yes sir, Dr. Lawrence, and answer his many questions about school and home and about where their parents and grandparents were from. It was much later that I realized our dad's secret: he gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth grade kid in Spring Valley who shined shoes, the same way he talked and listened to a college president or a bishop. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say. And although he had the intellectual and physical tools to outmuscle a smaller person or mind, he never bullied. He gained your allegiance by offering you his strength not by threatening to overpower you.
In my brother's words, I heard the recovery of rich meanings of respect. Through my tears that morning, I heard the lovely symmetry and reciprocity, not the static hierarchy. I heard the tender transfer of authority and not the power plays. I heard the deep curiosity, the need to know, the urge to understand, not the arrogance of knowing enough or knowing it all. And I heard the beauty in the ordinary, daily gestures, not the drama and glory of great public moments. I am sure that my brother's words of gratitude and loving farewell have burned their way into my heart, fueled my interest in respect, and shaped the way I understand and interpret its meanings.
As a researcher and educator, I've also seen the power of respect in schools and classrooms, seen the ways in which respect is crucial in nourishing and sustaining relationships between teachers and students. In the last 25 years, for example, I have visited literally hundreds of schools across the country, from city schools in poor communities to affluent suburban schools, from remote rural schools to elite preparatory academies. And in all of them I have asked students to identify their good teachers and to tell my why they think they are good. The students' answers across all of these diverse settings are always the same.
"Why do we think that Mrs. Browning is a good teacher," they ask me incredulously, as if I should know the answer. "Because" they say, "she respects us." I push further, trying to discover what they mean by respect. Again there is no reluctance or ambivalence in their responses. They feel respected by teachers who make them feel visible and worthy, who are demanding, who hold high standards for them, who insist that they learn. And they feel disrespected or "dissed" by teachers who never bother to get to know them, who let them off easy, who do not take them seriously or believe that they can be successful. Respect grows in relationships of expectation, challenge, and rigor. It is diminished by inattention, indifference, and empty ritual.
In "A Gathering of Gifts," a beautiful piece by my sister Paula Lawrence Waymiller. I bring my family with me. My brother Chuck stands here, my sister, Paula stands here, and they give me the courage to speak with you this evening. Paula is a masterful and compassionate educator, a poetic writer, and now an Episcopal priest. In this piece she recalls the weeks of grueling anticipation before her first day of kindergarten and speaks about the primal fears that we all experience when we enter new communities. Her story rehearses the raw feelings of vulnerability and the yearning for visibility and voice, the desire to be known. So here are a few paragraphs from Paula's piece:
It is 1951, and summer has come to a steady, hot, quiet, hum in late August. A healthy amount of boredom in the air begins to let the summer end, making way for anticipation of my first day of kindergarten, the beginning of school. My brand new first day of school dress hangs on the mirror, over my bureau, red plaid, I think, with a white collar. New cotton undies and a slip and soft white ankle socks are folded on the bureau. And in an open shoebox with white tissue paper unfolded enough to see them, are my new red school shoes. My mother had told the salesman, something sturdy, in a school shoe. I had been thinking bright red, patent leather, party shoes, and was crestfallen, when sturdy signaled the salesman to bring out brown with a tie. Mom and I must have each persevered with our own image of what my first school shoes would be, because, I ended up with oxblood red leather with a double strap and double buckles. Pretty, but sturdy. Handsome, was my father's peacemaking word for the compromise shoes.
Every end of August night, before going to bed, I would carefully lift the shoes out of the crisp paper, smell the fresh new leather, put them on the floor next to my feet and think, I am going to school. I am going to step up the big high steps onto scary Mr. Gurkey's scary big school bus, where I've heard that the big kids chant "kindergarten baby stick your head in gravy" when the little kids get on. I'm going to a real school in a strange new place. Will anybody know who I am?
The big question: Will anybody know who I am? For teachers and students across the developmental spectrum, from kindergarten through graduate training, the question is the same and respect is a potent, omnipresent concept. It is on our tongues, embedded in our rhetoric. It is central to our philosophical frameworks and educational vision and it shapes our daily actions and interactions. It is therefore, both practical and prophetic.
By now I am sure you gather that my view of respect challenges traditional conceptions of the term. Let me briefly tell you what I mean by respect, identify what I think are its key dimensions, focus on a quality of respect that I find one of the most surprising and generative, and look at the work and wisdom of a practitioner of respect, who embodies that quality.
Respect is commonly seen as deference to status and hierarchy. Usually respect is seen as involving some sort of debt due people because of their attained or inherent position, their age, their gender, their class, their race, their professional accomplishments or their status. Whether defined by the rules of law or the habits of culture, respect often implies required expressions of esteem, approbation, or submission.
By contrast, I focus on the way in which respect creates symmetry, empathy, and connection in all kinds of relationships, even those such as parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, commonly seen as unequal. Rather than looking for respect as a given, in certain relationships, I'm interested in watching it develop over time. I believe that respect generates respect. A modest loaf becomes many. With that in mind, I am interested in how people work to challenge and dismantle hierarchies, rather than with how they reinforce and reify them, as well as with the ways in which the context that is the situation of the healer and patient, parent and child, teacher and student, photographer and subject, shapes the ways in which people engage in respectful relationships. Since I focus on individuals, it is important to consider how family roots, temperament, and life stories, shape the ways in which they are able to become respectful and respected. Rather than the language of inhibition and constraint, typical of the more old fashioned view of respect, I listen for the voices of challenge and exuberance. Rather than the language of dutiful compliance, I hear the words of desire. I hear the words of commitment. Rather than the broad and esoteric abstractions of philosophers and moral developmentalists, so distant, often, from the complexities of people's lives, I watch for the details of action and try to decipher the nuances of thought and feeling.
I identify six dimensions of respect, not to be heard as discreet ingredients of a prescribed recipe, but rather as a framework for considering the rich experiential complexity of the term. Each dimension reveals a different angle of vision. So let me briefly describe what I mean by each.
The first dimension is empowerment. When we are respectful of others, we want to offer them the knowledge, the skills, and the resources that they need, that will allow them to make their own decisions and take control of their lives.
The second dimension is healing. In showing respect for another, we hope through our work and our actions, to nourish a feeling of worthiness, of wholeness, and well being in them.
The third dimension is dialogue. Dialogue. In showing respect for another we encourage authentic communication. We listen carefully, we respond supportively. We are willing to move through misunderstandings, distortions, conflict, and anger, towards reasoning and reconciliation.
The fourth dimension and the one on which I will focus my remarks this evening is curiosity. Curiosity. When we are respectful of others, we are genuinely interested in them. We want to know who they are and what they are feeling, thinking, and fearing. We want to know their stories and we want to know their dreams.
The fifth dimension of respect is of course, self-respect. In order to show respect to another we must feel good about ourselves. Self-respect, however, must not be confused with narcissism or entitlement. It results from a growing self-confidence that does not seek external validation or public affirmation. It is learning to live by our own internal compass, one defined by a daily, private, vigilance.
And the final dimension of respect that I explore is attention. Attention. When we are respectful of another, we offer our full, undiluted attention. We are fully present, completely in the room, sometimes engaged in vigorous conversation, and sometimes bearing silent witness.
I want to talk to you folks about curiosity and about its messenger, a man named Dawoud Bey. Because I think it is perhaps the quality of respect that surprises and enhances our view more than any other. Curiosity, it seems so innocent, so ordinary, so doable. And it seems the least tainted by political hype or tired rhetoric. It also seems so fundamental to relationships of all kinds, relationships between lovers, relationships between parents and children, between teachers and students, among colleagues, all kept alive by genuine curiosity, by wanting to know and be known, by the search for knowledge, by discovery, openness, and attention to newness and change, by making oneself vulnerable to hearing things painful or incoherent. And curiosity is fundamental to the quest for justice and the commitment to inclusivity. Individually and institutionally, we must be genuinely interested in the stranger's voice and in the challenges and opportunities that his or her perspective will bring.
As an artist and as a photographer, Dawoud Bey, creates larger than life sized color portraits that allow us to see into the psyche of his subjects. His art hangs everywhere in all the largest art museums around the country and the world. When Dawoud talks about his art, he points to the development of a relationship with his subjects at the center of his work. If most of us think of photographers with a camera held up in front of their faces, using their equipment as mask or barrier, hiding out while they expose others, then Dawoud stands in defiant contrast. He believes that photographers must enter into relationship with their subjects that are mutual and symmetric where both photographer and subject are unmasked, making way for trust and dialogue.
His photography is more about discovery, more about finding out what is true for each person through listening to his or her stories than it is about presenting a likable portrayal. For him photography begins always with a deep curiosity. "I'm endlessly curious," Dawoud says, about the primary motivation that defines his respectful regard of the people with whom he works.
In his early twenties, Dawoud began his career hanging out in the streets of central Harlem, in New York City. Streets that were both exotic and familiar to this middle class black boy from Queens. For five years, from 1975 to 1980, he worked to develop his unique approach to making pictures about the human experience. His hanging out was methodical. He would select a particular area, usually a 10-block square like from 125th Street to 135th Street, moving from east to west. And he would land there each day with his 35mm camera hanging around his neck. For several days he wouldn't take any pictures, just stand around, approach people, and begin a conversation. Sometimes, he'd go to the same bus stop for several days in a row and begin to recognize the people who would arrive at the same time each day. They would begin to notice him and eventually, they'd strike up a conversation. "This was very hard for me," admits Dawoud, "I was an incredible shy person. Real reticent. Real fearful. I was a stutterer. I think making pictures was the way I began to engage people, the way I came out of my shyness.
But even as a novice, Dawoud knew that photographs grew out of relationships and that the process had to be reciprocal. This reciprocity usually emerged out of the sharing of stories. Courageously pushing past his reticence, Dawoud forced himself to reach out to the folks and make a connection. Sometimes he had to begin the storytelling in order for people to feel moved to carry on. But once the ball got rolling, he found that one story encouraged others. Before you knew it afternoon had slipped into evening and an atmosphere of reciprocity emerged. The stories were usually inspired by a question, about a genuine curiosity about the other person. And the curiosity couldn't be faked.
Despite his shyness, Dawoud thinks that part of the reason he was able to learn how to reach out to people was because his father was an amazingly friendly and gregarious man, who had the ability to engage everyone. He could stand on the street all day long and enjoy talking to everyone about anything. Dawoud remembers how his father, Ken, would stop and talk to the man selling hotdogs on the corner. His curiosity was provoked by anybody. He would ask the guy how long he'd been selling hotdogs, who his supplier was, how much profit he made, and on and on, endlessly curious. But it was not only that Ken was eager to engage in conversation that amazed his son. It was also his ability to connect with people of all kinds, whatever their status, whatever their station. Ken was an electrical engineer by training, and he usually held the position of manager or director in whatever shop he worked, but he never used the power of his position to diminish others or to pull rank. Dawoud remembers visiting his dad at work and never having the sense that he was the boss. He had an easy relationship with all the men and women who worked with him.
Dawoud loved his father's curiosity, his gregariousness, and the even-handed way he dealt with everyone around him. Even though he grew up feeling awkward and shy, so different from his father's ease and cool, he must have absorbed some of his social inheritance. In his early days meeting people and taking pictures in Harlem, a part of his father seemed to grow up in him.
After working with a 35 mm camera for several years, Dawoud decided he wanted to slow down the way he was working, in order to force a more sustained relationship with the person he was photographing. He switched to taking pictures with a black and white, 4x5 camera, a camera that produces both an instant print and a negative, and a camera that required that he set up a tripod every time he would shoot a series of pictures. "With a 35mm camera," Dawoud explains, "you can be invisible, you can take ten pictures without people ever noticing. I began to have ethical problems with using the person as an unwitting participant. With a 4x5 camera you have to get a commitment from the subject. You have to ask someone to stand in front of you, be still, and cooperate. I wanted the act of consent." The idea of consent was especially important to Dawoud in working with the black community. He not only felt that it was crucial that he construct a set of alternative images of African Americans. He also believed that the process of the work needed to express a respect for the dignity of his subjects. The process needed to be deeply relational and fundamentally human. The process could not be separated from the image. He explains the equation: if I wanted the pictures to have a more intense quality, then the relationships needed to be more intimate and more reciprocal. I needed to build up a series of relationships slowly and patiently.
When Dawoud describes the curiosity and commitment that are part of his work, and the depth and complexity that he strives for, he takes me on a flashback to his second grade teacher at PS 123, a public school filled with African American teachers and students in Queens. When he photographs his subjects and bathes them in light, he wants them to feel seen, in the way he felt seen in Mrs. Jones' classroom. "Mrs. Jones," he recalls, "was profound and extraordinary and very inspiring."
"In what way profound?" I ask, somewhat surprised at a word that seems to go beyond most people's recall of second grade. His response was immediate. "She established real relationships with every single child in her class. Everything was possible and everyone could do it. Ever since second grade, all of Dawoud's other teachers and all of his other educational experiences had been measured against Mrs. Jones' amazing skill and passion and they have all come up wanting. By the third grade, Dawoud's parents had enrolled their son in PS 131, a higher achieving white school where he was the only black child in his class, where he remembers feeling an uneasy, unnamed, anxiety, every time he stepped off the bus and into the school. Dawoud recalled an incident in fourth grade where one of the little girls got her lunch stolen and he looked up to find the teacher singling him out. Her cold stare and her accusatory finger waving in his face and he felt baffled and confused. I was innocent, I didn't even get the connection recalls Dawoud. "Me?" he stammered. Was she talking to him? Dawoud broke into a sweat. Yes, she meant him and he was to go down to the guidance office immediately. He was the culprit. There was no doubt in her mind. Dawoud rose up from his seat, walked the long march to the door amid the quiet stares of his classmates, and dutifully took himself to the guidance office, where the counselor interpreted his acting out as some kind of mental problem and gave him, as he recalled, some weird tests putting square pegs in round holes.
In Dawoud's memory, this is one story among many. "I'd get singled out," he recalls, "much of the time I was in a conflicted state. There were these strange things going on but what do you say? I couldn't name what was happening and I couldn't find the words or the courage to ask." The following year in fifth grade, he remembers that the class was writing a group play about colonial America. And the play was to be written in verse. Dawoud loved the assignment and he leapt right into the middle of the work. The teacher was gratified by the way her class pulled off the assignment so quickly and with such apparent ease and mature collaboration. She inquired of everyone how they had been so incredible productive and the children all pointed to Dawoud who smiled back shyly. "I remember," says Dawoud, with hurt in his eyes, "how her expression changed in that moment, the raised eyebrow, the amazement, the surprise." She must have applauded his inspired work and thanked him for his contribution but the only thing that Dawoud can remember is her utter bafflement and his inner confusion. The teacher was unable to reconcile his brightness with her stereotype of him. How could this black boy from Queens produce this verse? She seemed tormented by this. Dawoud's tales of being painfully misunderstood, the ways in which his fourth and fifth grade teachers were blinded by their prejudice remind me of the opening passages of Ralph Ellison's classic novel Invisible Man. A book published just before Dawoud was born. I quote from the opening paragraph:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spoof like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bones, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows. It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorted glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything, except me.
The plight of Ellison's invisible man echoes through Dawoud's later childhood stories. He suffered, what Ellison describes, the construction of their inner eyes, and he learned the hard way that to exist, we must be visible. The contrast of the biased oversight of his teachers at PS 131 and the full empathic attention bestowed by Mrs. Jones, surely influenced Dawoud's approach to his art. His photographs, motivated by curiosity, shaped by commitment to his subjects and their consent and participation allow his subjects to express themselves bathed in respectful attention. Our view of knowing, really seeing, the whole child, the whole student, might be informed by Dawoud Bey's masterful and compassionate lens. Threaded through his story, we see the daily acts of justice, the warm brace of inclusivity, and the relentless curiosity that says "yes" yes, to little sister Paula's haunting question "will anybody know who I am?"
In closing I can't resist being the teacher that I am. I want to mention seven lessons that I believe are important for those of us who want to honor and enact the missions of diversity, equity, and welcome the exciting and difficult challenges of creating schooling on a human scale. For those of us committed to embracing diverse voices, identities, frames of mind and learning styles. For those of us who want to turn our tears into wise work, and generous service, and for those of us who want to build families, schools, and communities based on relationships of respect.
So I'd like to close my talk tonight with seven, big lessons. The first is on symmetry, on symmetry. We need to reconstruct our images of and metaphors for respect. The old views of respect that emphasize hierarchy, approbation, and obedience, based on habit, ritual, or law, then to lead to relationships that are static asymmetric, and constraining. People become stuck in their roles of power or impotence, responsibility or irresponsibility, and are neither challenged nor inspired to try on other personas or develop new ways of being. Respect that is symmetric and dynamic, on the other hand, supports growth and change, encourages communication and authenticity, and allows generosity and empathy to flow in two directions. The image is one of a circle, not a triangle or pyramid. From this new perspective, differences in power, strength and expertise may remain but the respect creates a relational and generative symmetry.
My second lesson is on relationship, on relationship. Respect grows in relationship and it is shaped by the context. I cannot possibly envision respect in the abstract. It is grounded in individual reciprocity, and engagement defined by the immediacy of the moment and the constraints of the setting. It is visceral, palpable, conveyed through gesture, nuance, tone of voice, and figure speech. One of the reason "to diss" to diss, has become a verb spoken by all of us, not just cool talking adolescents, is because it seems to capture, in one sharp syllable, the potency of respect not given. The moment when we are suddenly made to feel diminished, demeaned, and dismissed. Those us seeking to nourish respect then, must see its embeddedness in growing relationships and appreciate the immediate and visceral way that it is transmitted.
The third lesson is on civility, on civility. It is important that we not confuse respect with civility. Although these notions are related, they are certainly not the same. Civility refers to the rituals, routines, and habits of decorum that characterize a gracious encounter. We think of the etiquette of politeness in matters as an important but relatively surface engagement. Respect certainly includes attention to these rituals of civility but goes deeper. It penetrates below the polite surface and reflects a growing sense of connection, empathy, and trust. It requires seeing the other as genuinely worthy.
And my fourth lesson is on storytelling. Storytelling is at the center of respectful encounters. Stories, lubricated by genuine curiosity, authentic questions, and attentive listening, stories also allow for rapport and identification across the boundaries of class, race, gender, prejudice, and fear. Through the unique and specific aspects of each other's stories, we discover the universals among us. And stories are not exclusive property. One story invites another as people's words weave the tapestry of human connection.
And my fifth lesson is on language, on language. If we are to make progress toward an authentic pluralism, a real diversity of voices in our schools, then I think we have to listen carefully to the language we use and get rid of code labels, like inner-city, like at-risk, like urban, that are masks for words we refuse to say in the politically correct environments we inhabit. And we have to strike, or at least revive and reinvent entire terms, like multiculturalism and diversity that have lost their punch and lost their challenge. One of the reasons that I love the word curiosity is because it is so plain, so core, so untarnished. If we really practice curiosity, we will be inspired teachers and creative learners and we will be genuinely interested in understanding the colors and differences in our midst, in knowing the stranger.
And my sixth lesson, the penultimate lesson is on family origins, family origins. The imprint of family is powerful in shaping the way we each negotiate respectful relationships. As we try to create relationships that are nourishing and challenging, that have respect at their center, we often confront the ghosts of our parents, the haunts of our early experiences as a child. These echoes can be inspiring. We create relationships that have the imprint of our parent's empathy and generosity. This was the good fortune of Dawoud Bey who inherited his father's irrepressible warmth and curiosity. But others of us must work to challenge harsh and troubling generational echoes. We must try hard not to unleash on others the assaults our parents, wittingly or unwittingly inflicted upon us. Our determination to become teachers and healers may, in fact, been inspired by the deep residues of pain inflicted by abusive parents. As educators engaged in respectful encounters, we hope to do the opposite, act out of compassion and empathy, restraint and connection, and in so doing, heal ourselves.
And after all of these words and all of this language, my final lesson is on silence. Respect is not just carried through talk, it is also conveyed through silence. I do not mean an empty, distracted silence. I mean a fully engaged silence, that permits us to think, to feel, to breathe, and take notice, silence that gives the other person, permission to let us know what he or she needs. In nourishing respectful relationships then, we must develop receptive antennae, take on the role of witness, and learn to live in stillness. At the still point, says T.S. Elliot in his poem, Four Quartets, there is the dance. Birth and Death join at such moments inviting our deep curiosity, our full attention. For the dying, and I believe for the living, the immediate moment is the most significant.
Here we are, this evening, in Seattle together. Now is always. Thank you very much.