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L. Gatti, Toward a Framework of Resources for Learning to Teach,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-50145-5_9
CH AP TE R 9
My semester-long poetry elective was always a small class, but my stu-
dents and I agreed that we loved it that way. For some reason, it was
always scheduled as the last period of the day, and so at 2:30 pm my
students would come in and, without prompting, con gure the tables so
that we sat facing each other in class. We would chat for a few minutes,
and then we would get into our work, each of us opening our journals to
free write before turning to the poems we would be discussing that day.
Almost without exception over the six years I taught it, the course was a
sort of cozy, intellectual community. Students wrote their own poetry,
sometimes based on themes and ideas in the work we were studying, but
often emerging directly from their lives. And at the end of the semester,
the students organized and participated in a school-wide poetry reading
where their family members and friends could come and listen, and read
their own work if they felt compelled to share it.
I had organized the course as a chronological study of Modern Poetry,
starting with writers like T.S.Eliot, the “father” of modern poetry, and
ending with contemporary writers like Mary Oliver and Li Young-Li. I
wanted my students to have an understanding of the historical trajectory
of what we call modern poetry, at the same time exploring the core ques-
tions, “What is poetry? What is considered good poetry? Do its de ni-
tions change? Who decides?” As we studied different poets, part of the
intellectual game was to create conversations between poets around that
question. And so, for example, the students took the role of James Dickey
Conclusion: Teacher Education toWhat
End?
responding to Beatnik poetAllen Ginsberg about whether or not the con-
fessional impulse in Ginsberg’s poetry was “good”; T.S.Eliot engaged
in (heated) debates with William Carlos Williams around who, exactly,
poetry should be intended for.
In this same spirit, we approached the individual poems through a lens
of “big questions.” When we studied James Dickey’s haunting poem “The
Lifeguard” (a poem based on his own experience searching for the body of
a drowned swimmer at a summer camp), we contemplated questions like
“Is it possible to save another person?” and the more personally focused,
“Have you ever wanted to save someone from themselves? Another person?
A situation?” One of the most powerful poems we studied through this
lens, though, was Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “The Boy Died in My Alley”
(1981). The footnote on the poem provides an important frame, explain-
ing “This poem allegorizes a tragic shooting in Brooks’s neighborhood .
. . the poem originates in separate incidents involving two black youths.
One, Kenneth Alexander, a high school honors student . . . was killed run-
ning from a policeman. The other, a both observed [by Brooks] in Ghana,
1974” (Ellman & O’Clair, 1988 , p.985).
In the poem, an unnamed speaker describes the experience of learning
that a boy was shot and killed in her alley while they were sleeping. On one
hand, the poem is simply the speaker’s vernacular account of the all-too-
familiar violence in the neighborhood: the speaker wakes up in the morning
to a Policeman1 pounding on the door asking if they knew the dead boy in
the alley. The speaker has heard shots before, they explain, but has never seen
the dead. And yet, the speaker explains, “I never saw his face at all …/But
I have known this Boy.” This paradox—not knowing the Boy, but know-
ing the Boy—constitutes an ethical magic realism in the poem. That is, the
speaker knows, and knows too well, the routine of black boys being shot in
the alley, but has “closed [her] heart-ears late and early.” As we move through
the poem, we watch the speaker contend with the agonizing complicity she
feels in having listened to and silently witnessed the lethal violence wrought
upon and between the boys in her neighborhood. She confesses, “I joined
the Wild and killed him/with knowledgeable unknowing.” In agonizing
recall, she describes the boy’s cries as he dies alone in her alley—“Father!”
1 The unconventional capitalization of common nouns in Brooks’s poem (i.e., Policeman,
Boy, Wild) is intentional and prompts the reader to consider issues of universality as it relates
to violence, being a by-stander, the law, and community. I have retained all capitalization as
Brooks wrote it.
174 L. GATTI
… “Mother!” “Sister!” “Brother.”—a cry that hangs in the air for a “long
stretch-strain of Moment.” And then, offset in its own couplet, the speaker
explains the cumulative emotional and moral effect of murder after murder
after murder of boys in her alley: “The red oor of my alley/is a special
speech to me.” The speaker nally hears ; the speaker nally sees that the alley
in her neighborhood is not a public space, but a domestic one: the alley is a
oor. And it is her oor. She is responsible for what happens in her house.
Most of my students, all of whom were working poor and Latino, had
lived experience with violence in their neighborhoods. One of our very own
students, Sergio, was murdered on the streets of Chicago in March of 2003
(Gatti, 2012 ). A woman was shot execution-style in the park where my
Cross Country students and I trained three blocks away from school. In any
given class of 25, I would estimate that six to eight students had lost some-
one they knew to gang violence. And so, when we read this poem, reactions
were deep and sometimes intense, in part sparked by the core questions
we used to guide our discussion of the poem: “What does it mean to be
complicit?” We discussed scenarios to clarify our de nitions and concepts of
complicity. If, for example, you hear your neighbor being beaten and do not
choose to call the police, are you complicit in that act of violence? What are
the events of our lives that we approach with “knowledgeable unknowing”?
But the lines that always required the most analysis were the last two in
the poem: “The red oor of my alley/is a special speech to me.” Brooks’s
use of the word “ oor” to describe the bloodied alley is a crucial one in
that it sets up the image of the street as a home. It’s not that the shooting
is happening outside; metaphorically, it is happening inside, in the private
domain of the speaker. And the use of the word “speech” in the line that
follows suggests that this reality—the bloody “ oor” of the alley—says
something to her, with the word “speech” suggesting a formal lesson or
message. What is that message ? we would ask ourselves in class. What is
Brooks saying about our complicity in the violent, unethical, or harmful
actions that go on around us? What is our responsibility to act? To come
together? To respond? To intervene? Or are we not responsible?
As I consider the current challenges of teacher preparation in a time
where the simpli cation of how and where to prepare teachers has resulted
in the largely unhelpful bifurcation of “reform the current system” or
“defend the current system,” I cannot help but think about the larger
themes of complicity in Brooks’s poem. What does it mean to be respon-
sible? What does it mean to be part of a community? What responsibility
do we have to the students themselves, the ones who show up and have
CONCLUSION: TEACHER EDUCATION TOWHAT END? 175
the audacity to expect that they are worthy of something more than being
schooled? What responsibility do we have to engage in parallel practice
(Lowenstein, 2009 ) as teacher educators, where we approach the profes-
sional and personal formation of the students in front of us with the same
asset-based stance that we ask our students to adopt with their own K-12
students? What responsibility do we have to think more creatively as teacher
educators? To work in less balkanized ways around the why and how of our
work? To connect our work with larger social movements? To politicize
our work by humanizing our commitments? These are the questions that
keep me up at night. These questions have fueled each word in this book.
Brooks’s poem provides a powerful springboard for the pressing, lin-
gering questions related to teacher education. As Nancy, the dean of
LEE’s partnering university, pointed out, LEE comes to the table with a
sense of urgency. This urgency is what de nes a good deal of the reform
movement. Something , they argue, needs to be done. Universities, on the
other hand, have shown themselves to be slow to change. While one can
argue that their efforts to do so have been slowed by the complicated reali-
ties of decreased funding and accountability, both of cial (i.e., CAEP) and
unof cial (i.e., the NCTQ), the fact remains that there is a crisis right now
in schools, especially those schools that serve minoritized, marginalized,
and poor students. What is the responsibility of universities and reformers
to come together to work on this? What kind of compromise is necessary?
What is our responsibility to subordinate our ideological positions to the
larger goal of educational equity? Is this even possible?
This last question is a particularly nettling one given the ways in which
our positions are arguably always ideological, rooted in particular under-
standings of where and how power and knowledge are constituted and
enacted and to what effect. For example, I ask myself whether or not it
would be ethically possible for me to abandon my own understanding of
structural racism and inequality in order to align my work with reformers
whose approaches to reform are market-based and animated by a faith in
hard-work-is-the-answer. These are deep and real philosophical differences.
Can they be bridged? Or is this goal of ideological compromise inherently
undesirable? Should we instead hold our ground and resign ourselves to a
combative position wherein we proactively ght for an expression of our
ideology—rhetorical, material, and institutional—that feels ethical to us?
If this latter position is the reality, that we must ght unapologetically
from our ideological position, then there is the related question of where
and how this battle should be fought. Currently, education reformers
176 L. GATTI
have dominated the mass media and the overall rhetorical space within the
debates on educational policy. (The NCTQ’s partnering with U.S.World
News and Report is but one of many examples of this dominance.) One of
the most powerful gambits of reform movement has been the reduction of
complicated arguments to “common sense” arguments (Gramsci, 1971 ,
p.322; see also Apple, 2006 ) about what it means to ght for educational
inequity. The framing of action is perhaps the most powerful example of
this, wherein the reformers’ sense of urgency not only justi es the deploy-
ment of underprepared (and unprepared) teachers into the highest needs
classrooms, but also shapes the public perception that teachers are the
problem and that making them more accountable (e.g., “value-added”)
is the answer. And there is truth in these positions—there is a crisis, it is
urgent, and teachers do matter. But it is the framing of these problems
that is fraught, and the solutions that are posed, specious: the market is
the solution; privatization is the solution; focusing on higher standards is
the solution; college readiness is the solution; global competitiveness is the
solution. Traditional teacher education is equally guilty when it defends
the current system of teacher preparation. Ignoring the urgency of the
situation, resisting deep change in programmatic structure and purpose,
and expending energy blaming the reform movement rather than working
creatively and urgently to transform its own programs—these are equally
unhelpful, and equally irresponsible, responses to the persistent disparity
between the educational opportunities afforded to middle class youth and
their minoritized and lower SES counterparts.
It goes without saying that there are no silver bullets. This book is no
exception. I will close, then, with what I think I know. I know that if we
are going to transform teacher preparation it must start with a clear-eyed,
honest, and sober examination of who we are as teacher educators—of
whatever stripe—and who we are as teacher preparation pathways. It must
start with us adopting deep rather than shallow focus when it comes to
seeing how we might transform teacher preparation, because to disregard
the context in which we are working is to render our work incomplete
and enervated. It must start, I think, with the uncomfortable recognition
that the aims and vision we have for our own teacher education courses
and pathways writ large—the to what end ? of our work—must be hon-
estly examined. Every teacher preparation pathway has an articulated
aim, whether that be a mission statement or a less formal set of norms
that guide practice. But we must ask ourselves, in what ways do these
visions really guide our programs and practices? An articulated mission
CONCLUSION: TEACHER EDUCATION TOWHAT END? 177
statement (for a course or a program) might be bold in rhetoric—“Close
the Achievement Gap!”—but conservative in practice, where the language
of high expectations and no excuses masks problematic and simpli ed
approaches to teaching. And these reductive and skills-based approaches
to teaching and learning are, as we know, disproportionately experienced
by poor and minoritized children.
Finally, to enact transformative teacher preparation means that we must
take seriously the need to enact a parallel practice (Lowenstein, 2009 ) in
teacher preparation, where we approach our own work as teacher educa-
tors with the same set of expectations and perspectives that we ask our stu-
dents to. We acknowledge, identify, develop, challenge, or strengthen the
resources our students bring with them. We do the same for ourselves. We
consider our own race, class, and gender positions and privileges; we seek
out ways to work with, learn from, and serve the schools we work with.
We make our programs recursive spaces where resources are consistently
being grown, re ected upon, and critically examined. We view our eld in
deep focus. We ask ourselves again and again and again, teacher education
to what end ? And then we work with others—our students, colleagues,
teachers, community members, and leaders in our districts—to cultivate
our resources and clarify our visions so that we can make progress (some
progress, any progress) toward enacting a more transformative teacher
preparation.
REFERENCES
Apple, M.W. (2006). Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, God, and
inequality (2nd ed.). NewYork, NY: Routledge.
Brooks, G. (1988). The boy died in my alley. In R. Ellman & R. O’Clair (Eds.),
The Norton anthology of modern poetry (2nd ed., p. 985). New York, NY: W.W.
Norton & Company.
Gatti, L. (2012). This is where we come from. In D.Boster & M.Valerio (Eds.),
What teaching means . Omaha: Rogue Faculty Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971). State and Civil Society. In Q.Hoare, G.Nowell-Smith (Eds.),
Selections from the prison notebooks. (Q.Hoare & G.Nowell-Smith, Trans.).
NewYork, NY: International Publishers.
Lowenstein, K.L. (2009). The work of multicultural teacher education:
Reconceptualizing white teacher candidates as learners. Review of Educational
Research, 79 (1), 163. doi:
10.3102/0034654308326161 .
178 L. GATTI
