Since March 10th,  I have been out of a job and it has been difficult for me to post anything worthwhile, because after all, it is tough reflecting on teaching when you haven’t been teaching. There have been many times I have had a post brewing, but I let it slip away due to either, laziness or self-pity. Whatever the case may have been, I have a new project and I am excited to be back in the game.

Although I am not getting paid and my future is still unclear,  I feel the need to be involved with my teaching network and trying to rustle up people who are interested in exchanging ideas and learning. Those are the reasons I teach anyway, not for a paycheck.

As I sat day after day, thinking about how the educational institutions of the world are mistreating me, I started to re-think what it means to teach in an institutional environment run at best by bureaucrats and at worst by corporate interests. I also began to brainstorm “perfect” classroom ideas. I have been forced to really sell myself to potential employers, and these negotiations have got me thinking about courses I would like to teach that don’t exist in most schools.

It appears that more and more people are starting to realize the fundamental flaw of teaching in a system that is based on profit. Teachers like Clay Burel and Bill Farren are asking us to rethink the very nature of how a school should function in society. As the global consumer cultures attains more and more influnce over all of our lives, should it not be the role of schools to offer young people alternatives to current systems.

Our schools should play a role in encouraging and teaching students the basic principles of activist culture. As the authority, teachers are nervous to tell an already rebellious group of adolescents to question authority, but we owe it to them to demand more of their educators.

I hope to play with some of these ideas further at the Intrepid Classroom, but I want to use this space to reflect on the reasons behind why these themes should be taught in traditional schools. I hope to create a sort of activist training school. A place where students can question the very systems they are told to worship. I would like to create a source of resources from art, to music, to web culture that helps students understand that although the mass media may try to make them believe they are powerless, there have always been people fighting for a better world, and most importantly they too can participate. Although perhaps not for much longer!
I have written in the past about my Utopian classroom, but now I want to focus on my perfect curriculum. The reoccurring themes for most of my ideas are the incorporation of Social Justice and Peace Activism into traditional curriculums. I see a series of specialized courses that deal with political, class-based issues, and artistic and philosophical themes. One such course would be an elective, probably a semester long on music as an agent of change. I hope to outline each course in depth, but for now I want to start drawing the rough sketches:

The music curriculum would study everything from sixties protest music, to the blues, to modern day singer/activists working for change. Students would not only listen to the music and examine and reflect on the lyrics, but they would also be asked to research and learn about the social problems that were the impetus of the music. As you can see there is already a Social Studies and Language Arts element to the material. They would also be asked to collaborate and create socially conscious music themselves. Using networking tools like Youtube, they would than try to promote their music to as wide an audience as possible.

I have taught a mini-music unit every year of my career, but it always seems forced, and it takes time away from the curriculum I “should” be teaching. Now that I am out of a real classroom, I hope to teach students about the power of music in a less constricting and confined environment We owe it to our students to not only study history, but learn to be a part of it.

How do you incorporate socially conscious material into your curriculum? What obstacle to you face?