"You Can't Give Your Students What You Don't Give Yourself"

Read it here - http://gulfcoastmag.org/online/blog/you-cannot-give-your-students-what-you-do-not-give-yourself/

This month I was interviewed about poetry in education by poet educator, R.A Villanueva, alongside Jacob Sam La Rose and Toni Stuart. 

On Race, Feminism, Education, Gentrification & Colonial Cocktails

“Students from gang-ridden areas of the East London borough of Hackney have been learning how performing poetry can help tackle life, one word at a time.”

After visiting the young poets I work with in Hackney, this is how the article, written last week by the Reuters journalist begins. (The journalist had good intentions, but skewed editors). Straight off, I’ll say the students I work with in Cardinal Pole are not themselves “in-gangs”, they are mixed-ability (in terms of literacy and predicted grades) and between the ages of 12 -17. They attend our after school Spoken Word poetry Club and are indeed, growing up in the marginal regions of Hackney, still, as one of the English teachers rightfully put, "our students are up to more than just rising against their circumstances."

“The Spoken Word Education Programme, founded by a former Chicago social worker, aims to help pupils in some of London's most deprived districts to articulate their feelings and have their voices heard despite an often difficult upbringing.”

Peter Kahn is not merely a “former social worker”, he’s an English teacher and community leader with over 25 years teaching experience.

"These kids are so disenfranchised," said Christian Foley, a poet and spoken-word educator at Cardinal Pole school. "The gang warfare arises from the fact you own nothing, and so you're going to fight over a lamppost because that's all you have."

Christian was in fact referring to a different working environment, not the students in Cardinal Pole. This is a clever spin, because what Christian was actually highlighting was the systematic failures in our government in welfare and education and how this ties to the future prospects of our young people. Also,(ironically, given the tone of this article), how harmful the negative reinforcement of stereotypes are for both, society and the individual within it. We don’t necessarily “give students a voice”, they already have one, we counter the argument that they don’t have anything worth saying. We recognise that whether they speak or not, other people (media, politicians etc) are already speaking for them.

“Hackney was one of London's four most dangerous boroughs in 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics. It also ranks in the bottom quarter of the capital's 32 boroughs for a range of indicators including low income, health and education, according to London's Poverty Profile, an independent data provider.”

When you say Hackney is “dangerous”, I think what should be asked is, dangerous for whom and why? Hackney is known as “the socialist borough”, due to its long history of anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations. Evident too, in the names of Hackney streets such as Sojourner Truth Close and Nelson Mandela House. Public figures such as James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Michael Jackson, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis have all spoken and passed through Hackney. The Dalston C.L.R James library acknowledges a powerful Caribbean activist. In certain circles, this indeed, sounds dangerous.

"A Symbol Of Hackney's History Of Tackling Racism" - Anthony Kendall

“The spoken-word initiative began with Peter Kahn, who used poetry to help students in one of Chicago's most crime-plagued districts. He found that pupils who could not discuss their problems would open up when performing poetry they had written, helped by the art form's links to hip-hop music.”

Yes, Hip-Hop music but also, many of the students are aspiring actors, public speakers, physicists and attend an after school “Debate Club”, which they excel at.

"A Complicated Answer," an anthology produced by the Hackney pupils, covers experiences from witnessing a stabbing to losing a friend to cancer. There are several about fathers leaving their families.”

Yes, there are also poems about poetry, friendships and “what it’s like to play the piano”. The poems in “A Complicated Answer” are about bravery, not ghetto pathologies.

“the programme is backed by institutions including the Arts Council. Since its 2013 inception, Cardinal Pole has seen one student into Oxford University to study English literature; while others at the school, which is principally made up of ethnic minorities, have improved their English.”

Something cuts me here, it’s on the edge of saying “ethnic minority children are being civilised by the English language, and look, they now have the prospects of attending a prestigious but also, a racially problematic institution, Oxford University. Just the other day Oxford made headlines for serving “colonial comeback cocktails” in their Union bar. Is this really the golden measuring bar for academic success? I've known students from ethnic and working class backgrounds who became suicidal after attending Oxford and similarly acclaimed universities.

“Poetry is not a panacea, and those involved in the programme know it has its limits."You never give up, but sometimes it just takes time you don't have," Kahn said. "They may not make it to (age) 25."

This is Peter Kahn acknowledging a reality for some of his inner city students in Chicago, but equally relevant, is some of those students grow to feel isolated from an education system which glorifies fascist, sexist and racist literature, I’ve written about this in a previous blog post.

“Despite this, at Cardinal Pole there seems to be an irrepressible optimism among students. What is poetry, the educators ask Tian Sewell Morgan, one of their star students. She thinks for a few moments and answers: "Blood in words."”

Yes, blood in words, as in the blood (that stays in her body) is poetry, as opposed to the idea that poetry is something keeping blood inside her.

Articles like this in Reuters contribute to the conservative's attempt to justify the social cleansing of London and the racist fear-mongering of working class ethnic minorities. The disparity between rich and the poor in the UK is vast and easy to contest, words are powerful, but they aren't enough. 

In the East London schools I've worked in, I've seen students have schooling disrupted because their council homes have been sold to private investors. Many are moved to Kent, where Fracking was a possible cause of a recent earthquake. 

Careless language is a misused weapon, people often say, "you get what you deserve", but we live in a country which built an empire on slavery and the oppression of the poor. There are twelve million dead Africans in the Atlantic, responsible for the wealth and building of British colonies world wide. Without those mass burials, there is no "Great Britain". This is why Nationalism takes on a form of genocide denial, or genocide glorification. Decolonising your British identity is difficult and I've yet to have a discussion on it that didn't involve someone getting upset or defensive.

George Orwell differentiated patriotism as "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life" and Nationalism as a desire to colonise and "secure more power and more prestige, not for oneself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his (or her) own individuality.”

I was asked the other day why "I put up race related articles on facebook, why is race a struggle, isn't feminism a more pressing issue?", the idea that a struggle needs to struggle against each other has only led to inside bickering of people on the same side of the coin. In this area, I myself have used embarrassingly careless language on twitter which I made a public apology for.

C.L.R James, in a speech in Hackney in 1984 addressed an anti-racist rally by saying, "I want us to be aware that for a long time women have been at the very bottom of society", James asks, if education is how we defeat oppression and austerity, why is it that there are higher amounts of women graduating from universities and still so few in Congress, Parliament or positions of political policy influence? 

C.L.R James states "black people in particular have a lot of experience of being maintained in a position subordinate to the general level which is attainted by men and women who are not black." He goes on to say it would be hypocritical to claim a "fight for equal rights"as a racially exclusive battle. This from a man, born the same century slavery was dismantled in the Caribbean, where he was born (1886) and spent over seventy years as a historian and activist.

The Island That's Hard To Find In English is a poetry manuscript I have been working on for the past two years. I am currently travelling to all the colonial hotspots in the UK (Liverpool and London covered wildly) but recently I was in Bristol and learned the idea for the African slave trade was put into motion by the Mayor of Bristol, John Hawkins. I'm delving into this history and feeling how it re-aligns my sense of self as a British, Jamaican. America's first UK based Embassy was built in Bristol after a falling out during the trans Atlantic trading profits of Rum and Sugar from the Caribbean. 

This links directly into our current culture and conservative-led government with the passing of a law called "TTIP" which allows major corporations compensation for "loss of profits", tax payers are now insurers for multi-nationals (as if their off-shore tax havens weren't enough of an insult). When slavery was abolished, slave merchants, plantation and slave owners were also compensated for loss of profits. Unbelievably, this was paid for by the tax payer. These people were rewarded instead of punished (there was no human rights bill that would see to it otherwise). Charles Dickens mocked this in Little Dorrit, "Credit is a system, whereby a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay". 

Human rights laws which would have seen the enslavement of Africans as unjust are now being undone by Michael Gove. When talking about colonialism, people in the UK often ask what it has to do with today? I find it incredible that anyone could go through the English education system without having such questions answered? Today is built on yesterday. 

Disclaimer

My thoughts here are by no means complete, it's merely an outpouring of thinking and feeling done while working in education, examining my privilege and positioning myself in a society, hung over after too many colonial cocktails.

Why & How Poetry In Education Matters

Student reading his favourite poem in our school anthology published in March 2015, A Complicated Answer.

Seeing a young student of his use poetry to deal with his conflicted feelings over his dad’s death reminded Raymond Antrobus, poet, photographer and educator, why the arts matter so much...

“Do not strive to be a person of success but a person of value”– Albert Einstein

Last year, I read a poem to a Year 7 class about my father's death. After that class, a boy – let’s call him Tyrone – waited for everyone to leave to tell me his father had died recently too. 

Tyrone told me that he was angry his father had died because it was his father’s own fault (he was an alcoholic). He told me I was lucky to experience my father’s death without anger in my heart. I told him I was angry at my father for a long time, but I'm lucky, because I'm a poet and I have written about him and have therefore written myself out of the anger. 

Tyrone asked if he became a poet, would he stop being angry? I said yes, writing helps you understand what you think and feel. 

Today, almost six months later, Tyrone sat next to me in the lunch hall and told me he has been writing. He pulled a red Arsenal notebook from his bag and handed it to me. The notebook was full of his wonky handwriting, and I sat reading the difficult words of a young boy who is a poet, trying to understand his father's death without anger in his heart. 

Experiences like this make me wonder how anyone can question the value of art.

“Value” is an old English word that stemmed from the old French “valor”, which is synonymous with “moral worth, merit, courage and virtue”. It seems nowadays many of us have lost touch with this root, as we don’t know how to measure value if it doesn’t have a price tag. 

Example

I called the parent of a student recently, to tell them their child has poetic talent, and the reply to this was, “So? Is that going to make my child rich?” I was stunned, but this response makes sense in a world where our language is socially engineered by capitalism. Even the word “poet” has connotations of “poverty” and “unemployment”. 

I don’t teach poetry and spoken word in schools solely hoping students will become poets or even that they go on to study English over science. My hope is to offer students an empowering relationship with language, which promotes a building of confidence, community and relief from stress. If our education system can nurture this kind of richness then students will prosper in any subjects that are taught by passionate teachers that foster their natural ability.  

Renewed

I used to be a personal trainer; I earned twice as much as I do now, but I’m happier writing poems and teaching, I’m happier in classrooms meeting young people like Tyrone, building a writing community in a school, I’m happier inviting other poets into my classes to meet my students, I’m happy that they are always excited to meet poets that look more like them than any of the poets or writers on the walls, I’m proud of many of our young people and I thank them for showing me new ways of assessing my own value.

Below is a poem I wrote commissioned by the Arts Council for their online magazine,Create, on why society ought to value the arts. I thought about how many encounters I have had in the three years I have been working in schools, how much my students have taught me about courage and what it really means to prosper. I have taught students that could hardly write or were too shy to speak, but were eventually able to engage with language and use their voice in a way that feels as important to them as it should to us.

Sound Air

Classroom chairs know Melisa’s weight.

Twelve years old, holding

space

at the back of the class, pinned

by her own gravity, a gravity her voice

fails to escape, even when reaching

for answers.

Hearing her find a way to hold

her quiver, silencing 

a hundred students in an assembly hall, 

knowing my words have lured her eyes outside windows

where a featherweight voice is still hard to throw—

Melisa’s nerve to read her first poem 

in her second language 

taught me the raising of back-row voices

lifts something closer to the front for us all.

Raymond Antrobus is a poet, photographer and lead educator on the Spoken Word Education MA Programme at Goldsmiths University. Born and bred in Hackney, he is also co-curator of popular London poetry events Chill Pill (Soho Theatre and The Albany) and Keats House Poets. Raymond’s work has appeared on BBC Radio 4, The Big Issue and recently in The Guardian and at TedxEastEnd.

You can follow Ray on Twitter @RaymondAntrobus 

Spoken Word Showcase, Hackney 2014

Subscribe to the Chill Pill Shorts YouTube poetry channel.

Artical originally published for ideastap, Nov 2014.

"a hilarious and fast paced double act piece, inspired by teaching spoken word in the classroom" - Sabotage Reviews

The Importance Of Vulnerability, Creativity, Honesty & Consciousness In Education

"If our young people grow up holding on to such terrible feelings, it could lead to another war some time in the future when the fate of the country is in their hands" - Zlata Filipovic

Student Slam

This Wednesday I was invited to teach, perform and curate a slam at the British School Of Brussels for a few days. It is an international school, mostly attended by the children of diplomats, government administrators, military etc. I was honoured to meet and talk poetry with many young people from all over the world. I spoke with students who have lived in Cuba, Philippines, China, Australia and all over Europe, as well as meeting students from Africa (some of whom are part of an exchange programme). The main thing that these young people have in common is that they are all from wealthy families. Coming from teaching in Hackney, where students live mostly in social housing, you'd expect a contrast... and there is. What I can't say however, is that one of these demographics has more of a need than the other, it is just a case of those needs being different.

The interesting thing about teaching poetry, is when you create a space that nurtures honesty, vulnerability and creativity, you make it understood that it is ok to think what you think and share it, because your story matters, and it is ok to step out of uniforms and predicted grades and just be the person who is working their way through life, as we all are.

Many beautiful and difficult things are brought into that space but recently I've been hearing students (in all kinds of classrooms and spaces) say things like, "I'm in school, I don't think this is the place to talk like this", it breaks my heart to hear that young people feel their way through school as a space that is closer to an incarceration than a liberation.

I often hear students label themselves "stupid", or "not smart", one particular lesson last week, I asked the class for the definition of "figurative language", when a heavy silence fell, a student staring at his desk said "We don't know sir, you're teaching the dumb class". It's heart-breaking when young people feel the pressure of "being intelligent", instead of the excitement of being curious.

Cyrus The Great in 550BC Persia, founded "The Rights Of Nations", the foundation of Human Rights laws 

While researching for my MA, I found that National Curriculums all over the world share a consistency in policies that encourage human rights, social awareness and student voice, something which I do not see practised enough. Reading through the National Curriculum's, it reminded me of the day I was invited along with fifty international artists and campaigners to recite each bill in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Halfway through, a woman from Iran and a man from Sri Lanka broke down in tears, followed by everyone in the room. It was the simplicity of hearing our rights, articulated out loud, with matter-of-fact-precision. If this was the bar set for basic human rights, too many of us are living with content instead of passion, oppression and mis-education instead of enlightenment and conviction.

No matter what part of the world, or the background of our students, I believe the classroom is one of the most important spaces to bring about self-empowerment and therefore, social change. This needs to be a space which, as I said before, allows us to be vulnerable (connected to each other), creative (to explore new possibilities), honest (to understand our similarities as well as our differences) and conscious (to keep seeking truth).

On Exhibit B & James Baldwin On Education

""We charge the Barbican with exhibiting institutional racism" - Sara Myers

Exhibit B was cancelled in London this week and much has been written on the case already. Firstly, I did not see the exhibition so my judgement, like most people in London, is based on A) the exhibition cost £20 - who was that money going to and who is this exhibition really aimed at? it reeks of classist cultural ownership, B) Brett Bailey, the creator is a white South African and was educated under the Apartheid regime, (a time when black people were denied education), bad move for the Barbican to not have had more dialogue before booking the exhibit and C) the promotional photographs of black people in cages aren't very imaginative if it's aim is to inspire a re-thinking of slavery.

"Accept the university of death" - Gwendolyn Brooks

I recently finished my Masters in writing and teaching, and I'm currently teaching in schools. My stance is that racist indoctrination is still alive and judging by the reading lists on every school / university / curriculum I have come across, our educational institutions still glorify and endorse racist literature, defended by creative writing and English Literature professors as "the mentality of the time". I'm not even saying to remove or censor these writers, I'm saying, it can't be taught without taking the painful narrative of colonial atrocity seriously. Without asking why all the "uncivilised, barbaric, savage" language is something that can pass without deeper interrogation of racism, how it translates today and why the establishment forgives it?

Much empathy is needed from teachers (I don't just mean qualified teachers in schools, but anyone sharing and accessing knowledge) in the presentation of this history. They need to understand that every time a white writer calls a black person a nigger, he / she is denying their humanity. It seems these "canonised" writers who are used as models of supreme literary achievement (such as H.G Wells, Darwin, Conrad, Kipling, Woolf, Lawrence, Larkin) and let's not even get started on the Americans, who assumed black people would never read their books, because the system they believed in would forever keep them illiterate. These writers were not stupid, they were racists, directly benefiting from slavery and defending white supremacy. To call black people human would be to admit that the only thing rich white people were by default is human rights abusers. What kind of teacher would not be able to empathise with this? Perhaps a teacher, who themselves are victims of a racist education? This requires a deeper exploration on race politics, particularly if you're a white teacher educating students of colour. How can we expect black and white students to have the same response to these narratives? Its about creating an honest history and debate between all students  and teachers (regardless of background). Would this not be a positive move in bringing us all together?

Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe have written excellent essays on this

As our education system has such a miserable time confronting colonial history, people surely aren't ready for Exhibit B before they're ready to resolve the present institutional racism. Perhaps part of what has caused offence is that Brett Bailey has assumed racism and slavery are things of the past?

"It's hard to talk about education in a country where people take seriously such a creature as John Wayne and Ronald Reagan... for a black person to get an education in this country, you got to have a lot of guts first of all... and to endure a racist institution... and risk schizophrenia" - James Baldwin

In other news, the country has just started a war.

Am I Born Again?

...and you were beautiful
innocent young though you were fat and clumsy
too but you were you and you treasured the nosegay - Gerald Stein

This morning my daily meditation took place on a bench under the sun in London Fields. I sat out of the shadows, facing a tree. I closed my eyes and focused my breath. Allowing myself to be present, feeling the bench planks hold my weight.

After twenty minutes of meditation I open my eyes to see a black boy, about ten years old, in a tuxedo suit, holding a leaflet that read "Are You Born Again?"

I sat still in a kind of semi-zen fuzz, the sunlight gathering the day into focus, "this is for you" said Tuxedo Boy, and I took it, and thanked him as he skipped away, happy to have something to offer the world. I was left alone with the leaflet’s question, Are You Born Again?

Well, firstly, I'm not religious, so my usual mind would be to ignore the leaflet and assume someone has told Tuxedo Boy to place the leaflet in front of my closed eyes and wait for them to open on a staged epiphany. But meditation pushes the mind beyond the horizon of assumptions, so I made space for the question... Am I Born Again? 

Answer

A few years ago my mum showed me my school report cards from primary school that read “Raymond finds it hard to focus. His reading and writing are below what’s expected of his age. He seems more interested in what’s happening outside the window than what’s in the classroom”.

I still recognise my "outside-the-window-thoughts", and it’s a shame for this to be picked up in a learning environment as a criticism. I was also partly deaf and this wasn’t picked up yet, but the signs weren't sounded out for traditional teachers. The truth is, I was in the wrong place for development because my teachers, instead of assessing their own practise, blamed me for not tuning into their classroom expectations.

When I think about myself as a child in that class, I don’t feel I have out-grown him completely. The person I am today is not “born again” if that means a death of a previous self has occurred. My growth as a person has all been gardened in the same bed of earth. Reading my report card, I feel proud that I was able to express something that is still aligned with my true self. Therefore, I am not "born again", rather, I have been born as I am, and have been taught to stay open to change, growth and transformation.

What We Learn & How We Learn

This past weekend I performed in front of two thousand people across three different stages at Wilderness Festival. One of my favourite support teachers from my school days was in the audience for the show I did with Tongue Fu. We hadn't seen each other for eleven years, she saw me through so much growing up. She is one of the main reasons I left school with at least one B. I thought about her throughout my first year teaching, telling myself that I want to give my students something equal to the power she gave me. Acknowledging the impact she had on my life as I came off stage (in front of one of the largest audiences I've had) was a privilege and testimony to the power of what we learn from speaking and listening to our best teachers.

Great Reads #RayRecommends

I am currently in the process of drafting my third collection of prose and poetry, entitled, 'The Island That's Hard To Find In English'. Given that I have been a part time Masters Student (in Education Theory and Spoken Word Education) these past two years, as well as working as a full time Poet In Residence at Cardinal Pole Secondary School in East London (same neighbourhood I grew up in), my creative output has been slow but I've been immersed in reading these past months and thought I'd recommend these books as they've informed some of the direction my new writing is going in.

Martin Espada

Andrew Salkey

Sherman Alexie

Arundhati Roy

Monique Roffery

I have attended numerous teacher seminars recently about the reformed UK National Curriculum. Michael Gove is only allowing the teaching of literature published in a country that's been colonised by the British, (The British Isles). To counter this I've made a personal investment to stay in touch with all the reasons our Government would rather pretend certain things didn't exist.

This speech by the great Arundhati Roy (author of one of the greatest novels ever written IMHO, 'The God Of Small Things') should be on every National Curriculum in the world.

Spoken Word Education in Hackney Today

Musa Okwonga, Joelle Taylor & Raymond Antrobus at one of London's first Spoken Word Schools

Since September 2013, the UK’s first full-time poetry Spoken Word Educators have been embedded in six London secondary schools.

On Wednesday 9th April students from Cardinal Pole Secondary will perform their work. Coached by Hackney poet, Tedx speaker and one of The Guardian's poets in residence, Raymond Antrobus. 

The Spoken Word Education Programme offers a highly effective approach to raising children’s confidence, self-expression, team-building and leadership skills, whilst also developing oral communication and literacy skills.

The Spoken Word Educators comprise award winning poets Peter Bearder, Dean Atta, Indigo Williams, Raymond Antrobus, Cat Brogan and Keith Jarrett. They work with young people who may not otherwise get access to arts opportunities, with a range of complex issues that affect their lives and engagement in learning. Spoken Word Poetry is a cathartic outlet for them, allowing them to be more focused and productive learners.
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The key to this innovative model’s success is embedding poets in the culture of each school and enabling them to build relationships with the students, both in school and during their after school spoken word clubs.

The programme has already benefitted more than 2000 students in some of the most deprived areas of London. The participating young people have wowed audiences across London including performances at Portcullis House for Parliament Week and the launch of Words Over Waltham Forest. Joshua Izundu, a year 11 student at Cardinal Pole Catholic School in Hackney said, “I have a new appreciation for spoken word. I have learnt how to turn a picture into words.”

http://spokenwordeducators.org/

Showcase Details


Address:

Cardinal Pole Catholic School

205 Morning Lane

London, E9 6LG

Time

5pm - 7pm

Nearest Station 

Hackney Central or Homerton Overground

Musa Okwonga, one of the UK's most popular bloggers 

Musa Okwonga is a writer, broadcaster, poet, musician, communications adviser and commentator on current affairs, including culture, politics, sport, race and sexuality.

A former City solicitor, Musa contributes regular opinion pieces to The Independent, Huffington Post and The Newstatesman on a range of issues, and has on several occasions been a guest on BBC Radio 4′s TodayProgramme. He has been interviewed by Channel 4 News and Sky News, and he has given talks on social media and literature for BBC Radio 3 and 4, the latter at the Royal Society of Arts in London. He has also written for The Guardian, The New Humanist and the Financial Times.

He is the author of two books on football, A Cultured Left Foot (Duckworths, 2007) andWill You Manage? (Serpent’s Tail, 2010), the first of which was nominated for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. He has also written about football for The Blizzard, The New York Times and ESPN, and is a regular pundit for the BBC World Service.

Joelle Taylor

Joelle Taylor is a spoken word artist, playwright, performance novelist and cultural terrorist. She has performed across the UK as well as internationally for the British Council in Zimbabwe and Botswana, taking in a diverse range of venues from Dingwalls, the 100 Club, the O2 Arena, the Royal Festival Hall and Ronnie Scott’s to the Royal Court, the ICA, Buckingham Place and Pentonville Prison. Her book Ska Tissue was released in 2011 and, after a summer festival tour, is now in its second edition. In 2001 she co-ordinated the first London youth slam championships for the Poetry Society and is currently the Artistic Director of SLAMbassadors UK, the national youth slam championships. Joelle is also the coach of the UK team and delivers Master Classes and ongoing mentoring for young poets and spoken word artists (aged 12 – 19). She has a wide experience of working in both primary and secondary schools – and is the Poet in Residence at both Kingsmead Primary in Hackney and Newstead Wood School for Girls in Kent – as well as tutoring adult poetry courses (Arvon Foundation, Cardboard Citizens).

BOOK TICKET HERE - http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cardinal-pole-showcase-tickets-11161154313 (free to book, £3 on door)