William Ayers

Small Heroes: in and out of school with 10‐year‐old city kids∗

∗This paper is based on the initial steps toward a fuller ethnographic inquiry into the life‐situations of a small number of African‐American, inner‐city, 10‐year‐old boys‐‐specifically to locate their school experiences in the framework of their larger purposes and general contexts. The opening sketch is a composite drawn from observations of several third‐grade boys in a variety of different urban classroom settings over a two‐year period (1987‐89). This preliminary work led me to the Richmond neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois, USA, and specifically to Richmond Elementary School, the site of my current study.

John Dewey Lives

This dialogue is an edited version of a dialogue between William C. Ayers and William H. Schubert at the November10–12, 2011, meeting of the Progressive Education Network hosted by the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Illinois. It was the opening keynote session on the evening of November 10. Ayers interviewed Schubert, who acted as John Dewey. The keynote addressed the contemporary relevance of Dewey for today’s educational issues in general and in particular for the audience of leaders and teachers in progressive schools. Special focus was placed on both extant criticisms of progressive ideas and practices and the relevance and power of Dewey’s ideas for improving education, social action, equity, and democracy today.

Teaching Toward Freedom: Early Childhood Education and the Challenges Ahead

Schools are always contested spaces, places where our assumptions about and hopes for humanity are worked out on the ground. Early childhood education is not immune from the struggles over what it means to be human and what the dimensions of a good society are or should be. This article offers an argument for early childhood to take up the challenge. This article was originally prepared as an oral keynote presentation for the June 2005 meeting of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators in Miami Beach, FL.

A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire: Teaching Toward Transformation

A single spark can start a prairie fire—an ancient saying that appears in many forms and in different cultures, carrying a range of shifting implications and meanings. In the version I first heard—from China—it pointed to the power of one action to inspire other actions, which themselves catalyze a cascading chain of actions and reactions. One flint and a single stone struck together in the right direction under optimal conditions can begin a conflagration spreading throughout the countryside. Prairie fires, in this telling, are not always catastrophic; they can be, as well, naturally occurring events, necessary and renewing, removing the thick mat of thatch that suffocates life, releasing the seeds while encouraging the birds and the insects and the other animals, all the flora and fauna, opening and crawling, transforming and lurching to life. This old saying fits so perfectly, maps so naturally onto teaching because teachers strike sparks within every student every day. There is simply no way to predict with any certainty which spark will come to nothing, and which might just start that prairie fire. We are striving toward the unknown, a place where teachers might feel the awesome power they wield, might experience, as well, the unknowable potential of each student, each three-dimensional human creature before them. Teachers might pay closer attention to every aching detail and each overarching circumstance, to sense at every moment that what they do—or, just as important, what they fail to do—has a significance beyond itself, that some act or another in fact may make a mighty and magnificent difference, entirely unforeseen by them, in this life or in that one. Teachers might not change the world in dramatic fashion, but we certainly change the people who will change the world. This single spark could be that long-anticipated catalyst, that historic meeting of flint and stone that releases the flames of change.

A parent-teacher conference: Interpreting Margaret Mahler

Dr. Margaret A. Mahler is a leading child psychiatrist whose theory of the psychologica birth of the human being has been influential for many years. According to Mahler, the physical birth of the infant does not coincide with the psychological birth.