Community can become contagious and empowering. One year, when I was teaching an
honors class in an inner-city high school with a weak academic reputation, students pledged
that every member of their study team would pass the state’s standardized exam, or none of
them should pass the class. Before the test, we all put our hands in the middle of the room,
like at a football rally, and shouted. When the papers were graded, one student had failed
and she and her study team came to meet with me. I told them I knew they all worked hard
and would not hold them to their pledge. But they insisted and only agreed to accept pass-
ing grades if I let them prepare her for a retest and promised to reverse all of their grades if
she failed again. On the second try, she passed with flying colors.
This chapter begins with the story of Linda Christensen, a high school English teacher
from Portland, Oregon. I read a number of articles by Linda in a newspaper for teachers,Re-
thinking Schools, where she discusses her efforts to build classroom community. The “nuts
and bolts” sections describe classroom practices that promote student community, and an
extended essay examines cooperative learning in the classroom. Rachel Gaglione of the New
Teachers Network explains how she tries to develop community in her middle school class-
room, and a final essay discusses developing community and student leadership during a
high school social action campaign.
SECTION A: CAN COMMUNITY EMERGE FROM CHAOS?
Educational philosopher Maxine Greene (whom I have had the good fortune to know as a
friend and mentor) believes that the human mind provides us with powerful tools for know-
ing ourselves and others. She encourages teachers and students to combine critical thinking
with creative imagination in an effort to empathize with and understand the lives, minds,
and consciousness of human beings from the past and our contemporaries in the present.
Greene sees the goal of learning as discovering new questions about ourselves and the
world. This leads her to examine events from different perspectives, to value the art, litera-
ture, and ideas of different peoples. For Greene, learning about the world and democratic
community building are part of the same process.
Greene (1995) argues:
Teaching and learning are matters of breaking through barriers—of expectation, of boredom, of
predefinition. To teach... is to provide persons with the knacks and know-how they need in or-
der to teach themselves. No teacher, for example, can simply lecture youngsters on playing bas-
ketball or writing poetry or experimenting with metals in a chemistry lab, and expect them to
meet the requirements or standards she or he had in mind for that activity. Teachers must com-
municate modes of proceeding, ways of complying with rules and norms, and a variety of what
have been called “open capacities,” so that learners can put into practice in their own fashion
what they need to join a game, shape a sonnet, or devise a chemical test. (p. 14)But how do you persuade teachers and students to do these things?
The most honest answers I have ever read were by Linda Christensen. Many of the arti-
cles she has written for the newspaperRethinking Schoolshave been collected in her book,
Reading, Writing, and Rising Up(Christensen, 2000). Three that I find especially helpful to me
as a teacher are “Building Community from Chaos,” “Discipline: No Quick Fix,” and “Writing
the Word and the World.”
Linda begins “Building Community from Chaos” by explaining to readers that “I read a
book on teaching that left me feeling desolate because the writer’s vision of a joyful, produc-
152 CHAPTER 6