Judy Bebelaar
Instructor, International Studies Academy
Biographical Profile, Reflections
My first teaching experience, in 1967, was at Samuel Gompers Continuation High School, where students were sent if they had been suspended for more than ten days, or if they could not speak English well enough to attend one of the large regular high schools. With no training in ESL techniques, I was given two "Americanization" classes, a label which definitely did not fit with my idea of what a good teacher would do. I remember a retired army colonel who taught at Gompers who always wore the same wide red tie emblazoned with a picture of Mr. Rushmore. He seemed to be compelled to snatch off the hats of African American students. He didn't seem to understand that many of them wore their hats in the hallways in order to hide their hair, which needed to be "processed" again, an expensive and time-consuming undertaking.
After a year of struggling to make a difference, along with a small group of teachers at Gompers who were from the same U.C. Berkeley teacher training program I had been part of, I helped to plan first one, then a second public alternative school designed to help students who were disaffected or discouraged, or who wanted to try another kind of learning - more "hands-on," more humanistically oriented.
When I first began teaching, what I wanted to do- was so certain I could do- was to show students how to love literature, how to enjoy writing. And what I realized, very quickly, was how difficult that task is. My students didn't want to write. They hadn't written - some of them told me not for more than a year. And reading, for many was a task to be avoided, not a joy.
I decided to invite a writer into the classroom. Perhaps, I thought, the love of words would be infectious. At a friend's house, I met Sonia Sanchez, then an unknown poet. She said yes, that she'd come. It worked. Students responded. They wanted to write for her. Ever since, for almost 29 years, I have invited writers into my classroom and have published the results: the students' own writing.
Currently I teach at International Studies Academy, a public high school which is also a Charter School. Anyone can apply to the school, which is small and which has an academic focus, and students are selected by lottery to reflect the city's population. Although ISA is 50.4% "Educationally Disadvantaged Youth," and 22% are students who are "Limited English Proficient," we rank at the 71st percentile on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, and have the third highest rate of admissions to University of California campuses in the greater Bay Area. My classroom, then as now, and like most inner-city classrooms, is filled with students with an astonishing variety of cultural backgrounds, and an almost overwhelming collection of needs.
I have continued to help students produce books of their own, which, since 1984, have included a multicultural calendar featuring student poetry as well as student-researched holidays, events and birthdays of heroes from around the world. The calendar's themes have included The Clown, the Trickster, and the Sacred Fool; "Come Together Right Now"; Human Rights; War and Peace; and for 1998, Music as an International Language. The calendar is sold in local book stores and has a mailing list of hundreds of past customers. The calendar project has won two national awards and has qualified for many grants.
Since 1988, when I became a Bay Area Writing Project fellow, I have enjoyed making presentations to teachers about the writing process and the impact of publishing student work.
My teaching philosophy stems from Sylvia Ashton Warner's "Language Experience" method of teaching and I firmly believe in writing as a process, with the end result being publication, so that students can share their insights, fears and dreams with the larger community.
I also believe that literature and writing must go hand in hand, and that students who produce their own literature will be more sensitive, perceptive readers of the writing of others. Although I have taught many different literature classes, for the last four years I have taught mainly American Literature, a focus for both my undergraduate and graduate studies at U.C. Berkeley and San Francisco State University.
Because I am a native Californian, I have grown up with a deep love for the incredibly beautiful and varied landscape of this state, and since I was a child, have been fascinated by imagining that landscape as it was when there were only Indians living here. I always begin my American Literature classes with a description of what that might have been like, from Malcolm Margolin's wonderful books about the Indians of the Bay Area. Students read excerpts from his books and from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee andBlack Elk Speaks, as well as from other works by American Indians. I hope that students will begin to feel the history and literature right under their feet. I also show students excerpts from Five Hundred Nations , and sometimes Little Big Man . I believe it's important to bring contemporary Indian writers into the classroom, and I have been fortunate to have Duane BigEagle, a California Poets in the Schools poet come to my classrooms many times.
I have used two themes for American literature for the past few years: "The American Dream" and "Race and American Literature." Faulkner's analysis of the American soul, Cornell West's thesis in Race Matters , and Toni Morrison's description of the "Africanist Presence" in great American literature (in Romancing the Shadow) are ideas I ask my students to grapple with. I have recently included Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem in the fall semester's readings because it gives students an interesting perspective on The Crucible andThe Scarlet Letter.
I have tried to make my teaching respond to the concerns of adolescents who notice prejudice, oppression, and injustice. I try to bring people who are creative, involved, committed, articulate into the classroom, inviting writers, artists, actors and activists. Many of my classroom guests are poets working with California Poets in the Schools, a successful artists in the schools program for over 20 years with which I have been working since its inception. What students need from a teacher, I believe, is inspiration and empowerment, as well as help with specific skills.
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