Articles

The Path to Actualization

By Courtney E. Martin

"Our primary job as educators in a multi-cultural context is to make students' aware of and capable of interpreting symbols. We must make them critical thinkers."

At a recent conference at the Interfaith Center in New York, New York on "Growing Up Multi-Cultural," I was moved by this statement, made by one of the women in the audience. While it was, indeed, an apparent point, it was simultaneously a thought-provoking one.

As a writer and an activist, I have had the benefit of many opportunities to work with young people on issues of human rights, identity, and creativity. While in South Africa in the spring of 2000, I created and facilitated a poetry workshop in a township high school, designed to cover shaky and essential ground: history, identity, and future. During the past six months I have again had the chance to learn from an energetic and under-educated group of high school students at the Brooklyn International School, made up entirely of immigrants. Again we spend our days trying to get to the bottom of who we are and what we can do.

Throughout all of these amazing experiences, I have often gone into a workshop with the idea of the woman in the audience to a tee. I want to foster, in these students, a sense of social responsibility, intellectual acuity, and political awareness. I want them to become critics of literature, of foreign policy, of domestic government programming. I want, above all, for them to become actualized.

But what I have learned, over and over (because of course the students always end up being better teachers than I am), is that becoming critical thinkers is the second step in an important path to actualization. The first is the simple and seemingly obvious task of helping the students decide that they matter. This has truly resonated throughout my teaching career. Before we could ask the students in South Africa to write poetry about post-apartheid social deprivation, we first had to ask them to write about their mornings.

I am reminded, particularly, of one day when I was belaboring a point about how poetry could serve to rewrite history, make it real on a personal level and powerful on a political one. The 40 or so students packed in like sardines, eager but bored, looked up at me with blank expressions. Then, my co-teacher, a young poet who had grown up in the township and gone to the high school himself, said something to this effect: "You know how when you wake up in the morning and your mama is making that stew, yebo? She's making it and it smells this very particular way. And you know what, nobody else has a mama who makes the same stew. So you can write about it, yebo, and then you make it important. White people will read it and print it in books and no one will ever forget what your mama's stew smelled like." Some of this was in Xhosa, which I had painstakingly learned, but for the purpose of communication I write it now all in English.

Not surprisingly, the students perked right up. They knew exactly what he was talking about and they appeared shocked that it was something important enough to write about. It was a break-through moment for our class; the next day students who hadn't said a word all week showed up with poems about their friends, their dreams, even-and this is where the drum roll really comes in-their criticisms of political and social life in South Africa. It was so powerful, and it never would have happened if Melisizwe-my co-teacher-hadn't, in essence, first said: "You are important."

We should, as educators and activists, strive to help our students transform into critical thinkers, inspired actors, and political activists. But first, and this is sometimes hard to hold on to, we simply need to look each one of them in the eye and listen to what he or she has to say. Becoming a hungry and intelligent citizen, making the most out of the participatory part of participatory democracy, starts with showing students that what they have to say is, in fact, the most important thing in the world.

Courtney E. Martin is a freelance writer and social justice advocate, pursuing a Masters Degree in writing and social change at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.