Beyond the Classroom

Beyond the Classroom

©2022, William Holiday

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-66786-105-0

ISBN eBook: 978-1-66786-106-7

Table of Contents

1. PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

2. The Superintendent

3. GFC

4. Kent State May 1970

5. Claudette Colvin and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

6. Bombingham

7. Janice Wesley Kelsey

8. Footsoldier Clifton Casey

9. Reverend James Bevel

10. Myeka Helen Edmond-Bevel

11. Aaralyn Liese - Daughter of James Bevel

12. The Murder of Emmett Till

13. The Troubles in Northern Ireland

14. John Kelly

15. Bernadette CanningMcGuinness’s Story

16. Meeting Martin McGuinness

17. Jean Heggarty at the Museum Of Free Derry 2016

18. The Omagh Bombing 15 August 1998

19. Educators

20. England

21. Developed Lessons After A Field Study

22. For the Modern Virtual World

23. Using Your Local Community

24. The Work of Educators

Preface

This book is written with three objectives, for those who have an interest in historical events and as an incentive to educators to think beyond the daily activities within the four walls of the classroom. With planning, opportunities can be arranged for students to experience history first-hand rather than through textbooks. This book could also be considered by homeschool teachers. These teachers are not constricted by the walls of a classroom or the constraints of a traditional school calendar. This book can be used as a guide for some controversial events. Lastly, this book can be used by parents who want to offer more background to a family vacation and sites of importance that can be visited as a break on a car trip.

The author has taken groups, middle school, high school and university to Washington, D.C., New York City, Gettysburg Battlefield, England (Castles and Cathedrals), Scotland, Wales (Castles and Cathedrals), Republic of Ireland (Easter Rising and Famine - An Gorta Mor), Civil Rights Trail (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi), Italy, Cuba (2009), Northern Ireland, Trail of the Nez Perce (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho), Greece, and Germany (Cold War and Nazi Germany).

I am indebted to my long-time colleague and former English teacher, Nancy Olson, and my wife, Lyle, for their prodigious help with suggestions and editing.

Chapter ONE

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

Center instruction around the learner, not the educator.

For many students he may be the first teacher they encounter who opens the door for them to consider history critically - not just memorize the facts and repeat them back. He is aware that much of the representation of the past found in educational material is not only bland, but biased - and does not include every voice. For this reason he never shies away from difficult topics and allows students to veer from the curriculum to follow the topics and perspectives they think truly matter. Eliza Price 2017

My philosophy of education is heavily influenced by what was called ‘the British Approach’ to primary education, odd for a secondary and collegiate instructor it would seem. I have spent my career in adapting instructional techniques and strategies designed for elementary students to my high school and collegiate courses. It has always been, How can I use this, adapt it, make it work for the students?

My approach has always been to center instruction around the learner, not the educator. British primary schools in the 1970s did this. It led to the popularity of the ‘open-school’ approach in the United States. There is a high school twenty miles from where I write that was built without walls to affect the approach. This simplistic approach did not work in this country and was heavily, if somewhat inappropriately, criticized by right-wing America. An example may be found here: https://archive.org/details/FreedomTalkEducation

I have always taken issue with the terminology used in response to the question, What do you teach? I answer, I teach students, or, rather, I put students in a position to learn. That is my objective. My classes are not about me. They are about my ability to put students in a position where they can learn. Thus, when I hear teachers exclaiming, This is my favorite unit! I ask, Is it your students’ favorite?

At times I have been asked to counsel on the topic of discipline. I have done workshops for teaching candidates at Norwich University, and I always tell adult students, Ninety five percent disciplinary problems are solved by organization. When students are positioned to know what to do, and when transitions from activity to activity are seamless, classes run smoothly. Planning and foresight are the keys. One of my strengths is my organizational skill, and classes nearly always include more than a single activity.

Providing a variety of options for students is essential to my philosophy. I have a list of dozens of assessment choices for students. I encourage artwork, music and other creative opportunities for students. I once had a skilled student come to me when she had met an opportunity to move on at her own pace, but had to pick a direction from several choices. She said, I don’t know which one of these to choose. I want to do them all! Of course, she did not have time and had to make the choice.

Perhaps one of the more innovative public activities that epitomizes my philosophy is a course I taught in the fall semester of 2017 titled ‘Film, Music & History.’ It was a Collegiate Dual Enrollment course with students who registered gaining three college academic credits at a nearby university as well as high school graduation credit. I reached out to a local commercial radio station and then offered the students the opportunity to produce a weekly half- hour radio program showcasing the history they were learning in class through music and film. I organized Field Studies (I do not use the terminology ‘field trip’) to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio; to Kent State University in Ohio where students learned from and conversed with shooting victim (May 4, 1970) Alan Canfora.

Tom Bodett’s recording studio

We traveled to the recording studio of Tom Bodett, well known NPR and Motel 6 celebrity. We met with WTSA radio studio’s DJs to learn the corporate side of radio as well as how radio has changed in the past fifty years (Traveling Wilburys ‘The Last DJ’). We invited local ‘historic’ bands to class and created radio programs about them. Lead singer Wayne Harvey of the Trophies (from Brattleboro) commented, Hi, Bill, I did listen to the production, and I was very impressed and pleased. You guys did a tremendous job, and it was exciting to reminisce. I definitely want to listen again. It sounds as though you guys had a lot of fun doing this, and all the other projects!

The students presented a workshop at the Vermont Alliance of the Social Studies in Burlington, Vermont in December 2017 and impressed Emily Titterton, the Proficiency-Based Learning Team, Arts Content Specialist at the Vermont Agency of Education. She wrote, "I first want to take this opportunity to reiterate how much I enjoyed learning about Tracking the Tracks from your students. The next one or (more likely) two Arts newsletters will focus on arts integration in Vermont schools. I am writing to you because I would love to highlight what you are doing. The students that you brought with you to Burlington were so engaged in the learning - I would love to be able to share their passion with the Vermont arts education community. I’m really curious about their thoughts on learning about history through music and why is it so engaging. Thanks again for connecting me with your amazing students and being open to highlighting what is happening in your classroom."

The class was featured in the Vermont Agency of Education newsletter.

All of the Film, Music & History programs may be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V_LPnAEojkuXj0WIufqPgU7JxbtpDGZQvVSSq-DPpd8/edit

If I were given a utopian opportunity, class would never be in a classroom. It would be ‘out there,’ on the road in a bus, a van, something to take us to where the things happened. To that end, I have traveled widely in the United States, Vietnam, and Cuba. I have taught courses in several locations in this country and in England, The Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Greece, Italy, Cuba, Germany and Europe. I have taken middle and high school students on Field Studies to Dallas, TX (JFK assassination), Alabama (Civil Rights Movement), Washington, DC, England, The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

I have not used a textbook since 1973 and just concluded my forty-eighth year as a public school educator: twelve years in grades 5-8 and thirty-six years in grades 9-12 and as college adjunct. Throughout the years I have pursued and I continue to pursue, the art of integrated education.

Chapter TWO

The Superintendent

I kept struggling with the idea: how do we pay? How do we give to teachers? How do we support them? I just kept saying it’d be great if we could double the time. We don’t spend all the professional development money every year. Why don’t we double it up to those that want to do something really big?

Ray McNulty - July 2020 - Photo submitted by Ray McNulty

I was sitting in the back of room 517, a notorious location where a teacher would be assigned Study Hall duty in a large cafeteria to monitor students, sometimes as many as 85 at a time, seated at typical cafeteria lunch tables. I always considered study hall to be a holding tank, a setting where the institution could account for its population for a certain period of time. There was little that had to do with the education of students. Understand, there were a small percentage of students who would avail themselves of the opportunity to reduce their ‘homework’ time, or even eliminate the need for it, by industriously using this allotted time.

There was always lots of traffic moving through the cafeteria, because in this school, the cafeteria was on a direct walking route from the Technical Center to the middle school, and to the high school. So there was constant movement and distraction. Few of the students actually studied in the study hall. They spent most of their time attempting to maneuver around whatever disciplinary provisions were in place. It was a holding tank, not an educational setting.

So here I was sitting in the back of the room, monitoring everything when sauntering into the room comes the superintendent of schools, Ray McNulty. McNulty was on his way to a meeting. And as Ray always did, he stopped to say hello. I responded in kind and asked Ray if he had a minute because I had an idea. Ray said he had just a minute because he was already late for his meeting. And he stopped to listen. About twenty minutes later, we had finished our conversation. And he had become, in my opinion, enamored with the content of it. At the time, in 1995, my school was readying the transition to a block scheduling system. Before the change, each school day was structured around the traditional 45-minute classes, a schedule employed by the school since its opening in 1952.

The superintendent’s concern was that teachers were going to need professional development to make this transition. For the first time ever, most educators in this district were going to be required to fill an hour and a half of time, rather than 45 minutes, and the question was what to do to manage that time effectively.

I had been trained in the British approach to education having traveled to York, England, from 1974 until the early 1990s through a graduate-level cooperative program between the College of Ripon and York, St. John, and Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. There will be more about this in a future chapter. I had become a proponent of the British primary approach and was constantly making an effort to see how I could transition my techniques, materials, and subject matter in a high school setting to the most positive aspects of the British interdisciplinary, individualized instruction approach. So, I was, in a way, a practitioner of the British approach and had been for many years.

Keene State and the exchange program’s Keene director, Professor David E. Costin, Jr., had developed confidence in me, and I was asked to develop and organize enhancement travel opportunities for participants. I had the experience of knowing the educational program and how to put together the travel opportunities. Thus, I had developed a program for taking educators to Britain for two weeks time to immerse themselves in studying and developing curriculum to enhance whatever their particular discipline was using the British primary education approach.

Those who signed on over the years from 1995 through 2018 included school counselors, administrators, elementary school teachers, middle school teachers, school nurses, and high school teachers. Superintendent McNulty himself went to Dallas, Texas on a field study investigating John F. Kennedy’s assassination. School Board member Paul M. Rounds traveled to York, England to observe the program in1997.

As the conversation with Superintendent McNulty continued, and I could sense his interest that this might be one way to offer the professional development that he was looking for, I explained my idea and he responded by advising me to go ahead, contact Keene State College, develop the idea and get back to him. Unknown to Ray, I had already laid the background for a six- credit graduate course through Keene State College to take educators in my school district to York, England, where they would immerse themselves in the British primary approach to education and adapt it to their personal teaching, no matter the age group or discipline. My idea was that it would be beneficial for them to begin teaching in this way, in order to use the block scheduling system effectively.

Keene State accepted the proposal.

McNulty’s first question was, Well, why don’t you go ahead and plan this out and see how it goes, and you can get back to me?

I answered, Ray, It’s already done. The course has been approved.

He was awestruck, and we began to discuss financing. Ray McNulty did something extraordinarily generous. For any group that I could assemble to go to England, he offered each participant the ability to use two years’ worth of course-reimbursement funds.

McNulty explained his rationale. "I was working with the administration to get the block schedule going. I kept struggling with the idea: how do we pay? How do we give to teachers? How do we support them? I just kept saying it’d be great if we could double the time. We don’t spend all the professional development money every year. Why don’t we double it up to those that want to do something really big?

That made a difference. Educators are not highly paid, but experiences like the one you were talking about was the perfect cat in my mind. That became the perfect way to think about getting them to look at this trip. It’s the banter between them. I know it sounds obscure, but the time after they spend the day, looking at the [British] primary system and thinking about it, when they’re in a more casual experience at a pub or having dinner… I bet on your trip the conversation never left the car. The idea of the work, the professional work that they were doing was 24 hours a day. A lot of people will say, oh, they’re off on a junket. I’m going to say, 95% of the teachers I know never lose sight in the downtime at a conference or talking with their peers about their work.

Under the teaching contract, a teacher was allowed to expend the cost of a three-credit course at the University of Vermont each year. Providing this opportunity meant there would be plenty of money to meet all expenses for all participants. There were requirements. For example, if a teacher did not come back to the district or failed to meet the course requirements, then that teacher would have to pay back the second year’s worth of course reimbursement money.

I agreed quickly and started my plan by announcing a meeting. A couple of dozen educators attended, curious about what was going on. I explained the program without explaining the financing. I was not interested in people going on this trip because it was going to be free. My objective was to find educators who were sincerely interested in changing and improving, in my opinion, their instruction. When one of them asked, What’s this going to cost? My response was, If that’s your primary concern, I don’t want you in this program.

I wanted people committed to the educational idea. If later, when I announced the costs, someone felt as though they couldn’t go, or did not want to go, they could let me know. But for now, I was looking for people committed to excellence in interdisciplinary education, not financing.

I found in a 2020 conversation with former Superintendent McNulty that we had much in common beyond this particular program.

McNulty said, I feel strongly about education being more active. It’s real. You ask them what they remember. And you know, you’ll never find anybody saying, ‘I remember the day Mr. Holiday gave us this test.’ They won’t say, ‘I remember the day that we learned double digit addition.’ They will remember that we were on an adventure with Mr. Holiday, a fun adventure. ‘We learned a lot. And we remember how all of all those kids worked together on our trip to Dallas. They’ll remember it all, and then when they see something, they’ll have that so embedded in them in their minds that they never forget that.

Dealey Plaza Dallas, Texas

So many of us nowadays think our job is about teaching and it’s not. It’s about learning. We define ourselves by that word teaching and that’s not correct anymore. I think we’re learning engineers. We engineer learning. It’s about teachers like you and others that I know that put kids as you said in positions, so that learning occurs and they get it themselves and they learn it. Any neuroscience tells us whenever you learn anything by yourself, you never forget it-never. It’s in your brain forever. You think about those experiences that you’ve provided. They’re all rich, they’re all powerful and they will never forget them. But our language has got to be different. We’re not teachers, we’re learning engineers. They’re not students. They’re learners. That’s a more active work that speaks to action versus sit and get.

Educators who signed on would eventually learn that the entire course, including accommodations, six graduate credits, airfare, transportation, and admissions fees in York, England, in the summer of 1995 would cost them nothing. I called the program, The White Rose Project, named after Yorkshire, England, that had been earlier involved in

The White Rose of Yorkshire

White Rose Group session - York, England

the Wars of the Roses with the House of Lancashire, whose symbol was the red rose. Thus, the White Rose of Yorkshire versus the Lancashire red rose. We were in Yorkshire and took on the symbol of the white rose.

White Rose participants meeting on the Quad in York, England

What has happened to Ray McNulty over the past 25 years? He explains in a telephone conversation, I do believe we need to transform education. And I talk about that all the time. And I write about that all the time. But what I feel is that people don’t understand that the job is 24/7.

You know, they’re good people. The job of a leader is not to doubt but to make more leaders, people like you, and there are others. I remember an English teacher. She went on the England trip, and she just loved that trip so much. She just could not stop talking about it.

McNulty was speaking about Nancy Olson, high school English teacher, who participated in the first White Rose Project sessions in York, England in the summer of 1995.

Nancy Olson - Brattleboro Union High School English Teacher

Olson - "Throughout the winter and early spring, the prospect of a summer graduate course given at the College of St. John in York, England, promised to be an exciting finish to a long and challenging school year. As an Interdisciplinary Project, I hoped it would help me combine other content areas with the teaching of English. Although I had become familiar with performance-based assessment and portfolio task work in my classes, it was still a separate piece of my curriculum. I somehow felt that this course experience would offer something that was missing from my understanding.

"What I learned from the course was much more than I ever expected. The reason that my previous attempts to integrate project work into my curriculum felt uncomfortable was my basic belief that they were not part of the ‘real work’ of the subject. My experience in England taught me that there are many paths that lead to the heart of a subject. True integrated education acknowledges that it is often through other areas of personal interest that a student can come to understand your subject area. By examining my own interests this summer, I received the message of interdisciplinary instruction in a way I had not done before. I am committed to bringing the fruits of my understanding to my students.

This course represents a source of renewal in my professional career as a teacher, not only for its educational value, but also for another important reason. The two-week experience of having shared ideas and feelings with my colleagues left me with a powerful and lasting impression. I have known most of the course participants for over twelve years, but, speaking for myself, I really did not allow them to know me until this summer. I’m looking forward to returning to school with new friends.

Superintendent McNulty commenting on the Dallas field study said, "I also remember what you said, which caused me to think deeply about the JFK trip, which was really exciting. Ellen, (Ray’s friend who accompanied us on the trip) and I were chatting about remembering the trip. Some of the things I remember as an educator observing the trip was, you didn’t have to get kids to think about questions they wanted to ask. They asked incredibly rigorous questions all the time. And it was just fascinating watching the kids come up with the kinds of questions that, in my mind, are a sign of a learner. A lot of people ask me when I worked at the Gates Foundation, what it was like to work with Bill Gates? We only worked with Bill twice a month. Bill Gates could sit in a