Saturday, April 07, 2007

Who are our Heroes?


A colleague from Arizona, recently sent me a copy of an interview with Roland Barth. Although Barth's work is no stranger to QHST he challenges us with an interesting task in this excerpted section.

THe following is excerpted from :

In search of heroes: Give educators a place on the pedestal
Interview with Roland Barth
By Dennis Sparks
Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2002 (Vol. 23, No. 1)

Trust us as professionals
JSD: Here’s what you wrote regarding the assumptions of some school reformers: "Behind the models, the rubrics, the principles, the analyses of the problems, and the prescriptions for improving them was a very chilling assumption: Schools are not capable of improving themselves. ... Sadly, our profession seems neither to trust nor to rely on the accumulated wisdom of its own practitioners."

Barth:
Educators read about the heroes and heroines in other fields — the business heroes, the military heroes, the sports heroes — but where are the Katherine Grahams, the Colin Powells, the Lance Armstrongs in our field? They’re out there, but we don’t have access to the exemplars in our field, and we don’t accord them the same place on the pedestal. Our profession enjoys neither the visibility nor the legitimacy of others. But if we want others to take us seriously, it’s time we begin to take seriously our heroes, ourselves, and the important work we do.

2 comments:

Pure said...

My hero is my high school band teacher. The year I graduated (8 years ago now) she was in her 50 year of teaching. Yep that's fifty. She was an amazing director. She inspired me to want to go into music. Gave me a place to belong in high school, and she's still there today folks. She once said her retirement party would be her funeral.

Mighty Mojo said...

You're my hero!!