Pencil Effigy talk

Jethro Gillespie, PhD

Dec. 30, 2019, Utah County

Hello everyone, I really appreciate you all coming out to be with us today. My name is Jethro Gillespie, and I’ve been a secondary public school art teacher in Utah for the past 13 years. I hope you don't mind if I take a few minutes here to provide some explanation and context for why we’re here gathered around this big goofy pencil sculpture this afternoon.

I am not a politician or a businessman or a real estate guy. I am not in charge of policy decisions. But I am a teacher, and I am in charge of helping young students learn, grow and expand their awareness of and build connections to their place in the world. I don’t have access to a large studio space or significant funding, I usually make my artworks out of cheap materials, such as thread, fabrics, or recently, pallet wood. I’ve lately been creating large sculptures of small, banal everyday objects from pallet wood and then I take them somewhere and burn them. I’d like to give a special shout-out to my sister Toni for hosting us here today!

As a teacher and an artist, I personally and perhaps weirdly relate to pallet wood. I think pallets kind of symbolize the foundation of our economic system. I mean, in a very tangible and physical sense, our industries and businesses rely on pallets for the logistics and operational functions of transporting just about everything we buy and sell. These cheap configurations of scrap wood and staples, sized for a forklift, are essentially used and reused until they break or are otherwise discarded. 

Unfortunately, I also think many members of the current Utah legislature regard teachers kind of like pallets. I wonder if they don't see us as cheap, replaceable, and utilitarian foundations upon which they can pile large loads of students, responsibilities, and labor. But unlike the commercial economy, the value of the teacher’s cargo is not simply quantified by data points, metric calculations, or by the bottom line. Our students are diverse, nuanced bundles of energy, each teeming with unimaginable potential. Kids are literally the future, and we should value their education as a significant priority, and not as a budgetary afterthought.

So, I’ve created this large sculpture of a used-up pencil as a symbolic connection to how I feel about working as a teacher in Utah. Maybe it’s a sort of self-portrait. A lot of statistics about education and learning are contingent on interpretations, regional norms, and many other factors that often make them seem difficult to understand or otherwise able to be cleverly shaped into just about any political or legal agenda. But if you don’t remember anything else I say this afternoon, I hope you’ll remember this simple statistic: Utah ranks 51st in the nation for per-pupil spending (51st means all 50 states plus Washington D.C.). This means, among other things, that especially, by comparison, we have very large class sizes and minimal financial support for equipment, buildings, supplies, as well as the ability to attract highly-qualified people to the field. Two of the main consequences to come of this situation that I have seen first hand (and I’m sure many of you have as well) are 1- a watered-down educational experience for most of our students, and 2- teachers that burn-out.

I was recently talking to a colleague and friend from Georgia who talked about teacher burn-out as though it were an inevitable step for the career of a teacher. Like, it’s going to happen, no matter what, and I believe the main contributing factor that will decide when it will hit us is the circumstances of our teaching context. Under poor conditions, teachers are going to burn-out much more quickly. But when we feel supported, financially, institutionally, structurally, I believe we can flourish and thrive and I hope we don’t have to burn out. 

Many in our Utah legislature are currently working to pass a tax reform bill that will decrease income taxes, which for over 90 years has been reserved for funding public education. This is after a non-profit regional planning agency called “Envision Utah” was brought in to assess the teacher shortage crisis facing Utah earlier this year. They recommended, among many things, starting by paying teachers a starting salary of $60,000 a year as well as offering a more substantial benefits package. They clearly saw that by putting more money towards education we could shrink class sizes and attract better teacher candidates. 

Ok, so I want to tell you a story to help explain why I’m doing this today. When I was working on my doctoral work in 2014, I was invited to a conference about art and education at NYU. I was scheduled as the very first presenter on the program of this conference to give a brief presentation to an auditorium full of international artists, educators, and education policymakers from all over the country. The second-most nerve-wracking aspect of this situation was that as I approached at the podium, the audio-visual technicians were still monkeying with the projector, and my presentation was timed in advance. So I had to wait until they fixed things before I could begin. I stood there, awkwardly basking in the silent spotlight for what seemed like forever, as everyone began to quiet and turn their attention to me. 

Which brings me to the most nerve-wracking part of this experience. In the front row of the audience, in her wheelchair, was the distinguished Dr. Maxine Greene. 

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Maxine Greene was a prolific author, professor, and one of the most influential educational philosophers of the past 50 years. Her name is highly regarded in international literary, philosophical, and academic circles. She became a scholar and professor in New York City in the 1950s when that career path was especially difficult for a woman and led an incredible career inspiring thousands of educators in many ways. 

I wanted to share some of her quotes with you to give you a sense of what she was about, and that I believe are pertinent to this little event today. One of the most important ideas she advocated throughout her career was that, as we encounter difficult circumstances, that we “both not only imagine things as if they could be otherwise but to move people to begin on their own initiatives, to begin to make them so” (Greene, 2010).

The following quotes come from an essay she wrote called “Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life,” in which she takes up the position that teaching is inherently a moral issue. She says:

“I am suggesting that, for too many individuals in modern society, there is a feeling of being dominated and that feelings of powerlessness are almost inescapable… I am also suggesting that such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them, to interpret the experiences they are having day by day. Only as they learn to make sense of what is happening, can they feel themselves to be autonomous. Only then can they develop the sense of agency required for living a moral life.”

“(Students) must achieve the kind of wide-awakeness I have been talking about, the ability to think about what they are doing, to take responsibility...There must be attentiveness to others and to the circumstances of everyday life. There must be efforts made to discover ways of living together justly and pursuing common ends. As wide-awake teachers work, making principles available and eliciting moral judgments, they must orient themselves to the concrete, the relevant, and the questionable. They must commit themselves to each person’s potentiality for overcoming helplessness and submergence, for looking through his or her own eyes at the shared reality. I believe this can only be done if teachers can identify themselves as moral beings, concerned with defining their own life purposes in a way that arouses others to do the same. I believe, you see, that the young are most likely to be stirred to learn when they are challenged by teachers who themselves are learning, who are breaking with what they have too easily taken for granted, who are creating their own moral lives. There are no guarantees, but wide-awakeness can play a part in the process of liberating and arousing, in helping people pose questions with regard to what is oppressive, mindless, and wrong. Surely, it can help people--all kinds of people--make the conscious endeavors needed to elevate their lives” (Greene, 1977).

I mentioned before how I drew a connection between pallet wood and my role as an educator. I also wanted to note that as an artist, when I’m tearing apart and reconfiguring these scraps of wood, I find that I am endlessly fascinated with the weathered textures and colors I find in the surfaces of the boards. Yes, most pallets may look alike, but I’ve found that when I spend my time and attention noticing the subtle nuances and unique imperfections earned from a history of wear and labor, I am able to locate a specific beauty in them. A beauty that not only proves to be worthy of my attention, but also becomes a generous reward for spending my attention on something so common, often overlooked, and important.

Back to that auditorium at NYU in 2014, in that silent moment, I remember looking down and receiving a mindful glance from Dr. Greene in the front row. I’m not exactly sure what was in that glance, but I felt her energy and what she stood for. It was humbling. I’ve thought about that glance a lot during the past 6 years, and what I now think is that glance inferred a personal responsibility to me as a teacher, as well as an invitation to utilize my skills in a creative and generative way that could work towards healing broken systems. So as long as I’ve got the physical strength to push around these boards and the neurons in my brain are still crackling, this is what I want to do with my energy and attention.

In a different article, Dr. Greene also said: “Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious” (Greene, 2010).

51st in the nation in per-pupil spending is obviously not a statistic that we’re proud of, but I think it should be one that we as citizens of Utah should be acutely aware of. This is not just a budgetary question, but I believe this is a moral issue that deserves our attention. 

And so with that, I’d like to dedicate this fire is to Dr. Maxine Greene as a personal gesture and response to the mindful glance she gave me in that silent moment in an auditorium at NYU in 2014 in what would turn out to be her last public appearance, as she passed away just a few weeks later at 96 years old. 

I also want to dedicate this burn to the many students and educators of Utah’s public schools. Thank you.

References

Greene, M. (2010). Teaching wide awake (taken from 

https://teachingwideawake.wordpress.com/tag/maxine-greene/

Greene, M. (1977). Toward Wide-awakeness: An argument for the arts and humanities, 

Teachers College Record. Volume 79(1).