NEW
Library Project
Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2003
Life
Experience Yields Authenticity
by Patricia Andres
Twenty-two
years after leaving Trenton High School without graduating, Tracy Davis
defined herself as a single mother of six and a woman who didn’t
associate even one of her personal successes in life with school. Like
most who find their way to Trenton Daylight/Twilight, a
return-to-high-school program where adults and young adults have the
chance to earn their diplomas, Tracy came to a bend in the road that
helped her give school another try.
Her niece had seen a sign advertising computer
classes. Deciding to “take a chance,” Tracy went to register for the
course at a nearby apartment complex. Though she missed the deadline for
registration, the teacher admitted Tracy, who completed the 16-week
course, earned a computer-skills certificate and met George Prassas, the
Daylight/Twilight teacher who suggested she maintain the momentum and go
for her diploma.
Last June, Tracy graduated, was admitted to
Mercer County Community College and plans to return to
Daylight/Twilight—this time as a People and Stories assistant
coordinator in our “bridge to college” program, designed to encourage
students to use our discussions as invitations to continue in-depth
analysis of what they read—just possibly in college.
Tracy says encouragement was key to her movement
from defeat to accomplishment regarding formal education. “At first it
was like taking baby steps, then it became exciting,” she says about
returning to school, becoming a more confident reader and risking the
writing of poems.
As I listen to her talk about parenting, her
determination to keep her kids safe from the streets and the challenges
she’s faced making ends meet, a tremendous sense of respect for
Tracy’s experiential learning wells up, along with some words by Paulo
Freire that inform our method: “Only through communication can human
life hold meaning. The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the
authenticity of the students’ thinking…Authentic thinking, thinking
that is concerned about reality,
does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in
communication.”
When I think of Tracy’s recent contributions
to People and Stories in an evening language arts class, “authentic”
is the best description of the way she brought her experience of reading the
world to our work of reading words.
We read literature that raised both large and very specific
questions: “What is home?” or “What does the line, ‘The welcome
smell of meat overexposed to the sun filled my nostrils’ tell us about
the narrator’s feelings as she returns home?” When she talks of home,
Tracy emphasizes what she has created with her children. “When I come
home my children hug me, ask where I’ve been, what I’ve done.” In
contrast, she continues, “Growing up, I didn’t know what ‘home’
meant.”
When asked what she liked most about the
stories, Tracy answers, “They open you up. All the stories had to do
with connection.” She mentions one, though, Peter Cameron’s
“Homework,” that was troubling because while the main character lived
surrounded by his family, “nobody connected, and the main feeling was
isolation, loneliness.” She smiles, adding, “And the title,
‘Homework,’ refers to work we do for school, but mostly to what we
create of our lives.”