Ayers about his graphic novel
15 March 2010
Weather Underground member Bill Ayers (the guy Palin and McCain were
referring to when they said Obama "pals around with terrorists") has
re-written his book, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, as a graphic
novel. It will be published in May. It's called To Teach: The
Journey, in Comics and is illustrated by Ryan Alexander-Tanner.
Brian Heater says, "In April Ayers will be appear at the MoCCA Fest
in New York to discuss activism in comics on a panel with Peter
Kuper, Tom Hart, Josh Neufeld, and Ward Suttton. I will be
moderating. In preparation for the panel, I spoke with Ayers over the
weekend. He was on his way back from a political rally in Detroit."
In a sense, you're structuring the classroom as a laboratory of sorts.
I think of the classroom as a laboratory for discovery and surprise,
absolutely. And I think every classroom should be like that, whether
it's a geography classroom in high school or a physics classroom in
college, or a kindergarten, it ought to be structured as a...
laboratory for discovery and surprise. And you can add other
metaphors to that. You can say it also ought to be a performance
space. It ought to be a place you can come to tell your story. It
ought to be an artist studio. It ought to be a museum. But notice,
all of the metaphors that you and I are coming up with aren't it
ought to be a factory [laughs]it can be a workshop, but not a factory.
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Interview: Bill Ayers Pt. 1 [of 4]
http://thedailycrosshatch.com/2010/03/15/interview-bill-ayers-pt-1-of-4/
by Brian Heater
March 15, 2010
Bill Ayers has led a number of lives in his time on earth. The
65-year-old Illinois native is likely best known as a co-founder of
the late-60s revolutionary activist group, The Weather Underground,
an aspect of his life that once again thrust him into the spotlight
when Sarah Palin and John McCain began bandying about his name in
their run against Obama. When Palin tossed out the phrase "paling
around with terrorists," she was almost invariably talking of the
then senator's fellow Chicagoan, Bill Ayers.
For the past 35 years, however, Bill Ayers has been deeply entrenched
in education, currently working as a professor at The University of
Illinois at Chicago, and penning a number of books on the subject,
most famously 1993's To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. When
approached to write an updated edition of that title, Ayers initially
balked, and ultimately tossed his publishers a curve ballhe would do
an update To Teach, so long as he was allowed to re-imagine the text
as a graphic novel.
His publishers conceded, and Ayers nominated Ryan Alexander-Tanner
for the project, a young Xeric-winning artist whose nameand workis
likely unfamiliar to even the most studious alternative comics fans.
Alexander-Tanner ultimately moved into a recently vacated room in
Ayers's Chicago home, and two began work on what would become To
Teach: The Journey, in Comics.
In April both artist and writer will attend the MoCCA Fest to promote
the book (due out May 1st). Ayers will appear on the Sequential
Activism panel, alongside Peter Kuper, Josh Neufeld, Tom Hart, and
Ward Sutton. I will be moderating. Ayers, happily, agreed to discuss
the project ahead of the event, calling from his car on the way back
home from a political rally in Detroit.
--
Are you working on the weekend?
I'm working every day, doing something. I was speaking at a
conference in Ann Arbor, and then I went down to Detroit to see a
friend of mine, who I'm collaborating with on a project. We spent the
day together and then I went to a political rally, and now I'm heading home.
Were you speaking about education?
Not this time. This is the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron
Statement, which is the founding of Students for a Democratic
Society. The first president of SDS lives in Ann Arbor, and he
organized a conference called "Bring it Back, Take it Forward." And
there were a series of panels on a series of issues about the
movement then and the movement now, it was a very interesting
inter-generational conversation. I was on a panel with several folks
I knew from the civil rights movement and several young people who
are either students or activists in Michigan. It was fun.
Do you tend to compartmentalize these two parts of your
lifepolitics and education? Or are they one in the same for you?
They're very much the same for me. That's partly because when I began
teaching in 1975, I had been arrested in the first International Days
of Protest against the war in Vietnam. I was 20-years-old. I spent
ten days in jail, and in jail I met some folks who had started a
freedom school as part of the civil rights movement. I marched out of
jail and went for a teaching job. I had no idea that I was going to
teach or wanted to teach. It became very much a life-changing event.
And from that day, frankly, I can't see teaching separated from
issues of access, equity, recognition, justicethose kind of seem all
tied up in my mind with teaching. It's a lens through which I look at teaching.
You're something of a teacher or teachers now. At what point did that begin?
It's funny, because I was a teacher when I was 20, and when I was 22,
I began teaching other teachers. I have a certain kind of approach to
teaching teachers that I suppose is a little different than one
imagines. It's really based on how I got into teaching. I think of
teaching teachers as allowing them to live the kind of discovery and
surprise that they ought to organize in their own classrooms. So I
organize my adult education classes the way I hope they'll organize
their kindergartens.
One metaphor for that is, I learned very early that you should put
easels along one wall and put red, yellow, and blue paint in front of
each easels. And, of course, the reason is because, just playing
around with the paint, every month, every day, every year, some kid
will come up to me and say, "Bill, look at this! Red and blue makes
purple!" I could have said, at that moment of discovery and surprise,
"don't you remember? We covered that in the primary and secondary
colors unit, you idiot!" Or I could say, "oh my god, how did you find
that out?" and then we're back to what I think learning is all about,
which is the construction of knowledge and the construction of
meaning and discovery of the world.
And, in discovering the world, even in a simple example like that,
the main thing you discover is your own power to access the world and
to perform in the world. That's the lesson I want everyone to have.
Not just because I think it's the best way to learn, but because I
think it's the best way to be a participant, a citizen, an ethical
person in the world. You have to believe that you have a mind of your
own, and that it's capable of discovery and new ideas. When you stop
thinking that, you're either a slave or a dogmatist, and that kind of
amounts to the same thing.
That's the big lesson to me, teaching teachers or teaching kids: you
are a working in progress, each of you. You are living in a world
that is not finished, that's incomplete. And through your own
imagination, curiosity, initiation, courage, in unison with others,
you can not only rediscover the world, you can remake the world.
That's the big lesson to me about teaching.
In a sense, you're structuring the classroom as a laboratory of sorts.
I think of the classroom as a laboratory for discovery and surprise,
absolutely. And I think every classroom should be like that, whether
it's a geography classroom in high school or a physics classroom in
college, or a kindergarten, it ought to be structured as a laboratory
for discovery and surprise. And you can add other metaphors to that.
You can say it also ought to be a performance space. It ought to be a
place you can come to tell your story. It ought to be an artist
studio. It ought to be a museum. But notice, all of the metaphors
that you and I are coming up with aren't it ought to be a factory
[laughs]it can be a workshop, but not a factory.
You want to stay away from homogenization.
I want to stay away from one-size-fits-all, because I think one size
fits none. That's part of it. And part of it is, I think it's an
absolute myth that we could ever learn the same things at the same
time in the same way, 30 of us sitting, eyes up front, well-behaved.
It just never has happened and never could happen. I'm interested in,
as you say, a laboratory or a museum or something. We're working away
at materials in kindergarten, it's the blocks and the clay and the
paint. In a college classroom, it's other materials. But working away
at materials, interacting with the world, the big, big underlying
hidden lesson is that you can discover and construct a world. You
don't have to wait passively for it to be given to you.
Had I taught those kindergarten kids lessons in primary and secondary
colors, the hidden lesson of that would be, 'I know and you don't
know. I know when you need to know this. You don't know when you need
to know this. I'm smart, you're not smart. I'm active, you're
passive.' And those are exactly the lessons I don't want to teach.
Is it hard to maintain that sense of discovery as students get older?
I think when students come to me at the level of college or graduate
school, they've already learned to play the gamed called "school," as
I have. I mean, we've all learned to play the game called school, and
then we're put into a certification concentration camp, where the
deal is, you come in and act like you're interested, and give me what
I want, and I'll act like you're doing well, and we'll have an
exchange. You pay the tuition and I'll give you a passing grade, and
you go out and repeat the whole formula.
That's a catastrophe for learning and for any kind of a human and
intelligent future. So I try to break with that and say I'm not
interested in that project or that deal. I try to undermine it and
say to students, "look, you and I have all learned to play the game."
I say this on the first day of class. "We all know how to play it,
and we were all successful at it. Not just you. Me too."
And so, if I say to you, "pick a question of authentic interest to
yourself. Something that you can really pursue by closing in on
primary sources, by projecting models. But not by referring to
secondary sources. Think of a question that powers your passion." If
I say that to a group of college studentsand I say it, every
semesterthe response absolutely predictably, with no contempt, is,
"okay, but what do you want?" And I get that. I get that. I'm there too.
I often say to students, after I've had them for two or three weeks,
and we're getting down and getting dirty, and getting interesting,
"come on, guys, you know that if I put up a sign in the center of
campus saying, 'Professor Ayers will be under this tree every
Wednesday at 5 PM. Anyone interested can come along. You won't get
credit and you won't have to pay tuition. And Ayers won't get paid.'
How many of you would show up?" And they always kind of giggle
uncomfortably, and two or three sweet souls always say, "well, I
would." And I say, "great, I'll be there."
But that's just one way of kicking at the underpinnings of the
hypocrisy of what we call 'education.' It's really just a
certification camp. And I really don't want to be in the
certification camp. But, there it is. And that's why, incidentally,
schools and universities and classrooms are contested spaces. We're
fighting over what they should be.
I don't know if you saw The Times this morning, but, oh my god, new
standards in Texas. It's absolutely appalling. In Texas, the
right-wing school board has won the day, and they're going to teach
only the good stuff about American history. And they don't want you
to see any peak of the dark side. It would be laughable if it weren't
so tragic. We already make that mistake, and we're going to make it
much, much worse. I think that's what fuels me every day.
--------
Interview: Bill Ayers Pt. 2 [of 4]
http://thedailycrosshatch.com/2010/03/22/interview-bill-ayers-pt-2-of-4/
by Brian Heater
March 22, 2010
Adaptation, it seems, was a far more involved job than Bill Ayers had
initially anticipated. "Ryan [Alexander-Tanner] was my teacher," the
writer tells me. "A 26-year-old kid. I certainly knew what I thought
about teaching and had a lot of ideas about teaching, but I had no
idea of what I was going to learn, working with this kid."
It's certainly in keeping with a major theme of To Teach: The
Journey, in Comicsevery teacher has something to learn from his
students, from kindergarten to college.
What the writer had initially planned on being a rather simple
sequential update to his work turned into so much more.
Tanner-Alexander moved into Ayers's home, and despite being a
self-proclaimed lifelong comics reader, Ayers will be the first to
admit that he still has plenty to learn about the form.
--
Is there a way to effect change in education while still largely
working outside the systemsuch as universities and the like?
You can never fully shed yourself of the system you live in. you can
never fully say "I'm not part of that system." Actually, it's an
on-going conflict and contradication. The thing you can do is work
purposefully within that contradiction. You can never resolve it. You
can never say, "I'm such a good person, I'm doing so many good
things, that in my classrooms, there's no certification going on."
But I can say, that every semester, every term that I've taught, I've
been inspired, fueled, excited by the kind of breakthroughs that my
students make and the kind of breakthroughs I make, and it makes me
go back, again and again, even though it's a very difficult job. I
always think of it as a wonderful, marvelous, ethical calling. It's
an intellectual challenge at the highest level. It's about knowing
the students before you as three-dimensional creatures. And that's
very, very challenging, because the creatures before you are dynamic,
complex, changing.
I find the challenge of teaching to be so exciting. I love doing it.
But did I ever claim to be free of the ugliness that I just
described? No, never. But that's true, incidentally of you or any
other writer. It's true of anybody. As much as people might try to be
conscious and try to be free, all of us live with one foot stuck
firmly in the mud and muck of the world as we find it. The trick is,
can you also be a person who tries to take that second foot and
strives to a world that could be. That's what I think is worth the journey.
In terms of this two-way learninggetting as much from the students
at they get from youdo you find that that applies equally across age
groups? From kindergarten to college?
Yes I do. In fact, sometimes it's easier to see it in kindergarten,
because they're more honest and more fresh. I'm now a grandfather of
two, and sometimes I break through quickly with my studentssometimes
it takes a little longer to prove to them that the kids they see
before them (the students in elementary school and high school)
really are able to teach them things. Sometimes it happens quickly
and sometimes it takes more effort.
I was telling some students last week that, as a grandfather, I was
privileged to be at the birth of both of my grand daughters. Some of
my students are parents, but most are not. But you can imagine what
it's like when a baby is brand new and taken to her mother. The
mother puts the baby to her breast, and the baby begins to nurse. The
baby is ten minutes old, and already you begin to see a dialog.
It's astonishing to watch, because the mother, who has read books
about it, and is strong enough to hold the baby is certainly teaching
the baby something about nursing. But the astonishing thing is, if
you watch more than a minute, the mother is adjusting. The baby, at
ten minutes old, is teaching the mother something. It's quite remarkable.
One of the funny and amazing things is, for the two or three years
that the nursing dialog is going on, it's always changing. The baby
is always saying new information, and the mother is always saying,
"no, don't bite me," when the kid starts teething. And then, when
they start to wean, and the baby says, "no," and the mother says,
"we're finished, and you can have a bottle." I witnessed this with my
own kids, but to see it again with my grandchildren was so fun,
because it was very clear that this very smart, accomplished,
competent mother, was suddenly in the position of being a learner in
the most basic dialog of all.
Is there something inherent in the comics medium that makes it a
good tool for teaching? Why did you settle on that for the new
edition of the book?
Well, you know, for me, it was much more spontaneous. I didn't set
out, deliberately to say, "here's a cool way to…" But I am a fan of
comic books and have been, all my life. I read them for enjoyment and
pleasure. I consume them. And then, when my kids were growing up, my
middle son, Malik, would never had read, were it not for the sports
page and comics. I saw the power of comics on a kid who was 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, 12. The first novel he read was Maus. It moved him profoundly.
He would have never read another novel. It was Maus that opened the
world to him. I've always been a fan of comics, but I had no idea
what was involved.
But speaking of being a learner, Ryan [Alexander-Tanner] was my
teacher. A 26-year-old kid. I certainly knew what I thought about
teaching and had a lot of ideas about teaching, but I had no idea of
what I was going to learn, working with this kid. He is, to me, quite
a genius about this form.
What I thought was going to happen, was he was going to illustrate my
wordstake my words and illustrate them. It took him quite a while,
like a good teacher with a bit of patience and a bit of pushing, to
say, "no, that's not actually what we're doing. We're writing a new
book. Get with the program." One of the things that was funny about
our work habits is, he's a late night guyhe goes all night. I'm an
early morning guy. I've written a lot in the last 25 years, but most
of it has been between 4:30 and 10:30 in the morning. That's when I
get up and write. Ryan doesn't go to bed until about five or six. So,
we would have some of our meetings in the dark dawn. He would be at
the end of his time, and I would be at the beginning of mine [laughs].
You were living in the same house at the time.
He moved in with us, yeah. We have a brownstone in Chicago in the
south side, and Ryan was living in Oregon at the time, and he came
out. We have three grown boys who are in their 30s. So they were
gone. My mother-in-law lived with us for five years, and she passed
away. My father lived with us for three years and then he passed
away. They were both people with alzheimer's. And then, thank god,
Ryan moved in. We'd never actually had an empty nest.
Ryan was there and he was a lot of fun to live with. He was very
patient. When I say "patient," he was a really good teacher in the
sense that he could be really patient and understanding with me and
then he could push me, hard, when I needed to be pushed. I thought it
was a great collaboration. I learned a lot about how comics work and
how they don't work. How they don't work is, if he had illustrated my
didactic writing. It wouldn't have been very interesting.
As someone who has been writing his whole life, what were the major
obstacles, as for as co-authoring a comic book?
Well, I wouldn't say I've written my whole life. I published my first
book when I was 45. And I'm now 65. So, about 20 years.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, it's not bad. And I'm working on some new stuff now that I
likeactually, now that I think about it, I never thought of it like
this. My first book was my dissertation, which I then turned into a
book. And then I wrote a couple of other books and edited a couple of
other books. And then, at some point, I wrote an ethnography about my
time in jail. That gave me a lot of courage.
When I wrote that book, I suddenly though for the first time that I
could write a literary memoir. That gave me the courage to write
Fugitive Days. When we struck on this idea of a comic book, I thought
I could do it in pace, but that wasn't true. For me, the great
challenge of it was that, on the one hand, we wanted certain ideas to
be represented, but we wanted there to be a narrative that was
credible, that was followable, that was compelling, that was seductive.
But I'd never written narrative like that. I don't want to say it was
"hard," so much as it was an interesting challenge and discovery, to
write a narrative about a character who we called "Bill" who has an
iconic book. To get into the character of Bill, who is not me,
exactly, but is a version of me as a young teacher, but mostly an
icon that we settled on, was actually thrilling.
.
1 comment:
Mr. Ayers, your are merely a piece of crap.
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