Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Tom Bean
Dr. Tom Bean talks to us about his work with incarcerated adolescents, building relationships, hearing what kids have to say, and challenging our own assumptions about how we label our students. Tom is known for his work in disciplinary and content area literacy, adolescent literacy, and his work with incarcerated youth. Dr. Bean is a Professor of Literacy/Reading in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Darden College of Education and the Rosanne Keeley Norris Endowed Professor at Old Dominion University.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2021, Apr. 6). A conversation with Tom Bean. (Season 1, No. 21) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/442F-6B61-75DA-D2F2-411D-5
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Education Research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom caffeine is here to help. Each week, I invite a top education researcher to sit down and talk with teachers about what they have learned from years of study. This week, Dr. Tom bean talks to us about his work with incarcerated adolescents, building relationships, hearing what kids have to say, and challenging our own assumptions about how we label our students. Tom is known for his work in disciplinary and content area literacy, adolescent literacy and his work with incarcerated youth. Dr. Bean is a professor of literacy and reading in the department of Teaching and Learning Darden College of Education, and the Roseanne Keely Norris Endowed Professor at Old Dominion University. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite morning drink. And join me your host, Lindsay Persohn. For classroom caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Tom, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Tom Bean:Thank you, Lindsay.
Lindsay Persohn:My first question for you, Tom is from your own experiences and education. Will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Tom Bean:Absolutely. I think I'll allude to this project we did for three years with incarcerated youth. But ultimately, it overlaps with some of what Leigh Hall has talked about building relationships and building trust. We can't do much with curriculum unless we have that in place. So we were asked my wife and myself and our doc student, Julie Morris, and another colleague from Arizona State, were asked by our chair who had been called by a foundation locally that works with incarcerated youth. And we would come out as reading specialists and help the reading problem the students apparently had they were ages 13 to 18. We visited the three different sites, one of which was co educational. And as we submitted our IRB and the judicial system IRB and so on. That took about took us six months to get approved even do this work because it's a protected class of students. Once we settled on the crisis center we were going to work with that was a co Ed Center. So we split off into small groups meeting once a week, in the afternoon for a couple hours. With these students, they were bused into an alternative high school about 10 miles away from their center, all the house itself they were in was under heavy surveillance, they used a point system 100 points per week to reward students behavior very Skinerian kind of approach, but one that seemed to be functioning pretty well, very caring staff. We were videotaped all the time, and audio surveillance and so on. But nevertheless, we were able to bring our technology and they didn't have much there. We have laptops, and so on, and engage students. So the position we took I would often say whenever we met with new groups of students, because of the revolving door, right, we had students waiting to be adopted in a foster home, waiting for a court case, under various levels of difficulty in their own lives outside of the center, and family life and so on. So what we tried to do is I would say to students, you know that we don't do school. That's not what we're doing here. And what we did do is bring in a lot of artwork, sketching, drawing, hip hop lyrics, anything we could do, to make it a reasonable sight and a place to spend some time working through some issues. So we started the first year, we started with just human rights, Youth for Human Rights material, Youth for Human Rights video clips, and had them kind of speak back to power and so on. So we were kind of guiding that process. But ultimately, what happened is students wanted to do more with singing, and rap and so on, and speak to other students that might be going sideways, so to speak, and speak out. So one of the students came up with a hashtag listen up. And that became the kind of monitor that we've worked with. And they really took on doing a lot of the writing and a lot of the thinking about issues they were grappling with. And so at this point, the project ended just before the the pandemic hit us. And so after three years, we completed the critical ethnography we reached saturation, so to speak all the way been asked to come back again, once things sorted out. We could probably do that. I really missed working with the students that put me on the ground more than I usually am in the ivory tower. So it was pretty powerful for us. So I'll allude I've actually read a couple passages from two of the students I've worked with, we tended to split across the COVID demand. So the the,
Unknown:my wife and our doc students, Julian Morris is now Professor Minnesota, they would work with the girls and on projects, the girls were working on often singing and producing lyrics and producing pretty compelling stories, their lives, and then I worked with the male populations. So that was my group to work with, and got to know them pretty well. And I would totally sketch with them, I bring my guitar. And sometimes, although they're much more interested in hip hop lyrics than when I played blues, so that's fine, too. Sometimes a student would bring a guitar or want was a guitar player, but didn't have access to any of those things in the home. And so I bring my guitar, and so they could play and teach them some things, and so on. So it was kind of an interesting spot, because we would have a stable group of students for a while maybe as many as 10 in the site, sometimes more than that, which got to be pretty challenging. Or we would have a smaller group, sometimes often during the summer, a smaller crew. So and then they would come back and see them again, that is they would have gotten out of the center, and gotten their feet on the ground for a while and then recycled back into it. The two students that all I'll read from their work. One is Dino, these are pseudonyms Dino, was African American, 17 year old. And he's explaining this, this is I'll share this as a reference point. It's one of our publications. And we're still doing a lot of writing on this project. So we're at that point where we're literally doing more writing in the data collection at this stage. But we did feel notes and standard qualitative research. That's the kind of work we were doing, or it's something more akin to action research. And so Dino talks about his struggles. And I'll just read this a little bit. And the other person that we work quite a bit with is mark a 17 year old white male, but who could code shift in and out of African American Vernacular, in a heartbeat. So these are students that have life lived experiences that are often really compelling, and somehow survived. And foundation itself ran a big cultural day in August, typically, where they could present their work and talk about it. And the whole notion is to try to get through high school or GED. And we were really trying to look at how can we get these students on campus with a mentor and so on, we've not been able to accomplish that for obvious reasons right now. But that's still something we would certainly consider. So Dino says about his life struggles. My struggle as I was growing up, I had no debt. My mom had no job living in Maryland at a house with bedbugs as a kid growing up with four younger brothers and one younger sister and an older brother didn't eat every night and barely had TVs and Wi Fi and clothes were the same stuff half the time, used to sleep in cars. I did my own thing, because I got tired sleeping with bugs, nothing to eat, started stealing food to eat. And when we moved to a neighborhood called Mary may Oaks, it was on Section Eight using EBT and started hanging with the wrong people doing bad stuff joining the gang out there, people had guns, smoking robbing. And that's when I started to do that playing with guns and robbing people. Wish I never took that route. Because look where I'm at locked up, and I have nobody but myself. Dino was a huge personality, a little wiry guy who often get in trouble in school. At one point a teacher punched him. But we love Dino, I mean, he was just as vibrant. Many of the students have huge personalities. And that's helped them kind of get street savvy and get through a lot of crises. Dino came back at various points in time. So we'd go oh, gosh, we're not glad to see you again. We are but we are not. And then Mark 17 year old white male, again, a huge personality and they would banter together. And it was almost like having your own Comedy Club and in our group with these two guys. And so what Mark says is I'm going to start with how I struggle. I currently stay in a motel. I've stayed in the same room for over 10 years. I lived in the city for about six years and got burned out of our house. So we moved here and got stuck paying rent out a motel. We had intentions of buying a house. But then that happened. My dad is the only one who works. And my mom stays home to watch us so I hardly ever see my dad because he's a workaholic. I started off as a good kid. And when I started getting in trouble for petty stuff, I stopped caring. I felt like I lost all hope. So then I started running cars and running into people's houses never got caught for it. So I thought I was invincible. So it finally got to where I was robbing people. That's what I'm locked up for now. I guess my luck ran out, got caught up the gun on me. I have three felonies over my head with two years upstate. So any mistakes I make, I'm going to go upstate going upstate means they go to prison, essentially a very different treatment. So if he goes on to say He feels lucky to be at the crisis center, because at least he has three meals a day, and support mechanism and counseling and help. So those are just a couple of those. There's a whole array of vignettes that we've collected and, and have and they really range from a kid is just waiting to be brought into a foster home and just kind of in advance till that happens to one lady that was part of a accessory to a robbery that resulted in somebody being shot that was in a wheelchair. So quite a range of things. So we would often end of the day going, Oh, my gosh, and kind of debrief out in the parking lot. Julia Morris, Dr. Morris, er, doc student was actually teaching high school at that point. So when she would come in, she'd relate to the students really well, they'd always go she wasn't there a certain day, where's Julia? We were okay. But we weren't as vibrant as Julia was. So what I would take away from that, and will always take away from that as much like what Leigh Hall said, in her podcast, relationships with students are absolutely crucial. If you want to do anything, they had to trust that we were, you know, reasonable and and, and that they could explore topics that we're not going to center those topics. We don't do school. We're not there to worry about your points or any of that we're there to really speak out to power and speak out to misperceptions of students. You'll notice in both those documents, I just read, Reading isn't a problem. We're not talking about reading disability or reading, struggle, struggles of any sort. These students are very street savvy, very sharp, on a hugely talented in their own right. And so the arts became a vehicle to explore some of those dimensions and also give them some hope. So they kept sketchbooks, they wanted to share those as soon as we came in, and they would have kept their sketchbook all week. And written in it. We brought in as many we didn't have a grant or anything. So we brought in as many supplies as we could for the artwork, for recording on GarageBand on a laptop, and on and on. So I guess the takeaway would be, don't assume anything, right, we can perceive by labels. The whole thing of Crisis Center as a, as a word suggests something nefarious, and so on. And so how we label things really the semantics matter a great deal. And I think we're just working through some of that now that we can see throughout the country, that we're trying to change things up here and provide accessibility and opportunity. They're reading a book called The Fifth Wave, for higher education, superior my stack of books, fifth wave, the evolution of American higher education. That's why the President Arizona State, which is my alma mater, for my PhD, and so I might have some personal bias, but the whole notion is, we need to open the doors, we're denying access to a large number of students. And these students want to talk about college, they knew we were college professors, they talk about that. They all had aspirations of going on further in their education, whether it's the community college, or on to a university like ODU.
Lindsay Persohn:How powerful powerful stories that certainly do a lot to shape our thinking about about youth. I appreciate the connections to what Leigh Hall said about relationships and about, really, I think students perceptions of themselves, we bring a lot of those labels to kids. We we tried to define them, as you know, the adults in their lives. But I think that your stories also show that the kids you worked with Dino and mark, and I'm sure many others, they aren't really defined by their labels they are there's so much more than that. One, one thing that really strikes me that you share, Tom, is that reading wasn't the problem for these kids. Obviously, they have some great literacy skills to be able to write the things that you shared with us. But we often we tend to think that when kids get in trouble, it's because their academics aren't where they're supposed to be. But But what I think I hear you saying is that that for particularly Dino and mark, it was an unstable home environment. It was not knowing where their next meal was going to come from. And what I hear in those stories is this idea of waiting. It sounds like these kids spend a lot of time waiting, they're waiting for shelter, they're waiting for food, they're waiting for family, they're waiting for the court. Right? And that leaves kids with a lot of time on their hands, all of that waiting.
Tom Bean:Absolutely. That was certainly an issue. I didn't really describe the context of the house they were living in. But if you wouldn't, if you drove by it, you go okay, this is a neighborhood like any other neighborhood, it seems to be a bigger house and it's actually constructed in the 80s. Where were the Rotary Club helped out with that, both financially and in terms of carpentry work and so on. So it's literally an 80s Vintage structure with kind of some strange things. Happy dolphins on the ceiling in the kitchen. Great area, very smiley dolphins. So the interesting contrast. And then otherwise the facility itself, when we were in there, I worked at a kind of a boardroom table, relatively small with maybe, you know, eight or so students, male students. And then the great room would contain Julia and Judy, Judith and other, our other team member on Skype. So all of that meant that they were in a building that was pretty dark and dank and old. Sometimes the air conditioning wouldn't work. Sometimes the heating wouldn't work. We get some pretty good storms here. So so they were You're right. I mean, they were enduring. Now that having said that, to be fair, they did have a van and they would take students out to the beach or to field trips a little bit. But if there any, there was any uprising or problems. Sometimes students would go AWOL, not too many. But then that meant that couldn't happen. And they're often reasons why things ended up just sitting around playing games, reading and writing in your journal and so on. But a lot of dead time. Yeah, absolutely. No question. So they valued. Let's just say they really valued the school, it was 10 miles away was alternative school, pretty rigid, sort of military like environment, but it gave them a way out. And they really look forward to that. So when they were in some kind of penalty where they couldn't go to school or something, as you mentioned, where they're headed to community college, but that's held in abeyance for a while, absolutely dead time.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, Tom, what would you like teachers to know about your research?
Tom Bean:Well, I think kind of along the lines of Nancy Lesko is old book Act your age where she deconstructs how we treat adolescence, Adolescence is not necessarily a tribe. These are highly individualistic people that have their own individual talents. I love Ernest Morells work, because he's worked with African Americans, and had them develop media that goes out to large stakeholder groups, including AERA, and so on. I think recognizing the talents that students have individually and treat them as individuals, rather than as a tribe. I think less goes notions around that are hugely helpful. And then don't assume things be quiet for a while and listen to their stories, listen to what they're expressing, listen to their future desires and their aspirations. And then try to help out if we can, realizing this is often really challenging. So when we're writing this work, we use something called co-storying, where we can create composites, right, because we can't necessarily have a single case. And then we have people coming and going, and so on. And so we've been using counter stories session that CO stories, counter stories, to think through that. So I think what I would say to teachers, including ourselves is just listen carefully be quiet for a while, see what students are bringing to the process. They often don't know what their lives are like outside of that setting. And so the crisis center, I think students valued that as a place that at least allow for some eating, routines, they have responsibilities, washing clothes, work in the kitchen a bit, and so on. So those responsibilities help pass the time, certainly. But right now, I think we have students that are in that virtual learning mode that are often when I talk to teachers, I'm working with our graduate enrollments up ten percent, I work with a lot of teachers right now, which the super, but they have students that will just turn off the media. Right? So how do you how do you help with that? So we have a lot of challenges right now. As we get through this, I think we'll be able to, we can go back to the crisis center and call it something else. But so I think, I think it's paying attention to students as individuals and developing those relationships and Leigh hall talks about and trust and and so I think, one example, that'd be Julie Morris, Julia was working with one of her high school students who wanted to go to Old Dominion University and Julia literally mentored that student, African American student into the first year at school before she got her PhD and moved off to Minnesota to be a professor. And he's doing fine. So so we know we can do this. And what that book I alluded to the fifth wave is talking about is open the doors were too exclusive. Right now we're not accessible. We're very old style University in many ways, from their point of view. And they use Arizona State as an example of a school that's broaden the base and that's not Oh students and on and on and on and high diversity and so on. Our campus is regarded as a multicultural campus, but I think we can do a lot more in that regard. So a lot of challenges for all of us, but when I'm reading my students, unit plans and their work, these are all experienced licensed teachers. They They're fantastic. They're amazing for doing such engaging work around media and multimodal dimensions. So the more we can stay on top of that, the better. I'm not a good example that didn't turn my camera on.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, Tom, what what what you say here about knowing students as individuals, and just getting to know what they bring to the table, this is a point that comes up again, and again and again, in the conversations I have for this podcast. And this is everyone from Susan Neuman talking about early literacy, to, to folks like yourself talking about working with adolescents, and even adult learners, it is the people and it is the relationships that make life worthwhile. And I think that, that understanding what our students bring with them, rather than looking at them to find out what they don't have, is such an important message in a school climate that I think can feel a bit rigid at times and can often feel a bit oppressive, but kind of flipping that script to say, Okay, what is the student bringing with them? What do they already have?
Tom Bean:Yeah, I think that's hugely, hugely important that local funds to knowledge, there navigating often really challenging circumstances that any of us would struggle with. Yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:And who are we just because we're older and maybe have some experience and some education? Who are we to say that we know their world better than they do? You know, and I think sometimes that is the approach that we in education, unfortunately, take is that we, we already we already, like you said, lump lump people together into these groups and assume that we know so much about them, when we may not really know anything about their story at all.
Tom Bean:In reference to that they were very interested in us to think Well, first then, what do we bring to the table, not all of this. And so we, we both had some experiences with either friends or family members that have done some time. So that was kind of our little bit of street cred, I suppose that we sort of know what happens to somebody that commits an armed robbery ends up in prison for five years. So they were interested in that aspect of us because otherwise, we're just these university characters that come in with sketchbooks, laptops, and so on.
Lindsay Persohn:I'm very interested in this work you're doing with incarcerated youth. And specifically, what you know, we heard a bit about the stories of these two students, Dino and Mark, what what were their overall reactions to the work that you were doing with them, what what were their highlights what what was their their big learning around the work you did
Tom Bean:They wanted it to be shared, they really want it to together? be published, and to have their work and their voices shared. So we've been working pretty hard at trying to make sure that happens. When we had transcripts of one of our sessions, we'd send those off, and then they would go back and edit those, make sure that it was accurately member check really accurately portraying who they were. So I think they wanted their voices out there, they felt stifled not being able to do that. So the arts provided a vehicle, both musically and, and in terms of sketching and writing, and essay writing, and so on, allowed them to get their voices out to a larger audience. So they're very, very interested in that part. And the whole notion of publication we bring in, here's an example of the book cover you're creating, you know, how it's going to look. So they're intensely interested in writing and figuring out how we could share that the larger groups, one of one of our early efforts, in that regard, we had a student that said he wanted to speak out to snot nosed kids about what he had done. He went through the center a couple different times. And then we've kind of lost track of him that which is the hard part, we can't really follow these students somewhere. So it's hard, it's hard to know the trajectory. We are always hopeful.
Lindsay Persohn:My hope is that you will hear from from some of those people in the future, to share with you where their life has taken them and how the work has changed their thinking and their actions.
Tom Bean:We always gave them our business cards and phone numbers and ways to reach us. And sometimes I know Julia did converse with one of the students for a while, but then that fell through after a bit the so absolutely. That'd be fantastic. And it's something that we sort of longed to have happen, but that's maybe down the road, we get back after the pandemic back down there.
Lindsay Persohn:What based on your research, what advice would you give to teachers who teach an adolescent group?
Tom Bean:Well, I think there's times where even working with these students sometimes people just need to decompress. So sometimes the student would come in and remember, it's a research project so we can't force them to participate. And they put their head down, they'd had a bad day. It's good to have a erasure and decompression time, and we would just go that's okay, you know, or you can go walk around for a while or in the building, if you need to do that, or so I think recognizing that there's just times where the school schedule, which is pretty rigid, the bells and periods and so on, where that interferes with human needs to decompress and not engage. So I guess one of my pieces of advice would be give students a space to go aside, and we're working on a smaller group, or work of the teacher in a mini group. Those are all things I know my wife is really skilled at that I've watched her teach middle school age students in a very overcrowded Charter School, and do that really well. So that's the ambient noise and confusion and general intrusions. How can we make that manageable and sensitive and caring, I love Nell Noddings work around caring. So I think that would be one way to acknowledge that students have bad days, let them have a bad day, let them decompress. And we'll come back to it. There's there's time, we put too much pressure on on students sometimes especially around what we call Standards of Learning tests, and so on.
Lindsay Persohn:That idea of acknowledging that our students are humans first, I think is so important because it does shape the way you view behavior a little bit differently. I know whenever I had a student who is acting out in some way, or displaying some sort of less than desirable behaviors in the classroom, I would try to put myself in their shoes and think what, you know, what have they been through today? How would I feel in that situation, because, you know, whenever we expect students to be on, so to speak all the time and to, you know, follow the every command, we know that things like hormones, attitudes, environments, all of that can really impact the way that we as humans function. And I think that advice to give kids space to be humans is, is really so important. So, Tom, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Tom Bean:Well, first of all, I think we need to just hugely value what teachers are doing, oh, my gosh, the teachers I work with are just phenomenal. And so I think that's definitely crucial, we should, we should do more to acknowledge all the wonderful work they're doing and best schedules that are broken now with the two day a week hybrid models and so on. Beyond that, I, I'm glad I was a high school teacher at one point, and I'm glad to be able to go back and work face to face with adolescents. But I have such respect, and admiration for teachers. I feel very lucky to have them in my classes and have their voices represented. I think we're trying to be pretty gentle right now too around what they're going through, because they're balancing often small children at home, teaching online. And then now increasingly teaching face to face online, small children at home. So I've never experienced anything like this. This is like 1918 all over again, only worse in many ways. Because it's literally it's the unknown, right? So I'm other admiration I have for teachers as they're navigating the unknown. With our students with their families, unbelievable.
Lindsay Persohn:Every day to right, it's a it's an more or less unknown situation. They're walking into day after day. And that is stressful. And I think we have to acknowledge that that it requires a lot of perseverance. It requires a lot of support that I think teachers haven't always felt. So so thank you for that. And I couldn't agree more. Teachers are our heroes in our communities. They're educating the next generation, they're keeping kids safe, often in in a lot of different ways. They're keeping kids safe. So yes, the work of teachers is, is such a valuable asset in our in our society. Well, Tom, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your work with youth. And thank you for your contributions to education.
Tom Bean:Thank you so much. Lindsay this is such a wonderful resource for all of us. So I look forward to listening to more podcasts and enjoying that experience and hearing from colleagues. Thank you so much.
Lindsay Persohn:Thank you. Dr. Thomas W. Bean is known for his work in disciplinary and content area literacy, adolescent literacy and his work with incarcerated youth. He is the co author of over 24 books, 32 book chapters and over 100 articles in refereed journals, including reading Research Quarterly and the Journal of adolescent and adult literacy. He is senior author of content area literacy and integrated approach now in its 11th edition, Tom served as CO editor of the then international Reading associations Journal of adolescent and adult literacy. He also served as the chair of the literacy Research Association publications Committee. He has been twice honored with the University of Nevada Las Vegas College of Education Distinguished Research Award for his studies of reader responses to multicultural young adult literature in content area classrooms. He is the co author of the original widely circulated international Reading Association. Now International Literacy Association's position paper titled, adolescent literacy, a position statement designed to guide policy decisions aimed at increasing literacy development efforts for adolescents and he continues to serve on ILA's adolescent literacy Task Force. Dr. Bean is a professor of literacy and reading in the department of teaching and learning, Darden College of Education, and the Roseanne Keely Norris Endowed Professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. For the good of all students, good research should inform good practice and vice versa. listeners are invited to respond to our guests learn more about our guests research, and suggest a topic for an upcoming episode through this podcast website at classroom caffeine.com. If you've learned something today, or just enjoyed listening, please subscribe to this podcast. I raised my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me