DML2015 Ignite Talks - Lennon Flowers
0"Our education system is built on labels: student, teacher, administrator, coach, counselor, average, gifted, rich, poor, a numeric test score, a checklist of Adverse Childhood Experiences. Rarely do we know the first names of our teachers, let alone the stories that brought them to the schoolhouse door. We know students by the statistics they represent: The product of a zip code, or a third-grade reading score.
What if, instead of directing our attention outward, we chose to direct it inward: to learn about the stories beneath the stereotypes, about our own roads traveled, about the fears and worries that have made us who we are?
The Dinner Party began with a group of five young women who'd all lost parents. It has since grown to include more than 50 tables in 26 cities, in the US and around the world. Along the way, we've discovered that loss--the thing we never talk about--is precisely the thing we should be talking about: The connective tissue that binds us across economic, cultural, and generational lines, a means of discovering what we share, and honoring the unique paths that make us who we are.
That story, together with emerging efforts in Baltimore, Reading, PA, and beyond, invite us to envision what schools might look like as centers of authentic community, and the implications of creating spaces in our education system where humans can be human."