Spreading Out Its Roots: Bank Street Advisement and the Education of a Teacher

Describes the intricate and life shaping lessons learned by the author during his tenure as a graduate student at Bank Street College

Singing in Dark Times

Bertolt Brecht raised a question in his poem “Motto”: In dark times Will there also be singing? His answer: Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. Our work here and now is in part to sing the dark times. We begin by waking up, by opening our eyes to the reality before us, the beautiful and the hopeful no less than the difficult, the tragic, the ugly. We cannot separate our own lives from the concentric circles of context—historic flow and economic condition, political situation and cultural surround—that make them more fully understandable and meaningful

Interview with Bill Ayers

In his April 1994 interview with Ron Chepesiuk, Bill Ayers detailed his part in the 60s Radical Movement. Ayers described his motivations for joining the Students for a Democratic Society community, the Weather Underground, and his eventual leading of the groups. He covered several issues of the anti-war movement, including communism, radicalism, social hierarchies, government distractions, bombings, and the Vietnam War. Ayers focused greatly on educational reform and the educational aspects of joining a social movement. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the Louise Pettus Archives and Special Collections Oral History Program.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/oralhistoryprogram/1023/thumbnail.jp

On Patriotism

What’s so great about America? Near the top of my list is sweet home Chicago—a mesmerizing metropolis, once home to generations of Illini, Winnebago, and Miami peoples, rising along the shore of that immense inland sea and sweeping toward the dazzling prairie just beyond. There’s Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, and Richard Wright’s Native Son. There’s Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm and Studs Terkel’s Division Street, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. So great, and there’s more: Haki Madhubuti, Kevin Coval, Eve Ewing, and Chance the Rapper, Chris Ware, and Aleksandar Hemon, the Wachowski siblings, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, Koko Taylor, and Yoko Noge, Lil Hardin, Bo Diddley, Jimmy McPartland, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. On and on. What’s so great about America

Introduction: Diving into the wreckage: Our Schools, Education Reform, and the Future Society

In this special issue of the Bank Street Occasional Papers, we will dive into the wreckage, engage the fight, and hope to reclaim the ground of education in and for democracy. --Author

Overlapping gestural zones and modulation on the fifteen-tone guitar

With its unconventional tuning, notation, and performance requirements, Easley Blackwoodʼs Suite for Guitar in 15- Note Equal Tuning serves as a reappraisal of both tonality (through its application of a microtonal equal temperament) and guitar performance practice (with a modified fretboard and note layout). Using concepts from the fields of transformational theory and gestural music theory, this study considers modulatory and sequential passages in two movements from Blackwoodʼs Suite. This paper demonstrates how the fifteen-tone tuning and fretboard provide a unique opportunity to recontextualize the diatonic scale and its generative interval cycles in a consistent transformational space that allows the performer to conceptualize the novel guitar fretboard in three overlapping gestural zones. By considering the perspective of the performer, this paper illustrates Blackwoodʼs multilayered compositional approach for the fifteen-tone guitar and his attention to the gestural potential of this new instrument