Courage in Kindergarten: An Interview with Andie Cunningham

by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Chris Love

“Who do I bring with me into the classroom?”
“Who do I want to learn more about within me?”

These questions sound like provocative prompts for reflection for educators engaged in a Courage to Teach retreat, but Courage & Renewal facilitator Andie Cunningham has posed them to a unique Circle of Trust: kindergarten students.

The two questions formed “the bones of our year,” says Andie, remembering the kindergarten classes she taught for five years at Harold Oliver Primary School in Portland, Oregon. Each fall she invited her kindergartners, whom she calls “friends,” to begin their year by painting, telling and writing stories and reading books about whatever “expert knowledge” they brought with them into school. Her goal for her students was to “link what they know in life to this new-to-them academic world.” Each year she, in turn, tapped into her collective student “expertise” for themes and topics to give life to the deep reading comprehension and community-building activities that formed the core of her curriculum.

What did this learning process look like? Starting with Comprehension: Reading Strategies for the Youngest Learners (Stenhouse Publishers, 2005), written by Andie and fellow Courage & Renewal facilitator and Lewis and Clark colleague Ruth Shagoury, paints a rich picture:

Books everywhere, spread out on the floor, the sofa, in the hands of five- and six-year-olds. Children point and exclaim over richly illustrated picture books on owl babies, great horned owls and owl poems. Bird field guides, illustrated owl habitats, and detailed owl anatomy charts spill out of the chalk trays and nestle on children’s laps. These children are becoming experts on owls, a subject they chose themselves.

This act of honoring what emergent readers already know and building on that knowledge to create the context for further learning was much more than Andie’s way of appealing to their interests: It was an intentional act of trust that grew out of her deep conviction to bring Courage work into her classroom. By inviting them to come together, honestly explore their learning and share what they wish with others in an atmosphere of trust, Andie hoped to bring these young learners into their own Circle of Trust.

“When I trusted my students, the learning curve changed dramatically,” she says. You don’t hear of trust coming up in education very much. One thing I dearly hope is that folks who participate in Courage to Teach come out knowing how to start trusting their own students, to have faith that kids’ inner teachers really are present in the classroom.”

Now an instructor of education at Lewis and Clark College’s Graduate School of Education, Andie considers herself “blessed” to have been able to participate in a two-year cycle of Courage to Teach. “I had time to look in me in the first year, and the second year I could look into my practice a bit more,” she remembers.

As she looked at her teaching craft through the Courage lens, she discovered new insights and began asking herself new questions. “How can you learn if the teacher doesn’t believe in you?” she wondered. “The soul is shy. Learning is heart-driven and heart-known. Miracles are happening all the time. How can we hold them up? What would it look like if I were to trust these students?”

One way Andie answered her questions was to bring the touchstones of Courage & Renewal – such as no fixing, and asking honest, open questions – to class with her. “I’d always be leaning back into the touchstones to ground me,” she says. “My friends (students) and I created the community. I was one twenty-seventh of that community. I worked really hard to sit in a space where everyone was honored, creating community in which each one possesses a voice was vital.”

Her goal was especially challenging in light of her student demographics: high poverty, six or seven different languages spoken, some parents using drugs or doing time in prison. “I saw exciting possibilities for community but I had to be intentional because those fragilities were right there,” she observes.

To protect those fragilities, Andie tried to follow Parker Palmer’s advice “not to get ahead of your speaker,” to stay open to new possibilities that may come from another when we truly listen. Once given a candle that she did not know what to do with, Andie placed it on a file cabinet and forgot about it until a child asked if the class could use it. Following the student’s lead, she invited the class to decide how they wanted to use the candle in their learning process. What resulted was a weekly circle ritual, named by students in various years a “Learning Circle” or “Lighting Circle.” The circles were used to both open and close the week’s learning. Each Monday morning a different Learning Circle Leader would ask Andie to light the candle while the class announced, “Our Learning Circle is now open.” On Friday afternoon the week’s learning circle was closed with a similar ritual.

Andie also began to reframe children’s literature as “third things,” working with the literature as if it were the writing used as catalysts for reflection and discussion in a Circle of Trust. “I always chose literature for my students that was difficult for me to understand and connect with, pieces I could genuinely invest myself in,” she explains.

When she found that her adult classroom volunteers tended to engage in the limiting practice of asking kids questions with answers they already knew, Andie developed a handout to help them learn to ask open-ended questions. By teaching the adult volunteers to really listen and attend to young writers’ ideas, the handouts encouraged the adults to create new Circles of Trust with the students. The handout is available online here.

Andie Cunningham says she has discovered that Courage work in the classroom “lives a different life” than it does in adult Circles of Trust. Her story of nurturing that different life into being is encouraging to all of us who seek new ways to embrace these principles more deeply in our own lives and work.