About this Project
The Abecedarian is the product of nearly 30 years of a life-long apprenticeship of participating and observing, teaching and being taught, and leading in urban settings with children, adolescents, and adults in schools and community settings.
The subjects of the Abecedarian were participants of the Liberty Partnership Program, which I was the founding director at Bank Street College of Education in New York from 1989-93. Liberty was a strategic state wide intervention for inner city youth designed to encourage and support them to complete high school and to seek post secondary opportunities..
The voices you hear evolved from recorded conversations begun in 1993 and returned to in 1997 as part of my doctoral thesis. And now, revisited in 2016.
​There are three levels of story happening in the Abecedarian: the students' stories, my own, and a larger literary and pedagogical one. My beliefs about teaching and learning, my hopes for public education, all the branches and stems of what I locate as the progressive tradition and history, adhere to every pixel and frame.
There are no research subjects here. But this is qualitative research. The lives and names of the participants are twinned and knotted into my own. Their identities were not changed to protect them. What I have sought to do is create a form for celebrating them.
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