Linda McSpadden McNeil

with Mirror by Jaume Plensa

Dr Linda McSpadden McNeil is the Director of the Center for Education at Rice University and a Rice Education professor. A curriculum theorist and analyst of school structure and reform, she has written extensively on teaching and learning in urban schools, on school organization and on education policy and standardization.  Her writings are widely cited scholarly publications and national media. In 1988, she co-founded the Center for Education to support research and teacher enhancement programs to address the persistent problems of inequity and uneven quality in urban schools.  She and her colleagues in the Center for Education have for twenty-five years designed, created, funded, and operated programs to retrain urban teachers in their subject fields and in children’s learning and cultures. She has two daughters.

  

What’s your story, Linda?

I am a teacher, my mother was a teacher, and my grandmother was a teacher in one-room schoolhouses, so teaching is in my bones. Now I teach Rice students to become teachers, but originally I was a high school English teacher and that has led to all my current work. 

I was a high school teacher in a district that had taken twenty years to desegregate its schools. I quickly realized an incredible tension between what they wanted kids to learn and what they didn't want them to know. I thought they had hired me to be the best teacher I could be, to be like the teachers who had inspired me to teach.  A cohort of us in the English department had that same vision for the kids and yet we were being told, “Don't teach Black poetry – that’s political.” I learned then what I've come to call the tension between knowledge access and knowledge control.

When I had the opportunity to pursue a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, I began with the questions I had faced as a teacher: “What counts as school knowledge?  What factors shape the ways schools make knowledge accessible – or inaccessible – to kids? Whose knowledge is of most worth?”  These questions took me into classrooms for long stints of ethnographic research, looking first at the interactions of teachers and kids and then into the school setting itself.  

I observed the dynamic between the teachers and the students, seeing what kinds of questions were being asked, and what was being left out.  This kind of research came naturally to me because I inadvertently became an ethnographer at a very young age.  My dad’s work as an Amoco engineer of the generation that drilled the West Texas oil fields caused us to move frequently.  As the new kid at five different elementary schools, I always began by observing:  who might be a new best friend, which teacher would be kind and interesting.  My experiences, from being a child in some very remote schools to being a teacher who was being told by the administration what not to teach, converged in my doctoral studies and my first book, Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge.

I arrived in Houston just as standardization was being imposed on schools, first from the district level, then from the state and, now, nationally.  Suddenly, the curriculum was not being shaped by the teachers in the classroom, but by “the system.”  Teachers were no longer valued as curriculum developers.  Because I was already doing research in classrooms, I was one of the first witnesses to the harm standardization was doing to the quality of schooling.  As multiple-choice standardized tests started to drive what could be taught, I documented huge curricular losses as the tested subjects were watered down into multiple-choice formats, particularly math, reading and writing in those early years. Other subjects were set aside, or their teachers made to replace lessons in the arts, physical fitness and science with test prep drills for math or reading.  Teachers were being forced to dump complex writing assignments, the reading of novels, lab experiments, field trips to arts performances and coastal estuaries, as well as lessons related to the cultures of their students, to drill on the generic content of tests that would be scored by computers.

That was the beginning of twenty years of “school reform” in Texas which has brought us the very top-down, centralized, standardized form of schooling most people look on as a testing system. The testing is really just the tip of the iceberg. The test scores are indicators in a management compliance system that ties everything from students’ graduation to teacher’s pay, administrators’ bonuses and even the closing of a neighborhood school, to scores on a computer-scored test.

I never thought I would be studying standardized testing.  But even as that first wave of testing came in, it became clear that the big investments in “education reform” would not be for perpetually underfunded schools or scholarships to recruit young people into teaching. The financial – and political – investment would be in the testing system. Despite all the research to the contrary, despite reports from teachers and child development experts, none of the arguments on behalf of children could be heard above the domineering voice of the testing industry. Testing companies have lobbyists; third grade children don’t.

I believe, however, that it’s up to all of us to do everything we can to create the professional, political and moral space in which good teachers can make magical things happen every day for the children in their classrooms.  It was this belief that prompted the two strands of work I’ve been doing.

The first was to create the Center for Education, with programs in support of teachers’ development. And the second was to embark on a series of research studies that could inform not only educators, but also parents and policy makers, about the impact of the standardized accountability system on children and schools. 

Even before the testing became so ubiquitous, my colleagues and I were very concerned about the anti-teacher climate in the press and in politics. We were, after all, preparing bright, dedicated Rice students to teach and we wanted them in schools hospitable to knowledgeable, caring teachers.  So Ronald Sass, now an emeritus scientist professor, and I created the Center for Education to be a base for teacher development. We had generous funding and incredibly wise advice from Maconda Brown O’Connor, our first board president.  A trustee of the Brown Foundation, she was a social worker who counseled boys in juvenile detention.  As she helped the boys connect back to their schools, she could see the ways schools could be nurturing or could exclude these youth as “problem kids.”  To Maconda, every child had promise, and her support of our work came from her own sense of urgency that all teachers needed support to be able to help all kids thrive.  She was a “practical visionary” whose lessons continue to teach us.

Our idea was not to give quick Saturday teacher workshops. All of our programs were long-haul, addressing serious deficiencies in the schools. A key example is science.  Very few middle grade science teachers had been science majors in college, and even fewer had ways of connecting with the city’s extraordinary scientists.  We created a teaching laboratory in an urban middle school where teachers came for an intensive year of study and exploration with scientists from Rice and industry, learning how to engage their students in the questions and ‘aha’ moments that make science so powerful.   We had financial support from individuals, corporations, local foundations, the National Science Foundation and ultimately the school district itself.  And now, after so many years, the “Model Lab” science teachers continue to be valued leaders. And out of that original lab, new programs were created first for high school teachers, then elementary teachers, as well as on-line curricular resources for science inquiry across the grades.

The School Writing Project addressed the persistent low quality of children’s writing nationally and locally – a problem made worse by multiple-choice test drills and formulaic writing required by the state.  The School Writing Project brought small groups of teachers together in intimate seminars to work on their own writing as well as the teaching of writing and sharing samples of their students’ work.  Over the years, these seminars branched into specialized discussions of teaching English language learners and of integrating the teaching of writing with the other creative arts.  Many teachers have told us that they have remained in teaching, and remained in urban schools, because of the professional community they found in School Writing Project.

The focus of these programs, and others such as Asia Outreach, created by Rice history professor Richard Smith, and our early childhood programs, has always been on empowering teachers.  We have worked to make teachers more knowledgeable about their own subjects and the many ways children learn, and about the cultures of the children in their classrooms.  We don’t just advocate for “teacher professionalism” in the abstract, but support teachers to make their teaching engaging and their classrooms places of inquiry and equity.  Our research in schools has informed our work with teachers. And, maybe even more important, we have learned from teachers what we should be investigating in our research.

Our research is the other “half” of the Center’s mission:  studying what is taught in schools, who is being well-served or underserved by our schools, and what factors in the community and in the policy arena are shaping children’s education.  When I began studying what is taught – or not taught – in schools,   those were classroom studies with me as the solo researcher.  What I found in classrooms led me to take a hard look at the administrative practices in schools and the policies controlling them.  For these larger studies, I’ve had the great benefit of working with smart colleagues who share my vision of research in the public interest. Our research looks a bit like a set of concentric circles:  from classrooms, to systemic problems such as dropouts, to democratic schooling itself. 

After being in classrooms documenting the curriculum losses – what I think of as the “real learning” – under standardization, we looked at where this was coming from.  This got us into policy analysis. Our next finding was even more disturbing. We discovered that schools were triaging out of school the students they saw as weak, those they saw as putting the school’s scores in danger, and they were doing so in ways that were technically legal. 

It was from teachers and principals we knew well that we learned the real story behind the “drop out problem.”  The myth of the standardized accountability system was that it would raise academic standards and close the racial “achievement gap” in Texas schools.  But as we spent more time in schools, particularly in high poverty, urban high schools, we saw that the huge dropout rate – more than 100,000 kids each year from Texas high schools! – was not a separate problem from the testing system.  The gap, in fact, was widening.

As the state’s system of accountability became ‘high stakes’ for administrators, directly tying their job contracts and pay bonuses to the test scores of the kids in their schools, they began to triage out of school those students whose scores were likely to lower the school’s accountability ratings.  These students came disproportionately from African American, Hispanic, immigrant and high-poverty communities.  Students literally came to be seen as “assets” or “liabilities” to the school ratings, with the “liabilities” triaged out prior to taking the test. 

Many schools were reporting dropout rates as low as 2% or 3%, yet when those same schools had one thousand entering freshmen, with only 350 of those students end up in the senior graduating class, you have to ask questions. My colleagues and I started noticing that the school ratings were higher if the dropout numbers were also up. The greater the number of low-achieving kids dropping out, the higher the school’s test score rating. Frankly, it took us a long time to figure out how to write about this because it shows that our state’s education system actually rewards principals who “lose” kids. 

In the end, we never had to make the accusation that principals were deliberately triaging weaker kids out – the principals did it for us. They told us they felt caught and but felt the system left them little choice.  We designed a study to find out if these schools were exceptions, or if this represented a pattern that could explain the thousands of kids being “lost” from our high schools. We were able to show, by race and grade level, how the “losses” of students enhanced their schools’ ratings—and those bonuses. We published our findings as Avoidable Losses in a peer-reviewed on-line journal.  It has had almost 20,000 hits and been used by parent advocacy groups, teachers, and legislators organizing against the high stakes testing system.

Having documented the losses of both high quality curriculum content and of students under standardized accountability, my research team and I are now studying and writing about the threat this system poses to democratic, public education itself.  The test score numbers generated by the standardized tests mask old inequities and create new ones. Low scores are being used to justify closing neighborhood schools and shifting taxpayer dollars to charter chains and others who would destroy the public’s schools.  There are political and for-profit forces working together to replace this essential democratic institution with a market of privately owned, but tax-payer funded, “schools.”  This push to de-democratize schools is important to understand because the public’s schools are a vital venue for maintaining a voice for democracy itself.   This is the book we are currently working on and we hope it becomes more than just bearing witness to this anti-democratic-schooling movement.  We hope it helps foster an even stronger public discussion already underway about re-claiming the billions of testing dollars for classrooms and high quality instruction in the public’s schools.

My original research question, “What is shaping our kids’ access to knowledge and to ways of learning in schools?” has led me into amazing classrooms where kids are thriving and into the current policy fray that frankly seems hostile to children.  I couldn’t be more grateful for the teachers and colleagues who keep reminding me why we need to keep asking these questions.

What is your Houston story?

I’ve been in Houston for thirty years.  I was born in California and grew up in the oil fields of West Texas before we moved to Tulsa.  Although my dad became Amoco’s international corrosion expert, he was the kind of engineer who was a real craftsman and didn’t easily fit any organization chart. I think I inherited that sense of craft from my dad and from my grandparents, and I carried it into what I think about teaching. 

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

My two daughters – one is a psychiatrist and the other is a veterinarian who does international public health work. They are both just amazing – funny, smart generous, caring – and always inspiring me.

The greatest influence on my work here has to be Maconda Brown O’Connor, who was fierce and more than a little angry about what was happening to children and youth in the justice system and in some of our schools. Maconda’s idea was that if you sit in a place of privilege like this university, with a base from which to work on problems, then you have no excuse not to. And if one thing doesn’t work, try something else.  She helped us create the Center for Education and also created the Greater Houston Collaborative for Children, an organization of advocacy for young children. She was not shy about giving advice, nor hesitant to give support.

Here at Rice, there is Neal Lane.  Neal is a scientist. He was our provost in the early years of our work and one of those rare people who is just so wise. 

I’m also inspired by people whose courage seems to them to be just common sense.  Our friend Joe Elder in Wisconsin, who as a Quaker peace negotiator took desperately needed cardiology equipment to the hospitals in Hanoi while US bombs were dropping on the city.  The young people who ten years ago started No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes to provide relief for immigrants in peril of dying in the Arizona desert.   The Black teachers who were assigned to integrate that white high school where I first taught, and in doing so became my teacher as well.    My professors at UW-Madison who asked important questions about education and power and tolerated my decision to do the messy and inefficient research in classrooms . This question is bringing to mind how many people I am grateful for – people I need to thank more often!

What advice would you give to someone new to the education system?

Find kindred spirits.  Find people who value what you value.  I tell my students to seek out other teachers who care deeply about the kids and who are willing to try things and to share ideas with you.  I’ve given that advice to my students and to my daughters as they start new jobs.  The same holds for kids starting out in a new school – and for parents as they build a common cause with other parents.  Sometimes it might be someone you work with very closely, or it might be colleagues around the country who are struggling with similar issues and situations, as we are now seeing in the movement to undo the harm of standardized schooling and get back to focusing on kids and learning.  Institutions are always in flux and the world is so chaotic right now that kindred spirits both anchor and energize us.

The countryside near Linda's cabin
in New Mexico

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

Through my daughters and through my friends, particularly those friends who have been in our lives so long that we are a part of each other’s stories.   

In terms of place, we are fortunate to have a small cabin in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.  It is in a remote area my parents took us to when I was a little girl.  It’s on a narrow dirt road with few neighbors.  Once we’re up there, it’s all sweatshirts and jeans and rain on the tin roof, hiking, fishing, or just watching the hummingbirds.  It is our family’s spiritual home.  As poet Wendell Berry says, it’s that one place that we have to know over many years and know by a particular tree or shifts in the stream to be fully alive on this earth.

What is your happy place in Houston?

The homes of good friends and my porch swing on a spring evening at dusk, when the night herons and other birds are coming “home.”

The Rothko Chapel and Menil complex are both energizing and restorative.  Think about the time period in which John and Dominique de Menil started bringing all of these things together in one of the most competitive, materialistic cities in the world. They were saying to Houston, “What about human rights?  What about the spirit? How can we bridge our differences?” I had the honor of meeting Mrs de Menil on two occasions. I don’t think she really felt what they were doing was courageous.  Yet they created this extraordinary Chapel so that Houston would not lack a sacred space dedicated to human rights, to social justice, to collective envisioning. Just amazing.  And it was a Rothko Chapel Oscar Romero Human Rights event that introduced me to Dolores Huerta, whom I was honored to host in my home, another of the inspirers in my life.

What is your favorite restaurant?

One of the greatest gifts of Houston is that we don’t have to decide!  It’s wonderful that the fourth largest US city has so much that is local.  We can shop at a locally owned dress shop, and a local hardware store where they can answer every question, and we can eat food from all over the world in restaurants owned by families who brought their grandma’s recipes to our neighborhood.   Just about any local Mexican restaurant is my favorite!

What is your Houston secret?

People who have never been here think that it’s going to be rather desolate but end up surprised at how lovely many parts of the city are – especially the trees.  And although the reputation is oil and gas and real estate, or space and medicine, the real Houston is in the mix of people who are from literally everywhere. And if I have a secret, it’s probably that I eavesdrop to try to improve my Spanish!

What would you change about Houston?

Houston is already a truly international city.  The children of this city and the families coming into the city are the changing face of America.  That makes it even more important for us to get education right, to get children’s health care right. Houston should be competing with Seattle in the race to bump up the minimum wage.

We are now the most diverse city in the US, which is certainly something to celebrate.  But I am concerned that diversity without equity is not progress.  Diversity without equitable political and economic power is not yet democracy. While I love all the international restaurants and hearing all the different languages on the street, I am starting to think that people are looking at diversity as an exotic accessory rather than “This is who we are now.”  Everyone is talking about how fabulous diversity is, but few seem to be thinking aloud about the growing concentrations of wealth and poverty, about what diversity means for the city’s infrastructure, for mass transit into all the parts of the city, cleaning up the superfund pollution sites and creating parks everywhere. The possibilities are endless if diversity can enact a new political imagination.

And in the schools, although diversity should be a great asset to connect all our children with the global community, we still sometimes hear that distinction between educating “our kids,” and “other people’s children,” suggesting that we will not make the same investment in some children’s education. 

Houston has the chance to become a very robust international city because everything here is truly globalized.   We have a chance to gain a real understanding of the world by learning from the human connections within our city’s communities.

Linda was nominated as an Inspiring Houston Woman by Pansy Gee.

For more information about Linda’s work at the Rice Center for Education and for her publications, visit the Center's website.

Elaine Green and Fran Wilcox

Elaine Green (left) and Fran Wilcox

Elaine Green and Fran Wilcox are the Special Education teachers at Lamar High School. Together they manage a class of students with a variety of learning and physical disabilities. They also work closely with their students’ parents to plan for the transition into further education or employment after graduation. Elaine has been a teacher her whole working life, but before teaching, Fran was a professional musician, playing the horn in orchestras and bands internationally.

What are your stories, Elaine and Fran?

ELAINE – When we both first came to work together at Lamar, I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me. We’d met once because we both worked in Special Education, but to be honest I was a bit leery. We would be sharing this classroom for eight hours a day and what if we didn’t share an educational philosophy? It could not work out well, but actually, it has.

FRAN – Our strengths are totally different and it is totally brilliant the way we work together. Green’s a detailed person…

ELAINE – … and she’s a global person. There are times when I say, “I just can’t see that…” but she just gets it immediately. It is almost a marriage made in heaven. We haven’t had a spat yet and this is our 15^th year together in this room. Strangely enough we found that we both have the same teaching philosophies and these days, I can say something and she will have been ready to say the same thing or vice versa.

We had met once before. I was at Fondren Middle School for about 100 years – ok, for 23 years – and we used to put on this little dance at Christmas which the kids loved. We we invited the participating high schools and that was when Fran was at Lee High School, and the day she came over for that was the only time we’d met before we had to work together.

FRAN – Yes, and you had on that really nice dress. I remember thinking, wow, she’s very dressed up. Maybe I need to tidy up my act a bit!

ELAINE – We both decided to come to Lamar at the same time and we’ve worked out well.  At first, we had a struggle because people expected us to do the same thing as the previous teacher. But I’m sure when we leave here, people will say, “Miss Green and Miss Wilcox used to do blah blah” too.

Anyway, I’m a native Houstonian. I am a mother of two, a widow of ten years, and my kids are 33 and 28. One is in Dallas, he’s an artist and works for the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth as an educational curator, so he somehow got into education too. My other one went into architecture. He’s a project manager in construction here in Houston. I take a lot of pride in them both. You know, you want your kids to be happy first of all, whatever their area is. I do take a lot of pride in knowing that they are ok and that they’ve found their niche.

When I was at school, and before I even graduated from Westbury High School, I just knew I wanted to be a teacher. I was in the Future Teachers of America back then and so I went to college to train and somewhere along the line I thought that I’d like to do Special Education. I didn’t have a cousin or a sibling with special needs, I didn’t know anyone, but I just really wanted to do that. Then I decided to get certified in Special Education and Elementary Education at the same time. When I started teaching Special Ed, I thought I’d do that for a few years and then go to teach elementary. Well, forty years later, here I sit. I’ve never done anything else. But she’s got a much more interesting story!

FRAN – I was born in New Jersey and had an undergraduate degree in Music Education, K through 12. I wanted to have performance degree but my parents would not allow me to do that, they said I had to have something to fall back on. But I knew was never going to be a Band Director. I did my student teaching with the band and I had no patience. I was really fortunate when I did my student teaching that I got to work with some students with hearing impairments and I absolutely loved that room. The kids in there were great and asked if I could do that full time instead, but they wouldn’t let me. But I knew right then that if I could never play my horn again, I would want to work with kids with special needs, I just knew it. But I went to Rice with a music fellowship and then played professionally in Colombia, South America, for a while. When I came back, I played with the Houston Ballet, substituted with the Houston Symphony and did the Opera tour. Then I developed Bells’ Palsy in my face and that pretty much ended my career overnight. I was 31.

I still play in a Czech band – my dad’s side of the family is Czech so it’s one of those ‘get in touch with your roots’ things – but these days I’m at the back only playing the up-beats. I put the PAH in the oompah! I think I could keel over back there and nobody would notice!  You see, because the Bells’ Palsy affected the nerve at the front of my face, sometimes I sound horrible and sometimes I sound great and think, hey, I wish I could still do this!

So I needed to find another career and it was always in the back of my mind that I had really enjoyed those kids from student teaching. I ended up working in vocational rehab and from there to managing a workshop for adults with hearing impairments and addictions and some folks with mental health issues. It was there that I was really introduced to the Life Skills population. I didn’t really enjoy it, but two women I worked with asked why I didn’t become a self-contained teacher because I loved working with all the clients, but I wasn’t very good at managing the staff. I did my Alternative Certification instead and ended up at Lee, then Houston Community College, and then I came to Lamar and that’s history.

On a personal level, because I was a musician, it took a long time for me to really settle down, but now I have a very important relationship in my life, and my sister and her family are down here and they are super important to me. I’m very close to my nieces, my sister and her husband and then I have my family at home in New Jersey. I’m the oldest of six. My sister Cathy is a teacher’s assistant working with special needs kids, and I am very proud of her.

Why do you do what you do?

ELAINE – At the moment we have 20 kids in the class, but we’ve had 34 at one time, it was nuts in here! We’ve never wanted this classroom to be a ‘holding tank’ so to speak. Our goal is to get the kids involved with the school and not to be the ‘group down in the basement’. We want to make them as independent as possible and that’s been our goal from the very beginning.  I guess if you get to the point where you don’t get some kind of gratification from that work, then it’s time to say ‘hang it up’, but we still both do. When one of the kids does something wonderful, it’s still very rewarding, and that’s the bottom line. We do it because we both love it.

FRAN – Yup, we just love these kids.

At a Lamar High School Pep Rally - October 2013

What advice would you give to someone coming new to teaching in Special Education?

FRAN – Volunteer first! Because Green and I have such a good relationship, we can spell each other.  Sometimes if she needs to do paperwork or call a parent she’ll go into our office, and I’ll cover the class room. We figured that out for each other, but if you were just a single teacher, I’d don’t know how you would do it.

ELAINE – That’s right, keeping on top of the paperwork can be very daunting. There are so many state requirements, even for the regular teachers. My niece came and volunteered in here with us a while ago and then decided she wanted to become a teacher too. Because she had volunteered first, she knew what she was getting into. I guess that would be my advice, you need to know that all of the stuff, the paperwork etc, can take away from what you want to do. Sometimes I say in meetings, “If we didn’t have the kids, we could keep up with all the paperwork! These darn kids just get in our way!” I’m joking of course, but that’s how it feels sometimes. The kids must be our priority, and although this other stuff is essential it must come second with us.

FRAN – I’d say if your passion is to work with our guys, just keep it pure. And you do have to have a passion – we both still have that passion. Even on days when we know we are dragging, the kids just spark us and we get so much from them. To share their “Aha!” moments and their laughs if they get a joke is just wonderful. We had a few minutes spare today and we played Hangman together on the board. Everyone was involved and laughing, it was great.

How to do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

ELAINE – We both have friends, but we are also friends with each other outside school too. We go out together sometimes after school and have Mexican food and a margarita. We talk about the day and try to work out how to fix things. We’ve even, at a restaurant, got a napkin and drawn up a list of pros and cons for a problem.

FRAN – Sometimes we get our toenails done too!

ELAINE – We also take yoga, and that’s our gift to ourselves. We don’t let anyone interfere with our Tuesday afternoons. We have a group of ladies that get together to do yoga and then go get dinner after that. We all get our balance and then we get our food!

FRAN – As well as that, I love to ride my bike and I used to run marathons, because of that I have this whole world of friends. I’ve just bought a kayak so that’s a new adventure. I paddled to the Christmas lights down in Dickinson last year – you decorate your canoe and paddle at night which was the most fun thing. And I love bird-watching. I’m real diversified and I have all sorts of groups of friends.  I’m really not a wild child or anything, but I don’t stop still very often.

What does Houston mean to you?

ELAINE – For me, it’s roots. I didn’t pick Houston, I was born here, my parents were here and my husband’s parents were here, so it’s about roots. I met my husband in high school and when we got married after college and I guess Houston means family to us. We bought a house ten minutes from where we each lived because we wanted to be around our parents as they got older, which we were. We were just a phone call away and we had many of those between the two sets of parents as they got older.

Now my children may break the link to Houston, but that’s ok, I want them to be happy. They are both of them looking further afield, and that’s fine because it’ll give me some nice place to visit.

FRAN – I loved playing my horn because it allowed me to travel. I travelled around Europe on a rail pass with a brass quartet and we travelled all over. I also love all things British and I did once apply for a scholarship to a school in London. I had a dream of living in one of these little villages where Miss Marple would have lived, where you could ride your bike and there were flowers everywhere, that would have been my ideal, even if New Jersey was always my home. At first Houston was just about my job, but now I have a lot of friends here, and I like Houston now, though it took a while for me to settle.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

ELAINE – Probably at my home with my family and my dogs, that’s my happy place. And also on my yoga mat. It’s very easy for me to find a happy place at yoga. For ten years we’ve been doing it and we consider it a gift to ourselves. It took me about two years to get to that point where things weren’t buzzing around my head, but now I find that spot on my mat and all of that other stuff outside is gone for an hour. Occasionally I have to fight to get it out but most times it’s just gone.

FRAN – I have several. On the couch, just being quiet, or sitting on the back porch watching the birds at the many bird feeders we have. We feed the hummingbirds and we see all the migratory birds come by, which is really cool. And I love being out on my bike in the country and actually, I’m happy in the classroom too, and also with my sister and her kids. You know, I have lots of happy places, I’m just quite a happy person.

What is your favorite restaurant?

FRAN – Carmelita’s on Bellaire Boulevard is right between both our houses, and then there’s El Ranchero and …

ELAINE – Basically, we just love Mexican neighborhood restaurants!

What is your Houston secret?

ELAINE – I think a secret that many people don’t know about is the beer can house. I saw it years ago as a child and then again recently with the kids. It’s off Washington, right in the middle of all these homes and people come from all over just to see it. The man who made it has gone but it’s still maintained by the same people that run the Art Car Parade – and that’s another Houston secret that everyone should know about, it’s fantastic!

And of course, there are the bats on Waugh Drive. Unlike in Austin where the bats go away on migration, our bats never leave. Bats all year round! Aren’t we lucky?

FRAN – It’s not really Houston, but a great day out from here is to Brazos Bend State Park to see the alligators, it’s just fantastic, and there’s amazing birdlife too. Also, there’s the Azalea Trail here in the spring which is also a wonderful thing to go to. We rode our bikes one year, and ate at every stop! The azaleas have such a short blooming time, it’s really worth going to see.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

ELAINE – the summer heat, it’s just too hot. When even the kids can’t go out to play, it’s just too much, even for us natives.

FRAN – Absolutely right, and because it’s hot most people don’t get to know their neighbors very well because we stay indoors for the greater part of the year, which is a shame.

Susana Monteverde

Susana Monteverde with part of
Skywriting by Daniel Anguilu & Aaron Parazette,
a mural on the north wall of the Lawndale Arts Center

Susana Monteverde is the owner of SuMo Art, specializing in art education.  Susana seeks to build rich connections between people and contemporary artworks.  She is also the President of the Friends of Women’s Studies at the University of Houston. She is married to William Grimsinger and has one daughter, Isabel.

What’s your story, Susana?

I was born and raised in Mexico City.  When I graduated high school, I came to the University of Texas in Austin to study Theater. I thought I was going to make a living in the theater, but halfway through the degree program I realized that I did not have the all-encompassing drive that such a career takes.  The other courses I really liked, however, were in Art History, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll work in a museum, that sounds interesting.” 

My last undergraduate semester, I decided to take a class with Sue Mayer, who taught Museum Education.  When I told her that I was from Theater, she said, “I love Theater people! Come!”  Her class was called Methods of Art Presentation. A boring title but it was an unusual course geared towards future art teachers, taught in what is now the Blanton Museum at UT.  All education students had take a public speaking class and Sue thought it was ridiculous to have teachers, and art teachers in particular, taking just a standard public speaking class. Why not teach them about art presentation in an art museum?  When I took that class, my world opened up.  It was brilliant, like Technicolor!  And I did it well!  So in graduate school I studied Art Education with a specialization in museums.

As I finished, my husband William was coming out of law school.  We knew we wanted to stay in Texas because William had passed the Bar here, but where did we want to go that would offer both of us opportunities?  We decided that Houston was that place because he had done a clerkship here and the museum scene in town is amazing. 

I started out as a freelance art educator, working with arts organizations and on projects all over the city. I worked for the Houston Center for Photography, writing curriculum and teaching a program called Girls Own Stories for 3^rd and 4^th grade girls in under-served communities.  We would do autobiographical portraiture with them and it was so much fun!  I was able to use not only my art education training but my theater training too. 

I also worked at the Contemporary Art Museum at the inception of their Frequently Asked Questions program.  Contemporary art can be very challenging at times, not least when the Museum presented Andres Serrano and his best known piece, Piss Christ, which had a crucifix submerged in a beaker of urine.  The photograph is so beautiful, the color and the atmosphere it creates is gorgeous, but it was obviously very upsetting to a lot of people.  The Museum was very concerned about protests, so they created a Frequently Asked Questions team.  Instead of having docents giving tours, they would have the FAQ team placed around the gallery ready to discuss the artwork with anyone who had questions. And it worked! In fact, it worked so well there was no controversy and they decided to keep the Frequently Asked Questions team on hand for subsequent exhibitions. 

I then worked at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as the liaison officer between the museum and Talento Bilingüe de Houston.  It was an experiment, set up to build stronger ties between the museum and the East End.  This arts center is located in an industrial area that was not really intended for people to live in – full of warehouses, train tracks, derelict buildings, etc – a tough neighborhood where children were growing up in a very precarious environment.  My job was to set up an after-school art program and a summer camp – very challenging but very rewarding.

I have done a lot of pilot projects, that is my strength; I much prefer initiating rather than maintaining programs.   So another pilot project I helped develop was the seed for what would eventually become the Young Artist Apprenticeship at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Museum.  It involved bringing high school students into the university to make art on a daily basis so that they would have a relationship with the university and with an artist mentor, culminating in their own exhibition.

Because of my work at Blaffer, I was invited to be part of a team which painted a huge mural for Frank Stella in the Opera Hall at the Moores School of Music.  We worked on it for about nine months and I learned an awful lot from many outstanding artists.

Frank Stella's mural in the Moores School
of Music at the University of Houston

I left the mural project to become the Director of Education at Blaffer and was there for four and a half years working under a really amazing director, Don Bacigalupi. We had a great working chemistry, and his populist philosophy fit right in with mine.  Our staff was very tight knit and we did some very challenging artwork. We worked hard, but we played hard too.

I loved it at Blaffer but just as the leadership changed, I gave birth to Isabel.  I had never really thought about what I would do as a parent.  I just assumed I would be a working mom, but something happened when I had Isabel.  When I went back to work, it was hard for me to hand my baby over to someone else, but what scared me more was that while I was at work, I found that I wasn't thinking about my baby at all.  It was terrifying. 

William is a tax lawyer, and around that time, his salary had increased so suddenly that I had the option to stay at home.  It wasn't anything we had discussed and William was rather shocked. It felt rather regressive.  I am a feminist and I understand all the politics, the power and independence that comes with earning your own money, and yet, here I was, putting myself and my child in the hands of my husband.  That took a lot of trust.  It was hard for William too, suddenly having the responsibility for us all on his back.  In retrospect, though I wouldn’t advise young women not to make a similar choice, but I would advise them to have those discussions beforehand!

I have continued to consult since then, but very informally and by word of mouth. Recently I formalized my business, which is called SuMo Art.  As I’ve freelanced this past decade, what I've realized is that I love, and I am good at, is teaching people about contemporary art.  I also enjoy connecting people both to art and to one another.  It feels like I’m connecting people to what makes them human, to that part of themselves that is creative, thoughtful, introspective, aware.

Last month I launched a trial program, Art Explorations, which is a seminar consisting of five visits to different galleries, museums, artists’ studios and the like.   After every visit, those who wish to join me are invited to lunch and further conversation.  We began the series at Moody Gallery, where Betty spent an hour regaling us with stories of starting an art gallery in the mid 70s when there were few women in the business. She showed us to the "secret" room (aka the kitchen) where she stages upcoming exhibitions and showed us brand new work, never seen before.  

The other major part of my life the last few years has been serving as President of the Friends of Women's Studies at the University of Houston, heading up a board of thirty amazing women, most of whom are breaking ground in their field, whether that is in energy, medicine, finance, philanthropy, academia etc.  Friends is the community organization that helps raise funds for the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies program to pay for scholarships and fellowships. We have dreams of expanding our two-year postdoctoral fellowship to include two or three post docs, thereby creating a community of scholars dedicated to studying women and gender issues.

Friends also supports the Carey Shuart Women's Archive and Research Center at the university library which collects the papers and ephemera of notable women and women's groups in the Houston area.   To date we have over 50 different collections which are available to the public to study and learn about the women who have shaped this amazing city of ours.

Friends is very much a hub for women.  Through our community programs, we connect the University to the community, facilitating direct contact between scholars and the women they study with information flowing in both directions.  For example, our newly-named Barbara Karkabi Living Archives series invites panels of women for round-table discussions about any number of subject areas involving women, most recently, Women’s Activism, Then & Now.

We also connect women to each other, most notably with our signature fundraising luncheon, Table Talk.  Every year we invite fifty amazing women to host a conversation, each at a table of ten women. Maybe this would happen in every city, but every year we have a wealth of riches in possible conversationalists to choose from.  We are now working towards our 2014 Table Talk and we know it will be incredible and that we are going to blow past our fundraising goal.

Why do you do what you do?

I’m not an artist. My passion is in educating, in having that conversation which enthuses people and sets them grappling with art. As a result, I come to art education from an intellectual and educational approach rather than from a studio background.  In fact, I was always very anxious about my art.  I was one of those children who knew what I wanted my art to look like, but I just couldn’t get it to come out right so I would walk away. I enjoy helping other people get beyond that obstacle, to have a relationship with art whether they are makers or not.  People can have a connection to art as viewers, as consumers, as “understanders”. That experience can be shut off for a lot of people because they think, “I’m not an artist. I’m not an art historian. I don’t know what I’m looking at. It has nothing to do with me so I’m walking away.” But what I love to do is to bring them back in.

This presents me with two challenges, one which is posed by contemporary art itself, finding meaning and building interpretations of intriguing works of art which often times have not been studied or written about very much.  The other challenge is facilitating a deep connection between the viewer and the work of art, engaging people in a dialogue, honoring the questions that arise when they are looking, and bringing to light the wealth of information embedded in the work of art.   People are often amazed when I mention that works of art are as loaded with information as are books. We've been taught how to glean information from books, but we haven't been taught how to do that with art.  So that’s what I am teaching.

I help my students to be comfortable looking and asking questions.  I want them to find answers, but more often than not, to find more questions without definitive answers. I want them to be comfortable with using their own formal and informal knowledge to create satisfying interpretations of artwork that otherwise they may just walk past and not give a second thought.  Now that for me is exciting!

Who has been the greatest influence on your life?

My parents loved going to museums and they were friends with artists.  Mexico took in a lot of ex-pats from the US during the McCarthy era and so I grew up around a lot of lovely left-wing people.  Neither of my parents were artists but they spent time with this group of international people, artists and teachers, and that all had its effect on me. Also, my mother was an excellent teacher in her own right and I learned much of what I know about teaching from watching her at a young age.

Working with Sue Mayer at the University of Texas was very instrumental to my career. She helped me see that I had a lot of skills that could be brought to bear in education and she opened a lot of doors for me and honed my skills. I co-taught classes with her and did a lot of training of museum docents with her.   Sue was one of the people who helped professionalize art education in museums.  Museum education, up until the 70s, was something that was done informally and by volunteer groups of women who would act as docents at the museums.  Sue articulated the need for professionalism and for pay.  She pushed for this position to be equal to any of the other positions in the museum hierarchy and to have a museum educator who had studied and really thought about pedagogy.  From a feminist perspective, that’s an example of women doing work that was not recognized officially and Sue said, “No! This work needs to be officially recognized.”

What does Houston mean to you?

Houston is the kind of place that has porous boundaries which means very deep conversations about art are possible where in other cities it might not be the case.  In Dallas or in New York, perhaps, it would be “If you need to ask, you don’t need to know”. I think there is much more of a divide. Something about Houston allows for real interaction. Maybe it is that there is less snobbery, maybe it is that if you have the enthusiasm or the idea, Houston says, “Go for it!” and it doesn’t matter where you come from or where you studied, or whose money is backing you.  I’ve always found that very interesting.

The other neat thing about coming to Houston is that it is so open-armed.  You come here and people immediately welcome you into their circle and introduce you to their friends.  The art community here is no different, it just welcomes you in. 

How to do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

I am fortunate that William and Isabel are very supportive of me and they are not stingy with time or with encouragement, so that’s one thing I don’t have to battle.  I do make sure I make time for myself in different ways.  One is that I like to swim and do yoga and I walk the dogs.  So I find bits of time, mostly in the morning.  I know that if I don’t get it done in the morning, the rest of the day takes over. If I am not physically active – swimming or doing yoga – I am not a happy person.  And a happy mom is a good mom!

Also having a network of women friends is so important.  I have been able to establish several networks of women friends in Houston.  Isabel and I are part of a mother/daughter book club which is just incredible.  I love it for the reading aspect and for teaching our girls the habit of reading and talking about books, and also because it teaches them how to engage intellectually with friends, something which I don’t think kids in this country see modeled very much.  A lot of times, social interaction between adults is segregated from the kids.  We find babysitters and go off to do social things with our adult friends, but it’s different with my friends who are not American.  We have big family dinners with the kids around and they hear us talking politics, science, art or whatever it is.  Oftentimes they join our conversations. With this book club, I not only love that I have a friendship with these mothers, but also that our daughters have solid connections with these women too.  These are women that Isabel can access, that she can bounce ideas off and that, as she encounters challenges in her life, she can go to and share and get feedback from, knowing that they are women that I trust and that she can trust too.  I think that is so important.

I have also been part of another book club, with some of my closest friends, for 12 years or so. Until I joined this book club, I didn’t really read for pleasure. I read for school and for work, but never just for myself.  It’s a really interesting group of women who all somehow or other find themselves outside of the mainstream. We are all pretty outspoken and we are all capable of fighting for our time and space to speak, and we are liberal of course.  It is important for me to be in groups of people where I can express my social and political beliefs without having to censor them.  Living in Texas, that is not always the easiest thing.  You do encounter people who are way more conservative or way more religious than I am, so it’s nice to find that group of people where you can have an exchange of ideas and those ideas can be heard without it feeling divisive.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

In the pool.  The day can be hell, but if I am in the water, I am just transported away.

What is your Houston secret?

It’s surprising, but Houston has something like the third largest working artist community in the country.  Houston has a vibrant community of working artists, museums, commercial and non-profit galleries and it is a treasure.  It makes it possible for me to do what I do.

What is your favorite restaurant?

Right now, it’s Pondicheri, owned and run by Anita Jaisinghani. She serves Indian food into which she integrates Gulf Coast ingredients.  On her menu she might have crawfish curry or spiced okra during season.  Her food is always so surprising.  It’s just a revelation in your mouth.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

One of the things that I miss from living in Mexico City is that there is not a walking culture in Houston.  I love the connection you have with a neighborhood and a community when you are on foot.  Zipping past everything in your car, unless you have a destination in Chinatown or wherever, you don’t know these neighborhoods even exist.