A short story depicting the impact of Social Reconstructionism on Education

Anne Benoni was selected as part of Jamaica’s government’s pilot programme – S.O.S.T.O.S.
which read “Save Our Society Through Our Schools”. She is a renowned English teacher with 20
years’ experience locally and internationally. Despite an excellent track record of preparing high
school students for the CSEC examinations, she felt this new project would be her hardest
challenge yet – despite having to teach only one class. She was assigned to Willow Way High
School – an inner-city school in Kingston that once flourished but saw a decline with the rise of
political violence.

On meeting her students, she tries different means to connect with but typically all fail as the
students were always distracted. On a typical day, if the students would be fighting over ‘Power’
and ‘Shower’, sometimes with very violent confrontations. With each passing day, the task of
getting through to these students seemed to become more and more impossible. However, Anne
was determined to reform her students and so decided to spend a lot more of her salary on books
and activities and spent a considerable amount of time at school in counselling sessions.

One day, Anne intercepted a political related death note from one of her ‘Shower’ students and
uses it as an opportunity to talk to the class about the how political differences should be a
barrier to friendship. She regularly had high ranking political opponents, who were close friends,
come in and talk to them. There was not much progress, but there was progress: the students
were beginning to trust her, and she buys each of them books to use as diaries. In such, they talk
about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die and even becoming orphans.
Reading their stories made her cry and allowed her to further understand the reasons for their
behaviours. With this new knowledge, she redoubled her efforts to get through to them.

As the months stroll on, finally a year passes and now her students were in the year of the CSEC
examinations. Over the course of the year, she made efforts to interact with the families of her
students and became a real presence in their lives to the point that they referred to her as
‘Mama’. Though they were not perfect at their current state, they were leaps and bounds above
where they are coming from. Anne proposes that her students make a “Toast for change”,
allowing students to open-up about their struggles and things they wish to change about
themselves.

Through consistent effort during her first two years at Willow Way High School, Anne managed
to get a 90 percent pass rate among her first set of students. Although she got divorced – her
husband believed she was more in love with her students than their marriage – she managed to
transform the lives of students for another 18 years before she retired.

Discussion Questions
1. What are some of the social issues that affected the students in Anne’s English class?
2. How did she go about seeking to get through to her students? How effective was her
methods?
3. What are some of the potential consequences of seeking to address social issues with
students, and how could they be mitigated?
4. How can her experience help with meeting the challenges faced with students today?

This short story was written by inspiration from the 2007 film, Freedom Writers, which is based on the
1999 non-fiction book: The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to
Change Themselves and the World Around Them written by The Freedom Writers, a group of students
from Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, and their teacher Erin Gruwell.