Shifting Our Perspective
by Sharon Daly
There is an old Ethiopian folktale, Fire on the Mountain, about a servant named Arha who agrees to a difficult wager that his owner concocted in order to be granted 10 acres of land and freedom. His task was to climb to the top of Mount Sululta and, as darkness descended, stand naked on the mountaintop through the long night with no means of warmth or food. It was an improbable task, and there was a very real prospect that he wouldn’t survive. He decided to ask a wise man for advice and the man came up with a plan. He would sit on another mountain peak all night, tending a fire. Arha was told “Keep your focus on that fire, and think of me, a friend, sitting there tending it for you. If you can do that, you will survive.”
This story resonates deeply with me as educators and students continue to struggle through the second year of pandemic issues and bad news stories that threaten to douse the fire of hope. It made me ponder the importance of focus and perspective and think about how we can intentionally make curriculum choices that will shift the focus from present-day difficulties to inquiry and topics that will transcend our current realities. What can I give my students that would help them focus on that small fire, barely visible on a faraway peak? What changes could I make in content that would generate new perspectives? How can Arha’s experience help us all as we continue in survival mode?
I decided that in order to transcend the omnipresent bad news and its accompanying angst, I needed content that would go BIG and also small, enabling students to train their eyes and attention on things that provide comfort and hope, just as the wise man’s fire did. So when we returned from winter break at the beginning of this new year, we explored content that was BIG. Deep space BIG. New horizons in science BIG! On December 25th, 2021 the Webb telescope was launched and it is now making its way to an orbit one million miles from Earth. What it will be able to see will fundamentally change what we know about deep space and the origins of the universe. The deployment involved intricate maneuvers of equipment over a 30-day span in January. NASA and scientists all over the world held their collective breath each day- a failure in any of the parts spelled disaster for the entire mission. My students followed each success, cheering along with the multitude in command, as the components of the telescope activated just the way they were designed to do. The mirrors of the telescope are covered in a thin layer of gold and are the size of three football fields. What will they reflect? How will our perspectives shift as a result? Similarly, what do we reflect to our students each day and what do they reflect back to us? How do we make choices in what we teach that will keep our survival fires burning brightly?
These are important questions to consider. Our students need to see the dreamers, the doers, the innovators, the kindness spreaders in numbers that are BIGGER than the dream busters, skeptics, and angry mobs. How will an enormous mirror that has been recently launched into space help us see ourselves differently? What joy can be found in a worldwide collaboration of scientists who have been working for decades to make this happen? How can we collaborate with our students and consciously choose what we want to reflect personally and educationally?
A middle school student shared a poem with me a few weeks ago that she was a bit hesitant about, stating, “It’s kind of personal.” As I read through it, absorbing the painful words and images, I knew that her thoughts and words seemed so very personal to her, but were in fact an all too common theme. It was about looking in the mirror and not liking what she saw. The mirror she peered into magnified her imagined flaws. She wondered if it reflected the truth. One line in the poem stated:
I’m my biggest critic
But why?
It’s because everyone around me makes me feel like I’m not enough
I wanted to tell her that her identity was so much bigger than her small mirror was showing her. That she is beautiful and worthy. Too many teens (and adults) look in the mirror and make judgments that are detrimental to their well-being. Likewise, have we been holding up small mirrors for too long? Mirrors that keep the spin cycle going, eroding our sense of who we are and the good that we are capable of creating?
In 1968, the first color photograph of Earth taken by a human from space gave people a new and singular perspective of what it means to inhabit this planet. It launched the environmental movement and is credited for the inception of Earth Day in 1970. One photograph caused a seismic shift in perception.
I don’t want to dismiss how difficult things are as we continue grappling with the ongoing pandemic and the gut-wrenching problems that the world faces. But I want my students to have a BIGGER perspective of this time in history, themselves, and their place in the world. Wonderments are out there to discover. They need to learn about things that generate awe and excitement. They need to know that people across the world in every discipline are doing and dreaming BIG things. It is imperative that we tend the fire of hope for them. We can co-create what we want to reflect and have it reflected back to us.
Going BIG doesn’t just involve talking about new horizons in deep space. It means shifting our perspective about other things too. We talk about seeing the ‘big picture’ but what we think we see doesn’t reveal all that is there. There is always so much more. My 4th-grade students read Fire on the Mountain. We had great discussions and shared insights. Then we learned about Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, who was the first to see bacteria and protozoa through his newly invented microscope in the 1600s. What looked like plain, ordinary water in fact contained a multitude of microscopic organisms. By looking closely at things, students can learn to grapple with BIG questions. I want my students to think about what distracts us daily and prevents us from really seeing? How are we lulled into thinking we know about something, but completely unaware that we receive that knowledge through insufficient lenses? How will perspectives about race and equity change if we look more carefully and analyze what has been and what continues to be so that we can recognize it and affect change? I want my students to look carefully and examine issues from multiple perspectives so that they can find their way to truth.
Shifts in perspective are the catalyst for change. We can go BIG with our students and sow the seeds of awe and hope. Conversely, we can teach them to look carefully, and realize that what we see or think we know is far more complex and nuanced. I want students to be empowered to examine issues and problems through new lenses. We can’t survive if we don’t refocus our attention and break free. Let’s be intentional about our curriculum so that students can see the world through new lenses, creating BIG shifts in perspective that will build a hopeful future for all of us.
