Books | AMERICA Interview with DR. ROSE CHERIE REISSMAN
-As a child, what did you want to become (profession-wise)?
As a child, I knew I would teach – but do it in my own way. I saw my mother and her heightened interest in museums, public speaking, gesticulating, poetry, reading and leading others as a role model. Even when I was a child, I watched educators and noted some who would serve as negative paradigms. These teachers devalued students and did not like independent or creative thinking. I knew as a child, I would become an educator who would foster creativity in my students and celebrate their individual capacities, even if those capacities seemed to go against the conservative standards or mandates of the “required.” I never liked the box of teacher template expectations. To me, seeing what students could conceive that I could not imagine or mandate, was the mission/goal of teaching.
-In which town did you grow up?
I grew up in NYC, the Flatbush/Church Avenue neighborhood of Brooklyn NYC.
-Do you think your background has influenced your current book writing and educational style? If so, what specific element in your background is most pervasive in influencing your current book writing and educational style?
As stated before in response to question one, my mother’s passion for literature, museums, and discourse was a key influence. In addition, as a Jewish female growing up in a very multi-ethnic section of Brooklyn with mostly African-American and Latino neighbors, plus attending and teaching at schools with less than 2% Jewish/Caucasian, I was heavily influenced by the need and the strong impulse for cultures to talk, share, communicate openly, defuse and enthuse. That movement came to be called Multicultural Education in the 1960s. However, by any name as writer, open discussant and communicator, I recognized that all
beings needed to share commonalities as individuals, learn about cultural rites/values, and study unique aspects of cultures. Since I loved to write, that aspect of sharing family stories, traditions, sayings, proverbs, fears and dreams plus literature about that became the crux of my initial professional writing and educational style.
In addition, as a child I interviewed my great Aunt Sophie Gromer, a Polish immigrant to the United States who worked as a seamstress and saw to it that her three sons graduated college. Sophie gave to charity, told great stories from Poland with zesty undertones, and refolded wax paper to be frugal. She was my first oral history. Although I only learned as an adult that Studs Terkel was an oral historian and interviewing the non-famous for stories was called oral history, I had interviewed Aunt Sophie using my school composition notebook when I was eight years old.
Almost every article, project and experience I engage students in has to do with oral history – talking to and connecting with relatives, seniors, and community to get their ideas and responses to issues. Family stories and conversations pervade my teaching and learning.
-What inspires you in the job of being an author/educator?
Just being with students and allowing them to create and to react to the project frames I offer inspires, invigorates, and renews me. Today, a student was doing a tessellation and came up with his own idea for a museum ticket to our geometry project, in the Museum 6th grade class headed by Jennifer Crotzer at Ditmas – a former museum educator now a Mathematics teacher at Ditmas IS 62.