Facts:

• Mo’ne Davis is a 13-year-old girl from Philadelphia who is the star pitcher for the Taney Dragons Little League team from Philadelphia.
• Taney is the first Philadelphia team ever to reach the World Series.
• Mo’ne appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week (4.9% of covers from 2000 – 2011 featured women, 2.5% featured a woman as the primary image, 1.5% featured a woman of color) –-Mother Jones, Katie Rose Quandt, August 19, 2014
• 3% of players in Major League Baseball identify as African-American. –New York Times, Jeré Longman, August 21. 2014

Sample Frame:

I can’t let this week go by without commenting on the phenomenon of Mo’ne Davis and what she and her amazing story mean for us as educators. You have probably heard by now about Mo’ne—she is the star pitcher for the Taney Dragons from Philadelphia who made it most of the way through the Little League World Series before losing to a team from Las Vegas in the semi-finals.

She is African-American. Both race and gender play out in school achievement, and are pertinent to this story. Only 8.3 percent of Major League Baseball players are Black and 0 are female. Somewhere in this 13-year-old girl’s past was an adult who, despite there being no existing role model, encouraged and supported her passion for baseball. I can imagine that many adults might have discouraged her, citing that girls don’t play baseball and Black girls head for basketball, track and field, or more recently, tennis. But in this case, the adult or adults who encouraged Mo’ne’s persistence and perseverance were not constrained by what IS—they allowed themselves to imagine with her what COULD be. What currently IS can often play out as low expectations for young people—the fact that the Black student gradation rate is 42% can affect our beliefs about our African-American students’ college potential. I can imagine that there may have been some people in Barack Obama’s past who said that he couldn’t be president of the United States because we had never had a Black president and our country wasn’t ready.

This is our job—every single one of our students has a spark of something that they love or they are interested in. Our job is to listen carefully in the course of educating them to what those interests and passions are and then to really believe in our students to pursue those passions. This could mean helping a student find a book related to her passion or keeping your eye out for articles in the paper about the student’s interest or just simply remembering what the passion is and asking him about it repeatedly. This also means that we help students figure out what skills they need to pursue their passions and then we help them develop those skills. We check ourselves if we notice that we truly don’t believe in a child’s dreams and communicate as much to the student. We check ourselves if we notice patterns in who we are encouraging to strive in particular directions. We check ourselves to dream with the student beyond what IS and allow ourselves to imagine what COULD be for this child.