USC: Museum of Education

established in 1977

Visit Carolina Shout 2001
Visit Carolina Shout 2004
Visit Carolina Shout 2006

Reflections on Carolina Shout
by Bill Ayers

Carolina Shout: A Celebration of Teachers
Museum of Education, University of South Carolina

Carolina Shout celebrates the important role of education in society today. This one-of-a-kind event, a fusion of cultural, musical, aesthetic, and academic experiences, is symbolized through the use of "a shout," the forming of communities that offer opportunities to testify and celebrate. Nationally- recognized educators and local and state community leaders come together to talk about teachers who exerted a profound influence upon their lives. The Shout includes music by Kenny Carr and The Tigers, a renowned trombone shout band, from Charlotte, who performs a form of instrumental music that bridges gospel and jazz.
Carolina Shout is staged periodically.

Carolina Shout 2006
Carolina SHOUT: Act III by Bill Ayers

The drama of education is always a narrative of change. Act I is life as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the already settled and assumed, the status quo. But there’s always something more to do, something more to learn and to know, something more to experience and accomplish. Act II is the fireworks, the wild upheaval and the crazy dissonance, the vast experience of discovery and surprise, the intense energy of remodeling and refashioning. Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing and behaving, a different way of seeing and being. Transformation. Act III, of course, will one day be recast as a new Act I, and the never-ending journey toward the new will begin again. Teaching changes lives.
This sense of growth and change, learning and transformation, fireworks and upheaval, was on full display at the 2006 CAROLINA SHOUT! This was Act III, and it channeled all the love and hope, all the hugs and tears from Acts I and II, with some spice and flavor—like any home-cooked meal—all its own.

Kenny Carr and the Tigers, founding partners, co-authors and co-conspirators with Craig Kridel in this most unique and uplifting testimonial to teachers, have become pit orchestra and indispensable cultural marker for the SHOUT. When Kenny hit it, the line of horns came blasting to life, and everyone leapt up, our spirits rising in righteous appreciation. It was a joy to behold. Ten-year-old Aileene R. shouted out with remarkable poise and grace for her teacher Ms. Tiffany Smith, whose tiny baby son Jeremiah stole the show as well as the hearts of those of us who took turns holding him during the proceedings. Traci Young Cooper, South Carolina Teacher of the Year in 2001, honored her Columbia High School French teacher, Madame Lilease Hall, this diminutive yet regal presence who “opened worlds to us,” and believed that her students could overcome any barriers to their dreams. And Craig Melvin, WIS news anchor, thanked Doug Brandon and Michael Fanning for never giving up on kids, and for creating idiosyncratic environments that were filled with interesting, provocative, and nourishing opportunities to learn, and kept him engaged in spite of his predilections to do otherwise.

A sense of opportunity and renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—was at the heart of it all, the ineffable magic drawing our spirits back to the classroom and the school again and again. Like these students and their teachers, we felt ourselves becoming more powerfully and self-consciously alive, challenged toward further knowledge, enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation. Here was a faith that every child and every student and every teacher as well comes as a whole and multidimensional being—a gooey biological wonder, pulsing with the breath and beat of life itself, evolved and evolving, shaped by genetics, twisted and gnarled by the unique experiences of living. Each has as well a complex set of circumstances that makes his or her life understandable and sensible, bearable or unbearable. Each is unique, each walks a singular path across the earth, each has a mother and a father, each with a distinct mark to be made, and each is somehow sacred. That insight, that understanding is something worth shouting about. SHOUT!

Carolina Shout 2004
"where learning rules and teaching rocks"
by Bill Ayers

Welcome to a different kind of teacher recognition, a different kind of acknowledgement of teaching—get ready to witness . . . get ready to testify . . . get ready to give praise . . . It's time for another Carolina Shout! Kenny, hit it!”
            And with that Kenny Carr and the Tigers blew the roof off, and the packed auditorium began to sway with excitement.
            Testimonials started with an elementary school student praising his teacher, Tim O'Keefe, as a man who “knows us” and “cares about us,” a man who loves sharing his life with kids in the classroom, and ranged all the way to I.S. Leevy Johnson testifying that Ms. Catherine Davis Thomas, fifty-three years in the classroom,, was always “soft spoken but strongly worded,” a woman committed to building an environment in which “no child was left behind.” We heard from people of every generation bout teachers who took the side of students, fought on their behalf, believed them into greater ways of being, and made a profound difference in each of their lives. Every word was powerfully delivered, every word filled with passion and sincerity, and before long everyone in the room was nodding or shouting affirmations, perhaps remembering a particular teacher who had made just such a difference in their lives.

Between presentations Kenny and the Tigers filled the room with their joyful noise: “When I Get Inside,” “Yes,” “Yes Lord,” “Heaven.” A traditional Shout Band, a line of trombones, a baritone and a Sousaphone backed by drums, the Tigers' sound— part gospel, part jazz, all joy—is an uninhibited testament to the human spirit. Their music stretches and soars, retracts, journeys outs again and takes us all along. The Carolina Shout is a community-in-the-making, and that night we were free to sing Hallelujah to the beauty of teaching and learning.
Teacher recognition is badly needed in these arid times. But Carolina Shout is something different—neither earnest nor clichéd, the Shout frees us from feeling small, marginalized, defensive, or barricaded. Here we can breathe deeply, live large and know we are not alone. Here learning rules and teaching rocks.

Reflections on Carolina Shout 2001
by Bill Ayers

I knew I would be there from the start, because Craig Kridel had asked me to be there and I always try to do what Craig Kridel asks me to do. And I figured it would be different because, well, because Craig Kridel is always and every time a bit of a surprise for me, and because he wrote to tell me that the SHOUT would be special, and also because when he called to update me on things, the SHOUT was always and urgently upper-case, even if he whispered it, even if he slid it in sideways and slow. THE SHOUT.
But, CAROLINA SHOUT? I had no idea.
It began as it should have begun—old friendships renewed, some time to catch up and catch on, good connections remembered and remade. There was conversation, then, with students and faculty from the University of South Carolina, with schoolteachers from nearby cities and towns, with a few guests from far away. We were coming together on some common ground—in celebration of teaching and teachers, certainly, and in recognition of the ethical dimension of this most propulsive calling of callings—we were creating a shared vocabulary to mark this moment as unique and to carry us beyond as well, and we were—each of us, I think—wondering and wandering.
CAROLINA SHOUT!

The first happy shock for me was meeting Louise DeSalvo who is as smart and feisty close up as she is in her many fine books, but also sassy and sexy in person. Louise talked about writing our lives as acts of assent and affirmation, as participatory and potentially liberatory events, as sometimes subversive but also at their best authentic and authenticating. She talked about knowing our students to the extent that they want to be known—no more—and about resisting the perverse and pernicious stance of "Let me find out all about your life while I’m busy avoiding finding out about my own." Louise embodied for me doing education in a dangerous world—education as emancipation. She found ways to embrace and challenge those of us around her with a single gesture, and watching her quick and critical mind at work took my breath away. I was entirely enthralled.
SHOUT! SHOUT!

Meeting Cleveland Sellers after a span of more than thirty years—a lot of water under that bridge, a whole lot of water—also took my breath away. I remembered Cleve as a brilliant and courageous field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a teacher and an organizer who embodied a belief in the ability of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things whenever they name the obstacles to their freedom and join hands in a collective effort of repair. Cleve was about simple justice then, the right of people to make the decisions that affect their lives, the vision of a humanity united in cooperation and peace. And now here he was a professor, an historian, but still with his mind and his heart and his eyes set on freedom.

Seeing him reminded me of the danger of looking backward with a kind of anesthetizing nostalgia—even if the intent seems beneficent—when there’s so much more to be done, and we talked about rejecting the construction of "the sixties" as a straightforward narrative with a message of obvious progress and a neat conclusion. There’s so much more to be done.

SHOUT!

The afternoon was wet, the evening drippy, and we ducked under newspapers or umbrellas rushing to coffee and dinner and then off to the big event: gospel choirs, step teams, shout-outs for teachers and teaching, soloists, and Kenny Carr and the Tigers. Kenny Carr is a big man with a big smile and big heart. When we met he gathered me into a big hug and squeezed hard. My breath left me again. He was strong and spirited and full of energy, ready to shout. The hall was filling up and the air crackling when Craig Kridel passed me a hand-held mic, and I delivered my well-rehearsed line: "Welcome, friends, to CAROLINA SHOUT! Kenny… Hit it!" The Tigers hit the down beat in full growl, and suddenly we were soaring with horns blaring into thin air—clapping, stomping, moaning, swinging, shouting out loud. The rhythm had a point—a celebration of teachers who changed our lives, their spirits summoned and their lives praised—and a counter-point—art that erupts, disrupts, touches our souls and our dreams, carries us across boundaries and borders into places we’d never before imagined. I felt transformed, sweat mingled with tears, your slap echoed in my head, my stomp joined with your step, and my blood quickened.
CAROLINA SHOUT! CAROLINA SHOUT! Thank you, Carolina, thank you.

Museum of Education - Wardlaw Hall - University of South Carolina - Columbia, SC 29208 - 803.777.5741
museumofeducation@sc.edu