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Hearing voices
Memory bank tasks students with taping history
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by SARA K. TAYLOR
Polish teachers Arkadiusz Ordyniec, left, and Monika Konczyk in the country for a Civic Voices conference in Washington, D.C., stopped by Mark Howell's Westlake High School history class to discuss the international memory bank.
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The Westlake High School seniors who share Mark Howell's Advanced Placement government and Advanced Placement European history class lumbered into their classroom like it was any other Tuesday, but March 2 would prove to be a little different.
They would spend the period hearing about Poland's Solidarity trade union, which formed an anti-Soviet movement in the 1980s advocating nonviolence while striving to usher in democracy.
Instead of a staid lecture, the students would hear the story from Monika Konczyk, a former English teacher who is currently Solidarity's spokeswoman.
Along with fellow Polish teachers Aneta Polit and Arkadiusz Ordyniec, Konczyk was in the area to attend a Washington, D.C., conference for Civic Voices, an international democracy memory bank that encourages students in the Philippines, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Mongolia, Poland, Georgia and the United States to speak to and record the stories of those who were involved in civil and human rights movements around the globe.
Already in Howell's class, local civil rights mover and shaker Mary Louise Webb has visited, relating her experiences of fighting for civil rights for the area's and nation's African-American population.
While America's push toward equal rights seemed to reach its apex in the 1960s, Poland's push for human rights took place in more recent memory — at least for the students in Howell's class.
Even though they were yet to be born, the 1980s wasn't a time of black and white film reels, it was a time in Poland when Konczyk was around the ages of the teens leaning forward in their desks, a time when she and her friends would have to plan parties that started at 4 p.m. to ensure they would be home by the Soviet-imposed curfew.
When the lucky few who were wearing jeans were likely the children of sailors who brought home denim from travels outside of the oppressive country; when Polish history books were "fake," making no mention of a Russian invasion.
"We had no symbols connected to the West," Konczyk said. "As teenagers we tried to listen to the music [of the U.S. or other western countries]. We had no chocolate …" Upon hearing this injustice, several of Howell's students groaned.
Konczyk continued, "No sugar, no cigarettes, no sweets, no shoes — we had one pair of shoes. At Christmas time, we could buy oranges from Cuba. It was amazing … I can still remember the smell of those oranges." Mail was opened up and censored, as were phone calls.
The only freedom Poles had was in the Catholic Church; it was the only place people could speak relatively freely, Konczyk said. And when John Paul II was elected Pope?
"The Communists hated it," she said. "He was the first Polish man that became important to the whole world."
And people in the West listened to him.
"He was the one of the leaders for the Polish people," Konczyk said. "We started to believe miracles can come true."
Ordyniec's students — he is a history teacher — spoke with those who were involved in the Solidarity movement, a movement that included striking inside of shipyards. Protesting outside the yard's gates proved fatal to some strikers who were killed or wounded for their efforts.
Howell, the only local teacher involved with Civic Voices currently, hopes his students and others in the area participate in the project.
"We are teaching students to collect an oral history from people who were involved in the civil rights movement," said Howell, who traveled to Poland for the program.
He and other Charles County teachers are also involved in Civics Mosaic, a teacher exchange program, which sends teachers to Russia and hosts Russian teachers here.
Howell, along with Melissa Hatch, a Thomas Stone High School teacher, have both linked their classes with those in Russia via Web camera.
Civic Voices, funded by a three-year, $3 million grant from American Federation of Teachers Education Foundation, offers students to serve as historians while preserving a region's history through eyewitness accounts.
"We're not just hearing from famous people," he continued. "We're hearing from the foot soldiers."
To learn more
To find out more about the Civic Voices project, go to www.civicvoices.org.
