The Story Of Orlonia Phillips

By Author: Tracy McGrady
Total Articles: 56
Comment this article

Orlonia Phillips attended grades 1-12 at what was known at the time as Pinesville School. She graduated from high school in 1978, and in 1980 she began a two-year vocational program in early childhood education at Park City Technical College, located one hour north of Pinesville. In 1982, she earned her associate's degree, becoming the first person in her family to attend and finish college. Shortly thereafter, she was hired to work as a paraprofessional in the kindergarten classroom attended by her younger brother Jack.

She described how her connection to Pinesville and the people who live there played a significant role in teaching: "I've been here [teaching in Pinesville for 26 years. Most of these children, I done had their parents and grandparents. Now I am teaching their grandchildren and great grandchildren." Orlonia is related to 6 of the 12 students in her current first-grade class. In observations made of her teaching, we have seen Orlonia shift fluidly between mother and teacher throughout the Five Fingers KSO school day-that is, ...
... not only does she deliver the mandated Direct Instruction reading curriculum, but she also "fusses" over the children as a mother would. Orlonia described this approach as coming from her relationship with her teachers, whom she saw as fulfilling a maternal role in her life.

When not working, Orlonia enjoys cooking and baking; doing household chores; caring for her aging parents; taking photographs with a digital camera; and communicating with, sending e-cards to, and sharing digital photographs among friends and relatives living outside Pinesville. Although Orlonia engages in multiple forms of literacy, a persistent theme within her life history interview was her struggle and discomfort with spelling and composing printed text. Despite her struggles with spelling, throughout her life she has drawn on her personal experiences and the history of her community to develop repertoires of literate practice.

To ensure that Orlonia's life history represented the complexities of her life, Amy cultivated a relationship with Orlonia that supported the sharing of intimate life details. Because Amy is a European American woman from the Midwestern United States, she was positioned as a "learner" requiring instruction on what participants take for granted about life in Pinesville. The fact that she is a European American in a community with a hostile white supremacist history influenced her selection of "community nomination" (Foster, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1997; Tillman, 2002) techniques for recruiting participants in a culturally sensitive manner: Participants were recommended for the study by an insider to the community. To address differences in cultural and racial identities, Amy recruited initial participants from a group of teachers at PCS that she had been working with for two years, ensuring that trust existed between herself and participants.

Once interviews were complete, we (Amy and Lauren), European American women, came together to interpret the data. Our outsider status both promoted and limited our understandings. That we are both "outsiders" to Pinesville required us to draw on Five Fingers Shoes our own life experiences to discuss the data in a manner that enriched our analyses. That Lauren is from a small Southern community and that Amy had spent over two years working with individuals in Pinesville helped us unpack some of the nuances of Southern life and life in Pinesville that were reported in Orlonia's interview. Yet, despite our efforts, we recognize that the data collected and life history generated would have a different texture if we had been African American or from Pinesville.