Teacher With a Heart: Covello, Community & Pedagogy

Overview of the Book's Structure and Purpose

Teacher With a Heart: Reflections on Leonard Covello and Community by Vito Perrone is a highly important didactic work. It represents a unique structure and form, as it is authored both by Perrone and by Covello himself — a dialogue of sorts between the two men and their reflections on the educational process in the United States. The first part of the book is authored by Perrone, who actively engages with the circumstances that contributed to Covello's seminal autobiographical work, The Heart is the Teacher. Because Covello's memoirs are out of print, Perrone's approach serves a dual purpose: restoring some of the most salient wisdom about pedagogy gathered in the middle of the twentieth century, while also providing it with crucial updates so that it continues to have educational and social relevance in the twenty-first century.

The manuscript is divided into two parts. The first finds Perrone discussing the various factors that contributed to Covello's passionate and deeply involved approach to educating students. The second part is an extended excerpt drawn directly from Covello's autobiography, allowing his voice to speak for itself across the decades.

Leonard Covello's Life and Educational Context

Before examining the factors that shaped Covello's philosophy, it is important to understand the gravity of his career. As an Italian immigrant, Covello spent the better part of 45 years actively working as a teacher in New York — most notably as the founding principal of East Harlem's Benjamin Franklin High School (Cinotto, 2004, p. 497). His tenure spanned a crucial and turbulent period encompassing both World Wars, fascism, the rise of global communism, and McCarthyism. The wisdom he accumulated during these decades, and which came to define his philosophy about the importance of education, is captured in the following quotation, one of many that Perrone drew from Covello's original text:

"The teacher is the heart of the educational process and he must be given the opportunity to teach — to devote himself whole-heartedly to his job under the best circumstances. Half a century as a teacher leads me to the conclusion that the battle for a better world will be won or lost in our schools" (Perrone, 1998, p. 144).

Although such sentiment is fairly commonplace in contemporary discourse, this philosophy takes on particular weight when one understands the social context Covello lived through — a context in which these words were quite literally tested. The first half of Teacher With a Heart gives Perrone the opportunity to detail the particulars of Covello's life and how they inexorably led him toward a teaching philosophy that was unique for his era. Perrone seamlessly blends accounts of the immigration struggles Covello endured with those of his own parents, as Perrone is also of Italian descent and a pedagogue himself. Much of the focus rests on Perrone's own life and the tribulations his parents faced as the sole Italian family in Michigan, and how those experiences eventually drew him toward a vocation in teaching.

The Theme of Community and Immigration

What makes this portion of the book particularly noteworthy is its reflection on Covello's experiences and principles — both as a teacher and as an immigrant navigating life in a new country. Immigration and community are among the book's principal motifs. The concept of community is discussed at length by both authors, since one's community provides the overall context in which education occurs. Importantly, this theme extends beyond the shared Italian heritage of both authors. It comes to encompass the broader community of Covello's students in East Harlem, as well as the communities that Perrone's own students inhabited.

This perspective aligns with broader scholarly discussions on community education, which emphasizes the school as a resource for and extension of the surrounding neighborhood — an idea that was radical in Covello's time but has since gained considerable traction in educational theory and practice.

Conclusion: The Enduring Relevance of Covello's Ideology

The overarching ideology that Covello propagated during his tenure as a teacher is suitably revived in Perrone's manuscript. The crucial idea disseminated through this work is that the educational process effectively involves the entire community. Covello adhered to the philosophy that "to educate the children of a community, the school must actively seek to connect with and become a resource for that community" (Polakow-Suransky, 2001, p. 45). The great value in reading this narrative is that one is able to vicariously relive the experiences of both Covello and Perrone that led them to this conclusion. As a result, passages that inspire the thinking behind that philosophy are arrived at through an organic, natural process — the reader can see and figuratively connect the dots as to why the social contextualization of education is so pivotal. Some of these concepts are echoed in "Extended Learning Opportunities" (CCSSO, 2006), which frames learning in contexts beyond the traditional classroom.

Inevitably, one compares the past work of Covello with one's own situation — both as a student and as an educator. This comparison is largely what Perrone's portion of the manuscript offers, and it provides a wealth of information about the progress still to be made and the distance teachers still have to travel.

References

CCSSO (2006). Extended learning opportunities. Council of Chief State School Officers. Retrieved January 22, 2013, from

Cinotto, S. (2004). Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the history of eating habits among Italian immigrants in New York. The Journal of American History, 91(2), 497–521.

Perrone, V. (1998). Teacher with a heart: Reflections on Leonard Covello and community. Teachers College Press.

Polakow-Suransky, S. (2001). Reconsideration: Teacher with a heart: Reflections on Leonard Covello and community. Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 32(3), 45–53.