18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Build an anti-racist and culturally responsive school environment
In Freedom Teaching, educator and distinguished anti-racism practitioner Matthew Kincaid delivers a one-stop resource for educators and educational leaders seeking to improve equity and increase the cultural responsiveness of their school. In this book, you’ll discover the meaning and fundamentals of anti-racist education and find a roadmap to reducing the impact of systemic racism in your classroom.
The author offers skills and tools he’s developed over the course of his lengthy career teaching anti-racist ideas to educators, providing readers with strategies that are effective at both the individual teacher and collective school community level. Readers will also find:
● A thorough introduction to the idea of Freedom Teaching and creating an education system that works for all students
● Strategies for building and maintaining anti-racist schools and classrooms
● Important social justice lessons from unsung activists
An indispensable resource for educators, educational leaders, and anyone who wants to actualize change in our education system, Freedom Teachingbelongs in the libraries of the parents and families of students and teachers in training hoping for a better understanding on anti-racist concepts and ideas.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 292
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: The Journey
There Is a Movement Inside You
Notes
Chapter 1: Setting Intention
Intention Matters
Agreement #1: Engage with Uncomfortable Truths
Agreement #2: Replace a Scarcity Mindset with a Possibility Mindset
Agreement #3: Embrace Your Radical Imagination
Agreement #4: Center Students
Notes
Chapter 2: Freedom Teaching's Foundation
What Is Freedom Teaching?
Theory of Change
Freedom Teaching's Five Tenets and How to Use Them
Notes
Chapter 3: Hope That Is Radical
Rosa Parks and Radical Hope
Reclaiming Radical
Using Our Tools
Notes
Chapter 4: From Radical Hope to Practice
Sharing Power with Students
Strategies That Cede Power to Students
Notes
Chapter 5: Free Minds, Free Kids
The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Limiting Beliefs and the Cycle of Socialization
Aligning Our Attitudes and Our Behaviors
Note
Chapter 6: It Isn’t Rigorous, If It Isn’t Relevant
Embracing Our Power
The Freedom Teaching Model
Cognitive Empowerment
Academic Achievement
Social and Emotional Well-Being
Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Environment
Notes
Chapter 7: Trouble Doesn't Teach
Reinforcing the Behaviors We Want
Misbehaviors Are an Opportunity to Teach
Notes
Chapter 8: Cultivating a Classroom That Values Cultural Wealth
Culturally Affirming Education
What Is Cultural Wealth?
Standpoint Theory and Cultural Wealth
Envisioning Equity
Notes
Chapter 9: Oh Freedom: Staying on the Battlefield
Freedom Song
On Hope
Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Aligning our attitudes and our behaviors: sample.
Table 5.2 Aligning our attitudes and our behaviors: template. (You can downl...
Chapter 8
Table 8.1 Ways your practices elevate Tara Yosso's six different forms of cu...
Table 8.2 Ways your practices
could
elevate each form of cultural wealth.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure I.1 Dorothy Counts on her first day of school, Charlotte, North Carol...
Figure I.2 Dorothy Counts on her first day of school, Charlotte, North Carol...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 The basic social contract in schools.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 The cycle of socialization.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 The freedom teaching model.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Visualization of standpoint theory.
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: The Journey
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
iii
iv
v
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
163
164
165
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
Freedom Teaching
Overcoming Racism in Education to Create Classrooms Where All Students Succeed
Matthew Kincaid
Copyright © 2024 by Matthew Kincaid, All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781119984832 (Paperback)ISBN 9781119984849 (ePDF)ISBN 9781119984856 (ePub)
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHYCOVER ART: © GETTY IMAGES | OXYGEN
To my grandparents, Thelma, Thomas, Eugenia, and “Jack”: You braved a world that I couldn’t imagine and laid the foundation for everything that I could ever dream that I could become. Thank you.
To my students: Teaching you was the greatest honor of my life. This book and everything that I do is dedicated to you.
Introduction: The Journey
Our journeys as educators, activists, or anyone who desires to make change are often not linear. As a result of this there will be times in any activist's journey where it will feel like we aren't making progress at all. Much of what we learn in school about how significant change happens is focused on hero worship. We are socialized to believe that change occurs because a once-in-a-generation leader shows up and makes it happen. Because this is the way that our history books remember freedom movements, it is easy to trivialize our own ability to make change.
In the midst of my efforts to make change I have found myself falling into the trap of self-doubt. Who am I to believe that I am the one to move or shift systems that have been around for so much longer than I have? Systems that are so much bigger than I am? And systems that are so resistant to change? People read books written by experts, and my professional and educational experience would suggest that I am one of those. However, I actually think the story that needs to be told is a story of overcoming: overcoming doubt, overcoming real and perceived limitations, overcoming racism.
In my journey to overcome, I have found that the person who makes the most change isn't always the person who knows the most. Typically the people who make the most change are the ones who have the ability to cut through the noise. There is now, and has always been, a lot of noise around the topic of ending racism. One would think that everyone could get behind the idea that racism is bad and should be dug up from the roots in the systems that we all have to exist in. Instead, recently many states made it illegal to teach about racism in schools. Historically anti-racism advocates have faced ridicule, violence, false imprisonment, and in some cases, death. It goes without saying that the noise that surrounds anti-racism work is so loud that it is often deafening. The noise serves to paralyze us into cynicism, to keep us stuck in doubt, grief, or guilt. The noise aims to drown out our voices and make it harder for us to communicate with one another. Toni Morrison describes “the noise” this way: “the function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up…. None of that is necessary.”1
The unjust structures and the people who support them are going to continue to do their work. Those of us who are inclined to create a just world for the students that we serve have to do our work too. We can only do this work as we are. We don't have the luxury to wait for someone else or to wait until we are a better version of ourselves. The heroes who are immortalized in our history books who led movements deserve all their praise, adoration, and credit. However, systems do not shift because of the actions of an individual. Systems shift because of committed individuals, imperfect individuals, the people the history books don't remember. Famed civil rights leader Ella Baker embodied this concept, saying, “You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up the pieces or put together pieces of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is that strong people don't need strong leaders.”2
There Is a Movement Inside You
The urgency of the moment dictates that we do not have the luxury of waiting for the once-in-a-generation leader. Instead, this book will encourage you to find the movement that exists inside of you. The battle for equity in education requires all of us to bring something important to this work. Your movement might not be mine. We need leaders both inside and outside of the classroom. We need a diverse set of skills, perspectives, and passions. If the education system is ever truly going to work in a way that serves all children, we need your movement—whatever it may be.
I often hold Overcoming Racism intensives where I talk about an activist named Dorothy Counts, who integrated schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1957. On her first day of school, Dorothy Counts was met by a mob of upward of 300 angry white children and adults. Figures I.1 and I.2 show her being harassed by her peers. Her first day of school was marked by her teachers ignoring her. Her classmates threw things at her, shouted racial epithets at her, and some boys even formed a circle around her at lunch and spat in her food. The district superintendent ignored her family's pleas to protect their daughter and the local police chief made it clear that he would do nothing to offer her protection. After four unbearable days at Harry Harding High, Dorothy's parents mercifully withdrew her from the school. By all accounts Dorothy, who is 81 now, is a hero. But when I ask participants in the Overcoming Racism intensives who she is, almost nobody recognizes her face.
Figure I.1 Dorothy Counts on her first day of school, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1957.
Photo by Douglas Martin, published September 5, 1957, in the Charlotte News. Public domain.
Figure I.2 Dorothy Counts on her first day of school, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1957.
Photo by Douglas Martin, published September 5, 1957, in the Charlotte News. Public domain.
The truth is I put this image of Dorothy Counts in the beginning of my presentations for completely selfish reasons. Dorothy Counts is a constant reminder to me of the sacrifices that people who look like me endured simply to get an equitable education. Dorothy was willing to put her entire community on her shoulders and face the rage and hatred of a bigoted crowd. Looking into the eyes of Dorothy Counts before I speak is a reminder that this work takes courage, and it has always taken courage. It is also a reminder that anti-racist change has never come without resistance, and that freedom has never truly been free. The breadth of Dorothy's bravery is only matched by the cowardice of the rageful crowd. What were they so afraid of, those three hundred people assembled to intimidate one high school girl?
I've been doing anti-racism work since I was 14. I've faced threats; I've been the target of white supremacists; I've faced police with tanks, dogs, and tear gas. My passion has always propelled me forward and the heroes who came before me have always strengthened my resolve. However, the years following the brief movement for Black lives following 2020 have been some of the most difficult. The swift transition from a widespread outcry against racism to the widespread passing of polices intended to reinforce racism is heartbreaking. In 2023, with half of the country passing laws targeting anti-racism training, for the first time in my activist journey I have considered what it would look like if I stepped away from this calling.
Black people have fought for centuries to have full enfranchisement in schools. My forebears shed literal blood, sweat, and tears simply to walk through the doors of institutions of learning that fought just as hard to keep them out. Both of my parents went to segregated schools for much of their childhood. I have always felt like it was my responsibility to do my part to make the world a little bit safer for my future children and all of the students I had the privilege to teach. As a historian, I have studied the centuries in which Black families were disallowed to attend schools, followed by the century of forced segregation, and I have lived my entire life in the decades of trying to make schools equitable for children who look like me. In the last year or so I have watched as, in what feels like a matter of months, white parents have organized to get books banned, to outlaw anti-racism training, and to undo centuries of hard-fought progress.
As I write this, half of the country has passed laws limiting the ability of schools to train their teachers in anti-racist practices. In the time in which I have committed my life to anti-racist change, I have felt pretty much every emotion imaginable. I have been afraid of driving past Confederate flags and plantations on my way to a rural workshop. I have been angry after being the target of misinformation and slander from white supremacists trying to discredit my work. I have felt joy and hope and love while watching the healing and liberatory nature of this work in schools. For the first time in my life, anti-racism work has broken my heart.
There is a part of me that won't stop crying for the fact that Dorothy had to face that crowd, and 66 years later people are using their positions of power to erase the fact that this happened from the history books. I say this all to emphasize that there is more work to be done. I have written this book for anyone and everyone who believes, like Dorothy did, that our students deserve an equitable education, no matter the cost. Dorothy Counts's story is not frequently told. It is a reminder to me that just because the history books don't remember you doesn't mean you didn't make a difference. In the end it's possible that not a single person remembers the name Matthew Kincaid or the work of Overcoming Racism. But just like Dorothy Counts, the change will endure. This book is for those courageous enough to pick up the torch that Dorothy, Ruby, the Little Rock Nine, and so many others lit and carry it, until our legs shake and our arms quiver, to its final destination. I know firsthand that the work ahead of us will be difficult, but I also know that it will be worth it. If teaching has taught me anything, it is that our students are the hope for the future and it's our job to build schools that are worthy of them.
Despite the crowd, Dorothy still marched forward. I cannot imagine the resolve that took. Who are we to turn around now?
Notes
1
. Toni Morrison, “A Humanist View,” Black Studies Center Public Dialogue. Pt. 2, Portland State University, Oregon Public Speakers Collection, May 30, 1975.
2
. Ella Baker, “Jeannette Rankin News Conference,” January 3, 1968, Washington, DC.
Chapter 1Setting Intention
Race is everything and nothing at the same time. Somehow calling race what it is—a social construct—feels wildly inaccurate when faced with the reality of what humanity has created and maintained. I couldn't have been more than five years old when I was introduced to the illogical nature of race.
I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, but went to majority white schools. Navigating these two worlds set up the foundation for this book. There is a common assumption that Black children first learn about race in the home, but my education on race came from school. It was actually my white teachers and peers who notified me that I was “Black” and it was also they who made me understand what being “Black” meant to many white Americans. At home everyone looked like me, most of the people in my neighborhood looked like me, and all of my extended family looked like me. Blackness was the norm and even at a young age I marveled at its beauty. Black love, Black family, Black ingenuity, Black excellence seemed to surround me at every turn. It wasn't until I started going to school that I learned the harsh lesson that many of my white peers were getting a different education on Blackness, or perhaps none at all; to this day I am not sure which is worse.
Perhaps my oldest memory of being in school is a white girl telling me that I could not play in the sandbox with the other children because I was “Black.” She stood on the edge of the sandbox, arms outstretched pressed authoritatively against my chest. Surely the teachers, also white, noticed that the only Black child was playing alone on the playground, but they couldn't be troubled to intervene. Later that evening I told my mom about the encounter as we were heading into church. She paused, knelt down, grasped my shoulders affectionately, and began to give me “the talk.”
At some point or another every Black parent in America has to have “the talk” with their children about what it means to be Black in America. There are rules. Some of the rules are to promote their child's success in an ecosystem that was not built with them in mind, but honestly most of the rules are about survival. I wonder what type of talk the young girl who guarded the sandbox was getting at home and if her parents knew that their hatefulness was spilling out of their young daughter at school. Looking back all of these years later after dedicating my life to teaching about race and racism, I am now firmly aware that the daughter's actions were the consequences of the education she received on race. This education had to be fundamentally different from mine.
In this way my first education on race came from my white teachers and peers. They taught me that being Black meant that I was “different.” They taught me the stereotypes that I would spend the rest of my life sidestepping. And they taught me that Blackness came with an entirely different set of rules and expectations. As I learned to navigate whiteness at school, I also learned intrinsically just how silly race and racism are. Most notably, I learned that everyone loses in this system and that ending systemic racism is not just about liberating people of color; it is perhaps principally about the liberation of people who are white. I grew to love a lot of my white classmates and teachers and many of them loved me back, but love is not a sufficient antidote to ignorance—education is.
I am writing this book all these years later for the kid who had to learn to be comfortable in his skin at school. I am writing this book so that teachers and school leaders can envision and actualize schools that are physically and psychologically safe for all learners, especially learners of color. I am writing this book because for far too long we have settled with “the way things are,” existing in a perpetual status quo in which large groups of students lose. I am not okay with this, and you probably aren't either if you picked up this book. Let's imagine a better present for our kids because their future depends on how we show up for them right now. It is my dream that we can no longer predict outcomes for students based on their race, gender, sexuality, class background, ability status—the list goes on. However, as Assata Shakur reminds us, “dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.”1 Let's act in accordance with our purpose and let's lead the revolution of teaching for freedom.
Intention Matters
Take a moment to reflect on why you picked up this book. Ask yourself what you were hoping to get out of the experience of engaging with this text. In this book we will examine strategies and principles that promote the development of schools and classrooms that serve all children. Doing this requires us to approach this text with intentionality. If we are going to promote justice in education, we have to be as intentional as the systems, structures, and policies that have supported and maintained injustice. This is no easy task. If we as educators can get this right, then the sacrifice will be worth it.
At Overcoming Racism, before we engage with participants in learning intensives, we first go over some operating agreements. We used to call this practice “norm setting,” but shifted to use of the word “agreements” because none of the learning in our intensives, or in this book, will stick if we cannot collectively agree to engage in a way that optimizes our learning together. Let's begin by examining the agreements, which will help you to get the most out of what this book has to offer.
Think of this as an active process. Reflect on whether you can agree to each of the following statements. Think about what it will require from you if the answer is yes, and reflect on what part of the agreement would need to change if the answer is no. Many of us signed up to be educators because we desire to positively impact the lives of young people while also playing our part in shaping our collective future. If you believe that our young people are too precious for us to continue to leave groups of children out, then continue to read. The journey ahead might be difficult, but belief is our first and most important hill to climb.
Agreement #1: Engage with Uncomfortable Truths
Year after year teachers go about the work of helping to raise the next generation. Of course our primary job is to educate them, but all teachers know that the job is so much more than that. Often, with inadequate resources and time, on any given day a teacher might be a parental figure, a counselor, a cheerleader, a nurse, a confidant. It takes a special person to sign up for and execute this job well. I like to believe that we don't see disparities because teachers, or students for that matter, don't care or aren't trying. Despite our best efforts, passion, and belief in our students, we still see students who have boundless potential fall short. This is an uncomfortable truth.
This book is going to engage a lot with uncomfortable truths. I will seek to tell the truth even when the truth might be hard to read. We will discuss topics that are uncomfortable and we will reflect on ourselves and our practice in ways that might unearth our complicity in systems that harm children. This can sometimes feel like it crosses the boundary between uncomfortable and unbearable. A part of the journey to find ourselves rooted in an education system that liberates students is first to liberate ourselves. This is not an easy process and it will require everyone reading this book to lean into and embrace the discomfort that comes with engaging with difficult truths. Truth comes before reconciliation, truth comes before justice, truth comes before freedom. The truth can hurt, but we can accomplish nothing until we learn to seek it with the same fervor with which we often run from it.
This comes up a lot in our work with teachers. Teachers are often already stressed and overburdened. Sometimes it feels easier to engage with the truths that make us comfortable. There are times in workshops when participants feel that, by being exposed to uncomfortable truths, we are dwelling on the negative, on what is, rather than discussing what could be. James Baldwin reminds us, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”2 We will face ourselves in this book. We will face the condition of the education system in this book. We will face the tragic history that builds the foundation on which we are educating our students. Facing the truth, though difficult, gives us the ability to control our own destiny and that of our students.
If you are feeling cognitive dissonance, that is normal. Think about how uncomfortable learning can be for some of our students. Reading this book will not always feel good. Remember to reflect on why you picked the book up in the first place; hopefully one of those reasons was to challenge yourself. We are often socialized to place our individual comforts over a greater sense of collective justice. This book is the antithesis of that: we must place the pursuit of justice over our individual desire for comfort in order to pursue the change that we seek. In this way discomfort is not an unintended consequence of this work but rather a necessary hill to climb. Think about the times in your life when you have made your most personal growth; chances are those growth spurts coincided with challenges and moments of discomfort. In these moments of discomfort, reflect on the source of that discomfort and on how you plan to work through it. The truth is the truth and it doesn't change simply because we are uncomfortable with it. We are the ones who have to change and adapt until we can realize the new reality that we are fighting for.
Engaging with the uncomfortable truth that, despite our best efforts, the education system that we are existing in right now is not equipped to serve the needs of all children gives us the foundation to radically reimagine what is possible. We will reference reimagination often in this book, but perhaps more than anything our actual practice is what defines outcomes for students. If we think of our students as mirrors, reflecting back to us both the beauty of our practice as well as its imperfections, it becomes easier to see that changing outcomes for the students we serve starts with changing what we see in that reflection. This book will discuss in no uncertain terms the harsh realities of systemic injustice and oppression and the role that these systems play in educational inequality. Because we live in a society in which frank discussions on issues of oppression are socially discouraged, it will likely feel uncomfortable how directly we discuss them in this book.
Agreement #2: Replace a Scarcity Mindset with a Possibility Mindset
Scarcity is a fundamental reality of life. Educators know scarcity all too well, whether supplementing the school’s budget with their own money to buy necessary supplies for their classrooms or trying to equitably share the limited number of minutes we have in our class with 30 different students with vastly different needs. A lot of our profession is about making masterpieces with what we have at our immediate disposal. We do an activity in our learning intensives in which we ask educators to envision what equity in education would look like. We preface this activity by asking participants to imagine without the constraints of a budget. We ask them to dream beyond what they think is possible or probable and to simply imagine what a school would look like, sound like, and feel like for students if equity were to truly be achieved.
This is a powerful activity because many of us are working toward an education system that we haven't even stopped to envision what it would actually look like if we were successful. It is almost like getting into your car and trying to drive to a destination without your GPS. You kind of know what it looks like but you have no idea how to get there. The most challenging part of this activity for our participants isn't the dreaming part; it is the fact that we ask educators to dream without limitations. Many of us are so conditioned to operate under real or perceived scarcity that we have lost some of our ability to dream beyond our own perceived limitations, or those of our students.
It is hard enough to change these systems that don't seem to want to budge without us making it harder on ourselves by buying a scarcity mindset. Especially when that mindset leads us to believe that if we are working to improve the experience for students whose needs have not been met for generations, that this somehow means we then need to choose a different student population to leave behind. If we engage in culturally responsive and sustaining practices in our classrooms that build self-esteem and improve performance for students of color, then somehow the opposite must now be happening for white students in the classroom. This is silly. This mindset has been one of the most consistent tools utilized to derail efforts for change. As long as we think of education as a zero-sum game in which some students win and others lose, we will always fall short of our calling. What are the material impacts of us deciding that we “can't make education equitable” because we don't know enough, we are not in the demographic of students, or because we are misaligned with leadership, or the like? At the end of the day our students need us to figure this out.
If there is one thing that teaching did for my life, it humbled me. It taught me how to empathize with how frustrating it can be to do something that is very hard over and over again. Failure is very hard for us as adults. For the most part, as we grow older we just stop doing the things that we aren't good at. Our students don't have that luxury, and for some of them, for various significant reasons, just showing up to school every day can be hard. Facing the anxiety of being a learner, especially in systems that weren't built with you in mind, can be extremely taxing. Existing in those environments daily, without having the agency to escape, could cause even the strongest of us to shut down. We ask students to do hard things on a daily basis. The goals we are hoping to accomplish in this book will require a lot of hard work. The genesis of this work starts in our mind. It starts with imagining what is possible rather than dwelling on all of the reasons our journey ahead will be difficult.
Agreement #3: Embrace Your Radical Imagination
This book is going to spend a lot of time discussing how we overcome the realities that systems of oppression place in our laps and the laps of our students. There are a lot of things that make facing systems of oppression extremely difficult. There are also a lot of things that work in our favor in this essential battle for the soul of our nation and its institutions. One of those things is that systems of oppression are predictable: patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, classism, the list goes on. All of these systems maintain themselves by engendering hopelessness in individuals who would otherwise use their power to advocate for justice and change.
Systems of oppression are literally designed to steal from us our ability to hope beyond our current lived reality. Have you ever stopped to think about how we define what is and isn't “radical”? It is radical to envision an education system in which all students have access to healthy food options for lunch, access to safe places to play, and so on. However, it is not radical
