On Re-Finding Ferocity: When there are no more lines to hold

It is nearing the end of the ‘24-25 school year; and while our current reality is not unprecedented, it is still painful: What do we do with all this hurt?

Thousands of children, caregivers, and die-hard teachers across the political spectrum are navigating a very new version of school.

What does it mean to hold the line in our current reality, where the freedom to teach and to learn is deeply complicated by policies, new legislation, and…fear?

Everyday, educators face new constraints to the thousands of decisions they make in daily classroom life. Legislated policies are shaping and inspiring public values, determining the kinds of texts, language, and curriculum teachers are able to use with students in their classrooms (ACLU, 2023).

These public values have infiltrated the very the ethos of who we are in schools, thus changing how our students be. What to do? What to do. WHAT TO DO!!?!

<Sigh.>

We cannot control others’ behavior, thoughts, or actions. But we still have a lot of power to control our own. We can still choose what we read and what we study; what kinds of questions we ask and who we commune with.

We can look back to find our way forward. We can question what we’ve been taught. We can look outside ourselves, connect with other sectors, and learn.

As I write this, I don’t mean to convey a tone of righteousness. Rather, I click this keypad with a sense of urgency: we are in the now. As in today, yesterday, tomorrow and likely the weeks and months to come now. Kids’ curiosity, imagination, and sheer will is threatened, and these experiences are reciprocated in teachers’ work now. The people who write, make and curate books are banned now. The people who study and publish research are defunded now.

You know those mottos, We all we got  and  No one is coming to save us? That’s our now. WE are it.

Our foremothers started in community, and they started with a plan. That said, I offer a brainstorming series over the next month or so.  I look forward to sharing, staying in touch, and rolling up my sleeves with y’all. I know that right now, we can continue to share ideas. I don’t have all the answers, but maybe if we all pour in, we’ll find our way forward. I offer the following brainstorm post below, as well as a journally-type worksheet accompaniment to develop momentum in our work.

Brainstorming session #1: To move forward, we must look back.

On Re-Finding Ferocity: Fierce Folx

There is a fierceness in some folx that I seek knowledge from. Not just to know for knowing’s sake, but to practice in real time, to change all kinds of things; to pour water and medicine on our very hard present; to cure the soil and plant something new.

Educators and thinkers from past to present have written extensively about their experiences with systemic constraints in schools and other oppressive structures in education. I think about Emma Goldman’s critique of factory-model schooling way back in 1906, in one of the first printings of her seminal social science magazine, Mother Earth; I consider Black sharecroppers’ quest to spread literacy in the South (Anderson, 2010; Givens, 2021), I read and reread James Baldwin’s messaging to teachers about grappling with American myths, I take Freire off my book shelves, carry his writing in my bag. I draw comfort and resolve from bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress in the early 2000’s, and Carla Shalaby’s recent call in Troublemakers for educators to practice freedom; specifically, powerfully, intentionally,  in schools…

When I’m feeling a thousand different things, or witness something I don’t have schema for, these folx help me find my way. I reread their words, let them flow into my consciousness, and more often than not, I feel a spark of inspiration. Sometimes, they give me just a tiny nudge of “keep-going” energy. I hope they might do the same for you. How might their conditions, ideas, and movements help us learn forward? Below, I offer some beloved lines and heartening descriptions of their work.

In 1906, Emma Goldman critiqued the education system’s reorganization in the magazine, Mother Earth:

The systems of education are being arranged into files, classified and numbered. They lack the strong fertile seed which, falling on rich soil, enables them to grow to great heights, they are worn and incapable of awakening spontaneity of character….Quantity is forced to take the place of quality. The consequences thereof are inevitable. (p. 9).

She, along with many other immigrant teachers during the First Red Scare, were later deported for speaking out against the Government. She continued to travel the world advocating for personal liberation for all people. Her quest for individual freedom continued throughout her life.

Between 1860-1935, Black sharecroppers worked endlessly to build educational experiences for their children. When corrupt Jim-Crow era government polices sent their tax dollars to fund white schools, they pooled together their own money  to create education for their own children (Anderson, 2010). Upon some of the first Black Reconstruction era schools, Booker T. Washington proclaims:

Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.

Educated Black people were overtly and publicly persecuted for displaying knowledge. As literacy rates grew among the Black population, so did lynchings (Sutch & Carter, 2006). Even so, the pursuance of literacy, joy, and liberation in education amongst Black folx has never ceased (Muhammad, 2020).

In 1961, James Baldwin, two months before JFK’s assassination, addresses the challenges of grappling with our nation’s history:

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence — the moral and political evidence — one is compelled to say that this is a backward society.

James Baldwin was not employed as a teacher himself. He was a writer, an artist, a powerful thinker– self-described “disturber of the peace” and “transatlantic commuter.” These lines, from his seminal text, A Talk to Teachers, live in the hearts of many teachers, and grace the syllabi of teacher-prep courses all across the land. If you’ve not read, it, please do!  

In 2017, Carla Shalaby, active Detroit educator, (alive and well today!), writes in her book, Troublemakers:

When I speak of a child’s right to freedom, I mean that by virtue of being human she is endowed with the unassailable right not to have any part of her personhood assaulted or stolen.  

I witnessed her work last summer. A constant refrain in my mind that comes from Carla’s community:

We keep each other safe.

Carla walks the walk, working in direct partnership with the University of Michigan, The Marsal Family School of Education and The School at Marygrove in Detroit Public Schools.  Her work focuses on the critical role that children and teachers play in the ongoing struggle for justice. She continues to go to P-12 school everyday with kids and teachers.

Paulo Freire, renowned Brazilian educator who firmly believed education should be used as an act of liberation, collectively!! Did you know he began his work in adult literacy education?  In the 70’s, he offered a framework for liberation via education in one of the most cited edu-texts of all time, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He says:

Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in the power to make and remake, to create and recreate, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is a privileged of an elite, but the birthright of all).

Freire carried out this ideology for his whole adult life, never backing down in the reciprocal nature between student and teacher – teacher as student. In all his work, on paper and in IRL, he made it known that there were always opportunities within the classroom space to become more fully human.

bell hooks’ teaching helps us understand that to create community in the classroom requires us to open up and love. More than that, she teaches us that the essential work of teaching is to transgress–to move beyond boundaries, parameters, constraints. In one of my favorite works, she says:

There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

bell hooks evokes deep wisdom, and generously offered her ideas and thoughts, her personal growth and wonderings to both strangers and familiars. We have so many understandings to gain from one another to help us make things different–not just on the page or in our minds, but in our lived reality, that hard-yet-tremendous present.

We can look at these blueprints and follow the unruly, non-linear map our forefolx and now-folx have left us: we grapple with American myths (Baldwin), we continue to question the system (Goldman), we find solutions, collectively, outside of institutions (Anderson), we accept our call to move beyond boundaries (hooks), we understand that our own freedoms are connected to others’ (Friere), and we move intentionally, thoughtfully, towards the regular practice of freedom in the everyday-ness of schools (Shalaby).

So…we move forward, less like a line, more like an amoeba.

Let’s keep going y’all. Like bell hooks says:

Even this yearning is a way to know.

*Develop and chart your own thoughts on this  journally-type worksheet accompaniment to this blog post to develop momentum in your work.*