Re-Storying NDSG, Learning in Heart, Body, and Community: Report on NDSG 2020 in Chicago by the Co-Chairs

Abolitionist teaching is built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving. 

-Bettina Love

The NDSG 2020 Chicago meeting opened by inviting all into the aims the planning committee outlined:

    *Facilitate authentic, sustainable and healthy relationships through community building,

     *Learn about, experience, and practice radical love and collective healing, and

     *Develop a shared understanding of equity and collectively work within that framework. 

Chicago teachers welcomed NDSG 2020 to Chicago with stories of struggle and resilience. They spoke of their love and dreams for their students. They shared their rage that the students aren’t ensured the resources they need to learn freely. Chicago teachers struck last fall, and they continue to push the city  for critical resources like lower class sizes, mental health supports for students, and affordable housing.  During the strike, teachers experienced the pain of separation from their students and of people in downtown offices who spit and cursed at them for striking.  The Chicago teachers at NDSG wished NDSG folk had offered more support during that difficult time.  The teachers asked the gathered educators to watch out for how the narratives of the powerful play out in Chicago, and to listen to the voices of students and teachers for the truth we need to hear.  

The next morning, Kenwood Academy students came to perform spoken word and enter into conversation about their experiences in Chicago Public Schools.  Before their performance, they joined the NDSG educators in exploring the meeting’s throughlines of radical love, racial justice, collective healing, and liberatory pedagogy through a Block Party process.  An educator reflected on this session afterward as “a poignant way to engage artistic voice for consciousness raising in so many areas.”  The quotes discussed in the Block Party process, she said, “were a good way to have interaction that set the stage for “receiving” the words of the youth by creating familiarity with each other.”

In the afternoon, Dr. David Stovall joined us to support our collective focus on race in NDSG.  Underscoring the continuous nature of the fight for racial justice in our country and in our schools, in contrast to the occasional engagement of NDSG meetings, Dr. Stovall asked if this group is actually down to do the work. He set us up to move into our Racial Affinity Groups asking  the question, “How are we living in recognition of our participation in or our refusal of white supremacy in our respective areas?”   In the RAGs groups, which met three times over the course of the meeting, participants shared stories, questions, and challenges.  A teacher wrote afterward,  “the racial affinity group served as a release for healing collectively by sharing of the pains of systemic racism, within and outside NDSG.”  Holding space for healing included challenging one another and ourselves to confront white supremacy as it impacted the spaces we shared in the past and share now in the present.

Another key part of building shared knowledge and healing was the panel discussion format.  One panel, facilitated by Mara Sapon-Shevin, focused on the past, present, and future of NDSG, with speakers from different generations talking about the origins, long-time struggles, and achievements of NDSG, then current challenges, moving toward future possibilities.  Deborah Meier attended the first NDSG meeting in 1972, when activists came together in North Dakota to resist standardized testing in HeadStart, and  later, to talk about their work.  Mary Harris and Jay Featherstone emphasized the importance of the arts and play in the meetings.   Greta McHaney talked about the excitement, both loving and heated, of meetings where we deeply explored social issues and took action.  Marsha Herron talked about the impact of the group on her life and of dreams for a more connected future, and Mia Valdez Quellhorst shared how NDSG has influenced her and her understanding of what it means to teach and to learn.

The other panel focused on Chicago and Jackson teachers, who in addition to meeting up at NDSG Jackson 2019 and 2018, built connections over the past three years through email and zoom calls sharing restorative practices, strategies for confronting the challenges of teaching in under-resourced schools, and teachers’ own life stories.   Teachers on the panel included Carol Redfield-Mims, Rachael Nicholas, Yvette Vasquez, Martria Clifton, Stephanie Gates,  and David Stieber, moderated by David Wasserman. The teachers didn’t talk about instilling knowledge in young people. They talked about their own learning, struggle, and solidarity. They told of the pain of losing students.  With tremendous vulnerability, they identified a critical source of their anguish: the school system they are part of sets up the most vulnerable students for failure, prison, and death.  What is education for, when the hard work and love of teachers, family members, and the students themselves isn’t enough to counter the systematic onslaught on Black bodies in this country?

In Home Groups, educators talked about what  it means for Black students to matter, guided by passages from Bettina Love’s book We want to do more than survive.  How do we stop perpetuating the harm on Black and Brown children that is built into the systems we’re part of?  What would it look like for us to bring the focus we’re practicing here at NDSG, with our throughlines of radical love, collective healing, racial justice, and liberatory pedagogy, into our work in our respective spaces?  These discussions deepened as together, we considered the video* of the Detroit-based Boggs School Principal, Julia Putnam, addressing how the school prepares students for the world we want to create.

Throughout the meeting, participants collectively sustained an intention to practice emergent strategy. We had read passages of Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategy in advance of the meeting, and were holding the intention of  “moving at the speed of trust.” We were mindful of Brown’s guidance, “There is a conversation in the room that only these people in the room can have.  Find it.” In this spirit, we sought to “build the resilience by building the relationships,” in traditional NDSG spaces like Home Groups, RAGs, Works in Progress, and Open Space Technology.  We also made sure to have ample organized and unorganized Playtime and good food and drink, and grounded ourselves in the Love Pledge, in dancing, and in singing. 

As the end of the meeting neared, we engaged in processes to help us think together about what the future might look like for NDSG.  We collected into small groups through Open Space, and began sculpting some images of possible directions. These include centering youth leadership, fostering beloved community, critical revision of progressive education stances, engaging restorative processes, amplifying teachers’ stories, and digital community building.  In closing, the group decided that NDSG should meet next year, should continue, and should develop ways of staying more connected and strategically organized over the course of the year.  For example, educators might engage virtually in shared study over the course of the year, then convene in person at NDSG for broader cross-pollination and shaping new studies for the coming year.  

NDSG closed with a ritual of interdependent wisdom.  Participants committed to making the personal and collective changes needed for NDSG to deepen its anti-racist learning and to be centered in the leadership of people of color, and especially the leadership of young people of color.  We look forward to organizing next steps toward these ends.

NDSG 2020 Photo Gallery, graciously offered by Phyllis Bretholtz

*Julia Putnam was the keynote speaker at the University of Michigan’s 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Symposium. FULL VIDEO is here (Julia starts at 41:20). Enjoy!

 

Jackson-Chicago Restorative Justice Teachers’ Exchange

by Shanti Elliott and Carol Redfield-Mims, with Suzanne Amra, Maryam Bilal, Jereece M. Brown, Gael Byrnes, Martria Clifton, Kassandra Cosby, Olivia Cote, Shauna Davis, Roshunda Harris-Allen, Nicol Hemphill, Jacqueline McClendon-Griffin, and David Stieber

“People in Mississippi are good at doing things that have never been done.”

• Jackson Historian Mr. Franklin Figgers

“To know where you are as an individual and as part of a collective group, you have to know from where you came.”

• Chicago teacher Ms. Jereece Brown

In the fall of 2017, 14 teachers from Jackson, Mississippi and Chicago, Illinois began meeting to share stories of their cities and classrooms. They were preparing to participate in an annual meeting of educators focused on equity in education, called the North Dakota Study Group because it began in 1972 in North Dakota.  This year the Study Group meeting would be held in Jackson, hub of ongoing collective work for liberation and democracy, where the fight for fully funded, vibrant schools is understood to be a continuation of the Civil Rights work led by Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Bob Moses and other Mississippi leaders.

The North Dakota Study Group (NDSG) invites you to Jackson, Mississippi, a singular place in the African American struggle for emancipation.  Rich historic sites in Jackson celebrate the courage, creativity and perseverance of activists who were part of Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement.  Jackson leaders of today are no less challenged by policies that condone violence, white supremacy, police brutality, and lack of access to healthcare, housing, jobs, and more.  Of particular concern for NDSG will be access to the emancipation that can occur through education, including our own emancipation from racism. https://ndsg2018.weebly.com/

The teachers of Jackson and Chicago, two cities joined by a common legacy of Black resistance to systemic racism, sought to build conversation and relationship between their students in the months leading up to the Jackson NDSG meeting.  A Jackson teacher described her goal in participating, “to partner with schools doing the work of transforming our schools as a place for cooperative learning and students to benefit from these new opportunities.” A Chicago teacher noted,

The first thing that comes to mind is my students’ family connections to Mississippi, and the history of migration from Mississippi to Chicago. We could learn about each others’ family histories, migration and non-migration – comparing and contrasting life and social justice issues between the two communities. A project could take form through many angles – by reading literature/art of each community, by researching family histories and migration trends, analyzing the impact of individual choices and the impact of the environment, etc. I am in charge of initiating our first year-end “capstone” project, and I see a collaboration as a unique learning experience that that provides leadership and collaborative possibilities for students in both locations

(Teacher application, Jackson-Chicago Teachers’ Exchange, Fall 2017).

In Jackson and in Chicago, public schools are under-funded, over-tested, and racked by the broader economic and social issues of their cities. The schools are also full of curious students, visionary teachers, and committed family members who teach and learn in powerful ways that are disregarded by the deficit narrative about public education, and especially public education in Jackson and Chicago.  They share a vibrant history and current reality of communities who organize social change around love for and protection of young people. So, while teachers were interested in building relationships between their classrooms, they also shared a vision for dignity in schools, authentic community-based learning, and social justice.

For the first several months, meetings were held online and by telephone, so that participants could learn about each other’s interests and teaching approaches, and share challenges each teacher experienced in their own contexts.  The teachers taught diverse subjects and grade levels, but quickly found that they shared a commitment to restorative practices as a support for improving relationships between students and between students and teachers.

Over the course of the year, the Jackson teachers traveled around the country deepening their understanding of restorative justice. They brought back to JPS new methods and perspectives and led peace circle training for students, teachers, and parents in the district.  Meanwhile, Chicago teachers practiced restorative justice in their contexts, with the support of professional learning offered by youth leaders of VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education).  The teachers from the two cities talked periodically, sharing new learning, questions, and applications in their schools.  In one public example of the teachers’ exchange,  Jackson teacher Dr. Roshunda Allen and Chicago teacher Mr. David Stieber connected in a Facebook Live chat to discuss educational issues impacting educators in Jackson and in Chicago.  For instance, they reflected on the racial disparities underlying current public attention to gun violence in schools: “gun violence has been impacting communities of color for years but it is only now after a shooting at a white school that everyone seems to care.”  The educators’ dialogue emboldened them to develop an analysis of the impact of systemic injustice on their students and bring it to a more public stage, to promote education that values the lives and believes in the dreams of all students.

To prepare for the Study Group meeting, teachers steeped themselves in Civil Rights history as well as current realities.  With the rest of NDSG, they read I’ve Got the Light of Freedom,  Jackson Rising, A Different Kind of Takeover for JPS, and other Readings.  They came to the February 15-18, 2018 Study Group meeting in Jackson primed, as NDSG’s invitation urged, to think about personal experiences in relation to a legacy of white supremacy in this country and to engage in conversations about education based in equity and justice.  NDSG Jackson Host and Institute for Democratic Education in America Director Albert Sykes challenged participants to ask, “How do we put ourselves in the story?  It’s not about coming to Jackson,” he said, “it’s about sinking in to Jackson. Not a drive-by, but a serious focus on race, on equity. If we can see what’s happening, we can know where we are.”

In February 2018, educators from all over the country came to Jackson with questions about national education policy and practice paired with intentional inquiry into the city’s local context: How can we learn to be in this place fully and respectfully?  How does my being here help me learn more about myself and my world? How does it impact my students when I follow Ella Baker’s lead, and sit at the feet of people who stood up when pushed down? What does a grassroots approach to change look like in education and in politics?

Participants of the meeting visited the Civil Rights Museum and the NAACP, mourned Medgar Evers and the thousands of victims of white supremacist violence, and at the venerable
HBCU Tougaloo College, sat together in conversation about approaches to education that combat racism and grow what keynote speaker Ms. Rukia Lumumba called “collective genius.”  She sparked questions for educators: Why hasn’t it been part of my education, to vision and dream? Who is served by my obedience to the accountability systems that are in place in my area? Why do I perpetuate approaches to education that don’t ground students and teachers in their capacities to collectively, boldly, creatively vision?

The Study Group focused on challenges to equity in education, in a context where the state has condemned Jackson students to what Mr. Albert Sykes names, “a sharecropper’s education.”  Local leaders situated the vulnerabilities of the school system.  They noted that the threatened state takeover of the schools stemmed from the fact that “Jackson never healed the gaping wound of slavery and Jim Crow.”  They also emphasized the resilience and resourcefulness of the people of Mississippi, whose work led to the Voting Rights Act and other critical social advances.  In the 1960s, local leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer took on the national Democratic Party though they couldn’t vote themselves. Dignity and collective power was embedded in the buildings like the building NDSG met in, home to CORE, NAACP, SNCC, and many local Civil Rights organizations. We were in, they made it clear, sacred space.

At Tougaloo, the Jackson and Chicago teachers held a fishbowl conversation, surrounded by NDSG colleagues from all over the country.  Chicago teacher Ms. Martria Clifton talked about the importance of students sharing stories, being able to say: “Here’s who I am, where I’m from. Here’s what’s going on in our schools.”   Jackson teacher Ms. Olivia Cote responded, “we need to create the space for students to explore their identity and be proud of their identity. To share with students who look like them in another area is a way to build their identities up.”  The teachers shared approaches to community-based civic engagement: Teachers and students researching their communities, oral histories, studying statistics through histories of local housing, and restorative practices in the classroom and community.

NDSG colleagues sat in a circle around the teachers.  They listened closely, then offered observations and support:

“This is a critical platform for building dialogue.”

“How are you building trust amongst yourselves? When educators take the time to do this, it models relationship-building for your students.”

“A seed has been planted. Protect it.  People try to trample on seeds before they have a chance to grow.”

“Unlike the vertical power structures that organize many of our institutions, this is horizontal development – teachers unfolding the lives and the wisdom of teachers.”

“Create the conditions of a no-whine zone. That’s what we’re not doing. Hold up the work of a child with each other.”

In her reflection on the Jackson-Chicago Teachers’ Exchange, Chicago teacher Ms. Shauna Davis wrote, “By exposing and encouraging students to have conversations with a different population than they are used to, we are helping them learn and grow into productive global citizens.  We are empowering them to take chances and get to know people, no matter how big or small the difference is.”  She emphasizes that supporting students’ development as global citizens requires that educators engage in a particular kind of preparation, one that is deeply reflective and influenced by community-based processes:

I am developing my practice as a culturally sustaining educator.  I am learning how to actively communicate with adults and students about race and injustices that are happening in the world.  Living in a large city, we are constantly observing injustices on people of color.  Students and adults need opportunities to discuss what is happening to us and our students.  I am learning through NDSG how to hold and lead these conversations, as well as sharing this information with colleagues so that they can have these conversations with their students too. Through NDSG I am gaining confidence in my abilities and a supportive community (networking) to become a leader in my school community.

We look forward to continuing the Teachers’ Exchange, where educators share their learning with one another and with their students, and invite students into the process of learning about the history, issues, challenges, and connections with the other city.

* The Jackson-Chicago Teacher Exchange is supported by the Mississippi Association of Educators and Chicago Public School’s Department of Social Science and Civic Engagement.

Borderlands Consciousness- part 2

Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures.  By creating a new mythos – that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves and the way we behave – la mestiza creates a new consciousness.

–Gloria Anzaldúa

The photographer stepped out from behind the camera standing at the doorway of the classroom.  He leaned toward the class of 11^th graders and said, “Actually I want to say something to you.”  They looked at him.  Young and thin, he could have easily passed for a student in this school in the Texas border town of Hidalgo.  It was the first time I had heard him speak; for two days I had seen him only behind the camera.  He said something like this:

Where you’re from is important.  I grew up in Corpus Christi, not far from here.  I thought I had to leave my community to be successful: people would always badmouth it.  I have gotten the chance to travel a lot once I got to college, and see amazing places.  I meet new people when I travel, and I tell them about the culture of my community, about my roots.  When you’re traveling, you meet people who have never been to this area, who don’t know anything about it. You realize that what people will know of where you come from is what you tell them.  You tell the story of where you came from – you don’t need to keep telling the same old tired story.  The negative story about this area is only one story.  What is the story you want to tell?

Misael got me thinking about how much I accept others’ versions of reality rather than doing the creative work of describing reality for myself.  Misael’s words to his younger colleagues reminded me that going away and coming back helps us get the perspective we need to be able to recognize the stories of hope and determination and courage that make us who we really are.  When we’re at home, wrapped up in the familiar routines and worries, we forget that the reality we inhabit is a story.  When we go away, and look back home, the deeper resonances that lie within the voices of our families and communities can emerge.  Listening to them helps us to challenge the faceless authorities that dehumanize us.

After coming back from the 2016 North Dakota Study Group meeting in Texas, (“Movimiento Sin Fronteras/Movement Without Borders”), I have been thinking about why Misael, and other university students I talked to in South Texas, are so adamant about young people coming back to their communities.  I heard people talking about coming back as a kind of a border-crossing: an act that was not only geographic but also spiritual.  By seeking out the stories of their parents and grandparents, they are growing stronger understandings of love, commitment, education – as well as of racism and exploitation.  By speaking and hearing Spanish in educational spaces, they are standing up to a history of English-only school policies that demeaned their families. By learning Nahuatl language and literature, they are reclaiming wisdom that preceded the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and that expresses spiritual resistance to oppression.

I wondered what coming back might mean to the high school students in Hidalgo who were listening to Misael.

When I returned from South Texas, I shared with my teacher education class the video of the NDSG meeting there, created by Misael Ramirez and his colleagues Jesús Sierra and Arnulfo Segovia.  My students, who have been focusing on systems of racism in education, were inspired to learn about teachers and students deepening their understanding of community, place, and story.  They talked about how education based in humanizing relationships could counter testing oppression, corporate control of education, and other ways that schooling systems disrespect students’ lives.

Alongside the NDSG video, my co-teacher Marcus Campbell and I shared Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade’s “Roses in Concrete” Ted Talk, which emphasizes the importance of students in urban communities coming back to their communities, and “creating rose gardens.”  This was an important image for my students from marginalized communities, and also for students from privileged backgrounds, who are struggling to find their place as teachers in urban schools with students who don’t look like them.  Many of them are realizing that they are part of an education system that is structurally designed to benefit White people at the expense of communities of color, and they are asking how to challenge racism from within the education system.

One student, a young white woman from a wealthy community, realized that she unintentionally supports students’ marginalization when she assumes that they need to leave their communities to succeed:

This idea made me think of the volunteer work I have done with children from the inner city of Baltimore. My mindset working with them was always to help them get out, and essentially get into the world in which I exist. I think I have been conditioned by society to imagine my world, the mostly White world, as the ultimate goal. I sincerely wanted to help these children, but in my mind helping them was getting them into my world and leaving their world behind.

Though these realizations are painful, they are also liberating.  For my student coming to terms with the assumptions she had made, “coming back” means value and dignity.  She is coming to question her “helping” narrative, which distorts who her students are and who she can be with them.  The more she learns to respect where her students come from, the more she can know of their reality – and of her own.  Her stories are changing; her range of meaning is expanding and deepening. To quote South Texas native Gloria Anzaldúa, “Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

Learning from Grace Lee Boggs

In honor of Grace Lee Boggs, who passed last week at a tremendous 100 years old, I am posting an excerpt from my book, which was influenced by meeting Grace and studying her work in Detroit.  This section of the book focuses on the North Dakota Study Group meeting in Detroit in 2014, which was hosted by Grace and other Detroit activists and educators.

When educators and students cross borders between schools and between schools and real life and between hierarchically divided groupings of age, race, and culture, they are taking part in the democratic work of coalition building.  I offer here a brief sketch of a group that has practiced democratic coalition building continuously over the course of generations, and between generations.  A strong collective history of community organizing in social justice movements enables North Dakota Study Group (NDSG) participants to recognize and nurture organic connections between the different constituencies in and around schools – from parents to policy makers to community organizations.  By choosing to fight for the dignity of every child in every community, following the lead of the families in these communities while remaining aware of their own identities, these democratic educators step outside of prescribed roles and foster a new kind of freedom.

Learning in Community Partnerships

Instead of trying to bully young people to remain in classrooms isolated from the community and structured to prepare them to become cogs in the existing economic system, we need to recognize that the reason why so many young people drop out of inner-city schools is because they are voting with their feet against an educational system that sorts, tracks, tests, and certifies them like products of a factory because it was created for the age of industrialization.  They are crying out for the kind of education that gives them opportunities to exercise their creative energies because it values them as whole human beings.

–Grace Lee Boggs

I will touch on a moment from my own experience at a NDSG meeting to provide an example of how school-community exchange leads to greater understanding of student learning.  Every time I attend one of these NDSG meetings, I hear stories of young people taking leadership and exchanging wisdom with elders in their home contexts, whether in Texas or New Orleans or Hawa’ii.  The young people describing artfully designed partnerships with older generations have deeply influenced my thinking about education.

The 2014 meeting was in Detroit, at the invitation of Grace Lee Boggs, a powerful social justice leader almost 100 years old, who along with other Detroit community organizers and educators introduced NDSG to the work Detroiters were doing “re-imagining and re-storying” the city.  In the weeks leading up to the conference, participants read articles like James Boggs’ “Community Building: An Idea Whose Time has Come,” which argues,

our first priority must be the rebuilding or the regeneration of our communities because it is in community that human beings have always found their personhood or their human identity as persons.  You can’t find your human identity out there by yourself.  It is in the community that our human identity is created because it is in the community that love, respect, and responsibility for one another are nurtured.  (2011, p. 334).

Grace Lee Boggs describes the growth of local community power in her speaking and writing as an “organically evolving cultural revolution.”  Detroit, like thousands of other local communities fighting for social justice, is “growing the soul” of interdependence and resistance to dehumanization.  “In ’this exquisitely connected world,’” Boggs writes, quoting Margaret Wheatley, “the real engine of change is never ‘critical mass;’ dramatic and systemic change begins with ‘critical connections’” (Boggs & Kurashige, 2011, p. 50).

At the 2014 meeting of the North Dakota Study Group, participants continued a many-year inquiry into the relationship between education and sustainability.  One of the community sites that participants had an opportunity to visit was EMEAC — Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council.  At EMEAC’s beautiful site, a gilded age era mansion called the Cass Corridor Commons, which houses several social justice organizations, leaders talked to a small group of educators not about plants and pollution but about learning, relationships, and personal growth as environmental issues.

At Cass Corridor Commons, young adult leaders from the community engage teenagers only a few years younger than them in “hip hop literacy.”  This community organization is not the kind of external partner that impose top-down change from outside of students’ experience, but the kind that supports critical analysis people in the schools may not have access to, such as structural analysis of race and power and interpersonal relationship building.

The young EMEAC leaders explained the educational premises of this literacy pedagogy to the assembled educators, who are mostly teachers a generation or two older and uneducated in the meaning of hip hop.

Hip hop literacy, we learn, presents the conditions and issues that are most real in young people’s lives within a critical framework that enables young people to construct meaning and connect with values that affirm them culturally and linguistically.  In hip hop art, “Maturity and power can be triggered through vocabulary,” Todd Ziegler, one of the young EMEAC leaders, explains.  Hip hop is a deeply democratic art, an expression of healing and hope: “Hip hop,” Todd narrated, referring to histories of violence in urban communities that drove people into isolated and fearful private spaces, “came out of people bringing people back on the street…bringing music outdoors…the message was, ‘stop staying indoors, come together!’” The hip hop modality of sampling is also democratic education: by setting iconic musical “texts” in new relations to each other and connecting them with contemporary rhythms and beats, hip hop music traces the knowledge and the histories that span the generations.  In this way, young people can connect to the cultural legacy of musical traditions of past generations like jazz and blues; hip hop puts them in dialogic relationship to past knowledge and power that they can build on.

Because they were so recently teenagers themselves, and were themselves mentored in empowering ways, these young community educators have powerful insights about liberatory educational relationships.  Through dialogue, conversation invoking values and recognizing capacities, drawing on what both adults and students know and don’t know, a learning exchange unfolds between educators and students.  In this reciprocal exchange, it isn’t “students’ learning” or “teachers learning,” but learning as the field that connects them.

As I listened, it seemed to me that this approach was more natural – and thus more possible – with young African-American leaders in educational relationships with African-American youth.  When I asked how this exchange might translate for white teachers of students of color, EMEAC leader Will Copeland responded with the story of a young white teacher who came to teach in the neighborhood school.  The first thing she did, he said, was learn where the young people spent their time out of school, and go there.  Even though she didn’t live in the community, she spent her free time in the community spaces where her students were.  She knew that she didn’t walk in the door with the kind of relational capital that a colleague who is a person of color might, and that she faced a steep learning curve.  By respecting students in their neighborhood environment, trust developed that could nurture strong reciprocal learning relationships.  This white teacher was doing her part in the “re-storying” of Detroit, by basing her teaching in the close company she kept with her African American students, in their neighborhood.

I highlight the educational work of EMEAC not as an exceptional program with exceptional people (though they are exceptional!), but as an example of the kind of local knowledge and democratic practices that thousands of ordinary people all over the country (and the world) are engaged in.  The social knowledge that blooms in grassroots organizations is a transformative resource for our schools, as the scores of schools in Detroit who partner with such organizations understand.

A speaker at the NDSG meeting later that day underscored what was so important in the approach the white teacher took in the Cass Corridor neighborhood.  Former Black Panther Ron Scott emphasized that unacknowledged racial tensions poison education in America.  Of education reformers who make claims about transforming kids and communities, he said, “we never put ourselves in uncomfortable situations to transform ourselves.”  “The charity model,” he continued, “created a dynamic we can’t handle.  It’s crippling.  You want to come into an area and you don’t want to respect the indigenous knowledge that’s already there – a wall goes up.”  Unlike the white teacher Will had talked about earlier, many educators as well as education policy makers assume that they are doing good without taking the time to learn how to enter a space respectfully.  In this way, a white supremacist master narrative remains unchallenged.

As Boggs and other NDSG leaders showed us, adult society needs to learn to take young people seriously, not only respecting their agency in their own lives, but also recognizing them as leaders who have an important role to play in democratic progress.  Instead of pinning them to individual measures on standardized scale, schools should be nurturing youths’ understanding of themselves as part of a vibrant collective leadership.  They should be helping students learn the language and methods of collective power.  We have the ability to change the rules that make up the structures of our individual and collective lives – and thereby change the structures themselves.

References

Boggs, G. L. & Kurashige, S. The next American revolution: Sustainable activism for the twenty-first century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2011).

Boggs, J. (2011).  Pages from a Black radical’s notebook: A James Boggs reader. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University.

— excerpted from Teaching and Learning on the Verge: Democratic Education in Action

For other writers’ posts on Grace Lee Boggs, click here.

Borderlands Consciousness

I have been living in a language carnival over the past month, with several very different languages rolling through me and around me, as well as new questions about what kind of language gives us access to our inner strengths and to other people.

February began with a visit my Immigration Justice Civic Engagement group made to Heartland Alliance, for a conversation exchange with the ESL students, who hailed from Burma, Iraq, Ethiopia, and many other countries. The people we talked with have refugee status, which entitles them to a few months of services like housing, English classes, and job training. Certainly, it isn’t enough time for people to be able to get their feet on the ground – yet, the fact that these services do still exist speaks to our country’s immigrant-welcoming heritage. But the contrast with immigrants who are not designated refugees is striking. I see people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico fleeing violence in their countries not welcomed and stabilized but put in jail and deported.

A painting I saw as I walked into a conference a couple of weeks later pointed to this problematic contradiction. The text on the yellow “Curious Jorge” poster read:

Syria= refugee
Darfur=refugee
Uganda=refugee
Afghanistan= refugee
Latin America = ILLEGAL ALIENS

For generations, this country has sorted immigrants into legal and illegal, deserving and undeserving – contributing to a contradictory relationship to immigration in this country, but also an unhealthy relationship to culture. At this conference I learned about approaches to culture, language, and education that are healthy and generative. “Embracing the borderlands consciousness,” the conference’s keynote speaker Monica Valadez said, “we gain strength.”

The conference was in McAllen, Texas, right on the border with Mexico, and it moved fluidly between English and Spanish. Francisco and Miguel Guajardo and their many colleagues, students, and family members hosted the 3-day event, the annual North Dakota Study Group meeting. Alongside coalition-building to organize against corporate-driven education, the people in the meeting – community organizers, teachers, students, and professors from South Texas and from all over the country – considered the relationship of language and culture, and the informal education associated with plática, which, the Guajardos’ students explained to me, is culturally grounded conversation.

Plática is learning that begins with one’s own experience, in connection with others, and grows outward from there; it leads to both keen critical analysis and deep cultural affirmation. Whereas much of academic discourse pretends to “objectivity” and disregards the specificity of people’s local, home, and inner experience, plática lives in human bodies and real space. The Guajardos write about plática as a base of their research, teaching, and writing, and learning plática from their parents:

The constant pedagogical tool was the plática, which made sense to us at every level. Plática was performed in language we understood, through an expressive cultural form that felt natural, and in a way that was respectful and affirming. It was a teaching and learning experience that conferred great privilege to our lives, the lives of our children, our students, and our communities (Guajardo & Guajardo 2013, p. 162).

This is language of learning that doesn’t stop at the doors of the school, but that affirms the human beings in home spaces as well as school spaces. The NDSG conference focuses on the power of school-community relationships, and the educators at the conference go out to learn from local community organizations in the same way that my Parker students do for their civic engagement learning. My group visited La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), the local United Farmworkers group founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. LUPE organizes in the colonias of the Rio Grande Valley, in which some 300,000 people live — and where they have to campaign to gain public services like lights, sanitation, and transportation. As LUPE’s sister organization Equal Voices Network emphasizes, organizers “bring the government to the people.” LUPE leaders gave us a handout that included this description of community organizing; it resonated with what I have been coming to understand about language:

Organizing does two central things to seek to rectify the problem of power imbalance – it builds a permanent base of people power so that dominant financial and institutional power can be challenged and held accountable to values of greater social, environmental, and economic justice; and, it transforms individuals and communities, making them mutually respectful co-creators of public life rather than passive objects of decisions made by others. — Mike Miller, Organize Training Center.

Language that is prescribed and controlled by faceless powers prevents people from developing as “co-creators of public life.” So, it’s no wonder that decision makers keep low-income and immigrant children in schools that ignore and devalue their home language, knowledge, and culture. Test-based education, just like English-only policies and de facto school segregation, ensures that the populace will be “passive objects of decisions made by others.” Local, place-based, culturally affirming practices, on the other hand, provides people with space to grow as human beings who see clearly, love fiercely, and act collectively for justice.