Rivera-McCutchin (2020) highlighted the fundamental shift that needs to occur in order for any call to action to be transformative and that is a commitment to social justice and anti-racism. Principal Johnson did not retreat in the face of racial and political injustice instead, he acknowledged the deleterious effects of police brutality on the psyche of black and brown children by planning conferences and organizing walk-outs (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020). Similarly, By Principal Johnson greeting students in the morning and humanizing their existence by asking about their family members and calling students by their names, he built a welcoming environment that took away front the notion that students are “just numbers/statistics” in his school showcasing what is referred to as “Authentic Care” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020). I was also impressed by Principal Johnson’s relationship with his staff. Creating a work environment that exercises authentic care is equally as important. As the survey indicated, teachers felt cared for, safe, and respected and it is that transference of energy that was cultivated in the weekly community circles (Rivera-McCuthen, 2020). Lastly, it was Principal Johnson’s intolerance and/or disbelief in mediocrity, authentic care, and commitment to social justice that pushed the school to function in optimal capacity so why is this so hard to infuse in our public school system at all levels? Why is it so difficult to infuse frameworks that work in our teacher education and school leadership programs? The reading and the aforementioned questions also have me wondering why questions of radical care are not included in our teacher certification exams?

Rivera-McCutchen’s (2020) case study was a change of pace for me. I enjoyed taking a pause from the dominant narrative of failed schools and leadership (p. 2). The article offered some interesting insights since I am familiar with the school through some organizing work in The Bronx. I particularly enjoyed the section on entering the field since it was the first time I got to see this section on a research study. It allowed me to understand the positionality of the researcher but also remind me to include this on future studies (my own positionality).

There’s something about this concept of radical care that caught my attention and I am now identifying ways in which to include this concept in my work going forward. Not only for my dissertation but for my work as a scholar and as a social worker. I need to do some more reflecting to fully understand what captivates me so much.

the section on Embracing a spirit of radical hope really landed well this week for me. I am still making my way through Bell Hooks (2002) “Teaching Community” and the chapter i just finished was on hope. Perhaps at some point I lost hope in being able to make small change (or change in general). We can both topple a system, and create spaces for folks to thrive within the system.

I have hope now.

Can the critical caring energies of a principal alone be enough to make a whole school a critical caring environment? This is what I am thinking about after reading about Principal Johnson. It is clear that he had a lot of energy, a lot of skill, and a clear vision that was firmly rooted in critical caring education. He hired his teachers because he felt they would also be critical care-ers. But even then, there were some tensions between his goals and the teachers’ means of achieving those goals. Which was a bit unexpected considering that he started the whole school himself and hired everyone. One would think that if someone so hands on basically built a school from the group up that there would be very little tension within the school. But the article we read this week showed glimpses of this tension. So it makes me wonder if it is a bit of a blunder to try to critically care outside of a collective. So maybe my question is more “Is critical care necessarily a collective practice?” Authentic caring between teachers and students has to be a bidirectional practice. Shouldn’t that same rule stand for the interactions between principals, communities, families, students, and teachers?

Something that keeps coming to mind as I write this is this study that I read when I was an undergraduate. It was about a Fae summer camp (for lack of a better term). In this space they had a firm rule that all decisions had to be unanimous. And they would sit and talk for hours and hours if they had to until they could come to consensus on something, even the smallest thing like who will do the dishes or who will cook breakfast in the morning. So I am wondering if critical care and radical care also might benefit from a similar consensus-based system. That everyone has to buy into and contribute to an idea before it can be carried out. Practically, it is impractical. But it’s honestly the only thing that feels right in my mind. How can critical care flourish in such a hierarchical structure? Can critical care flourish in such a hierarchical structure? Maybe it can flourish in hierarchy and I just have too many anarchist friends influencing my thoughts?

Radical Care Week #8/March 25, 2021

This week’s reading on radical care in urban school leadership provided a richly detailed case study of one principal and his leadership strategies—all of which were coherent and many of which seemed completely innovative.  The coherence was centered on the five components outlined by the author (p. 7): embracing a spirit of radical hope; adopting an anti-racist, social justice stance; cultivating authentic relationships; believing in students’ and teachers’ capacity for growth and excellence; and strategically navigating the sociopolitical and policy climate.  Several of Principal Byron Johnson’s (pseudonym) innovative and strategic decisions stood our for me: using his budget to hire student support staff—counselor, social worker, parent coordinator—rather than an assistant principal; placing himself outside his office on a regular basis, where he could simultaneously observe the school in its daily interactions, build relationships, and model the school’s values for teachers and students. 

I was struck also with the emphasis Johnson placed on exposure as a force in his own life, noting that his childhood move from the Bronx to the Upper East Side afforded him an opportunity to observe wildly divergent social and economic circumstances.  In my view, exposure is an under-investigated phenomenon that is part of the opportunity gap.  I remember hearing a third-grade teacher in the Bronx reporting on a question in the New York State ELA exam that stymied her students because it talked about “stained glass windows.” While most of her students were quite able to decode the words, they had no idea what the phrase meant—since the churches in their community were located mostly in storefronts.  This anecdote speaks to the cultural bias in standardized tests, for sure, but it also highlights the role of exposure in rounding out the education of all young people, especially those growing up in marginalized communities. 

One final observation: I appreciated the role of reciprocity in this account—that the researcher and principal met when the principal supervised a leadership intern from the researcher’s university; that the principal served as a willing research subject over two years; that the researcher was able to assist the principal in planning and implementing a citywide conference.  Clearly, both parties (as well as the field of education) benefitted from the partnership. 

Here is a pdf of the Jamboard we used on March 18th for our Critical Race Care activities.

Building off what others have shared here; I now understand that not only do we have different ways of caring but that deep misunderstandings and contradictions exist as to what caring entails. I found Valenzuela’s (1999) observations of competing forms of caring in Antrop-Gonzaléz & De Jesús’ (2006) particularly helpful. This idea of clashing expectations or understandings surfaced in various readings. In Rolón-Dow’s (2005) work, the authors CRT framework helped us see how this plays out beyond competing understandings of authenticity to how racism impacts how teachers and schools see students and families. When I hear stories about teachers like Mr. Rosenfield, who have come to understand why it would be best to teach in an orphanage, to see school as a good home away from a “bad home,” and have the audacity to ask another human being if they grew up in a barn, I wonder if CRT is enough to bring change to schools. Can this analysis, can our counterstories as people of color change deeply entrenched colonizjng and racist attitudes?

Antrop-Gonzaléz & De Jesús’ (2006) article raised other questions. Why do we always come back to soft and hard when talking about meeting the needs of students and communities of color? Why is lack of care or wisdom, what the authors describe as the problematic “Ay bendito syndrome,” characterized by a teacher’s feelings of pity that result in the lowering of expectations for students of color, described as soft? Simultaneously, I don’t agree that the other extreme, in which teachers come to form authentic relationships and hold high expectations can best be described as hard. I think we need to examine what underlying assumptions these words hold. I think we need to question the belief that students of color need “hard” structures and systems to excel. And to reimagine soft caring, as one that implies being in a mutually educational, dialogic, flexible, highly nuanced, open to change, and emotional relationship with another. It was important to see this issue of soft caring, one that absolves teachers from holding high expectations for students of color, in Rivera-McCutchen’s (2012) work. We see a new possibility, between hard and soft, in the author’s calling for a bridging between the affective and academic needs of students. The authors this week all argue for the type of space, home, or community that students describe at El Puente Academy (2006).

Basically, what these readings reinforced for me is that there are different ways to care. The communities that we as  educators come from have direct impacts on the ways in which we envision and practice caring. Moreover, the communities we come from affect who we see as capable of producing care or worthy of receiving care. These works highlighted, specifically the Dolon-Row (2005) piece, how race and racism affect the ways in which educators and school administrators care. While these works cover who cares, how they care, and why they care, the works still don’t address the issue we’ve been asking about all semester: how do we teach empathy? In other words, how do we teach people to care about us if they don’t see us or interact with us outside of school settings and racialized media images? 

Valenzuela (1999), who builds upon Nodding’s (1984) care-centered work, articulates differences between authentic and aesthetic caring. Too often, educators from mismatched communities to the ones they serve focus on aesthetic caring.  Ariel Tichnor-Wagner & Danielle Allen (2016) go further in developing a Typology of Care Framework. The framework helps “carers” understand how their type of care may be received by students. But how can caring authentic and hard care be imbued into educators that have radically different social and racial experiences than the students they serve? Aldfe (2002)r, DeJesus (2006), and Rivera McuCthern (2012) all argue that caring starts with a nurturing environment where students know they matter and are supported by the educator and holds/challenges students to achieve high levels of academic success. 

The readings and video this week made me think a lot about the fundamental purpose of schools, and who gets to determine and measure that purpose.  In particular, they made me think about the concept of standards and standardized structures in schools – who designs them, who enforces them, and who determines how they are evaluated.  Ultimately, it brought me back to our discussion last week of the danger of false “neutrality”.  Standards aren’t neutral and conceptions of care aren’t neutral, and so no single school structure, standard, or evaluative tool can be used alone or uncritically. 

This was most clear in the readings in terms of the concept of care.  It is clear that concepts of care are always filtered through the lens of the individual enacting the care – their positionality, relationship, race, and position of power.  As Antrop-Gonzalez and De Jesus (2006) explain, the “colorblind assumptions” of a White feminism define caring as “emotion-laden practice characterized by low expectations motivated by taking pity on students’ social circumstances,” (p. 411).  This is the kind of caring that Rivera-McCutchen (2012) describes as prevalent in her study of Highbridge High School.  As she notes – “without a fundamental belief that students are capable, the other qualities the literature identifies as part of a caring framework…are ultimately secondary” (p. 677).  Indeed, the White savior definition of caring is steeped in the racist ideologies of who is intelligent or capable. 

However, it is not possible to simply establish a set of policies or structures to address this fundamental difference in defining caring, because policies and structures are not neutral.  For example – in Rivera-McCutchen’s (2012) study of Highbridge school, teachers continual extending of deadlines was an example of this problematic form of caring – not in and of itself, but rather because “there was little evidence to suggest that teachers believed students would ultimately be capable of meeting standards without the additional leniency” (p. 675).  In contrast, a student in Antrop-Gonzalez and De Jesus’ (2006) study shares that a teacher’s flexibility was framed in the knowledge and belief in the students’ capacity – “I remember when I got a ‘C’ on a test. The teacher told me that I could’ve done better so he let me take the test again. I thought that was cool because it showed me that the teacher cared about me.” (p. 426).  As they explain, high expectations and academic press are not necessarily “extreme academic pressure, high-stakes testing or other humiliating practices aimed at raising test scores” but rather are “communicated through the patient investment of time and the creation of reciprocal obligations between students and facilitators as an important and active form of social capital.” (p. 426).

Further, if teachers demonstrate care by holding students to high standards, but those standards are problematic, how can that be considered critical care?  In the practices that Curry (2016) describes a powerful ritual implemented by the school as part of its “critical carino”.  However, some of the standards established for that experience – the “professionalism” of dress and language – upheld problematic and white-washed ideologies presented as neutral. As Curry writes, “firewalks through their symbolic endorsement of dominant, meritocratic paradigms as evidenced in ‘‘dressing for success,’’ the reification of a college education as the ticket to becoming valued, and bootstrap remarks like ‘‘You can do whatever you want to do!’’ or ‘‘The power is in your hands!’’ may be viewed as mechanisms propping up the status quo and co-opting students into false consciousness” (p. 909).  

This came up also in the powerful video about parent organizing in the Bronx, and work of CC9 and the CEJ coalition. The Lead Teacher program worked precisely because it was guided by the knowledge, care, and expertise of parents coupled with the support of other institutions taking their cues from them.  The parents established the standards – the goals of the program and the method of evaluating it – the parents conducted the interviews, devised the questions, and developed the “rating system, what we were looking for.”  Just like the description at the start of the video – “They [the parents] knew best. They were their children.”  The parents set the tone for what was most valuable and important, and then worked with educators they identified as having the qualities that were most important to design the measures of “good teaching” that would ensure the best for their children. However, when this program was taken and replicated by the DOE – the same institution that created and implemented the systems that the CC9 were fighting against – it lost the fundamental and central feature that made it successful – the specific and explicit input and structural power and decision making by the parents whose children were in that school.

As both the Antrop-Gonzalez and DeJesus article, and the parent video, make very clear – you cannot simply take a structure or a program and replicate it out of context.  Small schools alone are not the solution for authentic caring (p. 410) – indeed the size of the schools were not the defining feature, but rather the fact that they “were established by Puerto Rican/Latino community activists, revolutionaries and educators to address educational crises in their communities created precisely by urban school districts” and that “the relevance and quality of instruction and the interpersonal relations that form inside these schools is far more significant than their size” (p. 410).  A Lead-Teacher program alone is not the solution – instead, the allocations of power to parents, the alignment of goals for their children out of the most authentic kind of caring, and the contextualized and specific knowledge and expertise were what made it successful.

I am left wondering – is it possible to design universal standards and structures for schools that don’t replicate or reify oppressive and violent ideologies?  What would it mean for standards to always be designed, informed, or measured by coalitions of young people and adults – to have horizontal relationships (Tichnor-Wagner and Allen) set the goals and standards – for students and teachers and administrators? To include young people in both of those processes?

Hey everyone!

I also sent an email about this, so you can ignore this if you saw that. If everyone could fill out this form before class, that would be great! It asks about which readings you completed and might be interested in looking at more closely. It will help Sohini and I create maximally enjoyable breakout groups for class tonight!

Thank you!

August

There was a clear distinction made this week between “soft” and “hard” care that really spoke to me. Teachers who exhibit “soft care” are “Sympathetic … teachers who take pity on students’ social circumstances may have good intentions, but this may ultimately harm students as it lowers academic expectations” (Tichnor-Wagner & Allen, 2016, p. 410). On the other hand, hard care is seen as “…the combination of high expectations for academic performance that teachers place upon students (Katz, 1999) and [the] supportive, instrumental relationships between students and teachers” (Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus, p. 423). There is a fine line between soft and hard care and reading about the two concepts along with the examples of both displayed in schools further pushed my thinking. To embody hard care is to believe that our students are intellectually capable of rigorous learning. It is to believe they are capable, set high expectations, and then support them in reaching those expectations by building strong relationships grounded in trust. “Unless there is a fundamental belief that students are intellectually capable of meeting rigorous standards, other forms of caring will not work. Teachers may believe that lowering standards for students is caring when, in fact, they are inadvertently holding students back” (Rivera-McCutchen, p. 676). This quote demonstrates the necessity of mindset and belief in our students’ capabilities as a starting point for hard care. It also points to the challenge that I see in teachers adopting hard care in their classrooms, which is the confusion that lowering the bar and making the work less rigorous can feel or appear to look like care. I think that in order to embrace a firm belief in our students’ abilities, a critical examination of the role that race plays systemically in preventing some groups historically from accessing educational opportunities is imperative. “A critical care praxis begins by acknowledging that, to care for students of color in the United States, we must seek to understand the role that race/ ethnicity has played in shaping and defining the sociocultural and political conditions of their communities… To critically care for students, it is also imperative to interrogate and seek to alter the ways in which educational care is unequally distributed along racial/ethnic line” (Rolon-Dow, p. 104, 107). It is in this interrogation that we are able to acknowledge how systems of oppression have impacted our students and ourselves. It is through this interrogation, I believe, that we are able to check our own mindsets and when and if they are impacting the expectations that we are setting for our students. 

School leaders play an integral role in cultivating a culture of critical care in our schools. By making “changes to the vision that they promote and the programs they introduce in order to support their school in (a) forging strong interpersonal relationships between students, faculty, and administration and (b) holding high expectations for student success in high school and beyond” (Tichnor-Wagner & Allen, 2016, p. 410), leaders are able to ensure that teachers are moving towards hard care and are adopting a mindset and pedagogy grounded in critical care. I am left wondering about how school leaders can model hard care with their staff and how important it is that they uphold and model high expectations for their teachers so that it can trickle down to students.