This week’s readings made me think about how positionality and identity affect perception.  Many of the article’s discussions of hard and soft caring showed how actions such as lowering standards may seem like caring to the teacher, but students perceive the opposite.  It made me think about what a delicate balance teaching, and really any meaningful relationship is.  It’s a constant swaying between pushing the student forward and pulling back.  Further, I wondered about how special education plays into this situation.  The best teachers I know have the skills and strategies in their back pocket that allows them to push students.  They believe enough in their own abilities as teachers and the abilities of their students that they are truly relentless.  

At the end of the day, though, no matter what the teacher intends, if the student feels as though the teacher does not care, then the outcome will be a lack of student learning and commitment.  

This truth about perception extends to adults as well.  I often feel as though administrators don’t care about me, my opinion or my work.  Just as students need teachers that offer critical care, teachers need principals that do the same. 

Another theme that emerged for me from these readings is that many of the wonderful schools and parent organizations grew out of a need that was not being met.  The Malcolm X quote at the end of the parent video highlights the need to turn our rage into action.  We see this in our small moments – students need teachers who will not just feel sorry for them, but will act in ways that will bolster their success, and in our larger activism – teachers and parents need to band together in order to make systemic changes.  The idea that change occurs in response to a low point reminds me of the conversation that we had the first day of class, in which we spoke about moments of caring in schools often occurring alongside a traumatic event or time in our lives.  

Lastly, I thought a lot about the positive surveillance practices that were described in the Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus article.  Those practices reminded me a lot of womanist and mothering practices.  For me, growing up, my grandmother watched all of her grandchildren incessantly.  It was impossible to do anything wrong because she would always know about it.  This practice of lovingly hovering with a sharp eye and a strong hand is common in many communities, especially marginalized ones in which the risk of permissiveness is greatest.  Many educational leaders, for instance, Ladson-Billings, have written at length about the positive impact of having so many kinfolk around that there was literally nowhere to hide.  

These readings also left me with a question about integration.  Do you think that some healing practices, such as culturally relevant curriculum and parental involvement, would work as well in an integrated school? 

I have started to write something and deleted it six times already. I have so much energy and many thoughts/feelings/emotions coming into class.

In short, the Video on “Parent Power” (CEJ, 2012) is very near and dear to my heart. I remember the day this was filmed and the number of times I shared this video to the parent organizers in the Bronx. The some of the folks in the short film I have marched with, cried at rallies with, sat next to on the Bus ride to the NYS capital, and still follow on social media. I was a Youth Organizer around the time this with filmed with UYC. UYC and CEJ share the same office space and were both apart of The Annenberg Institute. I wish CEJ would make another video to show all of the amazing work Parents did during the NYC Student Metro-card fight soon after this video was made.

Rivera-McCutchen (2012) & CEJ (2012) both empathize the value of parent voice in education. Rivera-McCutchen (2012) & CEJ (2012) this a step further to suggest that parents engaging in the experiences of student is a key aspect to the students success. CEJ (2012) suggests that parents who engage in the negative aspects of student experiences (Lack of school resources, metal detectors, loss of programs). CEJ (2012) engages with parents through social-political-activism scope to make change happen. Rivera-McCutchen’s (2012) findings also suggest that knowing the social-political context that impact the lives of students is an important factor to grasp.

I’ve often said that engaging in organizing as a high school student has taught me things about life that I will use until my time on earth is done. Below are some questions I am sitting with

1. Why are school struggling to form parent associations?
2. How might the NYCDOE include parent voices as of of the Panel for Education Policy?

Recognizing students for their cultural significance and all the contributions that they bring into the classroom not only affirms students but also, makes them part of the democratic process of schooling (Antrop-Gonzalez & Dejesus, 2006). The readings for this week highlighted that affirming students and teaching with authentic care are two factors that are inextricable from student success (Antrop-Gonzalez & Dejesus, 2006; Tichnor-Wagner & Allen, 2016). A point that was well made by Tichnor-Wagner & Allen (2016) is that exercising ethics of care is priceless as such, I question why it is so hard for teachers and school leaders to exercise care? In reading Rolon-Dow (2005) the point of understanding how race and class intersect with how students receive and interpret caring stood out tremendously. Similarly, I am reassured that “caring” cannot be forced onto educators instead, it must be demanded. More specifically, if educators aren’t able to care about the students they serve then they don’t deserve the right to teach. The aforementioned point of demanding caring educators is strong but the damage that has been done by those who don’t care has been worse. Students respond to caring environments provided that it is the right care as such they also respond to being held accountable because of established trust and the belief by their school leaders in their greatness (Curry, 2016; Rivera-McCutchen, 2012).

My final thought for this week has landed on the Community Control movement of 1966. Perhaps we need to disrupt public education and push for community control over our public school system? Can this ever happen? I know it’s happening in fragmented ways but, what if this was the way we “did” public education?

Radical Care Week #7/March 18, 2021

Of the many themes that emerged in this week’s readings, I want to explore—in this brief reflection—the role of parents in Critical (Race) Caring.  I started the assignments by reviewing the Parent Power video, which outlined the 15-year trajectory, including successes and challenges, of parent organizing in the Bronx, especially in District 9 through the Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 Schools. Despite some heart-breaking setbacks, including being rebuffed by then-Chancellor Harold Levy, the Bronx parents persisted and, over several years, were successful in generating reforms that included enhanced teacher development (financed by the district and supported by the United Federation of Teachers); citywide middle grade reform; and creation of new schools in high-need neighborhoods, among others.  Success factors included the energy and determination of the parent leaders and the supporting role played by the Annenberg Institute and by the non-profit community (e.g., New Settlement Apartments), serving as respectful allies who brought complementary skills to the collaborative table.

Parents make varied appearances in the readings.  Curry notes that parents are not included in the firewalk rite-of-passage ritual at a California high school, a decision that she analyzes at some length, weighing the pros and cons within the school’s context and observing, in her conclusion, that “when instituting such rites, practitioners may also want to address some of the tensions identified in this article, specifically the role of parents…” (915).   Rolón-Dow’s ethnographic study of Puerto Rican girls in an urban school presents some harsh and seemingly unwarranted judgments made by teachers about students’ parents—for example, Mr. Rosenfield’s beliefs “that students’ homes were bad and uncaring places,” which kept him from “joining in a collective effort to care for students” (97).  By way of contrast, Antrop-González & DeJesús cited examples of teachers and counselors reaching out to parents on behalf of students, enlisting parents’ help in keeping students on course.  As one student in this article observed: “They do that because they care about you.  They want you to succeed and accomplish all your work” (429).

Rivera-McCutchen uses “valuing parents as resources” as one of six basic categories of behaviors identified in the research literature on care theory that form the conceptual framework for her research at a small urban high school in New York City.  Her research documented a mixed picture on this aspect of the work: on the one hand, staff members made a critical effort to engage parents in the school experiences of their students; on the other hand, because the “teachers’ expectations for students were fairly low, they failed to capitalize on the parental relationships they had cultivated to create a stronger academic environment for their students” (671).  She goes on to observe that caring teachers must go beyond simply making connections with parents; they must seek to create relationships that “harness the families’ existing funds of knowledge as a building block for more traditional forms of learning” (671). 

Educational leadership conversations have been traditionally confined to school spaces, but the question is, why (Miller, Brown, Pons, 2011)?  Well, we need to think about the structures and actors involved to answer the question. The structures involved are: local, state, and federal government who provided support in the forms of funding and resources; schools and the school districts they rise in–ie, the educational industrial complex; and the private institutions/business that make up the corporate structure that have ushered in since the 1980’s the neoliberalization of education. Local communities have too often been left out of educational conversations, more specially educational leadership conversations. So back to the question of why, doing so disrupts the current ways power is wielded within these structures. For example, school budgets could spend money on community resources and experts to bridge the academic and communal divide between Black and Brown communities and White run schools  that exist in many Black and brown school districts. A Freirean approach to the educational inequities starts with recognizing the social conditions and inviting new actors to transcend traditional school-community boundaries. But this entails some type of group solidarity. And what these works don’t address is how to incite group solidarity. Yes, we know that groups can find shared experiences to ground their work. But how can educators who don’t have shared experiences as students magically become empathic to the needs of  students? Mismatched student/teacher/leadership demographics is part of the poisonous well of “structural racism that has systematically denied Black and Latinx students access to opportunities in schools” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2019). When leaders are from and care about communities, such as that of Bowman and Bloomberg, they can take action meaningful at the intersection of education, government, and community to disrupt structural racial inequity. 

One thought that kept surfacing as I read this week: Love is not neutral, it is and must be an act of justice. I reflect deeply on Freire’s words “Whether or not we are willing to overcome slips or inconsistencies, by living humility, lovingness, courage, tolerance, competence, decisiveness, patience-impatience, and verbal parsimony, we contribute to creating a happy, joyful school” (Freire, 1998, p. 212). Freire has always made me return to what it means to be human: our humanity. What has become of love in the capitalized, masculinized, white supremacist world has distanced greatly from a love that is core to our humanity. Each of the other readings this week reflect and take further the contributions of an epistemology, an ideology, and way of thinking that Freire grounds. Miller and colleagues (2011) argue and describe the ways in which love, hope, and humility are embedded within progressive pedagogical practice. And in Rivera-McCutchen (2019), the armed love of Principal Bowman in resisting the high stakes testing and Principal Bloomberg resisting racist resource allocation, truly confirms the notion that love must be a commitment towards resisting injustice. In reflecting on teaching practices and my own schooling of course, the seemingly political neutral “love” of teacher is never truly neutral, and wasn’t really love. I wonder really how neutrality is a trope that educators in my suburban town cling to in their teaching. I think a lot about what the conversations that we have in our class would mean to them? Would such conversations push them to conceive their role as a teacher differently? What happens when we begin to include the voices of suburban white middle aged women teachers in these conversations to developing radical care in the classroom? If they are primarily white teachers serving predominantly white schools, how will they realize that the work of critical care extends to their responsibility to deconstruct harmful assumptions of Anti-Blackness and capitalism that their white students are mostly likely entrenched in?

This week’s reading from Freire and the other works building on his writing did a great job articulating the deeply political nature of teaching. This holds true whether the educator is purposefully trying to be political or not. Ideally, of course, all educators would be aware that their career is a political one (and they would obviously have the exact same political ideologies as myself). However, it seems that embracing the role of teacher-activist is a rare occurrence. We saw in both the River-McCutchen piece and the Miller et all piece that fabulous things can happen when educational leaders lean into the politics of their work. Yet, I am still curious what goes on in the majority of classrooms and schools where teachers and leaders do not lean into their political roles. What political ideologies are conveyed to students when they’re never explicitly mentioned or embodied? What do students learn from a politics of neutrality? Is that better or worse or different than an explicitly right-wing or conservative politics?

This week’s readings reminded me of my long and patient relationship with Freire’s work. I was in my late teens when I first tried reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I remember feeling drawn to these concepts but overwhelmed. Although I’ve taken long breaks in between, I have never stopped coming back to his work, looking for new messages, strategies, strength, and hope. Along the way, I committed some of the mistakes that this week’s authors brought up, thinking that somehow, we should apply his methodologies to our current context. As Miller et al. notes, Freire has created a language, a set of categories and practices that we should not attempt to replicate but take what is useful to guide our own analysis and to use within our own educational contexts (p. 1087).

The authors this week helped me hear new ideas in his work. Miller et al.’s challenge that this work requires that we explore alternative actors and venues has stayed with me. That teachers and school leaders alone cannot do this work. That we need to see how our ties to schools constrict us. To examine how they limit how far we can go in our critique of the system, because of our fear of the repercussions. While community activists operating within their own communities benefit from their independence. As the authors explain, “Here institutional detachment (primarily from schools) emboldens liberal critiques of oppressive regimes” (p. 1088). This article made me think about the role community centers have played in strengthening Black communities. The type of centers and programs that Dr. Bettina Love (2019) credits with helping her to become more critical and thrive growing up. Spaces that were run by people from within the community, who were deeply embedded, knew the families, and cared for the youth. This feels so different from some of the community centers near me that feel more “outside businesses” than transformative. I keep thinking about the idea of community centers as likely sites for radical social change.

I’ll return to the topic of fear because it seems so vital. While this is something Freire directly addresses in his (2005) Letters to those who dare teach, reminding us that our courage cannot exist without it, Darder (2002) does a beautiful job exploring this relationship between our revolutionary dreams, fear, and courage. Fear as a signal that we are doing the work of disrupting the status quo. As a necessary and inevitable of this work, “The more you recognize your fear as a consequence of your attempt to practice your dream, the more you learn how to put into practice your dream” (p. 499). This brings me to the deep care and advocacy work taken principals in Rivera-McCutchen’s (2019) article on armed-love. While we see the courage required for them to challenge racial inequality they were witnessing in their schools, I now want to hear more. To become better armed in love by understanding how they worked with the fears that must have accompanied their courage in their fight for justice.

I really enjoyed this week’s readings, both because of their hopefulness and openness, and also because they engaged so many concepts that are often explicitly omitted or erased from the discourse about teaching and school reform – love, faith, and political action.  Each author built from Freire’s initial teaching to consider what it could mean to purposefully reenter those concepts to fundamentally transform the discourse.

In thinking about the role of political action, or “armed love” as named by Freire and Rivera-McCutchen, I thought about the common practice of telling teachers (and administrators) that they must be “apolitical,” or “neutral” in the classroom.  These calls to be “apolitical” are in reality calls for teachers to adhere to a very specific kind of politics.   The notion that it is possible to be apolitical (or neutral) is a political stance, and one that serves the interests of an oppressive school system (and by extension, the violent settler colonial logics that the school system upholds) – a stance that is easier for teachers and administrators who do not see their own humanity bound up in the liberation of all from oppression. As Rivera-McCutchen notes, “neutrality in the face of injustice, and particularly racial injustice, is unethical” (p. 244).

Freire directly addresses the question of a teacher’s position as a political agent in his discussions about fear and courage.  As he explains, “to the extent that I recognize that though an educator I am also a political agent, I can better understand why I fear and realize how far we still have to go to improve our democracy.”  His identity as a political agent is tied up with the notion of “armed love” – “the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce”.  Similarly, as Miller at el note, “Freire’s baseline discussions of love, humility, faith, hope, and solidarity … reintroduce language core to the human condition but foreign to the contemporary discourse on educational change” (p. 1091). This quote made me think about what Sohini wrote about and shared in the chat during class – that the violence of whiteness and settler colonial logics severs us from our innate human tendencies toward empathy and care, love and connection.  

And so the public school system in our country, which was hijacked and designed as a technology to uphold white settler colonial logics, necessarily needs to function to perpetuate the severing of those ties to our innate humanness – as political beings, as loving and complex beings, as relational and empathic beings – because settler colonial logics requires dehumanization, and the false definition of humanness based in ownership and domination.  The readings work together to show what it might look like to build a vision of schools, and larger communities, that are deeply connected to humanity in ways that seek to dismantle oppression, collectively.

One of the ideas from this week’s reading that really stuck with me was that of “armed love”. Freire (2005) notes that there must be a “lovingness” both towards students, but also for the work or practice of teaching. He writes, “It is indeed necessary, however, that this love be an “armed love,” the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce.” (Freire, 2005, pg. 209) This description of armed love reminded me of the markers of critical care uplifted by Wilson including “empathy, compassion, advocacy, systemic critique, perseverance and calculated risk-taking for the sake of justly serving students and improving schools.” (Wilson, 2011) It also reminds me of the Black Lives Matter principle of Loving Engagement. This principle calls on us to embody and practice “ justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.” (https://blmedu.wordpress.com/guiding-principles)

The descriptions of armed love, critical care, and loving engagement has me thinking about love as a practice in the context of education in the following ways:

• Love through Nurture
  • How are we creating spaces and engaging in interactions with students, educators, school workers and families that are compassionate, empathetic, welcoming, inclusive, supportive and thoughtful?
  • How are we creating spaces and engaging in interactions that affirm and take care of the true selves, hearts, minds, bodies, spirits and talents of every child, educator and family member?
  • How can we build a school culture focused on nurture and wellness?

• Love through Community
  • How are we building spaces that prioritize collaboration, cooperation, and collectivism?
  • How do we ensure that all voices are heard and honored? 

• Love through Curriculum and Instruction
  • What does love look like in the form of curriculum and instructional practice?
  • How can we make students feel loved and cared about through our curriculum and instructional practice?
  • How does culturally-responsive pedagogy and practice manifest as love in classrooms?

• Love through Resistance and Advocacy 
  • How are we pushing back on policies, practices and curriculum that are harmful, both in our respective schools, but also in the larger school systems?
  • How are we organizing and activating towards policies, practices, and curriculum that honor the identities, lived experiences, needs and wants of students, educators and families?
  • How are we addressing oppression and centering the agency of students and families?

A few questions that are lingering for me include:

• How do we get to the educational spaces and experiences that students, families, educators, and other school workers deserve when all of those with a stake cannot agree on what is right,  what to fight for, what to denounce and what to announce? 
• How can expressing “armed love” be sustainable in our current climate given the demands of teaching, ongoing learning and growth, family engagement, organizing and political activism?