I want to talk about the Blackfoot nation’s (an indigenous tribe) model of self-actualization. In psychology, and particularly educational psychology, “maslow’s” hierarchy of needs is often drawn upon to make sense of and provide direction to how students learn and can optimally learn. Duncan-Andrade notes this in his Google Talk, but still somehow misses the point. First of all, it is not an “inverted triangle” as he says. Duncan- Andrade makes sense of maslows work by saying that he change how he did, because “our society was soooo off from where it should be”. This is wrong, what Duncan- Andrade fails to note is that actually Maslow only created his rendition of the model to FIT the capitalist foundations of the united states. There is little “radical” about his “hierarchy of needs”, namely, it’s a hierarchy. He fails to recognize the value of connect and collective actualization, which still perpetuates the individualistic narrative of racial capitalism, and ultimately serves to oppress Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and AAPI people in different ways.

            First of all, Blackfoot Nation’s model is an inverted tipi- a THREE dimensional model, that actually is no hierarchy at all. Embedded at every aspect of the model is serving each of the needs, sense of belonging, and self-esteem (that maslow wrongly places hierarchically)—each of these aspects of wellbeing are achieved BOTH individually and in community simultaneously. Also, this is a model built by and for the Blackfoot Nation, it is a sacred way of life, that to now colonize in psychology and education is dangerously intrusive and disrespectful. I am all for cultures gatekeeping some shit, and this is one of them.

            The themes that are presented in the Blackfoot Model are reiterated and reflected in the discussion of critical hope and healing in this week’s readings as well. Critical hope and healing are inherently communal when cultivated by teachers. I wish the readings stressed this. To see yourself and grow critical consciousness IS a relational process, to be in relationship with yourself, with others, and community. It is to strengthen and sustain each of these relational bonds that support and in tandem encourage to be “committed agents  of change” (I.e. Yolo’s relationship with students) (Cammarota, 2011) through the relational pathways of critical consciousness, action, and wellbeing (Ginwright, 2011). Communal sustenance and wellbeing is predicated on cultivating each of these pathways all the while maintaining a critical hope relationally. And I don’t want to lose sight of that.

The readings this week highlighted for me how deeply ingrained individualism is within schools and within education discourse.  This was perhaps best encapsulated by Duncan-Andrade’s citation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – a framework that is hyper individualistic, where the top tier is self-actualization and focused on an individual’s needs within a single time frame.  I recently learned that Maslow stole his idea for this framework from the Blackfoot nation. However, because his ontological framework was situated in racial capitalism, he adapted and interpreted it through a lens of individualism and capitalism.  In the original framework, self-actualization is the foundation that built towards community actualization and then cultural perpetuity, expanding beyond both the individualistic scope of needs and the limitations of a single time frame or dimension of reality.  Indeed, the fact that meeting basic needs for survival needs to be explicitly stated or reminded about in a racial capitalist framework is because we have an individualistic rather than collective structure for society – it is not a given that every person should have their basic needs met, nor is it a requirement if the ultimate goal is individual attainment instead of community actualization or cultural perpetuity.

I appreciated Duncan-Andrade’s distinction between hokey, mythical, and deferred hope on the one hand and critical hope on the other, and found it a useful framing to analyze the kinds of “social justice” curriculum I see in my own school and in other “liberal” spaces – either teaching the kind of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” hokey or mythical hope that he describes as “profoundly ahistorical and depoliticized denial of suffering that is rooted in celebrating individual exceptions” (p. 184), or the damage-framed deferred hope that equates blackness with oppression, existing only through the white gaze, where teachers “have a critique of social inequality but cannot manifest this critique in any kind of transformative pedagogical project” (p. 184), leaving students both demoralized and without agency to exist fully as humans or to imagine or know that there are other ways of being.  Duncan-Andrade’s depiction of critical hope challenges both the ahistoricism and problematic damage-framework of these other types of hope by reconnecting us all to the “collective by struggling alongside one another” where “solidarity is the essential ingredient for ‘radical healing’” (p. 190).  However, by stating in his conclusion that critical hope is a “factor for improving achievement in urban schools” (p. 190), Duncan-Andrade still places his vision both as in service to individual achievement rather than collective liberation, and also as something only needed in “urban” settings, perpetuating a deficit framework that ignores the tremendous need for developing critical consciousness across all schools and for all children.  

This week’s readings reminded me that constant reflection and reframing are integral in interpreting the ways in which I react to and advocate for the rights of black and brown youth. I was reminded of the Black Lives Matter protest that has played an integral role in messaging the frustration that marginalized people in society are feeling. In my unpacking of the BLM movement, I accepted the protest as an absolute right and never interpreted my engagement with and understanding of the protest as acts of civic engagement. Ginswright (2011) discusses the limitations of qualifying what is considered civic engagement. As such conceptualizing what civic engagement “looks like” must be reimagined. Similarly, Cammorata (2011) also discusses the ability for youth to feel empowered once they’ve adopted a social justice perspective which would allow them to conceptualize that there are systemic forces that operate beyond them. 

Additioinally, Duncan-Andrade (2009) also makes a case for understanding that two things can be true at once suggesting that educators can engage in academic pedagogy and social justice simultaneously. Material hope which is a tenant of critical hope can be cultivated if educators reenvision their approach and connect their academic content to the lives of the students (Duncan-Andrade, 2009). While I agreed with some of Duncan-Andrade’s article, there was an undertone of a deficit-based lens that was used to describe and was in relation to “urban youth”. Simply put I could not connect fully with the article. Perhaps it’s something that I am struggling with as well, situating the demographic without appearing deficit-based. I just feel like when we discuss urban youth regardless of us speaking on hope there is this negative connotation to the ways that the lives of urban youth are portrayed. Is it just me?

This week’s readings and video left me thinking a lot about hope and how essential it is to cultivate a critical hope in ourselves as educators so that our classrooms become spaces of critical reflection and action. Critical reflection without hope is misery, and hope without critical reflection is false, a lie. “False hope would have us believe in individualized notions of success and suffering, but audacious hope demands that we reconnect to the collective by struggling alongside one another, sharing in the victories and the pain. This solidarity is the essential ingredient for “radical healing” (Ginwright, 2009), and healing is an often-overlooked factor for improving achievement in urban schools” (Duncan-Andrade). This week, I have also been thinking a lot about this idea – the idea of the illusion of individualism and the reality of collectivism. When we talk about critical hope, it means we are recognizing the system and our role in perpetuating or disrupting oppression. So much of the deficit rhetoric that we hear about students is directed at the individual, and it distracts us from critically analyzing the system. Critical hope, to me, means critically examining the system and critically exploring the opportunity that we all have at each moment to either perpetuate or disrupt, and the decision that we have to lean into acts of disruption. When we shift our thinking towards a more critical consciousness, or an awareness that our freedom is tied up in one another, we can experience empathy. We can feel empathy only when we genuinely understand and feel our connection to one another as human beings. By recognizing the humanity in ourselves and others, we can experience this collective solidarity and join in our collective fight. “Second, community organizations provide pathways to action, which compel individuals and collectives to claim power and control over sometimes daunting social conditions” (Ginwright). This quote speaks to the recognition of our role in collective suffering and victory as well as the NEED for us to work with our communities in this work, because we can’t do it alone. 

This week’s readings were a great reminder that when it comes to radical care, it is not enough to simply have high expectations for students and help them develop their critical consciousnesses. It is also important to instill a sense of hope in them so they have the energy and motivation to meet those high expectations and to make some changes in the world with their new critical consciousness. Take the Cammarota piece for example. If the instructor would have just shown care to their students and taught them that the special education classroom inequality was unjust but left out the hopefulness that it could change, then nothing would have change. Yolo’s rightful indignation would have remained as it was. It wouldn’t have turned into any meaningful action. However, their instructor gave them the hope and drive to do something about it, which led to an entire movement, and in the end, their demands were met. However, it is not enough to just teach our students hope, we also have to be hopeful ourselves, according to Duncan-Andrade. We have to have the same drive and hope for change that we are trying to create in our students.

I am looking forward to being able to take some time to unpack the Duncan-Andrade video that we watched. I, personally, found it strange and unsettling. I did not appreciate that he made such definitive claims about educational psychology, since the reality of the matter is that we do not actually know that much about how people learn. I also found it super creepy and fucked up that he recorded a students’ traumatic story and played for a big group of people. Like, yeah, maybe she consented to having it shared, but like what on earth did that add to what he was trying to say to the Google people? It didn’t add anything. It was just trauma porn for it’s own sake. And I hated it.

One particular section from the Yasso piece that caught my attention was when they were discussing how epistemic oppression along with white and upper/middle class-centered notions of capital value shaped policy and practice in the education of non-white children. The write:

” The assumption follows that People of Color ‘lack’ the social and cultural capital required for social mobility. As a result, schools most often work from this assumption in structuring ways to help ‘disadvantaged’ students whose race and class background has left them lacking necessary knowledge, social skills, abilities and cultural capital (see Valenzuela, 1999).

These ideas have been embedded in the mission and vision statements of almost every non-profit that I have worked for over the past 10 years. They have served as the basis for theories of change, program models and evaluation tools. They have been reinforced in the messages passed on to board members, funders, staff members, community partners and the communities themselves. I’ve sat in meetings with development teams that couldn’t even imagine ways to attract financial supports for programming without a deficit-based or savior narrative. Even when presenting with counternarratives or viable alternative, they insisted that it wouldn’t be “compelling” enough. It’s like our children are not deserving of meaningful, enriching programming unless it is there to “fix” them in some way. I’ve watched board members talk about how “lucky” our “needy” kids were because of the support of wealthy donors that allows them opportunities “they wouldn’t have otherwise”. It’s pervasive, infuriating and exhausting to fight every day.

Yosso (2005) was an interesting read for me. Like August mentioned in her post. I often struggle with capital. I think much of it has to do with the historical context of the word capital and the ways in which Black and which Black Have been made Into capital and treated as capital gain. It was really interesting to see and read about the way Yosso (2005) described the CRT “family tree”. I wonder how might we as a class Identify a position ourselves within the same tree.

Today I presented at the CUNY faculty diversity and inclusion conference. It was a presentation done the highlight of the Five tenants of Critical Race Theory. It was interesting to hear CUNY faculty talk about how to challenge the dominant ideology through social justice framework. It was also interesting that it seemed folks did not want to name white supremacy culture as the dominant culture. Yosso (2005) Offered some interesting insights on social capital and during the presentation it was also interesting to see and hear how faculty talk about using social capital as a means for promotions. Overall I think the concept of social capital Means a lot into capitalism and I’ll also believe that folks have used social capital as a form and a means for resistanceI think I multiple truths here.

I teach the Yosso text in my Social Foundations of education class. In discussion, my students often focus on linguistic capital because many of them have experience with their home language practices being devalued in most educational spaces. They feel excited by the opportunity to discuss what it means to disrupt assimilationist pressure felt by students and teachers of color. I hope the impact of those conversations goes beyond our class time.

I found the way Rodela and Rodriguez-Mojica text engages with the idea of resistant capital to be stretching beyond the definition advanced by Yosso. The examples given were of two women who resisted the gender norms of their home cultures in pursuit of their own educational and professional goals. This feels like a misrepresentation of Yosso’s application of the term. Because this article sought to make sense of the experiences of the participants through a cultural lens, I feel like the salience of gender was understated in relation to culture and ethnicity in the educational and professional realities faced by Teresa and Josie. Particularly, I wondered how much of the “directness critique” faced by one of the women was really about about her stepping outside of white norms of femininity than about anything inherent to her latinidad. I didn’t get the sense the men faced similar challenges.

I also found myself disappointed by Yosso’s framing of cultural capital being used in service of survival and resistance. Indeed the Black voices in her discussion highlight that these forms of capital support the survival and advancement of a people. That imagination is far beyond the limits of “survival” and “resistance”. Like Bettina Love said.. we want to do more than survive.

Yosso (2005) makes the case that “Cultural Wealth” should be acknowledged and respected as a contributing factor within communities that have always been researched as deficit-based. I agree with Yosso’s (2005) assertion that privileging and or centering Whiteness as the standard-bearers of epistemological contributions and “wealth” is problematic. As such Communities of Color should be seen as acknowledged for all that we bring into many spaces that we occupy. Similarly, Rodela and Rodriguez-Mojica (2020) not only acknowledge the brilliance of students but also consider the ability of Latin-X students to be resilient as a cultural strength. The truth is Communities of Color bring so much to all aspects of life from inventors to philosophers, greatness is within our DNA.

In addition to finding the readings interesting, I was also analytical about the words most often seen in articles like these specifically the term “resilIent”. I can’t help but ask if it’s fair for marginalized students to be inadvertently tasked with being resilient? Resiliency is a resource and people of color have no choice but to be resilient if they want to survive the evilness that is racism. But I am conflicted. I am conflicted because being resilient is exhausting. As both readings suggested the cultural wealth of Communities of Color should be acknowledged without Communities of Color being subjected to conformity in order to be respected. However here is my conflict, isn’t being resilient still conforming/accepting the holds of racism? Both readings make the case that the interconnected processes of social equity and education equity are inextricable from each other. The pervasiveness of racism is real and I am happy that the CDC recently recognized Racism as a public health crisis. Just as the articles suggested the deficit should not fall on the backs of Communities of Color.    

The readings this week definitely left me with mixed feelings and some questions. First, Yosso’s notion of community cultural wealth I feel is an important response to Bourdieu’s theory of “cultural capital” which has been used (or mis-used) in many cases to justify deficit beliefs about communities of color and to support the notion that they need “fixing” in order to better “fit” into capitalist society. A response to this theory or the mis-use of this theory is important. However, as my classmate’s have mentioned, placing the “community cultural wealth” into a similar paradigm as “cultural capital” similarly seems to reduce the humanity of communities of color to six categories of wealth, which still suggests that outside of these categories there is deficiency. It almost seems to reduce the inherent wealth and value of being human and makes it seem as though that needs justification and isn’t enough. I love Sohini’s connection to Audre Lorde’s words: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and agree that the framework of community cultural wealth seems to be born out of the same foundation (capitalism) as cultural wealth, and while they exist on different ends of the spectrum, they are still on the same spectrum. I wonder what it would be like to rebuild the entire house on a completely different foundation, where we wouldn’t need to justify or describe wealth because it was so clear and evident because our society was in touch with our humanity and the humanity of others. While that’s said, I do think there are some important contributions to the field that come from this piece. For example, Yosso claims that “CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged… CRT centers the research, pedagogy, and policy lens on Communities of Color and calls into question White middle class communities as the standard by which all others are judged (Yosso).” Acknowledging this shift in focus and redefining the “standards” that we use as a society to judge communities based on the white middle class is an important acknowledgment, and the six forms of capital help to shift the focus away from what’s wrong to all of the things that are right. However, I think in the new house that we build, we won’t have to justify or clarify one’s capital as being worthy because being human will be enough. 

The second reading this week was an excellent case study of school leadership. One quote that stood out to me was: “Just because we work for the whole, not the I, does not mean that our leadership is less important. At times, it is even more important. You can sound like you know everything, look so well put together and know nothing. That is the “I” culture, but this work is about relationships, this work is about people, this work is about kids” (Rodela & Rodriguez-Mojic). To me, this quote points to the most important aspect of leadership: relationships and dialogue. It made me think a lot about Freire’s approach to leadership, where the leader is in constant dialogue and continuously learning from those who she leads. Putting kids at the center and working in relationship with the school community is the only way to lead a school in a transformational way. While reading about the principals gave me a lot of hope, seeing the statistics on the number of Latinx school leaders compared to white leaders was disheartening and left me wondering about what next? Where do we go from here? How do we flip these numbers on their head? Why are these numbers so small? It made me think back to our readings about the history of Brown and the shift in leadership from leaders or color to predominantly white leaders and teachers in schools and it made me question what needs to be done to return to a community school model in which the school is led by community leaders that look like their students. This might also require rebuilding the house…