Remind me why do we want (cultural) capital, again? As I read both Yosso (2005) and Rodela & Rodriguez-Mojica (2019) I keep thinking about Audre Lorde’s words: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She also talks about how doing so only narrows the parameters of change that are possible and allowable and does not enable genuine change. The concern I have in reading this weeks’ texts is the danger of language and how powerful language can be through discourse in the use and implications of words for the realities of people. There are limits that are placed by using the framework of capitalism to discuss something inherently anti-capitalistic– community and indigenous cultural knowledges. The semantics of framing “Outsider”, mestiza, an transgressive knowledges as (cultural) “capital” is dangerous. As capital in a system of capitalism is capitalized—and that is exactly what is happening and what ends up happening from using a framework of oppression to make sense of indigenous knowledges, that persist in opposition to intersectional, colonial oppressions. August, I hear you– to then go on and discuss SIX forms of capital and call it community cultural “wealth” (again a capitalistic term) is entirely counter intuitive. I am new to this theory but have often heard “cultural capital” thrown around by educators as a justification for why ELL, predominantly non-white immigrant students from primarily working class families struggle in public school. And ultimately is used to promote assimilationist pedagogies and goals for those who do not fit the white-middle to upper class-english speaking-american student typology. At the same time, my concerns may be reduced to a disdain to semantics (although I see it as much more nuanced than simply semantics). I do want to recognize the insight that Yosso (2005) and Rodela & Rodriguez (2010) (through counternarratives) provide. Maintaining hope and dreams (aspirational), strengths as a multilingual (Linguistic) , cultural knowledge that hold communal history, memory, and intuition (familial), strength in relationships  (social), navigating spaces with resilience (navigational), and inherent resistance towards oppressions (resistant) among communities of color all still contribute to how we are theorizing about radical care. Radical care draws on these six areas that Yosso (2005) identifies and Rodela & Rodriguez (2019) extend in the counterstories of Latinx School Administrators, however to view them as “capital” and not integral components to the critical, radical care we imagine defeats the purpose. I am sure there are people out there in the world talking about what I am trying to say here much more articulately but I hope you get what I’m tryna say.

Y’all might need to take my cool-cat-education-researcher card for today’s take. But I have never been a big fan of the theory of community cultural wealth. I know all the CRT education people love it, but there is something about it that doesn’t sit right with me. Let me explain…

Capital only happens when someone starts to accumulate more resources than they actually need. The only way to get capital is through exploitation of others and exploitation of the planet. In my mind, capital is always going to be a bad thing. Capital is what you can extract from workers and the planet and hoard for yourself, to no end other than looking at your money or making more money. So this is how I read Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. As I understand Bourdieu, the theory of cultural capital was meant to be a critique/analysis of capitalism. Cultural capital is a unique feature of the bourgeoisie, it is not a good thing that we should be striving to give to everyone or mimic or replicate. It is something to be abolished, if possible. Class signaling through cultural capital is a means by which oppression operates.

Yosso briefly mentions the mis-readings of cultural capital theory. Basically, some liberals came along and mis-read what he was saying and interpreted it as saying that poor kids are deficient. Which, of course, meant that we have to fix the poor non-white children by giving them the cultural capital they need to succeed. But these efforts to provide students with cultural capital were misguided because they were rooted in a mis-understanding of what cultural capital is. So Yosso presents a new framework that highlights the strengths of students of color, but it does so by mimicking cultural capital. If you remember in my last paragraph, I claimed that cultural capital is not a good thing. So why would someone expand it to SIX KINDS OF CAPITAL and apply it to students of color, thus expanding it’s reach!? To me, the community cultural wealth theory/framework just allows (racial) capitalism to get off scott-free and further entrenches students of color in it’s bullshit. It seems to just want students of color to do better under capitalism, not to get rid this system that is partially causing their problems in the first place.

In my eyes, community cultural wealth is not a counternarrative to cultural capital, it is just including students of color in that same narrative.

Feel free to call me out if you feel like I am missing something or mis-representing something. I am open to learning to love community cultural wealth theory. But it has not captured me yet.

I really appreciated the synergy and alignment of this week’s articles and videos, all focused on counter-stories as radical care. Tara Yosso’s article on “Whose culture has capital?” takes a strong and welcome stance that the community cultural wealth framework she developed is intended to counter the all-too-common deficit views of communities and students of color.  She posits, instead, the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups and offers a compelling framework that outlines six kinds of capital (aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant) that comprise community cultural wealth.  Yosso’s framework draws heavily on Critical Race Theory, including the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings, William Tate, and Daniel Solórzano.

In the article by Katherine Rodela and Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica, we find a rich application of the Yosso framework to a research study on educational leadership in a specific and changing context (the Pacific Northwest—Oregon and Washington State).  The case studies, which include extensive quotes from interviews with four Latinx educational leaders, illustrate the relevance both of counternarratives and of Yosso’s expansive view of community cultural wealth.  It is heartening to read how “They often saw themselves in the students they serve now” (p. 300) and equally disheartening to learn about the many obstacles these educators face in their struggles with white administrators as they pursue an equity agenda that is often misunderstood or trivialized. 

The videos (The Graduates/Los Graduados) illustrate every form of community cultural capital described by Yosso, especially aspirational and familial, and offer the viewing public very strong counter-stories to those portrayed by Fox News (and too many others) about Latinx students and their families.  From a programmatic perspective, I was particularly intrigued by the interventions that seemed to be making a difference, such as Reality Changers in the San Diego episode and the Peer Jury approach used in Chicago—good examples of care in action. 

So what stood out for me in this work, as a future researcher, is how you got around the IRb part. I appreciate how you found different, non-traditional ways to effectively and meaningfully triangulate your work. There was a lot of public data that served as data in easy tha IRB data would have functioned. This served as a model for how to obtain needed data ttah IRb does not approve. 

Also, for Bowman, what stood out was the way in which he dealt with teacher-evaluations: “ This arose from a sense of urgency Johnson felt around getting it—the teaching and learning—right for his students. It also drove him to put his teachers on notice that after the first year of the new teacher evaluation rubric, he would be a “tougher grader.” His motivation was to inspire his teachers to excel in their practice. As he explained in the Johnson Bulletin, “The only way for us to be our best is if I push you to be your best.” Johnson’s view was that if he did his job well, the staff would lead themselves, and each other, to high standards of practice. This, Johnson believed, would lead to growth and excellence for students, as well.” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020, p. 23). This displays a commitment to communal excellence by not allowing teachers who don’t display authentic CARE for students in ways that contribute to student success (academic, personal, and communal) to continue to serve Black and brown students. This is because the well-being of his students, not policies, drove his decision-making. A concrete example of this manifested in his urging parents to have their students opt out of state testing. Moreover, this resistance led to genius hours where students were focused on work that was not related to state tests. 

In reading about the principal highlighted in this week’s readings, I was amazed by the level and care and dedication that he exhibited.  The ease with which he interacts with both the teachers and the students makes it feel like his school is the ideal place to learn and a perfect community to contribute to.  I was so moved by the call to action and invitation that he wrote to NYC leaders and educators following the release of Eric Garner that I read the section aloud to my colleagues.  

I also appreciated that Rosa included that the DOE “rejected a proposal to include student, parent and teacher participants in the study,” and that she used the NYCDOE School Survey data to “mitigate the limitation …”  This transparency was really helpful and meaningful for me. I have been thinking a lot about ways to include parent and teacher voice into the structure of the school.  Though there are more authentic ways than these surveys that are published on school websites, it is interesting to see the different ways that community voices are honored.  

Lastly, I just wanted to say how wonderful it is to look at positive counternarratives in this class.  I especially appreciate that Rosa wrote, “As a critical ethnographer (Madison, 2020), I am drawn to counternarratives of success to better understand the underlying qualities and characteristics of effective principals leading in urban schools, and to do so in a way that honors the individuals who have opened their leadership practice to scrutiny.”  Though many researchers assume that giving a platform to marginalized voices is always positive, I think that as researchers we have to be very careful at the frameworks that we use to interpret the communities that we enter into.  As Foucault said that “visibility is a trap.”  We have to recognize that putting people in the spotlight can be very dangerous.  As such, I appreciate that Rosa is looking for positive counterstories to highlight and learn from the good being done. I also found it interesting that Rosa highlighted the ways that she served the community.  I believe that it is important for researchers to not only give back to the places that they study, but that they write about it so that it becomes a regular practice. 

I am in AWE of radical care and hope. Lots of things stood out to me in the reading this week:

1. I love the review of literature of critical care and hope to create a framework for radical care. I shared this article with a lot of my colleagues to provide a brief, but solid foundation of what is meant by radical care.
2. DOE IRB rejecting the proposal to include students, parent, and teacher participants! Wow. Why?
3. High expectations of staff– this was very compelling as a component of critical caring in schools. Johnson’s high expectations of his staff may have been met by pushback, but by setting those same standards for staff as he did for students and himself, the movement towards radical care became a possibility, that otherwise may not have been.
4. I am in awe of the radical hope exhibited by Johnson frequently asking “what if…” or making statements like “I believe we can use education to change the world. I believe we can end poverty, wars, and hate in our lifetime”. This is a reflection of perhaps my own struggle in cultivating hope in resisting the violent dehumanization in our schools. I really struggle with holding onto my imagination– sometimes I worry that hope may become false hope in the face of a reality of oppression. Although this feels painful and even wrong to write– I find it hard to hope. This week’s reading has pushed me to reflect on and realize that i must do the internal work of holding onto that radical hope that I certainly once had, but let go in the process.

Looking forward to class today!!

I am so happy to jump into this conversation. Something that stood out for me was Rivera-McCutchin’s (2020) choice to place her positionality, under its own subheading, at the end of her methods section. I found this inspiring because it reminds the reader that there is no objective view of the research, ever. And hopefully, it reminds the reader to question the absence of this in so much research. In addition, it was interesting to see the choices that the author made in this section. I hope to learn more about this in class. How the author understands the value or power, in focusing on her stance (lens) in relation to the study, pointing to her world views, ways of being and knowing, the values and ethics that guide this work, and not the more typical detailing of identity that often dominates this section. This felt beautifully placed.

I appreciated Jane’s reflection on reciprocity. As this is something I’m highly interested in, something that was not explicitly discussed in the reading, and is often missing in research. It begs us to consider how questions of beneficence (Mangual Figueroa, 2014) that live within discussions of ethics may also be explored as an aspect of researcher care.

I was also drawn to concerns about the hierarchical structures that predominate in most schools. And it is unfortunate that due to IRB regulations, we don’t know how teachers, staff, families, and students perceived the situation. While Principal Johnson saw it as his responsibility to lead, inspire, and demand growth and excellence, I wonder who else in that school might have been interested to assume their own leadership roles. Who might have felt ready to take on curriculum work for example, and how this could have served as a source of support, strengthening the vision and mission for the school. Perhaps not achieving the consensus-based system that August described but increasing voice, power, and leadership amongst stakeholders.

Throughout the time I spent reading Rivera-McCutchen’s 2020 case study of the leadership of *Byron Johnson*, I kept returning to the phrase “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” In my experience, the vast majority of educators are motivated to enter the profession quite nobly. Overwhelmingly, teachers want to do something positive for society through their work. Unfortunately, a caring heart is insufficient in transformative approaches to education that center social justice. The radical care framework demonstrated through Johnson’s leadership combines the power of a caring heart and the application of hope and social/political strategy to enact material changes that influence students’ and teachers’ capacity for success. I appreciated the insight this article provided on Johnson’s reflective process to make it clear how he came to understand that his teachers needed more than encouragement from him and in fact needed material resources to successfully implement the vision for the school. When teachers were resisting pushes from Johnson to further tweak their teaching practices, Johnson initially responded by emphasizing his belief in their capacity to be successful. It was only after the meeting that he realized that he had to give his staff more than positive messaging and got to work assembling curriculum resources for them. Similarly, students need more than caring words of encouragement from their teachers. They need teachers who understand the material and structural realities that shape their students’ lives and provide meaningful support for them to achieve various academic and personal goals.

In a totally unrelated on-going conversation with myself, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the notion of deservingness as it relates to students and access to different kinds of learning experiences. In a commodified education landscape, high-quality, safe opportunities for intellectual development are often positioned as luxuries. It’s a sore point and I need to find more productive words for exploring my ideas here.

A couple of things stood out to me when reading the article this week.  First, I was struck by the fact that the IRB didn’t allow Rivera-McCutchen to include “student, parent, and teacher participants in the study” (p. 10).  Although she found other ways to include those voices into the study through surveys, I wonder about how much is limited in the scope of research by policies that refuse the inclusion of the voices of those most closely connected to, invested in, and affected by the spaces being researched.

I was also struck by Principal Johnson’s assessment of systemic racism in terms of pedagogy, when he noted that “schools in more privileged and White communities organized student learning in ways that encouraged choice and exploration, while low-income schools in communities of color emphasized standardization and testing” (p. 14).  His rejection of standardized testing seemed like a clear and explicit response, and in general his approach was bolstered by the radical care that Rivera-McCutchen defines – which centered on a sense of visionary optimism that allowed him to “strategically navigate a volatile bureaucratic landscape without losing sight of a vision of schooling that is grounded in antiracism and social justice” (p. 23), but then a set of grounded and relational practices when he realized that “encouragement, alone, was insufficient” (p. 21) to realize that vision.

Finally, I was struck by the discussions of teacher resistance to Johnson’s vision for the school.  I am wondering how much of that resistance comes from teacher’s own internalized (and racialized) sense of how school should be for their students, and how much came out of a lack of preparation or uncertainty about how to teach in a way that is different from the standardized forms of teaching that are replicated in teacher education programs. 

I am left thinking about all of the material and strategic obstacles that work to explicitly get in the way of authentically creating schools that are collaboratively, collectively, and “horizontally” imagined, designed, and evaluated.  From the explicit prohibition of including student, teacher, and parent voice in research, to the fact that teacher education programs run separately from principal programs, to the fundamentally vertical hierarchy of school systems, to the creation of policy by folks who are far removed from schools necessitating that individual principals must make decisions outside of that policy on their own, there are so many structures standing in the way. It was exciting to read about the ways that Principal Johnson operated outside of those structures to create a space of radical care for his students and school community. And I am left wondering what it would take to fundamentally dismantle those systemic obstacles.

Reading about SFSJ and Johnson’s leadership has left me feeling INSPIRED. The shift towards a radical care, a care that encompasses the tenets of critical care along with a radical hope seems to be ingredients for true and lasting change. How can we fight for sustained change if we can’t envision it? If we can dream of it? “Since Johnson viewed the education landscape as full of possibilities for liberation of marginalized communities, he was less inclined to feel constrained by policy and context than others might… Having a firm vision in “what could be,” therefore, drove Johnson to believe that anything was possible; rather than seeing constraints, he was solution-oriented…  It is essential, then, that the school leader maintains a level of intense and almost unbelievable optimism if they are to lead” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020). These three quotes really stuck out to me because they are powerful examples of the authentic and radical care that seemed to drive Johnson’s vision and leadership. From his “Johnson Bulletins” to the Community Circles to Johnson’s presence in the school and relationships with students, families and staff, this vision and commitment to hope, social justice and change seemed to be so embedded and genuine. The article speaks about Johnson’s support of his teaching staff and how he showed them care similarly to how he showed care to his students and their families. “Johnson came to understand that he needed to actively support teachers in order to help the students achieve success. He admitted to me that he was beginning to recognize that encouragement, alone, was insufficient” (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020). This quote and his commitment to supporting his school community left me wondering who supports him and how he receives care. One idea that came to mind was the reciprocal relationship he seemed to foster with his school community, but I wondered how someone with his incredible energy and commitment receives and is cared for to sustain that energy. I wonder how school leaders in general receive adequate support and care and if the lack of care for leaders could be contributing to the high turnover rates of leaders in the urban context. How can we foster more school communities by actively caring for more leaders like Johnson?