Monthly Archives: June 2019

By Tracy Castro-Gill

Re-blogged from The Teacher Activist

I don’t think there would be much opposition to the following statement:

Social hierarchies of any kind result in oppression. Period.

When I teach my sixth graders about ancient history, one of the first concepts I introduce them to is that of the social hierarchy compared to the ideas of tribalism and egalitarianism. Haters will say, “But, wait! Ancient tribal societies were not egalitarian!” Yes, I know this, that’s why I said, “tribalism and egalitarianism.” While I know that many tribal structures include some type of a hierarchy, it is much less rigid than the hierarchies created by larger civilizations.

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY AND COMPARISON OF TRIBAL VS STATE HIERARCHIES

Francis Fukiyama, in his book The Origins of Political Order; From prehuman times to the French Revolution, does a great job of breaking down the differences between tribal and state governments. He does this mostly by describing the different ways in which personal property was valued, regulated, and shared. In tribal societies, personal property, mostly in the form of land holdings, was strategically traded between tribes, usually through marriage arrangements. Using this method required a sense of community and trust between different tribal governments. Yes, there were gender hierarchies and class hierarchies, but there was still a sense of family and community because of the cooperation between tribes. The leaders were in community and were familiar with the community, if not liked or loved by them. Leaders who lost the trust of the community lost power.

Fukiyama compares three ancient cultures and outlines when and why they went from tribal governments to state governments. All three, China, India, and Europe, started with tribal governments. The shift to state government came in waves in China because the tribal organization was so deep and the geography so wide. India remained largely tribal until it was invaded and occupied by European nation-states. Interestingly, Fukiyama points out that Europe’s transformation was the swiftest and strongest because of Christianity. Individualism, as discussed in the last blog post, and adherence to law are two important tenets of Christianity, especially after Reformation, and since early monarchies and Church leadership were virtually inseparable, Church law was law. This created a shift in how personal property was defined. It became more of an individual ownership and not something that is shared within community or to build alliances between communities. It laid the foundations for capitalism and individual gain over the common good. It also set the leaders apart from the people. Power was transferred to wealth instead of community agreements.

Through invasion, occupation, and colonization, other cultures eventually took on similar state governments creating the social hierarchies we are familiar with today: capitalist oligarchies, totalitarian dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, democratic socialism, etc. Those are just the state hierarchies. There are still the gender and class hierarchies, and we’ve added racial hierarchies. There are institutional hierarchies as well. I want to address the last few here, but as you can see… it’s going to take a while, which is why I’ve split this topic into a four part series.

DECOLONIZING THE CLASSROOM BY DISMANTLING CLASSROOM HIERARCHIES

“I am asking you to actively work to dismantle racial, class, gender, and institutional hierarchies in the classroom, in your school building, and in your school district.”

In part one of this series, I want to begin to argue that decolonizing our schools can’t happen unless we actively work to dismantle these hierarchies. No, I’m not asking you to dismantle capitalist oligarchies (though I believe if we do what I am suggesting, that will be a natural consequence). I am asking you to actively work to dismantle racial, class, gender, and institutional hierarchies in the classroom, in your school building, and in your school district. Until we do, we are still colonizing our students and each other. I will start with the classroom. Part two will address school and district-wide hierarchies, part three will address higher education, specifically in school administration preparation programs, and part four will be a reflection on how I’ve worked to dismantle hierarchies in my classroom.

Paolo Freire tells us that liberation requires a “praxis.” This can be defined as “theory in practice.” Recently, I learned from the leaders of the Mexican-American studies program in Tucson that the Aztec word for this is Huitzilopochtli, which translates to “hummingbird on the left.” It is taken to mean acting from the heart. Freire writes at length about what it takes to be a revolutionary leader. He says, “… but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis… Revolutionary praxis is a unity, and the leaders cannot treat the oppressed as their possession.” How can leaders act from the heart if they are not only detached completely from the people they are trying to lead, but also feel they know better than the people? I, and Freire, argue that it’s impossible. That’s not leadership. That’s oppression, and the only way to avoid it is to dismantle the barriers created by hierarchies.

“Box checking educators are responsible for the rise of fascism in the United States.”

In the classroom, we are the leaders. We can further oppress our students, or lead them to praxis through education. I recognize that there are many of us in the profession who are box checkers. We show up, we check off the boxes for the standards we covered, and check off the boxes in our scope and sequence map, we collect a paycheck, and take our summer vacations. This is my official call to action: if you are this educator immediately cease and desist this practice! If you work with educators like this immediately organize educators who believe this is immoral and push those educators to immediately cease and desist their practice! Box checking educators are funneling our children into prisons, poverty, drugs, streets, and police brutality. Box checking educators are responsible for the rise of fascism in the United States. Box checking educators are killing public education.

We need to return to tribal values of community and cooperation through praxis and egalitarianism in our own practice. We must recognize that our students, regardless of age or ability, come into our classroom with an astounding wealth of knowledge, and for most of their lives, they have been told that their knowledge is not valid or not valuable simply because of their age. I am saying that this is a hierarchy; an institutional hierarchy, yes, because a classroom is part of a larger institution, but also an hierarchy based on age and perceived knowledge. I’ll go deeper into the perceived knowledge hierarchy in part three.

WHOSE KNOWLEDGE? THEIR KNOWLEDGE.

One of the first messages I give my students is that I see them. I see their lived experiences, and I value them as educators. I explain that I am at the front of the room only because I have the privileges of age and formal education, and that in no way makes me or my knowledge superior to theirs. I also share how much I love to learn with and from my students.

Dismantling hierarchies in the classroom requires a complete shift on the definition of knowledge. The human brain is wired to perceive the world and process knowledge through culture. From the moment we are born, how we interpret our experiences is painted by the culture we’re born into. Unfortunately, when we go to school to learn, we are expected to check those cultural perceptions at the door and allow teachers to fill our heads with the perceptions of white American cultural “knowledge.” Our brains become colonized.

I think it’s impossible for every educator to learn the culture of every student that is in front of us, and the beautiful consequence of dismantling age and knowledge hierarchies is that we don’t have to! Our students have what Dr. Anita Fernández refers to as “cultural wealth.” They bring with them all of the cultural knowledge and experiences of their communities. Learn from them! Don’t invalidate their knowledge! Utilize it! Value it! Teach your students the value of having diverse perspectives when solving problems and analyzing their world. You are there to give them resources and guide them. You’re not giving them wisdom, knowledge, or even a lens through which to see the world. They came to you already equipped with those things, but part of our own education has told us that they are ill equipped if it’s not the white way of doing things, and that children aren’t sophisticated enough to already have skills that we deem valuable.

LOVE AND HUMANITY

One thing I do think all educators have the responsibility to do is love their students. I love my students. I love who they are when they come to me. I love what they teach me and the joy they bring to my life. I love when they’re challenging and they push me to be a better human being. In order to fully dismantle hierarchies in the classroom we must love our students unconditionally. I have literally been laughed at in the past for suggesting this. It goes against what we’re taught – to be objective. Here’s another call to action: if you can’t love your students, get another job! If you know educators that don’t love their students, counsel them out of the profession!

If we don’t love and value our students, they won’t trust us as leaders. This is where we lose our kids. This is how we are funneling them into prisons or worse. Love your students! Be a valuable member of the classroom community. Don’t be a figurehead lecturing from behind a desk. Be with them. Learn with them. Commune with them. It’s not some hippy bullshit. It’s how we are meant to engage as human beings. Teaching and learning are part of the human experience, not some sterile, objective process.

Through unconditional love we can fully value the cultural wealth that our students bring to us and each other. When we love our students we see and build on their humanity, which is my goal as an educator. I’m not here to check boxes or prepare students for “college and beyond.” My goal is to grow human beings who value their humanity and the humanity of others. We’ve lost sight of that in education for a lot of reasons, mostly corporate ed reform, but that’s a blog post for another time.

“Dismantling classroom hierarchies through loving and valuing our students means empowering them to be change makers now, not after it’s too late.”

By practicing unconditional love and valuing the humanity of our students we are modeling the kind of human beings we want them to be – not become! Emphasis on now. Part of dismantling the hierarchy is showing students that their cultural wealth can be put to use now, not when they graduate or turn eighteen. They can change their world now. In kindergarten? Change how they treat one another. In 6th grade? Change school policies. In 11th grade? Change laws and perceptions in their community. Dismantling classroom hierarchies through loving and valuing our students means empowering them to be change makers now, not after it’s too late.

In partnership with the Creative Advantage, Seattle Public Schools teachers worked with guest teaching artists to develop Theater of the Oppressed strategies into Ethnic Studies classrooms. Pictured here: Ian Golash, Heather Griffin, Tracy Castro-Gill, Jéhan Òsanyìn, Lara Davis, Gail Sehlhorst, Jesse Hagopian, Jennifer Dunn Charlton, Rachel Atkins, Luke Azinger, Tina LaPadula, Tikka Sears.

by Jennifer Dunn Charlton

It is becoming clearer to me that Ethnic Studies is a mindset more than anything. It is the lens which we put on any particular subject or object of study. Once you understand the frameworks of the curriculum, any racial equity literate teacher could potentially deliver the content. But Ethnic Studies is not just content-it is a whole shift in the purpose and goal of education: Education for liberation-not assimilation. The challenge then becomes about moving away from traditional methods of content delivery and traditional assessments coded in white norms and what Paulo Freire referred to as “banking style education”. We remove barriers when we let go of high-pressure, independent assessments, but what do we replace it with? When I inform my students that we will be taking no tests, no quizzes and then ask students what they want to do instead, the default response is often a puzzled “give a PowerPoint presentation?” Students have been given so little autonomy over their own learning that they hardly know what to do-EVEN IN THE TENTH GRADE. Theater of the Oppressed (TO) is a gateway that leads to infinite possibilities beyond tests, quizzes, and PowerPoints.

In early spring 2019, I agreed to partner with a guest teacher to launch a series of lessons involving Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed in my humanities classroom. After meeting with the guest artist, we adapted lessons written by the Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies curriculum writers to incorporate TO moves. TO is a natural fit in the Ethnic Studies classroom because it transforms the room from passive consumption by spectators from traditional theater (and classroom?) space and everyone is a spect-actor. This can be a difficult shift for students who have learned to hide in the traditional classroom. Since everyone is involved simultaneously, no one can sit passively listening to a lecture, bubble in a long column of “C” on the quiz they didn’t prepare for or watching the clock for the class to end. Everyone is in because there is no “out.”

TO allows access to Ethnic Studies by making space to express through movements some of the things that are SO HARD TO SAY about topics like identity, privilege, indigeneity, white saviors, gentrification, etc. The work involves finding your real place in machines and confront your own role in perpetuating injustices-since we are all in the system-we are all guilty of complacency unless we as Mario Savio put it in his speech in front of his fellow students at Berkeley in 1964, “put our bodies upon the gears of the machine.”  

When I first agreed to pilot this work in partnership with Ethnic Studies, I worried that I would not be able to match the energy that experienced theater artists amaze me with, but by the second collaboration, I found myself almost talking over the teaching artist since I started having my own visions of how to help students create the motions and words in their work.

“We were preparing for real world communication needs without even realizing it.”

Over the weeks, a few days looked and felt similar: Warm up. Active machine or tableau work. Reflection. Warmups involved some fairly low stakes theater games. One game, red ball, uses imaginary balls of different colors being passed around a circle. Red ball requires making eye contact, listening, giving and receiving in a “gamified” format. We were preparing for real world communication needs without even realizing it.

The first full on TO activity we did together was build a machine. The machine represents the system; any system that we find ourselves inside of such as the patriarchy or racism. The machine that we rebuilt together was called the Machine of Gentrification. We first studied the Central District of Seattle by watching the music video “The Hood Ain’t the Same” by Draze and reading supporting articles and listening to a podcast about gentrification in Seattle housing and schools. We chose lyrics from the song that stuck out to us. Mine was “no white sheets but these suits and ties look the same to me.” Then we chose a gesture that would represent the words we were saying. After all coming up in partnerships with our gesture/word combinations, we moved into position on a pretend map of Seattle to identify where in the city this was happening and where we are in relation to the problem. We “ran the machine” in the order that we thought one thing was leading to another. This was very eye opening to students, “I think the machine of transformation really identified the problems we face and what it would look like if those problems were solved. It really got me thinking about how these problems are treated, where they’re located, and how our lives would be way different if these problems weren’t around.” -MH

Then we tried to imagine what the opposite of the problem would look like with our bodies. We created new gestures and words to demonstrate that change. This is where the magic happens. We identified a problem, imagined what we wanted to see instead and then we were able to explore different pathways to achieve the goal. Then we ran the machine sequentially with all of the moving parts cycling through problem, a change that needs to be made, and a solution. This was a little broad the first time we did it, but it absolutely led to students identifying real world problems that they were concerned about and helped them see ways in which they, as individuals, but also by forming alliances with other groups, could create change. I took photos and notes up on the overhead as they were creating all of this work.

We experimented in a few other activities such as tableau. In this activity, we built a tableau of the White Savior Complex. We read articles about different ways people accidentally or purposely do this in the world. Tableau is similar but different from Machines in that this activity involves identifying a problem, a change and a solution in the same way but differs in that it a robot style 3 pose sequence of movements as opposed to the machine which runs continuously with all of the parts moving at once. This was a good activity, since this class has a white majority. Had we just read about it, or even just discussed it, I don’t think it would have been as powerful as watching someone “act” a certain way and being able to see why it is problematic.

“Theatre of the Oppressed makes us ready to respond and ready for action.”

While I could (and probably will) write more extensively about all of the benefits of doing this work I really want to say this: TO makes us ready to respond and ready for action. In the first workshop I did to prepare for this work, it was suggested that this work is “acting like act-ivists until we become them.” I leaned into this energy to dive into topics that I am certain would have been harder for all students to engage in as a discussion and yet through TO, students were able to access the content, collaborate and create some truly meaningful projects using the same methodology that we developed in our theater work:  

The past few weeks have been very action-oriented. Students have organized open forums for the recent Abortion Legislation in several states, and also to some racist vandalism that happened inside the school among some really amazing other projects. These students have designed their own finals without feeling disengaged, left out, assimilated, bored or coerced. They are engaged in Freire’s “problem posing education”.

Follow Jennifer on Twitter @JenniferIsDunn

By Jesse Hagopian – Re-blogged from I Am An Educator

At the first NAACP Youth Coalition Racial Justice Conference on Saturday, ethnic studies teacher Jesse Hagopian and Superbowl champion/bestselling author Michael Bennett presented the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award (BEMSAA) to three of the most dynamic and powerful changemaking youth in Seattle.

The 2019 BEMSAA award winners are:

• Rena Mateja Walker Burr, Cleveland High School

Rena is an NAACP Youth Coalition leader  and one of the most outspoken leaders for ethnic studies and the Black Lives Matter at School movement.

• Khabirah Weddington, Garfield High School

Khabirah founded the Black Student Union at Madrona Elementary School and has served as the Garfield High School BSU president for the past three years. She has been a relentless advocate for Black students and lead many struggles for racial justice and initiatives to promote Black excellence.

• Cece Chan, Nathan Hale High School

Cece serves as the Nathan Hale’s representative on the NAACP-Youth Coalition and has been a leader in the struggle for ethnic studies and for the Black Lives Matter at School week of action. Cece has also recently finished a documentary about the struggle and promise of ethnic studies in the Seattle schools!

The Black Education Matters Student Activist Award (BEMSAA) offers a $1000 package to deserving Seattle public school students who demonstrates exceptional leadership in struggles for social justice, and against institutional racism.

Michael Bennett gave Rena the special Pennie Bennett award in the name of his mother saying,

“My mom worked in the school district for the last 30 years…Me and Jesse have been friends for a while and I wanted to be able to create an lasting award for Black education and give out an award out every year to represent what my mom believes in…My mom was looking at all the things you were doing and she said, that girls is amazing! And I’m lucky to be able to give this award to Rena!”

“I am so proud of this year’s winners of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award,” said BEMSAA director Jesse Hagopian. “They have all contributed greatly to undoing institutional racism in the schools and have demonstrated brave leadership in struggles for social justice.”

Past award winners have been among the most impactful student leaders in Seattle, including leading mass walkouts against president Trump’s inauguration, leading the successful movement for ORCA transportation cards for Seattle students, leading whole teams to take a knee during the national anthem, launching the NAACP Youth Coalition, leading movements for food justice, and more.

Ifrah Abshir , 2016 winner of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award, created this video to tell the 2019 winners what the award ment to her.

The BEMSAA award was started with funds Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian received in a settlement after suing the Seattle Police Department and the City of Seattle when he was wrongfully assaulted by a Seattle Police officer.

On MLK Day 2015, Jesse Hagopian was pepper sprayed in the face by a Seattle police officer without provocation. The incident occurred not long after Hagopian gave the final speech at the MLK Day community rally.

Visit http://www.BlackEducationMatters.org to learn more about the award or to nominate a youth leader.

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Jesse Hagopian teaches Ethnic Studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School and is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine. Jesse is the director of the “Black Education Matters Student Activist Award” and the co-editor of the new book, Teaching for Black Lives.  You can follow Jesse on Twitter or on his website, www.IAmAnEducator.com.