Blog Archives
Responding with Awe
| Public schools are cornerstones of replicating and resisting traditions and behaviors. It is hard to imagine that when girls were finally allowed to wear pants to school in Delaware, it felt like liberation to middle-school me. Now, as more and more students strive for their autonomy and authenticity as early as preschool, teachers are stretching to meet them. One morning, a bewildered elementary teacher stopped me in the hallway to tell me she’d just gotten a call from a parent, wanting to know how the teacher would support her transgender child. “I’ve never had a transgender student,” she said, “what can you tell me?” Another day a teacher was flummoxed by a student changing their name and pronoun at least once a week. My first response was awe; it’s just so fabulous that kids have such imagination and willingness to explore. We talked about proceeding with curiosity and allowing for sometimes feeling awkward while trying to keep up. Hearing the N-word is always jarring, especially in school. When it happened on an elementary school playground, I suggested we start with the assumption that children don’t understand how hate festers and resides in a word, or they’re parroting words they hear outside school and in social media, without knowing the hurt they create. So instead of punishment, we talked about how words have the power to cause serious harm. This conversation grows as the young people do. I support educators to meet moments like these with warmth, curiosity, and a willingness to step in, engage, explain even if they don’t feel they have the perfect response. Get the conversation started at least; silence and politeness cause more harm, and there is a place for a hard ‘no.’ A colleague sent a slideshow about symbols for an art class. She wondered if she was getting it right. The beauty, meaning, and substance of symbols was all there and the point that, as with words, symbols portray a lot of power visually. As I pondered what’s missing I realized that some of those ancient designs had been stolen, desecrated, rebranded from the sacred to a clarion call of hate. I sent some examples and encouraged deep conversations with her classes. Teachers are under pressure from all sides to say and do and teach the right things, to offer content that is inclusive, expansive, flexible, more complex, and to engage with young people who are also quite complex. I don’t know anyone who isn’t afraid of making mistakes, and educators know their mistakes can cause more harm than others, so it’s understandable that some opt for silence rather than meeting the moment inelegantly, but definitively. That’s what I’m there to support. And they want to do it. As I work with educators, build relationships, listen to concerns and questions, I hear honest wonder: How do we engage students with relevant, diverse material, meet all the state requirements, satisfy the parents, and meet the students where they are? I hope you hear my respect for, and wonderment at, the stamina of educators – teachers, paraeducators, counselors, nurses, administrators, kitchen and maintenance staff. My work is to respond to their challenges with resources that work in real time, for real effect – and it’s also to encourage them to add joyous wonder to their work, and to be collaborative. I respond to their questions and challenges with curiosity and generosity and remind them of something the poet Maya Angelou said: “Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.” Kids love to know why. It is such a good query. What might we build together to inspire our students to keep asking that question, to find and reach their own unique stars? That’s the work, as I see it, of the scholar in residence. It’s the best, most frustrating, most amazing, work I’ve ever done. |
This piece was originally published in the Institute for Liberatory Innovation’s newsletter. The institute has grown into Humanityinpractice.org Please visit the Humanity in Practice’s new website to see the transformation.
Imagining New Worlds
When I first began contributing to a newsletter for my local school district, I explored heritage months: Black, Women’s, Arab American, Asian American & Pacific Islander, Jewish, LGBTQ+ Pride, Disability Pride, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous Peoples, and more. Of course, one month each is not enough to celebrate the history and complexity of each group, so these pieces were teasers, meant to inspire life-long learning.
In a recent post I commented on a line from the poem “Belief in Magic” by Dean Young. “The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.” Imagine. A document that holds dreams and powers we still hold dear was crafted with a feather. It is astonishing to think about.
Classrooms are wonderful places to learn to cherish the rights and values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Last week at an elementary school, members of their Humanity and Justice group created a learning opportunity about the history of Memorial Day. Everyone was welcome, as students learned about the Race Course, a Civil War prisoner of war camp in Charleston, South Carolina, notorious for its horrific conditions, and abandoned after the end of the war. Students learned about a group of formerly enslaved people who reburied Union Soldiers found in a mass grave there, and in honor of those they buried, declared that day Memorial Day.
The students read A Day For Rememberin’ (you can listen to it here) which tells the story of ten-year-old Eli who helped prepare the fencing that surrounded the graveyard at the former prison, ahead of the ceremony that took place there on May 1, 1865.
In his 1963 speech, A Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin spoke of troubling times, and said “those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people must be prepared to “go for broke.”
I read a few 2025 commencement addresses, and found words like these repeated: “stay human,” “make yourself indispensable,” “don’t follow the rules—create better rules,” and “Ignore other people’s blueprints—they depict a world we no longer live in.”
And this from sociologist Ruha Benjamin, “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
There are awe-inspiring opportunities in our schools to imagine new worlds. That Memorial Day lesson was that kind of opportunity. Our young people need us to be willing to make those opportunities happen to revise models, imagine possibilities, open-heartedly risk and ‘go for broke.’
I’m grateful to ‘go for broke’ with all of you.
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