Tag: Restorative Practice

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On Talking to Students: Writing Centers, “Cop Shit,” and Sanctuary Spaces

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“Cop Shit Doesn’t Build Community”

In his keynote at Digitial Pedagogy Lab 2020, Jesse Stommel said:

There has been much talk over the last several months about maintaining ‘continuity’ of instruction and assessment, but less discussion about how we maintain the communities at the heart of our educational institutions.  That is the design challenge before us.

A few months ago, also using Stommel’s work, I set out to document some issues with schools and districts near-religious devotions to the LMS of their choice: the primary goal, the foundational entry point, seemed to be control and compliance—students turning in assignments—rather than anything related to their critical care.  Additionally, little attempt was made to build the LMS in a way that supported all of connective tissue of schools, which largely happen outside of strict structures, including the classroom itself.  When policing exceeds critical care and collaborative community building and sustenance as a core value, you get what Jeffrey Moro calls “cop shit,” which I was happy to see in Stommel’s keynote.  From Moro:

Cop shit undoubtedly reaches its sine qua non in the K-12 classroom, particularly given how such classrooms are even more militarized (actual cops, metal detectors, education premised on compliance, etc.) than higher ed. While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, my stylist told me about her daughter’s math teacher, who is currently punishing her daughter for falling behind on work due to a broken arm by assigning her upwards of fifteen pages of homework a night. The child is seven. This is pure, uncut cop shit.

Before we say that this story is an exception to the rule, there was a recent Twitter thread that attempted to grapple with the excitement many teachers felt now that “accountability” was coming back this fall: grades, synchronous class time, attendance.  “Cop shit” is one thing that we can count on trickling down.  It’s hard to see some colleagues rely on these measures in their teaching; they need control—bodily control—of their students to be able to engage them in learning.  The “online learning doesn’t work” choruses have roots here: if learning is directly mediated by an adult presence enforcing rules, then it’s not really learning.  This spring, some folks found out that their classroom communities were really just loose confederations held together by rules that kids were too scared to break or say anything about out of fear.  Those loose confederations certainly weren’t co-created with students, especially those students pushed to the margins of our schools.

Long story short: it’s only a matter of time until etiquette “tutorials” like the one below are all over the socials setting up systems to hurt those who are already marginalized and vulnerable.

There’s also reason to be worried that a hyperfocus on content, especially given the narrative that “kids are falling behind,” will cause us to rush in and leave the work of critical care behind: there will still be time for teaching students to write a claim or assess rhetoric or analyze evidence.  Manufactured crises, like the idea of “being behind,” takes our eyes off the really, really important work of cultivating hope and providing safety.  I’m seeing this happen in the writing center sphere where there are webinars about synchronous and asynchronous tutoring or developing online tutor training and almost nothing about how we’re prioritizing care and helping our students build sanctuary spaces, as students continue to navigate a global health crisis, ongoing racism and state violence, ICE deportations, anti-Semitism, and mounting economic losses.  If your writing center is worried about being online but hasn’t yet addressed the multiple threats to the most vulnerable students, I’d argue that you’re thinking in reverse.  I’d also say that I don’t necessarily care about the former until we address the latter.  Here’s Sean Michael Morris’ take:

Rather than connectedness, administrators and instructors (and those supporting their work) have focused on connectivity, worrying more about the technology they use than the human being they are trying to reach.

He later writes:

But it goes without saying that sustaining a classroom community is an essential act during a time of crisis. It is in crisis that we most immediately front with our human capacity to intervene, to grasp our agency—to be learners. When we are faced with feeling there is nothing we can do, we can ask: what has been done, what could have been done… which leads us to ask what can I do, and what will I do?

We’re so worried about the how—we’re desperately looking for the model or that tech trick—that we’re forgetting the who.  This doesn’t necessarily come from a bad place, but the end results of this thinking can be dangerous for those who are already in danger.

So, back to Stommel’s keynote and, arguably, his best piece of advice:

Stop looking for models and begin by talking to students.

On Sanctuary: Writing Centers and a Pedagogy of Critical Care

I’ve been thinking about the idea of sanctuary for a long time, although not always in those terms, but I knew it was important for any kind of learning environment.  I first started attaching the word sanctuary to how and what I was feeling after reading Be Oakley’s “Radical Softness is Boundless Form of Resistance:”

I look to the sanctuary that are built within each of our communities that provide a certain aspect of comfort for the people directly involved with them.

When I first started out teaching and leading a writing center, I thought that I was responsible for setting up a sanctuary, and no doubt that my voice and presence matter, but I realized that unless students co-created the environments with me, I wasn’t really creating a sanctuary, I was creating my idea of what I thought a sanctuary should be.  That’s some cop shit; I’m not at the center of the classroom or the writing center, and the faster I realized that, the better off everyone would be, particularly those that don’t share in all of my privileged identities.  Here’s Oakley:

I don’t feel that any space marked ‘safe’ by a white person, even if they have the best intentions, can ever be truly safe for those who are not white.

Oakley goes on to say that this doesn’t mean white people don’t have a gigantic role to play in making spaces safer, but that we should ask those most impacted what sanctuary looks like, feels like, and is to them.  As Press Press’ sanctuary manifesto says:

Sanctuary is different for different people.  Whatever version of sanctuary we create needs to be malleable and accommodating of those different versions.  Many versions of sanctuary can exist simultaneously.

I read this to mean that our role, before we can even think about pedagogical models or the latest LMS hack or our digital tutoring methods, is to talk with our students and have our students talk with each other about what sanctuary looks like for them and find ways to meaningfully link those visions together, which means embracing tension.  If our students aren’t co-creating the space, virtual or physical, with us, then we’re just reinforcing the cop shit because, as Moro says, we’re setting up a necessarily adversarial relationship with and between our students rather than a generative one.

Avoiding the reproduction of the things we seek to avoid requires a heaping helping of imagination and critical care.  In her OLC Innovate keynote, Maha Bali argues for:

Reimagining [professional] development as ‘fostering imagination’ around central values, not just offering tools and strategies.

The professional and the community development we need most urgently is to talk with students about what they need and want and find ways to collectively imagine how those diverse wants and needs fit together into a coherent whole.  There’s no technology, no system, no model—no cop shit—that will do this for us, even if the rhetoric, the sales pitches, the educelebrities and brands, and some of our instincts tell us otherwise.  This is why focusing development and conversation around uses of strategies means that our work is necessarily incomplete.  Let’s return to Press Press’ manifesto:

We can protect sanctuary by creating a pluralistic social contract of values and ideas to which we all agree. We can protect sanctuary by sharing responsibility to sustain the things we value.

Skyline Writing Center’s Summer Circles

This summer, the Skyline Writing Center has held a series of “Summer Circles,” modeled from the critical care practices that we use during our in-person meetings to build community and talk about issues that are important and figure out how we, in our space, can address them while also becoming comfortable with tension and discomfort both generally and within our group, which is remarkably diverse in all facets, especially since the likelihood of a virtual fall start were always high.  This necessitated asking some big questions—and being asked some big questions of me and the institution—to start:

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These discussions have been interesting and iterative, and they’ve covered a ton of ground, ground that I didn’t think we’d necessarily cover.  But with a group of students, some writing center veterans and some newcomers, and an open conversation, we’ve been able to imaginatively co-plan large parts of the year together, most notably how to meaningfully care for and stay connected and engaged while apart.  Truthfully, we haven’t even talked about numbers or training or pedagogy or the LMS, and those conversations seem far off still. My concern isn’t whether we’ll do 1 session or 1,000 sessions.

I never expected 15, even 20, students to show up during their summer break to talk about writing center, but you never know until you create the conditions.  And, really, that’s the point: as a white, cishet, neurotypical, able-bodied male, I can’t create the sanctuary for my students anymore than I can liberate my students, but I can remove the barriers, help create the conditions, and be a co-equal part of the discussion that helps us ensure a safe, comforting, responsive environment for each student, whatever that means for them.

There’s no magic here, really, but a reminder: create a space, let students talk, listen, and use their experiences to build an environment and community that works for each person in the community.

 

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Coaching Notes: Building Community in Diverse Classrooms

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Recently, I listened to an edu-celebrity talk, at length, about “speaking our students’ language,” where I thought we might try to dig into centering non-canonical texts, valuing multiple literacies, and multiplying funds of knowledge in our classrooms. This was a chance, on an influencer level, to have a conversation with a full room of mostly white educators about how notions of “language” work in schools and what that means for students who aren’t in the dominant culture identities. However, the next slide featured a clip of “Old Town Road,” which was used as an example of “speaking our students’ language” and building relevant school environments for students, and a slide after that featured the edu-celebrity doing the Whip and Nae-Nae. While the inclusion of music, films, books, and other forms of media into lessons can be beneficial, the mere presence of Lil Nas X or Silentó or any another artist doesn’t make a classroom relevant or responsive to student, especially if the same oppressive pedagogies and practices that are responsible for the continuation of systemic inequity remain underneath the surface. In other words, these surface-level attempts at inclusion send a dangerous message to rooms of white educators: put on a rap song and dance your way to a more culturally relevant classroom without acknowledging the historical context and current reality of racism and other kinds of bias. Building more equitable environments requires consistent, ongoing work and effort to confront bias and unlearn inequitable practices that marginalize our students. Unfortunately, in the edu-celebrity’s speech there wasn’t any mention of the continued reflection and learning that white educators, myself included, need to do to understand how and what our identities mean in our classrooms and schools.  (By the way, if you’re interested in reading more on the way edu-influencers topics around equity, Benjamin Doxtdator has written extensively about it.)

This speech had me reflecting on coaching sessions I’ve been doing with teachers this year around building inclusive classrooms, a huge part of which is honest, open, and uncomfortable self-reflection. Two of the teachers I’ve worked with this year admitted to struggling with building a connective community in racially and culturally diverse classrooms because they don’t share the students’ experiences and because the students don’t share the experiences of one another. There was a way in which these practitioners want solutions with quick implementation and fast results, but there is no efficient way—whether its “Old Town Road” or the Whip and Nae Nae—to create connected classroom cultures. Chrysanthius Lathan writes: “Many white teachers are discouraged, believing that they are ill-equipped to meet the needs of students color simply because they don’t have the same experiences as them.” This discouragement often leads to what Lathan calls “avoidance,” or it leads to looking for surface solutions to engrained, systemic issues. It’s worth white teachers thinking critically about how to make our classrooms humanizing spaces for students of color, and I’ve been working with colleagues in large and small ways to try to do the hard work of dismantling exclusive spaces and building more inclusive ones in their place.

Don’t Avoid Talking About Race and Justice. Lathan’s idea of “avoidance” resonates because I know that many White teachers, including me, have at times struggled to have honest conversations about race and justice because of insecurity, fragility, and lack of education on critical issues related to race. Our students want to talk about identities and how and what their mean, and we need to be able to provide them with the space and support to have courageous conversations, which means rededicating ourselves to raising our level of consciousness through formal professional development and training, continued informal education, including seeking out our own resources to raise our level of consciousness, and a commitment to anti-racist, anti-bias education. Learning to lean into conversations about race and justice is truly learning to speak our students’ language. In the case of the edu-celebrity’s talk, they avoided talking about race save for in coded ways that made the conversation safe and sanitized for the audience; there was no direct discussion of the threats faced by people of color in this country each day.

As a coach, I’ve read Elena Aguilar’s thinking that encourages us to pursue justice for kids in our transformative work with teachers.  Perseverance is required in shifting these deep-seated mindsets that have impacted every element of teacher practice.  In this spirit, I frequently recommend the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards as a framework to use to reshape and reorient their classrooms; it sets out important ends that both teachers and students can use to work toward democratic, equitable, and socially just classroom spaces. The ideas of a “common language” and an “organizational structure,” phrases used in the introduction to the standards, help anchor teachers and their practices to the anti-racist, anti-bias work required to build the equitable schools and classrooms that we want. Having a robust conception of what anti-racism and anti-bias look like in practice make practitioners more likely to act. Many teachers don’t know that the Teaching Tolerance Standards exist, and more education around them is necessary in schools.

Build Healing Classrooms: Even with an emphasis on social-emotional learning, the teambuilding and connection-making work that are hallmarks of the first week or two of classes go by the wayside when “content” becomes the star of the show, which makes the connections hollow and sustaining relationships difficult. Moreover, social-emotional learning that doesn’t have anti-bias work at its center is, at best, incomplete. Antero Garcia and Elizabeth Dutro encourage teachers to consistently reflect on their positionality within the classroom relative to students and how students are positioned to each other based on the physical and social constructions of the learning environment and our society. Garcia and Dutro talk about ensuring that we are “critical witnesses” to students and that students are “critical witnesses” to each other, which means listening “deeply and compassionately.” This message is in direct opposition to the influencer’s key themes: there is individualistic competition for high-paying jobs, so we better start preparing you for the competition now regardless of toxic and oppressive that might be.

Elements of restorative practices aren’t just for readmitting students; they can be used proactively to create healing environments that both acknowledge and work against oppressive systems that make students feel like they don’t belong. I’ve been encouraging teachers to use mini-conferences throughout the trimester to check in with each student so that no feels invisible or unheard. This requires teachers to attentively and actively listen without defensiveness, pretense, or trying to think of a response, even when they might not like what they’re hearing. I’ve also encouraged the use of circles at regular intervals where students can listen to the stories and experiences of their classmates, which are often visceral and always so important. Healing classroom communities have connection at their center, and restorative practices focus on individual and communal engagement. While these practices take time and might be mildly disruptive to content, they are central to the continued work of connection that our classrooms require to connect us to our students and our students to us. These are practices that help us and our students bear “critical witness” to each others’ experiences.

Center Stories, Not Stuff: Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate have both written extensively about the ways that centering stories can have profound impacts on how they see the world. Building the trusting space necessary to have students feel comfortable and safe enough to share vulnerability is incredibly intentional and difficult, which requires a rethinking of how classrooms are organized. In strange ways, the edu-celebrity presentation I watched was doused in capitalistic undertones about making students competitive in a cutthroat world, which certainly speaks to students have come to view school as a space to fight for limited resources. For someone who claimed to be so against deficit orientations, the influencer spent a ton of time on scarcity. Shifting away from “stuff,” like capitalistic notions of success, rank ordering students, and amplifying notions of “rugged individualism,” can have positive impacts on all students because it shifts away from notions of school as a communal space where students work together to have important conversations, share important stories, and empower each other is anathema to “stuff.” Building this communal space that undoes some of the more competitive and exclusionary elements of school requires teachers to reorient their pedagogies, reimagine their time, and respect the voices and values of those who don’t share their experiences, but, if they can do so, they may find themselves revisiting their beliefs along with their students.

One of the strategies I’ve been advocating with teachers is having communal writing days where students can write about important, compelling issues—issues confronting them and our society—without any sort of grading mechanism. Students can choose an issue, find mentor texts that can help the group along, and then share their stories with one another in an open forum. As Linda Christensen argues that we need to be “developing curriculum that builds students’ intellectual capacity to engage in national dialogues,” which gives credence to creating an authethnographic classroom.

The subtext of the influencer’s keynote was that our schools and classrooms are meritocracies, and putting students on the same “playing field” is about teaching students to code or making sure that Lil Nas X is blasting when they walk in. For me, anyway, I think this message misses the mark. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with teaching students to code, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with playing music when they come into class, but, on their own, these things aren’t going to fundamentally change the bedrock inequitable practices systemically built into classrooms and schools. It is the inequitable practices that lead to disproportionate outcomes. We can’t avoid talking about these issues and this work, especially when we have captive audiences of folks who need to hear it.