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I think that another key component of being an anti-oppressive educator is by working through the tensions, biases, and reactions in your body as Menakem describes. If I'm not taking care of myself, moving my body and listening to it, and critically self-reflecting, it would be easy to become an oppressive educator.

Treading the known path could become tempting but I know the known path IS oppressive. I need to continue to take care of myself, clarify my goals, stay connected with my body, and show up ready to be with the students every day. This is all key to maintaining the momentum that I feel I'm gaining now. There will be a lot of distractions, bureaucracy, rules, and "that's just the way it is" attitudes along the way and I need to work hard at moving through those as I work towards my vision of a learning environment and not resorting back to the same experience of teaching that I had growing up.

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Re-reading my text notes and Kumashiro's piece on anti-oppressive education, some new commitments and lines of thinking have come up for me.

A specific factor I am really dedicated to working on is my inaction. As Kumashiro describes, inaction on behalf of the educator is one of the main ways that harm is perpetuated through the classroom. Inaction is in itself a stance. Students will be looking to me to see what I say or do, and if I say or do nothing, that shows my tacit approval. It's alright if I don't always know the right thing to do, I can just do my best in any given situation and when I mess up, I can listen to those I've harmed and learn for the future.

Something else I'm committed to working on in my practice is unlearning deficit perspectives and assumptions about my students. I wrote a little bit about this in my letter for Kyle, but I think it works here too: I’d like to dive deeper into unlearning deficit perspectives. I experienced adults in education using deficit terms to describe students of color and low income students for much of my life. Reading Gorski helped me start to understand why deficit perspectives have persisted which has in turn helped me shift the way I look at students. Rather than looking for the source of a problem within the student or their family, I’ve been looking at the source of the problem from an institutional and/or historical level. I want to continue unlearning deficit perspectives and minimizing the assumptions I make about students.

bell hooks talks about the importance of approaching each student as their own, unique human being. Deficit perspectives can reduce students to stereotypes which results in an oppressive form of education, where students are expected to fit into one specific box of identity rather than coming to us as they are and being accepted as they are.
Kumashiro adds to this: "Sometimes, disposi tions- both conscious and unconscious ones-are about whom the Other is and/or should be."

Assuming who students are or should be is a form of oppression, and I want to continue working on letting students approach me as they are and articulate their identities themselves.

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"Our lizard brain cannot think. It is reflexively protective, and it is strong. It loves whatever it feels will keep us safe, and it fears and hates whatever it feels will do us harm.

All our sensory input has to pass through the reptilian part of our brain before it even reaches the cortex, where we think and reason. Our lizard brain scans all of this input and responds, in a fraction of a second, by either letting something enter into the cortex or rejecting it and inciting a fight,

flee, or freeze response. This mechanism allows our lizard brain to override our thinking brain whenever it senses real or imagined danger." (Menakem, 30)

"An embedded trauma response can manifest as fight, flee, or freeze—or as some combination of constriction, pain, fear, dread, anxiety, unpleasant (and/or sometimes pleasant) thoughts, reactive behaviors, or other sensations and experiences. This trauma then gets stuck in the body—and

stays stuck there until it is addressed. We can have a trauma response to anything we perceive as a threat, not only to our physical safety, but to what we do, say, think, care about,

believe in, or yearn for. This is why people get murdered for disrespecting other folks’ relatives or their favorite sports teams. It’s also why people get murdered when other folks imagine a relative or favorite team was disrespected. From the body’s viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather, they are physical,

visceral sensations. The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety." (Menakem, 31)

"The body wanted to fight or flee, but wasn’t able to do either, so it got stuck in freeze mode. In many cases, it then develops strategies around this “stuckness,” including extreme reactions, compulsions, strange likes and dislikes, seemingly irrational fears, and unusual avoidance strategies. Over time, these can become embedded in the body as standard ways of surviving and protecting itself. When these strategies are repeated and passed on over generations, they can become the standard responses in

families, communities, and cultures." (Menakem, 32)

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"Not hurting is no longer an option. We must face and feel soul-stirring pain. But this pain can be clean or dirty. We have a profound and historic opportunity. As the world watches and holds us accountable, we can choose clean pain. If we do, then the deaths of Justine Damond—and Philando

Castile, and Tamir Rice, and countless other human beings whose lives were taken from them—may be partly redeemed. This book can help us make that choice, and to navigate the unknown waters into which we will need to sail." (Menakem, 320)

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"When someone with unhealed trauma chooses dirty pain over clean pain, the person may try to soothe his or her trauma by blowing it through another person—using violence, rage,

coercion, deception, betrayal, or emotional abuse. This never heals the trauma. Instead, it increases the first person’s dirty pain by reinforcing harmful and aggressive survival strategies as standard operating procedure. It creates a sense of ongoing unease in the first person’s body that he or she

then must override. It may also provoke a reflexively defensive or aggressive response in the second person’s body. Sometimes people inflict this pain on others deliberately, but more often it occurs spontaneously and unexpectedly. Something triggers a person’s trauma; his or her lizard brain instantly launches a fight response; and the person physically or emotionally harms whomever is nearby." (Menakem, 62)

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Frequently, the somatic practices I've engaged in from My Grandmother's Hands, have asked me to sit in the memory or imagination of something uncomfortable. These exercises have helped me bolster my body's tolerance for discomfort. Throughout these types of practices, I have found that the discomfort has always subsided the longer I've stayed within that imagination/memory. While on multiple occasions this has been painful, it has always subsided and led to clarity and calmness.

This is one of the most important lessons that I think I've taken away from my somatic practices. The discomfort has always gone away eventually, it's only fleeting, and leads to new possibilities and clarity on the other side. I've begun to see discomfort as a space of opportunity, for growth and new understandings.

I also believe that leaning into discomfort is essential for being a transformative educator. Continuing to resort to the comfortable or to the known is not going to create a transformative learning environment, nor will it advance social justice objectives. Further, what is comfortable to me as a white, middle-class, cishet woman is likely oppressive to the students, or at least to some of them.

I think that true social justice and transformation requires stepping into uncertainty, imagining alternatives, and working to bring those visions to reality. Envisioning and creating these alternatives is inherently uncomfortable because it's unknown territory. My somatic practice has helped me build up my tolerance for discomfort, which will be necessary to bring bolder, non-oppressive types of schools and teaching into existence. I hope to continue to build this capacity for discomfort throughout the year.

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Moving my body through my somatic practice has been one way for me to process my emotions and tangled up thoughts. Hopefully, the continuation of this practice will help me make better, more intentional, and more conscious actions as I move through the world and interact with students.

Processing my emotions and my trauma allows me to act more intentionally, rather than reacting to situations and allowing my hurt/pain to override my decision-making. This makes me think back to the Crisis Curve, which we discussed in class a few weeks ago. People in crisis can't make the same rational decisions they would at equilibrium. The emotions and stress can become too much. Processing these emotions and managing stress are key for me to make the best decisions and show up as my best for students.

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My body and its reactions to specific people, skin tones, ways of speaking, or ways of dressing are a manifestation of racism. Part of addressing my own biases and racism needs to be done through the movement of my body and self-reflection. The combination of somatic practice and self-reflection can further help me identify unquestioned assumptions that I may not have noticed otherwise, unless I was paying close attention to how my body was viscerally reacting or feeling.

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The notion of a mind separate from the body is in itself a manifestation of white supremacy and colonialism. This concept is a difficult one for me to respond to as an individual for myself. I've been conditioned to think of the mind as body as separates for most of my life and have not often sought to cultivate them together, which I now realize is essential. My somatic practice was one way I was able to help take care of my body and my mind together. What I think will be even more challenging is translating this to the classroom. Schools are places where students are asked to separate their minds from their bodies and their bodies' needs. How do I ensure that I don't maintain unnatural expectations for my students while also preparing them for existence within a system that requires this separation?

"One of the defining traits of school systems is the Cartesian separation of mind and body. The emphasis is on developing the mind separately from the body. This mentality is apparent in rules regulating students’ movements. They must remain seated and focused, fidgeting is frowned upon, and moving the body is generally perceived as a distraction to learning. For example, in an elementary and secondary context, only a short portion of the day is given to physical education and recess to take care of the body’s natural drive to move and be active. The separation between mind and body is detrimental to the wellbeing of those whom it hopes to educate, due to being an unnatural, disjointed state of existence.” (Making a case for decolonial curricula, 7)

"This means that they must be able to disengage, at least temporarily, their feelings from their actions. It also means, of course, that they must be able to re-engage feelings and actions when conditions are appropriate.” (Jackson, The Daily Grind, 18)

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My body has the capacity to hold a lot of very negative emotions and ideologies. In addition to holding racism, my body holds anxiety, tension, stress, fear, frustration, and insecurity. These emotions and sensations can take up a lot of mental bandwidth and physical energy if I allow them to.

Having a somatic practice allows me to work out some of these negative emotions and sensations, which in turn clears out more mental space and energy to help me show up for students as my best. I know this is a little cheesy, but Florence's "Shake It Out" always comes to mind when I think of my somatic practice and working through some of my tensions/emotions/stress in order to clear out enough space to hold my students interests, aspirations, and needs.

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My thoughts, emotions,  the physical feeling of my body, and my actions are all interconnected and inseparable

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My thoughts, emotions,  the physical feeling of my body, and my actions are all interconnected and inseparable