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As I read Larson-Billings article Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2. 0 A.K.A the Remix, a lot of passages resonated with the type of teacher I’d like to be. I particularly liked her advice that “If we ever get to a place of complete certainty and assuredness about our practice, we will stop growing. If we stop growing, we will die, and, more importantly, our students will wither and die in our presence. Both teachers and students can be vulnerable to a sort of classroom death.” This is quite powerful language and it reminded me of remarks my CT had made about believing that when she had 10 years of experience under her belt, she could basically go on autopilot. Now, however, still faces challenges and believes there’s always more to learn. I hope to be the kind of teacher who can learn something each year, and I’m interested in how to sustain myself and avoid being a teacher that goes on autopilot. Since we did the critical writing exercises about what it means to be a teacher I’ve been really interested in and sometimes dismayed by the expectations that surround teachers. Because teaching is often seem as such an important job, it’s easy to be exploited as a professional, and this exploitation is usually seen as heroic. But it leads to burnout, which is then portrayed as an almost inevitable part of teaching—especially for new teachers. I don’t think it has to be like this. It’s important to me to have boundaries around my teaching identity and personal identity so I can sustain my practice and desire to teach.

I also really liked Larson-Billings’ comments about teachers who “rarely pushed students to consider critical perspectives on policies and practices that may  have direct impact on their lives and communities” because it resonated so much with my experiences in the licensure program. Many of our professors are not willing to extend their criticism to the elite nature of the program or their own curriculum and expectations. Every student, not just teacher candidates, has opinions about their learning experience. I also think we know ourselves as students and what we need best. In a classroom, there should be space for students and teachers to redirect and construct the direction of learning together. Curriculum should be flexible enough to incorporate students' own considerations so they can have ownership over their learning. I appreciate that some teachers give a survey during the semester to gather student input. When I was a service-learning volunteer at Avalon, a project-based charter school, I was inspired by their cooperative model of leadership, where the teachers are the administration and make all school-wide decisions

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Balaev’s article on trauma novels, “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory,” gave me a lot to chew on. As I read, I was reminded of how suspicious I am of the statement that reading teaches empathy, “how to care for others,” or “how to be.” As many of us in the licensure program are beginning to feel, reading is a passive experience. We read, digest, absorb, contemplate, argue. We have the ability to use the emotional tools we have when we read, but I’m not sure we can grow them solely by reading. Through reading we grow a theoretical foundation of knowledge through which we can better understand events in our life, but I’m uncertain what action reading brings us to. So, this piece encouraged me to think about what novels can do, and what they cannot.

As I read about the intergenerational theories of trauma and the transhistorical model of trauma, I saw a connection between how these frameworks collapse all trauma (and even label peri-traumatic experiences as trauma) and how many people (English teachers being perhaps the chief offenders) claim that reading can instill in us special abilities to empathize and connect. What I believe intergenerational theories of trauma lack is specificity in locating trauma, disseminating variants of it, and diagnosing it. Just as we will encourage students to be specific in their analysis of texts and reading, we need to be specific about the powers fiction has, and what it does not have. We need to see the symbol for the smoke. It’s no surprise that intergenerational trauma in literary theory would combine a lack of specificity with an overestimation of what literature can do. At least, that’s my opinion until someone changes my mind.

Reading and engaging this article gives me an appreciation for the portrayal of Starr’s struggle with her identity as an individual and others’ perception of her as a black girl and a victim of trauma in The Hate U Give. Connected to the literary theory of intergenerational trauma, in which a character becomes a representative of “a group of people or a particular culture, race, or gender, [that] have collectively experienced massive trauma” (155), Starr is a metarepresentation of this trope as she navigates these explicit expectations from peers and teachers in her overwhelmingly white private school and the larger world when she becomes a public(ish) figure defined by the trauma that put her in the spotlight. Balaev writes that “To claim that the traumatized protagonist expresses a specific, idiosyncratic response to trauma, while also functioning as representative figure of a social group in order to relate the actions in the novel to a historical event, does not suggest that the protagonist asserts an essentialist, intergenerational identity based on a decades-old event,” which I can understand especially in books that deal with trauma as nuanced and well as The Hate U Give. Yet I see these two as separate to character and plot, respectively. Whereas portraying a protagonist’s response to trauma as idiosyncratic is connected to character development, the trauma itself as understood to be connected with historical events is connected to plot. I’m interested in seeing and discussing traumatic events in literature through their resonance with specific political events, and I don’t believe we need to interpret one character’s post traumatic trajectory as a representation of the effects of trauma for someone else.

I was also really interested in theories that described the “speechless terror” as “an epistemological conundrum or neurobiological fact” as opposed to Balaevs assertion that the unspoken trauma in literature usually is a result of cultural values (157). If this is true, then a way for novels to become the powerful things we so often wish and see them to be is by naming that which is socially constructed as taboo or impolite.
For all progressives, there is something to celebrate about Biden’s election, even if it’s just Trump losing. As we refocus our efforts, my link this week is a really helpful for those hoping to better advocate for abolition and understand the mission at the heart of abolition, which is creating better ways of taking care of each other. I think a good place to start the project of abolition is to understand how to discuss it with those who do not understand it.

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So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist

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This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown...

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Recently I have become more preoccupied with the standards teachers create in their classrooms: how they practice agency beyond following state and national standards, how they choose to define learning, and how they choose to implement and enforce standards. In undergrad, my curriculum teachers introduced me to the “high care, high expectations” approach. This made a lot of sense and learning more about student self perception, belief in abilities, and motivation suggests that oftentimes when students know their teacher expects more from them (within a reasonable range of their abilities) students feel more academically empowered. However, in my experience working with students I’ve realized that I’m not really predisposed to not be, in the words of Tina Fey in Mean Girls, a “pusher.” Since undergrad, the issue of creating and implementing standards seems a lot more complex. There’s the issue of knowing your students, managing your relationships with them, and defining what is most important for students to learn. Teachers like Christensen in the reading from a few weeks ago seemed to break the traditional mode of academic rigor and verbatim state-to-classroom standards. It’s really refreshing to hear about teachers like this, but I also associate these teaching approaches with a certain level of compromise and managed expectations, which isn’t necessarily accurate but in the spirit of self-exposure, that is how I feel. I do wonder how I can be both, especially since my own nature is very relaxed. I am fundamentally a very lazy person.

My CT at Sanford Middle School provides a really inspiring example of how to teach in a pandemic, and it’s basically to acknowledge that the usual standards are impossible to maintain. I would describe her approach as high care, high realism. Before this appointment, I intended to GTFO after I got my license until schools were safely back to in person instruction. I truly preferred the idea of returning to the service industry during a pandemic than being a new teacher during a pandemic. Not to connect everything with abolition, but my boyfriend was listening to a podcast the other day where activists were describing the creation of new justice systems as “building the boat while we row it,” and that seems like an accurate description of teaching in a pandemic. Yet the way so many people in the profession discuss it characterizes it more as business as usual. Somehow this seems so connected to teachers who are so beholden to standards and high expectations that they lose sight of their students' needs. I appreciated this week’s article “Redefining Rigor” for this reason— it presented a classroom that more closely aligned student interests and course standards
One of the teacher panelists from our Culture Schools and Communities webinar mentioned freedom school, which really interested me. My resource this week is the Children’s Defense Fund, which operates freedom schools today among other services.

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CDF Freedom Schools® Program Overview

The mission of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) is to ensure every child a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start and a moral start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. The CDF Freedom Schools® program provides summer and after-school enrichment through a research-based and multicultural program model that supports K-12 scholars and their families through five essential components: high quality academic and character-building enrichment; parent and family involvement; civic engagement and social action; intergenerational servant leadership development; and nutrition, health and mental health.

The CDF Freedom Schools program incorporates the totality of CDF's mission by fostering environments that support children and young adults (known as "scholars" in the CDF Freedom Schools program) to excel and believe in their ability to make a difference in themselves and in their families, schools, communities, country, and world with hope, education and action.

By providing K-12 scholars with rich, culturally relevant pedagogy and high quality books that deepen scholars' understanding of themselves and all they have in common with others in a multiracial, multicultural democratic society, CDF Freedom Schools programs further empowers scholars to believe in their ability and responsibility to make a difference while instilling in them a love of reading to help them avoid summer learning loss.

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CDF Freedom Schools® Program Overview The mission of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) is to ensure every child a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start and a moral start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.

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Playing in the Dark and New Historicism 

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Playing in the Dark and New Historicism 

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I really loved both readings this week. As a writer, I was confronted by my own instances of “lazy” language reading Morrison’s chapters from Playing in the Dark. In the preface she writes “The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains” (11). Reading this chapter reminded me of an essay I wrote for a Latinx literature class about the bruja figure, where I referenced “dark magic” to refer to evil or sinister doings. My professor pointed out the racial implications in this phrasing, and it was a lesson in how easily it can be to write “lazily;” unquestioningly. It also reminded me of a time a friend of mine was filing a report against a neighbor and described her behavior as “hysterical.” When I read the report I prickled at the word because I understand the sexist history of how that word has been used to describe women-- and I still wonder the extent to which my friend was aware of this history. I don’t believe you can claim to be completely naive of ‘loaded’ language like this, but there are so many instances where I or someone I know have dysconsciously engaged in language in this way. Later, Morrison writes “I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination” (12). I am interested as well. The most obvious conclusion is that the racial assumptions in the eyes and pens of the white beholder have created the cannon of “dead white guys (and ladies)” we know and are so familiar with. This cannon has constructed the white self by constructing a black (or non-white) other. I was really interested in the way Morrison argues that many white readers ignore race in “traditional, established” literature. It’s an impulse to claim that because these white texts have only marginal evidence or mention of people of color that they are exclusively white, but there is such nuance and care Morrison takes to point out that criticism has treated these books color blindly and selectively (probably because the critics themselves were white). And, the quote “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist” makes me wonder if any art truly is universal… Which would be a pretty fun essential question to explore in a lesson with students.

Putting this reading in conversation with the essay about Sherman Alexie and the issue of consuming/ teaching art made by abusers and Bad Guys, I want to try to articulate a reaction that has been emerging when I see other white people talk about cleansing their art diet.... Many white people are latently waking up to the fact that a lot of media is made by and for a white audience, a fact that we only have the luxury of not noticing because of white supremacy and our own consumption habits and identities as white people. So, there seems to be a naivety in the well intentioned decision to reconfigure consumption habits to a representation based algorithm. I’m not saying that it isn’t good for us to try to renegotiate our consumption and interrogate our interests, but it is a luxury to be just waking up to this fact, instead of aware of it from the beginning.

As I read Carey-Webb’s “Shakespeare and the New Multicultural British Literatures,” I thought about incorporating new historicism in an activity I got from Critical Encounters in Secondary English. The activity is called Theory Relay. After reading a book and learning about different critical lenses, stations are set up where students respond to discussion questions using these different lenses. More information on this activity is on page 230.

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For last week's jigsaw reading of Critical Encounters, I read Appleman’s chapter on Reader Response theory. Although I didn’t focus on that reading for the blog, it turned out to be a complement to this week’s reading of Christensen's chapter called “Building Community Out of Chaos.” According to Appleman, reader response has become a very commonly used lens in many classrooms because it often easily captivates student engagement-- we all want to talk about ourselves, and adolescents especially so. It is far more accessible to write about how you feel about a text and similarities and differences between characters and your life than it is to discuss the multiple ways race, class, and gender function in a story, or to get into deconstruction. Yet Appleman criticizes the limits of reader response for how it does not keep students “in the text” and fails to engage with theory and standards of evidence-based argument. Thus Appleman suggests that teachers use reader-response in classroom activities that include other theoretical approaches such as a “theory relay,” where students visit different stations after reading a book to discuss different lenses to analyze and find meaning from the text.

Appleman is primarily concerned with maintaining high expectations for her students, grounded in standards. While Christensen writes about using the same curriculum for high track and “low” track classes as well as using student experience to fulfil work that follows standards, I noticed some difference in these teachers’ ultimate goals for their students and methods to meet these goals.

According to Chirstensen, the point of education is social action. For this to happen, students need a sense of community within the classroom so they can be in a relatively safe learning environment which allows them to critique their world. But in order for community to be established, Christensen’s particular student population needed to be engaged towards empathy for their peers. Thus, community building and developing empathy were the priorities in Christensen’s class-- her own standards. To meet these standards, Christensen relies on a reader-response lens to encourage her students to find points of similarity in their struggles and character conflicts and fellow peers struggles.

Although I pledge more allegiance to Christensen’s vision of an empathetic classroom community than somebody’s standards (I do not claim them), I keep going back to this quote that really struck me when I first read Appleman’s chapter: “Underlying all of these assumptions is our belief that the sharing of personal responses in the public sphere of school will bring students to a greater understanding of themselves and one another rather than underscore the depths of the chasms, or the inequality, that often divide us. This is the essence of the false promise of democracy in the literature circle.”

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The Absolutely Confounding Conundrum of an Abuser on the Reading List

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The Absolutely Confounding Conundrum of an Abuser on the Reading List

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As a fan of Sherman Alexie’s writing, it was really tough to figure out what to do with the information of his harassment charges (besides believe the women, which I absolutely do). I’ve also been wondering if Junot Díaz can still take up space in my future curriculum after hearing allegations about his behavior as well. It sucks because both The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian have a lot of wonderful elements and are really great books to motivate student engagement. A few years ago, I would have said that there is too much good art in the world to give attention and power to the artists who are shitty people. Now, personally, my take is a little more complicated-- I no longer think that I cannot personally and privately enjoy something if an author has caused harm, but I would never give a platform or my money to such an artist (My boyfriend and I often argue about this, but he still watches Quentin Tarantino movies, so clearly we are all drawing our own lines about what is acceptable and overlook-able behavior from artists). At the same time, it was even more devastating to hear about Sherman Alexie a few years back because of the heroic position he occupied for a lot of readers-- I still think often about the impact and message of his powerful essay “The Best Children’s Books are Written in Blood.” (Díaz less so-- anyone who read his work could tell the misogyny did not begin or end with his characters).

Yet teaching these books rather than simply reading them recreationally is an issue I’m not sure where I stand on. I appreciated reading Lauren Porosoff’s take in “Why I’ll Never Teach this Powerful Book Again.” According to Porosoff, when her faculty found out about the allegations of First Nations women against Alexie, it was too late to completely change the curriculum that featured Alexie’s book, like they planned to do the following year. Instead, it became a “teaching moment,” more aptly described as a discussion moment. The questions Porosoff raises (“How do we respond when we discover that someone we look up to is not at all the person we thought? Is it ethical to appreciate a piece of work when the person who created it behaved wrongfully?”) are wonderful questions to discuss with a class because as a teacher, I don’t know the answers myself. Usually my philosophy with class discussion topics is that you never know what your class is capable of-- teenage idealism is not simply unrealistic fantasy but can be a bold reminder of the possibilities adults often overlook, and should be engaged and questioned rather than shut down. Additionally, as Akiea Gross says, “If we (students of color) ain’t too young for you to hate us, for you to sell us, for you to kill us, then we ain’t too young to learn how to love ourselves enough to heal, to resist, to unlearn… to get free.” Teachers are not protecting students when they refuse to discuss certain topics. They actually are just refusing to help students name issues that may be affecting their lives. So I think there is definitely space to have these conversations with students. My bottom line is that I don’t want to be the teacher who is afraid to raise these subjects and have these conversations-- if I fail or it gets messy, I can pick up the pieces and figure out what worked and what I need to work on.

If a teacher chose to continue teaching a book like The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian in order to prompt this sort of discussion afterwards, I personally don’t think that would be a bad idea. I understand Porosoff’s decision to change the curriculum in order to deplatform Alexie. She makes a good point about the news of Alexie’s behavior not being news to everyone-- many First Nations women writers were already aware of his harassment. Making a decision to replace Alexie’s book with First Nations women writers, informed by the publishing erasure of these voices, is understandable. For my part, since we control what our curriculum represents and what it doesn’t in our book choices, we inevitably limit representation of identity and experience-- so teachers need to understand the limits of what a “diverse” reading list can do for our students. I think the conversations we have are more important than checking off a list of identity. This is not a defense of an “dead white guy” curriculum but a question of the limits of a “representative” curriculum.

The Akiea Gross quote in the second paragraph comes from my resource this week, the Abolitionist Teaching Networks Teaching to Thrive podcast.

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When bell hooks writes “The production of terror, unmediated dread, in the hearts and minds of the oppressed, binds us to a politics of domination, keeps us in place, unable to resist, afraid to resist,” I’m reminded of Audre Lorde’s essays Poetry is not a Luxury and The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action because she seems to share the belief that dread is the weapon that produces silence and perpetuates oppression. According to both women but as stated by hooks, the key is to use “knowledge in the service of liberation”
I was really struck by the “colonization of the imagination” hooks writes about. I particularly liked how she criticizes how so-called “radical” circles and society at large receive the imagination; it's easy to understand this response because I have often seen liberal people dismiss proposals and ideas outside of capitalist and political American norms for being “unrealistic” or “idealistic.” Although hooks is talking about the use of fantasy rooted in genuine visions of hope and justice like magical realism, I believe this phenomenon can be seen in the conversations (if one can call them that) between liberals and those farther left of liberalism. Abolition is on my mind lately and it has been unsurprising yet dreadful to watch so many who were months ago advocating for abolition or defunding now walk those beliefs back. I feel like there is a sense of fantasy in police and prison abolition, of course. For many of us it requires an imagining of alternative forms of justice beyond retribution, which is all many of us know.
Hooks refers to the exploited and the oppressed in this chapter, but a lot of what she says about the danger of forgetting or silencing the imagination made me think of the convenient ways white and middle class Americans “forget” about the oppression that we periodically claim to be dedicated to dismantling. We know, yet are reluctant to admit that, at least materially, our quality of life is just fine despite (if not because of) oppression and exploitation. Too often, when we get tired, we stop fighting. For the Minneapolis city council to take advantage of such a heavy moment in our history to make a promise to its communities to “change policing as we know it,” which they never intended to make good on, only to walk back that promise as if the urgency has ended (which it has, for some) is really upsetting me right now.

In Who’s Culture has Capital? Tara J. Yosso writes that “Looking through a CRT lens means critiquing deficit theorizing and data that may be limited by its omission of the voices of People of Color.” I wasn’t quite sure how to square this with the aspect of wealth called “navigational capital.” What does it mean to value a student of color’s ability to navigate institutions that require assimilation to white middle class norms to succeed? I understood Yosso’s  definition to emphasize student agency and access to specific culturally affirming resources outside of institutions, but the term is interesting to me. As Yosso writes— as well as Eric Toshalis in Make Me— the personal cost of navigating these institutions can be painful and incredibly stressful for students of color. Is this simply reframing the cultural marketplace? Does it serve students to applaud their ability to navigate hostile environments? Can we do more? I wonder if operating from the constructive imagination hooks writes of could open more possibilities than survival… but someone will cry “that’s unrealistic!”
By now I’m able to identify common aspects of curriculum and teaching practices that reflect white middle class norms but of course I do not possess experiential knowledge of other cultural norms and practices. The conundrum reminds me of the critique of “culturally relevant” pedagogy that simultaneously attempts to embrace all ways of speaking/seeing/behaving while teaching students to “succeed” in the white middle class world… Who does this truly serve? This remains the dominant interpretation of culturally responsive/ relevant pedagogy— as reflected by this program’s ELA course, which has been criticized by several members of our cohort already.
Yosso’s piece, especially the care the author took to define income versus wealth as well as the definitions of aspirational, familial and social capital, made me think of the “social justice” jerseys the NBA are wearing this year— specifically Andre Iquodala’s group economics jersey. I’m weary of forms of justice that expand rather than disrupt models of capitalism, but I understand the necessity for immediate action rather than the long game of systemic change (which feels so distant a real possibility anyway). This is also the tension between investing in charters and divesting from public schools— charter schools as an immediate action towards equity (in the best case scenario) despite public schools as a flawed but critical service increasingly endangered by privatization. I don’t know man. It’s complicated.

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I really loved this quote from Coffey’s “Critical Literacy”: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world and with each other” In this week's readings about critical literacy I appreciated the verbiage of “doing” rather than learning or practicing. Critical literacy is something we do. It’s a specific approach that has real consequences for interpreting our lives and experiences. An essential part of critical literacy is that every story read and told privileges one perspective and exempts another; there is always a position taken in what we read. I appreciate the concentration on critical literacy after last weeks reading, which emphasized the importance of how we present and choose texts but left me wondering whether incorporating readings to simply check off a box of representation is enough. Once we find lit that we love, that at least suggests multiplicity and reaches our students closer to their lived experiences than the traditional cannon, where do we go from there? I’ve become more interested in what social action can look like in the classroom. There are many suggestions in the readings we’ve done this year that schools tend to compartmentalize knowledge from one subject to the other. I also think many school tasks are disconnected from the work and actions people take in their lives outside of school. In one of our other classes, we are discussing how teachers are composed in mainstream imagination and how we individually construct the concept of a teacher. I appreciate theory but I found myself becoming frustrated by the topic and readings which seem to focus on teaching as a purely intellectual activity. It’s not. I am not saying that investigating how we conceive of the teaching body isn’t important given the work we are expected to do and the difficulty of these demands given our underprotected status in the labor market, but we also construct an image of teaching through action as well as through that often sweaty strenuous thing called thinking.

The more I think about social action as an important aspect of teaching the more I wonder what that action can look like. I’d like to discuss this more because I think interpretations of social action fall more into philanthropy than justice, and I want to understand better which actions create the most meaning and impact in our lives. For example, a friend of mine that went to Blake— a private school in Minneapolis— was telling me the other day about a volunteering event the school does every year. According to this friend, students get a full day off of school to volunteer at different locations and organizations, but usually only volunteer for a couple hours. The students then get an event at the end of the day to hear speeches and reflect on their experiences.

“Socializing With the Ghosts of Our Racial Past” reminded me of a tweet I’ve seen on my timeline: ”If black people epigenetically inherit trauma from slavery from our ancestors, what do the descendants of overseers and slave owners inherit?” (@allcurledup). I don’t have the answer to this question, but it’s clear that an enduring legacy and compounding symptom of the racial trauma committed by white Americans is an inability and disinterest in discussing this trauma. As a result, healing and justice are being denied to students in classrooms where teachers are not prepared for these conversations. I was interested in the advocacy for novels that present racial trauma. It was helpful to hear this because I sometimes wonder if, as a white teacher, presenting stories about racial trauma might alienate and re-traumatize students of color. I agree that “these novels by themselves will not solve all of our racial problems.” Knowing why these readings are necessary and how to facilitate rather than control the conversations about them is my responsibility as a teacher.

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I suppose I shouldn’t be, but it is still so surprising to see how often the books Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are referenced in reading about teaching literature. The farther we go into discussions of worthwhile, relatable, and culturally relevant texts, the more I wonder whether these books— however they are taught— can do anything besides bore and alienate students. I know better than to ask why they remain in the curriculum. Of course they can be taught critically, but I see serious limits to the impact critically reading canonical texts can have when assigning them in the first place reifies their position in the cannon and takes up space from other books. The more I see these books referenced, the more I reflect on how I would navigate being handed a required curriculum that featured these books on it. I wonder if appealing or petitioning administration could work, and I also wonder how I can include student opinion in shaping a lesson that demonstrates learning and includes civil action, which last weeks readings taught me are important aspects of student output.

As I read Critical Encounters in Secondary English I thought a lot about my own relationship to literary theory as a high schooler and college student. While literary theory excited and interested me as a high schooler, the coverage style pedagogy of my English teachers didn’t necessarily engage that interest and desire to learn. What frustrates me is that when I entered college, there was a whole new set of obstacles to engaging with literary theory— mainly the mystification and guardianship academia exercised over ways of seeing and understanding (theory). Of course, as Appleman cites, this trickles down to how high school teachers sometimes avoid theory and how high school students are sometimes intimidated by it. This happens even as students are effectively using theoretical lens in the way they engage with reading by pointing out, criticizing, and questioning gender and class dynamics and race in the books they read. So it seems to me that the work to be done is in demystifying these powerful lenses and then engaging students when they read theoretically. A question that occurred to me as I read both texts this week is how, even as we attempt to introduce theory to our students, teachers can become the gatekeepers of knowledge rather than the co-creators of it. In Against Common Sense, Kumashiro explains how better conversations can be had about literature when students are encouraged to reflect on their own beliefs and the way they come into contact with and make sense of what they read.

How do we take theory further in the classroom to underscore nuance and complexity in literature and lives rather than to serve our own narrow goals for learning? In Against Common Sense, Kumashiro discusses how a book lauded by a national association for Asian American studies was criticized for its portrayal of Filipino Americans. I haven’t read the book but this debate sounds familiar to discussions I’ve had with people about what constitutes stereotyping in literature and the pressure of portrayal. How do we manage our expectations when we introduce and read texts with the faith that they will portray an experience? Is that all there is to reading? I seem to be presented with two conflicting beliefs. On one hand, I believe good pedagogy includes reading that can both connect with student experiences and suggest a depth of experience outside their own. On the other hand, there is no monolithic experience and it is naive to expect an author to portray anything in any objective way when they have their own set of biases. It reminds me of an essay by Lauren Michele Jackson about anti-racist reading lists and how they can narrow our understanding of authors and literature. For example, Toni Morrison is often on anti-racist reading lists because her work obviously explores race and the racialized experiences of its black characters— and that is important. However, these conversations neglect the other powerful aspects of Morrison’s writing and work like her gorgeous prose and the often brutal experience of being a woman. I obviously appreciate literature's value in bringing us to conversations about race and how critical it is that we have those classroom discussions, but I’m not sure there is inherent value in these conversations if we can’t be honest about ourselves and our expectations. Hopefully this makes sense and I apologize that my Gemini moon presents more questions than answers.

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What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?

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It is unclear whether each book supplies a portion of the holistic racial puzzle or are intended as revelatory islands in and of themselves.

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Big Questions, Backwards Design, and Effective Assessment 

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Big Questions, Backwards Design, and Effective Assessment 

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I really appreciated the Teaching So it Matters chapter in Going with the Flow. I found the advice to be really practical and helpful, and I thought it was a good complement to Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding By Design, since Smith and Wilhelm build on the backwards lesson planning design and advance the advice from UBD to approach lesson planning with an essential and difficult to answer question to guide the class, something grounded and applicable to students’ lives and interests rather than just a “schoolish” reason for learning. This advice was a paradigm shift for me. It was inspiring to see how a teacher can reinvigorate their pedagogy by asking themselves why a certain book should be read, or why students should be able to learn a certain skill, and work backwards from there. As this program continues, I feel greater anxiety about constructing an effective and compelling lesson plan and implementing methods of assessment that are helpful for myself and my students and do not follow a standardized model. The more I learn about effective methods of instruction (which were not the methods I experienced as a high schooler), the more I see that they all seem to share the quality of student choice. In these two readings, assessment seemed like the area where students had the most freedom in their education. In Understanding by Design and Going with the Flow, assessment-- while defined by the teacher in the preliminary stages of lesson planning-- allows students to express and synthesize what they have learned. This is relatively unique since assessment is an area which typically is the most teacher-controlled element of learning in so many schools. UBD reminded me of the other Grant P. Wiggins reading our cohort did for our Child and Adolescent Development class, a chapter from Assessing Student Performance called “Assessment and the Morality of Teaching.” This reading affirmed so many of the testing experiences I had had as a student, and created a personal foundation for myself to understand how so many assessment practices both contradict how we learn and unnecessarily harm students.

I was also interested in the presentation of the “coverer” in all three readings this week. Smith and Wilhelm echo Wiggins’ and McTighe’s conception of a teacher who “acts under the illusion that textbook and test-driven instruction encourages retention and understanding” (76). All authors this week seem to agree about the coverer’s relationship to textbooks and standards. For the coverer, the textbook is a “sacred text” (77) that is beyond criticism. In comparison, Ladson-Billings writes that culturally relevant teachers “critique the knowledge represented in the textbooks… The teachers also brought in articles and papers that represented counter knowledge to help the students develop multiple perspectives on a variety of social and historical phenomena” (162). The result of this critical pedagogy is action, which is a component of student work in Smith and Wilhelm’s backwards planning pedagogy and another huge takeaway for me this week: effective education includes some level of direct action.

My resource links this week is to MPD150’s “Enough is Enough” report, a “150 year performance review of the Minneapolis Police Department,” as well as its complementary curriculum guide. One of the biggest questions in our local and national communities right now is what the alternatives to policing look like. The report provides wonderful information about historical alternatives and insights and would be a wonderful resource in constructing and answering  guiding questions about reform, abolition, and policing.

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Enough is Enough! That is both the conclusion and the title of this report, a 150-year performance review of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The report is the product of an investigation into the conduct of the department over the fifteen decades since its founding in 1867. It includes a survey of its current role and impact, especially on marginalized communities, and an exploration of viable alternatives to the policing model. With this report, we hope to take the idea of police-free communities out of the realm of fantasy and place it firmly in the public agenda as a practical necessity. You can download a PDF copy of the report, listen to the the whole report as an audio book, or read the following sections online.

The first section will establish that the MPD has always acted as the enforcement arm of the economic and political elite. Like its fellow departments around the country, it is at the front end of a system of mass incarceration that devours black, brown and indigenous peoples, stripping them of voting rights, job prospects and dignity, keeping wages low and people divided. The US police system, we contend, is not reformable. Efforts to reform it - aimed at addressing recruitment, training, discipline, oversight and transparency - are quickly and effectively neutralized by the organized opposition of police departments and their unions and professional associations.

Part two speaks of the present. It features interviews by MPD150's interview team and by partner organizations. We share the reflections of professionals (in areas such as mental health, domestic and sexual violence, emergency response, and homelessness) whose work is impacted by the police. They report that the militarized, combative presence of police is not the medicine needed in our traumatized communities. Even the social service functions absorbed into the police system over the years would be better-served by removing them from department control. We also hear from community members who contend with police intervention in their daily lives. The constant reality of intimidation, harassment and bullying are the wide base of the police misconduct iceberg of which murder by police is just the tip.

In the third section, we turn to face the future. What might it look like if we addressed our communities' needs as neighbors and creative problem solvers instead of relying on force and imprisonment? Here we draw on the insights from our interviews, the promise of existing alternatives, and examples from other places to begin sketching the outlines of the police-free communities of the future. We have no shortage of ancient cultural traditions, innovative social programs, and community resilience strategies from which to draw.

The transition to a resilience-based Minneapolis will not come overnight. It will require a succession of steps that starts with limiting the harm caused daily by police power, and begins the orderly transfer of resources from the police to projects, programs, and grassroots initiatives that meet people's emergency and long-term needs. Neighborhoods with good jobs, affordable homes, healthy food, and green places to play produce less conflict and fewer mental health crises than ones that feature empty lots, under-funded schools, and starvation wages. Like any process of change, the transitional period will raise new questions and pose new problems. It will, naturally, meet with concerted resistance. The solutions that result, however, will be designed to help all our communities thrive, not contain and divide them.

The material presented here turns the common wisdom on its head. The idea of a police-free future is neither naive nor unrealistic. It is the only pragmatic solution to the challenge of a police system rooted in the era of slavery and Indian removal which has defeated every reform effort thrown at it. To believe that we are just one or two reforms away from turning the police into a trusted partner of the very communities it has treated like enemies to be conquered for a century and a half... that is the ultimate in magical thinking!

It is time for Minneapolis to look this problem in the face and begin a new, more courageous, conversation about our future, a conversation that includes possibilities that the police, media pundits, and corporate lobbyists tell us are out of bounds. This report is a contribution to that discussion.

You can read the whole report in PDF format, or take it piece by piece on our website. We've broken out the three main parts of the print report into the Past, Present, and Future categories. In addition to the print materials, you can find a Timeline of MPDs history, and some Alternatives to calling the police both now and in the future.

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Enough is Enough! That is both the conclusion and the title of this report, a 150-year performance review of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The report is the product of an investigation into the conduct of the department over the fifteen decades since its founding in 1867.