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My passion for equity and social justice coalesce in my membership and work with several local and national organizations devoted to seeing equitable outcomes for people of the global majority.

I am, also, a freedom dreamer whose commitment to advocacy and equity is reflected in my published works, myriad nationally recognized presentations, consultant work, as a Teach Plus Policy Alum, a Master Teacher for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and my work with the Illinois State Board of Education to develop the Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards.

 

Before joining NLU, she spent 22 years in public education, first as a bilingual teacher and later as a school administrator. Dr. Gonzalez-Adamski lives in Bartlett and is the mother of three wonderful sons. She and her husband love to walk the many trails in DuPage County. 

 

She was born in Chicago and raised in the south suburbs. She is a member of the Illinois Principals Association, the National Association for Bilingual Educators, the Illinois Association of Multilingual Multicultural Educators, and the National Diversity Council. She also sits on the board of directors of the Girl Scouts of Northern Illinois.

For the last eighteen years, I have been fortunate to have held several roles in education. Some of my roles include Interim Principal, Assistant Principal, Instructional Coach, and English and Reading Teacher. My teaching career began in an alternative Charter school in Chicago, and for ten years, I worked with some of the most dedicated colleagues, students, and families. The experiences during this time helped me grow personally and professionally. Over these formative years, I gained an insight into the systemic inequities that made it difficult for some students to obtain a high school diploma and pursue a college degree. I knew that the more I learned about the students and their families, the better prepared I became to support their needs and celebrate their victories. During this time, I also began to make connections to my own experiences as a first-generation student and teacher of color. For the first time, I also felt proud of my ability to navigate two cultures and speak two languages. 

In my role at NLU, my goals include continuous professional collaboration and development to continue to support and create spaces for students of color where they feel seen and valued. 

(2) The case studies this week echo recent events (and past events, see this article about a Professor from Wheaton College who was fired for wearing a hijab in solidarity with Muslim people) at Hamline University where an Art History adjunct professor had her contract rescinded after depicting images of the Prophet Muhammad while discussing Islamic Art. The University's reaction to rescind the instructor's contract while largely overlooking the broader context of Muslim students' complaints about Islamophobia on campus and in the community illuminates several issues in higher education today: questions around academic freedom, the precarity of untenured and adjunct work, and institutional power dynamics that trouble instructor-student relationships and classroom atmospheres. This occurs even as good faith efforts around racial justice task forces continue on many campuses, including ours. Why does this happen? And, what does it take to address this as members of the institution? 

-          What was lacking in the case studies is an exploration of opportunity for dialogue.

-          Re: two cases of Prof. Hawkins at Wheaton College & professor at Hamline University, what was so offensive about the professor wearing a scarf to the rest of the college campus? That is academic freedom. What is missing (in both the case studies and in these examples) is an exploration of the opportunity for dialogue. In the case of Wheaton College, the institution felt a need to “take a stand,” jumping over dialogue.  Similarly, in Hamline University instance, there was a missed opportunity to discuss the instructor’s perspective, to understand student experiences.

-          Focusing on student experiences in the case studies – the students walk away with a lot of shame, embarrassment and anger; those feelings stay with them for a long time, and the case studies do not really delve into that.

-          Re: the “winter party”, usually admin invites parents, but we need to also think about who makes it into the room. The few parents that make it are making decisions for an entire school; showing up is already a privilege, as is having the language to push ideas forward, take a vote, etc.

-          Re: case study on islamophobia, the danger in allowing students to speak “honestly” is making space for inappropriate comments. The teacher struggled to stop the student since she made a rule for audience to listen; once a student is making hurtful and hateful comments, that rule should not matter anymore.

-          While some found the case studies superficial, other folks in attendance found that they resonated; i.e., recognizing that while you may not identify/celebrate with “religious” Christmas, for instance, you may identify with/celebrate secular Christmas.

o   What’s the give and take between being very neutral about an issue (such as religion in schools) versus actually having inclusivity? Forced neutrality vs. inclusivity?

o   What does it mean to take into account someone else’s feelings? Could we say that something is important and means good things to one person, but perhaps not to someone else? (i.e., Hindu symbol of swastika)

-          It is important to distinguish between Islamophobia and insensitivity.

-          Who gave someone the right to take my symbol of peace and make it into a symbol of hate? Hijab is also portrayed as a symbol of hate and puts pressure on kids and adults to worry about “What am I representing? Am I a target?” Every time there is an event related to terrorism, the face of Islam becomes women, and Muslim women become targets, and are put in a position of having to justify why we wear it or not.

-          How do you tell people that you want to be recognized, and how often can you tell them that? Do you want ot be included, part of “the family”? If I’m fasting and someone is having a lunch party, I don’t really want to be told, “you can enjoy how it smells!” “You can make a doggy bag and eat it at sunset”.

-          This weekend is lunar near year, and in the Korean community parents are wondering why schools call it “Chinese New Year” when other Asian countries celebrate this in different ways. Different communities will about the holiday differently and celebrate it differently, but this is glossed over in school and discussed in a very superficial way. Parents struggle to talk about this to teachers, and teachers struggle to about it with administrators to change this.

-          Safety of Asian-American community is also on the line right now.

-          What are those systematic and real adjustments and changes that we can make? A small example: shifting winter performance from the 1-2 weeks before December to end of January; these are the kinds of actions that feel like it’s a little more thoughtfully done, there’s an impact on parents and children.

-          Controversial perspective: learning Christmas songs, etc. was a way of learning American culture while growing up for one participant. But as their kids go through American school system, Christmas holiday became “Winter” holiday, and it felt like something was lost.

-          There is plenty of room in the year to have lots of real discussion; Muslims in general have not been fighting to not have a Christmas celebration in schools. There is a sense that the resistance to inclusion is the idea that something else has to therefore be excluded, or that by excluding one thing (i.e. Christmas) that this necessarily spells out inclusion (i.e., accommodations for Muslim students fasting during SATs, for instance).

-          There is a sense that teacher prep students are resistant to / struggling to understand what culturally responsive teaching & curriculum look like (i.e., a resistance to engaging non-Halloween texts in October, texts about Thanksgiving in November, etc.)

-          There is also a sense that students see English language learning as a “Spanish/Mexican” issue, and do not see the need for this if they are working in predominantly white contexts.

o   What does it take to change students’ minds? Can I really change their minds? Can I really teach them anything if they do not want to learn it?  

Sandra began our meeting by broadly discussing the case studies and those that resonated the most with her. She discussed how the case studies represented issues she had dealt with in her own experiences as a teacher and principal.  Sandra discussed being disturbed by the idea of “grit” and that it tends to put the onus of responsibility on young people or individual family members to change and adjust to structural and system issues: “I’ve been listening to this for the last 20 years and I know it goes deeper than that”.

Wendy presented next and discussed that reading the case studies was personally triggering for her. She explained that being part of a space where she and the rest of us share stories that are “personal and private and trigger not-so-pleasant memories” is a privilege. After relating her own experiences with fundraising initiatives in secondary school, she discussed, how curriculum can be designed to both support minoritized students and teacher candidate, but also prepare dominant teacher candidates to engage with diverse student populations whose experiences are different than theirs. Wendy asked: “What does it take for students [I interpreted this to mean teacher candidates, but I could be wrong] to get it?” and, “I don’t know what it’s like to have that experience, but how can I support you?”  The question about what does it take to “get it” I think speaks to an important difference between being fluent in the literature and language of inclusivity, but still coming up against a barrier of understanding something in your “gut” – which is the word that Christine Sleeter uses.

 

Lee then continued the conversation and posed another important question; “How do we help future teachers to understand that there’s more than meets the eye?” He discussed the importance of visiting students in their home to understand and appreciate the lived contexts that students circulate in outside of school. He shared a story of a student who would often fall asleep in class. Once Lee visited the student in his home [I actually forget if Lee shared that he visited the student at home, or if the student told him this], he understood that the student was not sleeping because his home had large rats, and so the student would stay awake to fend them off.  This made me think of the literature around appreciating students’ funds of knowledge and cultural community wealth, which, to my understanding also suggests the importance of visiting and appreciating students’ home communities to learn and understand; how can this be facilitated in a way that does not toe the line between appreciating students’ home communities and voyeurism?

Keshia followed and offered both a personal and macro perspective on the case studies. Keshia explained struggling with the overwhelming presence of empathy in the case studies. She explained that in her experience, when people have empathized with herself and her family they have put them in a box. The onus was put on Keshia and her individual family members to enable the empathy; similarly, in case study 1, the principal empathized with the poor students that could not sell chocolates, but did nothing. There seems to be a fixation on empathy when it comes inclusivity and equity in education, Keshia explained, but what is empathy? How do we get people to empathize? Similarly, practices in schools that are seemingly inclusive and democratic, such as “taking it to a vote” (from the case studies) still enable the dominance of dominant groups: “even when we think we are enacting structures that are equitable, quite frankly, we’re not”. Another term that is popular in DEI initiatives and language in education is support. Keshia compelled us to ask: “What does support look like? How do we define support? What might supporting Samantha’s parents (from the case studies) look like? She emphasized the importance of looking at an issue from multiple perspectives.

Sadia followed by offering an immigrant perspective on the case studies. Sadia’s early interactions with schooling and class issues and poverty were shaped by her frequent moving before coming to the US. For two years, Sadia was a special education teacher at two different schools on the south side of Chicago. While teaching, she was struck by the immediate needs of her students, who lacked boots and coats for the winter, meals, etc. She mobilized a turkey drive at her school, and explained that she shares this and other stories with her students at NCE to convey the idea “we do have some control over things”. She explained that while it is important for teachers to understand themselves and their own experiences, what has shaken her in the US is poverty in schools and how students talk about it.  Sadia explained: “sometimes we get so caught up in the race discussions that the lens of poverty is overlooked. If you don’t take into account what poverty does to children, their parents, their communities, even when we talk about voting – are you actually engaging in voting policies that will help families get some kind of relief from poverty?”  Sadia also explained how race, ethnicity and class intersect to shape her own sense of positionality: “being an immigrant, I don’t want to be perceived as ‘I can’t do this for my child when everyone is doing’”.   Finally, she discussed the importance of courses like a past course she taught at NCE around disability and poverty that involve students in action-based projects that are tied to alleviating social inequity.

I, Blanca, attempted to wrap up the discussion by posing a question that attempted to speak to the specificities of the case studies, their relevance to our practice and lives, and some enduring dilemmas in education – it was a version of the question #1 of the 3 questions posted to the padlet: 1.) The cases in Chapter 3 compel us to think about how we would approach a number of dilemmas having to do with religious holidays, the use of technology in communication, leading inclusive PTA meetings, recognizing students' diverse learning modalities, and more. Additionally, last week we discussed the necessity of "freedom dreaming" in the face of normalized inequities in and outside of the workplace (i.e., racial micro-aggressions, racial profiling). In what ways - if at all - do you see continuities or tensions between envisioning practical school-based or context-specific approaches to educational dilemmas like those outlined in Chapter 3, and the political project of freedom dreaming?

I was interested in hearing how everyone thought about the tension of working within the mechanisms of schools and schooling to redress structural and systemic issues, while also engaging in a sort of radical dreaming, which is how I understand freedom dreaming.

 

We then opened up the floor for conversation. Below are some of the responses from participants & conversations that ensued (not entirely verbatim):

Participant 1: - It’s empowering to know that you can empathize without having had the same experience as students - its empowering to not sit in the seat of the expert and allowing families to come to the table and allowing those experiences to inform our instruction and the conversations that we've had and how we provide; even the word support is hard to use because that implies ‘helper’ - giving families the expert seat …

 

P2:

The word support is a term that we hear related to these topics and there is a genuine desire for folks to figure out what support really is and what is meaningful because what could be intended as support may not be meaningful or effective. In moving from to empathy to action and doing something, I’m curious about the phenomenon of how we identify support that is truly support for people and not just a window dressing or distraction

- WENDY ADDRESSES QUESTION: when I think about supports, I would start with what support is not. Going back to the example with the chocolate boxes - if we know that that’s problematic, let’s get rid of that system. We know that systems aren’t working, and we know what the outcome will be, and some of us are worried about saying ‘this isn’t working, so let’s just get rid of it”. Support does not mean paying for my boxes - it means getting rid of them or sending only one box. Savior complex comes in when "I have the money, I can help out".

 

KEISHA: Support starts foundationally with listening, active listening, we could read these case studies and say they did listen, they listened to what parents had to say about the chocolate and they overrode it. Listening to children in the classroom, I am a better teacher today for having listened […] checking in with students - humanizing step that we often disregard because it’s the simple thing. Support starts with engagement of listening and the conversation - because had the PTA really listened and engaged in subsequent conversations, they would not have taken it to a vote. Valenzuela talks about caring for and caring about - thinking about how we're caring for communities, for students, instead of just caring about their academics, that then unearths the support that’s needed for students and families.

 

Participant 3:

How do we get our teachers to know that there are social services that can get families kinds of things that they need

 

SADIA

When we you see something very overt like hunger, obviously that needs an immediate solution. Teachers that have closets full of crackers and lunchroom staff that accommodate students' needs. So on some level, we have to look at schooling from the perspective of poverty in terms of education, literacy, family access, community access - we're stuck on just raising money without any accountability of where money is being used. The conversations teachers CAN have is can we bring more into it? 

 

P4

[…] listening in the moment increases trust - in Trenton, NJ teachers had to make school visit, was part of requirement; principal really trained and helped with idea of listening - going into the homes was valuable to learn about the families; idea of learning how to listen, power to applause, building trust is more important than ever; children and students know when you’re not listening; training all of us as educators is so important in that idea of really listening.

 

Participant 1

- has seen examples of every single case study; if we ask our teach candidates on any given day can you give us example of system of oppression that happens in school, they might have hard time, but when you see these case studies right out in front, hopefully light bulb goes on - all case studies point to the need for the dominant culture to shift - we gotta shift some gears - notion of everything is a competition has irked me for 40 years; the kid that sells the most chocolate bars, what schools do best is sort and select. Collaboration is much more powerful tool to get kids engaged – that’s all kids - not just kids of color or with disabilities, but when we actually create a community of learners where everybody's contribution is valued and recognized

 

P6

- Bringing everything together - thought of importance of listening, and importance of going in to communities; stop being outsiders ; if you want to know what’s happening and what’s working, go into the communities and see for yourself; a lot of effective strategies have already been in place out of urgency and survival - food pantries, assisting with electricity - we had to mobilize