As a K-12 teacher-leader and social justice educator coming from a transformative justice approach, one of my biggest passions is creating "mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors" (Bishop, 1990) for my students as a path of resistance and empowerment. A huge part of creating paths of resistance for an educator-activist like myself is to create access points through curriculum, culturally responsive literature, and through sharing resources that come from culturally responsive and equity-centered spaces. We know from Emergent Strategy that it is critical to "move at the speed of trust...[and] focus on critical connections more than critical mass--building the resilience by building the relationships" (Brown, 2017), which applies to having a relational approach to social justice education that centers the identities, background knowledge, cultures and experiences of the students in front of us. I chose my themes of resistance & change-making from our course, and shared several resources that I have come to rely on as a classroom teacher, as well as classroom practices & strategies we use, and even a few read-alouds, and pictures from units & weekly focuses and monthly cultural celebrations. Each thing we learn as classroom teachers reflects that every mistake, new piece of learning or realization is "never a failure always a lesson" (brown, 2017), including the humility required to examine one's own unconscious biases, and weak points to be open and willing to learn new things from other sources and incredible educators, activists and community organizers who've gone before us. What you'll see here is an eclectic collection of resources, strategies, student-work, and more. My action-research in particular has centered the question, "what holds educators back from doing the anti-bias anti-racist work in their classrooms?" and "what do educators need to be successful within this work?", and some of my early findings indicate: time, energy, trainings, resources, community support and collaboration as preventative measures, and the barriers are clear and point back to systemic racism, oppressive systems, and capitalistic ways of being that actively cause harm. I hope you enjoy your visit at the Resistance & Change-Making in K-12 Schools exhibit! P.S. All of the classroom work you'll see was completed between 2021 and 2024 by 2nd graders and myself their classroom teacher.

As you leave this exhibit, my hope is that you take-away both tangible, real-life, in-the-field examples of student work and classroom change-making in action, and also examples of strategies, resources and inspiration for social justice centered educators. Another hope of mine is that you feel not only inspired, but hopeful, and excited about the future for our K-12 students, despite the very obvious and clear challenges and barriers that get in the way of this social justice teaching work, now more than ever. As the Everyday Practices for Transformative Justice video reminds us, "communities have been solving problems without the state for generations", and my hope is that these examples, inspirations and reflections truly display that this is possible and happening within K-12 classroom spaces. There are SO many educators out there doing this resistance work within classrooms, working with educators, students & families within their communities to do better and make our schools and communities more equitable, safer, more inclusive and more antiracist spaces. I tried to include as many examples from the classroom, my inspirations, and resources that you could draw from in the future as possible that would be encouraging and helpful in doing this critical work. Within the Cultural Strategy.space website (https://www.culturalstrategy.space/) which I included within the exhibit, it says that it is a critical piece "to have imagination as an element for cultural strategy...asking to keep boundaries fluid and make room for complexity and multiplicities". We see this all the time within K-12 spaces, particularly in response to community, policy and nationwide identity politics pushback from conservative extremist ideologies such as CRT, book bans, changing of curriculum, budget cuts, and more. Thank you so much for visiting and engaging with this space. I hope you took away at least 1 new element of a classroom space, 1 new inspiration, and 1 new strategy or resource took take and apply to your current site and role tomorrow if applicable.