If this is your first year doing this series, we recommend starting with an orientation meeting using the September 2021 material before moving on to the current month.
For the next two months, we are narrowing our focus from accountability in general to accountability to our students. While many of our districts tell us accountability is about making students receive higher test scores or learn normative white behavior, we know from our past two months that this is not the kind of accountability our students need. This month’s essential question emerged from the broader questions which inspired our work for these two months: What does it look like when we are accountable to our students? How do we hold ourselves accountable to them?
In a white supremacist system, teacher-student relationships are set up to be carceral: based on monitoring, coercion, and punishment. We therefore believe accountability to our students first and foremost means forming transformative relationships with them which are rooted in love, healing, and joy - the opposite of those carceral relationships. Even though we may be well-meaning, if we are not intentional about creating these transformative relationships, we can instead reinforce racist carceral structures.
This month, we will reflect on how we create a culture of care in our classrooms and how we build transformative relationships with students, knowing that these are the keystone of accountability. In this month’s primary resource, Dr. Shawn Ginwright explains his model of Healing-Centered Engagement, which offers a guide for imagining and creating transformative classroom culture and relationships with students.
Primary Resources:
Toward a Greenhouse Model: An Interview about Healing-Centered Engagement - Shawn Ginwright interviewed by Farima Pour-Khorshid from Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators (We encourage you to purchase a copy of this excellent resource here)
There are so many wonderful resources about accountability out there. In an effort to compile these into one place, we’ve created this Accountability Resources document. We will continue adding resources and linking this document for the remainder of the year. If you know of any resources that you think should be on this list, please email us at [email protected].
Guiding Questions:
Consider how you might be engaging in both transactional and transformative relationships in your classroom or context. What is the difference (p. 265)? Thinking back to our October discussion on accountability, how would transformative relationships be part of the process of accountability?
Look at your own practice and context through Dr. Ginwright’s lens of “damage-centered approaches.” (p.264) What damage-centered approaches exist in what you do and in the institutions you are a part of? How do they impact Black and Brown kids?
Dr. Ginwright talks about healing needing to happen at the personal level, interpersonal level and institutional level. How can you implement (or be part of implementing) a healing centered approach at each level? What is the relationship between healing and abolition in our teaching practice?
What do you take from this reading about how to be accountable to your Black and Brown students and all students of color?
Consider Dr. Ginwright’s Greenhouse Model (p.268). What conditions are needed in your context? How is your school already cultivating conditions necessary for transformative relationships? What else is needed?
Facilitation Reference Guide:
Set a day and time for your group to meet - Make sure to send reminders.
Send this month’s Primary Resource to your group. Look through the additional readings to see if there is another reading that might be better suited to your group and its interests.
Prepare yourself for January by setting a date and time, inviting colleagues, and looking out for our next Discussion Guide on January 1st.
Feedback Form: As we grow in year four, we hope that one person in your group can take a few minutes to fill out our feedback form to let us know how it went.
Here is a few takeaway from previous meetings:
Thank you all for your feedback so far, please keep it coming!
Pass The Hat: In addition to being accountable to our colleagues and students of color, we believe it is important to be financially accountable to people of color who are doing this work on a daily basis. Each month, we will recommend an organization led by people of color, in education and beyond, doing the work of pushing for justice.
At the end of each monthly discussion, pass a hat (or a box) and collect donations for the designated organization. You can then have one group member go online and donate in the name of your school. If you want, you can add “Building Anti-Racist White Educators” after your school name.
This month, we encourage you to donate to the Education for Liberation Network and/or Critical Resistance, two groups doing essential liberatory work. Education for Liberation Network “is a national coalition of teachers, community activists, researchers, youth and parents who believe a good education should teach people—particularly low-income youth and youth of color—how to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face. The network aims to help improve the practice of Education for Liberation by bringing people together to learn from each other’s experiences. The network provides a space for members to share knowledge and work together to create tools for liberatory education.” Critical Resistance “seeks to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex (PIC) by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.”