If this is your first year doing this series, you might consider using our Inquiry Series 3 material for the year or hosting an orientation meeting using our September material before moving on to the current month.
Don't forget to give us feedback!
Overview:
For the past year, the BARWE core has engaged in political education through reading and discussing Let This Radicalize You, by Kelly E. Hayes and Mariame Kaba. We felt an especially deep connection to the eighth chapter, Hope and Grief Can Coexist. Educators are facing increasingly disruptive attacks on antiracist teaching, all of which sap our will to continue working together towards a just and free world. The stories shared from organizers around the country contained in this chapter discuss dealing with loss, grief, and setbacks in our work, while motivating us to build a community that will support each other through the fight, and maintain our hope that a better world is possible. We are encouraging groups to begin this year by sharing stories around grief, as well as spending the Fall developing a practice of care to buoy the folks you are struggling alongside.
Our 2024-2025 Inquiry Series will feature a small change from years prior. You can expect to receive our discussion resources on a quarterly basis. We are planning for the resources and prompts we'll share this year to be substantive enough to sustain group meetings and discussions through each season. Gather monthly in order to check in and identify community needs. Spend time discussing these prompts deeply and connecting with your group. We will still be in touch monthly to provide updates on our work and highlight relevant resources that may help your meetings and conversations. The resources provided in this email are intended for the next three months.
Primary Resource: Chapter 8: Hope and Grief Can Coexist in the book Let This Radicalize You, by Kelly E. Hayes and Mariame Kaba was a big inspiration for this year’s inquiry theme. We suggest you purchase the book and use chapter eight for all three months of your fall inquiry meetings.
Discussion Questions: We encourage you to break up the Discussion Questions over the next 3 months as makes sense for your group. (We adapted these questions from the Let This Radicalize you Reading and Discussion Guide and Let the Radicalize You Workbook, which we have linked under secondary resources.)
Secondary Resources:
We encourage all readers to purchase Let This Radicalize You from Haymarket books. The book is currently part of a 40% promotion and is available in paperback, e-book, and hardcover formats. The authors have also made the following supplementary resources available, from which we drew on for our discussion guide above.
Facilitation Reference Guide:
Feedback Form:
We have made edits to our feedback form, with the hopes that you find it faster and more straightforward to fill out. Please have one person in your group take a few minutes to fill out our feedback form to let us know how it went. It is very helpful to hear from you, and helps build our connection to you!
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.
Over this three month cycle, we are encouraging you to donate to the organizations spotlighted in chapter eight of Let This Radicalize You. This month we suggest you donate to Indigenous Justice (Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples). Indigenous justice is “working to end the incarceration of living native peoples in jails, prisons, and group homes across the state, to end the incarceration of our Salmon relatives impacted by dams on our rivers, and to end the incarceration of our ancestors' skeletons locked away in basements of universities. We are doing this through developing powerful indigenous leaders and communities and organizing with them to transform the systems, structures, and stories that keep us all imprisoned both physically and spiritually.”
Don't forget to give us feedback!
Overview:
For the past year, the BARWE core has engaged in political education through reading and discussing Let This Radicalize You, by Kelly E. Hayes and Mariame Kaba. We felt an especially deep connection to the eighth chapter, Hope and Grief Can Coexist. Educators are facing increasingly disruptive attacks on antiracist teaching, all of which sap our will to continue working together towards a just and free world. The stories shared from organizers around the country contained in this chapter discuss dealing with loss, grief, and setbacks in our work, while motivating us to build a community that will support each other through the fight, and maintain our hope that a better world is possible. We are encouraging groups to begin this year by sharing stories around grief, as well as spending the Fall developing a practice of care to buoy the folks you are struggling alongside.
Our 2024-2025 Inquiry Series will feature a small change from years prior. You can expect to receive our discussion resources on a quarterly basis. We are planning for the resources and prompts we'll share this year to be substantive enough to sustain group meetings and discussions through each season. Gather monthly in order to check in and identify community needs. Spend time discussing these prompts deeply and connecting with your group. We will still be in touch monthly to provide updates on our work and highlight relevant resources that may help your meetings and conversations. The resources provided in this email are intended for the next three months.
Primary Resource: Chapter 8: Hope and Grief Can Coexist in the book Let This Radicalize You, by Kelly E. Hayes and Mariame Kaba was a big inspiration for this year’s inquiry theme. We suggest you purchase the book and use chapter eight for all three months of your fall inquiry meetings.
Discussion Questions: We encourage you to break up the Discussion Questions over the next 3 months as makes sense for your group. (We adapted these questions from the Let This Radicalize you Reading and Discussion Guide and Let the Radicalize You Workbook, which we have linked under secondary resources.)
- Think about some of the losses that have shaped your life. What opportunities did you have to grieve? What demands did grief make of you? What did you learn about yourself or others through the process of grieving? How, if at all, does that grief show up in your everyday life? In your relationship-building? In your organizing?
- How can a loving practice of grief serve as a practice of resistance? How do you process grief? (p.151)
- The authors write, “Our oppressors...are hoping that the battery of catastrophes we witness in real-time will shorten our attention spans until the fallen are forgotten in the blink of an eye” (152). How might you and your co-strugglers create rituals of pausing, feeling, and remembering to honor those who have been lost or taken? How can you make a commitment to resist the normalization of mass death?
- Morning Star Gali invokes the principle of acting in the present with concern for the next seven generations (156). How can you practice the Indigenous wisdom of planning for the next seven generations to come?
- Pino asks, “How are we waging acts of care? What is our own practice of care? How are we making sure that the community is cared for?” (171). Do you consider the work you are doing care work? Why or why not?
- Read Lea Kayali’s description of joining a Palestinian folk dance troupe (174). Her participation in a community-based dance practice operates as both a political commitment and self-care. Reflect on your own life. Do you have practices and pastimes that represent both your political commitment and self-care? Might you reach for some opportunities like this in the future?
- Journal Prompt/Possible activity: Spend five quiet minutes sketching or writing about the world you are working toward for the children seven generations after you. After five minutes, reflect and share: What was that like? Hard? Surprising? Enlightening? (Possible activity for your final fall meeting in December)
Secondary Resources:
We encourage all readers to purchase Let This Radicalize You from Haymarket books. The book is currently part of a 40% promotion and is available in paperback, e-book, and hardcover formats. The authors have also made the following supplementary resources available, from which we drew on for our discussion guide above.
- This workbook is intended as an extension of our book Let This Radicalize You. It was created to feature resources that we couldn't fit in the book, including other helpful books, essays, wisdom from veteran organizers, and more. Printable workbook.
- Discussion questions and further resources, curated by Rachael Zafer Discussion Guide.
Facilitation Reference Guide:
- Set a day and time for your group to meet - Make sure to send reminders. If you’re meeting in person, snacks are always a good idea!
- Send this month’s journal prompt 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 to facilitate by reading through our Norms and Discussion Protocol.
Feedback Form:
We have made edits to our feedback form, with the hopes that you find it faster and more straightforward to fill out. Please have one person in your group take a few minutes to fill out our feedback form to let us know how it went. It is very helpful to hear from you, and helps build our connection to you!
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.
Over this three month cycle, we are encouraging you to donate to the organizations spotlighted in chapter eight of Let This Radicalize You. This month we suggest you donate to Indigenous Justice (Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples). Indigenous justice is “working to end the incarceration of living native peoples in jails, prisons, and group homes across the state, to end the incarceration of our Salmon relatives impacted by dams on our rivers, and to end the incarceration of our ancestors' skeletons locked away in basements of universities. We are doing this through developing powerful indigenous leaders and communities and organizing with them to transform the systems, structures, and stories that keep us all imprisoned both physically and spiritually.”