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.
In addition to the primary article and guiding questions, we are offering BARWE users this notebook as a place to gather their thoughts and commitments throughout the year. In the past, we have sent various tools and handouts in separate months. This year, we encourage all work to be done in this one document to encourage ongoing attention to commitments and frequent review of previous months’ reflections.
Overview:
Last month we took a dive into the topic of student partnership, looking at the impact on students when teachers are the sole decision makers in classrooms. We explored student perspectives and began to discuss how traditional classroom management strategies are rooted in compliance. They are rooted in the white supremacist belief that there is one right way to be and act inside of a classroom (and therefore in our society). We see racism and ableism overlapping in the ways we tell our students, especially our neurodivergent, Black and Indigenous students, how they can and cannot act in our classrooms.
If compliance and control are the center of this harmful way of structuring our schools and classrooms, what are alternatives? How can our classrooms and schools become more free?
This month, we will explore student partnership through the lens of liberation. In this month’s primary resource, “Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School,” author Carla Shalaby states, “I am convinced if we continue to prepare children for the world we have now, we will necessarily reflect and reinforce the everyday harms and assaults of punishment, confinement, and exclusion. Instead, we have to begin to prepare children for the world we want.” We have not fully realized this world where freedom, imagination, joy, and dignity of Black and Indigenous students and students of color are centered. There are no prescriptive practices that we can suggest. Together, we must dream, collaborate, create, and revise our ways to alternatives for what we have now. This month's inquiry is designed to support a strengthening and deepening of the mindsets needed to get us there.
Optional Facilitator Pre-Work: After reading the primary resource, choose a situation similar to the story of Marcus in this month’s article to discuss with your colleagues. Use the thoughts and questions posed in the text to engage in a Problem of Practice Protocol, with the aim of unearthing shifts in practice that may better support the student and address the underlying “problem of freedom.” Some of these suggested discussion questions are:
Primary Resources:
Guiding Questions:
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.
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 Detroit Heals Detroit, recommended by the author of this month’s primary article, Dr. Carla Shalaby.
In addition to the primary article and guiding questions, we are offering BARWE users this notebook as a place to gather their thoughts and commitments throughout the year. In the past, we have sent various tools and handouts in separate months. This year, we encourage all work to be done in this one document to encourage ongoing attention to commitments and frequent review of previous months’ reflections.
Overview:
Last month we took a dive into the topic of student partnership, looking at the impact on students when teachers are the sole decision makers in classrooms. We explored student perspectives and began to discuss how traditional classroom management strategies are rooted in compliance. They are rooted in the white supremacist belief that there is one right way to be and act inside of a classroom (and therefore in our society). We see racism and ableism overlapping in the ways we tell our students, especially our neurodivergent, Black and Indigenous students, how they can and cannot act in our classrooms.
If compliance and control are the center of this harmful way of structuring our schools and classrooms, what are alternatives? How can our classrooms and schools become more free?
This month, we will explore student partnership through the lens of liberation. In this month’s primary resource, “Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School,” author Carla Shalaby states, “I am convinced if we continue to prepare children for the world we have now, we will necessarily reflect and reinforce the everyday harms and assaults of punishment, confinement, and exclusion. Instead, we have to begin to prepare children for the world we want.” We have not fully realized this world where freedom, imagination, joy, and dignity of Black and Indigenous students and students of color are centered. There are no prescriptive practices that we can suggest. Together, we must dream, collaborate, create, and revise our ways to alternatives for what we have now. This month's inquiry is designed to support a strengthening and deepening of the mindsets needed to get us there.
Optional Facilitator Pre-Work: After reading the primary resource, choose a situation similar to the story of Marcus in this month’s article to discuss with your colleagues. Use the thoughts and questions posed in the text to engage in a Problem of Practice Protocol, with the aim of unearthing shifts in practice that may better support the student and address the underlying “problem of freedom.” Some of these suggested discussion questions are:
- Is there a harm this child is suffering within our classroom to which this behavior might be a response?
- How might this problem in the classroom be related to a problem that we see in our world?
- What might I teach and learn in order to intervene on those larger social problems?
Primary Resources:
- “A Letter to Teachers: On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom” from “Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School” by Carla Shalaby. You may purchase a copy of the book here.
- View Carla Shalaby’s Rowland Foundation Keynote (this video discusses many of the same ideas in the text)
Guiding Questions:
- How are you responding internally to the choice of language of “troublemaker”? Why do you think Carla Shalaby picked that word?
- What does it mean for kids to be free in our classroom? What instructional or structural shifts would get your classroom closer to a space of freedom?
- White supremacy culture thrives off of compliance and beginning to purposefully relinquish control can be extremely uncomfortable. Tell a story of a time you have tried a new practice or structure towards the aim of the primary article and felt uncomfortable in the moment of implementation. Where did you feel the discomfort in your body? How did you respond? Does the story give you ideas for what would be supportive in acknowledging, exploring, and moving through these feelings in the future?
- 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 Primary Article 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. An optional Problem of Practice Protocol is included at the end of this email. It will need to be adapted slightly if you’re choosing to include that protocol in your meeting.
- Pass the Hat and collect donations for Detroit Heals Detroit this month.
- Complete the Feedback Form.
- Prepare yourself for April by setting a date and time, inviting colleagues, and looking out for our next Discussion Guide on April 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.
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 Detroit Heals Detroit, recommended by the author of this month’s primary article, Dr. Carla Shalaby.