My whole life, my eyesight has been terrible. Nearsighted with astigmatism, I've worn glasses as long as I can remember. As a child, I lost my glasses several times. As I waited for a new pair of glasses to be shipped, life was different while everything was underscored by a state of blurriness. Trying to decode the pale chalk lines on the worn out green chalkboards in school was absolutely exhausting. Figuring out who was at the other side of the cafeteria? Impossible. Identifying my school bus number? Wasn't happening.

At seven and eight years old, I got pretty good at finding creative ways to hide what I couldn't see in the classroom, looking and listening for other clues in the world to help me know where to go, or which bus to hop on. Nobody really suspected I had any issues re: access because I could be compliant, I could be quiet, and I could tell a good story. It wasn't that I didn't make an effort; I tried to figure out what was being written in the front of the classroom, but it was exhausting. Most of the time, I was checked out, deep in my internal world building a very strong set of daydreaming skills! Besides, there weren't many grown‐ups probing my vision situation, so flying under the radar became my specialty.

There are many people who are doing the work of teaching and learning, in schools, in a similar state: they are truly working hard, trying their best to decipher various social situations, cultural components of learning, and/or numerous lifeways in literacy. However, like me and my nearsightedness and astigmatism, it's really, really hard to see without the proper tools and equipment. And, if they've never been diagnosed with having a vision problem, the state of blurriness in which they move throughout the school community feels normal.

Honestly, the thing that brought me to clear sight wasn't my bad vision, it was my sister: six years older than me, in high school while I was in elementary school, there wasn't anything she did that I didn't try to emulate, and she just so happened to wear glasses. Because I wanted to be more like her, I asked my mom to take me to an eye doctor. My mom obliged, taking me to the optometrist located at the Base Exchange (BX) on the air force base we currently lived on, and then it became an annual thing. With every visit, my eyesight got worse, my prescription grew stronger, and I got to choose a new pair of glasses, totally in sync with the trajectory of my sister's eyewear! Those new glasses were such a treat! In addition to being one step closer to my sister's style, the relief I felt from my new and improved vision when I put on those new frames … whew! It was ah‐maz‐ing.

I would put on those new glasses and move through the world in absolute awe; it was almost incredulous that this is what the world looked like when you could actually see. The lines in people's faces were distinct, trees had collections of single leaves, and the name of the street I was crossing was no longer a mystery. To this day, after the blur and haze of the journey from my bed to the bathroom, I relish the clarity in vision I feel every morning when I put on my glasses or contacts.

If you are not someone with impaired vision, then you may not know about the afflictions that come with new glasses or lenses: the ache you feel in your temples, or distorted perception of space that splices your eyesight. At first, the glasses feel great—you can see everything, and you feel like you're queen of the world! And then the strangeness creeps in with the stronger prescription, and there's a great amount of temptation to just take the new lenses off, put the old ones back on, and even sometimes, just go without anything to help your vision because it feels better.

My metaphor is getting more obvious! Our motivations to understand what's happening in school, that is, What is unjust?, What is just?, and What are we supposed to do about it?, come from different places, from different people in different ways. However, in my experience, I have found that no matter where the motivation comes from, once people are truly engaged in identifying injustice and justice, powerful outcomes in school communities occur.

With proper tools, equipment, and practice, you will begin to see how something as simple as the tone in a teacher's voice displays a sense of injustice, how the parameters for family engagement time excludes specific demographics of people from attending school events, or even how recess policies are in favor of one gender over another. Beginning to see how school, as a system, is underscored with injustices, absolutely takes some adjusting to—especially if you've been operating within the status quo for most of the time you've been in school, first as a student and then as a teacher.

It will take time. Adjustment is necessary to get used to clarity in vision. Powerfully, with every injustice you're able to identify, you'll have an opportunity to create justice for children, colleagues, and families you're connected to within your school community. But those opportunities are absent from teaching and learning life if you're not able to see what's not working in the first place.

There will be time for rest and recuperation, but the clarity in your vision doesn't disappear. Once you see what you are able to see, it cannot be unseen. At times, this weight, sometimes referred to as emotional labor, might be categorized as a burden, and it can be frustratingly exhausting to walk with and wear this knowledge.

But I think it's important to note—we are working toward building our ability to move through a just lens, not only some of the time, not only through a few lesson plans here or there, but all the time, everywhere. There is a specific beauty to this work, this clarity in vision. And as tiring as the emotional weight can feel of seeing and understanding everyday injustices in school, joy beckons as we create opportunities and uncover robust and student‐centered learning across the minutes and days and years kids, and teachers, spend in school.

Dominant Culture: Perspective Changes Everything

There are all kinds of things that surround us in school that, to the naked eye, are harmless. Take, for example, the school chair. The ubiquitous navy‐blue chair, made with hard seats, chrome legs, and memories from its tiny squeaks created from every transition passed on from year to year to year. Maybe you, like me, also sat on this chair for most of your elementary, adolescent, and adult school life. Most of the time, as student or educator, you think nothing of it. Until one day, it's the only thing you think about!

As I belabor this point, I invite you to find a blue school chair to sit in for full effect!

A singular, common perspective of the school chair is that its purpose is to serve as a place for students to sit as they are learning in classrooms. Seems simple, but it's far more complicated.

Let's grow that perspective from multiple vantage points:

• The antsy student: “The blue school chair dictates how I can position my body to learn!”

  When the perspective of an antsy child or grown‐up is considered during a lesson or independent work period in any kind of learning environment, sitting in the blue chair might feel like a constraint, uncomfortable. Having a sore bottom is one of the first things my own antsy child (and self) talks about after a long day at school! Meanwhile, at home, those same “antsy” people might be reading, computing numbers, making posters, and/or engaging in the most organic of conversations with their entire bodies sprawled out on the floor.

  Let's think about a few other players' perspectives, such as school leaders and school business managers, those who are responsible for equipping the school with furniture.

• School leaders and/or business managers: “The federal government dictates when I can buy chairs, how many chairs I can afford, and what chairs I am allowed to buy!”

  Those responsible for buying school furniture usually are not sitting in kids' chairs. Consequently, the way their bodies are positioned to learn within their workspace isn't necessarily similar to what students are thinking. Rather, they are tasked with budgeting for all kinds of operating expenses and priority school items like books, curricular materials, supplies, and, yes, desks and tables and chairs. Here's the thing that's tricky: budgets are finicky, incumbent on many different factors, such as Title 1 Funds, PTA bank accounts, and the number of kids and teachers in the school demographic.

  What's more, when spending government money, it is really difficult to use funding outside of companies that are already enlisted as vendors and contractors with local and/or federal governments.

  Maybe you're thinking “TMI Kass!” Maybe you're right.

  But here's the thing, all these details help us build perspective. The hard blue school chairs the school leader had to order from one of the three Blue School Chair companies contracted with the government were probably a great bargain. That great bargain might have allowed for a whole ‘nother teacher or teaching assistant to be hired for the following school year. The thing that is super uncomfortable for a whole bunch of kids is also the same thing that allowed a teaching assistant in their classroom, enabling oodles of comfort to be provided in different ways throughout the school year.

• Teacher: “The blue school chair limits how I can organize my classroom environment to optimize learning!”

  Earlier, we addressed the “comfort” component from the learners' perspective, but let's work to get closer to omniscient perspective as we unpack what a teacher might be thinking in terms of comfort and communal learning at the behest of the blue chair. One of the resounding memories in my teacherhood is that screeeechh that hit the ears between every period when the bell sounded, as students leave their desks to head to their next class. (If you close your eyes, you can probably hear it, too. If you are an active teacher, this sound is no stranger to you!) While chairs are the most common option for positioning how kids learn in a classroom, they limit a teacher's ability to create a calm, comfortable, communal space. Calm is often the first thing derailed by chairs.

  Developing a community of learners within a classroom space is an important force when building social justice. As a child of the 1980s, I did not feel a deep sense of communal learning in elementary school. When I became a teacher, aligning desks in rows and handing students responsibility for their chairs was a practice I carried with me from my own school history, and I took solace in the quietness that rows and cold chairs promoted.

This classroom setup was part of the culture of dominant schooling I brought with me from my childhood—sitting in blue chairs in desks lined up in rows was normal for me, throughout all my school experiences (in college, too!). Hefting chairs on top of desks as a child with my tiny kid muscles was part of my classroom routine. The “chairs and rows” classroom environment was in my blood.

However, I learned very quickly that classroom quietness was not synonymous with classroom engagement. Rather, I learned that silence was an indicator of kids' boredom; the loudest sounds were the sighs of relief attached to the teacher carrying all the intellectual labor. By sitting in their blue chairs quietly, students' learning engagement was optional and checking out was easy.

The only time period in my teaching career that my classroom was decked out in rows was that first few months of my high school teaching life. That year, I was in grad school. I remember talking about the importance of group work and its impact on student engagement in classroom communities. Because group work made noise and sparked paranoia about pending chaos, I avoided group work at all costs. Even when I learned that students learn more powerfully from each other than they do from teachers, I still planned my workshop model as individualistically as possible because it felt safe … it felt quiet.

Soon, group work became unavoidable. Not because my school mandated it, but because one of my grad school classes required “implementing group work” as part of my official New York State teaching certification. I found myself with an assignment that required me to design a lesson for groups, where students worked together and learned from one another. I was pressed for time, working extra hours to afford New York City rent, full‐time teaching and full‐time grad schooling, so I was not about to waste planning time on something that I wasn't going to use.

I took a deep breath, and chose a group work structure to plan carefully. I decided to implement a simple Jigsaw activity for a text on a topic we were reading about in our biology unit—fetal alcohol syndrome—and committed to the Jigsaw Protocol the very next day. After I taught the mini‐lesson on “babies in utero,” I instructed the kids to move into groups [resounding screeeechhh from blue chairs] and to sit where they like. [Slight panic on my part: Would my class explode into mayhem? Would kids start the dance for “Chicken Noodle Soup”¹ as they headed to a different area of the classroom? Would they actually engage with the text? Note: Since I was a novice, transitions were not smooth in my class, hence my rows and chairs and mostly independent activities.]

It was loud. Some of my panic had merit: kids did start dancing to “Chicken Noodle Soup.” Their bodies were folded, flat, standing, sprawled in all sorts of ways. And they were talking a lot.

And yet … they did the activity! They proceeded to read their sections, identify the topic, create a poster, and did a little “teach out.” It was nothing like my own school experiences. It was communal, and kids were learning.

No blue school chairs were involved.

That first Jigsaw experience, for me, was a turning point. It allowed me to witness kids interacting in the classroom space in ways that were loud, yet full of learning; slightly chaotic, yet vibrant.

While a quiet, somewhat motionless learning environment made me comfortable, I realized it was making the students I was working with uncomfortable. I may have been super engaged with the content, “teaching” science with flowery vocabulary for 20 to 30 minutes a time, but that time was clearly for me. You know those old sayings, “Sage on the stage” and “The one who does the most talking does the most learning”? That was me, 100%!

Inadvertently, I was developing nap‐like notes of disengagement for students, and while they may have appreciated the comfort that comes with rest, they deserved better.

From that chairless, semichaotic, yet super‐engaged pursuit toward group work, I learned that oftentimes my students' comfort required my discomfort.

I chuckle as I look back because, honestly, the discomfort of creating engaging teaching and learning spaces has never left me. I often joke that I'm like the Incredible Hulk, not because I'm green and angry, but because I've taken a page from his playbook when it comes to managing my presence in learning communities. There's a scene in one of Marvel's Avenger movies where Black Widow asks Hulk how he learned to stay in his human form, rather than transforming to a green angry monster due to negative emotional charges. His secret? He stays angry.

Like the Hulk, I've chosen how to be in spaces: not angry, but slightly uncomfortable. Because I've made that choice, more often than not I'm able to responsively adapt to people's learning needs, especially when it comes to their communal environments.

Catalyst for Change: Knowing How to See and Feel the Pressure of Injustice

To build our capacity for envisioning justice, we have to create multiple lenses in which we can not only see and understand various perspectives, but also, feel the pressure to change the injustices so many people in our schools experience daily. This well of empathy equips us with the ability to identify and prevent potential harm.

Too often, educators and families view school through rose‐colored glasses: believing the false reality that it's all good so long as there's no overt, loud, and/or super‐visible trouble happening. The pink tint of nicety only operates when school life is seen through one lens, one way, and in one particular shade. Mono‐perspectives often go hand in hand with the concept of neutrality, this idea that “rocking the boat” is bad because once you name something as being problematic or racist or inequitable, you may get in trouble, create more work for people, and/or life becomes harder in some ways.

This is when people start insisting they have no power to change a thing, or that it doesn't matter what we think about issue X, because it's outside our role or job jurisdiction in the realm of school. But here's the thing: viewing a problem from one lens, claiming neutrality, always meeting in the middle, sacrificing your power in the name of “keeping the peace” is equivalent to maintaining the status quo—the underlying source of injustice in schools.

It's true. Deepening perspective and identifying problems does challenge people's workloads; it does make life harder in some ways. Because of this, many people who are able to see injustice with clarity feel as though they don't have the time or bandwidth or even permission to name it, and their jobs and livelihood are quite literally in jeopardy. Nonetheless, those same folks, disproportionately BIPOC and disproportionately Queer, have been naming injustices in schools since the inception of public schooling.

Oftentimes, the general public situates the unjust nature of schooling in the past. When people think about equity or equal rights, the Civil Rights Movement, Thurgood Marshall, and the Little Rock Nine come to mind. Those who have spent time studying education or who have children with IEPs (Individualized Education Programs) might even think about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that passed in 1975 and was later revised in the 1990s, granting access “for a free and appropriate education,” special education, and other related services for any children who qualified. Or perhaps those familiar with gender discrimination laws or who were in secondary school in the 1970s might think about Title IX, an educational amendment passed in 1972 banning sex discrimination of any kind in educational spaces (most widely known for allowing girls to play school‐sponsored sports).

Those were all major victories and powerful shifts for equity in American schooling. However, the ubiquitous, quiet, everyday injustices that haven't necessarily made their way to the Supreme Court are also powerful—powerful enough to produce the same inequitable schooling outcomes for socially and economically disadvantaged students for the past 70 years. Since public schooling was revamped in 1938 toward the end of the Great Depression, policy and legislative changes, even when designed in favor of marginalized groups, still haven't changed the experiences for those students powerfully enough (Rothstein and Jacobsen 2007). Graduation rates, attendance, suspension rates, and family participation all show data that leans in favor of kids from well‐resourced families and the dominant culture.

Although injustice is often historicized, we must understand that it is very much part of our here and now. We are all implicated, and we are all empowered to choose change.

Identifying Layers of Perspective

Identifying layers of perspective requires us to engage with one another through sharing, digesting, and actively listening to one another's stories. Not just reading research papers or articles on “best practices,” but listening to stories. I'm going to begin this storytelling with a walk back in time, offering a snapshot of my first year of classroom teaching under the magnifying glass that was instrumental for building my own lenses. This allowed me to start unpacking layers of perspective and injustice from a very early point in my career.

Earlier, I talked about the blue school chair, and how it is symbolic of varying points of view. Let's dig deeper and consider how competing points of view on something like a chair represent deeper problems within a school community.

Tools for Perspective Analysis: More than a Decade Later

When I reflect upon those moments in time, it isn't the seismic activity of the chair being tossed, or even the students' responses to the incident that are most salient to me. Rather, what is most memorable for me is the ocean of pain I saw in Delia's eyes as the chair got tossed, and the terror in Tremaine's eyes as he witnessed his peer lose control. And my Field Supervisor's response: that I should have called the police.

Here, I'll introduce an analysis tool to uncover the layers of perspective, why they matter, and what the heck the chair has to do with our perceived realities.

In teacher preparation programs, there is always a course or two on childhood development, and a psychology course is a prerequisite for all college degrees. However, no matter the books you have read or the analyses you've written, there isn't a whole lot of print‐based literacy that will prepare you for witnessing the kind of pain students experience when they throw classroom furniture.

When I witnessed classroom furniture being thrown, I was working under a “Transitional B Teaching License,” which allows teacher candidates to teach kids while they are still learning how to teach in a grad school program. Symptomatically, those programs produce many teachers who are ill‐equipped to de‐escalate behavior or to support kids and their specific dis/abilities. At the time, I was one of those teachers. However, what I lacked in experience I made up for with instinct, with empathy, and, most of all—with practice and commitment.

Reader, to follow are some pertinent details I left out.

First, both Tremaine and Delia were Black, Afro‐Caribbean teenagers who had varying degrees of humor in their personalities. Delia loved to shop with her friends. She'd break out into “Chicken Noodle Soup” dance at random intervals throughout the school day. She had deep affinity for a few teachers, and was generally participative during class conversations. Tremaine had jokes of all kinds, and wrote long stories featuring various fantastical characters. He was new to the school, and didn't have many classmates who he called his friends.

Also: in Brooklyn's public schools, both Tremaine and Delia had been participating in special classes (one of the most restrictive special education environments in community schools) from the time of their elementary school lives. Both had classified disabilities, and very thick Individual Education Plans (IEPs). At a young age, Delia had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and Tremaine had been diagnosed with autism. They each lived in nearby public housing projects. Some days, Delia slept for hours with her head on her desk. Other days, she would come into class shouting at no one in particular. Her oral literacy skills were strong, her print‐based literacy weaker. At times, her working memory challenged her. Tremaine spoke in the same loud, high‐pitched tone for all forms of interactions. He often was not aware of his body in concert with his surroundings, and bumped into people, furniture, and walls easily. His stamina for literacy was strong—however, his ideas and focus often meandered.

This, readers, is where perspective comes in. If I were to extract the story of Delia and Tremaine and place it in a news report or social media feed outside the context of this chapter, the perception of what happened—and, more importantly, why it happened—would differ.

Let's think about various ways this story could surface and be told:

• Local media news report: “Underfunded School Fuels Classroom Brawl”
• National news report: “Urban Schools' Special Education Programs Disaster”
• Social media EduTwitter: “What is this WYTE Teacher Doing?!”
• School yard banter between students: “Delia was Lit!” “Yeah, but what about that other kid?” “Who?!” “I don't know his name, but he was crying like a b**CH!”
• Text exchange between parents: “Did you hear what happened in that new teacher's class? I hope my child never gets her!”

Moreover, if I were to attach to the story a picture of Delia and Tremaine and the post‐furniture‐flipped classroom, the story of perpetrator and victim gets louder. The perception of Black youth; new, white teachers; urban schools; and their relationship to one another is underscored by whatever stereotypes different groups of people have about those players. At first glance, nobody knows about the state of anyone's mental health or experiences. People create stories not about truth but about perceived reality based on their own experiences and exposure to the players in the event.

This is an opportune time to note that posting pictures of students and their classroom environments is a violation of students' rights according to FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Protection Act. (Unless they have signed media consent from legal guardians … and even still … media consent usually has a clause that would forbid the posting of an incident like this.) Typically, newspapers and magazines have less access to the inside of classroom walls, but the proliferation of technology and phones as documentation tools has surfaced lots of classroom happenings, especially on personal social media feeds. Conversely, the use of documented events in classrooms from the student perspective have also been used to film teachers to capture both harmful events and banal happenings. While adults also are entitled to privacy in learning spaces, the need for students to protect themselves from curricular violence warrants the use of documentation, even if their privacy is infringed upon.

There are so many different factors that impact perspective around high‐tension events like the one I described. And oftentimes in school, space for reflection and careful attention to not just safety, but health and well‐being, are overlooked.

Careful consideration of various perspectives is often the thing that makes the most difference for how people, especially youth, experience school. The imprint of people's pasts impacts their reactions during these kinds of “in the moment” events—as do the more intentional choices educators make when they do have longer periods of time to consider how to be and act in school. Building our perspective by viewing events through multiple lenses equips us to more powerfully parcel out truth and justice.

Timeline Pedagogy: To Move Forward, We Must Look Back

To find and create the future goodness of school, we're going to have to revisit school in both past and present iterations and, especially, your relationship to it. This journey requires reflecting upon your experiences in school along the way … as well as the ancestors' experiences (whether they be your ancestors or someone else's). Together, we'll navigate historical narratives about public school within the United States, starting with its inception. Essentially, we are traversing the stories of us.

Whether or not your engagement is done individually or communally, the goal is to surface both convergence and interference across historical, ancestral, and personal timelines in order to develop a more sophisticated, nuanced perspective on how teaching, learning, school, and education manifests in present circumstances.

This part is integral for developing deeper conviction around one's teaching philosophy. While I'm talking about how my own teaching philosophy developed through both personal experience and historical reflection, you, reader, will have an opportunity to create a parallel trajectory that supports your understanding of how your own philosophies show up by developing a more robust shaping and naming of your learning and teaching identities.