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Chapter 3
A Framework for Social Justice Work in Schools and Gentle Notes on Learning

In reading this book so far, we've already done so much! We've interrogated big ideas like radical hope, the pedagogy of justice and joy, and the history of school. We've begun to envision new ways forward to spread joy and justice, and have even parsed out a few ideas on where to begin that work. But I would be remiss if I went on composing chapters as if developing more just and joyful opportunities for teaching and learning in schools was as simple as following a manual and engaging in a few discussions.

For transformational change to occur in any part of life, whether it be personal, organizational, or institutional, it requires people to think differently. Within the realm of education, it's important for educators to build and revise their schema on what school is and how they operate within it for any kind of substantial justice and joy shifts in school to happen. This type of schema revision is in reference to our existing mental models (Senge et al. 1994) that tell us how school is supposed to go, or how we are supposed to teach, or even how kids and their families are supposed to learn.

Cognitive scientists refer to mental models as “the semi‐permanent tacit ‘maps’ of the world which people hold in their long‐term memory, and the short‐term perceptions which people build up as part of their everyday reasoning processes” (Senge et al. 1994, p. 237). It is no easy task to press the restart button on a system that most educators have been a part of for much of their lives. Nonetheless, thinking differently is necessary for acting differently. It's a lot of work to build new mental models, but it's also a lot of fun! In this chapter, I introduce a framework for doing just this, building social justice that reorganizes our notions for “how to do school” in ways that energize the human spirit, inner knowing, and our ability to reflect with one another.

Here, we'll work to collaborate, build, nurture, and reflect, on repeat. Below, find the foundational concepts behind this framework that allows the work of spreading joy and justice to become more sustainable.

Collaborate

Big idea: The answer lies in the room.

I learned this lesson a long time ago. In 2004, I was hired to work as a Tutoring Program Supervisor on the South Side of Chicago. As a 21‐year‐old white woman, I learned quickly that all the things the University that employed me told me to do and all the theory my brain held from my degree I had earned just a few months previously were mere suggestions for how school could go, and meant not a whole lot in terms of how school actually went. Upon my hiring, I had never been to an urban school in my whole life, had never lived in a city, and had rarely been the only white person in predominantly Black African American spaces. Suddenly, I was put in the position of knower, but what I knew in terms of what the school communities I was working with needed, was basically nothing.

That was nearly 20 years ago, in the babyhood of my teaching life. Every moment that has passed since has provided a powerful learning trajectory for me … one that has increased my capacity for deep collaboration with those I am connected with in school communities—whether they be grown‐ups or children.

Now, in the realm of collaboration, I understand my position to be that of both learner and purveyor of knowledge, and that my connection (or lack thereof) to the community I work in dictates the experiences educators, students, and their families remember.

When I use the term “collaborate,” this is what I mean:

To engage in meaningful acts of listening.
To position oneself alongside the humans you're learning with—not above or over.
To put forth ideas, frameworks, and strategies as offerings, not nonnegotiables.

Nurture

Big idea: Thought sanctuaries for teachers support joyful curiosity!

Educators need thought sanctuaries in which to develop the kind of change that social justice movements in school require.
This book attempts to create that protective space in partnership with its readers.

When I think of teachers, I think of full, human beings who execute tremendous tasks on a daily basis. However, from my experience, more often than not teachers are forced to execute those tasks and develop their practice in the soul‐deafening landscape of scripted curriculum, top‐down initiatives, and antiquated schooling norms. It's hard to hear yourself think in those conditions, let alone develop strategies and solutions and new learning paradigms for young people!

This is probably not a great surprise for those reading this … but humans (and most other mammals, too) only experience positive curiosity when they feel safe, secure, and a sense of belonging within their environment (Shah et al. 2018, p. 380). Prachi Shah and her colleagues describe this as “joyful curiosity.” For teachers in school, this manifests in lots of ways. It's the project‐based learning you create with your colleagues over lunch time after students ask questions about a shared experience. Or maybe it's experienced by a group of first graders who just learned that their teacher's dad is the mystery reader for class one morning. It's even the energy you receive after reading a really helpful article that makes you want to try something different or new in your classroom. However, in too many cases, that foundation of safety, security, and belonging has been crushed for teachers by those aforementioned soul‐deafeners.

When that foundation is absent, joyful curiosity in inhibited. Humans still get curious, but not in a healthy way. This other kind of curiosity stems from survival instincts, and it is triggered by an adrenaline response that creates an anxious need to acclimate to new, sometimes threatening environments. It's a teacher's racing heartbeat when school leaders or guests come to observe their classroom. It's the panic‐induction from a parent’s or caregiver's accusatory email. It's the annual school‐wide inquiry focused on students who are “high leverage” who have also been named “underperforming.” The distinction between those two types of natural curiosity is clear. In this text, we work toward instilling joyful curiosity while moving away from survivalist curiosity by carving out thought sanctuaries in the physical spaces of school.

While the word “sanctuary” is often associated with holy, spiritual, and/or religious connotations, its meaning also extends to a space that provides safety and protectiveness from danger. In the context of creating a thought sanctuary for educators to gather and think safely, maybe even joyfully, there are a few different components to think about when building that space. First, it's important to consider the actual physical (or digital) space available for people to gather. This space should be adequate for people to gather, reflect, meditate, concentrate, and study. It should also be adequate for people to converse, move about, develop materials and artifacts, and be animated with one another. Finally, and perhaps most important, it's essential to develop thought sanctuaries in the context of protection, a space where people can gather without judgment, evaluations, or outside threats.

Thought sanctuaries are bountiful outside of school for teachers, and those spaces are important—whether they be in virtual affinity space with people who share identity markers that are most central to your life experience, at a weekly happy hour with people of your generation, or maybe even on Saturday morning walks with folx who enjoy exercising. Certainly, it's integral to our well‐being to find space to connect and think and reflect.

When I was a classroom teacher, thought sanctuaries were not an actual separate physical space in the school. Rather, they were classrooms transformed by organic, teacher‐created meet‐ups. Every Thursday, in one of the other fourth grade classrooms down the hall, my grade team met. Not upon assignment or mandate, but upon invitation and affirmative welcomes by peers and colleagues, who later transformed into great friends.

It was in this space where I learned more about my students and their families, understood the nuances behind my colleagues' identities and instructional choices and teaching philosophies. Also, it was the space where I laughed and I cried and messed up, where I shared childbearing woes and teacher evaluation heartbreak.

No school leaders were present. Agendas were not created. It was a group of people who were in community, working together, striving to build something better through shared relationships. That space was a powerful thought sanctuary for me and my colleagues. This space is elaborated on in Chapter 4, including suggestions for building similar spaces in your own community.

So that we also may feel a sense of well‐being while we're working in our classrooms or sitting in a professional development workshop, it's integral that we also carve these spaces within teachers' daily lived experiences at school. While safety and bravery cannot necessarily be guaranteed, it is a worthwhile effort to build these protective spaces.

In this text, the term “thought sanctuary” means:

Spaces within or outside of school where your needs are met.
Spaces where joyful curiosity is enabled.
Spaces that underscore the value of flexible thinking and loose or absent agendas.
Spaces that pair well‐being with ideation and creativity.

Build

Big idea: To build is to cultivate learning experiences through the lens of justice. This is what happens when joyful curiosity comes to life!

All people connected to school; kids, teachers, school leaders, and families need opportunities to contribute materials to the build in the form of knowledge, culture, and resources that work toward shared values.
To build, strategic collaboration between humans needs to take place within a thought sanctuary.

When I think about working with others to build justice and joy in schools, I lean on what I know about how learning works. Old friends from our educational studies like Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey help us understand important ways to activate joyful learning. All of them played a major role in developing constructivism, that is, the central premise that all new learning is built upon previous experiences, or prior knowledge, referred to as schema (McLeod 2019).

And then, there's also this idea that it matters who participates, and how they participate in this construction of knowledge. While Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, and Dewey spent lifetimes figuring out experiential learning in ways that led to brightness and fun for many teachers and children, considerations for cultural traditions, family literacies, and configurations of school environments were not fully recognized in their research (Meacham 1996, p. 301), and many children were not considered wholly in their work, notably those with dis/abilities, Black children, poor children, European immigrants, Latinx children, and Native American children, among others.

Here, I propose we construct knowledge in robust ways, honoring the agency of teachers and other educators, while also including students and their families along the way!

Lucky for us, there are many people who have spent lifetimes generating a platform that envelopes all types of family literacies, cultural traditions, and various types of schooling. When we build, a primary source of wisdom we'll draw from is the concept of funds of knowledge, the work of Norma González, Luis Moll, and Cathy Amanti. Funds of knowledge are skills, attributes, and literacies that people learn from their families and other home environments.

When we consider including the voices of all people in our build, we must think about what some people know, what some people don't, and how to bridge those knowledges when tensions within the community are heavy.¹ Most importantly, funds of knowledge are viewed from capacity orientations from González and others, encouraging teachers to incorporate and build upon those experiences in school (González 2005, p. 5). Working through the lens of justice requires us to work in tandem through the lens of capacity, too.

In short, to build strong foundations requires us to:

Consider multiple perspectives.
Deeply understand how learning is connected to the brain, heart, and instinct.
Expect messiness, and to engage in trial and error.
Share the value of risk‐taking as a community.

To be strong, foundations don't have to look pretty; but they do have to be deeply rooted in the ground, they have to withstand pushback from all types of weather, and they have to outlast those who leave the building project.

Reflect

Big idea: To move forward, we must look back.

The personal histories of all people in school communities matter.
Experiences and policies of the past have shaped the way school operates today.

Essentially, I assert that to move forward, we must look back. The work of joy and justice in teaching and learning supports the curation of strong, clear, and thoughtful teaching philosophies that insert an individual's personhood within the wider landscape of school.

We will work on developing a guided practice for connecting our personal histories to our teaching philosophies. One of the most important components of our journey together is to excavate our personal histories before we landed in our grown‐up educator roles. These pieces of ourselves matter. They inform our personal convictions—the why behind our teaching.

For example, throughout our time together interacting in this book, I'll share how my experiences in schools, as student, teacher, mother, coach, and community organizer, have shaped my pedagogy, my stance, my curricular choices, my teaching journey. In those spaces, I've witnessed how the multiplicity of experience is a reflection of both connection and disconnection across all the persons within the ecosystem of school.

The more we all recognize how those connections and relationships manifest in our work, the more we enable ourselves and each other to develop a more sustainable, joyful, and just paradigm.

I hope you'll join me in culling the unique experience of your adolescence paired with your current school community, crafting a personal teaching statement that articulates your stance, and supporting choices that match your educational philosophy—all to help you along a path to a more healthy teaching journey.

We will also do a fair amount of work learning more about social and historical context of schooling, especially within the United States. In this book, Timeline Pedagogy will be a guiding force in our work toward justice, which we'll explore and unpack throughout the text, as we've already begun to do with the Historical Underpinnings work.

Connecting the Collaborate, Nurture, Build, and Reflect Framework

Schematic illustration of Naming North Stars. — Naming North Stars.

It's easy to get caught up in reinventing the wheel and become overwhelmed by the enormity of barriers that find themselves in your way and stop the work—because you're exhausted and you feel done by the seeming impossibility of it all. Sometimes reinventing the wheel is necessary. It's necessary because we're trying to create a joyful and just learning paradigm in school—what so many of us have not experienced, as kids or as adults.

That said, as we reinvent and reimagine what school can be by operationalizing the Collaborate‐Nurture‐Build‐Reflect Framework, it is useful to study models of learning, or “North Stars,” in people‐based institutions that have operated similarly toward the pursuit of human‐centered care and social justice.

Using North Stars as Guidance for Our Work

The term “North Star” can be thought of in a couple of ways. First, you could think about the North Star in terms of its placement on Earth, directly to the North of the North Pole (aka “Polaris” in your science textbooks!). Or, you could think about the nativity story from the Christian Bible in the Gospel of Matthew, where “three wise kings from the East” are inspired to follow the North Star, or “Star of Bethlehem,” to Jerusalem to find the revered Baby Jesus. The North Star is also mentioned in other religious and spiritual texts like the Quran, as well as the Torah. Hindu astronomers discuss “sacred alignment” in connection to the Vedas and Upanishads (Bhagwath 2020).

However you like to think about the term, the point is that the North Star serves as a point of guidance, giving us direction when we feel lost—spiritually and/or logistically. In our work toward finding joy and spreading justice in schools, it's integral for us to name, study, and hold metaphorical North Stars close to us in our work. Throughout this text, I'll name numerous North Stars I've found helpful, that communities I've partnered with have held tight, and that you may choose to study carefully as well.

Here, I invite you to contemplate your own North Stars! They can come in various shapes and sizes, including notable figures from both past and present, memorable events, people you know who have left an imprint on how you walk through life, or even documents that serve as powerful reminders for social justice work.

I'll start. As I'm writing this section, it happens to be International Women's Day,² and I'm thinking about all the women in the world who, 'round the clock, care for others. And they do so while solving problems, maintaining careers, and attempting to search and sustain their own dreams.

The first North Star of mine I'll share with you is not necessarily a singular person, but rather, a widely shared role, and that is The Matriarch; the grandmothers and mothers and aunties who serve as connectors and caregivers and intellectuals and makers and lovers, but have routinely been underrecognized, or unrecognized altogether. The term I use to describe the dynamism of these roles is foremother.

Foremothers who shine brightly as North Stars in my mental model for how to be in school spaces are situated in groups within the realm of matriarchy. These spaces are many, including classrooms while teaching children, school cafeterias running workshops with teachers, and even in museums while chaperoning school field trips.

I refer to these women as blueprints for working toward joy and justice in the various groups and positionalities I occupy in those different environments:

I think about Georgia Gilmore³ and the group of Black women she organized called the Club from Nowhere. These women sold pies to fund gas and cars during bus boycotts during the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama. Aside from Georgia Gilmore, the other women in the group remained anonymous. She was the only person who knew where the money came from when she distributed the funds to people who were leading the movement. The Club from Nowhere helped sustain the Civil Rights Movement, and did not step onto a single pedestal or proclaim their stance in public or in writing. Rather, they activated justice with careful planning, commitment, and clear actions in collaboration with one another.
I think about my maternal grandmother, who divorced her husband in the late 1950s. Rejecting this social more at the time in smalltown northern Ohio, she marched through the trial of ending her marriage anyway for the sake of her and her children's happiness and livelihood. She managed to finagle a career while single‐parenting my mother and my aunt, never losing her sense of humor or ability to find magic in life's otherwise mundane moments.
I think about my own mother, her tenacity, and how she organized my brother, sister, and me all around the country as my dad's career in the military required regular moves across state lines. She created experiences for us kids that left powerful imprints on our ability to see ourselves in the world, as well as connect with other people—all the while managing full‐time work, sometimes by herself as my dad embarked upon multiple tour of duties.

While some might say the work of these foremothers is just “regular life,” I argue it is in the subtleties of their everyday actions that have created the significant changed outcomes for individuals and groups rather than mere shifts in people's circumstances. Their work did not come in the typical containers of leadership or go‐to blueprint for “how to be in schools;” they didn't stand on a pedestal and make a speech, they didn't write a bunch of essays declaring their intent or their accomplishments. Rather, they met people over a series of micromoments that over time impacted lives.

Think about it: the ability to bake pies, organize others to also bake pies, sell them for a profit, and put that profit into the hands of the right people will not be found in your *hypothetical* Activism 101 course. Walking away from your partner will also not be found in that hypothetical manual, and neither will a “creative child‐rearing” chapter.

However, distinct purpose, clear bottom lines, reverence for humanity, the ability to act swiftly, and devotion to a specific cause or idea for the betterment of people's lives can be surfaced from all those foremothers' stories, and those are the components of their blueprint that work together to form the Matriarch‐ness of my North Stars.

An “asterism” is a prominent pattern, or group, of stars. As you work across your community, you will need different guides, different blueprints for how to move forward. My grandmother, Georgia Gilmore, and my mom are not the only North Stars I can rely on, nor should I rely on only them as I work in community with so many others. This is why asterisms are important. (Such a great word, right?! I just learned it recently during a family trip to the planetarium.) So, if I think about an asterism, a cluster of North Stars as guidance, I am in much better shape for this school year journey. Add my coworkers' North Star, perhaps their grandmother, or Eglantyne Webb, to the mix? Already, we are in really great shape!

Imagine you are adding the North Stars of the people sitting next to you as guides on your journey. Keep this idea at the forefront of your mind as you plan on how far—or where—to go this year.

Applying the Collaborate‐Build‐Nurture‐Reflect Framework Through a Case Study on Folk Schools

One thing I often think about is how freedom movements of the past are connected to the freedom movements of today, and, especially, how they can serve as blueprints to provide guidance for us (North Star guidance!) within school spaces—particularly classroom spaces.

Here, I'm introducing a brief case study for you to engage with on your own, or with a team of people at your school. The case study navigates an important North Star for joy and justice work, connecting the conceptual foundation of Folk Schools and real‐life, mainstream⁴ schools in the United States. I'll start with a brief historical overview on the inception of Folk Schools, and afterward, you'll read about Highlander Center, a space developed for collective learning that grew in both popularity and impact during the Civil Rights Movement. From there, I'll apply the foundational characteristics of those ideologies to school spaces I've worked in to name what has been possible for spreading joy and justice. Finally, we'll use the Collaborate‐Nurture‐Build‐Reflect Framework to see how you can activate those components, or even imagine different variations on joy and justice in the spaces you teach and learn.

Folk Schools hold collective responsibility, community empowerment, and oral traditions in high regard. However, it's important to note these ideals existed across the globe within Indigenous communities and other collective societies⁵ long before Folk Schools came to be. The Folk Schools you read about here are as close to the “institution” of school as we get in terms of moving toward human‐centered education that promotes collective responsibility.

I want to take a moment to clarify the word “folk”—it's one of my favorites! In short, it simply means “knowledge of the people.” Everyday people. Not necessarily teachers or professors or tutors, but people from everywhere who occupy all different walks of life. You also may have noted in the style guide that when I refer to folx in plural, I've been using an “x” instead of an “s.” The x is meant to underscore the significance of gender expansiveness within a group of people, or folx.

The formalized concept of Folk Schools originated in nineteenth‐century Denmark. In the quest to move from Greek‐ and Latin‐centric studies to more democratic, humane experiences in education, Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig developed the foundational philosophy that Folk Schools, to this day, are borne from (Eiben 2015). First and foremost, Folk Schools evolved from the concept that “learning is based on an understanding of human identity that includes an individual identity, a cultural identity and a democratic identity,” and that the individual cannot be separated from community (Eiben 2015).

The first Folk Schools in Denmark were created between the 1830s and 1850s. Christen Kold operationalized Grundtvig's philosophy within 50 schools, building those schools around the philosophical tenets that Grundtvig formed:

Education must consider the nature of children and youth and their needs.
Students must be given time to develop the capacity for feeling before learning facts, and appreciation before learning skills.
The living word (oral culture) is central.
The wholeness of the individual is experienced only in the context of community.
The purpose of education was to respond to the needs and struggles of common people.
Education should embrace heart, mind, and body. The main purpose of education is not to teach factual knowledge, but for “life's awakening.” “The school should be for life, for the spiritual, and for that which is of the heart” (Grundtvig, in Borish 2005, p. 196).
The school should be free of government control, and there should be no tests, grades, or certificates of competence given (Borish, in Eiben 2015).

Folk Schools made a lasting impression on many political progressives within the United States, and scholars/community organizers like Myles Horton, one of Paulo Freire's good friends and collaborators, studied them in depth. Horton later founded the prolific Highlander Folk School, a place where Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer all studied.

North Star: Myles Horton

I work hard to emulate Myles Horton's work in creating lateral, participatory change through my positionality, as a learner, as a coach, as a parent, as a volunteer, and, especially, as a former teacher. Myles Horton was a tacit hero in the educational landscape in America's history. His last published work was a documented conversation called We Make the Road by Walking between himself and his friend and contemporary Paulo Freire.

Many folks who've studied education or any of the social sciences in undergrad have met Freire's work in such‐and‐such 101 class. Few have been assigned Horton, for he was a person whose actions were so much louder than any word he wrote. Horton notably fueled his education principles and teaching practice from and with participants and learners in his community as opposed to delivering knowledge to the community members he worked with, who were mostly poor, rural workers who did not read.

His participatory approach led to great trust alongside all sorts of marginalized folks, including the disenfranchised American South: He helped to found the Freedom Schools throughout Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, supporting many, many community members to learn to read, and then creating a base for those newly print‐based literate folks to teach others to read as well, growing the African American voting base across the South. He also provided physical meeting spaces for SNCC, and moved out of the way to let young Black people steer the movement.

I deeply identify with Horton's work as an on‐the‐ground local, community‐based educator constantly searching and seeking ways to build capacity for all people in school communities to bear responsibility for kids' positive, inclusive, equitable schooling experiences. This isn't to say that teachers are the same as folks who couldn't read, but it is to say that teachers are marginalized because of the socially constructed narrative that American media has woven into their occupation. For this reason, folx who work with teachers to improve learning for kids should assume they need to build trust with those teachers, and that decisions for how to improve learning for kids should be done in co‐creation.

Highlander became one of the few places within the United States during the Civil Rights Movement where people from different racial groups could gather safely to organize liberation movements for all people. Folx at Highlander worked together to build adult literacy, develop fair labor practices, offer safe haven for various freedom movements, and help people gain legal citizenship (Our History: Highlander Research and Education Center). To this day, Highlander serves as an instrumental force in organizing for racial and economic justice within the United States.

I could say a lot more about Folk Schools, but the gist is that these were places of teaching and learning that placed relationships, culture, and personal and community empowerment at the center of life. When those elements worked in concert together, they formed a school (Eiben 2015). The conceptual ethos of Folk Schools was centered in the belief that it was far more powerful to produce equitable relationships than capital and rote memorization.

Highlander Folk School has translated Grundtvig's aforementioned core Folk School Philosophies to serve their mission to “build more just, equitable, and sustainable systems and structures … and bring people together across issues, identity, and geography to share and build skills, knowledge, and strategies for transformative social change” (What We Do: Highlander Center). Methodologies that Highlander uses to serve this purpose include the following:

Popular education is the process of bringing people together to share their lived experiences and build collective knowledge. Popular education learning informs action for liberation.
Cultural organizing celebrates and honors people's spiritual traditions and cultural expression in the work to shift policies and practices.
Language justice recognizes language as an essential part of empowerment in collective learning and strategy‐building. It creates spaces where people from different places, different cultures, and different dialects/languages can come together and understand each other, without forcing themselves to communicate in a language that is not native to them.
Intergenerational organizing brings together the collective wisdom of ancestors, elders, young people, and all those in between to envision, strategize, and take action for a better future.
Participatory action research recognizes information as power. It is a collective process where people investigate a specific issue or question to inform organizing, strategy, and solutions.
Land, legacy, and place builds strategies to nourish and tend to our relationships with our histories, places, communities, and environments that support our collective thriving (Mission and Methodologies: Highlander Center).

Between Grundtvig's tenets and Highlander Center's translation of those concepts, there is much to consider for building justice in the realm of school. At the center, these concepts help confirm it is possible to “do school” based on relationships and learning as opposed to competition and production. Although there are few Folk Schools⁶ within the United States that act as full‐time education systems for young children and adolescents, their core belief system is noteworthy: Folk Schools serve as a model for how to enact collaboration and nourishment within our community. They help us to see and to understand how to build school that is human‐centered and spirited; carefully reflecting along the way. All these components work together to help us spread joy and justice in more mainstream schools.

Here, I want to demonstrate where the tenets of Folk School ideology do live and could live within mainstream schools. I know that reading parts of Grundtvig's core philosophies and Highlander Center's methodologies might feel completely incongruous to the goals of public schooling, re: “The school should be free of government control, and there should be no tests, grades, or certificates of competence given (Borish, in Eiben 2015).” However, the goal is not to scrap the foundation of school entirely, or walk into your next scheduled grade team meeting and craft a brand‐new credo. Rather, the purpose of this work is to gain clarity on what social justice can look like and, in some schools, does look like in action when tethered within the needs of community as opposed to a larger, disconnected agenda (usually rooted outside of kids' learning experiences).

Even though this might feel far away from where your school is at, or what your community believes in, or what you are ready for, I encourage you to do a little dreaming here. Let's say that something in one of the fields in Table 3.1 feels impossible given the constraints of your current school community. Imagine your life in school if those constraints didn't exist. What if it were possible to build workable versions of the kinds of positive, constructive components described in Table 3.1? I encourage you to take notes or flag in the margins what appeals to you.

TABLE 3.1 Spaces for spreading joy and justice in schools.

	Spaces for Joy and Justice in Schools
Popular education/The wholeness of the individual is experienced only in the context of community.	Community circles. Restorative circles. Group work/Flexible grouping structures. Socratic seminar/Class congress. Recess. Lunch. Thought sanctuaries (start with libraries, teachers' lounge, dedicated classroom spaces).
Participatory action research/The purpose of education is to respond to the needs and struggles of people.	Formative assessments. Inquiry‐driven, co‐created curriculum. Interviews: Inter‐class interviews (teacher‐student/student‐teacher/student‐student). Intra‐school interviews (student‐principal/AP/student‐students in different classes/student‐parent/caregivers). Audit trails. Multiliteracies.
Cultural organizing/Education should embrace the heart, mind, and body. “The school should be for life, for the spiritual, and for that which is of the heart” (Grundtvig, in Borish 2005, p. 196).	Culturally relevant teaching and learning (in the classroom, in professional development, in family engagements). Representative texts and meaningful literature. Social‐emotional learning. School‐supported playdates. Field trips.
Intergenerational organizing/Education must consider the nature of children and youth and their needs.	Student‐led conferences. Family engagement series. Literacy and math workshops. Needs assessment gatherings. Social gatherings designed to foster intraschool connections.
Language justice/The living word, (oral culture) is central.	School communication translated in all the languages spoken in the community. Translation services provided for real‐time meetings. Value is placed on oral literacies within curriculum (storytelling, chatting with peers, collecting oral histories), as well as AAVE and other forms of the English Language. Translanguaging. Language goals are woven into the curriculum and high‐quality ELL services are provided.
Land, legacy, and place/Students must be given time to develop the capacity for feeling before learning facts, and appreciation before learning skills.	Place‐based pedagogy. Walking tours. Somatic literacy. Community elders invited as guest speakers. Appreciation circles. Teachers, students, and families view each other from capacity orientations versus deficit perspectives.

After reviewing Table 3.1 of possible spaces to spread joy and justice in schools, think about which component/s you may want to work on building in your own school community. At this point, it will be more helpful to play around with multiple ideas rather than commitment to just one plan. This is meant to be a generative thinking spot in the book; later, we'll clarify some of the components that might be unfamiliar to you. Each space for spreading joy and justice is expanded upon in different areas of this book. As you read, you'll gain more clarity on what this work entails in connection to your role, your positionality, and the needs of your community. Additionally, you also may want to spend time doing research in connection to what excites you!

Work Along: Generating Joy and Justice within the Collaborate‐Nurture‐Build‐Reflect Framework

In this work along we combine our knowledge of human‐centered practices displayed in our study on Folk Schools and generalized knowledge on how schools operate and connect it directly to your life in school from the roles you occupy (parent/caregiver, teacher, principal, assistant principal, social worker, school psychologist, paraprofessional, student teacher, teaching assistant, etc.).

List what spaces for spreading joy and justice interest you from Table 3.1. What component of human‐centered teaching practices are they connected to? How might they live within your school?
Human‐centered teaching practices of interest Where do they live in your school and/or how might they live in your school?
Surface Collaborate, Nurture, Build, and Reflect in Your School
Use this note catcher to jot down actions or characteristics from your school community that show evidence of collaboration, nourishment, building, and reflection.

Collaboration Nurture Building Reflection
Now, consider the following:
- What about your school shows social justice? Joy?
- What about your school might be disconnected from social justice and joy?
- Is your collaboration/nurture/building/reflection robust or sparse? Which column was easier to unpack than others? What column was most difficult?
Make two working goals:
1. What part of your CNBR Framework will you place emphasis on for further development and why?
2. What components of joy and justice will you place emphasis on for further development and why? (Think about Table 3.1: What activities, mission language, or community connections could live within your school spaces? Your classroom? Your interpersonal relationships?)

Historical Underpinnings: We Might Know Our Now, but Do We Know Our Legacy?

Part of knowing your stuff is knowing your history. Educators, students, and their families comprise the institution of school; without them, it doesn't exist. However, as we go about unpacking injustices within that institution, it's important to understand the root causes of various forms of oppression, injustice, and harm that have disproportionately affected groups of people with distinct characteristics and identity markers. Without treating the root cause of a disease, we are only treating the symptoms of a system that harms so many. At this juncture, I offer an historical trek within the institution of school that works to unravel injustice in the name of moving toward radical hope and joy: https://www.kassandcorn.com/teachingfiercely/.

Gentle Notes on Learning: Rituals and the Beginnings of Our Thought Sanctuary

I know this work is hard. I know there are times where your current school environment will feel unhealthy, and where you will feel like an alien within it. There will be moments when your peers or your friends will disappoint you, where people you thought were aligned with your teaching goals are actually mismatched to your inner self's awakening, or your stance on what it means to be in community with people in school. There will be space and time where you feel like no one is listening to you and nothing is getting “done.”

This is where I offer my metaphorical shoulder: I encourage you to treat yourself, to pause, and to take a breath. As educators, we have been programmed to operate within a deep sense of efficiency, at the cost of our well‐being and general functionality. This climb toward efficacy isn't always healthy, and oftentimes educators have a tendency to think with their heads rather than their hearts as a coping mechanism. The phenomenon is the mind and body's stress response working as a warning system when we perceive an experience as a threat (T. Woon, personal communication). We avoid that warning system by shutting off our emotions.

Many teachers I'm in connection with find great solace with the simple gifts of space and time, and I hope that with these reflective moments, as you read alone, with a partner, or maybe even in a book club, you, too, are able to carve out those things.

I also offer you this gentle note on learning: reflection is where we remember, where we process and progress. It's the space where new ideas are formed, shaped, and find a place to stick. Even when we plough through new information and ideas with the greatest intentions, when we do so with a lack of thoughtfulness, then we are robbing ourselves of the kinds of learning we seek to build within our classroom communities: learning that is just, nourishing, student‐centered, and community‐oriented. How can we implement an experience within our learning spaces that we have hardly experienced ourselves?

Part of our work in reconstructing our mental models for spreading joy and justice in schools is by developing rituals that build the muscles for collaboration, nourishment, building, and reflection. With practice, these muscles become reflexive, forming a new mental model that sustains our health, our spirit, and our livelihood—especially when it feels like the world is crashing down all around us.

As I am sure you've noted, throughout this book, we'll be reflecting together, like, a lot. The primary goal of our work together, reader, is for you to have a documented journey of your own teaching journey as I parse through mine. To move forward, we've got to look back, and, first and foremost, we've got to start with ourselves.

First we'll consider how to develop our long‐term abilities to reflect by considering (a) how we are taking care of our bodies by becoming more in tune with how our biology impacts our mental state and (b) what other social needs we need to feel and experience when we are working toward joy and justice in community.

Somatic Literacy

To sustain frequent and deep reflection, it's important to work on developing our somatic literacy. The first piece of this term, somatic, means having to do with the body and how it is interconnected with one's mind. And literacy, this catch‐all term for so many things in our edu‐world, simply put, means the ability to read and write. So, in short … we're going to work on reading our bodies!

I can almost feel the eye rolls! It's okay, I get it. This is new. This is different. It might feel strange. But hear me out. Developing somatic literacy is new‐ish for me, too. Sometimes it makes me feel weird, sometimes it makes me feel great—but the overriding piece of knowledge that makes our time well spent on the endeavor toward building our somatic literacy is this: so long as our minds and hearts are separated from one another in the schools we teach in, in front of the students and families we love, it is highly likely the classrooms our students learn in will replicate the same systems that harmed us. So, humor me here; the risk is too great.

Our first practice round will be short. As you become more experienced with reading your own body, you'll be able to do this with future groups of learners yourself.

Work Along: Somatic Literacy Body Inventory

The point of a body check‐in/inventory is to practice identifying the sensations our body feels in the moment.

Review the list of sensation words in Figure 3.1 created by Meenadchi from the Non‐violent Communcation Center. Note: these are not emotions, or feelings; they are physical sensations.
Consider a lesson you taught to a group of people that resonates with you. Jot down a brief anecdote that describes your memory.
Example: I'm remembering some of those first experiences I shared from the beginning of my teaching career. During one of the lessons I taught to a group of eleventh and twelfth graders during the America Speaks project I designed, I remember creating an identity chart for America with my students. It was wild: kids were talking out of turn and I certainly hadn't developed a strong sense of “management”—but our conversation was so vibrant. It was charged and full of passion. Few students agreed on what America was or who it claimed to be, but I remember noting their fervor—and for me, with them, it opened up a landscape of possibilities for how and what we would learn together.
Keeping that teaching experience in mind, refer to the list of sensation words in Figure 3.1. Which words most accurately describe the physical sensations you felt during that teaching experience? Identify every sensation you remember feeling.
Example: Electric, pulsing, spacious, tense.
Reflect. Do the physical sensations you named for question three inhibit or enable you personally? Do the sensations you named open up possibilities for positive feelings? Or do they feel more captive, disabling a sense of innovation or freedom in your work?

Example: For me, the pulsing and electric sensations were incredibly enabling for my high‐energy, somewhat open‐ended instructional practice with older learners. The sensations fed me, and helped me feel a sense of renewal in my spirit, like what I was doing was important, even special. The spacious and tense sensations produced multiple pathways for me. The spaciousness led to almost too many possibilities for how the curriculum could go, or sometimes I worried I was straying too far away from what I was “supposed” to teach. The sensation of being tense, or tightness, is all too familiar. As a person with a diagnosed general anxiety disorder, “tense” is a constant in my physicality. In some ways, it allows me to be incredibly productive, but other times, that tightness is restrictive in that I may squash a possibility or a dream because it takes too long or makes me feel lost.

FIGURE 3.1 Body sensations list (Meenadchi 2020).

What our body experiences on a physical level impacts how we feel on an emotional level. And how we feel, holistically, matters for how much, to what degree, and with whom we are able to learn. Now that you've had this short experience in reflecting somatically, we'll put this practice in our pockets for now. We'll keep our practice warm, though. Because as we imagine building our pedagogies—really figuring out what is justice, what is joy, why does it matter, and how does it look—we have to be able to identify these things within ourselves. And that starts with the most basic recognition of what our bodies feel in real time.

To Remember Is to Feel a Collection of Tensions with Elements of Joy

Earlier, I mentioned what pains me. To remember, to reflect, is to feel a collection of tensions, a sprinkling of joy, and depending on how long you've been alive, a cobbling together of emotions and experiences that have somehow painted the path on which we stand today. In many schools, Western culture dominates,⁷ especially within the United States. Students, teachers, and school leaders are taught to remove their emotive capacity from decision‐making, to stick with “the” agenda, and carry on, despite whatever may be happening in the world that surrounds them. In fact, one of the human body's greatest physiological coping mechanisms is to shut down one's capacity to feel when things get hard; our bodies work instead to evoke an adrenaline response that equips the body to move robotically throughout the day, to get by, to enable us to eat and drink, and, yes, to teach. But that same response makes it really, really hard to learn.

Here, I pose that we allow ourselves to feel. That we commit our whole selves, our whole body experience into the classrooms we share with our learners. I know there are many barriers⁸ that disallow many of us to fully exist on both macro (big, institutional) and micro (small, personal) levels, that inhibit our motivation to even try to be fully in a classroom space. As an empath, for years, and many moments in between, I have certainly willed myself to ignore my emotions to simply get through the day. If I didn't embark upon my adrenaline response, removing myself from an immersion of tears and angst in the face of school's injustices like having to teach a packaged curriculum to students with varying abilities, receiving a teaching assignment outside my licensure, and being ignored and silenced from different parts of power‐laced hierarchies would have swept me out of this profession a long, long time ago.

To create any sorts of shifts in the paradigms we occupy, we must be vulnerable with ourselves and one another. If we want to enable people to show up as their whole selves, feelings and all, we have to practice with ourselves first.

Personal Needs and Feeling Better—Even Good in a Learning Community

Recently, I worked with a group of educators to build multi‐literacies and culturally responsive practices over the course of a four‐day summer institute. Teachers who participated had just finished teaching through the 2019–2020 school year, one of the most unpredictable academic years in the history of school. My partner and I knew we had to create the safest, most nourishing learning environment possible—exhausted teachers were choosing to spend their time with us, and we wanted them to feel nourished before, during, and after.

We put our heads together and surfaced our previous histories in learning environments of all types, from our adolescent lives all the way into grad school. We asked ourselves: In what spaces did we feel best about ourselves? In what spaces did we feel good? Where did we feel smart?

Perhaps you won't have too many school‐based learning environments that make you feel great. Maybe, like me, you'll identify that the learning environments that felt best were the ones closer to home, like your grandmother's davenport, or your mother's kitchen.

When I'm working to build community in spaces where people have experienced collective trauma, or when people's humanity has been dishonored, typically I look to our foremothers for answers. In this case, I looked to Gloria Ladson‐Billings. In her book The Dreamkeepers (1994), a seminal text for educators everywhere that provides the groundwork for Culturally Responsive Education, she says: “My teacher was a woman who told us how much fun we were each going to have and how much she expected us to learn. Our school was safe and clean, with people who cared about you: again, a lot like home” (p. 3).

To do the hard work of transformation—of self, of community, of classrooms, and/or of school—educators must think hard on what it means for their learners to feel at home in their learning environment. The following activity is something I experienced in one of my few school‐based spaces that made me feel good about myself, not just as a learner, but as a human being.

I had just left my job as a classroom teacher in an elementary school in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and had accepted a new position working with one of my mentors, Celia Oyler, to support The Inclusive Classrooms Project at Teachers College, Columbia University. As we carved out a plan for documenting the important work our partner teachers were doing in their classrooms with one of my new colleagues I had just met, Celia, with her infinite and fervent warmth, abruptly stopped our meeting agenda after we had already started and insisted we work on building our “documentation community,” which was, at that point, three people.

Her experience and wisdom compelled her to print out a “Needs Inventory,” provided at no cost by The Center for Nonviolent Communication. She instructed both my colleague and me to think about what we needed to feel good about ourselves in the space in which we were meeting, which was her faculty office at Teachers College. She gave us a few minutes to think, circle three needs, and then invited us to share with one another what our needs were and why those things were important for us to feel good. We shared, she documented. She also shared, and added her needs to the list. From then on, every time we met, we had a list of needs to serve as our North Stars for optimal learning.

After that experience, I realized something. I'd often been asked questions like, “What do you need to do to be successful?” or “What do you need to complete this project by the stated classroom goal?” But a question as simple as “What do you need to feel good here?” … I'd never really had an experience with a question like that in a school—especially not in a space like a university, which can feel especially stifling!

I had always loved meeting with Celia, but after that experience, I loved meeting with her and my colleague even more—I felt at home in her office. And as for my three needs, I had identified authenticity, joy, and to be seen. And sure, those things were present in many ways before we did that exercise, but naming those needs was especially affirming. That helped me feel seen. Ensuring my needs were met, as a community, helped me feel safe, which is a necessary undercurrent to enable a need like joy. And the posted list of needs served as a note of accountability for all of us as we created goals, made plans, or worked through our ideas.

So, as we worked to cultivate a safer learning environment for a group of teachers who were giving a lot to the community by simply being present, we chose to begin our community build with a similar activity. As you think about cultivating or recreating a learning community in your own space, I encourage you to try it out! I've included a lesson below. By no means should you feel as if you have to replicate this as written; it is simply a suggested roadmap to get closer to the original objective, which is collecting needs from a group of learners to create safety and warmth, and serving as accountability through the duration of time spent together.

Feelin' Good: Our Needs Lesson Plan

Objectives:

Surface community needs to cultivate safety and warmth within a learning environment.
Develop an accountability touchstone for ensuring community needs are met throughout time.

Learner audience: Ages 4 to 100! This activity is kind of like the card game Uno. It can be adapted for almost any age group.

For kids who are emergent readers, or early elementary, consider using the needs inventory with visual vocabulary support. Children can draw their needs, and tell you orally while receiving help to label their pictures. You could also do this activity during a morning meeting, and make it a shared writing experience where children dictate their needs out loud and grown‐ups list the needs in real time.
Older kids or grown‐ups may wish to explore their needs on a deeper level independently before sharing with the rest of the community. For example, they could collect photos from various life experiences or geographical spaces that demonstrate their needs, and write long about how those visuals evidence their needs. The class could then create a communal bulletin board that serves as visual accountability for all participating in the learning space.

Materials: Needs Inventory List (available free online from The Center for Nonviolent Communication); optional: maker materials.

Connection: Share a story with your learning community about a place or experience that made you feel good, at your best, and/or smart. Invite them to add places and/or experiences that made them feel those same ways. List their comments on a visual chart.

Teaching point: Explicitly state the objective. Something like: “Learners, today we are going to think hard about what we need to feel good about ourselves in this learning space. It is my goal to work with you to make sure everybody has what they need to feel good here. We need to feel good about ourselves to feel we can learn!”

Mini‐lesson: (This is super mini … like five to seven minutes.) “When we feel good about ourselves, usually that means our needs are being met. For example, when our bellies are full, we're not hungry. We're satisfied, so we're able to talk about our daily activities, like playing with friends, walking in the park, or reading a book. But when we're hungry, and don't have enough food to eat, our needs aren't being met. All we can do is think about our stomach rumbling. It's hard to focus, and we feel yucky. Our emotional needs are similar! (Show the class the Needs Inventory.) This is called a Needs Inventory. It's a list of needs a lot of people have named “important” to feel good about themselves in a learning community. Not everybody has all those needs. Most people have two or three that are really important to them. For example, one of my greatest needs in a learning community, especially one like ours, is joy. Joy is something that makes me feel like I'm having fun, that gets rid of my headaches, that makes me smile when I'm around people. Without joy in our learning space, it's hard for me to be clear, and I feel funny when I have to say things out loud. For me, I am going to name joy as one of my really important needs.”

Active engagement (in communal learning): “I want you all to think to yourself for a moment. What's something on this list that seems really important for you to feel good about yourself? (After a moment): I want to invite you to share with the person sitting next to you the need you named. Try to explain why that need makes you feel good. (Listen in to learners talking.) (Share a few experiences you heard kids talking about.) (Invite one or two kids to share their needs with the rest of the class.)

Independent practice: On your own, I want you to think even more deeply. Think about places in your life, and experiences you've had, that make you feel really good. Then, use the list of needs to try to match those feelings you had. Which of your needs were being met that made you feel so good? Circle all the needs that make sense for you. Finally, think about what's most important for you. Star the three most important needs.

More active engagement: Invite learners to work with a partner or in a small group of three or four people. This time, they are sharing the needs they named, and they are working hard to be clear about why those needs are so important to them. There are many options for documentation of needs. Here are a few:

Learners work together to create a visual demonstration of their needs; include the needs along with symbols, diagrams, or pictures to demonstrate why those needs are so important to them.
Learners work together to list their needs, sharing their “why” and then are invited to access a box of maker materials to create an abstract interpretation of their needs.

Sharing: Each group or partnership is invited to share, visually or orally, with the rest of the class. You may wish to do a “gallery walk” where the class visits each chart or creation for a few minutes at a time, noticing needs, and collecting thoughts and reactions on sticky notes. The most important component of sharing is that the collective needs inventory can live in a space within the classroom environment that can be frequently revisited and seen to serve as community accountability.

Notes

1 We'll address the important work of navigating community tension throughout the text. This is the part where we begin to name “the what” and “the why.” The “how” comes in the section called “Perspective Shapes Our Knowing.”
2 I think these thoughts on almost all the days, outside of days named for formally recognizing the significance of womanhood.
3 Read more about Georgia Gilmore with students in the picture book Pies from Nowhere: How Georgia Gilmore Sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Dee Romito and illustrated by Laura Freeman
4 I define mainstream schools as the types of school that the majority of kids living in the United States attend, including private, independent, charter, and public schools. Although many children participate in schooling that isn't mainstream, that group is significantly smaller in the U.S. demographic. Examples of schools that are not considered mainstream in this context are Forest Schools, Folk Schools, Freedom Schools, home‐based education, unschooling, and/or full‐time private tutoring.
5 Later in this text, we'll unpack a few oral histories in those Indigenous communities to discover the saturation of care and intention between interpersonal relationships in the scope of life learning. See “Historical Underpinnings: We Might Know Our Now, but Do We Know Our Legacy?”
6 The ones that do exist, however, are fascinating, albeit somewhat inaccessible for all people. Aside from Highlander Folk School, which has a vast network of diverse peoples and is run by majority BIPOC folx working specifically toward the rights of people in Appalachia and the South, I've noticed that many Folk Schools (who have categorized themselves as a Folk School) are characteristically white, but not necessarily centered in dominant culture. For an example, read more about Center for Belonging Folk School in Iowa at https://www.centerforbelonging.earth/. There are other learning experiences that majority BIPOC kids do experience that have tenets of Folk School ideologies, but are not named as such. For an example, read more about Nikolai Pizzarro's blueprint for a school called Liberatorium: A Neighborhood Permaculture‐Forest School & Learning Space based in Atlanta at https://linktr.ee/raisingreaders.
7 Dominant cultures are the ways of life from groups of people who share similar identity markers that demonstrate the most power, and are the most deeply considered within systems. For example, in the majority of schools within the United States, Christian culture is dominant, and deeply impacts structures created such as a school's academic calendar and acknowledgement of holidays within the community at large.
8 Macro‐level and micro‐level barriers will be addressed throughout the text, but right now, we're focusing on you!

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