Early 2000s

When I began teaching in the early 2000s, “social justice,” “equity,” “ABAR,”¹ and “CR‐SE”² were not buzzwords floating around in public rhetoric, and most certainly were not featured on television or other media channels. Conversations about the “science of reading” had not yet hit public airwaves. The heat behind schools' choices for literacy curriculum took place mostly within academic circles working at universities, not so much between those who worked at schools, with children. If you saw something on TV about reading, or about how children should act, at least in my fledgling teacher world, you were most likely catching a rerun of Levar Burton's Reading Rainbow³ or maybe listening to Prince Tuesday from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood⁴ say a thing or two about how children should behave.

In the early 2000s, MySpace was still a thing, Facebook had just opened up to the community at large, and Twitter and Instagram didn't yet exist. In short, spreading information about what was really going on in schools—i.e., what kids were experiencing, how teachers were teaching, what parents and caregivers were saying—was much harder to access. As classroom teachers who remembered the strange undercurrent of both fear and jubilation during Y2K,⁵ my colleagues and I were teaching our hearts out—and, honestly, there weren't a lot of people around us who had “boo” to say about it, let alone comment on what books were in our classroom libraries.

My partner, Cornelius, and I joke about how in those first few years of teaching life we were feral teachers, teachers who were given so much freedom in the name of kids' best interests that putting parameters around our work would have inhibited our ability to activate our instinctual knowing, our innate calling, that is, to teach. I'm talking about the kind of teaching that has limited support these days: the kind of teaching that is raw and gritty yet playful and effective. The kind of teaching that is labored, almost subconsciously, by a teacher's work with the kids and families and colleagues that surround her, through trial and error, love and rejection.

Sigh.

People often give the word “feral” a bad rap, a negative connotation. But I think there's a really beautiful association with it. For example, at the Brooklyn Public Library down the street from where I live, a perhaps feral cat has built a home, or at least, has insisted upon its housing. It (he? she? they? not sure of the gender) can be seen in the front garden of the library, nestled in a cinder block with a scrap of wood over it, surrounded by three bowls of food that are always full. I imagine it comes and goes as it pleases. When we see it, its needs are met, belly full, with access to the world, unfettered. Our children have named it Mr. Books. Every time I visit the library with my daughters, books in hand, my heart skips a beat when we near the entrance. I worry Mr. Books will be gone, that his scruffy self will be absent amongst the flowers. And yet, we haven't missed him yet. He continues to survive.

I often think about who I would be had I begun my career in the climate educators currently experience, a climate that is defined by relevant truths, ahistoricism, and a new, post‐2020 reality. How would I be me? Would I still be as curious or loving or connected?

During those early days in my teacherhood, I felt a great sense of freedom. In retrospect, I also realize that maybe to be free requires us to be somewhat feral. But to be free also means to struggle to survive—and as much as I felt that freedom, I felt that struggle, too. I felt it then, and I feel it now, albeit differently. Lots of things have happened to me, to you, to all of us working in schools, in education, within the past 20 years. As a profession, as a people, we're all over the place. Who are we? What is it that we do? Where are we going? Where have we … been?

In the beginning of my career as a new teacher, like Mr. Books, I was cared for by others, particularly, by the immediate community of teachers surrounding me on a daily basis—and also the progressive school reforms that had been implemented within my school. We were included in the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), an endeavor built by contemporary progressives like Ted Sizer and Debbie Meier to reinforce John Dewey's foundational concept of Democracy in Education: fundamentally, that kids learn best by doing, interacting, and experiencing. They believed schools should foster those elements within their curriculum and for their students. Many of my colleagues shared that belief, and so did I.

We were also part of the New York State Performance Standards Consortium, lovingly dubbed the Consortium by those who were a part of it, a group of secondary schools that replaced high stakes testing with performance assessments for graduation requirements, teacher‐led and state‐approved. Most CES schools in New York City were part of the Consortium. In short, during those first few years of my teaching, my colleagues and I were blessed with a freedom and flexibility that many teachers were not then, and most certainly are not now: project‐based learning was the norm, and standardized tests were the exception. We were lovingly engaged in a world of curriculum that we innovated, created, and adapted.

With students, we teachers created project‐based learning that was directly connected to the students' personhood and their place‐based experiences. Teachers worked hard to design project‐based learning with the rigor they were implored to demonstrate, building deep literacy and numerical reasoning with the students in their classroom communities. I took my first (of what would soon be many) walking trips to explore Times Square in Manhattan with students and their ELA (English‐language arts) teachers. Students captured comparisons of the real‐life media feeds displayed on 42nd Street to the media displayed in dystopian novels Feed by M. T. Anderson and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

Another time, within the history department, we worked to capture the impact of a newly built IKEA in nearby Red Hook, Brooklyn. Students interviewed passersby, and created photo essays with shots fastidiously snapped from their Sidekicks—the popular cell phone of the time, pre‐smartphone. They were able to demonstrate longitudinal shifts on their blocks; visual reflections regarding the impact of rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn on their families.

We even had students research one of the most polluted waterways in the world, the famed Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site⁶ (epa.gov), to find out exactly which contaminants surrounded some of their homes.

One of my first independently designed projects was called America Speaks, an exploration of the history of school in the United States, exposing students to the Civil Rights Movement, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), and the very relevant question on whether or not racial school integration made a difference for Black and Brown students. Out of the approximately 500 students who attended our school, fewer than 1% identified as white. Decentering my teacher self as the knower in the room, students and I grappled with questions like: If America could speak, what would she say? Has integration “worked”? What are different ways people make change? What do we want our society to be like?

I was deeply invested in all of it. My students, the teachers I cotaught and created with. The families who patiently waited for me to do better, to get better at teaching their children. Student government, the curriculum, the basketball games, the skateboarders, Brooklyn, I loved them. I loved all of it. It was a beautiful time for me; I felt like I had figured out what I had been put on this Earth to do.

But there was an ugliness to all the deliciousness in that work. David Chang, renowned chef and restaurant mogul, has a beautiful food docuseries on Netflix called Ugly Delicious, an homage to the food your grandmother might make, heap on your plate, and insist that you eat at least two servings of. It tastes absolutely divine, and you and your family agree on the delightful exchange between your tastebuds and said food. But for others, those who don't know the recipe, who weren't part of cooking it, rather than looking divine, the food looks questionable. Unappetizing. Different.

Chang says this kind of food is the “ugly deliciousness” that restaurateurs enjoy eating at home, or that chefs and line cooks and waitstaff enjoy eating before their dining rooms open. No matter how delicious, for diners in restaurants, those dishes are really hard to appreciate. Maybe they don't know what they're eating, maybe it's something they've not seen before … whatever the case may be, chefs have a hard time selling the food that comes from the deepest parts of their hearts.

This was the case of my school and our work: we were ugly delicious. As much as our students were learning, as seen as they may have felt, and as hard as we were working, the people who evaluated schools didn't have a metric to gauge what we were doing. They could not see the value of our work; even though it was from the deepest parts of our hearts. They didn't have the recipes for the projects, the alternate assessments, the anachronistic schedules, the communal cross‐grade advisories we built: those ideas and programs didn't come from their kitchen.

I've condensed the 500‐page story that paused our freedom into just a few sentences:

• We were categorized as a “failing school” by New York City's Mayoral Office.
• The visionary principal who led the school abruptly took leave, and later quit.
• A new principal took their place, and the city went through another iteration of school reform underneath former Chancellor Joel Klein and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's leadership.
• The school withdrew from the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Consortium.
• It later turned into something entirely different, so I left and began working at an elementary school in a different part of Brooklyn.

For me, and many of my colleagues, “failing” wasn't something we thought a lot about. We were deep in the struggle. We were too busy figuring out how to teach, trying to understand what our students needed, and working to develop connections between the projects we were designing to the new Common Core State Standards⁷ that had just been introduced. Most of all, we were doing our best to stay in community with our students' families. I'll speak for myself here: I felt like I was doing the Work, capital W. Many of us, including myself, identified our teaching work as social justice.

While there were certainly a great many things my school could have improved on, that I could have improved on (the school's uniform policy and restrictive rubrics are among the top practices that, to this day, make me cringe), I know a lot of what was happening there was special, unique, just—joyful. However, those positioned to oversee the best interests of students and their families in school communities weren't able to see what I saw. Instead of growth, innovation, and opportunity, they saw failure, the need for new curriculum, students who needed to be fixed, and teachers who needed to be replaced.

It pained me then, much like it pains me now, to witness such limited vision.

It pains me to see school closures touted as school reform.

It pains me to see teachers' methodologies boxed into categories like highly effective or in need of development⁸ based on tiny experiences parsed from enormous years.

It pains me to see the same cycle of data sets in the same geographical spaces show the same outcomes for the same group of people decade after decade after decade.

It pains me to see robust inquiry‐based learning replaced with a prescription for learning as a remedy for low test scores, reading levels, or graduation rates.

And you want to know what's most painful? When I see educators, especially teachers, leaving their schools, or sometimes this profession forever, because the “why” behind their teaching is no longer reflected in the job they've been assigned, or the rules they're told to follow.

More than anything, the continued witnessing of impaired vision warrants a thoughtful quest to introduce not just new equipment or resources to manage the work of creating the rich, full, learning experiences in school that few of us have experienced ourselves, but rather, a thoughtful exploration of who we are—who we want to be, and to develop, build, and enact; something different, something better, something from our grandmother's kitchens.

Those early experiences in my teaching life were a collection of tensions that marked the shape of my work as an educator for years to come. The undercurrent of heartbreak in the realm of joy: former students who've died while the others got married, built companies, or had babies. The kids who love you the most, from the families who rejected you the hardest. The curriculum that fostered the deepest engagement from the otherwise disenchanted child deemed inappropriate, unnecessary, and/or irrelevant by a concerned parent and spineless school board.

These days, when I'm working in schools and partnering with teachers to develop justice‐oriented learning spaces, things feel very different. Most teachers I know live somewhere between the space of restriction, negotiation, and a careful restoration of self. Any one decision a teacher makes about their curriculum can initiate an email thread from a concerned parent so long, so potent, that an entire summer's worth of planning can be thrown in the garbage, and a month's worth of sleep is lost from everybody involved.

And things don't just feel different, they are different: at the time of this writing, half of the states within the United States are working to pass legislation that inhibit the teaching of whole truths, and have already moved to ban books that have previously been chosen to be read by entire school communities. The National Book Award–winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, by MacArthur Genius Grantee Jaqueline Woodson, has recently been banned in some school districts. I Dissent, a picture book written by Debbie Levy, demonstrating the life and impact of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has also been banned in some school districts. Books that document the lives of persons who have impacted our society in important ways are now seen as radical, controversial, and inappropriate by some communities.

Almost every day, I look into the eyes of teachers and educators and children and their caregivers, and I search for the antidote to build the kinds of learning that feel joyous—not necessarily comfortable, but joyous. The kind of learning that is driven by reverence for one's community, a deep connection to the people who surround us. The kind of learning that is fueled by deep conviction and stance, a belief so central to one's teaching that any given mandate or new politicized element of school rolls off an educator's shoulders and yields no traction within a classroom.

A kind of learning that, like Mr. Books, is unfettered; and maybe not necessarily feral, but free.

What This Book Is About

Teaching Fiercely: Spreading Joy and Justice in Our Schools offers educators important, practical antidotes to remedy injustices experienced by kids, teachers, and families in schools everywhere, every day, all the time. It also offers a treatment plan immersed in care and community, and poses that connectedness as a sustainable way to move forward. While many bodies of thought exist on social justice curriculum, culturally responsive and sustaining education, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, few resources offer a place for educators to carefully reflect on their past experiences with school; to thoughtfully analyze and train their eyes to see rampant injustices in the everyday practice of school. Few spaces are held for teachers to reflect, to consider how they matter … to, essentially, be heard. Here, educators will find space to plan, apply, and activate justice‐oriented learning through reflection, radical listening, collaboration, instructional practice, and community‐based school experiences.

This book focuses on the how more than the what. While content‐oriented justice is important—that is, teaching diversity and inclusivity beyond a multicultural potluck or holiday—there are incredible resources for that work already, which I'll reference throughout this book.

This book is multifaceted. It calls upon educators to ask, to study, and to develop a practice in response to essential questions I've sought to answer, name, and apply throughout my entire career in education:

One thing I know for sure—the pedagogy of justice is expansive. We use the term “pedagogy” to describe all the acts, experiences, philosophies, curricular choices, instructional moves, communication styles, classroom environments, project plans, and community collaborations that serve our purpose for teaching the humans in front of us. This book acknowledges that expansiveness, acknowledges that teaching through the lens of justice is more than a read aloud, a diversity workshop, or a social studies unit. It also acknowledges that working toward justice is not sustainable if we don't experience joy within that pursuit.

Driven by the possibility of building more just and joyful learning in schools for youth, teachers, and families everywhere, teachers will journey through this book by starting with a generalized understanding of justice, and then work toward building a more specific sense of justice in schools through their own pedagogy. Readers will relive their own experiences along with my own, and various partners along their personal journey in school, as well as connections in their outer communities. They will reflect on multiple relationships and roles within a school community—some of which they've held in the past or currently experience as student, teacher, teacher‐educator, parent/caregiver, administrator, and, most of all, learner.

Like I said, it's expansive! How, then, do we commit without becoming overwhelmed? How do we reflect without walking away? How do we shift beyond just surviving? How do we transform in ways that are more than doable—that are just and joyful for kids and their families, for yourself, and your colleagues? How is any of this even possible in a time when the very idea of justice is riddled with tension, anxiety, and harm? How do we teach not just with our hearts and minds, but our instincts, too? How do we teach fiercely?

While we search for definitive answers to those questions, our work will inevitably serve us nebulous answers. It is up to us to conjure meaning, and make learning joyful and just for the communities we serve. This work doesn't have to be done alone, nor should it be! Together, we uplift teacher agency to make this work doable. This book honors both the urgency and fullness of teaching through justice in an applied sense by activating instructional practice through the lens of justice and joy. This book is also more than doing; it is a treatment plan for unjust practices.

This book acknowledges:

• The importance of reflective practice.
• Historically and culturally responsive teaching.
• Theoretical foundations of teaching and learning.
• Examination of the self in connection to community to cultivate real and sustainable transformative teaching practices that center humanity, particularly for the learners we teach.

As I write, I am surrounded by (I just counted) 18 books, all of which I am reading, none of which I have read. What I mean by that is that rarely do educators who work daily in classrooms sit down and read books about teaching from front to back—or, honestly, even chapter by chapter. It can be a wonderful experience when a book's author unpacks ideas for the reader's consumption, especially if a nagging question gets answered, or an inspired solution to a tricky situation presents itself, providing fodder for trying something new. But a book of only that could also feel like a 75‐minute lecture that's a struggle to get through.

So I offer what I'm calling work alongs: spots to provide an impetus, a little motor for cultivating your thinking, capturing your experiences, developing your agency—perhaps now, perhaps later, or not. So, in between my ideas and experiences, and the research‐backed practices and frameworks, throughout there will also be many opportunities for you to reflect, generate, and document the pieces of you that make your teaching unique. There isn't necessarily an expectation to finish this book; one's personal development of teaching can never really be complete. In fact, that's what makes this work‐along experience so beautiful: it's an authentic representation of how personal growth works. It's cyclical, iterative, and—usually—done in small bites.

Read a little bit, reflect and write, try out some new things with your peers and/or partners, and definitely experiment some instructional strategies with the kids in your classroom. Interacting with this book is meant to catalyze our ferocity and activate our best selves in the learning spaces we occupy.

By reviewing the experience of school and the relationships we have to it, I hope that you as readers will learn to train your eyes to see everyday injustices. With that more clear‐eyed vision we will also take frequent, deep dives to learn more about the historical, institutional underpinnings of unjust practices in schools. Most importantly, you'll be able to cultivate your own pedagogy of justice by bridging history, personal reflection, and instructional practice.

Together, we cultivate our fierceness in the classroom. We root ourselves in justice, and we experience joy along the way.

How This Book Is Different

There are many powerful books out there about equity literacy and social justice and ABAR (Anti‐Bias, Anti‐Racist) teaching. While there is a place for many of those books in our pursuit toward justice, this one is a little different.

This book works to recognize a teacher's reality; the ideas and experiences documented here have been created and told by witnessing teachers who, on a daily basis, are working within a school ecosystem. Within this text, we grapple with multiple truths. Particularly, these two:

• Truth 1: Now, more than ever, teachers have limited bandwidth to engage with the idea of re‐existing in the world—soaking their pedagogy in justice while working in schools that have been, by design, oppressive, insular, and exclusive for both the teaching profession and the student body.
• Truth 2: Now, more than ever, changing the school experience for kids who are learning within that institution requires labor, instincts, and collaborative, creative, critical thinking from those who are most proximate to their experience. This means those same teachers who are working in oppressive systems—who are working incredibly hard, who are probably the most tired—must reengage or continue on as change agents for sustainable, child‐centered shifts rooted in justice to take hold.

The acknowledgement of these truths requires us to grow in both intentional and strategic ways. In this text, I'll introduce frameworks that allow us to recognize both personal and systemic multitudes, while cultivating a sense of joy and justice in our work as educators.

How to Traverse This Book

The landscape of this book is designed to support your individual needs as well as the collective needs of your community. I encourage you to journey through the text as you see fit. Alluding to those aforementioned teacher truths, we all know that time is precious. That said, it isn't necessary to read this book from start to finish.

However, I will say there are some ideas that start in Chapter 1 that grow throughout the text, tethering some of the concepts woven throughout the book. Specifically, Chapters 1 and 2 set the tone for activating social justice education in a way that underscores shared understanding around important terminology like “justice,” “joy,” and “pedagogy.” The Structured Generator of Hope is foundational to this text, shaping several ideas and activities throughout. As you read, it can serve as a point of reference for envisioning how the pieces of social justice work together.

If you're planning a workshop for your school community, consider using some of the work alongs provided to grapple with justice and how it operates in your community.

At the end of Chapter 1 you'll find the beginning of a recurring section called Historical Underpinnings, which explores the roots of the U.S. public school system to both help readers unpack the legacy of injustice in schools and also expose brighter moments of education that have been built outside dominant culture. (That journey continues online at https://www.kassandcorn.com/teachingfiercely/.)

Chapter 2 situates perspective as a key component for treating social injustice, and helps to surface and identify rampant injustices in schools through a series of anecdotes and activities. These are places in the text that will land differently depending on readers' identity markers. For example, there is an aside that discusses anti‐Black racism. If this is a term you've never thought about before, consider discussing it with others who also haven't thought about it before. I say this because it can take some time to fully comprehend how this racism operates—so we can show additional respect to the Black folx who experience anti‐Black racism by striving to understand it before discussing the concept with them to learn what their experience has been.

If you are reading as an individual, note spaces that may require more energy for you to unpack. For example, if you are someone who experienced high levels of trauma within your schooling, the reflective components woven throughout the text may be something you choose to do when you have time and space to process on your own before you reflect and share with others.

If you are reading with a partner or group at school, take notice of the various identity markers and experiences of the participants. In addition to considering your own challenges, anticipate what others may find challenging. Consider the different kinds of experiences people have had in their teaching lives; some folx might be brand‐new teachers, while others may have taught for over a decade. Some material in Chapter 4—like Understanding by Design, Universal Design for Learning, and Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogies—might be very new for some teachers regardless of how many years they've been teaching, while those concepts might be a complete review for others.

Teacher agency is also another really big idea present throughout the text, but especially in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 denotes the curriculum‐making journey underscored in teacher agency, while Chapter 5 demonstrates the meaningfulness of centering students in curriculum making. There is a special emphasis on joyful learning in Chapter 6, and a teacher I partnered with features her work. Real‐life artifacts are shown. Note the curricular examples are from a kindergarten classroom, but the foundational ideas could be applied to upper grades.

If you are reading sections in Chapter 3, you'll be introduced to the Collaborate‐Build‐Nurture‐Reflect Framework that highlights the potentiality for embedding care and community within the structure of school. Later on, in Chapters 7 and 8, you'll read about “negotiating the curriculum.” Both ideas are quite different than what exists in many current educational paradigms. Some people might be immediately on board; for others, it will take some time to process and shift. To that end, be mindful of people's zone of proximal development if you are reading in community.

Also, consider priorities that feel engaging and exciting to focus on. Maybe you are excited to start building curriculum right away—head on over to Chapter 4! Want to embark upon a more personal, reflective journey—spend some time digging into Chapters 1 through 3, paired with dedicated writing time. Are you planning a workshop for your grade team? Chapter 5 lends itself to deep conversations on teacher agency, and Chapter 8 includes possibilities for justice‐oriented learning designs. Is it a whole school workshop? Unpack justice with everyone in Chapter 1. Maybe you're planning out a few conversations with families; if so, begin with Chapter 6 or 7 to center kids. In any case, there's a little something for everyone.

Social Justice Work Illuminated: The Work Is Multifaceted

Social justice work in schools, generally speaking, has ignored the multifacetedness of listening to and honoring the communities educators serve, and has a tendency to skirt the surface of literacy practices that are nuanced enough to reach myriad learners. It is usually pawned off as a curriculum in and of itself, as opposed to a stance, or a way of being. Anti‐Bias, Anti‐Racist (ABAR) work, which is in fact an infusion of the soul, is often treated as “sit and get” professional development by school districts.

Equity Professional Development (PD), federally funded, has caused a race to the RFPs⁹ and complete 360s from testing corporations and curricular juggernauts that have formerly only ever produced literacy assessments or word study PD. After both attending and teaching at research universities, I understand the headiness, the esoteric visions of just schools that academia professes to be true, but rarely lives within their own teaching experience.

For many, many people working toward justice in schools, the urgency is there, the fidelity is not.

So, what does that mean for us?

It means we have a lot of work to do. Important note: the work is not a special march or singular protest—it is the seconds we live and the air we breathe with the students we teach that creates pathways to joyful, just, and humane schools.

Like many of you, for my whole career, with numerous communities, I've worked to build, restore, and teach the kind of justices I'm talking about in this book. Just about every single school day, I meet with teachers, students, principals, superintendents, and/or caregivers and participate in the sojourn for more just schools. I live it, I breathe it. It is me. It is my life.

This book is an attempt to surface all the unjust practices in schools that I witness on a daily basis and that others communicate to me regularly. Moreover, it is written to help more people develop their lenses in which they, too, are able to see, name, and undo injustice by working toward—and, ultimately, activating—justice.

I do not have all the answers. I am only but one person, with a specific set of identity markers and unique personhood. But I have community, I have partners, and I have a very deep conviction that we can figure this out if we do it together.

So, let's highlight potential antidotes, and give all the people access to tools, resources, and community for a different kind of pedagogy; to help more folx see that justice work is not only an everyday practice, it is a joyful pursuit. This, readers, is what it means to teach fiercely.