Whenever I do a keynote presentation or workshop, I’m often asked: “How does this apply to me when I teach in a school with all-white staff and an almost all-white student body?”
The moment we’re in right now is why. Say less about the Rittenhouses, the Carlsons, and the Trumps of the world and more about the society that has created pathways for permission towards white nationalism, murder, and fascism.
The current pandemic has taught us several lessons. Among them is that our solutions must be contextual, historical, borderless, and structurally compassionate. To bring this to the school level, it’s cool when a student has that one teacher who believes in them as a student and as a person, develops culturally-responsive and engaging lessons, and wants to stay in the profession for more than a couple of years, but if it’s only one teacher out of seven or eight that the student has, we need the goal to be higher. Every one of us may have a right to close our doors so we can focus on our own lessons, but, at some point, we must see how our teaching and the teaching across the hall or on another floor (or school) have a relationship to one another. Unfortunately, some students might not see any teachers in their lives who meet these criteria, but this makes the imperative that much more urgent.
This is to say, we have plenty of evidence that all of our classrooms are interconnected. We can’t pretend that individual choice can trump collective failure … or success.
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