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73: School and the Carceral Network w/ Dr. Connie Wun
20 Plays5 years ago
Our podcast today features Dr. Connie Wun, the founder and director of Transformative Research: An Institute for Social Transformation and AAPI Women Lead. Connie is an educator, activist, and researcher whose work centers on race and gender equity, community-centered research, women's empowerment, school discipline and punishment, and anti-Blackness in education.
Connie and I talk about school and its relation to the carceral network, or how school is intertwined in producing delinquency, inequity, and power structures in the United States. Our discussion talks not only about the issues facing US schools, but how we can utilize the "winds of change" of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the COVID crisis, to revolutionize the education system to best serve Students of Color and marginalized students.
Briefly, to provide some context to the carceral network and schools - we're referring to not only the "school to prison pipeline", but the commonplace day-to-day discrimination that Students of Color face, including but not limited to a white-centric curriculum, dress codes, the tardy system, and racial stereotyping/discrimination (for example, sending a student out of class for "laughing too loud" or "chewing gum", which effectively hurts a students' education as well as simply their humanity.)
Dr. Connie Wun provides an incredibly clear overview to the carceral state and continuum between schooling and carceral pedagogies.
GUESTS
Dr. Connie Wun, researcher, speaker, and educator, and founder/director of Transformative Research: An Institute for Social Transformation and co-founder/director of AAPI Women Lead.
RESOURCES
- #ImReady Solidarity Work (AAPI Women Lead)
- The Abusable Past: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness
- Asian American Justice Toolkit
- TransformHarm Resource Hub
- Truthout.org: We Are Witnessing an Uprising Against a World Built on Anti-Blackness by Dr. Connie Wun
- Teachers for Social Justice
- Education for Liberation Network
- Teaching Tolerance Black Lives Matter Resources
- Movement for Black Lives
- Black Visions Collective
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Support
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:05
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Human Restoration Project's fantastic patrons.
00:00:11
Speaker
All of our work, which includes free resources, materials, and this podcast are available for free due to our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Susan Michelle Harrison, Dustin Rideout, and Trent M. Kirkpatrick.
00:00:23
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:24
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Host and Guest Introduction
00:00:46
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 73 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:50
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:54
Speaker
Our podcast today features Dr. Connie Wan, the founder and director of Transformative Research and Institute for Social Transformation and AAPI Women Lead.
00:01:04
Speaker
Connie is an educator, activist and researcher whose work centers on race and gender equity, community centered research, women's empowerment, school discipline and punishment and anti-blackness in education.
Discussing School Contributions to Delinquency and Inequity
00:01:14
Speaker
Connie and I talk about school and its relation to the carceral network, or how school is intertwined in producing delinquency, inequity, and power structures in the United States.
00:01:23
Speaker
Our discussion talks not only about the issues facing U.S. schools, but how we can utilize the winds of change of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the COVID crisis, to revolutionize the education system to best serve students of color and marginalized students.
00:01:36
Speaker
Briefly, to provide some context to the carceral network in schools, we're referring not only to the school-to-person pipeline, but the commonplace day-to-day discrimination that students of color face, including but not limited to a white-centric curriculum, dress codes, the tardy system, and racial stereotyping discrimination, for example, sending a student out of class for quote-unquote laughing too loud or chewing gum, which effectively hurts a student's education as well as simply their humanity.
00:02:04
Speaker
So much of your research is focused on on black feminism, how the institution of school negatively impacts young women of color.
00:02:11
Speaker
And in all these continued events that we see going on right now, the murder of yet another black individual, there's protests going on throughout the country.
00:02:20
Speaker
We see schools taking that first step of at least acknowledging racism in the United States.
00:02:25
Speaker
They have like website statements and things of that nature.
00:02:28
Speaker
This is obviously a very small first step, but it is opening that door to perhaps more deeper systemic change in the education system.
Connie Wan's Research on Racialized Violence
00:02:37
Speaker
Before we jump into what those changes could be, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself and the research that you're focused on and what your current role is?
00:02:44
Speaker
Sure.
00:02:45
Speaker
So thank you for inviting me to come and talk with you.
00:02:50
Speaker
I am one of the co-founders of AAPI Women Lead,
00:02:54
Speaker
which is an organization that amplifies the issues of violence that impact self-identified Asian and Pacific Islander women and girls.
00:03:05
Speaker
And we also talk about or amplify the leadership of our community members as well.
00:03:09
Speaker
I'm also a consultant and the founding director for Transformative Research.
00:03:15
Speaker
where I go around the country and I train organizations how to do community-driven research, data analysis, and host campaigns based upon their community-led research.
00:03:28
Speaker
I came across your work when I was reading, I believe it was a study out of your PhD.
00:03:33
Speaker
A lot of that work stemmed out of looking at particularly young Black women in school.
00:03:40
Speaker
Could you talk a little bit about how that research has led you to where you are right now?
00:03:44
Speaker
So I think it's important to note that what I did was I studied school discipline, punishment, and violence.
00:03:52
Speaker
through an intersectional framework.
00:03:54
Speaker
So I wasn't studying black girls, I was studying schools and their disciplinary practices.
00:04:00
Speaker
And that's what led me to the findings that the folks who are most impacted are black girls.
00:04:05
Speaker
It's important to distinguish that, right?
00:04:08
Speaker
That work is ongoing.
00:04:10
Speaker
That's actually been going on before my dissertation, before any of my publications, which I actually have a piece coming out on truth.org in a couple of days.
00:04:20
Speaker
That work has led me to go and make sure that I talk about the intersections of violence across communities.
00:04:30
Speaker
And it's led me to do the work of looking at how
00:04:36
Speaker
anti-Asian violence and our contingent freedoms and privileges are based upon anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, right?
00:04:48
Speaker
For our organization, I think about our community members, both Asian and Pacific Islanders, as colonial subjects.
00:04:56
Speaker
And what does it mean to be colonial subjects of racialized forms of violence?
00:05:03
Speaker
in an anti-Black world and an anti-Indigenous one.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:07
Speaker
So let's dive into maybe some concrete examples for teachers listening in.
00:05:13
Speaker
I know one huge one is definitely the colonized curriculum and what students see day to day within that curriculum.
00:05:19
Speaker
But you also have dissected things beyond suspensions and beyond expulsions.
00:05:25
Speaker
I think many people are familiar with the term school to prison pipeline, but it's obviously a lot more deep than that.
00:05:31
Speaker
And there's a lot of
00:05:32
Speaker
like microaggressions or small things that happen every day that add up into a much bigger picture of systemic racism.
Curriculum's Role in Promoting White Nationalism
00:05:39
Speaker
Could you dive into some of those concrete examples?
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:44
Speaker
So let me contextualize some things and I'm going to give you examples, right?
00:05:47
Speaker
So I want us to think about there are differences between being anti-racist and also being against anti-Blackness.
00:05:58
Speaker
As educators, we are doing a couple of things.
00:06:01
Speaker
We have been consciously or unconsciously, but definitely formally, we're tasked to teach a particular pedagogy and curriculums.
00:06:11
Speaker
that ushers in a very specific, multicultural, white form of nationalism.
00:06:19
Speaker
We see it in our history books.
00:06:21
Speaker
We see it in our political science books.
00:06:23
Speaker
We see it in our English classes.
00:06:25
Speaker
We see it all across our disciplines and subject matters that there is a specific culture and narrative we're ushering in.
00:06:35
Speaker
And it's very multicultural, white, nationalists.
00:06:39
Speaker
Very rarely are we learning about Black liberation movements.
00:06:44
Speaker
Very rarely do we learn about the depth and breadth of an anti-Black chattel slavery condition, let alone its history.
00:06:53
Speaker
Very rarely do we talk about the breadth and depth of the anti-Indigenous genocidal project that still exists today.
00:07:01
Speaker
That's not a part of our curriculum in history, poli-sci.
00:07:06
Speaker
English classes, that's not what we're teaching.
00:07:09
Speaker
Very rarely do we talk about the United States colonial projects beyond the United States.
00:07:15
Speaker
We don't talk about the breadth of the war in Vietnam, what happened in Laos, what happened in Cambodia, right, or the Philippines, or Guam,
00:07:24
Speaker
or Hawaii or Samoa.
00:07:27
Speaker
We don't know these histories.
00:07:29
Speaker
Even when we say the U.S. history or United States, we may talk about Hawaii, but we're not talking about Hawaii as an occupied territory by which Native Hawaiians will vehemently remind you.
00:07:40
Speaker
We don't talk about U.S. states.
00:07:42
Speaker
We don't talk about its territories.
00:07:45
Speaker
Those are occupied lands that's not in our history, political science, in any of our courses for the most part.
00:07:54
Speaker
So that's what I mean when I say that we have a particular set of values that we're teaching and a particular recollection of this country.
00:08:03
Speaker
So then that's a part of the informal ways that we produce white supremacy.
00:08:09
Speaker
And now we have an increasingly diverse population that we're teaching it to.
00:08:14
Speaker
And a lot of these multicultural populations, they don't remember their histories.
00:08:20
Speaker
They don't remember how they got here.
00:08:22
Speaker
But we're continuously teaching them how to be good citizens.
00:08:26
Speaker
We're teaching them how to be really good at STEM without a context, by which they're supposed to be really good scientists and mathematicians to continue ushering in this project without context.
00:08:40
Speaker
So those are kind of a day-to-day informal practices of multicultural white nationalist project, right?
The Carceral Continuum in School Discipline
00:08:48
Speaker
So then when we talk about discipline, the other hand, right?
00:08:51
Speaker
We have the soft ways of disciplining.
00:08:54
Speaker
And then we also have these more stringent, rigid ways of disciplining and punishing young people.
00:09:01
Speaker
So people talk about the school-to-prison pipeline, as you referenced.
00:09:05
Speaker
There are many of us who talk about it, schools and prisons as a continuum.
00:09:09
Speaker
And we talk about them as a school to prison continuum under a carceral state, by which while everyone is subject to surveillance and policing, there are certain populations that are being targeted for premature death and or enclosure or political and social debilitation.
00:09:30
Speaker
That happens through the punitive projects or the punitive policies of suspensions and expulsions.
00:09:37
Speaker
where we see that most of the young people impacted have been Black, Latinx, and Indigenous.
00:09:43
Speaker
So then, you know, we started kind of contending against, you know, these punitive practices, like how dare we suspend these kids?
00:09:51
Speaker
How dare we expel them?
00:09:53
Speaker
How dare we bring in the police to arrest them and punish them, right?
00:09:57
Speaker
That's definite.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yes, stop it.
00:10:00
Speaker
We've also failed to look at the kind of normalized forms of policing that many of us are implicated in doing.
00:10:08
Speaker
That looks like in my research when I was, and I continue to do this research, in my research, I'll find students will tell me
00:10:17
Speaker
they would have gotten in trouble for chewing gum.
00:10:19
Speaker
They would have gotten in trouble and sent out of class.
00:10:23
Speaker
They may have gotten a referral and or they just get sent out of class to stand outside for an hour.
00:10:27
Speaker
That doesn't get documented.
00:10:29
Speaker
Or a student will come to school late and predominantly Black youth, Black girls will talk about coming to school late because they're actually taking care of their siblings at home because they're living under conditions by which they're under-resourced.
00:10:44
Speaker
So they have to be the second parent.
00:10:47
Speaker
They come to school late.
00:10:48
Speaker
They ask for support from their teachers and their teachers are asymptomatic.
00:10:52
Speaker
That's a form of policing, disciplining.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then they end up getting tardy referrals instead of some compassion.
00:10:59
Speaker
So then we also have incidences of, you know, students will actually intuitively know that their teacher is racist.
00:11:07
Speaker
And I think the way that we've been taught, we've kind of dismissed our young people's intuition under the presence that it needs to be logical, like demonstrate to me that that teacher is racist versus young people saying, well, they're not talking to me and they're not looking at me.
00:11:24
Speaker
I can actually tell that they don't like me.
00:11:27
Speaker
We don't lend any credence to that young person's feeling of being ostracized in the classroom, right?
00:11:34
Speaker
As a type of disciplining.
00:11:36
Speaker
In my research, the young people will say, you know, I had a young person say that teacher doesn't like black kids, but they don't get a referral for it.
00:11:42
Speaker
They're just like, they don't, they don't talk to me.
00:11:44
Speaker
They, they just don't help me.
00:11:46
Speaker
Right.
00:11:47
Speaker
That's not documented as suspension or expulsion.
00:11:50
Speaker
Or one of my AP students that I interviewed gave an example of how she did an assignment in one of her classes.
00:11:59
Speaker
At the end of class, the teacher pulls her aside and said, this is not your writing.
00:12:04
Speaker
My student, a black girl, was like, what are you talking about?
00:12:07
Speaker
The teacher says, this is an Asian girl's handwriting.
00:12:11
Speaker
None of that was documented as a suspension or expulsion.
00:12:15
Speaker
Instead, she sends the student to the principal's office
00:12:20
Speaker
with her assignment and the principal has that girl in real time start writing to compare whether or not that was her writing.
00:12:29
Speaker
These forms of disciplining and policing and punishment are not documented.
00:12:33
Speaker
It's an everyday ritual that the young kids experience.
00:12:37
Speaker
And so that student that I was talking to felt so marginalized, if not attacked in the classroom, she's literally shut down.
00:12:46
Speaker
She's not, she wasn't going to drop out of school, right?
00:12:49
Speaker
She's going to stay in school.
00:12:50
Speaker
She's an AP student, but she feels tortured in the school.
00:12:54
Speaker
I'm giving you a handful of examples by which a lot of the young people I spoke to in my research talked about anti-Blackness as a part of the culture they were living in.
00:13:07
Speaker
beyond the referrals, suspensions, and arrests.
00:13:11
Speaker
They're much more mundane and everyday than we are archiving.
00:13:17
Speaker
As you share those stories, I mean, it's sad.
00:13:20
Speaker
Like, it makes me feel so bad that these students every day are being, in a way, forced to go to a place where they're not being accepted, where they don't see themselves, where there's not even a form of empowerment for them to share their voice, usually on a day-to-day basis.
00:13:34
Speaker
As you're diving into, first off, the curriculum side of things, it's sad that so many teachers have used the standards as they're written as
00:13:45
Speaker
as a way to whitewash history, because it is possible to integrate more perspectives, even what would be seen as a more critical perspective to the United States and still teach the standards, because there's tons of resources like teaching tolerance and Zen Ed Project and all the different variety of materials that one could use.
00:14:04
Speaker
But it's not explicitly said you should use these materials.
00:14:07
Speaker
It's more of like a sadly and above and beyond type thing.
00:14:11
Speaker
In the same way, too, with like math and science, which are also incredibly white centric, where, for example, in math, people are not recognizing in anywhere from like south east and southwest Asia and like the roots of the golden age of mathematics and all these different things.
00:14:26
Speaker
Then building into that the point about discipline.
Movements for Systemic Reform in Education
00:14:30
Speaker
I wonder, with the wave of the Black Lives Matter protests, with what's going on in the news, do you see any systemic reform or anyone actually looking at how this movement could impact how teachers and schools see discipline within the classroom and how they deal with systemic racism?
00:14:52
Speaker
So I was on a panel for Partnership LA, which is a group here in California.
00:14:59
Speaker
I bring them up because we asked the question about the relationship between education and racial justice.
00:15:06
Speaker
And I referenced an organization called Teachers for Social Justice, which is a national organization.
00:15:12
Speaker
working for social justice.
00:15:14
Speaker
There's a group called our education for liberation.
00:15:17
Speaker
So there are people who are doing this work to make schools more accountable to students of color.
00:15:24
Speaker
And then there are, there's curriculum on black lives matter in schools.
00:15:28
Speaker
I know that teaching for tolerance.
00:15:31
Speaker
I know they have curriculum as well.
00:15:32
Speaker
I also know that there's a huge movement for police free schools.
00:15:36
Speaker
That I think has to be emphasized in terms of changing the tide of discipline and punishment in the schools.
00:15:43
Speaker
police free schools that is in tandem with the defund police movement, the abolish police movement that's taking place right now.
00:15:53
Speaker
And that's being led by organizations like movement for black lives, organizations like black visions collective who led what's going on in Minnesota.
00:16:04
Speaker
These black led organizations have drawn upon decades of organizing.
00:16:10
Speaker
in order to hold schools accountable by asking them or demanding for them to remove police from schools, to redistribute those funds towards restorative justice, transformative justice in the schools.
00:16:25
Speaker
There's a huge movement around that.
00:16:27
Speaker
Now, what I am going to say is that I would love for us to use this moment to make schools, if we do it correctly, we are schools and an educational system that centers racial justice and demands an end to anti-Blackness.
00:16:46
Speaker
If we do it correctly, it's not infusing anti-racist curriculum into the schools.
00:16:53
Speaker
We make the schools racial justice centered.
00:16:57
Speaker
the entire educational system, right, would be working to upend anti-Blackness, to upend colonial projects?
Envisioning Racial Justice in Education
00:17:06
Speaker
What would it look like if all of our curriculum and practices were working to end anti-Blackness, were working to end colonization?
00:17:14
Speaker
Not just to infuse it, but those become our practices.
00:17:18
Speaker
What if it was, you know, our curriculum and our practices were to end white supremacy, not to infuse
00:17:25
Speaker
anti-white supremacist pedagogy, but that those were our standards.
00:17:31
Speaker
How would the lessons and the curriculum be working to end these things?
00:17:35
Speaker
Abolitionists, including myself, we've been police prison abolitionists for decades.
00:17:42
Speaker
What we're asking for is not only the end of these things, but to create an entirely different world.
00:17:48
Speaker
where we get to rely on each other.
00:17:50
Speaker
We get to take care of each other.
00:17:52
Speaker
We get to center our young people's livelihoods and not just try to get them through the next day, which I know as a former school teacher, most of our days kind of feel like that.
00:18:04
Speaker
And when it comes to that systemic change, I think of things I don't understand why they're such a big deal, but I know that schools take them so seriously and they disproportionately target people of color, for example, like dress codes or how tardy policies are handled.
00:18:21
Speaker
But I also think about things like grades and ranking and filing students and making standardized testing overtly competitive.
00:18:29
Speaker
And using standardized testing as an emissions calculation at all when it's based on literal racist IQ testing.
00:18:35
Speaker
All these different things that have sadly rich histories of white imperialism.
00:18:41
Speaker
And we know these things, but yet we continue to use them.
00:18:44
Speaker
As a teacher myself, I imagine that I'm listening into this conversation.
00:18:48
Speaker
It can feel very overwhelming because we're talking about dismantling a system in the United States that's been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years.
00:18:55
Speaker
What recommendations would you have for a teacher on their own without any systemic support?
00:19:03
Speaker
What would they even do?
00:19:04
Speaker
Where would they start?
00:19:05
Speaker
So I think one is listening to, you know, your podcast would probably be helpful.
00:19:10
Speaker
I also think it's a couple of things.
00:19:14
Speaker
One is that everyone who isn't already doing the research and the work, you want to be able to study and genuinely understand the foundation of this country.
00:19:28
Speaker
You want to embody it as real knowledge first.
00:19:31
Speaker
Like this is an anti-Black, anti-Indigenous colonial nation.
00:19:37
Speaker
Now, once you do that, do the research, do the studying, tons of resources online, do your reading, do your research.
00:19:45
Speaker
The second step is it's a false dichotomy between standards and teaching a racial justice curriculum.
00:19:53
Speaker
It's a false dichotomy.
00:19:55
Speaker
You can still teach content,
00:19:58
Speaker
that is racial justice based and in fact probably produce the standards quick like faster if not better.
00:20:08
Speaker
If you had our young people reading the history of genocide here I'm pretty sure they'd be like oh man that's crazy can I read some more because you know what I mean like that's kind of that would entice me right.
00:20:23
Speaker
I thought you had our young people reading some of these like really exciting texts about resisting slavery, resisting colonization.
00:20:33
Speaker
Like I think I would, it's maybe idealistic, but I'm sure our young people would be more inclined, would be excited to learn this kind of history, especially in this moment.
00:20:43
Speaker
I taught history for years, and students always would say whenever we were talking about, for example, like the Filipino-American War or about even like the war in Syria, things that are going on right now, the class was consistently seen as like, wow, this is like the coolest class ever, even though it's
00:21:00
Speaker
hyper depressing and everything we talk about is so sad and morbid really because sadly united states history is steeped in there's very few points in united states history where you can go like oh yeah they were a good person uh it's always either a shade of gray or something nefarious is going on behind the scenes and you're like oh
00:21:18
Speaker
This is why we're at the way that we are today.
00:21:21
Speaker
But students get hyped up about that kind of thing.
00:21:24
Speaker
They discuss those things.
00:21:25
Speaker
They talk about those things, especially if you have basically the conversation that we're having right now with students talking about the school system and how it basically treats them.
00:21:37
Speaker
Because it
00:21:38
Speaker
They're living that.
00:21:39
Speaker
And in my opinion, it's really important that students understand the system that they're in so that they can then transform and lead some change and even things like protest and demand change from the inside.
00:21:52
Speaker
I love that, right?
00:21:54
Speaker
So I love that we're studying the history.
00:21:57
Speaker
We're teaching the history.
00:21:59
Speaker
So those are two steps, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
We study it, we teach it, infuse it in our curriculum.
00:22:03
Speaker
I think it's also, you're saying that it inspires young people to be critical thinkers and to act upon that, right?
00:22:12
Speaker
So we change our curriculum to include more racial justice-centered content,
00:22:19
Speaker
And then the other part to that, if your subject matter doesn't allow for that, you also teach kind of, you diversify the content.
00:22:27
Speaker
I have a school teacher that I know and care about in my family who's a third, fourth grade teacher.
00:22:33
Speaker
He's teaching Christopher Columbus, right?
00:22:35
Speaker
As he's been told he has to teach.
00:22:36
Speaker
And then he teaches his students.
00:22:38
Speaker
Like, so who were the originators of this country, right?
00:22:42
Speaker
Who originally are the stewards?
00:22:44
Speaker
And the young people, the students will say the natives are
00:22:48
Speaker
So he teaches them like, here's what I'm supposed to teach you.
00:22:51
Speaker
I've taught it to you.
00:22:52
Speaker
Now here's another set of history.
00:22:54
Speaker
So I want you to compare and you tell us, you get to decide.
00:22:57
Speaker
You can also teach them other vantage points if you're not going to center it, right?
00:23:03
Speaker
Because you feel constricted, even though I think you have the freedom to change it, but nonetheless.
00:23:09
Speaker
I think that's a really good point too, which is I think many educators are afraid of this top-down administrative approach that if they go against the grain even slightly, that they're going to instantly be fired.
00:23:23
Speaker
And I think that you could make the argument that in most districts –
00:23:27
Speaker
Teaching this way can be framed as just saying this is a more critical and more difficult approach to teaching and learning.
00:23:36
Speaker
As in, it's more practical, it's centered around current events, it is deep in both context and literature, and it's reminiscent of what you would get in a college environment, hopefully, where you're getting more sides, where you're getting deeper context in books, etc.
00:24:00
Speaker
I hope you're enjoying our podcast so far.
00:24:02
Speaker
If you like what you hear and want to dive deeper into progressive education, I highly encourage you to visit us at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:24:09
Speaker
There you'll find a range of free materials, research, writings, and more to help transform schools towards human-centered practices.
00:24:16
Speaker
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00:24:21
Speaker
We appreciate your support.
00:24:23
Speaker
Now back to the podcast.
00:24:25
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project.
00:24:29
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
00:24:32
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:24:36
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
Resisting Systemic Discipline Methods
00:24:51
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How about the other side of things as a teacher?
00:24:54
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So first part being curriculum, but then second part being the disciplinary stuff.
00:24:59
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How does a teacher push back against a systemic discipline system in which they are at least expected to abide by?
00:25:09
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I'm not sure that people, what it means to be expected to abide by it.
00:25:14
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Like, for example, let's do like an easy one, like dress code.
00:25:18
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If you are not policing dress code in your room, you're going to get reprimanded for not doing so.
00:25:26
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Or if a student is being loud, like laughing loudly, and it disturbs someone in another classroom, and they're not being assigned like a warning, and you're saying, hey, like, can you be a little bit quieter because they can't learn it?
00:25:41
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Like, you're just not being humane about it.
00:25:43
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And to serve someone else, someone might say, like, hey, like, you should be disciplining, quote unquote, them.
00:25:48
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All these, like, minor things that are kind of upheld by the school system, but sadly are written into handbooks.
00:25:54
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It's such a great question.
00:25:56
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And I'm gonna say two things.
00:25:59
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I think they're just going to have to resist.
00:26:02
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You're gonna have to do and be brave and bold enough to really be about what your students need, right?
00:26:08
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So for instance, if you're a young person, I remember when I was teaching my students, at some point I taught at a continuation school, which is an alternative school, right?
00:26:18
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Kids have discipline records.
00:26:21
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And I remember my students coming in and being loud or acting out.
00:26:29
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The two things I remember thinking is one, I wanted the context.
00:26:34
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So I learned my students.
00:26:36
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I learned about their lives.
00:26:38
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And it was then that I could understand, one, maybe I'm being really sensitive around the volume.
00:26:45
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Maybe I'm the one.
00:26:46
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Maybe I'm potentially the problem.
00:26:49
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Maybe I'm the disrespectful one versus all thinking it's the young person that's being disrespectful.
00:26:54
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So I check myself and my own barometer around privilege or my own barometer around cultural sensitivity or whatever that means.
00:27:04
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My barometer.
00:27:05
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Then I also think.
00:27:06
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What's the content of my young person's lives?
00:27:10
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I would find out a lot of things.
00:27:12
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Exposure to premature death, the amount of responsibilities they had to experience, the intergenerational trauma.
00:27:18
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All of that is to not pathologize the young person, but to really think about the systems that have made it very challenging for them to be, you know, so much more focused on the kind of curriculum that you want them to be
Valuing Students Beyond Serving Time
00:27:30
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focused on.
00:27:30
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And then I want you to think about potentially how oppressive the environment really is and how much when you were younger, did you really like school that much?
00:27:38
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Like, I really want us to be honest about that, right?
00:27:42
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For me, I have a PhD from Berkeley.
00:27:46
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which is like one of the top tier universities.
00:27:49
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But I have to admit to people, I genuinely hate school, 100%.
00:27:53
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I do not like school from second grade past my doctorate.
00:27:58
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And I have had to go through so much therapy in order to get through it.
00:28:01
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I say that because sometimes we have to honor the fact that a lot of the young people feel like they're just clocking time.
00:28:08
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So how do you create a condition by which our young people are not feeling like this is just prison?
00:28:13
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I'm of the mindset that the best teachers are those that hated school.
00:28:16
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Deborah Meyer, like the famous progressive school advocate, said that she intentionally hired people that did not either didn't do well in school or admitted that they were apathetic.
00:28:26
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It sucks for the most part, especially if you are in like a high capacity, like 2000, 3000 person plus school where you're just treated like a number and everything's controlled from like when you can use the bathroom to what you learn about at every given moment of time.
00:28:42
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It's not a good experience.
00:28:44
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And many students are just waiting for 2.30, 3.30 to roll around so they can go do the things they want to do, which is sad because there's so much opportunity.
00:28:53
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On the other hand, if we were doing things right,
00:28:56
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I highly doubt the world would look like it does today, where there are so many problems.
00:29:03
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And even though there's inklings of them getting better, the majority of people still aren't voting.
00:29:08
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You still have issues with racial insensitivity, especially in rural areas and suburban areas where educators are less prone potentially to talking about it, at least in my experience.
00:29:21
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There's a lot going on.
00:29:22
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I like that point that you made surrounding if teachers go out and read and they understand the deep, dark history of the United States and their role in it within that system, that will allow them then to every single time that they're presented with the situation to really reflect on what exactly they're saying and doing and if they're upholding that system or if they're changing the status quo.
00:29:44
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I love that summary.
00:29:45
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That's a perfect summary.
00:29:46
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It's when you know what this is, what this nation state continues to do, especially under this context, all the violence that we're witnessing.
00:29:55
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And you want to think about the deaths from COVID as a part of the violence, like who's dying?
00:30:01
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How did it come to be that people are dying with these health disparities and access to health care?
00:30:06
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What are you upholding?
00:30:07
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When you're teaching, what are you teaching and what are you teaching them for?
00:30:11
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Are you teaching them to reproduce what has caused us to live under this crisis?
00:30:19
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Are you teaching them to upend this crisis?
00:30:23
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Are you teaching them to end the crisis that we live under, to create a different world?
00:30:28
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Because a good colleague of mine, she's a psychologist,
00:30:34
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She goes by Dr. Jen, huge following on Instagram.
00:30:38
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Brilliant.
00:30:38
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She says like, what kind of future do you want to create?
00:30:42
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You know, when people say this is how it's been for hundreds of years, like you alluded, what do you want for hundreds of years later?
00:30:48
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And this is the moment to decide upon that.
00:30:52
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Do you want this to continue?
00:30:53
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Because if this is what you want to do, then we know, be clear about it.
00:30:57
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Be clear about that.
00:30:59
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I feel like I talked to you for a very long time about this, but I also don't want to eat up too much of your time.
Empowering Change Through Education
00:31:04
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So Connie, is there any other point that we haven't discussed yet that you really want to make sure that everyone hears?
00:31:12
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You know, I want people to be bold.
00:31:15
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This period speaks to how much change is overdue.
00:31:20
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By that, when you're talking about the police violence issue,
00:31:23
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the high rates of incarceration, the people dying.
00:31:27
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I think we have to be bold enough to create an entirely different world, be bold enough to stand up against what it is we've known because lives are on the line and they have been.
00:31:40
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This country has been built upon so much violence, it cannot continue.
00:31:45
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And people have to be honest about that and be bold enough to put themselves on the line for change.
00:31:52
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I just want to say the second point is that people are attacking, rightfully not attacking, but people are seeing the police as agents of violence, but our educational system also makes all that violence possible.
00:32:06
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We're the other hand of it.
00:32:08
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So we have a role in the abolition of that violence.
00:32:11
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Yeah, that's a perfect final line if I ever heard one.
00:32:14
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And I'm with you.
00:32:15
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I love that idea of teaching as a revolutionary or teaching for protest, as a form of protest.
00:32:22
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To me, that's empowering.
00:32:23
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That's like what makes the job worth doing it.
00:32:25
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You're doing social good in the world.
00:32:27
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Like that's the whole reason why you sign up to do it.
00:32:29
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I don't understand why that wouldn't be appealing to someone because the opposing side would be, I go into school to teach Algebra 1.
00:32:37
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It's like, oh, cool.
00:32:38
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I just couldn't imagine that being inspiring.
00:32:40
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But...
00:32:41
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I don't know.
00:32:42
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That's why people need to listen.
00:32:43
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I'm going to say something to you too, Chris.
00:32:45
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It's like, I want people to understand like you get to be that expansive and that creative to like create a different world, you know, in a world that like is not founded upon racialized violence.
00:33:00
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Right.
00:33:01
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Those people who want to uphold that, those are the people that are on the other side.
00:33:06
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We get to have a revolutionary movement to create something entirely different and be creative and excited about what it is that we do.
00:33:16
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Get to be excited.
00:33:17
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Get to say, I don't like what this is about.
00:33:19
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This sucks.
00:33:20
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Feel the freedom to say that.
00:33:24
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You know, and I think that's a part of the repression.
00:33:27
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People don't feel the freedom to be like, I don't like this.
00:33:31
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I want to do something different.
00:33:32
Speaker
And then know that the world is on your side now.
00:33:40
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
00:33:43
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:33:48
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.