Transcript
Speaker: Hey, everyone.
Speaker: Many of you are already working to get your classrooms ready and will be welcoming students for the first day here in the next couple of weeks, if you haven't already.
Speaker: It's a magical and stressful time of year.
Speaker: So we wanted to release Dr. Carla Shalabi's 2024 Conference to Restore Humanity keynote as a back to school special podcast.
Speaker: Carla speaks so powerfully to her own practical experience of human-centered education and why we do what we do, moving away from control, surveillance, and punishment, and towards a model based on collective care, inclusion, and restorative practice.
Speaker: We hope you find it a great way to center ways of thinking about classroom management that'll help get the school year started off on the right foot and sustain community with students throughout the next several months.
Speaker: As Carla reminds us, being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such a thing as a throwaway person.
Speaker: If you prefer video, that's up on our YouTube channel too.
Speaker: Just search for Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: Thanks as always for listening.
Speaker: We hope you have an amazing school year and let us know if you need anything.
Speaker: Hello, Human Restoration Project folks.
Speaker: I'm so just delighted really to be with you.
Speaker: I'm so grateful that you're here.
Speaker: I know this is a time when folks are just especially beleaguered and unwell and really needing and seeking spaces of restoration themselves.
Speaker: So I hope we might find some of that in one another today.
Speaker: I wanted to talk today about teaching love and learning freedom, what it means to practice human being.
Speaker: So I think of human being as a verb, something you do in action, and like all actions, something that requires lots of skill building and practice to be good at.
Speaker: So being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such thing as a throwaway person.
Speaker: So in keeping with that, and in keeping with that as a core philosophy, guiding light North Star for me personally,
Speaker: Anytime I'm sharing space as we are today, I always start with a moment of silence as a way to allow people to be with whatever grief they may be carrying.
Speaker: And also because in times of mass death, mass murder, I think to fail to recognize the loss of life is
Speaker: is another way that we invest in a culture of disposability.
Speaker: And I'm really interested in divesting from a culture of disposability.
Speaker: And that means pause with intentionality,
Speaker: even when we have precious time together to be with the loss of human life.
Speaker: So please take a quiet moment of silence for yourself and for each other now.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Okay, I wanna also begin with an offering for you.
Speaker: This is a poem that I return to often as, again, another guidepost for me.
Speaker: It's called Shoulders by Naomi Shehab Nye.
Speaker: A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
Speaker: No car must splash him,
Speaker: No car drive too near to his shadow.
Speaker: This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo, but he's not marked.
Speaker: Nowhere does his jacket say fragile, handle with care.
Speaker: His ear fills up with breathing.
Speaker: He hears the hum of a boy's dream deep inside him.
Speaker: We're not going to be able to live in this world if we are not willing to do what he is doing with one another.
Speaker: The road will only be wide.
Speaker: The rain will never stop falling.
Speaker: I wanna jump right in so that we use our time together as well as possible.
Speaker: And I just can't wait to be with you all for questions and answers.
Speaker: So please, of course, collect your confusions, your concerns, the things you hate, the things you love.
Speaker: Just keep note of all of that, because I'm really excited to talk with you about these ideas.
Speaker: This format's a little rough.
Speaker: Of course, I prefer to be interacting with you and I'm excited to get to interact with you around these ideas.
Speaker: But these are the three that we're gonna consider together today, okay?
Speaker: The first is that safety and control are incompatible.
Speaker: Where there is control, there can never be safety.
Speaker: And that control prevents us from learning to practice our freedom responsibly.
Speaker: So that's the first idea that we're going to unpack together.
Speaker: The second is that punishment and accountability are incompatible.
Speaker: Okay, so where there is punishment, there can never be accountability.
Speaker: And that's a second idea that we will unpack together.
Speaker: And the third is that human being is a verb, and every day is an opportunity to practice it both in and outside of classrooms.
Speaker: So we can engage a curriculum and a practice and a pedagogy and a way of being, of care, as a challenge to the culture of throwaway people.
Speaker: Okay, so each of these three ideas we'll treat in turn and go into it a bit so that we can argue about it when we get to be on the live Q&A.
Speaker: I want to think about the difference between safety and control.
Speaker: I want to think about how we define safety.
Speaker: I think when I, I mean, sorry, how we define freedom.
Speaker: When I talk about freedom, people often misunderstand me to mean that freedom means getting to do whatever you want.
Speaker: And I want to be really clear that I am absolutely about the practice of freedom.
Speaker: And I absolutely do not define freedom as the ability to do whatever you want.
Speaker: Okay, I want to offer this definition of freedom for us to think about and toy with and play with together.
Speaker: Okay, I'm going to move over a little bit so that you can see the whole thing.
Speaker: Freedom means safely getting to be our whole human selves in community with other whole human selves without any threats or assaults to our well-being.
Speaker: That's part one.
Speaker: That is our right to freedom.
Speaker: Part two is our responsibility.
Speaker: Freedom means using our power to demand that each of us is taken care of, protected, treated with dignity and affirmed.
Speaker: Every time I am talking about, thinking about, teaching about freedom, I am teaching it and talking about it as both a right
Speaker: something that we have just by virtue of being human and a responsibility, something that we must ensure for others because no person has the right to freedom if we each don't mind our responsibility to freedom.
Speaker: By that I mean,
Speaker: You could never be a free person, safe, getting to be your whole human self, if I violate that right at every turn.
Speaker: So your freedom depends on my actions.
Speaker: So freedom is my responsibility if it is to be your right.
Speaker: So when I talk, especially to young people, but really to anybody about what freedom means, I try to frame it as much as possible as a responsibility, something that we owe one another.
Speaker: When I think about defining it for young children, this is the definition of freedom that I use.
Speaker: Freedom means we keep us safe.
Speaker: We protect everyone's bodies and feelings, and we protect our planet.
Speaker: I'm gonna give you a quiet moment to think about this definition of freedom and how I'm framing it as a responsibility.
Speaker: Freedom means we keep us safe.
Speaker: That's a phrase that I borrow from abolitionists movements that insist that it is not police who keep us safe.
Speaker: We keep us safe.
Speaker: When I'm talking with teens, I level up a bit here.
Speaker: Freedom means we keep us safe.
Speaker: We move and act in ways that reduce harm and that protect the well-being of all people and of our planet.
Speaker: Again, it's a responsibility.
Speaker: There is a focus here on the reduction of harm.
Speaker: These are abolitionist principles that are built into a working everyday school-friendly definition of freedom as a responsibility to protect each other's bodies, feelings, and our planet.
Speaker: Because while we are talking, of course, about human being, there is no human being without the sustainability and the life of all land and waters and living and non-living creatures.
Speaker: And these are not less important than human beings.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So we really try to keep a focus on that as well.
Speaker: This poster is up everywhere around our building.
Speaker: It is our core anchor poster for safety.
Speaker: We keep us safe.
Speaker: We protect everyone's bodies and feelings and we protect the planet.
Speaker: This responsibility shapes everything that we do.
Speaker: It is our working definition of the relationship between safety and freedom and our behaviors.
Speaker: I wanna contrast that surveillance poster with the giant security camera with this kind of messaging instead.
Speaker: I don't watch my neighbors, I see them.
Speaker: We make our community safer together.
Speaker: These are ways to define and to think about safety that are outside of logics of control, of surveillance, of policing, of tighter restrictions of freedom.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: As a challenge to this poster around our school, I want to show you one campaign that we offered our high school students, our young people.
Speaker: We put up our own poster next to the district provided poster.
Speaker: What does safety mean to you?
Speaker: It features a block print by one of our young people and we invited our students to define safety in and on their own terms and then we took
Speaker: some of what they provided back.
Speaker: And we created this campaign of safety around how they define safety.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So we use Jay-Z's lyric, nobody wins when the family feuds, we protect each other.
Speaker: We keep us safe.
Speaker: And we use some of their offerings from that QR code.
Speaker: They were talking about care, about joy, about community as the things that make them feel safe, that signal to them.
Speaker: a sense of safety and community belonging, a sense of seeing each other instead of watching each other.
Speaker: And so we created these posters, which are all around our school building, trying to redefine safety, trying to challenge surveillance as a synonym for safety.
Speaker: It is not.
Speaker: Policing and surveillance are not synonyms for safety.
Speaker: And I really want to try to build the argument that control and safety are incompatible.
Speaker: I'm going to keep building on that idea before we move on.
Speaker: I want to show you a translation of what it looked like at our elementary building.
Speaker: Our school serves kindergarten through grade 12.
Speaker: So two buildings, but we serve all grade levels.
Speaker: These are some of our playground signs that will go up this year.
Speaker: We're, of course, seeing a lot of behaviors on the playground.
Speaker: Any of you that work in elementary school see a ton of behaviors on the playground.
Speaker: So we are trying to keep on theme with the We Keep Us Safe program.
Speaker: We're trying to address some of the common behaviors that we're seeing on the playground, throwing rocks, not sharing the swings, harming and hurting the environment, the trees, the bees, the land, the waters that are there, you know, sliding down the slide when there's still a ton of people just sitting there at the bottom.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We're trying to address these behaviors.
Speaker: And we didn't want a list of rules.
Speaker: So instead, we are just talking about our responsibilities and what it looks like in practice to keep us safe.
Speaker: It looks like giving other people turns, protecting what lives here, rocks staying on the ground, checking below before sliding, right?
Speaker: These are still ways to shift behaviors, which is what we want to do.
Speaker: But we want to shift behaviors through this lens of keeping each other safe.
Speaker: All of this is under the umbrella of practicing freedom.
Speaker: You have the freedom to throw a rock at another person.
Speaker: You have the freedom to hog the swing.
Speaker: You have the freedom to kill and stomp the flowers and the trees that are on our playground.
Speaker: Those are freedoms that you have.
Speaker: What we want young people, all people to learn to do, adults are terrible at this as well.
Speaker: We want them to learn that though they have those freedoms, they want to use their freedom responsibly.
Speaker: So you do have a choice whether or not to throw the rocks, to hog the swings.
Speaker: And we want you to start to think about what it means to be accountable to other human beings as you think about how you want to use your freedom.
Speaker: So any kind of messaging that we can do at all grades and at all levels to center behaviors around impact to other human and non-living things.
Speaker: Sorry, I'm outside talking to you and speaking of other living things, there is a very scary one right near my foot.
Speaker: So excuse my distraction, but we want to really think about the impact of our behavior on other things and people.
Speaker: Okay, not the impact on ourselves.
Speaker: And I'm going to talk more about this when we get to punishment.
Speaker: All right, I want to think about the culture of disposability and how it shows up in schools, right?
Speaker: And so this is ultimately a project that is trying to intervene on policing in prisons, but I really want to show you how we can do that just as everyday educators, okay?
Speaker: And it's really about interrupting logics of disposability.
Speaker: So I want to think about what we do in schools typically around classroom management.
Speaker: We determine and post classroom rules and norms, whether we do that together in community with kids or on our own,
Speaker: doesn't really matter for my purposes right now.
Speaker: The bottom line is we determine them somehow and we post them.
Speaker: And then we use very complex systems of reward and punishment to enforce those rules.
Speaker: We flag children who consistently violate them.
Speaker: And we intervene on those children either by punishing them or pathologizing them, right?
Speaker: We look for what is wrong with this child that they will not follow the rules of the classroom.
Speaker: Ultimately, we will end up having to exclude those children who cannot or will not adhere to the rules that we have set up.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is typically our classroom management logic.
Speaker: This is, as a matter of fact, what we teach new teachers, typically in traditional teacher training programs.
Speaker: This is the logic of classroom management.
Speaker: You be clear.
Speaker: about your expectations for behavior.
Speaker: You flag people who refuse to meet those expectations.
Speaker: And we, you know, begin a series of interventions on that individual person.
Speaker: I want to think about what we do out in the world.
Speaker: Okay, we determine loss.
Speaker: And then we use police to enforce those laws.
Speaker: We search for and we capture the individuals who violate those laws.
Speaker: We intervene on these individuals through fines, arrests, or other forms of punishment.
Speaker: And ultimately, we exclude, through incarceration, individuals who cannot or will not adhere to those laws.
Speaker: because our schools right now are made in the images of the society that surrounds it.
Speaker: And what I wanna invite us to do is to think about the world we want and create the kinds of classrooms and schools that might prepare people for that world instead of this world that we have now.
Speaker: It's another image by Molly Costello.
Speaker: We really wanna uproot tendencies toward policing others that exist inside you.
Speaker: And I will say with love,
Speaker: with all love and all grace that educators really do often do the work of police officers.
Speaker: They do the work of policing, of controlling, of surveilling, of investigating, of doling out consequences, fines, punishments.
Speaker: And when you find yourself doing that, I just want to challenge us into understanding that we did not sign up to be police officers.
Speaker: We signed up to be educators.
Speaker: And there is a key difference in the way that we want to approach undesirable behaviors and the culture of the classroom and the school through a lens of teaching and learning rather than through a lens of policing and controlling and surveillance and criminalizing.
Speaker: So let's think about the difference here.
Speaker: I wanna look at this kind of ubiquitously used poster.
Speaker: Just focus all the way on the, to me, it's the left.
Speaker: It's the lineup and hallway routine.
Speaker: Be quiet, listen, look ahead, hands at your side, stay in line, walking feet.
Speaker: This is just a ubiquitous poster that we see in early childhood spaces.
Speaker: They very, very clearly outline the behaviors that we expect as we're lining up and walking in the hallway, right?
Speaker: And we practice these, we go over them.
Speaker: I want to bring back, though, this definition of freedom.
Speaker: Freedom means we keep us safe.
Speaker: We protect everyone's bodies and feelings.
Speaker: Now, I want to kind of apply this definition of freedom to this poster to start to understand a different kind of poster that we might use that would reframe away from control and toward safety, harm, and impact to other human beings.
Speaker: They are both aimed at the same set of behaviors, which is to walk safely, thoughtfully, and considerately from point A to point B when we are in shared public space, like the hallways.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But instead of using language and means of control of bodies, we're trying to teach children to be mindful of the ways that their movements and their bodies might impact the people around them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Signage is one small key and important way to shift our values away from control and toward the responsible practice of our freedoms.
Speaker: Here's another example from our high school.
Speaker: Originally, there was this giant sign in the library.
Speaker: It said no food in the library or gym because as you can imagine, there's a ton of food in the library and the gym and then a lot of trash.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Seeing that sign, I went through and I added this bottom part, right?
Speaker: Please help love and care for this special place.
Speaker: As a difference, again, a shift in tone, in values, in the reasoning behind our requests for a different set of behaviors.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: at our elementary school, seeing what happened with our library at the high school.
Speaker: When I built out our library at the elementary school, this is the poster that I created.
Speaker: Please forgive, of course, I wanted to keep these youngies anonymous here, but the library that we deserve, it stays loved, organized, peaceful, clean, safe, beautiful.
Speaker: It's different than a list of rules.
Speaker: It requires discussion.
Speaker: It requires practice.
Speaker: It requires some debate.
Speaker: What does it mean for our library to stay safe?
Speaker: What does it mean?
Speaker: That's a discussion.
Speaker: It's a series of lessons.
Speaker: It's an engagement of teaching and learning.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's not just a set of rules that tell us exactly how to use our bodies.
Speaker: It's instead an invitation to imagine together what it means for our library to be loved and to think about what that means for our individual actions within that space.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Give you a couple more examples here.
Speaker: One is from our first floor library and the other is from our cafeteria, right?
Speaker: So at our cafeteria, we're trying to shift behaviors and we want to show people, you know, especially because they're young, just exactly what it means to care in the cafeteria.
Speaker: And so here are some ways that it might sound.
Speaker: Can you make space for me?
Speaker: Need my help cleaning that mess?
Speaker: Can you move more gently, please?
Speaker: Do you have enough to eat and drink?
Speaker: Can I take out your trash?
Speaker: Did you forget to say thank you?
Speaker: They're invitations.
Speaker: They're prompts.
Speaker: They're sentence starters.
Speaker: They're scaffolds.
Speaker: for young people in thinking about how we encourage each other to use our freedom responsibly.
Speaker: Okay, so we're actually trying to skill build the way that you would with any content area in a school building.
Speaker: Okay, there's a set of things we're trying to teach and we want to teach it through a ton of support, scaffolding, concrete examples and practice.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Same with our first floor library.
Speaker: We want to bring calm energy, move around slowly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Again, we're trying to think about how do I word rules as invitations to care?
Speaker: Just trying to be as concrete as possible so that you can see how doable and makeable these shifts are.
Speaker: They're really easy little shifts, but they are interventions on control.
Speaker: They're interventions on policing.
Speaker: They're interventions on surveillance.
Speaker: They're interventions on punishment.
Speaker: So these tiny everyday shifts are trying to challenge culture of punishment, criminalization, and disposability.
Speaker: It's about restoring human beings.
Speaker: I just really wanna challenge us to recognize that we often use safety as a justification for control.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: And so we'll say, well, I have to exclude.
Speaker: I have to enforce these rules.
Speaker: I have to do X, Y and Z oppressive controlling, surveilling behavior because that's the only way to keep us safe.
Speaker: No, it's not the only way to keep us safe.
Speaker: OK, safety does not result from control because control steals our opportunity to practice freedom.
Speaker: So I invite you to engage a very controversial kind of thought, which is
Speaker: classrooms that have the best traditional form of classroom management, where the rules are extremely clear and the enforcement of those rules is extremely consistent.
Speaker: Those classrooms most steal the opportunity of young people to learn the skills required by freedom because they don't need to practice them.
Speaker: The way the environment will run is already decided for them and the control of bodies
Speaker: is the definition of safety.
Speaker: So those children never have the experience or the opportunity to practice what happens when there are no rules in place and they have to move with care and thoughtfulness and consideration for other human beings.
Speaker: Safety results from every member of a community having their needs met.
Speaker: If your needs are met, you don't have to use, you know, extra legal means to secure your needs.
Speaker: It results from belonging so that care and inclusion are the work of safety.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: We often think of exclusion as required by safety.
Speaker: I have to kick this person out because they are unsafe.
Speaker: In fact, if that person had the most genuine kind of radical sense of belonging and responsibility toward the other people in that community, they would be less likely to cause harm.
Speaker: And so care and inclusion and belonging are the very hard work, the pro-social work of safety.
Speaker: And safety results from building the skills required by Freedom Care.
Speaker: We can fight about that when we're on the live Q&A.
Speaker: But I'm going to say that you're either practicing safety or control.
Speaker: They don't go together.
Speaker: They're incompatible.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's nice to not have you live to argue with me right now.
Speaker: We'll argue later.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Second, right?
Speaker: And we're getting actually toward the end.
Speaker: This will be a much shorter section because the first really leads us into the second.
Speaker: Punishment and accountability are not synonyms.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I want to think about the phrase holding someone accountable.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Sometimes we feel like we have to dole out consequences and punishments because it's the only way to hold someone accountable for their actions.
Speaker: I wanna challenge us to understand that there is never ever a way to hold another person accountable.
Speaker: It's actually impossible for me to hold you accountable or for you to hold me accountable.
Speaker: I'm gonna build that argument in the next few slides, right?
Speaker: We can only hold ourselves accountable.
Speaker: And I wanna offer a definition and a vision of accountability, some clarity around that because then it will be very, very obvious why I can't make you be accountable, all right?
Speaker: I want to think about rupture and repair.
Speaker: So I'm specifically focused on the side of this poster that says repair is more than I'm sorry.
Speaker: It's also naming it happens, owning our role, naming the impact and listening to the version that another person is offering us, wondering how the conflict was co-created and planning a way forward, making repair.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Those are like the five basic steps of accountability.
Speaker: Naming what happened, owning your role, naming the impact, wondering how it was co-created, planning a way forward.
Speaker: If that's what repair and accountability mean, how could I make you do any of it?
Speaker: How can I even make you name what happens?
Speaker: I can't force you to do that.
Speaker: So I can't even force you to meet the first standard of accountability.
Speaker: You have to be willing and able to do that yourself, committed to doing it.
Speaker: I can't force that.
Speaker: No punishment or consequence is going to force you into naming what happened, owning your role, naming the impact, listening to someone's version, planning a way forward.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's a set of skills and capacities that
Speaker: that need and deserve to be built over time and cannot be forced on anybody.
Speaker: I'm not going to go through all of this, but I want you to understand here, and I can bring this up again when we have our live Q&A if it's going to be helpful, but I want us to think about the ways in which defaulting to rules and punishment actually undercut accountability, okay?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: If I know I'm going to get in trouble for doing something that I did and I am a rational person, why would I admit what I did?
Speaker: It makes no sense.
Speaker: if there's going to be harm to me as a result of admitting what I've done, the only smart thing for me to do is refuse to admit what I have done.
Speaker: And so if a punishment is looming, I am de-incentivized from admitting what I have done.
Speaker: So punishment encourages lying.
Speaker: It encourages denial and it encourages the avoidance of consequences.
Speaker: What punishment does is
Speaker: is it motivates me to change my behavior because I don't want to get in trouble.
Speaker: I don't want harm to come to me.
Speaker: Accountability is encouraging someone to change their behavior because of the harm and the impact on somebody else.
Speaker: It's not about avoiding harm to yourself.
Speaker: It's about avoiding harm to other people, to a community, to a sense of safety, to another person's right to belonging.
Speaker: OK, so punishment makes us care and think about ourselves selfishly.
Speaker: And that is undercutting every effort that we might want to make toward building a community of accountability.
Speaker: OK, so I want to think about the skills and lessons that are required by self accountability.
Speaker: This is a set of 12 posters, again, that we have at our school that we post everywhere.
Speaker: I can name what I did.
Speaker: I can listen as someone explains how they were affected.
Speaker: I can describe the harm I caused.
Speaker: I can take responsibility for causing that harm.
Speaker: I can explain what I was thinking at the time.
Speaker: I can say what I have thought about since.
Speaker: I can work to make things right.
Speaker: I know that I cannot demand forgiveness.
Speaker: I can recognize my harmful patterns.
Speaker: I care enough to change.
Speaker: I can work to repair my relationships.
Speaker: I can work to restore my community.
Speaker: This is what is required by accountability.
Speaker: Punishment will not even get us the first thing.
Speaker: I can name what I did.
Speaker: It won't even get us there.
Speaker: Think about the work required to get somebody good at doing these 12 things.
Speaker: That's a curriculum.
Speaker: It's a lifelong curriculum and it's a curriculum that we ought to start early and that we ought to practice often.
Speaker: And I can't think of a better place to do so than schools and classrooms because they are microcosms of the world and they are gardens of conflict.
Speaker: And so they provide numerous multitude opportunities to practice accountability.
Speaker: What a beautiful opportunity to practice accountability together.
Speaker: Punishment will undercut any effort to practice accountability.
Speaker: Okay, I'm going to actually skip through here.
Speaker: I want to invite us to believe that stepping into our accountability can be a real moment of liberation.
Speaker: I want us to believe that for ourselves in our own conflicts, in our own lives, and I want us to offer this to young people because they deserve this form of freedom.
Speaker: They deserve the freedom of
Speaker: to learn how their behaviors impact others and to be in good and right and healthy relationships that are rich, that are thriving, that are joyful, that are balanced, that are just, that are fair, that are caring.
Speaker: They deserve those kinds of relationships.
Speaker: And we have an opportunity to help them to develop them.
Speaker: So restorative responses are really around harm.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: They're around harm reduction.
Speaker: And I really consider harm reduction as a key practice of human beings.
Speaker: So what exactly are you sorry for?
Speaker: How have you been affected?
Speaker: Who else has been affected?
Speaker: These are the kinds of questions that focus on impact to others instead of getting in trouble ourselves.
Speaker: Okay, so not what's the consequence to you if you do X, Y, or Z, but what is the impact of your actions on our community, on our sense of safety, and on other human beings and other living and non-living things to which we are responsible, all right?
Speaker: We are really having to unlearn generations of teaching that taught us how to dehumanize and encouraged us to prioritize punishment.
Speaker: What an exciting invitation to do this unlearning, to be better as educators, but to be better as human beings in this world of conflict.
Speaker: Wrapping up, human being is a verb.
Speaker: To be human is a verb.
Speaker: Requires practice, requires principle.
Speaker: It requires skill building.
Speaker: So what are the kinds of actions that challenge the culture of disposability?
Speaker: I'm gonna quickly review the difference between kindness and care so that we might understand care as one of the key ways that we practice freedom.
Speaker: Okay, so I want you to imagine a situation where a kindergartner with diabetes can't eat the sugary snacks at a class party.
Speaker: All right, the kind act here in response to that may be to provide a couple of snack options that the diabetic child can safely eat.
Speaker: That's kind.
Speaker: There's nothing wrong with kind.
Speaker: Kind is great.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's just, I want you to contrast that kind act, which is interpersonal and singular and individual with the justice work of care.
Speaker: A care response, a justice response here would be to learn with all the kids in the kindergarten class about all the dietary needs of that community and to design a snack menu for every class party where every child can eat every snack available.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Engaging in that kind of work is political work.
Speaker: It's the political work of inclusion, care and belonging.
Speaker: It's skill building.
Speaker: So it's not it's my responsibility as a teacher to serve the special needs of this one sick child.
Speaker: It's that the illness is a fact of life.
Speaker: It is not a special need.
Speaker: It is a basic need.
Speaker: We all have needs around food and we ought to have a class menu that is inclusive of all people.
Speaker: It is a political shift, okay, toward disability justice, toward radical inclusion, toward safety, toward belonging, toward care.
Speaker: It interrupts a culture of disposability, okay?
Speaker: I'm gonna keep going for the sake of time because people can only listen to so much so much.
Speaker: I am going to go through one example here.
Speaker: So I want to think about teaching rules versus practicing cares.
Speaker: And I want to kind of focus on the mask mandate one, because I know that people think this one is untimely, but to me, it will forever be timely.
Speaker: And it is, again, fundamentally about disability justice.
Speaker: As a matter of fact, disability justice work.
Speaker: has been the most helpful body of literature in advancing my own understanding of what it means to practice freedom, right, because it really is about safety and access, and that radical kind of inclusion that politically shifts toward a constant
Speaker: awareness of how our behaviors impact the literal lives of those around us.
Speaker: Okay, so I want to think about the fact that mask mandates are no longer in effect.
Speaker: So now the rule is that everyone can just make their own decisions about whether or not to wear one, right, both in school and out of school.
Speaker: I want you to imagine a teaching and learning scenario instead of that rule.
Speaker: It's a freedom that people get to practice, right?
Speaker: You have the freedom to decide whether to wear a mask or not.
Speaker: I'll be done in one second, okay?
Speaker: So imagine instead that students read and discuss the science about how airborne viruses are spread.
Speaker: And they talk about individual choice versus the common good.
Speaker: They share their health and immunity vulnerabilities in their households.
Speaker: And then they consider wearing masks as an act of protection, right?
Speaker: So with the information from their actual community, they make an informed decision about whether or not a mask is necessary.
Speaker: A decision that is focused on impact to others and how do I use my freedom in a way that is responsible to the people around me and that is focused on those most vulnerable.
Speaker: These are all ways to politically shift, to use teaching and learning as a way to shift politically toward care and impact and harm reduction and inclusion and belonging, which are ultimately the ideal ways to increase safety and to advance life, to breathe life back into our schools, our communities.
Speaker: some more visual examples, okay?
Speaker: These are the kinds of posters we put up during Pride Month and all year.
Speaker: Everyone deserves love.
Speaker: We protect each other.
Speaker: Everybody is somebody.
Speaker: All bodies are beautiful.
Speaker: My body belongs to me, right?
Speaker: Thinking and learning and teaching about consent.
Speaker: I am perfectly made and everybody deserves access.
Speaker: These are the posters that guide our social studies curriculum.
Speaker: I wanted to include these as a way for you to understand the way that our actual content area curriculum is also still feeding and advancing our goal of restoring human being, of practicing human being.
Speaker: as a verb.
Speaker: So these are the anchor posters for the social studies and Laksh is for grade one, all bodies unique and essential is for kindergarten and miigwech as a way to again extend our relations, our web of relations and our web of kinship beyond human beings and toward land and waters is our third grade anchor poster for all of the third grade social studies and science curriculum.
Speaker: Finally, again, I want to think about even how the celebration of holidays can be an invitation to challenge a culture of disposability.
Speaker: We make sure that we celebrate the holidays that honor the lives of the people we love whom we've lost.
Speaker: We think a lot about grief, not as a social emotional, not just as a social emotional support, but as a political intervention toward insisting on the value of life.
Speaker: an interruption of the idea that there is ever a such thing as a throwaway person.
Speaker: There is never a such thing as a throwaway person.
Speaker: And in death, we celebrate the lives and the legacies of those who've come before.
Speaker: We share space to be with each other in grief as a way to uplift life, as a way to interrupt logics of disposability.
Speaker: This is up in my house next to the sink.
Speaker: Wash the plate, not because it's dirty, nor because you're told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.
Speaker: I'll leave you with one final poem as I close out.
Speaker: It is again by Naomi She Have Nye.
Speaker: It's called Red Brocade.
Speaker: The Arabs used to say, when a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he's come from, where he's headed.
Speaker: That way, he'll have strength enough to answer, or by then, you'll be such good friends you don't care.
Speaker: Let's go back to that.
Speaker: Rice?
Speaker: Pine nuts?
Speaker: Here, take the red brocade pillow.
Speaker: My child will serve water to your horse.
Speaker: No, I was not busy when you came.
Speaker: I was not preparing to be busy.
Speaker: That's the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world.
Speaker: I refuse to be claimed.
Speaker: Your plate is waiting.
Speaker: We will snip fresh mints into your tea.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: With love, with gratitude, with care and in solidarity.
Speaker: Cannot wait to be with you for the live Q&A.
Speaker: Thank you for your work and your commitment to the practice of human beings.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
Speaker: If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
Speaker: Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thank you.
