Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 137 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
Speaker: As always, this episode is brought to you by our supporters, and I'd like to thank Leah Kelly, Ryan Bourne, and Julia Valenti for their support.
Speaker: Today's episode is another keynote from our Conference to Restore Humanity 2023.
Speaker: This one from EduColor leader, educator, and author Jose Luis Wilson titled Building Our Shared Humanity.
Speaker: Because of our incredible sponsors, attendees, and supporters, we've been able to release 16 keynotes, Q&As, and events on our YouTube channel.
Speaker: And all of our track resources covering A Green Education to Change the World, A New Perspective Using Game Design, and Rebellion by Design, Anti-Racism and UDL on our website under our conference collection.
Speaker: We do have a funding drive underway, so if you find our resources useful, consider donating at humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thanks so much again for listening, and enjoy the wisdom of Jose Luis Bilson.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to our third video keynote for Conference to Restore Humanity 2023.
Speaker: As always, this is a flipped keynote address with a video recording of the keynote itself, followed by a live Q&A discussion on Wednesday, July 26th at 11am Eastern.
Speaker: I want to take a moment and thank the sponsors of this event, Holistic Think Tank, Cortico, Antioch University, Education Evolving with Teacher-Powered Schools, UnRuler, and our gracious Donors at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: These sponsorships ensure that we can continually host successful events like this, as well as release much of each conference's resources as Creative Commons licensed materials for years to come.
Speaker: More information about our partners can be found in the links below.
Speaker: Today, we are joined by Jose Luis Vilcun.
Speaker: Jose is a veteran educator, writer, speaker, and activist in New York City.
Speaker: He is the author of This Is Not A Test, a new narrative on race, class, and education.
Speaker: He has spoken about education, math, and race for a number of organizations and publications including the New York Times, The Guardian, TED, El Diario, La Prensa, and The Atlantic.
Speaker: He's a national board-certified teacher, a Math for America master teacher, and the executive director of EduColor, an organization dedicated to race and social justice issues in education.
Speaker: He is currently a doctoral student studying sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Speaker: It's genuinely so incredible to introduce Jose Luis Vilson today, and thank you again for joining in on the conversation.
Speaker: Hello everyone, my name is Jose Vilson and welcome to the Human Restoration Project where I'm giving you a keynote about the teaching profession and the profession that we all deserve.
Speaker: And something that we need to start thinking about specifically is how are we going to transform the profession, especially in moments of conflict,
Speaker: of turmoil, of different things that are happening around us and the context in which we are all situated.
Speaker: But first, I'd like for us to think about how so much of our work is really focused not just on students, but also parents and community, our peers and admin and the world more generally.
Speaker: And this is tough because so many of us are just really focused on students and we think, oh, students, students, students.
Speaker: but it's a little deeper than that because our teacher identity is so focused um on maybe students that you know we forget all the things that end up actually coming in as we're teaching but also things that we're pushing out as folks who are doing this work and so i'd like for us to think a little bit about how we could be more critical about all this how we could be more thoughtful about all this how we can uh possibly engage something a little bit deeper
Speaker: and go into the future thinking more extensively about how this teaching thing works.
Speaker: But first, I like to engage with a little bit of a story.
Speaker: I think to so many of the spaces that I've been, places I've traveled and the ways that I've had to navigate what happens around me.
Speaker: And so more recently, I was able to take a trip around Harlem.
Speaker: Actually, this happened just a couple of hours ago.
Speaker: And
Speaker: We're walking around Harlem and something starts happening where, you know, I know that I'm one of the facilitators and we're all adults, but I started going walking from the back and letting people walk in front of me.
Speaker: It was weird because it was just like an automatic instinct for me to do.
Speaker: Not because I'm so used to being in the back because of my last name, but because
Speaker: That's usually what my role was over the course of 15 years teaching students math.
Speaker: Whenever we went on trips, I was usually the person in the back trying to push people forward.
Speaker: And all along the way, like as even as I'm navigating through life, I'm finding myself in situations where like even though I don't need to do the teacher thing.
Speaker: I still end up doing the teacher thing.
Speaker: It's wild.
Speaker: And it becomes automatic.
Speaker: But it also speaks to how so many of the behaviors that we take on as teachers and to become part of our daily ritual, that is to say that we are truly about this life.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: there's a few things i want to navigate here the first is that as teachers you know we can center ourselves a little bit this is called my process for thinking about the development of teacher identity so we start from the middle and it's about us as teachers doing some inner reflection doing some uh internal work thinking about how we as ourselves are teachers but of course within that it's worth
Speaker: inspecting that, right?
Speaker: Because not only are we just teachers, we're actually a bunch of different roles at the same time.
Speaker: On one level, we may be called to become healthcare workers or people who are psychologists and psychiatrists.
Speaker: We may be people who are asked to be, I guess, pseudo-parents for lack of a better word, though some of us are teachers and parents at the same time.
Speaker: That's still not a part of the dialogue and unfortunately it ought to be.
Speaker: I would also say, too, though, we are also agents of the state because once we've been able to get that contract, get those salaries, we've inevitably said we are going to sign off on this idea that we are representing these institutions.
Speaker: And that doesn't just include our schools.
Speaker: That usually also includes institutions.
Speaker: whatever school system it is, whether we are public schools, charter schools, private schools, so on and so forth.
Speaker: When we signed that contract, we are inevitably given a certain set of powers and responsibilities as per the state.
Speaker: So teachers at any given moment are political.
Speaker: There's no separating the politics that allows us to be teachers from the role that we take on as teachers more generally, right?
Speaker: So that's just the internal stuff, right?
Speaker: And it's wild because what we also recognize in our own work is that
Speaker: Even as we say, you know, we're so-called just teachers, we are also sometimes creating a policy right within our classroom.
Speaker: So how many times, for example, have you told people, well, I'm just a teacher, but then I don't get to create policy.
Speaker: But then within your own classrooms, you have 30 students who could literally start a revolution tomorrow if they really wanted to.
Speaker: They could literally just band together and say, we are going to revolt against this one person who he may be twice our size individually, but he is no match for the rest of us collectively.
Speaker: What stops students from actually doing that?
Speaker: Because it's not just the authority or it's not just expectations set from society.
Speaker: It's also the ways that teachers and educators more generally ingratiate themselves in the best ways possible and try to build strong relationships with students so that they don't revolt.
Speaker: because so many of us may have actually had that relationship and we said, oh my goodness, how am I gonna teach tomorrow?
Speaker: But then the better we get at this craft, the less likely those revolts actually happen.
Speaker: And so for me, I feel like that ought to speak to how we are also endowed, not just with a political and a professional responsibility, but also a moral and a spiritual responsibility to get this teaching thing together.
Speaker: And of course, there's also that little part that is in Latin that says that we are a parentis loci, which basically means like there are moments and times when we find ourselves in positions of substituting for what the parent or community member might do.
Speaker: And, you know, of course, like I think to so many communities that it's not just about being a parent, right?
Speaker: It's also about like actually just making really good decisions for everybody involved.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: That's one.
Speaker: The second is that we also have to think about what it would mean to just go a little bit beyond that and recognize that the teaching profession right now feels like it's under a lot of duress.
Speaker: I think back to Linda Darling-Hammond.
Speaker: 1985, she writes that, you know, we're not trying to strive for teachers to have standardized practice.
Speaker: We're striving for them to have appropriate practice, which is a whole different matter.
Speaker: She was saying this in 1985.
Speaker: And four decades later, we're still dealing with the same issues because too often we have this
Speaker: guess one directional situation where the researchers make all the research and they make best practices from wherever it is that they do it from.
Speaker: And then you have the policymakers who write the policy based on the recommendations of the researchers and then the teachers are supposed to implement that policy.
Speaker: We don't really get the sense that there's a real feedback loop, even for those of us who've been unionized over the course of the last 40, 50 years.
Speaker: Now, all that said, though, there's also spaces where we need to think about how we can be active agents in the ways that we work.
Speaker: and that specifically includes the classrooms.
Speaker: Over the last year or so, I've been to a plethora of classrooms, and if you go to any number of different news outlets, I won't mention which, but if you ask them,
Speaker: These classrooms are supposed to be red and scary and socialist and we're not supposed to feel any sort of anything and we're just going to get angry and cancel everybody around us.
Speaker: I mean, yes, there may be some people who deserve to be canceled, but that's a whole other conversation.
Speaker: Just kidding.
Speaker: But when I walk into these classrooms, I think about the joy, the mirth, the enthusiasm, and the ebullience.
Speaker: I love using that word, ebullience.
Speaker: The way that teachers in their own personalities from their own selves have decided to take students on the learning journey with them
Speaker: and really build a rapport that suggests that A, the teacher does not have to be perfect, but then B, even within that imperfection, they can grow together and learn together in the best ways possible so that they can actually share humanity.
Speaker: Share it.
Speaker: Because too often when we use words like dehumanize, we forget that the people who are dehumanized are already human.
Speaker: And so our children, particularly our black children, Latinx children, indigenous First Nation children, even our Asian students and our white students who people say, well, if they get good test scores, then we don't have to worry about them.
Speaker: No, we ought to worry about every single child.
Speaker: But the way that society represents
Speaker: that caring and that love is often through whether or not they are academically successful through standardized achievement scores.
Speaker: And that's a problem.
Speaker: And so for us, we have to be able to consistently rethink what that looks like, make sure that the outcomes are good and fine, but also how are we going to engender some form of shared humanity and how do we model that
Speaker: for each and every student that we have in front of us.
Speaker: Because as I'm looking at so many of our works, for example, we see policies now to try to diversify the teaching profession.
Speaker: But when you look at black teachers, Latinx teachers, teachers of all stripes, the classrooms that I've been to,
Speaker: Whether the students were predominantly white, were predominantly Latinx, were predominantly black, so on and so forth.
Speaker: The teacher decided upon themselves to share with them how it is to be a good human being and then continues to model that and demonstrate for them how to carve that road out for themselves.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so within that, it's interesting because you think about what our world is trying to ask teachers to be.
Speaker: They ask them to be fearful, to be afraid.
Speaker: And fear is a valid emotion.
Speaker: But unfortunately, it often allows us to go against our minds and our hearts and the ways that we can approach this work in a really deep level.
Speaker: And fear, like any emotion, right?
Speaker: Any emotion could do this, but fear is particularly pernicious for us.
Speaker: And it often channels our greatest aspirations or our worst instincts, right?
Speaker: And so many of you have been called all these different names.
Speaker: You've been called a snowflake, a reverse racist, a groomer, anti-American.
Speaker: You've been called lazy just for wanting safety protocols for your kids and for your communities.
Speaker: That's wild.
Speaker: And to think about all the different tragedies that we witnessed, the mass shootings all across the world, especially in this country, all the ways that we've had to navigate climate change.
Speaker: And even as we're looking at
Speaker: I won't even call it transphobia because it's not fear, it's trans aggression.
Speaker: So many of our LGBTQIA plus students and the ways that people are legislating their very existence out of our schools.
Speaker: That's wild.
Speaker: And we need to speak to that thoroughly and without fear.
Speaker: And this is what really sucks about so much of this is that once we use the energy of the fear to combat something, then we have to give ourselves a chance to also be vulnerable because that's the way the balance works.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so we need a society that generally cares.
Speaker: And the way that we can model that is through teaching, because teachers are the vanguard for society.
Speaker: We are often the first adult outside of students' households that shows what society is supposed to do and the way that we're supposed to be.
Speaker: That also means that for so many of our white teachers who are in front of white students, the work is also for you because you must also demonstrate that everybody around you, regardless and because of who they are, deserves a great education, deserves to be a full-on citizen, deserves all the humanity that they have already come into the world with and that this world often tries to strip them of.
Speaker: But if you ask me, any given moment, you see so many students of color, particularly our Black students, particularly our Indigenous students, who are consistently seeking ways for us to share that humanity and do it together.
Speaker: You should be so fortunate that we've decided to go that route.
Speaker: So something else about the profession too.
Speaker: We recognize that teachers are leaving in mass and that hasn't been remedied too much.
Speaker: And even though we do have a little uptick in college students choosing education as a field of choice, we also see that it's only been a small uptick as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who left the profession
Speaker: since March of 2020.
Speaker: And people estimated between anywhere between 300,000 to 570,000 and probably even more since then.
Speaker: And they've gone to any number of professions that have built up the skills that teachers already have, being able to be a good time manager, a good project manager, a good person who can relate to other people, just
Speaker: folks who actually have really dope skills and put them all together and become teachers, maybe you only wanna get paid for one of those sets of skills and get paid better than you would as a teacher.
Speaker: But those of us who stayed in the profession see something bigger.
Speaker: But of course, it also means that because we've stayed, we also have to fight.
Speaker: And even those of us who've left and myself included, that also means that I have to fight alongside you and listen to you and ensure that also you can be held accountable for ensuring that our kids deserve better.
Speaker: Because the pandemic is wild because, for one, we are not post-pandemic.
Speaker: I'll start from there.
Speaker: The second part...
Speaker: is that we saw, especially education activists who were alarmist the whole time, we had often said that the pandemic only exacerbated the inequities.
Speaker: It didn't actually do anything to do it.
Speaker: I guess it didn't really remedy or create those inequities that were already there.
Speaker: So if anything, those elements that we kept seeing, whether it be students feeling depressed or mental health situations more generally with our teachers or extreme poverty,
Speaker: those were exacerbated by the pandemic.
Speaker: And even as we're so-called coming back to normal, this is a new, this truly is a new normal, but it's not the normal that we really wanted after we had revolted so often in 2020.
Speaker: What does educational hope look like with all the things that I've said?
Speaker: And of course, I always think to students because as I've always said, most of my work when I was a math teacher for 15 years wasn't even actually about the math.
Speaker: It was believing that students could do it.
Speaker: And within that belief, it wasn't just that I said, well, I believe you.
Speaker: It's like, no, I showed it and I modeled it every single day that I believe my kids could do it, not just despite who they were, but because of who they were.
Speaker: That's different.
Speaker: And when you look at the research, any number of teachers of color, you recognize that one of the first reasons and initial reasons why teachers of color want to stay in the profession is for their students.
Speaker: And the reason why they leave is never actually the student.
Speaker: It doesn't make a difference.
Speaker: Now, the other element too that's worth naming is that maybe the students can't read the way that you want them to, but they can read you.
Speaker: They can read how you make them feel.
Speaker: They can read how you make them think.
Speaker: They can read whether you actually want to see them that day or not.
Speaker: They can read you.
Speaker: And so there's so many wars right now happening about the science of reading versus balanced literacy and
Speaker: all these different conversations.
Speaker: But for me, it all comes back to whether or not students feel like they're going to learn in your classroom, because how can they trust you with their brains if they don't trust you with their hearts?
Speaker: That's a big deal.
Speaker: Now, the other part too is that we need to be able to spread this out to so many of our peers because squad is critical, y'all.
Speaker: We can't do this by ourselves.
Speaker: And even when we see the four walls around us and how they're often closed sometimes, when we open those doors and we look across, we look down the hallway,
Speaker: we hear our peers, we see our peers, we acknowledge them, but then we should take the extra step and build with our peers and try to find values that we can share in common about the way that we're going to work with our students.
Speaker: Even if we have different personality traits.
Speaker: As an introvert, it was often hard for me to extend that handout to other teachers.
Speaker: But then I also found myself saying,
Speaker: Well, my students are getting this experience in this classroom, so I should at least try to ensure that they get the same experience in other classrooms where the teacher would actually build community with me.
Speaker: That's hard, but it's good work and it's necessary work.
Speaker: And this is the way that we hold each other accountable and we build with each other.
Speaker: The other element, too, is that we have to make sure that our school leaders and our men can be involved in that values-driven perspective because so many of our principals either A, have found themselves shut out of the conversation or B, want to be shut out.
Speaker: But the ones who actually want to be involved and actually want to see that, it often means that they want to get into this work knowing that they're going to be teachers who have their back, folks who they can actually build with.
Speaker: as opposed to admin who on the other hand, only focus on numbers, only focus on discipline and rarely wanna build community with us.
Speaker: And so being able to differentiate in that way, when you have admin who actually wanna like build in the ways that they do, it becomes even more powerful.
Speaker: It's almost exponential the way that admin and principals can actually build together when they have teachers who are also aligned in the same values.
Speaker: That's huge.
Speaker: Now, what that also means, too, is, by the way, that our communities can also get involved as well.
Speaker: One of the biggest tricks I used when I was in the classroom was trying to get my kids to get a good experience because I knew that my kids were the biggest gossipers.
Speaker: And when they gossip, they often told their parents, they often told the community, oh, that's Mr. Wilson.
Speaker: And you want to be in this class.
Speaker: And so my first time that I ever had a parent's teacher conference, I had 90 students.
Speaker: Out of those 90, I had 60.
Speaker: Contrary to all those memes that talk about Jordans versus PTAs, my parents showed up.
Speaker: My community folks showed up.
Speaker: And why?
Speaker: Because I.
Speaker: I didn't do anything too special.
Speaker: I mean, yes, I called them in September.
Speaker: I called each and every one.
Speaker: I let them know what my name is.
Speaker: I introduced myself, so on and so forth.
Speaker: But then also I tried my best to engender favor with my students through authentic.
Speaker: underline authentic teacher relationships, student relationships, so on and so forth.
Speaker: Once I built those relationships, I also was able to say, what does my content knowledge add to your content knowledge?
Speaker: Because I never assumed that students didn't know anything.
Speaker: If anything, I ensured that I knew what my students knew so that I could build off that in my lessons.
Speaker: I left my lesson plan is just open enough so that I was able to learn from them and then say, okay, now that I know you know this, let me figure out what I can fill in with so I can actually build with you.
Speaker: That's the way that we should be thinking about our relationships in schools, especially from a content and academic standpoint, because content knowledge is dope, but it gets even more magnified.
Speaker: when we actually have strong relationships with our students as people.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But unfortunately, too many of our politics don't want that.
Speaker: Now, I know there's a plethora of you who are in communities right now where everyone's only talking about the anti-truth movement.
Speaker: I don't even call it CRT.
Speaker: I refuse to call it critical race theory because I know what critical race theory is.
Speaker: Critical race theory is a legal body of work that talks about how institutional racism is baked into our very structures in society.
Speaker: And so in the way that we can combat that is through different works and the ways that we do things.
Speaker: Fine, that's what critical race theory is, but the way that it's been used, unfortunately, diverts us from the actual work that we need to do because critical race theory, for example, is not wokeness.
Speaker: Those of us who grew up on 90s hip hop know exactly what wokeness is.
Speaker: It is not that.
Speaker: Critical race theory is not social-emotional learning.
Speaker: Getting kids to actually feel things and let them feel things and then teach yourself to feel things, that is not critical race theory.
Speaker: Anything related to diversity, equity, blackness, even Black History Month, Latinx, Hispanic History Month, Asian History Month, no, none of that is critical race theory.
Speaker: But unfortunately, it's all been baked in because people want to assault public education, and we can't allow that.
Speaker: That keeps us further and further away from the thing that we've been trying to do all along, and that is to build a shared humanity.
Speaker: I would allow us to think about how schools are sites for social reproduction, which I think so many conservatives actually know and know well.
Speaker: That's why they're able to take away so many of our rights, because they know they know they can't do anything without us if we don't allow them.
Speaker: And so when we think about schools, I would challenge us to think about the word urgency, because even though people say, well, it's not urgent.
Speaker: Yes, there's a certain structural urgency that I want us to apply because we can't waste generations waiting for the pendulum to swing back on the side of justice.
Speaker: We have to force justice.
Speaker: We have to bend the arc ourselves.
Speaker: And that includes for so many of our students who are LGBTQIA+, our students who are Black and consistently under harassment and attack by any number of social structures, including our Muslim, our Buddhist, our Jewish, our Bengali students, any number of students.
Speaker: That also includes our
Speaker: predominantly Spanish-speaking students, are predominantly French-speaking students, whether they're coming from Latin America, Central America, they're coming from West Africa, from any number of parts of Asia, not just East Asia, but Southern Asia as well.
Speaker: I'm thinking too much Tamil, Pakistani, Indian students, our students who are poor all across the board and all across the world, our Eastern European students as well, our Yemeni students.
Speaker: All of them, they all deserve the shared humanity.
Speaker: And if we kept a level of compassion and equity about ourselves, then we can address all these harms.
Speaker: It doesn't take much.
Speaker: It just takes a really big heart and a really thoughtful mind.
Speaker: And then being able to align those things in the ways that we talk to students and about students and then with students.
Speaker: Because something that I recognized too when I was a math teacher is that, yes, I came into the profession specifically thinking about how social justice can inform how I teach and then use that mathematics to be able to craft a new world for my students so they have more opportunities built out for them.
Speaker: At first, it was all about the high school dropout rates, and that was good.
Speaker: But then I built it out even further for me to think, well, it's not just about the rates.
Speaker: It has to be about something deeper.
Speaker: It has to be about them being able to charter their own dreams, go for their own goals, and me just opening alternatives for them to be able to do that.
Speaker: And so as I leave you, I think to all the teachers who I've taught because then they became teachers.
Speaker: I think to so many of the kids who looked at me and said, I could do that too.
Speaker: And then me looking back at them and said, I think you can do it better than I can.
Speaker: And I challenge you to do that.
Speaker: This is the way we build legacy little by little, bit by bit.
Speaker: And even though it feels really hard right now because you have so many things around you, I'm also going to challenge you to keep building, keep striving, keep doing something that pours into you so that you can come back again.
Speaker: Yes, rest is cool, and I want you to rest where you need to.
Speaker: But at some point, you may be tired, but inevitably, you will get tired of being tired.
Speaker: And that's the way that goes.
Speaker: So continue to build on, continue to move up.
Speaker: And of course, I would implore everybody, of course, feel free to check us out over here at EduColor because we're really putting things out there for the world to see.
Speaker: And we hope to keep building community, not just with this organization that's put this on.
Speaker: And I want to thank Human Restoration Project for having me on.
Speaker: But then also for us to continue to look at each and every school across America, across the world and say, how can I build a better and a bigger influence so that we can ensure that all of our kids get the justice and peace that they deserve and the education they deserve.
Speaker: because I'm fortunate to have the best pedagogue that I know live right next to me.
Speaker: Oh, why?
Speaker: Because she lives with me.
Speaker: That would be my wife, Luz Maria Rojas Wilson.
Speaker: But then I also look at the future too, Alejandro Wilson, being somebody who is a deep intellect who continually challenges me to be a better person.
Speaker: I couldn't do it without them.
Speaker: And if I had that in my household, I can only imagine what your household looked like and the ways that you continue to learn.
Speaker: This stuff is real personal to me.
Speaker: And so I think about my students who I've seen them.
Speaker: They've come to school tired.
Speaker: They've come to school hungry.
Speaker: They've come to school sick.
Speaker: And I think back to my own childhood and how I just needed that teacher to say, welcome.
Speaker: Come through my class.
Speaker: I will teach you something from wherever you are.
Speaker: I will meet you where you are.
Speaker: And then I will pull you and push you to go further than you could possibly have imagined.
Speaker: Because I can't do this without hope.
Speaker: We must do this with hope.
Speaker: Hope is always going to be on the passenger side while I drive.
Speaker: And as we're hoping, as we're building, as we're restoring humanity together, I want everyone to really think about what it means to be hopeful in times of peril, what it means to be human and actually have that shared humanity, not to re-humanize because we never lost that humanity that first time.
Speaker: It's just that there are those of us who've decided that there are people who are less human than others,
Speaker: But the folks who have been subjected to that have always seen themselves as human beings and simply want everybody else to be challenged and thoughtful enough to see that humanity and then create policies around that.
Speaker: And I think the classroom is one of the best scenes for us to share that humanity together.
Speaker: I want to say thank you to everyone.
Speaker: I hope to see you at the Q&A.
Speaker: Take care.
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.
