Being Human Together
Chapter 10: Building a foundation of care
Happy Sunday!
Welcome to our fall book study of Alex Shevrin Venet’s Becoming and Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School. If you’ve missed any of our previous posts, I’ve linked them below. Leave a comment and help us keep the conversation going!
Each post will provide a brief summary of the week’s chapter, a reflection, and a series of discussion questions designed to spark conversation in the comments. Feel free to jump in at any point! You can also find our entire fall reading schedule and vision.
Chapter 1: Messy Scares Me (And That Might Be a Problem as a Teacher)
Chapter 2: I'm exhausted!
Chapter 3: When SMART Goals Aren't That Smart
Chapter 4: What if?
Chapter 5: A Space Between Fear and Hope
Chapter 6: Ripples to Create Change
Chapter 7: Why Slowing Down as a Teacher is So Ridiculously Hard
Chapter 8: One Plus One Equals Three
Chapter 9: What I Look For To Understand My Own Classroom
Summary
In Chapter 10 Alex Shevrin Venet discusses how care is central to equity and justice. During any change process, the people involved deserve care and consideration. After sharing some personal examples of care (or lack thereof) in education, Venet outlines how to build care into the change process. By structurally planning for care, schools are better equipped to facilitate change within. Having everyone be a part of the change process requires centering those most marginalized in society. Structural care focuses on individual relationships and the overall care of the community. Venet ends this chapter with an extended Rest Stop asking us to consider leaving an organization in the face of a lack of care.
Rehumanizing public education has been a central tenet of my pedagogy for my entire career. I don’t remember many concrete details about being a novice teacher. I do have strong emotional memories: feelings of stress, anxiety and overwhelm. When I think back to those first three years, the strongest memories I have are from the teacher’s lounge. I remember sitting in the lounge, eating my lunch, and listening to the older, veteran teachers complain about the state of today’s kids. What shocked me in those conversations was the feeling that it was more than just mere venting. It felt like some of them had truly lost the ability to see the humanity of their students. I vowed very early in my career to never, never, NEVER to become one of those cynical teachers.
Fast forward to the present. I have been an educator for 21 years. I’ve had a front-row seat to a variety of educational initiatives come and go in our school district. I have worked for many principals; some who lasted for years, and a few who only lasted a couple of months. I taught in the classroom during major world events: the war in Iraq, the invention of the iPhone and Wikipedia, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, just to name a few. I have taught Elementary school under four presidents and in that time, I’ve witnessed over 1000 K-12 school shootings and a global pandemic. As of this writing, more than 325,000 children at 346 schools have experienced gun violence.
I don’t want to sound like one of those cynical teachers longing with skewed nostalgia for the better days of teaching. I was born in 1980 so I consider myself an elder millennial. I can empathize with some aspects of that generation, while feeling at home with many of my fellow Gen-Xers. I’m not as old as Boomers, yet.
I have worked with students in classrooms with no technology and classrooms with one-to-one technology. I have held space for students who have experienced racism, school violence, and bullying. I have facilitated debates with students parroting their parents’ polarizing political views and those who are working to fight the same oppressional educational system that marginalized their parents. I can still remember the moment when one of my former male students raised his hand and asked, Why don’t we have a White History Month? I remember gathering in the library to watch our first African American President, Barack Obama, address students for the first time in the history of the American Presidency. It has been a wild ride; sometimes emotionally exhausting, other times beautifully sentimental.
I can see now those cynical teachers’ perspective. I understand how one loses one’s humanity in a system designed around scarcity and to reinforce a zero-sum game of achievement. If I take ten minutes to read aloud to my students, that is ten fewer minutes I have for my math lesson. If I’m helping one student, there is another one who misses out. Agendas and curriculum maps are all used to keep schools running in a timely manner. The problem is that in an effort to be efficient, we’ve stopped showing up for each other. We’ve been socialized to believe that care is scarce.
Education is an incredibly complex and adaptive system. There are intersections of race, gender, finance, health care, housing, parenting, leadership and pedagogy. We all have a desire to change the educational system, but how can we disrupt a system that is so complex? Alex Shevrin Venet offers us a very simple answer: make time for one another. “Treating one another as valuable, not disposable, create[s] the conditions for care” (p. 196). Unfortunately, most public education institutions are not designed for caring. Nel Noddings sees caring relationships as the foundation for pedagogy. For students to flourish, they must be cared for. For teachers to excel, we must care.
If there is to be a foundation of care, we must build it into the system of public education. One way I intentionally structure care in my classroom is to use student-centered design thinking to design culturally responsive learning experiences for my students. Instead of following standardized lesson plans with teacher scripts and fixed rules for student engagement, I spend time building strong relationships with my students. I learn about their wants and needs; their strengths and weaknesses; their hopes and fears. Together, we create a learning environment that is not standardized. We create a space for students to discover who they are and develop their skills.
I want to be human together with my students. I realize that there is much pressure for students to achieve and for teachers to excel as pedagogues. Teaching to the humanity of my students requires me to actively subvert a system primarily designed to rank and sort students (harming many in the process). Instead of helping students understand themselves, schools traumatize students. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I am reminded of this quote by Dr. Christopher Emdin, from his book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too.
"The way that a teacher teaches can be traced directly back to the way that the teacher has been taught. The time will always come when teachers must ask themselves if they will follow the mould or blaze a new trail. There are serious risks that come with this decision. It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student."
Dr. Christopher Emdin
When framed this way, do damage to the system or to the student, the choice is really not a choice at all. Will it be challenging and risky to “create a space where the people who have been most marginalized are centered, so we can be human together?” Yes. Will I get in trouble? Maybe. Is is worth it for the sake of my students?
Every. Single. Time.
Now it’s your turn!
Share your thoughts, questions, or anything you’d like about Chapter 10 in the comments. The above discussion questions are just a guide. Feel free to share how this chapter resonates with you and your own experiences as a changemaker.
Next week, Marcus Luther will share his thoughts from Chapter 11: Anticipating change and crisis. See you then!
I can’t remember who said this me once but I think about it often: Sometimes you’re in the right church, but sitting in the wrong pew.
While reading this chapter I thought about how when I’m making the decision to switch schools or if maybe I just need to switch roles within the same school I think really I’m basing it off of where I would be in the best position to better care for students in a way that I’m best equipped to do and also personally be cared for/better supported. I keep trying to think of the ways that I feel best supported as a teacher and I think one of the ways is when I feel im genuinely trusted by admin. That one is huge for me.
One area Im still grappling with is how to balance getting my work done during the day with bonding with my colleagues which I know lets them know I care. I am super determined to get my work done during the school day so I’m not spending as many hours at home doing work (which I have not been successful at so far) but then I don’t want to appear cold to my colleagues. At the same time a prep period so quickly disappears when I start talking to someone - which is super fun to catch up in the moment but then I’m resentful that I have more work to do at home…once again this comes back to time for me. I haven’t quite figured out how to strike this balance.
Thank you again for creating this space! I’m so grateful I’ve been reading the book each week and love the format of digesting it chapter by chapter. I don’t know that I would’ve been able to finish it during the school year without this format. So thank you!!
One of the most difficult decisions I had to make occurred earlier in my career when I was working at a school with incredibly toxic leadership—including some really sketchy stuff happening at the district level. As a member of the school leadership team, I spoke up about some of those things and was essentially told to "leave them off the minutes," etc., and realized that it would only get more challenging the longer I stayed.
I was commuting to work at that school and there was an opening in the school where I lived, so I realized eventually that I needed to make that change.
The problem? The students at that school, in part due to the toxic leadership from the district, had experienced many of their teachers saying goodbye. And the fact that I was only going to a school 20 minutes away? Made it even harder.
There are many really positive days in my career that I will never forget. Telling each class period that I was leaving without being able to tell them the reason why near the end of that school year?
Without question the right decision and without question one of the worst days of my teaching career.