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11/24/2020 Leading Antiracist Schools with Accountable Shared Leadership with Dr. Cherie Bridges PatrickRead Now
Today, we are bringing back frequent guests to the Time for a Teachership blog and podcast. Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick. If you've listened to a previous episode, you already know all about her, but a quick summary. She is the founder of paradox Cross-Cultural Consulting, Training and Empowerment, LLC. She is a racial justice consultant, leadership coach and psychotherapist. She works with social workers, counseling professionals, educators, and organizational leaders. And she uses a trauma focused lens in her work to build leadership capacity for racial justice. Cherie holds a PhD in leadership and change, and her research is in racism, denial, discourse, racial justice, social work and the helping professions like education. I can't wait for you to hear this episode of a conversation between Cherie and I diving into the organizational nature of how we create a culture in our schools for fostering racial justice.
Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change like I was, you are a leader. If you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in. Lindsay Lyons: Welcome back, Dr. Bridges Patrick, to an episode of Time for a Teachership. We were together in a previous episode talking about the primacy of discourse, the need for building the muscle for personal and interpersonal discourse capacities. You talk to us about readiness and willingness, vulnerability, adaptability, and the importance of a liberating dialogic environment. For those of you who haven't listened to that episode, please go back and listen to that one. That one is absolutely amazing. I just want to introduce you to Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick, if you haven't already heard that episode and you are going to dive right into this one Dr. Bridges Patrick is a racism denial and discourse scholar, and she is here to talk to us about how we identify and dismantle systemic racism in educational systems. So today's episode is more focused on that organizational level. We previously talked about the personal and the interpersonal today. We're going to that organizational level. So I'll actually hand it over to Cherie to start us off with the first question. Dr. Bridges Patrick: This is exciting for me because I get to ask you some questions in this. So my first question for you, Lindsay is, at the organizational level, how can schools build capacity for generative dialogue and continuous learning more broadly? Lindsay Lyons: Yeah, so I think one of the things that I love about working together is really putting adaptive leadership at the core of all that we do. When we think about that capacity building that is really central to really systematizing a lot of things, systematizing the process of diagnosis, as we talked about really identifying so that we can dismantle so many of the problems that are, you know, general across the system, educationally, nationally, globally, but also very particular to the individual schools that we're talking about. So my first kind of thought whenever I hear this, and I think about organizational capacity building is really to set up structures that enable us to really sustain these conversations that we talked about in our last episode that bring in diverse perspectives of different stakeholder groups and truly share in the leadership and the decision-making of an organization. So we can get a better understanding of the problems and challenges we encounter as well as what solutions and policies would actually address those challenges in an equitable manner. What do you think, Cherie? Dr. Bridges Patrick: Can I just add to that? I think we have to, because we're a society with attention challenges and short-term thinking like, you know, we want things done quickly. I want to just touch on that process that you just talked about, the setting up the structures to sustain. To be able to start shifting mindsets and when mindset strips sets are shifted, then you know, we can get into the policy work and how we change that because it all starts with us as individuals. Just talk briefly the length of time that it takes and so I say that, I hesitate as I hear myself say, there's something because this has been going on for so long, it is entrenched because we are entrenched in this. There has to be some time and I know that there are some things that need immediate change. And for those people who think they can make that happen quickly, Great. But I think we need to understand that this process takes time, the time that the process of shifting mindsets of changing policy. Just think of our political system and all the steps that need to happen to make laws change. Right? So if you go into an organization and similar that you've got, you know, you've got your policies and practices, so it takes time. But in that time though, you're always practicing. You're always engaging because of the power of discourse because of its ubiquity as a social practice that is in every aspect of our lives. Lindsay Lyons: Excellent points. I absolutely love those contributions because I particularly love that you're talking about the time piece and how it kind of hits you as you say it, because we have seen people on the one hand rushed to action without the process that needs to be shared. The dialogue that needs to happen among key stakeholders that represent different stakeholder groups. So that rush to action and kind of skipping over the democratic process is problematic. But then we also need to recognize that, you know, we need to sit in some things with the balance of the urgent call to action, right? So like, we need to take action, because like you said, it's been happening for so long we need to address it. We can't wait a long time to do that, but we also need to make sure the way that we're addressing it really speaks to our priorities as well. Dr. Bridges Patrick: Yes. And for me, it goes back to just that primacy of discourse and the need to learn how to engage in generative dialogue. If we can't talk about the issue, we can't talk about race and like you said, sit in some stuff, sit in that discomfort and navigate through it and, you know, and build the capacity to do it. How are we going to solve something that we cannot talk about that then we cannot see because we're not talking about, it's like this elephant in the room that is always there. So we have to be brave enough and bold enough to see the elephant and then to figure out how we are gonna, do this. So then Lindsay, that takes me to another question. Can you talk a little bit about shared leadership? Like what is shared leadership? Where does this approach come from? Lindsay Lyons: Absolutely. So I love shared leadership. I think that's my answer to pretty much everything. But I will talk a little bit about the powerful women who have actually inspired and held up and practiced shared leadership through history. I think it's really important to acknowledge that because when I was first researching shared leadership or when I was first exposed to it in our leadership program, we had this little handbook of leadership theory. And it's interesting because it was a man that was credited for this idea of shared leadership. When in fact, if we go back further, we will see that is not necessarily the case. So it actually came up in the early 20th century, 1924, Mary Parker Follet wrote about shared leadership and the idea of power versus power over. And so this idea of, she says, first by pooling power, we are not giving it up. And secondly, the power produced by a relationship is a qualitative, not a quantitative thing. She says that this is a "freeing for both sides and an increased total power or increased capacity in the world," and I think that really speaks a lot to the rooting of intersectional feminism, first. And kind of in this approach, when we look out a few decades later, we see Ella Baker a racial justice activist and community organizer who really prioritized developing the leadership of others as opposed to positioning herself as the leader of a movement. It's that selflessness and the nature of building capacity for really young people, students that she was working with, I think is probably why a lot of folks don't know her name as much as a lot of male leaders that we may point to. And she is just, I think my role model in terms of shared leadership development. We also see people today, like U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Presley her quote, "people closest to the pain should be closest to the power." That to me is just like, yes, that's what we're, that's what we're trying to do here! If we're talking about ending systemic racism and we don't have people who have been directly impacted by systemic racism that are in the school community as part of that conversation of how to end it, what are we really doing here? So I think these are the powerful women that have really taught me what shared leadership is. I've tried to learn from them and learn from their practice around how we move forward. So really we think about it in a school setting. I look at it from a structural perspective of how decisions are made, who is at that decision-making table? And are there feedback loops because we know the decision-making table is small, right? It has to be kind of representative just in how things are organized and to be able to hear everyone's voices, but we need those feedback loops to be able to go back to the stakeholder groups that the representatives represent and collect that feedback, not just speak for the group without that kind of cycle of going back and getting more data. And so I'm interested in your perspective, Cherie, of how this idea of shared leadership really supports folx who are laboring for racial justice and the centrality of this idea in racial justice work. Dr. Bridges Patrick: Well. So as I was listening to you and, you know, all these things are just jumping out at me. So I'm writing an article about white supremacy and social work and, you know, just the dominance and the pain and the ways that systemic white supremacy operates is challenging. And those of us that are going to be fighting for working, for laboring towards racial justice. There's a part that I explore this need for like self care and accountability. I want to touch on that self care part and how it ties into shared leadership. So it may not necessarily be self care, but it's this, this collective care, maybe. This work is hard. This work is more challenging than we can ever imagine. So as an individual, you can get burned out very quickly because the work is very hard, it requires you to take this real deep look at oneself. And then at an organizational level, we're looking for—we're talking about shared leadership. I get to share some of that difficulty, some of that challenge, right? And so in that I'm building relationships with other people, right? We're building intelligence, we're building new knowledge because of our experiences, right? They can then contribute to how do we, you know: How do we actually do this? And you know, we're leaning on the work of Ella Baker and the other women that really brought this, this concept forward. But so shared leadership offers this place of collectivism of just being together with like-minded people who are, who are working towards the same thing. So then it supports the need for care. We can call, we can say to one another, "Hey, you know what, I think you might need to, you know, take a little break." So, having that structure allows for some time, for us to sometimes step back. So then there's also this energy that comes with that. I know I have enjoyed tremendously working with you because when we get together, you know, we have our conversations and all these ideas start to generate. So it's shared leadership, you're sharing ideas, and they feed off of each other and they contribute to that feedback loop, which, you know, continues to build. So ultimately shared leadership in terms of racial justice is like this, the support, this, a leveling of the weight that is carried because of the difficulty that it entails. So I, I like to ask you a little bit about the student voice, which is, you know, the area of research that you looked at, what wisdom can we pull from that body of research Lindsay? Lindsay Lyons: I absolutely love the field of student voice. This is a relatively kind of emergent, I would say the last three decades kind of emergent field. I say emergent, because this has always been something historically that different groups of people have practiced. But in terms of the larger or I guess more, maybe more mainstream student voice, like research in journals and such like that. This has become something that is more studied heavily in the last few decades. So we get to see all of the brilliance that schools for a long time, these different pockets of individual schools have been practicing. And so one of the things that I love is Dana Mitra, who was one of the leading scholars in the field. She created a pyramid of student voice, and she talks about these three levels of student voice that exist in schools. I think this is relevant for students. I think this is relevant for teacher voice and family voice when we're talking about shared leadership and all those stakeholders, but she talks about the bottom level being probably the most common, hence, the kind of pyramid shape it's the largest, but it's also kind of the least effective in some ways. It's merely listening. So we might ask students or families or teachers to fill out a survey, but then that doesn't necessarily mean we do something with that survey. So we listen but that's kind of it. And at the middle level, that next level up is slightly less common but more impactful is a kind of partnership among students and adults. We're working together in concert with one another to accomplish those school goals. At the top, the least common is really building capacity in students. (And again, I think this is relevant for all stakeholders) in themselves to lead. And so when we think about students, as leaders, as folks that we can listen to and learn from as adults in the school community, I think this is really that idea of radical collegiality, that the student voice field talks about this idea of partnering and seeing students as equals as people that we can help them learn. Then we also learn from them. This I think is really at the heart of why shared leadership is so helpful and so important. And in order to do that, we need to give students multiple opportunities to be able to take on those leadership roles, to develop the personal and interpersonal capacities that you were talking about, Cherie, in our last episode to engage in racial discourse and to engage in discourse you know, in a generative way about all topics, including oppression of all kinds. And what's interesting about this. I think when we're talking about sustainability Dana Mitra partnered with another scholar to actually apply turbulence theory to the pyramid. And what they realized was the lowest level of the pyramid that just listening part, it actually increased individual and organizational turbulence because what was happening was they were just surfacing those problems. They were just identifying what was wrong, but they weren't actually doing something about it. They were just kind of bringing them all to the surface and that bubbling up of identification without the follow-up was actually de-stabilizing the schools. Whereas when we look at the top level, when students are able to kind of come out as leaders and say, we're here, we can learn from them, the adults are listening to us. There's actually a reduction in turbulence because we're talking about organization-wide communication. And that mindset shift that really helps us collectively work towards addressing those problems. And so there's actually an increased stability in terms of where schools can go when we partner with other stakeholders, which I think is really fascinating. So I'm interested in your perspective of Cherie, when I'm talking about these things, I'm thinking about the conversations we've had about why racial justice initiatives have historically failed in schools and organizations more broadly. Particularly we talked about accountability in our last episode, and I'm just thinking about all of these kinds of different pieces for sustainability and identifying and dismantling some of these problems that are identified. So what does that actually look like in terms of what are the problems that have kind of been barriers to success for racial justice initiatives in the past, and then where do we go from there? Like what does accountability, for example, maybe look like at an organizational level? Dr. Bridges Patrick: Let me try to tackle this. That's a big question. So then how do we begin to do this? So what I'm tying this turbulence to is—the notion of the concept of turbulence—to Heifetz disequilibrium, right? And so it just jumped out right at me. But then, you know, you often talk about this too. This is the system of diagnosis, right? Adaptive leadership says, you know, one of the most frequent causes of failure is that, you know, the leaders fail to, to really examine the system that they're working within. So, like you said, earlier, folx just jump into the work without really exploring what's happening. So a focus on diagnosis. That means to really drill down and under, you know using that pyramid to like using a combination of those things, but recognizing that the higher up you go in that pyramid, you know, the more progress you're going to make. So I'm trying to combine those things there in terms of accountability. So this gets hard because there's all these barriers, right? So you know, there's the barriers of just racism itself and what that really means, and white supremacy. So you've got, you know, a group of people who are in power, white people who, come together with these, beliefs, these ideologies, these like lifelong commitments to being white, because that brings what it brings. When we're talking about accountability, there's a lot to dig into because the people who have those ideologies are typically the ones that are in the power. So who's going to want to give up, you know, what they see as, as power you know, as beneficial to them. So then you start asking questions like, okay, so how does this harm the organization? How does this harm, you know, people within the organization? To bring it through a relational level. And how do we hold people accountable to really seeing the universal harm, of white supremacy of racism, so that there can be this collective effort towards, you know, dismantling and changing our policies and changing. It practices. So understanding that why that I talked about earlier is like what's the why for the organization you know, why are they doing this? And a lot of times organizations are engaged because everybody else is doing it. That's a lot of what I think is happening now in the larger sense of what we're looking at. So, you know, it's like, okay, so everybody else is doing it. It's becoming a practice, but we really don't explore. So organizationally, we need to explore and understand what is our why, and it too needs to be grounded in, you know, something that's going to help keep the organization going, because there's going to be a lot of fatigue, a lot of effort put into this. So that's one area of accountability. Offering people support from individuals who are trained and who understand how racism operates. Not the ones that, you know—cause I still, like I said earlier in the other episodes, I still don't know a lot about racism, although I've studied it right. Because it's that complex. So you know, we have to be able to really educate people. And to do that again, it requires these mindshift changes getting through these barriers so that we can do the work. So that accountability is a constant work of breaking down the mental, the ideological, the social barriers that come with the weight of white supremacy. I'd like to touch on just a little bit about what you said about the student voice, because it was interesting. I don't think he said it this way, you talked about the collegiality between students and teachers, right? So if I remember my days as a student, that teacher was definitely like, you know, he, or she was the one in power and you had to, you know, you had to operate you know, in a construct that was like, they were over you and you were under them, so you have this hierarchy. I think that's in me, and in my continued experience, I think that's still true to some degree. So now we're shifting from, you know, a position that doesn't necessarily relate to race. But if we take this in the direction of racial justice and your experience as a teacher, as an educator, how do you narrow the gap between, you know, "I'm in charge," the power, to bring it more towards this collegiality to allow students to have this voice. If we're honest, we see young people are the ones doing this heavy work out there, right? There's all kinds of ideas and information that we can get from them. So I'm curious to know, and I know I'm throwing you a curve ball because this is not what we talked about. Could you touch on that a little bit? Lindsay Lyons: Absolutely. I think, as you were talking about radical collegiality, maybe not explicitly tied to race, I actually was thinking about the statistics of just who are the teachers, what is currently known as the United States. Most of those teachers are white. Many of whom are working in schools where the population of students are predominantly black and Brown children. So it's interesting that we have both that teacher authority piece, but then we also have that racial piece and the white supremacy piece that plays a role. And so when we're talking, and I know not everyone is in that position, but when we're talking about these kinds of schools, where we have white teachers teaching Black and Brown students, I think that adds a level to that idea of radical collegiality that makes it that much more important. I know we've talked about the idea of kind of white liberalism and one of those practices, or one of those kinds of tenants or aspects of white liberalism being a devaluation of Black and Brown people's expertise on racism. And so just not enabling students to be part of that conversation. I think ties in there and I just wanted to comment on that really quickly before answering your actual question. But I think there are so many ways as teachers, we talk about having a student centered culture, but if we were really to reflect on what that student centered just meant, if we were really to think about the, the four things I typically ask is: Do your students have an opportunity to decide what they learn? So the content (when they learn), where they learn, and how they learn, if we can't enable students to have voice and choice in those things. And of course sometimes, you know, that's us kind of providing some choices and they choose from that. But other times, and listeners probably will recognize this particular anecdote... That one time I tried an entire semester, an entire, like, you know, five months of school of students designing their own units. I had 80 different units going at the same time. And just kind of following that path of a personally designed unit that brought them joy, that fed into their creative spirit that enabled them to follow their curiosity. I think that is kind of that radical end of what that might look like. But, you know, if we are truly committed to engaging in this radical collegiality with students, it's going to be a co-construction of what and how we learn. And a lot of times, as teachers, we are told in grad school, when we're getting our teacher's degree, you must have a hundred percent of students quietly, obediently listening to you and following directions. That's what makes a good teacher. When in fact, that does not make a good teacher, that's going to isolate a lot of students. That's going to send a lot of students to the principal's office when there's this disobedience of weird rules that we think we have to Institute, but that student voice really comes to life. When we use practices like circle, which was really common for me. And I know some people have been taking that to the virtual space where we pose a question about something relevant to students' lives. So for example, we just did this in my college class, but I've done similar things with my high school students around the decision coming in of the Breonna Taylor murder. And so having students have an opportunity each one of them to answer and to just have everyone listen to students' answers, particularly when those students are kind of seeing their own experiences reflected back at them in current events, like that's what radical collegiality is. It's not coming in with a pre-made lesson plan and telling students what they need to believe it's honoring their experiences and their expertise. So I know that's just one example, but I wanted to, to share that anecdote. Dr. Bridges Patrick: As I said, there's all kinds of things just running through my mind as I'm listening to, cause you're saying you know, that last example of the circle experience where those voices that are typical, everybody gets a voice, right? So then they're sharing their experiences. So then that leads to vulnerability, one of the discourse capacities. But it also just keeps me connected to what you said earlier about first, you've got this power dynamic between, you know, teacher and student, and then you've got the other power dynamic of race. You know, it just speaks to the complexity of how all this stuff works together to maintain structures. So what you're asking for, I think the word radical is like on point because it's truly radical and what then do organizations, schools need for their teachers to be able to come into a radical space, you know, mentally, right? And to create these spaces where this can happen. Cause as I listened to you talk about how you did this for a semester, you did the student voice. Hey, how would you learn? But to show me what you did and what you would do and you stayed with it. What did it take for you to stay engaged? What did it take for you to really, you know, not lose sight of what you were trying to do? I wondered, like, does that take you to your why? How can you talk to that experience just a little bit? Cause, we overestimate what's involved, but then we also under-estimate. That takes a lot of physical work. Administrative work, but it also takes this work of, of the shift in the mindset. We're talking about the ways that we have been trained, teachers are trained to come in and, you know, you have this information and you give it to people. You are not trying to hear anything. So can you speak to that experience of what did you, what happened in those times? How did you hold on and, and just share with the audience? Like here's some things that are real and here's how I dealt with them. Lindsay Lyons: Absolutely. So full transparency. I will not do what I did again, because it was just too long. And the reason I knew that was because students told me, so I think a huge piece of this is those feedback loops of asking the students, checking in with them, how is this going? And the biggest piece of feedback I got from them was "This was an amazing project. However, I would prefer it to be shorter," because they even said they were losing steam, just themselves, trying to orchestrate and follow this complex unit that they developed, even though it was, you know, their passion project, their interests, they were just like, I really wanted it to be done sooner. It was half the length of time. So parsing out all of the student feedback at the end was really valuable to me, what it taught me was not to throw away the project as a whole, but just to make some adaptations. Another piece that I think is really helpful is that I did not do this by myself. There were 80 different topics, many of which I had no idea about, like some of, one of them was stand up comedy. I am not a standup comic. I am not a particularly funny person, but I do know other people who are really interested in comedy in the school, or, you know, personal connections. What I did was, I tried—I think I got about 50 or 60 students to be connected with people, either in the school or connections that teachers in our school had to outside sources that were experts in those fields. So they became like the content mentors. So I think the first thing was realizing I didn't have to do it alone was huge. And so when we talk about shared leadership and student voice and co-constructing curriculum, we're also talking about how we leverage family members that are experts. One of the students actually went to her uncle because he was an expert in the topic that she was exploring. And so her uncle got to be her teacher, which is so cool because a lot of times we invalidate the expertise that family members have. And we say, we are the teachers who know how to do school. I think that was a huge realization for me. And I think another thing that supported me was an administrator who was like, go for it. Who said, I will support you. I will show up to the final expo where the students are sharing what they did, and I will celebrate that win. And I'm going to come in occasionally, but I'm not going to say if students are, you know, being very loud, that that's something you're going to get penalized for. I'm going to see that loudness as excitement and energy and things that we typically don't associate with loudness when we're looking in a school and that's often what it was, it wasn't off task loudness. The students were more focused than ever, and they were just really excited to dig into the work. So I think that admin support was really helpful. And specifically within that admin support, and for me to, to, to kind of realize what was going right, and what I would change is changing the measurement. Like, what am I actually measuring? So instead of measuring student obedience, for example, or discipline rates or something like that about following directions, I instead was measuring, you know, for example, how excited students felt on a day-to-day basis, how valued or heard they felt in the class itself you know, different pieces like that, that are student-reported metrics that we typically don't measure in classrooms was what kept me on track was what kept me energized and what was also something that my admin valued. So I think being able to be in that space that was really set up for me to do an experiment like this was really what made it possible. Dr. Bridges Patrick: Thanks, Lindsay. I think your example is like a perfect example for adaptive leadership, right. Combined with shared leadership. Because you had this project, you engaged the students and then you listened to them. You've got that feedback loop and have to have that. So, adaptive leadership talks about that. They talk about not like you start talking about not throwing away the entire project when you realize, Oh my gosh, this is too much, you took what you learned from it. And you narrowed it down and you made adjustments. This was because you didn't have structures in place. You didn't have practices in place that were there to to help guide you through this truly adaptive leadership. Adaptive practice, I mean that there's no rule book for it, right? There's no policy book that says, this is how you do it. So you went in blindly. Another piece of that, that you talked about is that that support, that organizational support, right? So when we're talking about changing organizations and helping them understand how racism is impacting, you know, all of, all of them, everybody and engage in embedded in their practices and policies, because it's just part of our system that this notion of having the support of the organization is critically important. Because if you don't have that experience, and I know yours was not specific to race, I believe it wasn't, but I mean, there's great lessons. So having that support allows for you to really live into your potential so that you could bring your students into their potential. So it's got all these benefits. And so then it's, it's this process of, of practice, of reflection in a practice that is absolutely essential to the continuation of racial justice and sustaining it over time. Lindsay Lyons: Thank you for summarizing, that just feels really nice. Nice to hear how that was connected to adaptive leadership. That's not something I would have immediately thought about. So thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to add to this conversation before we go through a quick summary of key points here? Dr. Bridges Patrick: No, but I do want to say that these are the kinds of conversations that just generate so much energy. You have all these ideas that come together between two people. I wonder what it would be like if you had another person with a different perspective. Who could bring some other insights to how we're looking at things. You know, that's a dream that I have expanding the possibilities by bringing in different perspectives. So that's all I would say. Thanks. Lindsay Lyons: Awesome. Thank you. I'm just going to go through a quick summary of some key points that we talked about, and then we'll do a closing call to action. And so we talked a lot about shifting mindsets as a prerequisite for this work and policy change, and specifically radical collegiality when we're talking about students, but also with families and seeing them as true partners in the learning, these things take time. So in that time, as Cherie said, right, the power of discourse, you're always engaging in this. So of course it will take time, but we're constantly doing that work. We're constantly laboring for racial justice on this path. As we kind of co-construct policy and things in a shared leadership setting, the need for self care and collective care, which brings me back to, you know, Audre Lorde's like initial calls for it. Self care is, I think she says an act of political warfare, right? It is about caring for the self so that we can, as you said, Cherie, support the collective. We're not turning away. We're turning inward for a moment, recharging, and coming back together. And so that shared leadership enabling us to share the weight and building relationships with another in generating energy is a critical piece here. Using that combination of Dana Mitra's pyramid levels to properly diagnose and really systematize the process of diagnosis, as well as dismantle and actually act on the information we're getting in things like surveys to dismantle barriers to racial justice is critical. Tying the accountability to the organization's "why" is really how we sustain the labor through fatigue, which will happen, and really making sure that we're getting support from folx who've studied and are knowledgeable about how racism operates when we're talking about accountability. We can't just be accountable to ourselves in just kind of our limited mindset of what accountability means, but we're pulling in experts to help us be accountable to our larger community. And finally, just listening to students, measuring what matters, and remembering that adaptive practice does not have a rule book. And that praxis that reflection and action is really what gets us through those adaptive challenges, of course, with organizational support, which is really a huge key there. So as we talk to leaders, as we invite them to take action after this particular episode, what would you say, Cherie, is something that you would encourage leaders to do after listening today? Dr. Bridges Patrick: Wow. I think I'm probably going to sound repetitive here. So from an adaptive leadership lens, that parallel process of examining oneself, you know, that inner glance and inner look/view and while doing that at the same time examining the system. So you've got that parallel process going on, particularly in the context of, of addressing racial dominance in the workplace. Right? So this interior journey is really important to be able to navigate through the external organization. The internal part of oneself. So I recommended this the other day or on the other podcast, but I still think it's very relevant. Some of the things that we can do right away, you know, a lot of times people think that there is something grand that has to be done. But if we're talking about changing mindsets, that means you have to get engaged with your mind. You have to know how it's operating. So in order to do that, spending just three minutes a day. Observing as just a third party. You're observing what's going on, so you can become familiar. You can make it as easy as what's happening in this interaction with this person what's going on with my body. What am I feeling? What am I noticing, or this is bringing in that somatic aspect of it, which is a big piece of how we continue to disengage from conversations around race. So it's just bringing some attention to how we're functioning as individuals within an organization, which makes us this, you know, the collective place, how are we, how are we working together? You know, you can take that data and apply it to, well, how does it impact, you know, our practices. Cause I, when we can begin to explore those things and become familiar with them, I think that can take us a long way. So that's one thing. Lindsay Lyons: Excellent. Thanks. I actually want to say too by the time this episode airs there will be a previous episode that I actually created for free before that is a daily journal for 30 days. And so you can use that journal to do exactly what Cherie's saying, where you're journaling for three minutes about that critical reflection. And again, bringing in other, other folx in other resources that we kind of talked about in our previous episode as well to kind of deepen your critical self-reflection there. So thank you for bringing that up again. I'm glad you did. I would say that you know, I was actually inspired by what you said earlier. I would actually recommend that you find someone to talk to like Cherie and I do. We have a standing weekly meeting and we just kind of brainstorm. Really amazing things come out of it, I think. Lindsay Lyons: We are doing a lot of professional work together, but it's also, I think just the ideas that flow when you have someone to talk to you and think through some of the adaptive leadership work with. So I think that's something that you can potentially do. Another thing, if you're interested in kind of the student voice element and trying to seek out students' ideas and perceptions of their leadership opportunities in your school is that you can use my, a statistically validated student leadership capacity building survey. So I'm going to link that as the freebie for this episode, just so you can start to kind of collect some data around whether or not students actually feel like they do have an opportunity to lead in schools. And in what ways do they have, you know, an opportunity to make decisions at the school level, at the curriculum level, in their classes? Lindsay Lyons: Do they have the professional development for themselves as leaders where they're building those personal dialogic capacities that should be talked about in our, in our recent episode? So these are some of the things that we might want to know about students, and I will link to that in the show notes. So thank you all for listening to another episode, there was so much in here, please let us know what you got from this. We have Time for a Teachership Facebook group. If you want to go in there and chat through your takeaways, we will see you next week. Lindsay Lyons: Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best. Episode Freebie: Student Leadership Capacity Building Survey
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Today's podcast was recorded the day of the 2020 election. In it, I talk about pushing back against this notion of teacher neutrality. This is a solo show. Just me, no guests pushing back against this entrenched concept of neutrality that I think we need to unpack to do right by our students, right by ourselves, and right by our society. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture, where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change, like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in Today, I want to talk about teacher neutrality or the concept of teacher neutrality. I want to push back on it. I'm recording this episode on Tuesday, November 3rd. So the day of the US 2020 presidential election. And I'm thinking back to 2016, when my colleagues and I effectively suspended our regular course content for the year in helping our students process the results of the election and the feelings that they had around, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. And thinking about preparing to teach my college class tomorrow, and also not knowing if we will have a definitive answer as to who the president will be for the next four years. At that point, I'm thinking about all of the other teachers in that same position, wondering what exactly they're going to say and how to approach the conversation about the election results in the coming day, the coming week, the coming months, as we continue being in our classroom spaces together and fostering a culture of anti-racism and productive generative dialogue that digs into issues of oppression. And so I guess my dream here is that as we digest the news about the election, whenever it does come, that we don't try to adhere to this notion of neutrality that I see as truly a false notion of neutrality. So some folx may say, Whoa, Lindsay, that is way too radical or way off base here. I just want to share why I don't believe in this idea of teacher neutrality and why as a teacher, I took risks that at times I thought might get me fired, because I felt like it was the right thing to do. And when we teach, you know, this, this idea of civil disobedience and we glorify it breaking the unjust laws, right? We're talking about laws there. If teacher neutrality is just a norm, or kind of an unspoken norm that we believe exists, it's not necessarily a law. And if it is in our contracts, again, I go back to that notion of glorified, civil disobedience, and we teach it. We talk about activists who are powerful and made a difference. And I suppose the question I have is: Are we willing to be the people that we glorify in teaching history classes and teaching this content to our students? Are we willing to push back against a regulation in our contracts, or if not an unspoken norm or agreement that we should remain neutral. And that's what a good teacher does. So here's why I think this idea of neutrality is not something that I want to adhere to nor do I hope that you know, others do. The first reason is because it's just not accurate, this concept of neutrality. If it means how we've always done things, how we've always taught history, how we have always centered whiteness and cis-genderedness and maleness, if neutrality is that, it's not neutral. That's just not neutral. Supporting the status quo is not neutral. When we know that supporting the status quo means that students who are Black, Brown, or Indigenous or transgender or students with dis/abilities when they don't get the same results as white cis-gendered rich students get. So if it's not accurate, if this concept of neutrality truly isn't neutral, I think we have to push back against this idea that speaking against injustice and teaching about politicians or the election or particular rules or Supreme Court decisions, pushing back against some of them as unjust, right? I think that is what we need to do to advance justice in our country and in our classrooms. The second problem I have with the concept of neutrality is this idea of neutrality being just neutrality in the way we conceive of it. If it means what I just said, it's not just the way we've always done things.I love Archbishop Desmond Tutu's famous quote, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." I think this is so poignant when we're thinking about the fact that we are serving all students in education. That is our purpose. That is our mission. When it comes down to it, if asked to choose to remain "neutral," supporting the status quo, the way things have always been... To speak out and speak for justice at perhaps a great risk to ourselves in our careers at perhaps a risk of having really uncomfortable conversations with parents who don't agree with your stance on the false notion of teacher neutrality with bosses, perhaps colleagues or family members who disapprove of your decision, that's truly what justice means, right? To reject the status quo. It is not just. So, staying neutral or "apolitical" is also an advantage. If you say that you are neutral or apolitical you're effectively sharing that your humanity and your human rights are not at risk here. And so you have the privilege or the advantage to remain neutral in a particular political conversation or situation. If your rights are not as risk as an individual, then you can opt out of a conversation with little risk to yourself. You can avoid that discomfort, which is a manifestation of white supremacy, right? As a tool of white supremacy, to avoid the discomfort, to not take risks, to not jeopardize the status quo that has served you. The reality is, most teachers, about 80% of teachers in the United States are white. Most students at this point in the United States are not white. And so there's this additional dynamic of who are we serving and who are we? What are we willing to risk to serve our students properly? Now you might be wondering well, this idea, in theory, of pushing back against neutrality, I'm with you. I agree, but how does this actually happen? How does this play out so that I walk the line between not getting fired or not putting my career in jeopardy and my livelihood on the table, and am also pursuing justice? And I will say that there are no easy answers here. That absolutely is a risk. And I just invite us to have that conversation first and foremost with one another about what that means. And if we can talk about it as colleagues, as adults, even with students, about what neutrality means in a broader sense, not necessarily as in the teacher sense—as a responsibility of teachers—but just generally, if we can have those conversations and produce generative dialogue about what this means for our conversations as a school community and as a larger community as well, I think we're getting there, right? We're making progress if we can do that. Well, I also want to say different teachers and different people have different degrees of risk. So for folx who can say, I am apolitical, or I am staying neutral on this because it doesn't risk your individual rights. Those folks have less risk typically in cases like this. And therefore it is more important that those folx step up to the plate here and take on some of that risk that other folx who have not been advantaged by our systems have been having to keep on their shoulders and have had to shoulder those risks far and above anyone else. And so it's time those of us who are at less of a risk in that scenario to step up and take on that risk and to voice our resistance to this concept of neutrality, which does not serve our students. Logistically speaking in the classroom, this looks like conversational agreements, that center justice, that center dignity and ensure that a person or a group's humanity is not up for debate. This is a central tenet of having these conversations. We cannot ensure a space in which students are going to want to return to conversations like this in a space in which students feel loved and supported in a sense of belonging, if we don't agree that a basic guideline that is foundational to productive conversations about oppression is that we cannot disagree with who a person is. We cannot say that their identity is invalid or their experiences are invalid. So we can honor the dignity and the experiences of people and disagree about where we're going to make a better world for everyone, but not about the dignity of the person themselves. In addition to setting human guidelines—guidelines for the conversation that center human dignity and make sure that we are not going to violate that—academic guidelines can also be established. So as an educational institution where your purpose is to support students, to have a better academic understanding of things like research and data, and fact versus fiction, academic guidelines can be established for the conversation because where conversations can get derailed is if we say everyone's opinion is valid without the consideration of factual information and where that information is coming from. So source quality, quality of research design, things like that. You can absolutely look at a research design and interrogate its sample, representativeness, all of that stuff. That's actually a great way to apply some key ideas about research and think about the applications of things you might be studying in the real world. Absolutely do a source analysis, do all of those things, but we cannot ignore data and statistics. We cannot ignore facts. That is part of our responsibility as an educational institution in this conversation. So again, you can disagree with how to solve problems. I think that's what politics really should be all about. How do we create a better world for everyone? How we get there might look different and we can disagree about that, but we can't disagree with people's humanity and the necessity for people to have their full set of human rights. And we can also not disagree with the fact that problems exist when data points to the fact that those problems exist. And so the next step in terms of getting started with this work, of course, this is going to look different for every community, depending on what grade level you teach, where you teach, the population you serve in terms of student demographics, geographic nature of your school, teacher readiness and teacher demographics as well. But as a leader, if you are a school leader, a principal, superintendent, assistant principal, you can bring this issue up with your staff. Many staff members have been thinking about it. They may be thinking differently about it. They may be thinking similarly to you, different from others, but they have been thinking about it in one way or another, this election and just current events in general affect everything we do. They affect us as individuals, as people, as teachers, they impact our pedagogy and our considerations when we determine what and how we are going to teach. What you can do as a leader is prepare how you want to talk about it with your staff and offer some shared language, to provide opportunities for teachers to talk about how they're going to talk about issues in their class. So provide some language around discussion agreements or values to uphold in class conversations. What are the guidelines? What are the shared parameters that our school can come up with to say, we are not going to violate another person's dignity. What does that language look like for your school, for your grade level? And maybe co-construct that with your staff. Another thing to consider is conversations with families. So consider that shared language that you want to have with staff so that if a family member comes in and addresses what they see as this issue of violating teacher neutrality, you can provide a buffer between the teacher and the parent. So you're kind of the first stop. So that family members aren't directly calling teachers, and you can provide that information and share that this is a school-wide initiative. This is our set of guidelines that we collectively came up with to have conversations about important issues. You can also support teachers and provide professional development opportunities, coaching support in the form of observations of these classes, not to judge or grade teacher performance, but to take in what's happening and collectively brainstorm where teachers can go from there or how to address problems that may arise. Now as a teacher, you can determine your guidelines for your class. Of course, you can bring it up to the larger school. You can ask your boss about creating opportunities for a larger staff wide conversation, but you can also, if you feel isolated in this journey, if you're the only one that seems to be doing this, you can determine the guidelines and the language that you will use in your own individual class to talk to students, to talk to family members who may come and talk to you about what you're teaching students and what you're talking about in your class. You also may want to prepare for colleagues—if you are on this journey alone—who may tell you that it is your job to stay neutral or remain apolitical. So you might want to prepare exactly what you want to say to those colleagues, to have that language ready to go, to share some additional resources, which I'll be sharing with you at the end of this episode, so that they can kind of explore those questions and push back against that notion of teacher neutrality as it fits for them. And as always, we need to build up our collective and individual literacies around various identities and forms of injustice so that we can facilitate conversations with our students, but also with adults, with our colleagues, with our families, with our bosses, with our students' family members on issues of racism and white supremacy, on issues of nativism and sexism, on issues of ableism and homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, all the topics that may surface in conversations around the election specifically, or more broadly around any current events that happen throughout the year and not just in this moment in time. In the show notes today, I'm going to link to a bunch of resources to support you in further exploring this concept of neutrality. So you can kind of get started. You can share some of these resources with your colleagues or with family members, and it might provide you a kind of shared language to figure out exactly what we are trying to do here in the field of education. What are we trying to do as teachers? Why did we get into this field and who are we trying to be as individuals? How are we bringing our whole selves into the class? If you're an activist outside, if you're going to Black Lives Matter protests, but you are showing up in class to remain neutral...that does something to you, right? That does something to you as an individual. It prevents you from being able to show up and bring a lens of justice, a centering of justice, a core of justice into how you teach and what you teach. And as a clear caveat here, I am not at all saying that you need to tell students how to think and that students all need to agree with you. I think that is something that I continue to work on because I am very clear in my passion for feminism, for anti-racism, but I also don't see those passions as something that is political, because again, they center people's dignity. They say, I am fighting for justice for all students, for all people. If I was pushing a particular agenda for a policy or for some sort of, again, solution to how we attain justice for everyone, that's not something I need my students to agree with me on, but I need students to center the justice of all people in our conversations. And if there is a trans student in the room, if there is a student who is gay in the room, if there is a student who is Black, Brown or Indigenous in the room, if there are a bunch of hetero, cis-gendered white kids in the room, I need them to know that they matter, their peers matter, and that everyone's dignity and humanity matters. So I see that as the clear difference between pushing my own beliefs and making sure that we center justice and humanity for all folx in our class. So the resources I will link today include a resource from Teaching While White, which is a podcast. The episode is called "No Neutral Zone" and features a wonderful interview with a teacher who shares his own personal identity—for a while. He found himself kind of covering up who he really was in the class. And then now being open about his identity with his students and how he teaches and sees the concept of neutrality. It's a fascinating listen. Also, April Brown wrote a blog post called "Talking with Young Kids About Elections, Democracy, and Justice For All." There are a bunch of great resources in terms of texts that you could use to center conversations around elections, democracy, and justice for young kids. I think this is particularly powerful because a lot of times in conversations about social issues about racial injustice, about, sexism or consent or all these things that are really central to how we live as human beings and absolutely are important to talk about in, you know, the young grades sometimes feel like either they shouldn't be talked about, or they should, but they're not sure exactly how to go about that conversation because of course, it's going to look different from a conversation with a bunch of high school students when you're talking to a bunch of first graders or kindergartners. And so this is a powerful blog post to check out. And finally, a resource from the Teaching Tolerance website. This is an article written by Corey Collins called "Teaching the 2020 Election: What Will You Do On Wednesday?" So specifically speaking about the election and thinking about that notion, which it references in the posts, I'm thinking about pushing back on that notion of teacher neutrality, and it actually links to another blog post—tons of blog posts, actually—within that article, from Teaching Tolerance, one of which does directly address a teacher kind of reckoning with that notion of neutrality and, and kind of walking the line, so to speak, between having students believe exactly what he believes and centering justice in conversations with students. And so I thought that was a powerful rate as well. I'll link to all of those resources in the show notes for today, so that you can check them out. If you have any resources that you would like to share about how you are addressing the election or current events more generally in your classes this year, how you're fostering these conversations with colleagues in staff meetings, in department meetings in just kind of "water-cooler" conversation moments (if those moments exist via Zoom or in-person)., and how you're talking about them with students, if there are activities that you want to share or shared language that you want to let us know about, please Let me know. You can find me on social media, or you can drop a link to one of your resources if you're willing to share, or just a comment about how that's going in your class and the approach that you've been taking and how you're thinking about this notion of teacher neutrality in the year 2020. Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best. Episode Freebie: Neutrality Quote Posters11/10/2020 Culturally Responsive Teaching: Shifting From Assimilation To A Multilingual Habitus with Kholood QumeiRead Now
I'm so excited for you to hear today's episode featuring Kholood Qumei. She is an educational genius. I'm so excited that I was able to share a room with her. When I did my teaching in New York City. She currently teaches 10th and 11th-grade social studies and ESL in New York. She worked with the International Rescue Committee of New York and New Jersey. Her Master's comes from Teachers’ College. She's currently back there, again, pursuing an EdM in international education and development with a concentration in languages, literacies, and cultures. I cannot wait for you to hear this insightful conversation with Kholood.
Lindsay Lyons:
I am so excited to introduce to you my former colleague and amazing friend today on the podcast, Kholood Qumei, who is literally one of the most inspiring motivating people that I have just the privilege of having in my life. She introduced to me this idea of marigolds, but she credits Cult of Pedagogy's Jennifer Gonzalez as sharing it. But just this idea that you know, marigolds really have these roots that are healthy and nurturing and giving, and also, you know, by giving we grow and this two-way relationship of just thriving and growing together. I think epitomizes just my experience of my relationship with Kholood. So I am so excited to introduce to you today, um, Kholood and her brilliance, and I'm just going to actually let her introduce herself in the way that she would like to just tell us a little bit about her journey to education, her background, her research, all the things that== you know, bring her excellence into this space today. Kholood Qumei: Thank you so much, Lindsay, you are so awesome and you are definitely a Marigold in my life. So I appreciate that. I will, yeah, I'll go ahead and introduce myself. So, as you said, my name is Kholood Qumei and, I am living that hyphenated life where I am an Arab-Filipina-American. I was born in Brooklyn, but then I spent my K through six years. So my elementary formative years in Amman Jordan, and then I moved back to the United States to do seventh through 12th grade. And then just ended up staying here for university. So, right now I am a 10th and 11th-grade social studies teacher in New York City. In another life though, I used to work with the International Rescue Committee in New York and New Jersey in different capacities. Started out interning with them, and then realized more and more that I wanted to get into the education field. Kholood Qumei: And then let's see what else. Yeah. Education was never really, I didn't know that this would be where I would end up, but my undergrad was in international relations. I had a stint in divinity school thinking I would get my Master's in theological studies that now, after getting my MA in TESOL with a K-12 certification from, from TC, from Teachers College, I'm working full time and also back as a graduate student yet again, pursuing my EdM and International Education and development, and I'm concentrating on the field of languages, literacies, and cultures. Lindsay Lyons: Awesome. There is so much there that you have accomplished already, and that is so impressive. Thank you for sharing that. I think one of the things that are really exciting about just our conversations that we've had about education is kind of like big thinking or our big dreaming about what education could possibly be. And so I think that's kind of the question I want to start with. What's the big dream that you hold for the field of education, if you could kind of dream it into being, what would that actually look like? Kholood Qumei: Yeah. Initially when I first thought about this question, my, my first answer was equity in education, right? Like that's something that I think so many of us today are striving for, but then I really thought a little more deeply and I was like, well, for me, what's my big dream for education and it is equity, but I really, I really love this emphasis on multilingual learning because I think that, you know, language is something that I'm really passionate about and I think it needs to be brought into the conversation a lot more. So, so many incredible people are doing anti-racist work and talking about the decolonization of education and pedagogy, and I think that language needs to be a part of the conversation on equity, where language diversity is really celebrated and incorporated in the schools both from the bottom to top and top to bottom. Because there's so much history that we can talk, you know, ad nauseam about, about language linguistics and colonialism because we still see today without, without even really recognizing it sometimes unless we pause the colonial legacy in our curriculum and you know, English is a very dominant thing, right? Kholood Qumei: So I know there are discourses on globalization, global English and this idea that you know, English is supposed to be good because, you know, it expands global markets and it enhances economic expansion, but all of this is really at the expense of people's languages and diminishing them. And then, you know, going, like you said, from these big ideas to more specific ones, I see it being diminished in my students. So that's my big dream is equity in educational development through multilingual education. Uh, yeah, that's how I would really like to frame this conversation. Lindsay Lyons: Awesome. I love that. And I wanted to pick up on a couple of things you said there about just even colonialism and recognizing, just being aware of and calling out and naming things like colonialism or things like just the absence of multilingualism or language in our conversations about equity. Too often, it is absent and I'm glad you, you brought attention to that. So that makes me think about the mindsets that we have as educators and, you know, as ways that we think about how education should look or how it's historically been. So what mindset shifts do you think are really required for educators and educational leaders to really buy into and, and the things that are really that you see are necessary in order to achieve this dream or work towards that dream. , Kholood Qumei: Yeah, and I think, I think that you know, in this case, we're talking more and maybe the audience is more of the American audience. So we're primarily focused here in the United States, but I think that's part of the, part of the issue, right, is that we are so America-centric. Nut I think a major mindset, mindset shift, sorry, is to think more globally, more internationally, and to, to really look beyond ourselves, both at the individual level and as a country, because there are so many great things happening out there, all around the world on all the continents that we need to be more aware of, language, education, policy, language practices, and a major mindset shift that we need to think about is, is our own language ideologies. This is something that I've been really getting into lately. Kholood Qumei: So, you know, an ideology is a belief. So what is our belief on languages, as educators, especially? And before I enrolled in my program, I really, you know, I come from the ESL world with my first Master's degree. And so the whole idea was, you know, to help students get to speak English. And this is part of the American assimilation narrative. And, you know, and I get that. And I, I worked in some capacities doing, the State Department mandated cultural orientation for recently arrived refugees, but the more I started thinking about it, and the more I started thinking even of the history of ESL is how Western English-dominated it is and how that in and of itself is problematic and how we need to rethink that. So even calling the students, "English Language Learners" is so diminishing for them because they have other amazing capacities that some people truly don't have that I don't have. Kholood Qumei: You know, some of them speak more than four languages. And so that's a shift from this monoglossic language ideology that is maybe so deeply embedded in this education system that maybe we need to have a more critical approach to it. And so that's more of a heteroglossic perspective and language ideology where we see that multilingualism should and can be normalized. My advisor calls it the "multi-lingual habitus", which I really love,—Carol Benson. She's amazing. So I'm really trying to adopt this language in my own life and work, but a multi-lingual habit where, you know, it's, it's drawing on people's strengths and recognizing multilingualism as really an asset. So even, even not using the language majority versus minority, like, "Oh, these are minority languages", you know, because sometimes the numbers, the numbers don't point to that. So instead of adopting language like dominant versus non-dominant, or even calling things, not a minority, but "minoritized" to emphasize that this is something that's happening to them. So really that's, I mean, in some, the mindset shift, it has to be a lot of self-reflection and looking beyond the self on so many different levels. Lindsay Lyons: Oh my gosh, there are so many things in there that I think we could talk about for days. But I think one of the things, two of the things that really stick out to me is one that non-US-centric idea, and that I think is, is a huge, huge piece paired with that idea of that assimilationist narrative, that idea that "Indian boarding schools," right, removed, people from their families removed their hair from their heads, their clothing on their bodies and their language from their tongues. Right? And, said that this is what it means to be American. And I think as educators, we need to recognize that is the history of what it has been in the United States. That, in addition to so many more, examples, but I mean, that's, that's what we have grown from. Like our education is rooted. Lindsay Lyons: Our system is rooted in that assimilationist narrative. And so stopping our language from problematizing students because they're "English Language Learners", as opposed to seeing, I love the phrase "multi-lingual habitus" and like seeing the assets, the brilliance that is required to be multilingual. Many of our teachers are not right? I, myself am not. And so I think that's a huge, huge shift. Thank you for sharing that. When we talk about, you know, like, how do we make this happen? So we have the mindset shift we're like ready to embrace, non-US- centric perspectives, we're ready to embrace the multi-lingual habitus. Like, what does that actually look like in terms of a teacher or a leader of educational development, you know, taking action towards that dream of, of that multi-lingual habitus or multilingual education being done in a way where students are thriving in schools? Kholood Qumei: Yeah, I get frustrated by this a lot because it's that action step, right? It's like, okay, what can I do? And sometimes I feel like I need to be in 50 different places at once, but then I realized well, we're spread too thin. Let's focus and be more effective focusing like one thing at a time. But, I feel like now in my role, as both a practitioner, as an educator, someone deeply devoted to their students, but also someone who is a perpetual student kind of at this point of a perpetual graduate student, it's never-ending, but you know, that's fine. But you know, as a practitioner, I get really frustrated in certain situations where I, you know, in my coming across different pieces of literature that have fantastic ideas, I want to implement them. And then also as a graduate student, I become equally frustrated when the literature doesn't take into account educators like an actual educator's perspective and voices when they make recommendations. Kholood Qumei: So, then I think about actions and I think actions need to be mindful of both perspectives. And really as educators, the work starts with ourselves. And I know that this is something that so many people talk about and I think it's easier said than done, right? But how do you challenge these preconceived notions, your, your ideas, your biases? And especially when it comes to language again, something I'm so passionate about, because I know that there's so much amazing work that is going on with anti-racist work, and challenging those preconceived notions. But I really, I would love to challenge others to think about their own biases with language. So what actions can be taken, what can people do in their schools? I think at a school level, maybe engaging more in the small steps. I know that a few of us started a book club, I think was it two years ago at this point? Kholood Qumei: Yeah. Book club, monthly and engaging in really, really thoughtful readings and then sometimes not thoughtful because we needed a break. But you know, when you learn something, running PDs, right, encouraging your colleagues to attend conferences with you, giving each other critical and meaningful feedback on your curriculum, on your pedagogy, asking people, what they think being vulnerable in that sense. And I know that when we work together, I so admired you and your work, Lindsay, that, that you were probably the first person I always went to for that kind of meaningful exchange and feedback to take actions, to have these mind shifts that we're talking about. But then I think comes the question like, okay, and this is, this is the frustration that I was talking about earlier where, you know, I think there are so many of us educators who are doing the work, putting in the time, learning about ourselves, how we can be better, how we can do better. Kholood Qumei: But then how, how do we make the next jump? Right? Because a lot of these issues are they're systemic. How do we challenge that? You know, I think in politics, people say that that next jump is, you know, with active citizenship and civics, civic participation. And one example is voting, among many, many other ways of civic participation, but I would love to see more educators at the table doing work with policy discussions and being in positions of power. I find it really challenging to accept when there's a person in power in the education world who's never taught a day in their life. You know, and then I also see many educators who have so many fantastic ideas who want to stay in the classroom because that's the kind of people that we are. We love our students, we love our work. I have those moments where I'm like, I don't want to leave, but is there a way to do both? So, having that balance, but being...doing the work ourselves and being a part of that conversation, that larger conversation, I think that that is how a lot of that mindset shift can really start to come to fruition. Lindsay Lyons: I love that because they also think it speaks to my research that I talk about all the time like shared leadership and thinking about how do we make sure that teachers are at that decision-making table in schools, but also beyond. And like you were saying, like in political positions, in policy-making positions, and I'm almost thinking too, you know, how, how about students and family members as well, who are multilingual to be in those positions of power, as well as shaping policy and, you know, thinking about those recommendations for schools individually as a community, but then also beyond. And I think that's an incredibly powerful shift when we can shift from like individual work to systemic work. So I appreciate you sharing that. I think a lot of the teachers that I talk to and the questions that they ask of me is like, "Okay, tell me a strategy." Like, "Give me a strategy to use." Lindsay Lyons: And while I think sometimes that oversimplifies the problem or approach, I guess I should say to address how, how we create spaces for multilingual students to thrive. I think it's also something that is tangible like you were saying and making sure that, you know, what we communicate is practical for educators. What are some of the key concepts that you've learned about, or the particular strategies that you've learned about in your research or you use in your practice that you would recommend that are maybe those top strategies or recommendations that teachers could take and apply in practice? Kholood Qumei: Yeah. I love that you bring that up, Lindsay, because I know I sometimes, and just, you know, like I want to open a blog and find a strategy immediately that I can implement tomorrow. And sometimes I do find amazing strategies, you know, and sometimes, sometimes I don't, but, you know, it's, it's definitely a combination right? The mindset that then organically translates in...translates rather...into a practice that we have. And also knowing some strategies. Right. So for me, I think, you know, we hear funds of knowledge, we hear removing deficit perspective, but what does that actually mean when you've implemented a strategy? Like, we can believe that as much as we want, but then if we don't do that in the classroom, it, it kind of doesn't mean as much. But I really personally love allowing students to use their home language. Kholood Qumei: I completely understand and honor the fact that some educators actually, not some, that many educators we're, so we're so pressured by standardized testing, right. Because our job is to help the kids. We want to get them to a place where they are, you know, taking—I can just also talk about the issues with assessment for a while, but I won't—because you know, our multilingual learners—I'm not going to use English language learners—but our multilingual learners, their accommodations, right? They have accommodations. So they're an afterthought. The test is not designed for them. So there's, there are inherent problems there, but as much as we want to, you know, help them, sometimes it sometimes before they can make that jump, we need to, we, as teachers need to also honor their home languages a little bit more and telling them, you know, "Yeah, like now is a great time if you want to use it," whether, you know, jotting down ideas on paper, or if, you know, some kids are lucky enough where there are other students in the classroom who share the same home language, allowing them space and time for that. Kholood Qumei: And also really being mindful of literacy practices. Right. So, you know, one area that I really focus on is the Arabic language and recognizing that whether, because of interrupted formal education in some of these contexts and countries, um, or because, you know, Arabic is diglossic in nature. So that means that there's, there is like a standardized Arabic, and then there are also different varieties and I will not call them "dialects". I call them "varieties" and different languages of Arabic. Right? So, you know, for me, I can write in standard Arabic, but when it comes to my home language, the Levantine variety of Arabic, it's not standardized. So it's mostly transliterating, orthographically, whatever is like coming out of my mouth. So sometimes students have different experiences with literacies even in their home languages. So allowing opportunities for drawing or speaking, you know, it doesn't—pen to paper is really hard for students sometimes. Kholood Qumei: And we don't, we don't pause to think about that. So my biggest strategy, I guess, in sum, that I would, I would give is, you know, allowing space and time and recognition of home language and really getting to know the students' home languages, because I see so many, so many, you know, papers that come from the system that labeled their language like, Oh, this student speaks Spanish, the student speaks French, Arabic, Bengali. But what does that actually mean? Because that's not that that oftentimes is not even their home language. You know, I've, I've seen Wolof a little bit more, for some of our Senegalese students, a little bit more now than, rather than just French, but there so many languages in Senegal, you know, Wolof is the lingua franca there, but it might not be our students’ home languages. And so we need to do a better job in learning that, and maybe with needs assessments, finding that out, finding out their skill sets there, and then using that because again, just because they don't speak English doesn't mean that our students are disadvantaged. We need to just, we need to eliminate that belief, and we can learn from them. Lindsay Lyons: Oh my gosh, I love that. You said that, like, I think, you know, I think so much of this is—I often say that standardized curriculum or standardized practices are, you know, difficult because there is this exchange, right? There's this exchange between what our students teach us and what we are able to teach our students. And the fact that we're in partnership and learning together, I think is a really important point. And I love that you highlighted, you know, this is what it looks like to do this in a particular space. You get to know your students, you get to ask those questions, you get them to tell you in their own words, you know, what their home languages and not just trust that what is given to us on paper is what is, and I think that's really important in terms of just the partnership that we have with our students. Lindsay Lyons: And, and again, going back to that mindset of we're together, and it's going to be responsive to the needs of our students and not just, I'm going to do teaching in this one way. I love that you used the phrase, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I wrote down something like the tests we accommodate students. Multilingual students for tests, "the test is not designed for them". And I think that's really important when we're framing and grounding our work and curriculum and assessments that we design. Are we grounding it in an approach that involves all students and enables all students to be successful, or are we just accommodating and adapting something that was not designed for all students? And so I just wanted to highlight that those I think are really important points. And I love that you also talked a little bit about your own students, and so you teach in a school where all students are multilingual. So, we taught in that same school together and it was beautiful what we can learn from our own students. And I would love it if you could just share maybe a particular either lesson or strategy or even student—individual student's story that highlights, you know, the success that we can have when we thoughtfully designed those learning experiences with multilingual students in mind and really centering their, their needs and strengths. Kholood Qumei: Yeah. I think when I started my career as a teacher, and I think the reason why I ended up choosing the TESOL certification was because of my own experience. I came to America in seventh grade knowing English. My mom made sure that we tried to speak it as much as he could at home because she always knew that she wanted to come to America. But I think that I was drawing on my own experiences in seventh grade and you know, that silent period, because, and that's why I'm really emphasizing, right, like honoring home language, and knowing the home language because, Oh my goodness, just learning that, you know, Spanish was not actually the first language of, you know, some of my students, especially from, you know, like my students who speak, K'iche or Quechua, that was, that was major. Kholood Qumei: And that was an education for me because I knew nothing about it. So it was also a vulnerability and education on my part. But, to go back to your question, a particular lesson or strategy or story...there's, I, well...I've been doing, I didn't know, I think, well, you know, this, but I've been doing more, more work around maps because I've, I've gotten really international geographic education. I actually got their fellowship, which was really exciting. So, um, I got the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship and got to go to Antarctica. And so bringing that to our students has been so phenomenal, but more than just learning about Antarctica. And that was a whole thing in and of itself was just rethinking geography and place and space, especially in the context of our multilingual learners. Again, thinking of funds of knowledge, thinking of what strengths they bring, and finding a way to create a mini maps unit, that looked at maps, but also perspective and bias. Kholood Qumei: Starting very simply allowing space for home language and, you know, multiple literacies where there was a lot of drawing, a lot of speaking, and not, I did not start with any like kind of essay prompts or anything like that, although there is a time and place for that, at that, that was a really cool experience. And I do particularly remember the first time doing it, the mini maps unit, it covered all the maps on the walls, which is there for this. No, I don't think, I don't think so after. Yeah. So, I have the traditional standardized, widely accepted yet highly problematic Mercator projection. And then also the Gall-Peters and also an upside-down one. I've been trying to get my hand on an Asia-centric map as well. But yeah, so having students just first draw what the world map, what they think it looks like to them. Kholood Qumei: And that was really cool because it was a space for drawing. Some students ended up using a lot more language, in the maps, so they were labeling things, other kids were not, and that was also completely fine, but then allowing them to, at first in small groups in pairs explain it to each other and then out loud with the whole class, like sharing their surprising moments, their shocks their interesting comments. And then from there, you know, learning more about the language of geography, so there's the vocabulary input, but it's grounded in something that we've already started, and also building on what they know, because I didn't know. And that's why I kind of wanted to start with this—curious about where in their home countries is geography taught there? And for some of our students, it was an Asia-centric map. Kholood Qumei: Right. And it was also cool to see which places were bigger, which places were completely forgotten. Right? You know, everyone remembered Antarctica because they kept talking about it for years. But yeah, slowly starting from there and moving from, you know, the conversation eventually to the written. And it was really great where at the end when we were writing about imperialism and doing an essay on imperialism, students circling back to this unit opener, I guess a hook mini, mini-unit, and especially in their conclusion that "So what?" part, cause I think that's the hardest thing to teach a student, even myself as the grad student that "So what?" part. But yeah, that was, that was really, that was really a fun unit that I could share that. I think it was really a high challenge because you're really challenging the students to think critically when you start introducing perspective and bias, why certain maps are the way they are. And then looking at different maps, we eventually looked at, you know, physical maps, political maps, topological maps, climate maps, but then also from different places and across different time periods. So that was, that was pretty neat while also making it accessible. Lindsay Lyons: That is an amazing unit. I saw—I think I was there when you started doing map units, but, I did not see the evolution to that point. That sounds phenomenal. And I would encourage any listener who teaches social studies to do that unit because I think there's so much that you're teaching there, you're embedding criticality, you're embedding intellect, you're starting where students are and you're inviting them to share their brilliance and, and really educate each other and ourselves as teachers being able to learn from students in that way, I think is just so profound. And I also think it's a great example of—I talk a lot about co-constructing curriculum with students. And so while you were there for my wild experimentation of like "Design your own unit and do that for an entire semester!"—Like that is one extreme, this is also an example of how, you know, students can, co-create the lesson, like on a lesson level, I'm sure having different students in the class for that lesson produce different results from, from class to class. Lindsay Lyons: And that conversation was varied. And so I think for educators or leaders supporting educators to the co-construct curriculum with students, this is a great example of one point on that continuum where it is incredibly valuable. And also doesn't take like a ton of, you know, front end work of like, okay, which, what do students know already? And identifying that going in, like you got to just learn that with them through the activity and during the lesson. So I think that's a very doable thing that teachers could put into their practice for teaching geography and so powerful. Kholood Qumei: I'll also just quickly add that it's also decolonizing it, right? Because you're, you're looking at geography and, and politics and histories so critically, and it is, it is anti-racist work too because you're questioning who made Mercator projection, right? Like why is Africa this size? Why is Australia here? Where is, where is, why is Europe so massive? Right. So, looking at that, identifying the biases of the creators and having students come to those conclusions is really empowering. So I'll just throw that out there too, in the spirit of what we were talking about earlier as well. So yeah. Lindsay Lyons: I think that's another great example. I think one of the things, we...I've been talking to educators who teach in rural areas that are predominantly filled with white students in their classes as well. Sometimes they will hear an example like that and they'll say, well, we can't do that because we have this like mono-racial, mono-cultural mono-linguistic, like, you know, experience. But I think this is a perfect example of how you would slightly adapt this and still teach exactly the principles that you're trying to get across. Right? Like looking at who created each of these maps and having that critical lens and having the lens of decolonization when we look at just things in our sphere of education is something you can absolutely do, regardless of who is in your class. I mean, you could also jump on a zoom call with another class, like Kholood's class or something, you know, to, to share ideas that maybe aren't present in your classroom. But I think that's, that's a wonderful emphasis that you just added because I think that's something everyone can do regardless of who is sitting in your classroom, whether that be your physical classroom, your digital classroom now, but, um, as we kind of move to close out of it, I'm curious, are there resources that you have come across that you find to be really helpful in thinking through this or that you would recommend instructional leaders read or, you know, things that would help them learn more about multilingual education and what they could do for students? Kholood Qumei: Yeah. I think that this is something where like when I was thinking also, I mean, every time I have a question I'm like, wait, and then it takes like an hour to come up with an answer. But, I have been trying...I think that's why I ended up pursuing this other graduate degree is because I wanted resources and I kept running into roadblocks. Like I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for with multilingual education, because a lot of what's out there still disadvantages them as English Language Learners. And as much as we try to celebrate them and to celebrate and honor, and, you know, empower—they're already empowered—you know, we just, they have voices, right? Like we just need to be listening more, but I kept getting, I kept hitting roadblocks. So I think that's why I pursued it. Kholood Qumei: I mean, I know that's why I pursued this degree in international education and development, focusing on languages, literacies, and cultures because I will admit that I was really intimidated by scholarly work. So I was like, "Oh gosh," like, "How do I, Where is my entrance into this? How do I fit? Where do I start?" But with comparative education and also linguistic anthropology, I've come across so many fantastic articles. And that's something that I would really recommend to educators interested in multilingual education is don't be afraid of the scholarly work. We know a lot as educators, right? Like researchers will come to us when conducting work. So, you know, I think, I think we, there's such a great divide between theory and practice. And I think we need to close that gap a little bit more. So a lot of the recommendations that I do have, you know, the canon of Linguistic Anthropology or, or, critical pedagogy specifically focusing on multilingual education is in scholarly work. Kholood Qumei: So again, um, you know, whether it's Carol Benson or Nelson Flores over at UPenn...Nancy Hornberger, a lot of their work is phenomenal and, you know, it's something that I think we as educators can read and then, and then think about in our own practice. So that's kind of where I have been heading to get more because I...yeah, I just kept hitting roadblocks. So don't be intimidated or afraid to read it and question it as we all should because that's important and that's, that's part of, you know, why people read and write and publish and all of that. Lindsay Lyons: I love that recommendation. Thank you. And I just want to kind of summarize, we've talked about so many things today. So we've talked about the mindset shift required. The multi-lingual habitus that we want to really frame our thinking around and start shifting from that problematic language of problematizing students for, for not having English fluency and seeing that strengths-based multilingual learner kind of lens. As we look at our students, we want to really do the personal work, the collective work as, as a group. I know you shared some great strategies for that. And we also want to make sure that we're at the policy level. And so teachers have representation there and multilingual people have representation there as well. Getting to know your students and really making sure that students are able to use their home language and are encouraged to use their home language as well as multiple literacies. Lindsay Lyons: And so we're not just putting pen to paper, and also you gave some great examples of ways to really look at perspective and bias to decolonize the curriculum, using your geography maps unit. And, and that recommendation that we should always be looking critically at, at the theory and the scholarly work. And also maybe I took from that as well, turning to other educators and just seeing what's working well in practice and even learning from our students and families, what can be done in classes. So there's so much richness in this, in this conversation that I'm curious if you could just recommend one place to start. So one next step that an educator or a leader of educational development could take to really live in alignment with that valuing of multilingual learners. That idea of rooting our work in equity and justice, and really be the best educators that they can be to enable all students to thrive. What would that one next step be? Kholood Qumei: Oh man, that's tough. But you also did a phenomenal summary. I have to, I have to tell you, the one next step and I'm going to make this next step—cause I feel like there's so much great work out there, but I want to make it, I want to make it like a language slanted next step—I think, I think it is kind of...this is so tough. But...cause it's kind of two-pronged right. I think it's questioning what we like our language use and like language practices and also better learning our students. So challenging these preconceived notions, like getting to know, doing, doing a language history. Maybe that, maybe I can say that doing a language history, learning history for ourselves and for our students, because this reminds me of like, you know, how you asked me to introduce myself and there was kind of a narrative to it. Kholood Qumei: Everyone has a story and we hear so many cool stories about, you know, people's lives and, you know, maybe it's like having the story. How did they come here to America? Or, you know, where, how did you end up in this field of study, but people have language histories and language stories that are often forgotten. Like maybe it becomes, maybe it becomes like a sentence in an introduction or in, in a biography, right? Like, and I speak this and that and that, or, you know, but, but that is, it's minimizing so much when like we're talking about literacy is like, well, I know how to read and write in this, but it's...it's different from my home language or, you know, I, you know, I went, I was like, my neighbors, you know, maybe spoke this one language, like my Italian neighbors. And I always heard like this one variety. But thinking more deeply about that, I think, for ourselves and for students, because I think language is a big part of who we are and how we express ourselves. And so, not minimizing language, and thinking of it more critically, more deeply and, and just figuring out the nuances will help us in our, in our steps of, you know, embarking on this mind shift. Lindsay Lyons: That's awesome. And you've been sharing so much, I think throughout the session of just things that you've been learning yourself like and been very self-reflective about that. So I think that's great just to kind of highlight we're all learning and growing constantly. And the best thing we can do is really commit to that learning and growth. And I'm just curious if there's something that you haven't shared that you're really, that you've been working on or learning more about or thinking more about lately. Is there something else that you wanted to kind of share, highlight or highlight even your own work that, you know, the research that you're doing, so that other leaders can just be aware of that and learn from you? Kholood Qumei: Well now, you know, teaching in the time of coronavirus has been on my mind a lot lately, obviously, it's had its challenges, to say the least. But one thing I've been looking at and thinking about a little more deeply is about education in emergencies, and how, you know, there's so much work being done now. But not just now, but has been done for so long on refugee and IDP, which is Internally Displaced Persons, their education for various reasons, whether it's war conflict, natural disasters, you know, and whether it is something acute, something ongoing or, you know, something protracted over long periods of time, but there are people out there would have been putting in the work for decades now. And there's so much literature out there. There is a network called the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies, and they do fantastic work and have published so much, for teachers, educators, researchers. Kholood Qumei: And I think it's worth exploring because you know, education in emergencies is not a new thing. And it's been around for a while and, you know, the Western world has kind of been epitomized like, "Let's look up to them and see what they're doing." Right? But now I think we need to be listening to a little bit more. So, you know, challenging the dominance and the hegemony and all that. So, that's kind of, what's been on my mind and I just would maybe throw that out there. That's a cool network to check out the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies. If anyone's interested. Lindsay Lyons: You can also drop a link to that in the show notes for this episode so that people can just click on it and they don't have to do a Google search. That was a mouthful. I was like, yeah, let me make sure I got that down. So I will drop a link in the show notes. And then I think just a final piece like I am constantly—I learned so much from you in this episode alone—but I am constantly learning from you. And I would hope that listeners have learned a lot from this episode as well, and are interested in continuing to learn from you. So I'm interested in, you know, where learners might connect with you or learn more about you on either social media or, you know, wherever it would be that you would direct them to do that. I think you just have so much brilliance to share and I want to make sure people are connected with that. Kholood Qumei: Yeah. I am, I am a little social media-shy, but I do have a Twitter. That's my one vice. So, I can also share that with you, but it's, I guess you put twitter.com/, or I guess the handle, right. That's what we're looking for. I am not like the most social media savvy, but it's my last name and then the first three letters of my first, so it's can QumeiKho Q-U-M-E-I-K-H-O, I almost forgot how to spell my name, but yeah, if people want to follow me, I'm always up for chaps and learning, and yeah, I really look forward to, to any of that, any and all of it. Lindsay Lyons: Awesome. Thank you so much Kholood. I just really appreciate you being here and taking the time because you are super busy with a full-time job and a full-time job like research and all the things that you're doing at grad school. And so I really appreciate you and I appreciate all the wisdom that you shared today. So thanks for being on the podcast. Kholood Qumei: Thank you so much, Lindsay. You honestly inspired me to go back to school. I...for all the listeners out there, I've never met a person like Lindsay, you dissertating while teaching full time. I just thought, "You know what, I can do this." And so, yeah, you inspire me every single day and you know, when the going gets tough, I'm like, I can do this, you know, and I think of you. So thank you for having me here and thank you. And I hope you know this, you know, I just, I wish you the best. So thank you so much, Lindsay. Thank you. Lindsay Lyons: Thank you, Kholood! See this is why she is my marigold. This is amazing. Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me @lindsaybethlyons or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of visionaries of educational development until next time leaders continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
To be an effective leader, we need to first and foremost be great learners. Today's episode features highlights from a book from Brookfield and Preskill who are talking all about what leadership as learning really looks like. We're going to dive in with great tips for teacher leaders, school leaders, principals, superintendents. Get ready for a great solo show.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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