Occupying Education or Transforming Space?: The Teacher as an Activist

Regardless of your relationship or attitude towards the Occupy movement, it cannot be denied that its presence has created important critical conversations.  How can we apply these conversations, critiques, and actions to what our work as educators looks like? How can we use these lessons to transform our educational system into one that is accountable to all students?

This interactive workshop, inspired by my amazing comrade and educator Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, will lead participants through a small group process to create something new: deciding on, designing, implementing, and evaluating a site-specific direct action in relation to education. Using the resources of urgency, our communities, and each other, let's create and make decisions together around the future of our educational system, focusing on the communities we are accountable to and what it means to transform space.

Materials:

Flip Chart Paper

Markers

Paper/Writing Utensils

Outline:

      0.   Introduction

• So, today's purpose of this workshop.... Sue asked me to reflect upon the Occupy movement and lead a workshop about its relationship to education.  Having not been involved directly with any of the movement myself, and knowing that my peers at Goddard are also quite technologically connected, I found it hard to see how my leading a direct discussion around the Occupy Movement was the best direction. Not to mention so many videos, articles, critiques, etc. to sort through. Instead, I wanted to focus on part of what made this movement happen. A sense of urgency and action.
• Regardless of your relationship or attitude towards the Occupy movement, it cannot be denied that its presence has created important critical conversations.  And we should ask ourselves how we can apply these conversations, critiques, and actions to what our work as educators looks like? And how can we use these lessons to transform our educational system into one that is accountable to all students?
• But todays workshop, inspired by my amazing comrade and educator Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, will not be about just questions. We will create something new. In the next hour and a half, with a debrief over dinner, we will decide on, design, implement, and evaluate a site-specific direct action in relation to education. Using the resources of urgency, our communities, and each other, let's create and make decisions together around the future of our educational system, focusing on the communities we are accountable to and what it means to transform space.
• My one guideline is to consider voice.  As you share, be sure to ask yourself, whose voice is absent in the room? This may be due to a true physical absence of that person in the space, but also be aware that different people share/take up space in different ways. Give silence and room for them.

1. Immediate Brilliance

• Identify something you are good/great at.. We're going to go around and share our name plus that skill or strength.  This should go fast- you know what you're good at. We are often taught to reflect, but today's focus is trust in ourselves and our immediate brilliance.
• Record everyone's name + strength

2. Top of Your Heart

• Now, in more of a popcorn style fashion, let's all share what things we're feeling very present to in the moment related to education or Goddard, even if only tangentially. Things taking up lots of your thought- things you're passionate/upset about.   What's on the top of your heart/mind about education right now?

POPCORN & RECORD

• What trends do we see? What commonalities? Similar tensions?
• What are the 2 biggest general themes we see that are important to us collectively in the moment?

3. Accountability

• Who are we accountable to in this issue?
• Who is the audience we want to engage directly with?
• Is this the audience we are most directly accountable to? Is it the one who most needs us? Or the one who holds the most power? Both are common approaches....

4. Designing an Action

• Being aware of our limitation of place, time, and resources, which are always realistically limiting in some capacity: What is an action we can do right now to address our heart concerns and be accountable to the group we picked?
• How do we ensure that our action is accessible to the group we are most accountable to?
• Division of Labor Chart: What has to happen?/Who will do it?

5. The Activist Impulse

• Lets spend the next twenty minutes enacting the action.
• We will regroup at dinner.

6. Reflection/Debrief

• We all always have the impulse to act or not act or act together. We get to choose. Sometimes we choose not acting out of safety, but other time we choose not acting out of fear.
• What did the action feel like?
• Did anything feel forced?
• What would you change?
• What was at stake? How is this different from other spaces you exist in?
• What aspects of this can be applied? What can you take away from this??
• Does it make you rethink any previous fears/limitations you had around activism before?