Status Updates From Cultivating Joyful Learning...

How can you get the school to feel less transactional especially among Black students?

Schools need to be understood as a web. There’s curriculum, cross guards, transportation, school security, administration, community resources, family interactions, government/legislation (school, local, and federal), and even violence (school, local, national, global) that are all connected with how all people who enter a school interact with that school and it’s in-house community.

Working with children means you need to see all things through an intersectional perspective. Janice says that she asked interviewees for employment at her school-program for their definition of racism and their definition of excellence. If the two definitions were seen through an individualist lens, they were not called back to work with the students.

Black girls are either to achieve superhuman status via excelling in school and being really exceptional friends, or they are to be considered inhuman via “misbehaving” or “talking back”. There is no room for a Black girl to be human, period. There is no room for them to make a mistake or to forget something. They’re either on top of everything in their life, or they amount to nothing.

So successful children get to experience childhood? Did they get time to play outside with their other friends when they weren’t vigorously studying for their SAT exams or composing music?

Black girls’ success in systems not designed for their genuine success allows outsiders to say that these systems are working just fine, and that nothing needs to be changed, that other Black girls just need to work harder to reach those levels of success. However, these children were merely surviving those systems the best way they knew how.

Why is it important for schools to address the disciplinary actions taken towards Black girls? Are school personnel aware of how these actions harm educational and personal life outcomes? Who are the people that are part of these conversations, and does it actually include the authentic narratives of Black girls in that school?

“I would argue that education is ultimately a foundational element of the ability of the United States to prepare to meet its aspirational goal of being a ‘leader of the free world’. But until our learning is liberated, the nation will remain enslaved to antiquated ideologies and behaviors that undermine the possibility of justice”.

Schools cannot be labeled as “safe spaces”. They need to created as such, and this goes into concepts of classroom design, uniform monitoring, architecture, and “communal spaces” such as lunch rooms and gyms where students get to be “free” in comparison to classroom instruction. Black girls are expected to know that these spaces aren’t welcoming, thus forcing them to become adults at younger ages.