2020: Beyond the Protest March

In the summer of 2020, the world experienced deep unrest as COVID‐19 became less of a temporary mindset and more of a long‐term reality. People's lives became significantly different due to the ever‐changing economic markets, policy changes, and health alerts. Grocery shopping and hospital checkups, once mundane activities, became fraught events that took considerable planning and preparation.

Many families with school‐age children experienced more “togetherness” than ever before when school and other activities became virtual and in‐home due to quarantining and safety precautions. While dubbed “tender and fun” at first, spending hours in the same space deeply impacted the mental health of the family unit—both individually and collectively.

Kids didn't get their daily dose of friendship time, the sensory experience of school environments was diminished to corners of kids' apartments or alcoves in their bedrooms, and parents and caregivers struggled to maintain a sense of coherence in their careers as they inadvertently became their children's part‐time teaching assistants.

Educators were challenged with learning entirely new teaching mediums to deliver instruction and cultivate community. Absenteeism saturated attendance rosters. Gaps between what kids used to be able to do versus what they could presently do widened.

While life became different, some old problems remained the same, if not worsened, in the United States.

On Monday, 25 May 2020, George Floyd, a 46‐year‐old Black man, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a 44‐year‐old white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (One year later, Derek Chauvin was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 22 years in federal prison.) Compounded with the murders of countless other Black folx¹ from policing activity and the disproportionate harm COVID‐19² (Grace et al. 2020) unleashed within the Black community, the United States' anti‐Black racism pressure cooker popped.

Although Black Lives Matter (BLM) existed in multiple iterations through different grassroots organizations prior to 2014, it became a more prominent force in public rhetoric during the protests that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, in the days and weeks after Mike Brown was murdered.

In 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was a wave that swept across the nation.

In 2020, that wave grew into a tsunami.

This time, the undercurrent of the movement was charged in new ways, becoming even more powerful. Black Lives Matter, whether or not people agreed upon its demands, was a placeholder in nearly every dinner table across the United States, and stretched to other parts of the world as well. From the proliferation of social media's clear and painful footage of police killings that went viral, to the aforementioned disproportionate trauma that blistered from COVID‐19 and to the centuries of unmet promises, Black people, along with many allies and accomplices from other racial groups, decided enough was enough.

Black Lives Matter paraphernalia flooded the market; major retailers like Target were not only selling BLM merchandise, but were also making statements declaring their commitment to racial justice. In June 2020, Brian Cornell, Target Corporation's chairman and CEO, stated:

Target stands with Black families, communities and team members. As we face an inflection point in Minneapolis and across the country, we're listening to our team, guests and communities, committed to using our size, scale and resources to help heal and create lasting change (Target Corporate).

Target was not alone. According to reporting from The Washington Post, “hundreds of companies blanketed social media with statements denouncing discrimination and professing their commitment to racial justice” (Jan et al. 2020).

While companies charted their commitments using carefully designed squares on social media, individuals followed suit. Declarations that Black Lives Matter increased, and it became a common point of interest to attend various events and protests that pledged people's interest to the movement. “Are you going to the protest?” became a popular refrain for meeting people up at social gatherings.

My own family, that is, Cornelius and me, and our two Black‐biracial daughters, almost every night for two weeks, witnessed the sound and energy of protest from the streets by way of our Brooklyn apartment. Regardless of closed windows, air conditioning, sound buffers—it didn't matter. When thousands of people gather on the streets in Brooklyn, there is no avoiding their sound, no matter the cause. So our children, of course, had questions.

Our older daughter (age eight at the time) thought the people who were marching were chanting “Our Justice, Our Peace!” Our younger daughter (age six at the time) was enamored with the honks, the horns, and the sheer number of people who relentlessly showed up night after night. Of course, as a mother who does her best to respond to the curiosities of all children, and especially her own, I gently told our oldest daughter that the people on the streets weren't saying “Our Justice,” rather, they were saying “No Justice.”

Older daughter: Why Mama? Why are they saying “No Justice, No Peace”?

Me: [Heavy sigh]. Because people are demanding safety for Black people. They are saying they won't be quiet until Black people are safe in the United States.

Older daughter: Can we go out there, Mama?

Younger daughter: Yeah, Mama. It looks fun!

Cornelius: [gives me a look]

Me: Me and Daddy go out there every day, but our protest just looks different. The work of protecting Black people and children comes in all different shapes and sizes. We can teach you to protest, too, but you don't always have to be in the street carrying a sign.

The website Black Lives Matter in School has created a powerful platform for educators and parents to root themselves in, with a clear path for advocacy:

1. End “zero tolerance” discipline, and implement restorative justice.
2. Hire more Black teachers.
3. Mandate Black history and ethnic studies in K‐12 curriculum.
4. Fund counselors not cops (2020).

Their demands are clear and necessary, and are also in pedagogical alignment in working toward future goodness. I recommend you explore their resources to understand more about their organizing and activism at schools. Their website, www.blacklivesmatteratschool.com, includes valuable artifacts such as films, lesson plans, workshop examples, and more.

We now live in an era that is governed by matters of racial justice—for better and for worse. The “better” being that intersectional coalitions are able to gather in school institutions publicly, no longer having to meet in secret spaces to discuss race matters that impact the livelihood of all people. The “worse” part being the cognitive dissonance that happened when the news media buzz was over, when the copies of Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility were dog‐eared and worn out, when the Black squares posted on social media months after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's deaths later were symbolic of voided actions, when schools stopped requesting “how to talk to your kids about race” workshops because the season of BLM protesting was sort of “over.”

While public proclamations, Saturday workshops, evening protest marches, and monthly social justice summits have changed the narrative regarding the urgency around justice in society and schools, they haven't necessarily changed outcomes, and they have definitely not changed the circumstances for students learning within those institutions, especially those students who are outside the sphere of dominant culture.

As I write this, in 2022, not much has changed regarding data trends for students who have been historically underserved. According to The Nation's Report Card, between 1978 and 2020, in every single category, in every single year, white students at ages 9 and 13 received the highest test scores (NAEP 2021). I will note that Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and kids who identify as more than one race are lumped into the “Other” category in the report, so it very well may be true that one of those groups could have outperformed white kids. In fact, previous studies do show that Asian students outperform white children (Hsin and Xie 2014). While the achievement gap has narrowed, between the years of 2012 and 2020, statistically significant growth was not evident amongst any group of students, including white, Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and children of two or more races parents (NAEP 2021).

Arguably, circumstances for Black, Brown, Queer, and female students have gotten worse. In the United States, several laws passed in 2021 and 2022 have worked to create a confusing landscape on what teachers “can and cannot teach” (Najarro 2022). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports the following legal landscape deeply impacting children in U.S. schools:

• Since 2021, 10 states have passed censorship bills that restrict discussions on race and gender in school.
• In 2022 alone, 111 new bills were introduced across 33 states that specifically target K‐12 schools and what they can and cannot teach (ACLU 2022).

Widespread book‐banning has swept across the country through local governance and school boards. Books by and about BIPOC people, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups are increasingly named “inappropriate” and/or “controversial” for adolescent readers, and continue to be banned (Harris and Alter 2022). Additionally, while Title IX has worked to protect and promote gender equality in schools, the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has set a dangerous precedent for how the public will view the position of girls within society, especially institutions like schools.

Even though the foundation of schooling has always been inequitable, this inequity is further exacerbated by inhumane legislation directly impacting children. Laws in more than 30 states limit and restrict the ways in which schools can purchase curriculum, texts, and other teaching materials based on gendered and racial language, as well as which parts of history or which historical figures are represented in the curriculum (ACLU 2022). Critical race theory, developed by legal scholar Derrick Bell in the 1980s, is used to explore ways in which race is embedded in societies and systems (Cobb 2021). Since 2020, it has been distorted and co‐opted by alt‐right politicians for “rebranding;” in some conservative circles CRT is equated with “false history” and “Black Supremacy” (Cobb 2021). This political rhetoric has permeated school communities nationally, and has impacted the types of professional development educators have access to, the books children can read, and, ultimately, the kinds of instructional experiences kids are “allowed” to have and school leaders are “allowed” to permit (Najarro 2022).

If we are to promote authentic learning and the well‐being of learners within our school communities, we must confront this legislative landscape in addition to the inequities embedded and present within our communities. Learners' shifts in experience happen in the many thousands of micro‐interactions they will experience across the periods, days, weeks, semesters, and years‐long classroom experiences they share with their teachers. Certainly, folx should participate in fighting for justice in ways that feel most appropriate regarding their identities, their privileges, and their spheres of influence. However, it is part of an educator's daily work, regardless of your identity markers, to enact social justice in the school spaces we occupy, especially for those who are in closest proximity to students.

It is my hope that social justice protests that include a march and a sign punctuated by a string of social media posts also include student data, instructional know‐how, representative and multi‐modal texts, and responsive community engagement. I hope it means people, especially those from dominant culture, those who have more power, step back from conversations and allow space for others. I hope it means that folx are leaning into students a little more, listening to them a little harder.

Designing Justice‐Oriented Learning Spaces

In a recent op‐ed regarding their teaching role in social justice education, Ursula Wolfe‐Rocca and Christie Nold wrote:

Our classrooms are not sites of doom and gloom. Students are hungry for explanations—real explanations—for the world they have inherited, and in our experience, they often feel relieved to gain insight into why things are the way they are. Moreover, our curriculum emphasizes the varied, powerful and creative ways that people have resisted oppression and built justice (2022).

In my experiences as a classroom teacher, as a partner educator to many present classroom teachers, and as a student myself, I find Wolf‐Rocca and Nold's anecdote to be overwhelmingly the case. When teachers work to cocreate understanding with the students they teach in regard to the world that surrounds them—and they do so from the perspective of honest, full histories, grappling with nondominant narratives, and, especially, revealing the stories of people's lived experiences—more often than not, students are grateful. Moreover, relationships are strengthened, and the classroom community grows stronger. When relevant issues are addressed and when power dynamics students seek to understand are part of the curriculum, joy exudes.

You may be wondering how teaching through the lens of social justice can be a joyful pursuit. All throughout this text, we've explored this paradigm. There is no distinct answer except that by surfacing the truth of the world kids have inherited, by creating space for them to express their daily lived experiences, by teaching through the lens of “more than one way” and multiliteracies, we are honoring their humanity, and there is joy that goes along with that.

Pragmatically speaking, to design justice‐oriented spaces with kids first calls us to define our purpose as educators: What is it we are really trying to do? This is another exploration we've been unpacking throughout this text. You've engaged in the inner work, you've practiced building community within thought sanctuaries, you've rediscovered what it means to nurture yourself and one another in the tension‐filled political landscape of school! You've either reiterated, deepened, or rediscovered your foundational understandings of childhood development and curricular frameworks like UbD and CR‐SP. You've even explored how policy decisions, both past and present, have made a difference for young people's learning and teacher's teaching.

These last sections of this text are designed for all those different components to manifest into something deep, something big, something you both know and feel. At this juncture, perhaps it feels hard to name. Even so, this feeling, “felt knowledge,” is your collective wisdom at work and it defines your purpose as an educator. I encourage you to engage in this quick work along to sketch what your purpose looks like, write about it, or even just pause and have some dialogue about your purpose with a person you are close to—even a family member. The most important thing in this exercise is for your purpose to manifest outside yourself.

The Nuts and Bolts of Justice Designs

Earlier, we discussed the “good bones” of curriculum‐making: the exercise of backwards planning, continued and intentional assessment, and purposeful instruction through the UbD framework. We also paired it with CR‐SP, planning, assessing, and teaching, while considering the communities of people we teach and learn with authentically, imbuing culturally relevant and sustaining teaching every step of the way. The genetic makeup of how that curriculum is delivered is incumbent upon one's levels of teacher agency and their instructional stance. Those entities come from the combined force of our lived experiences—our real‐life intellectual DNA. Finally, we must pay attention to the students in front of us and how the world they traverse within has impacted the past, and continues to impact their present and future.

Here, I'll start the work of creating justice‐oriented learning designs with a big, broad question:

• How do we create student‐centered experiences in standards‐based classrooms?

That's the generic version. The one you can use anywhere and people won't bat an eye. But what I really mean is:

• How do we teach young people honestly, in ways rooted in both culturally relevant and strength‐based capacities? That are also research‐based?
• How do we teach young people about the world that surrounds them; things like class, gender, race, and all the other nuanced topics that are increasingly being named “taboo” … even when it makes grown‐ups uncomfortable and in some cases … the legality of the text or instruction is questionable?
• What methodologies, approaches, and resources will help us teach young people about the world they are growing into in honest, developmentally appropriate ways?

Wiggins and McTighe (the UbD people) would name those my “essential questions,” questions that drive the purpose of the curriculum forward.

In so many school spaces, educators struggle with how to talk to young people about the things emerging in their communities. Discussing differences and difficult histories can feel tricky. But not discussing these things gives kids a false sense of the world and who they are in it. Rudine Sims Bishops (1990) revealed this long ago, naming that children from dominant cultures experience a false sense of reality and an exaggerated sense of self when they are not exposed to the stories of people who live differently and carry different histories.

Justice‐oriented teaching and learning is doing the work beyond merely expecting that kids will be the “leaders of tomorrow.” This is about giving them a framework for how they—in their play and among their friends—be the leaders they were born to be today. When should they speak up, hold space, or stand back? Amongst the sea of misinformation that bombards their lives, how will they parse fact from fiction? What about their personhood matters most for them, and how do other people within their classrooms and outside of it perceive this meaningfulness? What does it mean to truly be in community with a group of people who may or may not share the same interests? (As we continue our process, I'm sure you are noticing that questions are quite prolific in this conversation. That's okay, it's as it should be. Powerful inquiry questions generate more questions. Don’t be overwhelmed—it's just how it goes!)

I may have big questions, but my purpose is clear: people who work in schools will learn how to design justice‐oriented learning experiences with children. I walk through this Earth as an able‐bodied, white, cisgender woman, mother, educator/scholar in a heteronormative interracial marriage. My pedagogy is delivered through the medium of that body in connection to my centering of human care, multiliteracies, deep practice, flexibility, innovation, joy, and justice. I am here with you, in this text, and lots of other school spaces because I think transformational change is most profound in the bodies of knowledge teachers carry, learn, and deliver to and from the students they teach.

In this book, I have already mentioned that kids are curious beings and that school poses a threat to their natural disposition. Additionally, I have unpacked and offered potential approaches to make shifts away from dominant school culture and toward future goodness. This movement illuminates a form of joy that has sustained my entire teacherhood. The best part of being an educator, for me, is the privilege of witnessing the growth of people, especially kids, across a school year, when they experience humane, supportive, holistic, collaborative, relational, communal, multiliterate, and process‐oriented school spaces (remember the elements of future‐goodness reflected in the Structured Generator of Hope in Chapter 1?). It has always felt very special to be part of supporting and shaping that progress as a learner, as a human being.

The human condition from birth is to learn. Witnessing my own children, along with many, many others across both elementary and secondary schools has given me great insight in terms of what kinds of learning children are ready for at different stages in their lives. Throughout my own growth, especially as I transitioned from secondary school teaching to elementary school teaching, I'd no idea the gaps of growth I'd been missing in those early years of kids' lives! When I became a mother a decade ago, the phenomena of what kids are able to do, the creativity and curiosity they hold within their tiny minds and bodies, was especially fascinating. It's been beautiful to witness the spectrum of development from my own children since their births, and for other children from whatever juncture I meet them. Throughout my research and my practice with other educators, I continue to probe this idea … where do we take children with their questions, wonderings, and ideas about the world that surfaces in our schools?

As discussed throughout this text, there is tension in this work, between society's predetermined ideas about what school should be such as reading texts that are part of “the Canon,” compliant thinking and behavior demonstrated from children and teachers, as well as product‐oriented assignments re: “Is it done?” “Did I do it right?” “What do I have to do to get an ‘A'?” and the kinds of authentic learning kids respond to most thoughtfully that support their well‐being. I revert back to my purpose, which I hope to some extent is not so far off from yours: I am radically pro‐kid. I aim to design student‐centered experiences. To do that, I must find ways to respond to the types of questions, ideas, and wondering they carry. In fact, regardless of the space I am in, another teacher's classroom, the subway, the schoolyard when I drop off my kids, or even my own dinner table, I am constantly listening, mulling over, and absorbing kids' thinking. I usually write their questions down so I can keep my finger on the pulse of youth's experiences! Recently, for example, I've collected the following questions and ideas in those various spaces I occupy with youth:

• How did all these buildings get built? How did New York City come to be? Who are the workers? Why are there only boys? (5‐year‐old)
• If you use a ruler made in China, you'll get COVID! (9‐year‐old)
• Do you think 2020 was like 1968? Which do you think is worse? (10‐year‐old)
• I just want teachers in this building to treat me like I'm a kid. (11‐year‐old)
• I miss school. Playing with one friend is hard. Playing with many friends is wayyyy better. (6‐year‐old)
• Who has been treated worse throughout history? White women or Black men? (8‐year‐old)

Of course, I also witness young people ask questions that may be considered less controversial, like what people's interests are or endless “would you rather scenarios” re: “Would you rather eat a popsicle or an ice cream cone?” “Would you rather have a cat or a dog?” etc. But alongside the more banal and lighter conversations are the deeper questions kids ask, and the ideas they surface challenge traditional notions of what schooling should be, and offer a wider range of possibilities for what school could be.

What Matters to Children

In the pursuit toward justice for those working in education, people will often cite their Ivy League degrees, the research they've conducted or participated in, the multiple letters after their names, the articles they've written, or the years of experience they have teaching. But when it comes to centering the child in our pursuit, what really matters? Especially from the vantage point of young people …

Author and educator Nikolai Pizarro de Jesus reminds us to ask ourselves this very question. In a panel discussion hosted by The Bank Street College of Education, Pizarro implored the audience to take a moment to pause and consider: “What credentials matter to children?” She then cited credentials that were most important to her, saying: “My neighbor's child comes to my house to rest. My son tells me when he is scared.” Pizarro served us an important reminder, and I reflected as such, this time through the lens of my former classroom spaces. Internally, I probed the broader question, and narrowed it down asking myself: How do children's actions tell me that what I'm doing is equipping them with the tools they need to grow and feel safe and feel loved and always positioning them in a space where they feel like they are a learner? Internally, I responded:

• They come to my room every morning before school starts to spend time with me.
• They bring up questions in morning circle about what they've seen or heard about in the world that no other adult is talking to them about.
• They show their tears, their joys, their whole selves. (I vividly remember a former student coming into the morning circle space abruptly, talking about how mad he was at his stepbrother for breaking his toy. The whole class community helped him solve his problem.)

What matters to young people goes far beyond the items on our CVs or résumés, and there are great implications from those actions in terms of creating curriculum and developing community centered in justice.

I know this all may feel very hard. Perhaps, too, it feels very affirming, or maybe you are still feeling like this is all within the realm of impossibility. Please know that I will forever be your cheerleader.

I offer a few general guidelines that underscore the plausibility for justice‐oriented learning designs in different types of school locations:

• Know that asking questions about what's happening in the world is kids' prerogative. Having conversations about kids' questions is a natural, organic occurrence in elementary school classrooms. It's authentic inquiry when we respond to their questions in thoughtful ways.
• Federal law indicates there is a separation of church and state within schools. More often than not, standards are formulated around science and accredited research institutions. That means it is your right as a teacher, educator, or school leader to teach science, and separate fact from fiction. When people give you pushback, especially students' families, I offer the language below to families to guide their beliefs in their homes. For example:
  1. At home: “In this family we value …”
  2. In school: “In this school we teach from a research‐based perspective… . We value x, y, z. If you don't agree with what we're teaching, you are welcome to have a separate conversation with your child at home. But please know, in this class, in this school, we will be discussing the world that surrounds us.”

One helpful exercise for educators who are working with communities that have different stances to the type of education their children should receive is to engage in role‐playing scenarios with their colleagues to prepare themselves for pushback. For example, this is when one colleague would take on the role of a community member disagreeing with content being taught, and then a teacher would practice using the language above to guide their conversation.