As educators across the country begin to plan for next school year, we are not only beginning to reckon with the logistics of creating a physically safe school environment, but also with the challenge of helping our students make meaning of their experience with a global pandemic, economic insecurity, attacks against Black bodies, and racial injustice. Amidst this uncertainty and tumult, many are grappling with their own role and the role of unjust systems in society. In this moment, teachers and administrators have a unique opportunity to reflect on their historical roles in creating and sustaining our education systems and to rebuild learning spaces around developmentally-responsive practices, trusting relationships, and liberatory design.
In particular, we can use this time to pause and rethink some of the most inequitable and institutionalized assumptions that underlie our current education system: that expertise in the classroom lies entirely with teachers; that a precondition to learning is that adults control students’ bodies, particularly Black and Brown bodies; that the quantity of content and standard coverage, rather than the depth of students’ understanding, should drive the work of a classroom; and that students who don’t do the work, don’t care about school. Indeed, these times of protest, sacrifice, and strife have laid bare the fundamental misalignment between what schools ask of students and what students actually need. At the same time, innovative strategies and perspectives on teaching and learning emerged this spring, forcing us to expand our thinking about what is possible and make difficult decisions about what our students need us to leave in the past and hold onto in the future...