No More “Distance Learning”: Create Collective Learning Instead
To survive the threat to our health and safety caused by reopening schools during a global pandemic, let’s rely on Black women educators to help us understand what it will take to transform our conception of teaching and learning. We can use them as guides to build a path away from distance learning towards collective learning. Since Fall 2017, I have taught a course at the University of San Francisco entitled African American Educational Thought. The course unapologetically centers African American expertise in teaching Black people because whenever this is not done United States’ schools systematically fail Black students. One historical example, I have focused on in the course, is the citizenship schools formed in the segregated south.
In 1956 South Carolina, Septima Clark, an organizer, and teacher recruited her cousin Bernice Robinson, who had a high school diploma, to teach an adult literacy class for a citizenship school that focused on literacy and voting rights. The school was housed in a building purchased for $1000 and hidden from white racists who would have viciously dismantled their efforts.
Robinson felt anxious about teaching,
I guess I was nervous, I was more nervous than the people because they didn’t know what they were coming for. They were just coming to learn or to see what they could learn, that sort of thing […]. They asked me to teach the class. But, I’m not going to be the teacher, we gonna learn together. You gonna teach me some things and maybe there are a few things I might be able to teach you, but I don’t consider myself a teacher. I just feel that I’m here to learn with you, you know, learn things together (Levine, D. 2008).
Despite that Robinson did not think she was a teacher, she taught a lot of vital information including four valuable lessons that should inspire us:
- Teach the skills you have. You don’t have to be a credentialed teacher to teach. All you need is a skill you are willing to share with others.
- Contribute. You have the capacity to make the world better by sharing your skills and expertise.
- Students have knowledge. “We gonna learn together” because our students have valuable information to share with us.
- Literacy is a political act. It leads to democracy and liberation.
We must turn to historical Black women educators like Robison, because, across the world, we have selfish tyrannical leaders causing death and destruction. At the federal and local levels in the United States, we have representatives who criminalize and murder Black people. How did we get here? Why did people empower these hateful individuals to kill us? Unfortunately, we have moved away from citizenship schools which valued empathy for the experiences of others.
Distance learning as it is presently conceived reinforces the move away from empathy and places the technology at the center of learning. Instead, let us focus on contributing to learning using technology as a tool for bringing us together. Honor the wealth of knowledge each of us has and the brilliance we can share with each other. Create collective learning where we build community and reinforce empathy. In this newly imagined learning space we recognize that everything our children learn about who they are as human beings and the importance of the place they hold in the world, they learn from us. There is no content more important than that. There are no standards more important than the standard of empathy and being apart of a caring citizenry. So let’s reframe our thinking and move away from using the term distance learning because it reinforces a perceived distance between learning, us, and our students. Instead, let’s do as Black women ancestors have done. Meet the challenge of this historical moment. Create collective learning spaces where the goal of learning is to develop caring citizens of the world.
