What’s Next for Schools? Dismantling, Healing, and Refusing to Return to Normal.
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.
This essay poses two points of inquiry to meet the power of this moment. First, how do we as educators create learning spaces in which students’ identities truly matter? Secondly, how do we critically examine our practices and beliefs in order to create learning spaces (virtually or in person) where young people are seen and heard, and not just assessed? While we didn’t plan it this way, we are actually well-situated in this time of disruption to take up these questions. Over the course of this spring, students, for the first time since they entered schools, were not always required to attend classes, complete assignments, or take standardized tests. As educators, we were often unable to rely on these tools to bring (and at times force) students to the learning table, and as a result, we’ve had to radically rethink the power dynamics between students and teachers. We need to use this moment to teach ourselves what school can look like when students are truly equal partners in learning.
We also need to broaden our understanding of what learning looks like. Indeed, this time highlights the need to incorporate research on adolescent development into school practices. We know that giving students space to explore their understanding of themselves and their worlds is always the right work in the classroom. At a time when students’ experiences with COVID-19 and racial injustice are simply too vivid to ignore, we must provide them with opportunities to bring their lived experiences into their learning. For some students, these experiences are traumatic, chaotic, or depressing. Many are galvanized to take action and lead fundamental change in their communities. For some, returning to the familiarity and comfort of typical classroom routines will be the structure they need. For others, the relevance of short-term learning tasks will be painfully unclear when compared to deeper questions of identity and agency on our students’ minds as they learn to navigate a changed, uncertain, and highly complex world.
For all students, this is a moment that is shaping their developing understanding of who they are, where they belong, and what role they can play in their community. As a result, how can we make permanent space in the curriculum for students to make meaning and learn from their and their communities’ experiences? How can we rethink our approaches to building relationships with students who have felt most marginalized by our practice? How can we give students meaningful feedback and opportunities to reflect on their learning? What new and varied ways can we provide for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned?
Being the educators our students need right now also means that all educators need to reflect deeply on our racial identities — especially if our racial identity is whiteness — and critically assess the source of our values and priorities. Additionally, if we are educators of color, we must find healing spaces for ourselves so that we can be fully present for our students. Without intentional reflection on who we are as educators and how we show up in the skin that we are in, we are at risk of filling in this space between ourselves and our students with pernicious, often anti-black, racist assumptions about why some aren’t participating in school the way we believe they should. This is a moment to take a deep breath and do the reflective work on our own identity, race, and understanding of the role we play as educators in a system that has failed Black and Brown students. It is time to repurpose our adult collaborative spaces and develop conditions for professional learning communities that critically reflect on our practices and values, interrogate our beliefs, and innovate new ways of doing school.
Then we need to reach out to students and families and take advantage of a time when the walls between school and home are disappearing, and when we can see into each other’s lives and each other’s homes in new ways. More than any other time in our careers, we have the chance to bring families into the life of a school and ask them to co-construct new visions of what a powerful school community looks like.
Finally, we need to ask ourselves a series of courageous questions about what it means to be an educator at this moment: How can we build relationships with students where they feel known, cared for, and respected? How are we — as educators and citizens — working to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that have oppressed our Black and Brown students for generations? How can we lift up the voices of our students and families as critical data to guide the work of our school communities? What is personally required to create partnerships with students across racial and cultural differences? As school leaders, how are we creating the conditions for ourselves and our educators to do this transformative work?
There are no easy answers to the questions we raise here, but the stakes for honestly grappling with these issues have never been higher. We face the risk of permanently breaking an already tenuous bond between our most marginalized students and their schools. We don’t have to settle for that rupture. At this moment, we must not allow the world to return to what it used to be. We must not just duck our heads, focus on logistics, and wait it out. We are all called to take up more courageous work.
Let’s look at this time as an opportunity to engage in intentional work of re-imagining what learning could look like and create the kinds of relationships, classrooms, and powerful learning experiences that we always imagined we were capable of when we entered this profession. If we respond to this moment as the call for change that it is, then there truly is no going back to “normal.” Normal isn’t an option in the present — but it wasn’t working for us in the past, either. And we shouldn’t settle for it in the future.
Adelric McCain, Director of Equity and Impact, Network for College Success at the University of Chicago
Jenny Nagaoka, Deputy Director, UChicago Consortium on School Research
Alex Seeskin, Director, To&Through Project at the University of Chicago
The opinions expressed are our own, and they do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Chicago.
