Counterspaces in the Assembled School: (Re)imagining Spaces of Critical Hope
I remember coming home from school one night in fourth grade and sobbing. Tears spread over my pillow as I tried to catch my breath long enough to put some sort of voice to my pain. I blubbered in half sentences about how I had never felt so alone as I did when I was at school. It didn’t matter which space in schools; in the classroom, the halls, the playground, the gym, or the cafeteria; I couldn’t figure out how to be the right kind of human, the kind of human that other kids wanted to be friends with. So I cried. A lot. I cried in school, I cried at home, I cried in the bathroom, and on the bus. I cried because at least it gave a voice to my pain. But the pain didn’t stop coming. It came in waves, from all directions. I didn’t know why other kids stopped talking to me for weeks when I acted a bit too “weird”, but I knew that it hurt. I knew the pain of never knowing the “right” thing to say. My world never quite lined up with the world that school operated in, and reaching across that distance every day was exhausting and hurt like hell.
To this day, I don’t know how I survived K-12. I am often surprised to find that I did. What I am beginning to realize as I reflect on those experiences is that there was never a space in schools where I was meant to belong. Even now, in my third year of university, that holds true. What I have found is counterspaces. In my second year of post-secondary classes, I, by luck or fate, encountered a program that changed the way I experienced school. This program didn’t quite belong anywhere in the university. It attracted people who didn’t quite belong either. The exceptional thing was, when we all came together, we did belong. We started as a class. Then we became a community. Then we became a force. We kept growing, finding joy, love, and healing in the work that we continued to do together. We found our space. No, we made ourselves a space.
As much as I wish I could leave you with this feel-good conclusion of a group of people who finally found a home in each other, it would be a huge disservice to our story. See, the thing is, schools really like everyone to fall in line. That’s their whole thing! Schools exist to create good citizens. The more successfully a student can be who and what will benefit society most, the better they do in school. Our problem arises because we are not those who will benefit society. Not the way society is today. U.S. society has a whole host of messed-up crap going on, some more commonly pointed at than others, and believe me, I have thoughts on that. However, the key point that brings us back to my story is that society would much rather not have to acknowledge the humanity of folks occupying the margins. By nature of the way we show up in the world, folks holding marginalized identities are already that much harder for schools to make into “perfect” citizens. Now, I am making a lot of generalizations. It is true that there is much, much more nuisance to the way that each individual and community who occupies the margins experiences violence and oppression from the systemic super-structures (white-supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, settler colonialism, hetero and cis normativity, ableism, etc) that our society was built on. However, for the sake of this narrative, I am going to leave it at the understanding that 1.) schools are not, and were never, meant to support folks who hold marginalized identities. And 2.) because schools were created to maintain a society built on the aforementioned superstructures, they cause a great deal of harm to people whose very existence as educated folks threaten those systems.
Now, take a bunch of those very people and put them in a space where they can talk about their pain. A space where they can begin to create. A space that centers love, healing, joy, and hope. A space that demands humanity and affirms identity. A space that serves as a counter to all the pain we have come to expect from school. These spaces are counterspaces. They “counter the hegemony of racism and other oppressive ideologies and practices of the institution and its members (Carter 2007).” Some amazing work has been done on this concept by Dorinda J. Carter (2007); Andrew Case and Carla Hunter (2012); Daniel Solorzano, Miguel Ceja, and Tara Yosso (2000); to name a few. One counterspace I have spent time in is an afterschool program located on the campus of a local middle school. Our programming aims to create a space at school where students who have never found a place to belong within traditional education systems can find love, belonging, joy, and a place to explore their passions and identities as well as the support to discover that they are brilliant, regardless of how they perform in school. Our program exists in response to the way school assigns value and humanity based on one type of knowledge, demanding instead on the creation of a space where students are co-teachers and learners alongside their program staff. We see the critical importance of acknowledging and placing value upon forms of knowledge and learning that are not supported in their classrooms. To achieve this aim, the program offers “enrichments” such as skateboarding, baking, playing rock music, beading and jewelry making, meme-making, video game design, graffiti, break dancing, and composing electronic music — just to name a few. The programming is important, but equally important is the culture of love, acceptance, criticality, and affirmation. In all of these ways, this program is a counterspace for our students and our staff.
However, nurturing and maintaining this space is a constant struggle. The program itself operates within a school (although outside the school day) and the staff are district employees (although paid by an outside grant). We have to maintain a tense approval from the school for our program to be allowed to continue operating on its campus. We are walking a constantly shifting line. We must find a way to insist upon our own values and norms as a program while juggling the expectations, caveats, rules, and authority of the administration at risk of losing our jobs and the program. This is not a unique situation in the realm of counterspaces
A paramount question for me recently has been: how can we better understand the positionality of counterspaces, and perhaps through that understanding move one step closer to a more sustainable maintenance of these spaces? To tell you the truth, I don’t know the answer but I have some theories. I would like to think about what these spaces look like if we examine them through assemblage theory. I will freely admit that I chose a very tricky concept to work with here as, in many ways, we don’t quite have the right tools in literacy to understand the world in the way that assemblage posits it. However, I want to try having us think about this in terms of art, as I think that makes it easier to comprehend. In art circles, “assemblage is a form of three-dimensional visual art whose compositions are formed from everyday items, usually called ‘found objects’ (Art Encyclopedia).” These pieces are created by taking many separate and often contradicting materials and modes and using them to compose a piece that then becomes entirely its own.
For example, this piece is a skull. It is also pots, pans, kitchen utensils, something (or many somethings) to hold it together, atoms, molecules, light, etc. It is experience, vision, labour, moments in time. It is located somewhere in the world and that, too, is part of what makes this piece what it is. It is an assemblage. It is what it is because of all of those relationships existing together. It couldn’t be anything without interacting with anything else. Its meaning, its identity, its very being as an assemblage, is sustained by circulation. Circulation is the second important piece of assemblage theory. Circulation just means the constant, shifting interactions that every assemblage is engaging in. An assemblage cannot continue to be if it does not interact. After all, “to be” is a verb. It is an action. There is nothing that is and is not necessarily interacting. The assembled skull not only has a relationship to all the pots and pans, but also to the artist, to everyone that walks past it every day, to the rain, the sun, the wind, and to you. It will always be changing because its relationships to other assemblages are always changing. Now, this is the fun part, the part that brings us back to school: an assemblage hides in its use. All of the interactions and relationships that make up an assemblage create a function. If that function is working, you won’t even notice it’s there. Like a road. If the road’s concrete and paint are in good condition, you can just drive on it without thinking about how it is assembled. If there is a crack in the concrete or the pain is scrubbed off, suddenly, the way a road functions as an assemblage is revealed.
School (an assemblage) is sustained through more relationships than I can reasonably list. Some include its relationships to white supremacy, Betsy DeVos, the many different histories it does or does not tell, each student, each parent, each teacher, America, ableism, settler colonialism, joy, and the 5 day school week. Each of these relationships, though very different in nature, make the school system what it is and determine how it functions. Most, if not all of those relationships, are often hidden. If school is working, you will not notice it functioning. You will simply go to school, move through your day, and go home. An assemblage only appears when it doesn’t work. If an “unruly” child “disrupts” class or an “unmanageable” teacher doesn’t teach the “right” lesson, they are exposing the ways in which school operates in their dissent from it. The way school is supposed to function systemically to enforce certain values and norms (think hidden curriculum) suddenly cannot be enacted. This is what counterspaces do and why they are so hard to maintain. They have MASSIVE, HUGE, consequential relationships to the assemblage of schooling. The function of counterspaces lies in the way they reveal how school functions and leave it vulnerable to change. The counterspace I started this narrative with, the one that has gotten me through university, is a collective that was created out of the need for a change in the way we educate teachers, with the hope that changing how we teach our teachers has the potential to change our school system. Although that was the goal, it is the need for that goal that I am more interested in. The need for this collective came directly out of how so many students, teachers, faculty, and community members have seen school function to break people, strip them of their humanity, isolate them from love, and frame them as commodities. This collective became so vital to me because its function was to talk plainly about how school had hurt us, to be able to finally have the tools to understand that in a way that was more than nebulous pain. We could do this because, in these spaces, the assemblage of school is no longer hiding in its use. We can voice our pain because we can hold space where the functions that cause the pain don’t work. In these spaces, the functions of the assemblage are dormant enough that we can talk about them. Those functions are still real, still painful, and still present, but they are not everything. We, collectively, can see the connections between our pain and the function of the assemblage.
Counterspaces matter not because they are separate from school or building apart from it, but because they are directly tied to it. Because counterspaces are tied to school so fundamentally, they have the ability to change it. They have the ability to start the work of building new relationships with school as an assemblage. Counterspaces offer the possibility of interacting with it in a fundamentally different way, in a way that necessitates change. (Of course, we know that this cannot leave us unchanged either.)
It is hard as all hell to nurture these spaces because they HAVE TO exist within school, otherwise, the work they are doing to directly counter the pain and oppression of that institution is somewhat lost. If these spaces were not in schools, we could not be in schools. Without counterspaces, I would have died trying to stay in school. I wish that I could say that was an exaggeration, but it is not. Folks of color and others facing marginalization are constantly expected to perform exhausting loads of uncompensated labour in order to survive. For many of us, it is a well-known truth that educational institutions are always asking us to make impossible choices between our health and our liberation. For me, counterspaces are a site where liberatory education is possible. Counterspaces allow us to dream new realities. They nurture our brilliance. They make us believe we are worth something and that we are changing the world, every day, by being: by continuing to exist in all the beautiful and incredible ways that we do, by refusing to accept that what is right in front of us is all there is, by refusing to accept that the hidden curriculum of hate and pain we have lived with our whole life is somehow inevitable. Counterspaces create the possibility of new futures where it’s our future that matters, not a future that calls for our eradication. They give us the chance to believe that if we are able to feel this much love and joy and hope in a space that is still tied to the institutions that want us dead, there may truly be a world that we can create where “all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction (Audre Lorde, Uses of Anger).” All of this is our radical imaginary. And there is no equal for that hope. That is something I never allowed myself to sincerely believe possible until counterspaces placed me one step closer to it.