What to Expect from my Connected Learning Camp: A Way Into Things. Please Join Us.
The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves. — Grace Lee Boggs.
This summer, I will be leading a Connected Learning Camp in partnership with Arcadia’s Connected Learning Certificate Program. See this as an opening salvo. Register for this enriching experience. For more information, please contact Dr. Kira Baker-Doyle, Director of Master’s Degrees and Certificate Programs at Arcadia University School of Education.
NOTE: Nothing said here will have more depth and love than this piece from Luam Kidane, which continually inspires and challenges me to be better and do better as my first-work, before entering into any conversation on education.
For a couple of years, I’ve been increasingly annoyed with the appraisal of the maker movement as a revolutionary force in the classroom. Maybe the most so because I haven’t been able to put my finger on my deepest contempt. It might be because these spaces, in my experience, are usually full of whiteness and always male-centered. It might be because many of its proprietors fail to take account for systemic inequities and oppressive structural forces. Audrey Watters writes on this perpetually. It might be because at its best, it still leaves room for today’s well-masked American thingification: the insistence of newness, innovativeness, tied into the disposability and destruction of that and those deemed to be the past.
I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about “achievements;” diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. Aimé Cesaire (1955).
There stands the overwhelming need to expose the fallacies inherent within our definition of and approach to “innovation” in education, but what I seek to offer through this course is another framework. One for appreciative inquiry, a more just way into things as Larry Neal would say. One that explores the revolutionary work and deep, local commitments offered to us through Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs, currently continued by such grassroots organizations as Detroit Future Schools and upheld by the James and Grace Lee Boggs School. One that seeks to remain principled and transformative as Theaster Gates and the Rebuild Foundation’s opus on “ethical redevelopment.” One that arises out of Black and Latinx spatial imaginaries and the responsibility of place-keeping. One that embraces the specifity of our cultural homes, and upholds the remembering of our original place that the incomparable Toni Morrison demands:
…the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory.
Our experience will undertake these world-changing ideas and concepts, and flood the room with ways that we can begin to practice this work within our learning spaces and subject contexts. And beyond them. Because every boundary deserves interrogation. What might this look like in practice? A local muse:
“They came into the neighborhood and made positive things for our community. Without the Penny Candy Store, I don’t think half of us would be here right now,” he said. Hendricks works at KFC and still lives in the neighborhood. He’s often too busy to get back to the store.
But, he said, “I would take a day off to help them out. They helped us become men.” The secret North Philadelphia candy store that teaches kids math, respect
Let us know that these spaces already exist, some in secret, or otherwise without and not in search of our validation. Let us learn to see ourselves and our work differently with the construction of these spaces in mind. Let us begin to shift our collective approach and reframe the intended destination of our pedagogical strategies. From preparing students to leave their homes for the real world, to realizing with students that this world is our home. And that we must sustain ourselves within it. And work towards that next world too. Let us teach that what stands inextricably intertwined with our ability to create, is our profound human duty to relate. Including those differently raced, differently sexed, differently oriented, differently abled and more. To us all. Let us build loving relationships. Let us make a mark on the world. Let us create for a more just society.
We must move from being shapeshifting individuals to being shapeshifting communities. We must continually focus on our self-transformations, but it cannot end there — we must also move collectively to change the structures and conditions from which we arise. This is not to say that shapeshifting is not a beautiful and magical blessing, but it is to say that if all we do is change our minds and our bodies, then our world, our laws, our countries, our state, our police, our prisons, our presidents, our politics will be neglected as something untouchable, unmovable. We cannot accept that!
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