“[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.” – bell hooks
February 2021 – we, the authors, had recently left our teacher education positions at the same New Jersey university. Leah Z Owens, a Black woman activist-scholar and former high school English teacher turned member of the Newark Board of Education and community organizer, and Brandie E. Waid, a queer Latinx activist-scholar and former middle school and high school mathematics teacher. While we had left these positions for differing reasons, we were both disillusioned with academia – a field in which we found our queer, BIPOC, and disabled bodies and knowledge were regularly exploited, taken for granted, or ignored.
Radical Beginnings
Throughout the month of February, we had several conversations in which we expressed our desires to chart our own path as activist scholars and center the joys and wisdom of the communities to which we belonged. Our conversations often led us to discuss the uprisings of May 2020, which inspired a hopeful (though brief) shift in education – one in which the voices of Black scholars and activists were being centered, and in which many educators (especially white folx) began to seek out communities in which they might learn, reflect, and engage in collective action to challenge structures upholding white supremacy within PK-12 schooling and academia alike. We had begun to see that drive for anti-racist pedagogies lose momentum and felt it was partly due to a dearth of spaces for teachers to sustain their commitment, build community, and continue learning. As a result, we set out to create such a space.
Drawing our inspiration from BIPOC, queer, and dis/ability activist scholars, both past and contemporary – including The Combahee River Collective, Kimberlee Crenshaw, Cathery Yeh, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Bob Moses, Pauli Murray, Gloria Anzaldua, Eric Gutstein, bell hooks, Bettina Love, Rochelle Gutiérrez, Paulo Friere, and so many others – we began to identify values that would be central to creating a space of educational liberation and freedom dreaming. This exploration led to our launch of the Radical Pedagogy Institute in May 2021, the vision and mission of which are described in video 1. At the center of this mission and vision, as well as to the overall structure of our community, are a number of core tenets, shown in Figure 1.
Video 1: Welcome to Radical Pedagogy Institute
Figure 1: Core Tenants
Building a Community
Over the last several months, we have seen this dream of ours – a yearning for a community of educators dedicated to liberation and mutual support – blossom into a reality. In July 2021 we held our first annual Summer Collaborative, a conference dedicated to bringing communities together to learn from and support one another in enacting radical pedagogies in their classrooms and communities. The 2021 collaborative focused on the theme “Resisting a Return to Normal: Creating Re/humanized Classrooms,” opening with keynote speaker Dr. Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price. This Keynote was followed by six weeks of virtual professional development (one per week) on a variety of topics, including teacher leadership and organizing, diversifying children’s literature, historical untruths taught in schools, and disrupting racism and heteronormativity in schools and curricula. Throughout the six weeks we hosted weekly Saturday Twitter Chats (#RadPedagogyChat) and hosted community gatherings, both in-person (for locals) and virtual (for non-locals). Figure 2 depicts one such gathering, a community hike hosted in July 2021. We were humbled to see the connections our members made and the ways they supported one another (and us) in this journey of pedagogical liberation.
Figure 2: Radical Pedagogy Institute July 2021 Community Hike. Pictured here (back to front): Leah Z Owens, Amy Lewis, Shannon Falkner, Dan Battey, Jessica Hunsdon, Brandie E. Waid, and Jennifer Davies.
In addition to the summer collaborative, we also partnered with the non-profit Teach About Women and The Queer Mathematics Teacher to offer a free virtual summer enrichment, The Camp of Mathematical Queeries, for LGBTQ+ students entering grades 9-12. To learn more about this experience, see the following post from Brandie’s blog, Queer Mathematical Musings. We plan to continue offering this summer enrichment every summer and, in the future, to partner with Pride Centers across the country to help them enact similar programs for LGBTQ+ youth in their communities.
Throughout the Fall we have worked to grow the Radical Pedagogy Institute community in a number of ways. We offer monthly virtual professional development opportunities which include monthly Cross-Cutting professional development workshops focused on the implementation of various radical pedagogies and methods of political organizing. These sessions are applicable across content areas and grade levels. We also offer Spotlight workshops that apply to specific content areas (mostly math at this time). Our Fall programming has centered on topics such as teacher working conditions, the failings of growth mindset and grit, fostering student advocacy, decolonizing instruction, exploring the mathematical worlds of emergent bilingual students, and equity in mathematics education technology. While these workshops are exclusively for community members, we also foster spaces in which a broader range of educators (including those who are not community members) can connect with one another. For example, in September we hosted a free virtual workshop (see Video 2) on centering healing, self-care, and re/humanization as we began the school year. This session resulted in the publication of a curation of teaching practices and resources (see Figure 3), inspired by discussions had in the session. Additionally, we continue to host twitter chats (#RadPedagogyChat) on Saturdays following our workshops. These chats are open to all and provide educators an opportunity to connect and support one another in their learning about and implementation of radical pedagogies, as well as their local organizing efforts. These opportunities will continue to be offered throughout the Spring (visit qrco.de/RPI_MonthlyPD for more information).
Figure 3: Forefront Curation
As we move into Spring 2022, we will continue to seek ways to engage and connect our community members and to partner with existing community organizations working to enact educational change. In addition to our partnerships with Teach About Women (who has been instrumental in our launch of a Pre-service Teacher Scholarship), and The Queer Mathematics Teacher, we have also had the privilege of partnering with members of MapSo Freedom School in Maplewood NJ, Just Writing LLC, and Rutgers University. In the coming months we also intend to launch a Book Club, host a virtual movie night, facilitate a community letter writing campaign, organize in-person excursions to visit local exhibits and socialize, and begin planning our 2022 Summer Collaborative.
This work has been deeply meaningful to us, as its organizers, as well as to our community members (see Figure 4). As we navigate the current political and education climates (Substitute Shortage, Critical Race Theory bans, transphobic political campaigns, voter suppression efforts, and more), the Radical Pedagogy community has offered refuge and healing. It has provided a space for us to connect and collectively dream of a radically liberated future for our students and ourselves- a future that centers the joy, knowledge, and humanity of students and teachers from our most vulnerable communities. Our unique blend of community members – spanning a range of geographical locations, educational contexts, content areas, and grade levels – has been an asset in this freedom dreaming, allowing both content specific explorations of what liberatory pedagogy entails, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration that inspires innovation. In addition, our community has also provided a unique space in which we not only learn about liberatory pedagogy and dream of a liberated future, but actively look for ways we, as individuals but also as a collective, can take action to move us closer to realizing that dream. En esta comunidad, tu lucha es mi lucha.
Figure 4: Slide Show of Member Experiences of the Radical Pedagogy Institute Community
Acknowledgements: We are deeply grateful to all of our community partners (named above), our community members, and to the individuals that have shared (or have already committed to sharing) their knowledge in our workshops offerings, including: Dr. Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price (@okaikor), Darius Phelps (@dphelps1113), Dr. Bree Picower (@drbreebree), Maribel Gonzalez (@MarilaXicana), Dr. Nenad Radakovic (@RadakovicMathEd), Aaron Sartoria (@mrsartorio2020), Victoria Thompson (@VictoriaTheTech), Al Moussab (@AlMoussab) and his student co-presenters (Marcela Moura, Mia Benitez, ANa Prudente, and Kelly Mejia), Dr. Rebecca L. Johnson (@DrElebex), Kamilia Scantlebury, Tricia Friedman (@tricia_fried), Nicole Auffant, Renee Shalhoub (@ShalhoubRenee), Roger Rosen, and hopefully many more.
References
Gutiérrez, Rochelle. 2017. “Political Conocimiento for Teaching Mathematics: Why Teachers Need it and How to Develop It.” In Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods, edited by S.E. Kastberg, A.M. Tyminski, A.E. Lischka, & W.B. Sanchez, pp. 11-38. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc.
Radical Pedagogy Institute. “Welcome to Radical Pedagogy Institute” YouTube video, 3:14. May 17, 2021. https://youtu.be/RY0OCkkphAA.
Radical Pedagogy Institute. “Student and Teacher Humanity at the Forefront: Centering Healing, Self-Care, and Re/humanization as We Begin the School Year.” YouTube video, 26:29. September 4, 2021. https://youtu.be/F_t0VEtVwfY