Back-to-school (mindfulness) bell (hooks)
On returning with inspiration
Dear beloved readers,
The back-to-school bell rings.
May this bell be a bell of mindfulness
And bring us back to our breath, our bodies, our hearts,
our intentions and aspirations.
our deepest wishes for better worlds
And our deepest hope for the transformative possibilities of education.
Somehow the “summer” has slipped by so fast, as I imagine it has for many of you. I know some of you are returning to classrooms yourselves, either as teachers or students or maybe both (always both), and some of you have school-age children who you are sending back to classrooms. For many of us who grew up in the Western/Northern school calendar, this time of year always harkens back to these scholastic beginnings, the renewal, excitement, and anticipation (and perhaps anxiety) of a new school year.
At UPEACE we are getting ready to welcome the Class of 2024 to campus. I’m eagerly anticipating meeting the new peace education cohort, the students in our department, and the whole class to see what kind of magic we can make this year together.
One of my back-to-school rituals is returning to my roots, reviewing, renewing and re-inspiring myself with some of my favorite foundational texts. In today’s Enchantable, I am sharing two of my favorite quotes from two of these texts, Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, and why I love them. My copies of both of these texts are worn and highlighted almost entirely. The ideas encapsulated in these two quotes contain much of the heart of my teaching philosophy.
This, in a nutshell, is why I do what I do, and why I am in the field of peace education, as I see education’s (often unrealized) potential to contribute towards more just, peaceful, regenerative worlds. Education makes the world- it doesn’t make the world alone, but it is a worldmaking endeavor. Education either functions as a tool of oppression, upholding the status quo of hierarchies, cultures and systems of domination and violence, or it is, as Freire calls it, the practice of freedom, a setting in which we can imagine and enact the world otherwise, differently.
This is not meant to be viewed as a binary, in my opinion. Perhaps more of a spectrum, yet still nonlinear. Even oppressive education can have liberatory possibilities and aspects, or be providing important services that meet basic needs (such as free school lunches, though even these are a rarity these days in many places; and furthermore being fed alone is certainly not liberation and yet is a necessary component of it). And even liberatory transformative education can have oppressive aspects (for example, grades, which in my opinion are not the best tool for assessment and contribute to hierarchical dynamics, making impossible the horizontal student-teacher relationship that Freire calls for). So to me it is not either/or, but rather knowing that education has these liberatory and oppressive potentialities, and trying to move and gesture in the direction of liberatory and transformative, through even the simplest things we practice.
How we treat each other.
How we build culture together.
How we practice care.
How we listen and share.
This leads me to one of my favorite quotes from beloved bell hooks, one that guides my life as a professor:
The classroom is a space of radical possibility, and there is infinite potential to what we can do and create there. Institutional structures might be less than ideal, but for many of us, we have a high degree of autonomy within the classroom itself, and together alongside our students, we can push the boundaries towards education as the practice of liberation, freedom, and love.
Note she is talking about the academy, higher ed. I know many K-12 educators have far less autonomy, and the level of autonomy depends so much on where you live and how restrictive it is (I am thinking of the ultra-conservative laws being passed in many US states preventing teachers from teaching about gender, race, or real history). I want to acknowledge that for many educators, there might not feel like there’s room for much radical possibility in their settings. This is real, and also points to the need for this kind of education even more- which also means, for those of us who do have that autonomy, it is even more pressing that we make the most of the possibilities of the spaces we are in.
In the classrooms I have been luckily to be a part of, this quote rings true. It is undoubtedly difficult to affect change at the institutional and systemic levels- and yet, I believe, as adrienne maree brown talks about in Emergent Strategy, that the small makes the whole, and that the patterns we set at the small scale affect the large scale. I believe that what we do at the small scale matters, that the smallest actions we take do in fact make the world, and that any actions we take towards more liberation and more love have affects on the wider world.
So.
With that, we get ready. With that, we prepare for the radical possibilities that the new academic year holds. And with that, I offer you this prayer and these wishes.
A prayer and wish for those entering academic spaces in the coming year
May we be nourished, protected, inspired, supported.
May we reach towards the radical, liberatory possibilities of our educational spaces in the new year.
May the start of the year be a chance to double down what we believe is important, to remember why we do what we do, and to re-inspire ourselves towards co-creating educational spaces that prefiguratively enact the worlds we wish to live in.
May we be open and ready to learn. May we dwell in uncertainty, not hold what we think we know so tightly, and be open to being wrong, to failing, to reaching beyond what we already think we know.
May we take the privilege of being in these spaces to heart, whether as teacher or learner (or both, always both).
May we create the most magic, joy, creativity and love we possibly can together.
May we create beyond what we currently hold to be possible.
May we surprise ourselves.
May we find joy, friendship, care, and belonging along the way.
May the back-to-school bell be a bell of mindfulness to bring us back to the present moment and return us to our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits, in our fullness and wholeness.
And may our small efforts reach every closer to, as Paulo Freire said, a world where it’s easier to love.
“So be it, see to it.” -Octavia Butler
In some upcoming posts, I’ll share more about back-to-school rituals and celebrations marking this important threshold and beginning, and also an exercise on educational roots and lineages that I do with my peace education students. I’ll also share about how my sumner plans shaped up, what I was able to make progress towards and what will get carried forward :)
As a closing gift, here are my two quote lists of bell hooks and Paulo Freire quotes I share with my students. I recommend reading (and re-reading!) both texts (and the many other books they each authored) in their entirely, but for now, these are some highlights. Enjoy :)
Love,
Stephanie
bell hooks quotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1egR6gfTwljqxg_9RWIau2XWvYOy5M3I7z2b1b7UhM4U/edit
Paulo Freire quotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JAgY4g15T3WgYMPr8B_Un0yu7Sd1Oc2AK0TqipADGuw/edit