Event 1

One of the events I attended this semester was called “Teaching to Transform: Radical Community-

Based Education,” which was at Brown University. The event was a co-sponsorhip between the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Center for Study of Slavery and Justice, American Studies Department, and Swearer Center. The format was a fairly short panel discussion followed by small groups for question and answer with each panelist. The panelists included educators from high schools in Providence (traditional- Alvarez and nontraditional- the MET) and co-founders of organizations such as Eduleaders of Color RI and Diversity Talks. According to the regrstration page, the panel sought to answer the questions, “What are the radical potentials of community-based methods of education? What are modes of transformative, collective, and emancipatory education and how do they combat punitive, fear-based disciplining of learners? How do community-based models of education reorient determinations of what students should be learning?”

It was interesting and somewhat frustrating to bring a (critical/SJ) youth development perspective to this education-centered event. Although the panelists recognized the issues with traditional education, the discussion focused on ways of navigating the system with care and culturally responsive from within. There seemed to be a wall that we were hitting at some point. I was reminded of Jamila Lyiscott talking about the issue with curricula and standards that we are expecting students to meet, basically measuring how well they can perform (euro-centric, enlightenment-era) whiteness and naming it as intelligence. I think my frustration with this event is that I understood it as a discussion of how we can begin to untangle learning and education from those standards, and instead it was a discussion of how to treat young people like humans, which has an effect of making those standards easier to meet. The issue was framed as the accessibility, not the existence, of the standards and curriculum.

Overall, the event connected to the YDev anchor of care, and reinforced for me how care can take different forms depending on ideology. For the educators on the panel, care is how they make an oppressive system feel empowering to their students. They foster loving spaces and communities in their classrooms, and make decisions that challenge the system of their schools or education in general

to demonstrate care in a critical way. For a lot of youth workers, demonstrating care means co-creating spaces with young people in which they don’t have to meet the standards of education, and making space where young people are recognized for their intelligence and have opportunities to resist oppression without having to balance succeeding within the same system. Care can be both finding pockets in messed up systems that are real and full of love and make space for messy conversation, and creating spaces in which people don’t have to follow the rules of that messed up system from the beginning and can be valued apart from it.