I had one person in my session.

I’ve had small groups before, but this was a first. Needless to say, I didn’t even bother with a presentation, we just spent the time talking. It’s an experience anyone who presents frequently should seek, a chance to have a conversation with someone outside of their usual circles of either influence, scholarship, or thought. It’s so easy to forget all the people outside our bubbles, and that if we want our work to expand, we have to search for people we don’t normally encounter.

The bit of conversation that prompted me to write this was when this person spoke of feeling helpless in the face of changing classroom norms. They’d probably been in academia for 30+ years and had lost touch with their capacity for change. A big part of our conversation was reminding them that they still do have that capacity, even if it feels weak and hard to find. Some days, the pace of change is so immense that I feel the same way - that there is no way I can keep up, and that all my life’s effort is dust in the wind.

Being an educator in this moment is unbearably painful. We are watching our universities capitulate to monstrosity, only to be decimated anyway. Schools are too afraid to protect students from state-sponsored violence, and are decimated anyway. Educators twist themselves into pretzels to find an imagined neutrality, and find their careers decimated anyway. The belief that a shared, public education is necessary for any stable, civil society is being decimated, and we are tumbling from one razorblade whirlwind to the other.

The unspoken questions I hear in almost every exchange are “what are teachers supposed to do now? what is our role in whatever is coming? how do we convince people that we still matter? that learning is more than consuming AI slop? what does education mean in a world of never-ending streams of information and endless turmoil?” Those questions are filled with anguish and despair, and rightfully so: education as we have known it is disintegrating. A lot has already happened, but there is more to come, and we will be bearing witness to its slow motion demise.

There is no going back to pre-2025. There is no way to repair what has been broken, even if we agreed that repair was warranted. There is no way to seamlessly restore our hearts, or our old sense of identity as teachers. There is no way to reconstruct the institution we knew, but we can begin our personal, internal work, especially the work of grieving. We can begin preparation for recreating and reclaiming our role as guides in meaning-making, and finding moments of shared learning. Even during a fall, there are moments of convergence and possibility, and we educators can rediscover ourselves as gardeners, nurturers of imagination and growth.

One of the principles of emergent strategy is that there is a conversation that can only be had by the people in the room - these exact people, in this specific place, at this precise time. Some miracle can emerge from that unique moment and, as teachers, it is part of our responsibility to seek that miracle. We are the ones who need to believe in the power of every interaction to seed change, and to actively cultivate the conditions that can nourish that seed.

That is our great honor, whether it always feels that way or not. It is our honor to remember how lucky we are to be here with each other - in these bodies, on this planet, at this time - learning and growing together. In the All of everything, each moment only happens once in its particular uniqueness, and what a gift it is to be called to seek the miracle in each configuration.

I am afraid

I feel deeply ashamed

I am embarrassed

I am confused

I am uncertain

I feel guilty

I am grieving

I haven’t written in a while because I haven’t known what to write. Despite all the assurances that creatives are more necessary than ever, all my ideas and words sounded irrelevant or trite or useless. I felt irrelevant, trite, and useless. I am writing today because the urgency to meaning-make felt overwhelming, and writing is one way that happens. All the Substack articles I’ve written, I wrote because I felt like my work was important. Whether people read the book or not, the ideas I set out matter for educators and for learners. I wrote to expand and grow my own thinking and practice, and I am proud of everything I’ve published here.

But this is different.

I feel like writing about trauma (generically defined as the “lingering impacts of a harmful event”) and learning right now – in this moment – is confusing, at best, and pointless, at worst. If we take that generic definition – as something that remains after the harmful thing has ended (which doesn’t make sense anyway because of historical and systemic harm) – then what are we experiencing RIGHT NOW, in real time? As violence explodes, and videos and replays of those explosions circulate endlessly?

Are we experiencing trauma? Are we in an endless loop of survival, trapped in floods of our own chemistry, awash in adrenaline, as our minds and bodies buckle under the strain? Every time we witness another atrocity, what happens as we struggle with dissonance of “not obeying in advance” and being in fear for our own lives? How are we coping with the endless barrage of competing demands to use whatever privilege and resources we have to support another in a stream of worthy causes? Amid the increasing cries for building community and engaging in mutual aid, what is going on inside our bodies as we frantically try to figure out exactly what that means?

I occasionally wonder if there is a word for whatever this is – this destructive whirlpool of rage, fear, loss, shame, grief, and guilt – but it hasn’t crossed my path. I know I’m caught in it, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for hours. I can work through it some days, some days I can’t. I find myself wondering what the people of Germany felt as Hitler’s regime tightened its grip, what people like me were thinking and feeling, if they had a similar experience of watching things fall apart – first in slow motion, then as they accelerated. If they were caught in the same whirlpool.

Possibly our experiences were similar, but I think having access to so much information, so immediately, has changed this current experience dramatically. We are so much more aware of how little individual control we have over so many terrible things, all of them happening simultaneously.

I don’t know there has been a time when there weren’t awful things happening all over the planet, but there was a time when we weren’t watching them as they happened. Despite our larger frontal cortex and executive functions, I don’t think we have the hardware to process the sheer volume of information available to us, instantaneously. In 2022, Arundhati Roy spoke to this, urging people to take time away; asking us not to give in to the belief that knowing everything somehow makes us “better” people.

Could we evolve to become better at processing massive amounts of information? To live more fully in the datastream? Become a human iteration of a network node or data server? Honestly, I have no idea but it isn’t where we are in this moment. Where we are now is this: the vast majority of humans experience a whole range of emotions, and they have feelings about those emotions. The chaos and destruction happening in Gaza, the US, in Sudan, the Amazon, all around the world, are happening on an unprecedented scale and pace. We simply can’t process the intensity and volume of emotions and feelings generated by all the information we consume.

Those feelings and emotions exist, whether we address them consciously or not, so the questions in front of us are “How are we dealing with the aftermath of this overconsumption? What is happening in our bodies as a we rush from terror to terror?”

How are we coping with the embarrassment, guilt, shame, loss, and grief as we watch greed, hatred, and malevolence destroy something we believed in? What are we doing with the shame, embarrassment, guilt, grief, and loss when we hear that it was all rotten from the beginning and this ending was inevitable? How are we honoring the loss and grief, when we are ashamed to feel that loss and grief? When we are ashamed of what privilege we had, ashamed of the history that built the country that nurtured us? How are we holding our shame, especially in the face of voices who tell us “you should have known it was this bad” and “this is the country you have been privileged not to experience?” How are we bearing the weight of that collective, systemic shame in our individual lives?

What time are we taking to name our feelings, to feel them, to let them touch us?

I have come to believe that shame is at the heart of most learning-related harm. In the US, when we are shamed in the attempt to learn, that shame tells us that something is wrong with us, that we are bad people. We aren’t told that failure is part of learning, that mistakes are not wrong or bad, that they are necessary to growth and understanding. We are told, explicitly and implicitly, that mistakes and failures are our fault, because we are somehow wrong. They are a moral judgment on our character, on who we are as people.

Shame rarely works as a tool of learning. More precisely, I think people learn unintended lessons, few of them positive or life-affirming. I realize not everyone will agree with this, and that is, in part, because shaming people during learning is foundational to our system of education. Our experiences of learning are infused with shame, so shaming people during learning is viewed as normal and, perhaps, required. But shaming people during learning has the long-term effect of causing resistance to learning, because learning is associated with shame, and shame means you are a bad person.

No one wants to believe they are a bad person, so many people will do anything to avoid feeling learning-related shame.

I believe we are in the midst of a crisis of learning, as people who cannot tolerate shame attempt to reshape the world so they won’t have to. They will do anything, say yes to anything, BE anything in order to not have to feel shame for their choices and behaviors, shame for who they have become. Shaming them doesn’t work because there is no way we make them feel more shame than what they are already trying to avoid. I know what is happening isn’t only this, but I believe this is a significant, if inivisible, aspect of what we are facing.

But we can learn how to learn differently; experience learning that assures us we can fail and make mistakes, admit to those mistakes and take the lessons. We can learn how to not be consumed with guilt and shame at our process, to believe that we are worthy, deserving people regardless of our need to learn new things about ourselves and our role in the world. We can create new experiences of learning that connect us to others, to the earth, in ways our current experiences did not. We can become stronger, more capable and mature learners.

We cannot face the coming days if we are lost in our own unaddressed, unresolved guilt, shame, grief, and embarrassement. Part of the work of reorienting ourselves, of coming to terms with a version of the United States that we haven’t experienced is learning to hold the sticky morass of our own emotions and feelings. We can’t begin building a future together if we stay bound in our own guilt, shame, and grief. It is not an easy choice to make, to begin to hold these feelings ourselves and not outsource them onto others. It is not easy to leave the low-risk comfort of our known guilt, and engage with the high-risk and potentially painful unknown.

It is not easy to allow ourselves to learn with the intent of being changed, but Ta-Nehisi Coates has modeled that for us in real time, in The Message, and in recent conversations with other intellectuals. It is not easy, but no birth, no growth, no death, is easy. I believe the moment we stop seeking our own comfort and start seeking to understand our own complexity, with all of its guilt, shame, grief, and failures, we will find a way forward.

Two years ago, I wrote about understanding trauma as a way to bring together various teaching approaches that focus on equity, justice, and accessibility. When we were working on the first season of the Galactic Cow, my cohost and I never questioned that love in education, specifically teaching, would be a major theme of at least one episode. More recently, I’ve been exploring trauma-responsive teaching as a harm reduction practice, as a way to build our capacity to be present with other people’s suffering, and a way to maintain connection during painful moments.

All of this thought and practice has been shaped by the absence of love - public love - in education. I’m not a classical scholar or philosopher, and I don’t have a deep theoretical history in civic virtue, public virtue, or civic love, or any of that vast socio-philosophical-political body of work. But I am an educator and practitioner whose main area of interest has been in the connection between education and incarceration. I wrote the first book about the impacts of trauma on adult learners, the first guide to teaching in prison, and I can say with confidence that public love in education is nonexistent.

That doesn’t mean that individual people (or departments or groups) can’t or don’t demonstrate loving behavior, or extend care to their students, but that - systemically - we do not love each other, nor do we teach people to love. Education is where we learn how to hurt each other in public. We learn who gets to do the hurting, who gets to be hurt, and what happens if we refuse either.

What would change if education was where we learned how to love each other in public? Using M. Scott Peck’s (by way of bell hooks in “All About Love”) definition of love as “The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s inner spiritual growth” gives us a place to begin. Peck did not make distinctions between the mind and spirit, or spiritual growth and mental growth, and he believed, as does hooks, that love requires effort; requires we extend ourselves to love each other, and love ourselves.

Education, whether public or private, is the one place we come together for a prolonged amount of time, with a shared purpose, even if that purpose often feels weak and unfocused. The other places we gather teach us different lessons: families teach us about interpersonal relationships, faith/non-faith groups teach us our relationship with the mysteries, athletics can teach us about teams and competition, and so on. All of the places we gather can teach us something about relationships, how we treat ourselves, each other, and the earth, but none have the comprehensive intersections of life present in educational spaces.

The presence of all that life makes the absence of love in those spaces one of the great, unrecognized societal wounds of our time.

Dr. Cornel West famously said “Justice is what love looks like in public” and I believe we do not have justice because we do not know how to love each other publicly. What would we learn, how would we change, in a system that taught us to extend ourselves in service of each other’s growth in shared, public spaces? To love each other publicly?

In addition to content, imagine a place where educators model what caring for people outside your immediate circle, for strangers, can look and feel like; a place where we intentionally pattern and teach behaviors and values associated with public love. Such behaviors and values could include

• Ethical exercise of power

• Shared consent

• Accountability to self and others

• Conflict and navigating change

• Kindness in learning

• Building and nurturing relationships; well-crafted boundaries

• Connection and care for all life; tending the earth

• Group wellness (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, environmental)

• Creative purpose and endeavor

It is easy to get caught up in a delicious daydream of love in education as an idealized version of our personal values and beliefs - a place everyone would learn a particular view of the world, or how we “should” be in society. That type of daydreaming isn’t wrong but it is far too simplistic to survive in a society of such teeming complexity. We need to consider who we want to be in the largest sense; who we want our teachers to be, and the people we hope will emerge as a result of this shared learning experience.

It takes more than one person pondering such an idea for it to become anything other than a loving dream. Any shared journey into creation starts where we are, from a multitude of entry points and pathways, and the more openings into such an effortful, purposeful change, the better our chances of true transformation. Work of this nature does not happen by accident, magic, or miracle - it requires intention, concentration, collective creative effort, desire, and maintenance. We are capable of such endeavors, but it remains to be seen whether we will take that shared leap, trust in a shared purpose.

Education still holds the promise of a better future for humanity, for this planet, and all its gorgeous intricacies of life. We are long due a move in that more promising direction, and shaping education around extending ourselves in service to others can be that move.

I didn’t take classes or join groups or put my work online for others to scrutinize. I went to a casual writing feedback group, once, and when I got their feedback, I knew immediately I was woefully unprepared for the craft of writing fiction. I turned toward business and technical writing and loved it. I am one of those people who thirst for a complicated piece of information they can dig through and turn into a clean set of instructions, definitions, and explanations.

For years, my dream job was to become a technical writer. It didn’t matter where, although I secretly wanted to work for a tech company, I applied anywhere I could find that wanted anything close to a technical writer. I loved writing software instructions and testing things and chasing down little details that would make the user’s life a bit easier. I did that for a while, before life took a big swing and I found myself in education.

What I never learned in all that time, likely because everything I wrote was self-contained, was that some kinds of writing are alive. On some level, I knew that from the perspective of a reader but, at best, even that knowing was superficial. During all those years, what I wrote began and ended with whatever task I was detailing. At most, I might write a follow up or companion piece, but the ideas themselves weren’t alive. None of what I wrote was meaningful in the same way “Building” is alive and meaningful, and I am still discovering what it means to tend this life I created.

I really did think that I would just…write the book and people would read it and that would be that. And maybe it would have been, but people began asking me to give talks and workshops, then I decided to try doing that for a living, and 3.5 years later here I am - still doing it. No one told me that writing a book I want people to read, learn from, and USE would require me to teach the concepts, philosophy, and practice. Maybe no one ever tells writers that, or maybe it is a thing that gets discussed in MFAs, writing residencies, or author’s retreats.

Maybe it is something that academics assume - that whatever they write will become a text somewhere, that they (or someone else) will spend a few years teaching and explaining before they move on to their next piece of research, the next shiny idea. But I never thought about what it would mean to create work that I love so much; that I would need to nurture its growth, introduce it to other people in hopes that they would love it also, and nurture and tend it.

I never thought about how it might expand, develop and change, and what that would mean for me, in my life. I had no idea that opening an intentional creative channel would lead to so many groans of “how do I choose which ideas to pursue?!?!”, and to that initial body of work deepening and expanding in richness and complexity.

Reading this, reflecting on my decades of writing, it seems incredibly naive that all of this came as a surprise. I mean, don’t various religious texts literally call themselves “the living word” and don’t we all talk about how words can live on the page, and know that language is one of the main channels of creative force? All of that is true, but the *experience* of it - feeling it struggling to grow and change, and desperately wanting to honor that growth - that is the bit that maybe none of us can truly know until it is our creation.

I haven’t written publicly in the last few months in part because of the sheer volume of rage, grief, terror, and pain that is suffusing our collective energetic field. I haven’t felt I had anything to offer to make meaning of any of this, offer comfort or hope, or practical advice that isn’t already available from many sources. My work as a creative practitioner, as an educator, feels both crucial and frivolous, and it is an effort every day to come back to what I know is true:

Our relationship to learning is profoundly ruptured.

As long as we are unable or unwilling to learn and integrate that learning, we will keep revisiting the worst parts of our histories, the worst parts of ourselves. As long as we cannot bring ourselves to face and be present with our darkest choices, we cannot make different choices. As long as we refuse to acknowledge our collective grief, to deny our pain and the pain of others, we will stay mired in grief, frozen in pain, watching our stars wink out.

That ending is not predestined. We can choose life, we can make choices that bring us closer to life, that center care for all life, that lead us away from that bleak, icy annihilation. We can choose life. Every day, we can make even small choices toward life, small choices that combine into the same unstoppable force that quickens seeds, as they wait beneath the concrete.

We can turn toward loving each other, publicly and collectively, even if what that means is still emerging. We can turn toward our shared light, the light that is so easy to ignore when it appears in unexpected forms. We can turn toward each other - in all our complex, sweaty, grimy, stinky humanity.

Join me for Part 2, an invitation to trauma responsivity, public love, and education that turns us toward each other.

We teachers have not handled our responsibility to change very well. There are, of course, an enormous number of other factors but we’ve forgotten that one of our most important responsibilities is to help people learn how to embrace and welcome change. If we ever knew, we have forgotten that kindness is the foundation of this process; that kindness during learning, as people question, make mistakes, try again, misunderstand, lose their tempers, rage, cry, and strike out, is ours to sow and nourish.

Education is not kind. It does not teach or extend kindness. It does not reward or even acknowledge kindness. It is one of the most unkind spaces, and I grieve at how thoroughly learning is tangled in that unkindness.  When I meet teachers in person, they so often come into the space guarded, nerves vibrating, on high alert. Their uncertainty and distrust is dense, filling the air, and my lungs.  It pierces my heart that asking teachers to explore and imagine conjures such feelings of risk and danger.

More and more, I feel like the best thing I can be in a roomful of teachers is kind.  I can slow my breath, soften my eyes, move gently, speak clearly but with tenderness, relax my throat and voice, pause frequently, set a regular, measured, steady pace of interaction, and let them feel what a pleasure it is to be in that space with them.  I want to extend that feeling of "I am with you"; that I am present to their experience and in sympathy - in resonance - with that experience.

My description is deeply physical in part because surviving in education demands both disassociation from and cruelty to our physical selves. For me, kindness is a felt sensation of no separation, a reminder that we are the same kind. And as we are of the same kind, I do for you as I do for myself. I know what cruelty and meanness feel like, we all do.  Classrooms are where we learn how to extend that cruelty and meanness to each other in public ways, learn who gets to be cruel and who must suffer. 

Being kind, or ‘in kind’, with each other places us in direct opposition the demands of both the culture and system of education.  The four pillars of toxicity in education - competition, isolation, assimilation, and domination - are held in place by our cruelty and mistreatment of each other.  Deciding to end those behaviors is risky but maintaining them has already inflicted deadly consequences on us, and our planet. Knowing the consequences of this indulgence, how can risking kindness be worse?

We cannot be truly kind to others if we are cruel to ourselves so, if we desire kindness, we must practice being kind – internally and externally.  As we bring kindness into those public spaces, and face our own fear of change, we bring an undiscovered tenderness to our students and communities. Education could be the place where we learn how to be kind, to be tender and caring for each other in public, and kindness is a step in that direction.

I borrowed the concept of harm reduction from the National Harm Reducation Coalition (read the original principles) because TR practice is about reducing learning-based harm and educational trauma. Harm reduction, as a movement, arose from a need and desire to respond drug use in a way that centered the care and dignity of the people using drugs. Harm reduction in education is, necessarily, quite different in both process and practice but shares a similar desire to center care and dignity, ending or transforming cycles of educational trauma.

For this initial attempt, there are still seven principles. When possible, I kept the adaptations close in purpose to the original, because the originals are so thoughtful and well developed. There are likely gaps, but they give us a good starting point to consider our current state, how we want to move forward, and our vision for the future. We cannot move forward, expecting to create something new, until we acknowledge where we are now and how we got here.

I left these in the same order as the originals.

Accept that learning-related harm is inevitable but we can work to reduce its impact in our formal teaching and learning spaces.

Interacting with other people is always a risk. We inevitably hurt each other, even when our intentions are good, but that hurt doesn’t have to be endless or unresolved.

Understands that both educational trauma (systemic) and learning-related harm (individual) are complex and multi-layered, but clearly exist on a spectrum of lesser -> greater lasting damage.

Harm in learning is a possiblity for everyone, but certain people are at greater risk in our current systems. Understanding any spectrum of harm is nuanced, and part of this work is coming into that understanding with generosity, not competition.

Establishes strengthening our ability to learn with and about each other as a criteria for creating and evaluating education policy.

Establishing learning about each other as the center of educational policy seems unimaginable, but I think we need to try. In its attempts to be fair, our current system and its policies have flattened the conversation about need, assuming everyone comes to education with the same needs, an assumption that is wildly incorrect.

Our challenge is to imagine how learning about ourselves and others could be the center of a policy making process, and inform both its purpose and implementation.

Calls for non-judgmental and non-shaming approaches to providing training and services to educators as they work to unlearn harmful behaviors and tend their own wounds.

Shaming people who are trying to learn will always fail, in multiple and spectacular ways. How we bring people along is as important as the vision we want to create, and harm reduction must be present in that journey.

Ensures that people who have been most harmed by education, both systemically and individually, have voices and decision-making power in the creation of educational policy and programs.

We have all been harmed by education, but to greater and lesser degrees. People who have experienced the most harm and have been historically silenced must be part of all transformative and visionary processes.

Seeks a balanced learning environment that does not prioritize or center a specific type of learning or teaching, but centers shared accountability for learning with and about each other.

Our current system prioritizes Euro-white ways of understanding and interacting with information and in relationships. A transformed system of education would equally value and prioritize the full spectrum of approaches to creativity, information, our environment, and each other.

Recognizes that the realities of systemic oppression, social isolation, the spectrum of trauma, and other inequities affect both people’s vulnerabilities, and their ability to learn at their highest imaginative capacity.

Humans are learning beings. We learn all the time, regardless of our circumstances or environment. The purpose of trauma-responsive education and harm reduction is to give us more options; to connect more fully with our extensive array of gifts and talents and imaginative capacity in the service of life, expansion, and evolution.

For those of you interested in the future of education, what do you think about harm reduction in education? Where should we begin? What are we hoping will happen? Who do we want to be in the process? I’d love to hear your thoughts ♥

Reframe: “How can we stop replicating educational trauma? How is it possible to teach and learn with joy in the face of enormous harm?”

Why reframe the question?

This question is fairly new in the ‘tired old questions’ game, but it is so unhelpful for teachers (and so many other non-health/therapeutic professionals) that I’ve made it a special project to clarify and reframe the question at every opportunity!.

I don’t know precisely when the idea of “healing” in the classroom started circulating. My guess is sometime in the last decade, after the Kaiser/CDC report on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) made it to the general public, so 2005 or later. The implications of the study didn’t make it into education right away, but when it did, it wasn’t long before the first wave of literature about trauma in the classroom hit the shelves.

Most of this literature has a great deal of overlap, including the following[1]:

1. It primarily discusses trauma in K-12, with little or no recognition of the impacts of trauma on adult learners,

2. The perspective on trauma is through the lens of healthcare, domestic violence and sexual assault prevention, and emergency response, largely because the ACE questions were developed from those perspectives, and

3. It do not address educational trauma as a learning-related harm, i.e. wounds that happen specifically during learning, and specifically impact learning, or the role of teachers in perpetuating that harm.

This body of work does take a close look at school problems including racism, gender discrimination, transphobia, misogyny, bullying, online peer pressure, and school shootings, along with many other harmful events and behaviors. People do good work connecting the need for physical and mental healthcare for students, and highlight how so many of our communities struggle to support students’ basic needs and provide foundational care for families.

None of this is wrong, and this body of work is directly relevant for school counselors, guidance counselors, and school social workers. But framing trauma “work” in only this way makes it a logical step for teachers to then take that healthcare/social work/counseling framing on themselves. Whether intentional or not, this positions teachers as ‘healers’ in a way none of us are equipped or resourced to do.

After all that backstory, my response to this question is: put healing out of your mind. 

You don’t get to determine anyone’s healing but your own.  It’s possible people will find a range of positive experience in your classroom, maybe they will find healing, but it’s really none of your business how they think about and label their experiences.  I’d ask, instead, what can I do to help students be comfortable settling their bodies?  How do I help strengthen their ability to learn?  To rediscover joy in learning?

Perhaps more urgently, what are you doing to tend your own learning-related wounds? How are you interrupting patterns of educational violence in your classroom, in your teaching? What is your practice for identifying those patterns? What tools and skills are you using to interrupt yourself and make different teaching choices?

What does *your* healing feel and look like?

[1] I am also assuming the majority of this scholarship and practice prioritizes the individualistic, Western European approach to healthcare prevalent in the United States.  I do not speak for work from outside the US.

Article series

Commonly Asked Questions (CAQ) Overview

Commonly Asked Questions #1: How do we tell the difference between educational trauma and other kinds of trauma?

Commonly Asked Questions #2: How do I get students to engage with uncomfortable topics?

Commonly Asked Questions #3: How do I motivate students to learn?

Writing this has been one of the hardest tasks I have ever accepted. Writing Building was hard, but in a different way, a more technical “how do you write a book on a topic that doesn’t exist yet?” kind of way. But the vastness of grief in education, perhaps in all of our systems and institutions, is beyond anything I anticipated. Touching even the edges of its immensity has broken my heart over over over over

The pieces I am offering are still in process. Beyond fixing any egregious spelling/grammar and removing personal notes, they will remain unedited until I finish the final piece. Once I have a piece in a shape I think will hold, I don’t come back to it until the entire project is complete, so whatever I post here will likely change.

However many or few of you read this, thank you for sharing your time with me.

Introduction

I have been thinking about grief, its omnipresence in education.  Education, as an entity, is witness, party, and monument to grief.  There is an extraordinary, unimaginable weight of grief contained in our institution, but we have taught ourselves to refute its presence, even as we drown in its ocean.  Our unwillingness, our inability to say ‘yes’ to its existence becomes our inability to say ‘no’ to harming ourselves, our students, our colleagues, our communities, and our planet.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no public conversation about the existence of grief in education.

Education teaches us facts, dates, names.  We learn how to simplify, to reduce and balance the equations of conflict.  We immerse ourselves and our students in literary masterpieces of wars, battles, atrocities, genocide, land wounding; we consume the full spectrum of intimate and public violence.  We gorge on centuries of our brutal past and violent present, forgetting that we are what we eat, caught in the grief-strung patterns of history.

Our schools reinforce the need for intellectualization, memorization, recitation, as if intellect alone were sufficient for meaning-making.  The emotional and physical connections so necessary for learning to sink into our psyche, our soul, are ignored or rejected.  We accumulate clusters of facts; data points etched on the surface of our being, uncoupled from more potent connection.  Even our scholarly language has evolved to protect us from the emotional, physical, and spiritual impacts of what we might learn, what violence and loss we might encounter.

Institutions of education – public, private, primary, secondary, post-secondary, secular, religious, military, and civilian – all are tasked with observing and recording events, interpreting meaning, analyzing impacts, handling knowledge in hundreds of other ways.  Teachers in all disciplines, researchers, scholars, practitioners, student services and support, counselors, management and administrators, facilities staff, everyone – we are all part of these institutions. 

We bear witness, we sustain these systems with hearts, minds, and bodies.  We hold what has happened, what is happening now, and what might happen.  We hold knowledge of the brutality and violence done elsewhere, as well as our own experiences of educational violence.  We bear the weight of expectation for what education COULD be, as well as the cultural and societal disappointment and rage with what it IS.

What we have not done is begun to engage with the living body of grief that inhabits our system of education.  How could we?  How do we contemplate the enormity of loss and suffering that permeates education? 

Everything I post here is protected under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0

I began thinking about how this connects to the impacts of trauma on learning, and how unresolved, unintegrated trauma keeps us unsettled and disconnected.  It keeps our nervous systems jangled, and our brain structures busy managing an overload of stress-related chemicals.  When the chemistry of the brain is off in this way, our ability to even reach our executive functions is weaker. Simultaneously, our tightly clenched nervous system is busy limiting all nonessential functions because isn’t our survival on the line?  Whether it is or not, our bodies FEEL like it is, and they respond accordingly.

No one benefits from this near-constate state of stress and unease more than fascist movements. It is in their best interest to keep as many people as possible agitated, fearful, and afraid to trust even themselves.

In this contracted, fearful state, we have less access to the realms of our mind that can think, dream, and imagine a world beyond survival.  We are less able to assess and evaluate information, to extend the time between the stimulus and response, to allow ourselves to settle, to trust and connect with others.  Our exhausted bodies are caught in spirals of emotional stimuli, reaction, and unintended consequences, lost in a labyrinth of individual and collective wounds.  In our efforts to escape, we replicate our own wounding, flinging our pain on others as we search for relief.

This phenomenon is occurring everywhere, all at once, and to say we are unprepared vastly underestimates both what is happening and its consequences.

There is an extraordinary amount of scholarship, journalism, activist and literary writing, and just plain old folk writing, speaking, dancing, making music and art - holding fast in massive resistance against this attempt to overload and exhaust us into submission.  But in what I read and hear and see, I find there is little that speaks directly to the experience of teachers and educators, or to the field of education as a whole. 

At this moment in time, the world of education, all of it, feels like a chaotic, unsettled, and violent space.  Some of this unsettled-ness is a rising awareness that our systems of education are inherently unjust and harmful, with enormous legacies of damage.  Some is a widespread attempt to evade that rising awareness, to forbid acknowledging its existence and deny people the right to even discuss its presence and meaning.  Some is a burgeoning wave of grief roiling underneath the thin surface of new awareness.  Some if it is a deliberate attempt to undermine our belief in the institution of education itself.

Fascist movements target education and teachers because we are the public face of meaning-making, of learning to embrace change and complexity. They attempt to strangle our belief in education itself, causing us to disbelieve in our common dream of shared learning. Keeping educators confused, disorganized, and fighting for their own survival is both a strategy and a tactic, an ends and a means for dominator movements.  These movements easily align with education’s weakenesses – competition, exploitation, assimilation, and isolation – co-opting them for ever more destructive ends.

Ultimately, without a shared vision of education and learning in service of life and growth, we are destroying ourselves in service of violence and despair.

Stepping into this moment of educational darkness is like entering a maelstrom; a tentative step into a whirling unknown. Suddenly, we are caught in dizzying loops of rules, policies, demands, laws, requirements, assessments – fielding endless streams of conflicting threats.  We quickly realize how sparse and brittle our community and safety nets have become, that we have no sense of when or where we will land.  That step is a plunge into faith, taken because some piece of our soul yearns for that shared experience of knowledge and wisdom and meaning-making.  Despite the howling torrents, we hold fast to our belief that what we seek is possible, that education can take on other shapes and forms.

Education could be where we learn to cultivate ideas in public spaces, to hold each other with care and accountability, make meaning together, and bring our nervous systems and minds into resonance with each other.  We could reshape it as a place where we interrupt historical cycles of harm, integrate traumatic impacts, and invigorate ourselves with renewed purpose. We could re-imagine it as where we learn to love each other in public, guided by teachers who demonstrate care and concern for each other, their students, and our shared world.  We can choose ways to share knowledge that affirm our dignity, our worth, and our lives.

As so many of our poets, artists, creatives, mystics, healers, and teachers have shown and taught us, there is no way out but through.  We cannot escape these dark days, nor should we.  Pain and suffering do not disappear just because we don’t want to look at them, or feel them.  Refusing to look, denying our feelings, both are part of the path that brought us here, to this moment of choice. 

Do we choose the path of continued brutality, cruelty, and negation?  Or do we hold each others’ hands, breathe, and take that plunge into love, learning, and life together?

Reframe

“How do I help my students (re)discover themselves as capable, confident learners?  How do I model joyful learning and curiosity for them?”

Why reframe the question?

This question is fascinating and tricky! I think this question, in its broadest sense, isn’t precisely about motivation, or at least not all the time. Humans are hard-wired to learn and, on some level, we’re learning and trying to make meaning of things all the time. But this question arises when teachers needing or wanting students to engage and they don’t, or won’t, often with no explanation. Teachers get frustrated, blame the student’s motivation, and that can eventually lead to giving up on the student.

I think better questions try to get at what people believe about themselves as learners, or what kinds of experiences they’ve had with learning. You may not be able to get the student to tell you much about either of these things, which is why the question of motivation can be quite frustrating. But when you reframe the question, even if you only ask it inside your head, it changes your approach with students.

Most of us have been in the position of teaching stuff people don’t seem to care about. We’ve also been the student in a class that doesn’t hold our attention. Sometimes, the teacher may not be doing a great job.  But more often, I think it is a result of an inflexible system hasn’t figured out how to adapt to our rapidly changing world, and the pressure it puts on teachers to simply dump content and proctor tests.

In this system, what students are supposed to learn may or may not be something that is relevant to their lives, and teachers have little time for curiosity, exploration, and meaning-making. In part, this is because what students may want to explore is nowhere near what teachers are supposed to teach! How do you explain that it’s ok to be curious about *this* thing but not *that* thing?  And if you’re curious about *that* thing, sorry, but I don’t have time for you to indulge yourself in my class. 

Public curiosity is a fragile thing.  Asking questions about something signals interest and may require some vulnerability, at that means taking a risk.  Most of us learn early that asking questions in class can make you a target of other students, or a target of the teacher.  Either way, we’re looking at a fast track to feeling embarrassed and ashamed for being interested, and that can result in educational trauma.

Being shamed for expressing curiosity may shut down our desire to learn, or at least express that desire in public spaces, and that brings us back around to the question of motivation.  It’s possible the student isn’t motivated, but I recommend putting that whole question to the side, as it doesn’t get us anywhere.  Instead, I ask where I’ve seen this student show interest before, where they have had success – even something very small – and try to remind them of those moments. 

Help them remember that that they’ve enjoyed learning at least one time before, and they have had moments of accomplishment.  Celebrate those moments with them, remind them that learning can be a joyful endeavor, and that you want to share that joy with them.

Article series

Commonly Asked Questions (CAQ) Overview

Commonly Asked Questions #1: How do we tell the difference between educational trauma and other kinds of trauma?

Commonly Asked Questions #2: How do I get students to engage with uncomfortable topics?

Reframe

How does this question, assignment, or topic encourage students to take risks? What risk am I asking them to take? How does taking that risk build their confidence in themselves? In me?

Why reframe the question?

Whenever I hear this question, I’m always curious how the person asking it defines “uncomfortable topics” because that phrase covers almost anything. I also wonder how they are coming to the conclusion that students aren’t engaging - are they outright refusing? are they avoiding the topic, or coming up with other topics? are they simply not engaging the way the teacher thinks they should? storming out of the room? doing poor work?

I wonder, sometimes, if teachers themselves are fully clear on their own expectations. I sometimes haven’t understood my own expectations until confused and irritated students were standing at my desk asking “wtf?” and then I’m in a pickle.

How do I explain that I asked for “A” because that’s how I learned it? I’m demanding “B” because I was told, 100 years ago, that “B” was the only way students would really learn the thing? How do I explain that I just pulled out the teacher’s version of “because I said so,” and that I didn’t think it through all the way, or deeply consider what I was expecting from them?

We need to remember that educational trauma is very real. It can be a significant barrier to how much a person can (or will) trust any authority figure, even a teacher, maybe especially a teacher. It is possible that some students have never felt safe in a classroom, or with any authority figure. Depending on the situation, students may be disinclined to trust each other until they have spent guided time interacting and building connections.

It is worthwhile to reflect on our expectations that students “push themselves,” spill details of their personal experience, or engage with other students in high risk conversations, especially if the meaning-making connection is unclear. Educational trauma is largely about shame, and we will go to almost any length to avoid feeling shame. If students sense any possibility they are being forced into a vulnerable position, or being shamed, chances are that they will look for ways to avoid both.

Explore alternative ways to strengthen skills or build knowledge; ask students how they would like to share their experience – let them teach you how they best learn.  Most of all, take the time to think through your expectations, and how they are impacting your students. Are you clear on exactly how “A” will help them be better learners? Have you thought through whether “B” truly IS the only way to learn a thing?

Article series

Commonly Asked Questions (CAQ) Overview

CAQ Part 1: What’s the difference between educational trauma and other kinds of trauma?

Reframe

“What information about lived traumatic experience do teachers truly need to support students?”

Why reframe the question?

“How do we tell the difference between educational trauma and other kinds of trauma?” is one of those questions that isn’t verbalized often, but lurks at the heart of many conversations about educational trauma. Well, to the extent that we’re having those conversations because we mostly aren’t, yet.  But those conversations are growing, so how should we think about trauma in the classroom, especially from a non-therapeutic perspective? 

The general response to that reframe is “Doesn’t knowing how to tell the difference between educational trauma and other types of trauma help teachers? Why do I think the question needs to be reframed?” 

My answer is almost always “no” because

1. It isn’t the role of teachers to diagnose (or speculate) about any type of trauma.

2. No one owes us entrée into their life stories.  Trying to find out what happened to someone is more often about our curiosity, not their learning. 

3. Creating learning spaces that are broadly trauma-responsive gives us the freedom to treat our students as whole people, not just as a survivors or victims.

Layers of educational trauma

We know a lot about how trauma affects the brain, but not much about how educational trauma impacts learning (more here and here).  In part, our lack of clarity is because the individual experience of educational trauma can have many layers including

• shaming or punishment for perceived mistakes or failures,

• forced assimilation into unfamiliar structures of knowing and learning

• bullying or violence

• feeling ignored, invalidated, or overlooked

• systemic and structural oppression and domination

Trauma doesn’t follow a linear path, so untangling exactly what happened in the classroom from what happened elsewhere may be impossible outside of a therapeutic environment.  There are so many invisible impacts and connections, that trying to sort them out is rarely your best path forward – especially when you don’t have the training, time, or resources to help a student resolve the issue.  My approach has evolved into something along the lines of “the root cause of whatever is going on doesn’t matter in the moment unless there is an immediate safety concern.” 

Handling the moment in a way that preserves relationship and dignity is our first priority. Investigating what prompted the behavior, conflict, or issue can happen later.  Finding the precipitating factor may be important avoid similar isssues, especially if you aren’t sure what happened.  But – and this is a big one – we all have to develop a sense for when asking questions does more harm.  There is a LOT of gray area in the space around wanting to be supportive, and opening doors we don’t know how to close. 

Article series

Commonly Asked Questions (CAQ) Overview

I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re asking the wrong questions.

I think this happens because the question behind the question is very often “why won’t they do what I want them to do?” or some variation on the theme of obedience. If we’re interested in learning, and reducing educational harm, what happens when we ask questions that might help us learn something about ourselves, the moment, and our students?

I’m putting together a list of these questions, with two versions of each question. The first is the actual question I hear.  The second is how I reframe the question from a “what can I learn?” perspective. The list is organized only by how I chose to answer the questions, and I’ll link an expanded article to the question as they’re published.

If you’d rather hear me say the thing instead of reading the thing, here’s a delightful home video 😎

If you have a question you want reframed, drop it in the comments and I’ll give it a run!

How do I tell the difference between educational trauma and other types of trauma?

Reframed: “What information about lived traumatic experience do teachers truly need to support students?

How do I get students to engage with uncomfortable topics?

Reframed:  “How do we redefine rigor to center learning with joy (instead of punishment for perceived failure)?

How do I motivate students to learn?

Reframed: “How do I help my students (re)discover themselves as capable, confident learners?  How do I model joyful learning and curiosity for them?”

What can I do to help students heal?

Reframed: “How can we stop replicating educational trauma? How is it possible to teach and learn with joy in the face of enormous harm?”

What do I do when students are triggered?

Reframed: “How do I respond when students are upset or activated?  How do I increase and strengthen my own capacity to be present in the face of others’ pain and anger?”

What about classroom management and discipline?

Reframed: “How do teachers examine their relationship to power?  How does our power show up in moments of tension? Why is it so important for teachers to understand this relationship?”

What are the strategies you use to create and adapt learning experiences for incarcerated students?

In her book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds, adrienne maree brown offers a visionary approach to change in a rapidly changing world. As teachers, one of our greatest hopes is that our students leave our classrooms believing in their ability to navigate those rapid changes, and build satisfying lives. In this two-part series, we bring the principles of Emergent Strategy to carceral classrooms, exploring how they offer both students and teachers a richer, more connected experience.

May 15 | 11:30 am - 1 pm ET | 8:30-10 am PT

What is Emergent Strategy?  Why does it matter in education? 

“Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.  ….a philosophy for how to be in harmony and love, in and with the world.”

In this session, we will explore how the elements and principles of emergent strategy can expand our teaching practice. When content is highly scrutinized and constrained, HOW we teach takes on added importance. Using emergent strategy in teaching is a way to expand our focus beyond content, to embrace teaching change, complexity, adaptivity, and relationship all as part of whatever content we offer.

May 22 | 11:30 am - 1 pm ET | 8:30-10 am PT

What is Emergent Strategy?  How can you use these strategies to enrich your practice and support robust learning communities in prison? 

“Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.  ….a philosophy for how to be in harmony and love, in and with the world.”

In this session, we will take the first steps toward integrating the principles (small growth, change, adaptation, interdependence, transformation, and creating more possibilities) into our thinking and teaching practice.  Join us and develop your own teaching statement that uses emergent strategy as a tool for shaping and co-creating learning communities with incarcerated students.

Two-part Workshop Series for Prison Education Practitioners | Individual registration for the series: $50

we all agreed that we want to stop hurting ourselves?

is that something we can all find a way into?

is that something that could unite us in some way?

what if we all agree that

hurting other people unites us in realizing that no, we don’t want to stop hurting other people. is that what we tell ourselves? is that what we are avoiding telling ourselves?

hurting other people makes us feel better. is that what we tell ourselves? is that what we are avoiding telling ourselves?

hurting other people makes us forget our own hurt. is that what we tell ourselves? is that what we avoid telling ourselves?

hurting other people is just…who we are. is that what we tell ourselves? is that what we avoid telling ourselves?

what if we all agreed that we want to stop hurting ourselves?

what if we all agreed that we want to stop hurting other people?

what if we all agreed that hurting other people is hurting ourselves?

what if we all agreed that hurting ourselves is hurting other people?

what if we all agreed we that we want to stop hurting?

I am learning that each time I am asked to stretch into something new or unfamiliar, my work gets stronger. I understand it better, how it connects in so many unexpected and unexplored directions. We are bound by our unresolved trauma, our untended grief, in so many ways. We are also bound by joy, love, creative endeavor, and care.

A spiritual teacher once said told me that the constant tension between the One and the Many is a Divine Dichotomy and that feels truer and truer everyday. I often wonder if balancing our connections between joy and anguish are also part of that Divine Dichotomy. Connecting in only one way or the other denies us the full experience of our humanity, but honoring them equally can seem an impossibility.

We spent the majority of our time in a short workshop, so I’ve included only my opening and closing remarks. As this was a conference about higher ed in prison, my talk was directed to corrections educators, and currently and formerly incarcerated scholars and teachers, but its message is applicable in all learning spaces.

I’m working on a recording but for now, here are my opening and closing remarks.

Our Guides

Today’s conversation brings us back into our bodies, as we consider how to build a trauma-responsive teaching practice.  At its heart, trauma-responsive teaching is an invitation to become familiar with our own hurts, care for our wounded learner self, and bring the experience of self-tending into our teaching.

As I prepared for today, I asked myself the question posed to us by the luminous adrienne maree brown:  “what is the next elegant step?”  What is something we can do, right here, right now, in response to this system of inhumanity disguised as education?  What can we do in the liminal and limited space and time we have with students trying to reclaim the right to education that is the birthright of all people?  What pathway can we dream – with them – into a different future?

Ancestor bell hooks called us in to education as the practice of freedom.  So have Michelle Alexander, Grace Lee Boggs, Patrisse Coulours, Angela Davis, Eddie Ellis, Paulo Friere, Shawn Ginwright, Miriam Kaba, Ibram X Kendi, Bettina Love, Cara Page, Sir Ken Robinson, Bryan Stevenson, and Erica Woodland. 

In my own life, I hear that call from William, Michelle, Koty, Alicia, Trish, Stanley, Terrell, Christopher, Chris, Ronald, Dylan, Jarrod, Brandon, and countless others past and present.  So many who have been most harmed by education still believe in its promise as a pathway to freedom, to liberation.

Transgressing the boundaries

But teaching to transgress demands substance beyond what is taught, and we can no longer indulge the mythology of intellect above all. Neglecting the emotional and physical facets of ourselves, has narrowed our efforts at growth and change to primarily the realm of thought. This self-inflicted boundary binds us in a fraction of our truth, a small portion of our full humanity.

Now, in this historic moment, we are called forcefully to transgress that self-inflicted boundary. 

We are living in a time of thresholds, of transitions, of liminal spaces.  We stand at the crossroads, where transgressions, border crossings, intrusions, interruptions, all carry the weight, the power, the potentiality that exists everywhere all at once.  Teaching and learning are suffused with that potentiality, as they seek the fields on the far side of our imaginations, disrupting the limits we have placed on our human-ness.

In this time, the substance of our transgression must arise from thought, feeling, and action, united in balance, prepared to move in all possible ways.  We cannot think our way forward, or intellect our way into some new space of teaching and learning.  We do not recover our fullness with greater intellectualization, but with our own rehumanization.

This first transgression prepares us for the next, as we consider the inhumanity of imprisonment.

Being fully human in a dehumanizing institution trespasses against personal and cultural defenses, erected to deny and avoid the unavoidable grief and rage and pain of incarceration.  Breaching this boundary is a transgressive act, to be done with great intent and purpose.  Bringing our full selves into truncated spaces brings the entire experience of teaching and learning with us; an invitation to our students to share in those experiences.

In an institution whose sole purpose is to punish transgression, education intensifies the urgency to redefine that term with our own purpose.  In a space created to dehumanize, our second transgression is to recognize, accept, and find joy in our students’ humanity, and our own.

We recover, reclaim, and restore the fullness of our humanity with a different conversation, a different experience, a different creative exploration.

Today, I invite us into that difference, to touch our unexplored edges; to reexamine the shape and feel of learning; to transgress our boundaried humanity - as learners - so we might bring that new shape into our learning spaces.

But what are those shapes, and how can they show up in prison classrooms? 

The answer is both philosophical and practical. 

First – we cannot share or give what we have not experienced.  If we have not experienced learning differently – in a way that recognizes our full human-ness, hearts and bodies as well as minds  – we cannot extend that experience for our students. We can try to ‘brain’ our way through a portfolio of pedagogies, methods, models, and frameworks, but without feeling learning in our physical and emotional bodies, we limit our imagination and our practice to what we already know.

Second - We replicate what we HAVE experienced.  We recreate how we felt, what was done to us, what we have witnessed done to others, what we have felt but not named.  We replicate our own dehumanization, and reinforce the dehumanization of others.

Our work now is to find – together – a new sensation of learning in and from our entire humanity, and consider how we might bring that into our classrooms.

Possibilities and futures

Access to education matters, in content exploration, learning how to learn, discovering our capacities as learners, and practicing how to relate to others – to see ourselves and them as equally human, equally worthy and deserving of love and care.

In prisons, dehumanization begins immediately for both staff and incarcerated people.  Those who get to leave at the end of the day face the daunting task of rehumanizing themselves on the ride home.  People who don’t get to leave face the task of reminding themselves and others of their humanity in the face of the endless dehumanization of incarceration. 

What I have heard, time and time again, is that prison classrooms are a place where many people felt recognized in their human-ness, even if for a limited time, and in limited ways.

How and why this happens, who experiences it and who doesn’t, why some classrooms don’t offer humanity and others do is a long and complicated conversation, but I can offer a piece of insight for all of us who work in carceral spaces:

We have to remember ourselves as human first, before we can truly recognize anyone else’s humanity.  Embracing ourselves then opens the space for us to treat others with the dignity they deserve a full and complete human beings. 

While it is not our place to confer humanity, we can protect and care for ourselves and others by remembering our shared birthright – our shared worthiness.

We are all worthy.  We are all born enough. 

Education – schools – which should be places that affirm our worth, treat us with dignity, and strengthen us as learning beings instead undermine our sense of worthiness, trivialize our dignity, and sow the seeds of disbelief in our learning selves.

Mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex carry this work forward.  They dehumanize everyone they touch, replenishing and nourishing nothing.

Maintaining our humanity, remembering the humanity of others, is not a given and takes more than the application of our intellect.  It demands work, consideration, thoughtfulness, and – above all – the desire to WANT to maintain and embrace humanity. 

It requires our imagination, our hearts, and that well of courage we may have neglected. 

And here – again - education and learning can provide a way forward; they can be a path that takes us into a future where joy and wonder lead us into the fullest versions of ourselves; building a world that affirms life, care, generosity, and awe.

We hold the gifts and talents and creativity to imagine joyful teaching & learning – how they feel, sound, look, taste, and smell.  How they make US feel – even in the harshest of environments. 

We have to believe they will fundamentally shift our human experience toward a fuller expression of our loving & generous natures.

This imagining happens on the individual, collective, systemic, and cultural level simultaneously.  Even the smallest, tiniest effort can have exponential impacts because that’s how joy works – it is highly contagious. All we need is a taste of what it CAN be in order to gives ourselves over to its birth.

And we aren’t imagining alone.  There is an emerging consciousness, a collective, that is working together - toward joy in this life, on this planet, in this existence; joy in so many different iterations and forms.

We have to keep choosing joy, wonder, imagination, and care.  We have to keep asking the questions that matter most when it feels hardest:  How do we prioritize dignity, connection, and joy?  How do we fight for liberation, not to protect privilege?

Maybe that’s what we can do right now – when things feel grimmest and so so dark – keep choosing joy, keep choosing to believe that we can and are better, keep practicing hope and joy as a discipline. 

Every time we choose these directions, we affirm ourselves as beings who can be more than violent survivalists.

Dacher Keltner, author of Awe, writes about “collective effervescence,” one of the eight wonders of life, originally introduced by Emile Durkheim. 

Durkheim describes the experience of collective effervescence as “feeling like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, and oceanic “we”.   Remembering, even imagining, this joyful physical sensation - that we can find it together - can help in even the bleakest of moments.

In all my years of education, as both a teacher and a learner, the teachers I remember best are those who so thoroughly enjoyed learning WITH us that it was impossible not to want to join them.  If you can do nothing else for your students, you can be a joyful learner WITH them. 

When you return to your work, whether inside or outside the prison walls, remember that isolation is an unnatural state, that joy lives in connection, and is what our souls desire. 

Even when times are hard, we can find joy, and satisfaction in teaching, and we can share that joy with our students.  Sharing the joy of learning together is the future that pulls me in its direction and I hope to meet you there, in those splendid fields.

We do not teach our grief in education, its incarnations and instances and iterations.

We do not teach the incalculable weight and depth of our grief, the invisible presence in all our endeavors. 

We do not teach the harrowing, lingering grief of those denied learning, the sharp, brittle grief of the deniers, the panicked, frozen grief of those who watched and did not speak.

We do not teach the grief buried in school graveyards, ghosts of children and cultures, bodies shackled to the pages of our collective history.

We do not teach that grief binds us in witness as education fails, as learning withers, as we attempt to escape the other.

We do not teach grief.

When I got the contract for Building, I found myself in a pickle.  I hadn’t developed any sort of a discipline around writing, but now I was committed to a big chunk of writing, and on a deadline.  It had become the task, the primary task, and I was so unprepared.  I got through it, but it was one of the most stressful anythings I’ve ever done, in part because I had never truly taken it seriously; I had not put in regular work.

We have all kinds of reasons for why we don’t treat our lovethings with the seriousness, the dedication, that they deserve.  Some of those reasons are legit, but there are a lot of things we prioritize that are simply mundane tasks.  Because I had to find a way to discipline myself to the ongoing work (and because I love it and never want to neglect it again), I came up with a way to choose.  Whenever I’m wavering between a task and a lovething, I ask myself: “When I am at the end of my life, which thing will I NEVER regret doing?”

I will never regret

making art instead of washing dishes

going for a walk with a friend

writing before working on taxes

taking a break from work chores to visit my plants

having a nap instead of cleaning the bathroom

eating delicious food that I didn’t cook

Qualifiers

This is MY list.  Our lists will all be different, and may change to match our lives.

The regret question works best when the conditions for the choices are roughly equal.

A ‘never regret’ list is NOT a tool for you to flog yourself some more about your life choices.

A word on guilt

It’s easy to feel guilty when we do something that doesn’t feel “productive.” Many of us are taught from a very young age that all the creative pursuits we love (our lovethings) are not *real* work, and don’t deserve the dedication *real* work requires.  We either put away our lovethings entirely, or feel guilty or ashamed that they still call to us.  That guilt is what keeps us trapped in the list of chores, never actually getting to the reward at the end of the list.

Even when we do ‘reward’ ourselves, guilt and shame are the great destroyers of creativity. We feel unsatisfied about our efforts, convinced that we are terrible, untalented, unskilled. We forget that growing our lovethings requires care, commitment, consistency, discipline, learning, mistakes, and more learning. Nothing springs from us fully formed and immaculate, untouched by our effort over time.

Your lovething is as important as any other part of your life.  We are creative beings, and our lovethings are all about plunging into joyful, playful, electric, gorgeous, harmonious, squiggly, exuberant, weepy, sticky, life-filled experiences.  Giving ourselves permission to explore our lovethings can feel damn risky, but I know my life is so much more because I took those risks.

What are the day-to-day experiences and choices you will never regret?

So while accessibility is not my area of direct experience, I agreed because educators need to think about accessibility differently, not as a requirement, but as a gift. Creating and exploring ways to make education more accessible to more people can be an excellent learning experience for any educator. I want us to embrace this aspect of our craft joyfully, with a full spectrum of curiosity and imagination.

After learning from my first keynote that I should never write and deliver 45 minutes of me talking, I landed on a format that includes roughly 15 minutes of my voice (total), and 30 minutes of guided conversations for listeners.  We didn't record during the live event, this is a studio recording done a couple of weeks after, but the prompts are included in the video and text.

I’ve included the text (because auto-captions can be funny) and the video.  I am so proud of this talk and thankful to Lindsey, who both opened the door and insisted I could make it through.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Introduction

Vancouver WA, where we are, is on the traditional lands of the Cowlitz people. Thank you to the historical caretakers of the land both here, across all North America and beyond.

As we gather today, I ask that we remember so many of our friends, families, neighbors, the earth and all of her denizens, people, land, and animals suffering around the world.  In my mind today are Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Sudan, all facing violence, devastation, and the suffering of hundreds and thousands of people, while the land itself faces upheaval and disruption from earthquakes, bombs, and climate disaster.

Lastly, before we begin, let us acknowledge these last several years, and the grief we carry, from so many sources. We cannot rush ahead, pretend we are well, and expect a different future. This is part of our collective work, to not shy away from our grief or deny its existence. These opportunities when we are together are a gift, a place to share our pain and fears, in balance with moments of joy and release.

Accessibility is a gift

Access to education is a human right.  As educators, we have been given the honor, the responsibility, for crafting educational paths accessible to all people.  This is our gift, our purpose.

Expanding access to education makes us better – better at our craft, in how we think and feel about ourselves, our colleagues, our students.  All the ways we make education both available and accessible strengthens US as learners, enjoins us to more complex and innovative approaches, to growth as humans.  It deepens our capacity for care and to end cycles of educational trauma and harm.

We are complex, curious, and adaptive beings, capable of incredible generosity and courage.

Even more should that describe us as educators.  In a time when we witness constraints and barriers being erected and fortified at every turn, we are called to remove barriers, tear down gates, and widen pathways.

Accessibility encompasses the devices and methods and structures we do or don’t use, and reaches further; it is a way of feeling and being, of believing in the promise of education and learning.  It is holding the certainty that everyone deserves access to education, and our responsibility as educators is to do - and be - everything we can to ensure that access

Learning, and our ability to learn, is foundational to our existence as a species.  How we learn, integrate knowledge, and relate to the world informs and shapes our existence, regardless of formal structures and systems.

Embracing accessibility brings us to both the content and purpose of education.  Formalized education and its systems are useful in many ways, but access to education only begins in those structures.  We also want to build strong, capable, confident learners, and strengthen our own ability to learn, adapt, change, and engage with complexity. 

But denying people access to education is harm, made worse through our own disinterest, or ignorance.  In these ways, we also dehumanize ourselves – denying the rich variety of pathways and openings into learning, protecting the gates that protect our comfort, that feel familiar.

Educational trauma can undermine our confidence in our ability to learn, but trauma is deceptive.  It doesn’t actually stop us from learning, but keeps our ability to learn confined to survival, limiting our belief in and access to the range of gifts, skills, and tools we have for visioning and creating different futures. 

Every time someone integrates knowledge, our futures are graced with the potential for newness, discovery, creation. Our work as teachers is to hold space for that emergence, to connect it with our shared realities. 

Author and scientist Dacher Keltner, talks about the eighth wonder of life as epiphanies.  He says “epiphanies unite facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding (Awe, p 18).  While we may not speak or think directly about epiphanies, learning, integrating that knowledge, then making choices based on what we’ve learned is how we become our fullest selves and create lives we enjoy living.

But this process is predicated on us believing in ourselves as learners, having confidence in our ability to learn, change, and grow.  All unresolved trauma has some impact on the brain – how we think, consider, and react – and those effects can linger across our lifetimes. Educational trauma may have an outsized impact because it can compromise our belief in our ability to learn. 

Limiting ourselves as educators to only what we know, afraid to venture into unfamiliar terrain, is one way we perpetuate cycles of educational trauma and harm. We obey these self-imposed limitations because we too have been subject to learning-related harm, and our own ghosts and scars accompany us into our classrooms.

But these painful remnants are not permanent.  We have the capacity to look into our own hearts, examine our experiences, and reflect on how satisfied we are with ourselves, with our practice.  We have the chance to make new choices, grounded in new understanding.

Our learning experiences

• What was a particularly impactful learning experience for you? 

• Why was it so impactful? 

• How did that experience shape you as a learner?  As a teacher?

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Removing the gates

Educational gatekeeping has brought us to this point, creating narrower and narrower openings into the pathways of education.

Systemic racism and ableism are two of the most powerful gatekeeping weapons in our arsenal, and I use the words of war with intention, as we so often fight to maintain our privilege, and against our students’ right to education; for their right to learn in the ways they need and want to learn. 

When we are asked to extend ourselves, we remain motionless, frozen by anxiety and apathy, paralyzed by perfectionism, terrified we won’t be up to the task.

We forget that we are also learners, refusing the challenge to engage in more complex and innovative ways.  We refuse to acknowledge, to feel, the harm we do to ourselves, and to others.

Trauma and accessibility

Because trauma is such a huge umbrella, let’s refine our understanding of trauma, and look specifically at what kind of harm we are discussing. 

Trauma changes not only how we think and what we think about but also our very capacity to think.  It disrupts our ability to make meaning, build connections with other people, situate events on a timeline, and engage critical thinking, reasoning, & long-term visioning

Educational trauma, defined as the emotional and spiritual wounds inflicted during the process of learning (Gray, 2019), as students are shamed for HOW they learn – is almost certain to embed itself at our very core. 

This harm often translates into “you are a bad person because you cannot learn in this specific way, or to this particular standard, regardless of your needs as a learner,” and becomes a moral judgment of who we are.

It can erode confidence in our ability to learn, grow, and change, cause us to believe that we are bad people if we cannot learn in certain rigidly defined ways.  One of its most devastating impacts is that people become convinced that they are unable to learn, and lose confidence in themselves as strong, capable learners. 

If, on a deep and unconscious level, we have been conditioned to believe that we cannot learn, that HOW we learn is wrong – that WE are somehow fundamentally wrong – why would we continue to try? People will do almost anything to avoid feeling shame, and that includes shame around learning, so why keep trying something that so often makes us feel ashamed?

Looking forward

Accessibility is about expanding those openings, inviting and welcoming all people to engage learning on their terms, not ours, interrupting the internal monologue of disbelief.

But if education is to have a future, it must be expansive, and accessibility is about all the ways we take down the gates to learning, to leave behind our role as gatekeepers. Our past and our present do not have to be our future. We all have the ability to learn and grow and transform.

We are all capable of change, and of changing the world around us.

It is easy to underestimate the power of BEING differently, of bringing a more whole and compassionate self into learning spaces.  It is easy to forget that people ALWAYS remember how they were treated, whether that was with dignity and care, or scorn and cruelty.  How we are treated and treat others is where education and learning live and breathe.

Trauma-responsivity is a throughline, a common denominator, a thread that weaves together intersections of oppression.  It understands and feels current and past hurts, is committed to ending educational harm.

Although intellectual understanding and acknowledgement is necessary, it is incomplete until we remember and honor the grief and pain we all hold in our own hearts and bodies. It is incomplete until we rediscover the well of courage that exists deep within each of us.

Trauma-responsiveness, at its core, is about harm reduction.  It is about meeting people where they are, meeting our own selves, with gentleness, with an invitation to extend trust.  It holds us all in our common humanity, our shared desire for liberation and joy.

(re)Building trust

Understanding how trauma, generally, can impact learning is necessary, and building a practice that works to counter those impacts is desirable.  But where we can make a more direct effort is understanding how EDUCATIONAL harm happens, and committing to ending that cycle of trauma – IN OUR CLASSROOMS.

I believe the crucial first step in educational harm reduction is (re)building trust in the self, in others, in education and learning. 

When people are harmed during learning, they lose confidence in themselves, as well as in the process and act of learning, and in their teachers.  This mistrust continues until and unless we prove ourselves trustworthy, and that means also trusting ourselves. 

Our own capacity for trust may have been abused during education, but we are now learning that we can rebuild that trust in our own hearts and minds and bodies.  Relearning for ourselves gives us insight into how we bring our personal sense of renewed trust into learning spaces.

Next steps

• What does it mean to trust our teachers?

• What does it mean to trust our students? 

• To trust ourselves?

Small is large, large is small.

Like many people, I tend to borrow from different faith traditions, elements that I appreciate and enjoy. That practice brought me to this post, as I reclaim the word ‘prayer.’ I added ‘spell’, because I also feel the pull of magical divinity, as another path into the All That Is. In the spirit of these traditions, I release and invoke this spellprayer, to join with all those already in existence. I release it as an invitation for everyone who is feeling overwhelmed, confused, paralyzed, hopeless, numb, exhausted, terrified, uncertain, disconnected, and all the ways we may feel lost and helpless.

The feelings of uncertainty, chaos, devastation, misinformation, disillusionment, disappointment, absolute-ism, division, enormous grief and rage - all are extremely present and active. This constant activity means our ability to make decisions, to choose with care and thoughtfulness, may be compromised, as the survival centers of our brains respond to our collective and individual fears. Remember that when the survival center is active, we are less able to access our executive functions, the area of the brain that provides access to curiousity, imagination, creative vision, and critical thinking.

Do not underestimate the force of the collective will, of the collective emotional state, on your own decisions and understanding. With so many people in desperate circumstances and so much terror ‘loose’ in our collective emotional field, it is impossible to fully escape its presence or influence. Sometimes, the best decision we can make is to not add to that collective rage, to take time to calm ourselves, and tend our own emotional state.

This spellprayer is for Palestinians, Afghans, Jews, Sudanese, Congolese, for those bearing witness, and for those inflicting suffering. It is based on the metta meditation, and expanded through my connection with the divine. This is my invitation to all of us, as we are able, to bring ourselves back to our center, and remember our shared humanity, our shared divinity.

May we be happy
May we be healthy
May we be safe
May we be at ease

May I be happy
May I be healthy
May I be safe
May I be at ease

May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be safe
May you be at ease

May they be happy
May they be healthy
May they be safe
May they be at ease

May our world be happy
May our world be healthy
May our world be safe
May our world be at ease

May we experience divinity together
May we experience creation together
May we experience freedom together
May we experience love together

I pray that our creative efforts are strong enough, pervasive enough, enticing enough, hearty enough, sticky enough, compelling enough, brave enough, tender enough, soft enough, deep enough, wide enough, delicious enough, tensile enough, stormy enough, connected enough, adaptable enough, beautiful enough, providing nourishment and courage to everyone called into their embrace.

I am profoundly grateful for all who have stepped into the vision, as we move toward a world where we can all feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease.

About the image: This is a Wordcloud portrait I completed several years ago, in collaboration with S. Renee Mitchell. It is one of the first larger portraits I attempted in collaboration, using the Storyclouding © process.