We have the power to shape our legacy

This post was originally shared in an email on August 28, 2020. If you would like to receive my next email update, you can sign up here.

My heart aches for Jacob Blake, his children, and his family. It aches for Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, Gaige Grosskreutz, and their families. It aches for every human being that faces the repeated trauma of imagining that next time it will be them or their children or loved ones. I hope and pray we learn to see each other and treat each other as fully human—for our children’s sake and for the sake of our future. I hope and pray I will have the courage to recognize, name, and repair all the moments when I have not seen and treated others as fully human; I have a long way to go.

I spent yesterday in conversation with people I love who are in the depths of despair and pain. Sometimes, when you are educating in a racist hurricane blaze of a pandemic, a team needs to stop trying to talk about how we observe instruction in a virtual context, and instead name and feel our pain together.

As a student of history, I often wondered how I would handle moments when our ancestors rose and fell. Well, here we are. This is a defining time; future generations will look back on the choices we are making right now. Our actions have power to influence the answer, as do the actions we call each other to consider.

When we look back on the events of this school year, I suspect we educators will measure how well we showed up for each other during this time by our actions in our relationships with students and families.

I recently spoke to Robert Crosby, Managing Director of D.C. Partnerships at the Flamboyan Foundation. They have been doing incredible work over the last several years, in D.C. and across the country, to build authentic relationships between families and educators. He said a few things that have really stuck with me:

• “It’s educators’ responsibility first and foremost to form trusting, authentic relationships built on consistent communication and shared power with families and students.”
• “Family engagement cannot be done without thinking about racial equity. Educators have to have experiences where they're challenging their own biases and really thinking about where assumptions and deep-held beliefs of their students and their families are coming from by looking within to then be able to do the work to think and be able to actually form really strong relationships across lines of difference.”
• “Families . . . are the experts on their children. So, we must treat them as such and form partnerships in which they are equal.”
• “One strategy for relationship building is home visits . . . where the agenda . . . was just about getting to know them and their child, it wasn't to tell them what they needed to do, it wasn't about telling them all the rules and all the regulations. It was about asking, ‘What are your child's hopes and dreams? What do you want for your children? What are you concerned about? What expectations do you have for me?’ The belief that this is a true partner is so critical to how we often talk about: It's not what you do, it's how you show up to do what you're doing.”

As a teacher, I was complicit in my school’s culture of complaining about the lack of families showing up for conferences, without acknowledging that we made it hard for them to do so. Not once did I conduct a home visit entirely on the family’s terms and agenda. What would have been different if I had? So much. I would have known my students better, been better at my job, liked my job more, been enriched by these relationships. I would have helped students and families more.

This time of virtual schooling adds new dimensions to the relationships between families and educators. There are new layers of decisions, and how families make those decisions may create opportunities for judgement and bias. And, virtual schooling brings families into closer contact with educators, revealing more clearly just how important a role families play in instruction and learning. This time could either lead families and educators to bridge new and deeper relationships or further distance and bias us against each other. 

Leading through the complexity and tension is so hard. I am not here to judge anyone’s efforts other than my own. But it is all of our responsibilities to call on each other to be the best we can for each other. I appreciated Robert’s push to think about how we can use this time to fundamentally reset the respect in the relationships between families and educators.

Forging relationships of equanimity and respect between educators and families can be a powerful model for all children of the real potential, power, and beauty of beloved community. And it may help us get one step closer to making the world safe for Jacob, Joseph, Anthony, Gaige, and all our children.

Here are the resources I’ve been learning from this week:

• The Flamboyan Foundation’s toolkit focused on beginning-of-year relationship building is full of great ideas that build on the themes of our interview.
• I am fascinated to learn more about curriculum-specific family engagement text tools like FASTalk that support actionable home activities in connection to the daily curriculum.
• Transcend released a "playbook" of community-driven design methods and a library of innovative school-level designs that work in remote contexts.

Final word today goes to Kid Superintendent from Reading School District: “Let’s give each other grace, not grief.” 

One step at a time, together,

Emily