About Me.

“The post-modern story may best be understood in relation to three narrative tropes: the ironic, the tragic and the parodic.  The ironic trope is an attempt to indicate to the reader that meaning is never fixed or essentialized, and that the position he or she can take can never be definitive or natural.  The tragic trope is an acknowledgement that any attempt to speak outside the comforting modernist assumptions enshrined in everyday and commonsense discourses is bound to be ambiguous, unsettling, and incomplete.  The third narrative trope identified by Burbules is the parodic where the only option open to individuals is to play the game without at any time taking up foundationalist or fixed positions about the curriculum.”

Scott, 2008

Everything I know about education I learned from basketball.  And, as a Girl Scout camp counselor.  And, working in kid prison. 

Irony – Basketball, played right, is ten interconnected players moving in response to each other and the ball, leveraging strengths and covering weaknesses, all working towards a shared (and opposing) goal.  It is hours in the gym practicing fundamentals and building relationships, using the four walls as protection to allow yourself, and other young girls, to wear confidence, to lead, to fail, to learn, to dream.  Somehow, time inside those walls defines potential beyond those walls and provides a blueprint for navigating complexities.  I used to cry for hours if I lost a game, but my greatest lesson was that ‘world as competition’ is killing us. 

Tragedy – I turned eighteen my last weeks as Girl Scout summer camp counselor.  Leila, a 21 year old camp participant attending for her 10^th year in a row, taught me how to love.  Down Syndrome made 12 year old girls say they didn’t want to share a cabin, to avoid her during unstructured social time, to stare and point, opportunities to ride horses forced them to interact.  Her mom had asked us to take notes so she could discuss the week with her, a yearly highlight, upon her return home; I wrote 30 pages, turns out that wasn’t the expectation.  Each day, Leila eagerly welcomed the girls, shared her crush on the only male Wrangler (Cowboy), tried new things, and laughed and smiled and laughed some more.  Still, others avoided.  I tried to intervene and failed when I couldn’t respond in an appropriate manner to, “I was here last year with her and my mom said to stay away.”  I knew, “Fuck your mom,” wouldn’t teach, but didn’t know what would.  Day 4, one of our horses died.  All dealt with grief.  Always Laughing Leila, laid in a puddle of dirty rainwater in a covered walkway, and sobbed uncontrollably, for hours.  I waited quietly, only because I didn’t know what to do.  Then, she got up, gave me a hug, and asked if we could go back to the cabins.  I was relieved.  When we arrived, the girls with bitchy moms had made giant cards for the Wrangler staff and for Leila.  They asked her to draw on and sign the cards and made sure she got to give Cowboy his card.  They hugged, they jumped rope, I thanked her mom.  On leaving day, our staff waved as the girls boarded the bus, Leila last.  She stopped abruptly, turned around to get off the bus, and insisted on a group hug.   We all ugly cried as the bus pulled away. 

Parody – The smartest kid I ever met, told me to “Fuck off,” every morning.  On the girls’ mental health unit at the state juvenile prison, Black Canyon School – which wasn’t much different than most of my public school experience – line up for breakfast was at 6:15am.  Due to meds and life and being twelve, Dusty didn’t start to wake up until at least 10:00am, which made for entertaining starts to our shift.  By 11am, she was taking and passing online college courses and detailing how ridiculous a system that locked up kids whose mom’s sold them into prostitution starting at nine for stealing shoes so they wouldn’t have to walk home barefoot on Arizona hot concrete.

 “You know everyone here is in CPS and they just can’t find another place to put us, right?”

“I’m learning.”

“Well, fuck this.”

“Tomorrow morning, it’ll be, “Fuck you.”

“What can I say, I need some sleep.”

Eventually, I started teaching math and science because people told me I was good at it, and I liked kids.  I counted the number of brown (Spanish speaking) girls in my self-contained special education class and black boys in my Algebra “trailer” courses and then the number of white boys and girls in my AP Physics class and didn’t think it required calculus to deduce racism.  They told me some of them couldn’t/wouldn’t learn, I remembered how much I hate to lose. 

They told me I was good at it, so I should work at a STEM school.  The students couldn’t calculate very well, but they sure as shit could count inequities.  I asked them What is Math?  We pondered for days on end.  John said: “The never-ending quest to answer already answered questions.”  He was on to something. The same year, I began teaching a curriculum about math modeling, these questions had no single solution.  State testing didn’t look like this.    

I asked students to write a ten page paper using mathematics to model the social, environmental, and political impacts of building a light rail between Phoenix and Tucson.  They had no clue how to do it, neither did I.  The products were incomplete, their learning was deep.  They told me I was good at curriculum and should lead teams to write more. 

We wrote a 9^th grade experience within a four year storyline:  9^th: Who am I and how do I make sense of the world?  10^th: How do we engage responsibly with our world?  11^th: How do we engage responsibly with the complex systems of our world?  12^th: How do I and how will I meaningfully contribute to our society?  We challenged Freshman to identify their passions, community challenges connected to those passions, knowledge in the world that helped them address those challenges in order to create a better future, and ways to define and measure success towards a shared, ethical vision. Students were amazing, planning was fun.  I didn’t have the words then, but I look back now and realize our endless hours of discourse answering “What is a model?” from STEM, Humanities, economics, and art perspectives was a decentering of a single truth.  And, our endless STEM vs. Humanities fights about what constituted evidence and reasoning was my first philosophy course.  The lived experiences of my students and racist Arizonan politicians taught me to question all forms of power, control, authority, and money.  They told me I was good at this and should become principal of the school.  More counting helped me see that only providing this experience to 100 Freshman a year only increased the inequity in our larger system.  So, I moved to Oregon without a plan.

Someone I knew told some others that I was good at STEM, and I ended up with the title Education Specialist for Applied Math and STEM.  Everyone thinks STEM means Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics and they debate which letters might need to be added still.  Business folks want to give lots of money to make sure students can do jobs.  I hate money.  I really dislike people with decision making authority because of money.  My job exists to support capitalism; yet, I end up learning about collective impact and support organizations towards indicators like shared values, communication, and aligned resources.  They say I am good at this, I like this work but I miss teachers and students.

I took a district job as Curriculum Administrator for math, science, health and PE.  More counting, I highlight inequities in math placement and course offerings and people listen, kind of.  We implement a more fair (maybe less) tracking system, but we still lead students on an endless quest to find answers in the back of the book.  There are small wins, but mostly lots of talk about measurement, alignment, organizing, truth.  I write a Geometry unit about Islamic art.  I love it, but teachers don’t really understand it because it isn’t the math they know.  I’m sad.  I love conversation about how to center health and wellness and physical activity, there is more truth in that.  They say I’m good at this work, they make me Director of Curriculum for all subjects. 

I spent a ton of time in meetings about money, talking about decisions that never seem to get made, and talking about data that shows inequities.  I spent a ton of time in meetings not about values, not about purpose of education, not about health/wellness, not about connectedness, not about relationship.  There’s too much work, I get tired and sick and lose hope.

If they all think I’m so good at this, how come they play the game so different from me?

A year later. I’ve taken a new position, implementing new networks through new policies and monies that are rooted in community engagement and ongoing continuous improvement, focusing on supporting student and educator wellness, addressing inequities by refusing hierarchical organization and asking educational leaders to dream something different.  This feels right.  Then, now, COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Elijah McClain (the list is long) murders.

“However, if hope is not terminal, then perhaps the process of writing the modern postmortem on hope is itself the genesis of the resurrection of a new paradigm of curriculum development for the postmodern era.”

(Slattery, 2013, pg. 284)

Is the modern postmortem a two hour cry in a puddle of water? Months of public grief over the murder of yet another Black man?  How might a public grieving process usher in new paradigms, or more importantly, recognize paradigms that have survived systems of dispossession and despair since time immemorial? 

And, now, Capitol insurrection. Us vs them; Us vs. Us; Them vs Them?  A clusterfuck for sure.

Possibly we can have “pessimism of the spirit, but optimism of the will.” 

(Slattery, pg. 284, 2013)

How can we, as educational researchers and leaders, respond to Dusty’s “Fuck this” insights in ways that reprioritize people over profits, treating the roots (rather than punishing the symptoms) of colonization’s Indigenous erasure and capitalism’s chattel slavery, and reestablishing healthy, just, interconnected, sustainable ways of living and being?