Introduction

Misfits, outsiders, radicals, and marginalized people have always had a conflicted relationship with education. On one hand, they recognize that school is an oppressive institution. It is a potentially dangerous environment that is forced upon them as kids. Then, when they finally finish or escape it, they are pressured into often ruinously expensive higher education. On the other hand, education has also been an escape valve for people who are otherwise stuck in grim or disadvantaged life situations, helping provide them with structure and intellectual skills that have the potential to improve their lives and those of others.

Although the institutions of education are historically problematic and often oppressive, students who have experienced them as "outsiders" understand the importance of learning from teachers who have developed radical notions of what education is and how it works. Sometimes these students become teachers themselves, helping subvert the educational institutions or finding alternatives outside of them. In recent decades, one of the most subversive, transgressive, and misunderstood global subcultures- punk--has seen many of its consummate "outsider" adherents become teachers. This makes sense, given that a large percentage of punks embrace radical idealism, strong personal ethics, and intellectualism. These teachers retain their punk identity, or at least acknowledge the significant role of the subculture in their radicalization.

I am an activist, a fairly new teacher, and a punk. I play in bands and participate in the DIY- and DIT-oriented subculture. Coming to teaching as a politically radical punk, I was not interested in being a one-way fount of information and judgment to my students. Rather, I was hopeful about the potential to explore different approaches to classroom practice--universally reciprocal and justice-oriented, respectful, and centering of a wide array of life experiences; equitable and committed to diversity and demarginalization on a deep level, critical thought-oriented and self-reflective, counter-hierarchical, and antiauthoritarian; intersectionally feminist, decolonizing, and liberatory.

Unsurprisingly, I found there was little real support for such goals in the state credentialing process I was required to undergo. Many of these kinds of ideas are reflected in the rhetoric found in modern teacher training programs, representing a belated acknowledgment by collegiate academies of the newfound visibility of some very hard-fought (and often deeply contentious) radical concepts. This superficial rhetoric, however, is contradicted when it comes to how teachers are trained in actual practice, and the structural nature of many educational institutions results in problematic norms of instruction and learning being perpetuated by default.

In his seminal 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige draws from Althusser's theories on unconscious ideology to describe how broader social divisions, processes, and hierarchies are replicated in schools, from the physical structure of campuses separated into "traditional" arts and sciences divisions (further divided by specific subject) to the act and shape of classroom instruction itself:

The hierarchical relationship between teacher and taught is inscribed in the very lay-out of the lecture theatre where the seating arrangements--benches rising in tiers before a raised lectern- dictate the flow of information and serve to "naturalize" professorial authority. Thus, a whole range of decisions about what is and what is not possible within education have been made, however unconsciously, before the content of individual courses is even decided.

These decisions help to set the limits not only on what is taught, but on how it is taught.

Seemingly intractable structures such as these, physical and otherwise, can carry strong (sub)conscious connotations of support for a recasting the well-meaning educator into a role that perpetuates injustice. My own student teaching assessments and pedagogy courses were undertaken in two liberal-leaning institutions that have been repeatedly excoriated by the reactionary right-wing outrage crowd for their reputed leftist "extremism." (n these institutions, I was struck by how much pressure was placed on teachers to maintain a veneer of "neutrality" and "lack of bias." Of course, neither of these positions truly exist in a broader society. We cannot separate ourselves from our learned, unconscious frames of reference, implicit biases, and positionality in the world--things our students see in us even when we don't. Many diverse perspectives can and should be considered in any classroom setting, and an open-minded, accepting teacher who is also transparent about their own worldview helps to set a standard of honesty for the entire class.(But the pressure to conform to a model of purported neutrality serves the purpose of perpetuating some of the most harmful aspects of the status quo, continuing to effectively marginalize many student identities and stifle critical dissent.

Fortunately, we live in a world where insurgent pushback against rotten institutions and injustice is growing stronger. There are many genuine radicals among teachers. Under the weight of administrative, parental, and social pressures (including the threat of doxxing by reactionaries), these teachers must often learn to be quite creative in teaching students to ask a more challenging set of questions, in fighting to push back against the oppressive status quo, and in using subversion to reinvent education from within by putting new and transgressive ideas into practice. As an aspirational radical and student teacher coming from a subculture/community that is used to being defined as "outsider" and consistently needs to create its own spaces, I wanted to connect with and learn from others who knew how to radicalize and subvert teaching pedagogy; those who treated their students as equals. I needed to learn from those who thought more like me.

The "Teaching Resistance" column, which this book is drawn from, began in January 2015, the month I got my teaching credential. It ran monthly in the infamous politically and culturally insurgent punk magazine Maximumrocknroll (aka MRR, est. 1982). I started the column on the suggestion of Megan March, my life partner and bandmate in Street Eaters, who had the idea after hearing me repeatedly bemoan the lack of a network and skill share for all the radical, punk-affiliated teachers I was meeting on tour and wanted to learn from. Although "Teaching Resistance" was born in a punk context, it was designed to be a platform for subversive educators of many stripes to share their innovative ideas and to draw attention to important issues around education. All of the authors in this book are personally dedicated to a deeply intersectional fight against oppression, lifting up transformative social justice ideals through direct action in their own classrooms and a wide array of other educational contexts.

In this book, you will find stories that directly document and reflect on classroom teaching practice, personal journeys in education, a little bit of theory, crucial labor struggles, and the challenges educators and students face in a wider world that is increasingly hostile to radical thought and to marginalized people in general. There are also several long-form interviews with iconic figures in punk and education that dive deeply into the backgrounds and motivations of these fascinating individuals.

The powerful, diverse voices in the column have given me countless insights and have been a major component in my education as a radical teacher, lessons hard to come by in institutional settings. I hope it can do the same for you, whether you are a teacher of any kind, a student, or a curious person who wants a greater understanding of how education can be used to center often marginalized voices, question and subvert the dominant narratives, rethink classroom structures and methods, and hopefully make the world a slightly better place.

I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions-a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education a practice of freedom.
-bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

One of the most consistent undercurrents in this book is that of intersectionality. This often misunderstood but absolutely crucial concept, theorized in 1989 by feminist scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, involves the understanding that any system of power that confers advantages or disadvantages on one group over another group (and among individuals within those groups) requires analysis of how these different categories-such as race, gender, sexuality, and class-are interdependent and overlapping, as are the power systems that generate such discriminations.

An effective approach to radical pedagogy recognizes that an intersectional lens is vital to understanding the "big picture," and that keeping various types of oppression in separate, discrete categories makes it much easier for the structural forces (and their agents) driving such oppression to prevent people from finding solidarity in their struggles, keeping resistance diffuse and myopic and thus cutting effective opposition off at the knees. Intersectionality's wide scope does not, however, require its advocates to eschew a specific focus or rhetorical emphasis on their individual struggles and battles with systems of oppression. In contrast, the intersectional lens encourages ever more crucial and detailed focus on the deep, underlying problem(s), with one eye always trained on the wider context-the "big picture."

The following essay is intersectional as fuck, to put it mildly, but it is also centered on wrangling with what is inarguably a primary concern for teachers: the long, difficult battle to combat racism in the United States, a chronic, historic cancer that is directly reflected in the fundamental structures and failures of the American school system. It is by Melissa Merin, known to some as Shakes, who has worked for many years with kids in a variety of counseling and teaching roles at public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

School is a Riot

by Melissa Merin

External control, are you gonna let 'em getcha?
Do you wanna be a prisoner to the boundaries they set ya?
You say you wanna be yourself, by christ, you think they'll let ya?
They're out to getcha getcha getcha getcha getcha getcha.
-Crass, "Big A Little A"

A GUIDE TO THIS CHAPTER

You're going to see u.s./usa/america in lower case. Stylistically, I find that it causes people to pause and wonder: Why the lack of capitalization? As a practice, I believe that it is one small step in un-essentializing america and american values and power, a minor subversion of sorts.

I cite about seventeen different radical writers, educators, and general badasses. You mighta heard of Noam Chomsky or Pedro Noguera, but a lot of these folks are largely unknown outside of academia related to education. This is largely because unless someone has produced something fit for mass consumption, we are trained to believe it's unattainable, unrelatable, elitist, or simply not for us. I challenge us to think beyond what capitalism teaches us is good or worthy. When you see these citations, imagine the words "incomparable badass scholar" or "decolonial educator" or something to that effect. I'll add a small guide to these folk at the end.

Footnotes are either exciting or intimidating. I like to think of them as a statement that just won't fit in (parenthesis). They're not critical to understanding what I'm trying to get at here, but they're interesting and might lead you to some things you didn't know.

4. STPP = school-to-prison pipeline; STCP = school-to-confinement pathways

*

On the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the L.A. riots, my social media was saturated with tomes dedicated to the notorious urban revolt. The riots left human and economic casualties and devastation in their wake, and yet they also revitalized a revolutionary sentiment that seemed to lie dormant for so many years for so many people after the apex of the Civil Rights Movement. This anniversary called me to remember my young self in 1992 and to recollect, in particular, how the L.A. riots were catalysts that allowed me to draw clear lines from my early experiences with covert and overt racism to my nascent introductions to radical thought and waking. It wasn't just that Rodney King coulda been me. It was that in so many ways I'd been experiencing a different kind of beating from the first time I entered a schoolyard. The images of folks destroying buildings that seemed concretely impenetrable were affirming and exciting to my young mind, because, as terrifying as it was to see block after block engulfed in flame, I knew that those burning buildings would later become empty charred lots, and then what? The possibilities seemed endless. I hoped I could bring that fire to school with me from middle school through high school and into college(s).

Decades later, I find it important to continue to link my political awakenings and my experiences in school. Though I was never a model student, I have managed to stay connected to institutional education in one way or another. Once in a while, I attempt to reconcile my distrust and outright rebellion toward education with my understanding that school is necessary, and yet doesn't necessarily need to be an "evil." It is within the framework of critical race theory that I find the most success in uniting my love of education and my never-ending quest for collective liberation from racist and heterosexist capitalist oppression. From this place of desire, I enter education as an educator and see as my responsibility as a punker, an antiauthoritarian, and a Black human in america to hone my practice in order to build and perpetuate transformative, restorative practices at the elementary school/early childhood education level. That's where most of us begin our more formal educational journeys.

The year before the riots, when I watched the beating of Rodney King on television so casually reported and with so little context, I felt a familiar rage. The grainy moving image of him lying on the ground surrounded by bright lights and uniformed officers beating him again and again felt familiar. I identified with his brutalization. He was trapped, alone, and vulnerable. The military agents of the state had dehumanized him and all anyone could do was watch. I was only twelve and a half and had already had at least half a dozen encounters with police officers, none of them good. Though I knew I'd been targeted in each interaction, and though I was aware that it was because I was Black, I didn't realize until Rodney King was writhing on the side of the road, surrounded, that they could rise to that specific level of brutality. I didn't realize that I had been smoldering.

The riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who beat King reflected the frequent and spontaneous inner explosions I experienced in my early adolescence, and the utter annihilation on the landscape seemed to be a reckoning to me. The news reported the riots as a tragedy, and that's how we talked about them at home, but secretly I saw them as revelatory--a fervent call for the destruction of oppression. A burned-out building was an indictment of capitalism, of racism. In the year following the beating, a sort of hopelessness burrowed inside of me. Nothing and no one was safe. However, a year later, as I watched L.A. burning on the nightly news, I felt almost relieved. The riots were seventy long miles away from me, yet they felt dangerously--inspiringly--close.

In our current epoch of protest, rebellion, and riot, it is not uncommon to see or hear folks in radical left circles quote Martin Luther King Jr. from 1968, when he declared that "riots are the language of the unheard." King was making the point that one can't condemn folks engaged in riotous behavior without also condemning the conditions and actions that preceded them. I believe this is true, and I believe that is why the L.A. riots spoke to me so deeply. This notion of the unheard, however King intended it to be interpreted, is analogous to children in early childhood education settings who are often misinterpreted, pathologized, and misunderstood, and whose voices are rarely heard or valued. Adding to this (quandary is the slippery slope of "school discipline." Though the root of discipline is literally to instruct (a disciple is a student), through the ages and especially in western educational institutions, discipline is synonymous with punishment and is usually informed by a teacher's interpretation of a student's behavior.

Educational policy centered around discipline on local, state, and federal levels generally asks educators to look at the behavior of the students, while the mirror rarely faces in toward the institution and the adults inside, who are often the source and cause of student suffering. Kids like the kid I once was are suffering in our institutions, and when kids are suffering, their behavior tells us. I want to be clear here: I am not saying that all kids who misbehave are suffering nor am I saying that all suffering is due to all teachers. I am also not saying that all misbehavior is problematic. I do not believe in absolutes, especially those concerning kids and education. I am making the argument that often an educator's perceptions of a child combined with their ideas of what discipline is or is not can exacerbate stressors for students, and that their behavior is often a good indicator not only of "problems at home" but of foundational problems in the classroom and school.

Shawn Ginwright works around healing and transformational justice with urban youth in the Bay Area. He writes,-"suffering is the internal consequence of oppression. Suffering is the result of the psycho-spiritual injury resulting from oppression."¹ There are degrees to suffering, as in most things. The damage caused by daily microaggressions causes suffering. Witnessing the brutalizing of people who look like you causes suffering. Worrying constantly about your safety and well-being causes suffering. Being made aware of your difference in the world as a negative causes suffering. Suffering accrues incrementally, and as it does it draws in more alarming terms: violence, crime, trauma, and abuse. As we take in these terms, we also necessarily distance ourselves from them so that we may alleviate the potential damage that suffering will cause. Suffering occurs in many realms of human existence. It persists especially in education.

CONCRETE

The way that I entered education is similar to the way many folks in the u.s. do. I went to kindergarten, learned how to write letters with monkey about racism and sexism and homophobia, though not because I had radically transformative teachers. School is where I learned to internalize those things, to hide aspects of my interior life to make everyone else comfortable, and, more importantly, to avoid the ridicule and abuse to which I was subject by students and teachers alike. School is where I learned to internalize punishment; where I discovered an inner voice that relayed messages that declared I wasn't good enough for anything although I could read and write for comprehension at an early age and was relatively "bright." All I ever wanted to do was to learn and get better at it and be smarter and to understand everything, including my own brain, yet school is where I learned how to sabotage my own potential. Elaborating on the work of Dr. Carol Dweck, Zaretta Hammond breaks down the four critical elements that imprint learning mindsets in the schema of a learner, building either "fixed" or "growth" mindsets, In her work on cultural responsiveness in education, Hammond explains (that microaggressions/assaults play a vital role in imprinting a "fixed" mindset on a young learner.² I understood from a very early age that shit just wasn't going to be fair for me. I just knew it, the way most kids knew it. But it wasn't because I didn't get an ice cream cone, or because I had to stop playing and do school work. It wasn't fair because no matter who was talking in class, I was always called out the loudest; because if there was a conflict and I was involved, the assumption was that I caused it; because life is sometimes outlandish when you're a kid, but adults rarely believed me when I told my versions of what happened. In The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, Van Ausdale and Feagin present astounding evidence confirming what I and many children of color growing up in the u.s. intrinsically know; children know about race and racism and experience it deeply. In their authoritative study, the authors noted that children operate and understand racialization in three distinct social worlds; the first is categorized as adult to adult interaction that encodes "racial-ethnic distinctions and concepts . . . essential for social life." The second world occurs as child to adult interaction, where kids take in the coded racial meanings and images they digest from adults without expressly letting the adults know what they understand. The third and likely most important and impressionable world exists among children to the exclusion of adults, where children experiment and interact with the dynamic information gleaned from the other two worlds.³ Having worked with young children for over two decades, I recognize that kids, like adults, have skewed perceptions of what happens, when, and why. I am quite aware of the trouble that I was responsible for and the mischief that I created. I was naturally a very curious, inventive, and inquisitive kid, and like many kids I yearned for social connection and meaningful relationships. However, it was within Van Ausdale's and Feagin's category of the third social world that I most often found myself, usually alone and working against experimentation with racialized power by other (usually white) kids. In this third world, the concept of fairness continued to elude me.

A child's world is rarely a democratic one. There were many instances where my treatment by other students and the teachers was categorically unfair. Third grade is when this notion became concrete for me. In third grade, I punched a kid and broke his nose and got suspended. I punched a kid who called me a nigger. I punched a kid because after he called me a nigger. I asked him what a nigger was, because I didn't really know, and I thought we were friends, and he said, "You!" and everybody laughed. I punched that kid, because I didn't know what a nigger was, but I knew that when he said that and the kids laughed, there was nothing I could do or say that would stop that laughter, and with their laughter they were threatening my life.

There were no protocols for understanding what was happening to me. Van Ausdale and Feagin remind us that "As a group, children are not socially naive and inexperienced, but develop complex social skills for dealing with a variety of people and situations that they are likely to encounter throughout their lives."⁴ The white boy who called me a nigger denied it vehemently to anyone who would listen, to the point of tears. Given my young reputation, the teachers and the principal did not believe that the boy had actually called me a nigger or that a punch in the nose was the appropriate way to handle it even if he had. A study a tendency to more closely observe [Black students... when challenging behaviors are expected," The study also found that while having the low expectation that Black students will present more problem behaviors [B]lack teachers "hold [B]lack students to a higher standard of behavior," possibly demonstrating "a belief that (B)lack children require harsh assessment and discipline to prepare them for a harsh world."⁵ Though the Yale study focused more on the disparate discipline policies focused on young boys, the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Monique Morris, and Connie Wun, among others, highlights that these disparities occur for Black female students at astoundingly high rates as well and that pushout and confinement often take different forms than "school-to-prison." Connie Wun notes that discipline and punishment in schools is rooted in "foundational anti-[B]lack logic" that unnecessarily punishes Black girls for being Black. She writes, "consciously or unconsciously-[B]lack girls are rendered vulnerable to racialized and gendered forms of discipline and punishment."⁶ In my case the school chose to eject me for a period of time. Even though the white boy had called me a nigger, in the perspective of my teacher and the principal, I was expected to have behaved with more restraint--civilized and "lady like." Calling a Black girl a nigger was not considered violent, yet the boldness of this particular moment created a laceration that I carry to this day. No repairs were made, no conversations had, and there was never an attempt to understand why I had done what I'd done. There was a victim and a perpetrator, and I was the latter. I went home for two days and returned to the same classroom with the same kids and the same teachers and the same sense that inside that building I was always going to be in danger. Following this incident, I would be suspended four more times in third grade alone. This situation mirrored countless others, in and out of school, where I could find no authority figure to hear what I had to say or to take my concerns or inquiries seriously. By purposefully being left out of equitable opportunities to discuss issues and problem solve, I was inadvertently taught another skill: question authority at all times. By the end of third grade, I was highly literate, skilled in math, and quite honestly didn't give a fuck about what anyone anywhere had to tell me about anything.

I highlight this incident and my general turmoil in the third grade because it directly connects to my growing judiciousness. The ways in which I was experiencing racism profoundly affected my worldview, and as my capacity for empathy deepened, my sense of justice began to extend to other folks, and my worldview became broader. It also began to dawn on me that the adults around me could not adequately address or repair the wounds that constant microassaults inflicted on me and people like me, especially in the world of education; indeed, many adults would commit a number of these microassaults.

Being a lover of learning meant that I worked very hard to find things that would help me to describe what was happening, but school was never the place for that. School is where I experienced damage but not where I learned how to analyze or cope with or combat it. Noam Chomsky reminds us that as far as school is concerned:

The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you're told and to be where you're supposed to be.. . . [T]he institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity.⁷

Chomsky is not saying this in order that we may eschew education entirely-he is after all an accomplished intellectual who has spent his entire adult life embedded in academia. Here, he is making a broader point about discipline, in particular what discipline looks like and means within the institution of school. Chomsky counterposes the mission of traditional discipline to that of independence of mind and spirit, noting that education is largely useless/serves only to indoctrinate if it doesn't mean anything to the students who are on the receiving end of the learning. He states, "just reading does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow. . . . And there's nothing valuable about that" (emphasis added).⁸ The dominant narrative says that school is where you learn the things that are important, but my experience has taught me how rarelv that is true, especially for Black kids. Pedro Noguera sums it up brilliantiv when he writes of discussing education with other Black men.

We all attended public schools, but each of us felt that we had succeded in spite of, and not because of, the schools we attended...[W]e threw out the possibility that the only thing that spared us the fate of so many of our brethren was luck--not getting caught for past indiscretions and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.⁹

Somewhere in the morass of adult voices were pleas to me to "do better" and some version of how I needed "more discipline," and though I'd looked up the word and attempted to contextualize it many times, I still didn't know what they meant when they told me that I needed it. What I knew was that there would be deprivation and there would be punishment--both of which I would have to learn to avoid.

I find the works of Damien Sojoyner and the work of Daniel Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal instructive as I consider and reconfigure ideas around discipline and equity in schools. They propose "transformational resistance" in their work, noting that many Black and Brown students arrive at school sites with an alertness that brings them to specific points of rebellion and release throughout their educational careers. These rebellions become classified as disciplinary problems; however, in light of the ongoing suppression of student life and identity in public schools, it is fair to say, as Sojoyner might, that these acts of rebellion qualify as forms of political resistance. In January 2009, in Oakland, California, undisciplined and militant political resistance drew the nation's attention to the endemic and systemic problem of police violence. The rebellions that raged for days (and were resparked in the subsequent weeks and months) set a new tone for demonstrating against racist oppression and would be followed by later rebellions in New York, Ferguson, South Carolina, and Baltimore, among myriad other places. Various adults, from politicians to teachers to "community leaders," called for calm, called rioters thugs and outside agitators and saw no point to the destruction the rebellions left. Others saw these rebellions as acts of principled defiance against a system designed to promulgate racist oppression. If the streets of Oakland were one giant classroom, then the smashed windows of banks and Footlocker were the desks upended by students of the streets who had taken in one too many indignities while simply trying to survive. Whose ideas of discipline are more valuable? And who gets to decide?

K. Wayne Yang, in the article "Discipline or Punish? Some Suggestions for School Policy and Teacher Practice," defines punishment as "retribution for an offense, an exclusionary act by which students are removed from the opportunity to learn; it is harm inflicted through which outside regulation becomes internalized subjectivity,"¹⁰ Yang goes on to define discipline as "an act of rigorous physical or mental training, a practice of will that can lead paradoxically to docile compliance or emancipatory possibilities."¹¹ Yang emphasizes that punishment masked as discipline in schools relies on exclusion from participation. This type of exclusion correlates with lower achievement and higher pushout rates. Yang also notes that punishment in public schools is revealed along lines of race, gender, and class, which is to say, it's fairly obvious who the targets of school punishment are. Yang writes, "furthermore, this racially disproportionate punishment and preference is not invisible to our students. They are collectively impacted by the culture of removal--even if they themselves are not punished."¹² So-called zero tolerance policies negatively impact everybody, as even students who "don't fit the demographic profile for punishment" see themselves as "always being available for punishment."¹³ More damningly, however, these students begin to believe that some are more deserving of punishment than others. This reinforces and perpetuates the cycles of exclusion, as all students grow into adults who are conditioned to believe that Black people are more deserving of punishment; some of these students grow up to be teachers, principals, store clerks, cops, judges...

FIRE

[T]he anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every [B]rown or [B]lack person lives simply because of skin color. This other kind of anger in time can prevent, rather than sponsor, the production of anything except loneliness.

You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.¹⁴

In high school, I was the only Black student in my grade for a while and only one of about five Black people altogether. Not even the janitors were Black. I was tallish, tomboyish, loudish, and strong. I had an awkward body and a beautifully masculine face that everyone felt entitled to comment on, constantly. By then, I'd learned that fistfighting with people who threatened my sense of self, my spirit, or my well-being would not be tolerated by the adults who held my future in their hands, so I made it a mission to become smarter and better in the hopes that I would begin to feel worthy of my own humanity.

By all accounts I was a fairly run-of-the-mill to average student. My growing "attitude problem" kept me from being moved forward in math, and I internalized that, believing I simply couldn't do it. Though I stayed ambivalent about school, my desire to learn continued to grow. I sought out random books in libraries and bookstores that I would spend hours perusing, looking for the right title or topic, anything that would jump out at me. In conjunction with books and magazines, I consumed a broad variety of music that not only informed my spiritual well-being but nourished my intellect. I taught myself how to play guitar. I became involved with youth organizing groups, taggers, troublemakers, gangsters, and punk subcultures. I maintained a B/C average.

I listened to Bikini Kill and the Dead Kennedys and X-Ray Spex and Sepultura. I brooded along to Tori Amos and Nina Simone. I smoked cigarettes and weed after school. I read Malcolm X and classic literature when I was alone-Wuthering Heights was my shit! My favorite writers were Hemingway, Audre Lord, and William Butler Yeats. I was weird and out of place anywhere that I went. Had it not been for my desire to learn more and be better, I would not have discovered a love of myself-a love rooted in my Black skin and my kinky hair and my strong body--and my weirdness and out of place-ness might have destroyed me.

Between my disparate interactions with school and the racist and heterosexist world we interact with in america, it's no wonder that my path to the academy was so divergent. In conversations with friends and colleagues, I frequently tell them that I believe I am lucky and that there are privileges that I had access to which kept me from being con- fined or destitute (sometimes by very narrow margins). The common dialogue among those of us who made it or made it out about not being in the wrong place at the wrong time is an endless echo for us, one which we rarely get to turn down or tune out. For however lucky I was, there are many more who are not as lucky. Students who are suspended and/or expelled from school are more than twice as likely to be incarcrated than students who have never been suspended. Black youth are disproportionately suspended and expelled from public schools at exorbitant rates: in 2003, in grades K-12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade), 20 percent of Black students were suspended across the country, and 5 percent were expelled, compared to 9 percent and 1 percent, respectively, for white students, and the numbers continue to trend negatively.

These statistics are critical to the overall understanding of race and equity so necessary in today's educators and vital to conversations about race and equity in america. I spent many hours (which add up to days) in and out of hallways and principal's offices, exited for infractions so slight as dropping a pencil and not picking it up fast enough, talking too loudly during class discussion time, and "talking back," which really means speaking without permission. In theory, I was prime fodder for the epic pipeline. However, there are problems with consistently drawing connections between school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline. Sojoyner explains that when considering this pipeline, policy frequently fails to address the historical development of public schools in that "the structure of public education is responding to the actions taken by black students that are perceived to threaten the status quo."¹⁵ What this means for education policy is that while institutions routinely focus on discipline and behavior, they consistently ignore what Sojoyner terms the "ethos of anti-Blackness" that the ver core of american public education and approaches to discipline center around, while simultaneously driving the "deficient" behaviors of Black kids This creates a seemingly impenetrable bind; how can Black kids "succeed" in a system that requires that you either dispense of your dignity and your identity or that you believe that you deserve to be disrespected, undervalued, and mistreated? When the institution is designed to deal with you only as a problem, it becomes an ethical quandary: Stay or go? In my case, I opted to hang on by a very thin rope, understanding that, from time to time, I would need to collaborate with this system to avoid being sucked beneath it.

I cannot pretend to begin to approach curriculum policy with any sort of authoritative mind nor would I want to. I've worked in many classrooms and alongside many teachers and administrators, but I am not a classroom teacher. I've always been more effective working with kids on areas that help develop their academic, intellectual, social, and emotional skills without constraints like Common Core or teaching to tests. I find our methods of educating kids to be antiquated, colonial, and problematic. This being said (and unlike many folks in my field), I do not buy into the popular campaign year narrative that says that our schools are failing. I believe that neoliberal policy is failing and that the colonial educational strategy has been a failure for some time, but I don't believe that education itself can fail.

Let me back up for just a moment. In 1992, the beauty and hope I saw in the L.A. riots was not predicated on a nihilist excitement for destruction. In the burning and the crumbling concrete ruins, I saw potential. I saw hope. I wasn't from the place that was on fire but my people were, and I held hope for them and, by proxy, for all of us. When I consider urban kids with "discipline problems" or "behavior issues," I think about the teenagers riding up and down Broadway Street in Oakland on their scrapers while their peers danced on police cars next to Laney College; I hear them yelling the familiar chant, "Whose streets? Our streets!" I imagine them organizing in their schools and their neighborhoods. I imagine their potential for transformative resistance. When I say that I don't believe the "education is failing" hype, it's because I think it's impossible to destroy education. Education is merely the process by which one learns. I do, however, think it's necessary to destroy the paradigm that says there is only one way forward for young kids in education.]

New teachers, seasoned teachers, former teachers, and soon-to-be teachers will all tell you that dealing with kids' difficult behavior is probably the most challenging aspect of their jobs. Often they will blame students' behavior for their inability to pass tests or grade levels. We institute policies like Response to Intervention (TI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS) in the hopes that these alone will be magic fixes, but I propose something bolder than more policy: I propose we torch our expectations of good and bad behavior, of discipline, of punishment, of order, that instead we look at our classrooms and our schools and recognize, as Connie Wun points out, that "the spectacle of punishing [B]lack bodies is ingrained in the 'dreams and desires' of the U.S. racial society and its citizens."¹⁶ I propose that educators--current and future--be taught in unequivocal terms that our system of education exists to keep order, to keep subordinate Black and Brown and Indigenous bodies, to enable poverty to proliferate and capitalism to thrive. But, whoa, this is heavy. Where do we start?I think that we need to approach education from the standpoint that we are here to make things better, and to do so we need to embark on a journey of betterness. I introduce betterness as a way of thinking about a world that is rooted in the destruction of the racist and patriarchal ideals that subjugate women and queer folk and people of color-and white folk as well; betterness is a standard of existence that includes an equitable distribution of resources and an understanding of the complex and nuanced rules that govern our lives; betterness means always outdoing what was done before, which means not ever settling into compromises made out of necessity (some modern examples of such compromises would be suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement, second wave feminism, and Barack Obama's presidency--these compromises were necessary and also not nearly enough to end oppression). Betterness is ever flexible, always growing, always building. I break this down, because I feel it's necessary to redefine the terms, to up the ante, as it were. I think it's crucial as educators, to take important risks, and even sometimes reckles;ones, to interrupt the giant miasma of oppression that still colors our society, because education to me is nearly synonymous with liberation, and redefining terms on our own terms is a means toward collective liberation and toward betterness in the future.

Betterness as a process begins and proliferates inside of communities and works best when communities are united and aligned. In the world we currently inhabit here in america, community is often a loose concept that is devalued or destroyed altogether by the need to create and maintain material possessions and capital. People don't have time to build, nurture, and grow their communities. We speak of communities in terms of ethnic groupings or queer groupings, but here again I think it important to redefine the terms, so I add "radical" to community. Radical community here is defined as a group of people who intentionally come together and are unified toward common goals outside of acquiring property and material wealth. Those goals can be food, shelter, self-governance, public education--all of these things and more happen toward a common purpose, which is betterness. Betterness is what we build and who we become out of the ashes of oppressive institutions like public education. If you made it this far, then you clearly have some investment in education regardless of its form. I write this with the hope that some of you out in the broader punk community will at least skim this and take the following message to heart: school is a riot. If we work hard and with intention and a great deal of critical inquiry, we can make education do and be and say what we want and need it to.

RIOTOUS REFERENCES

Noam Chomsky is an old head. He's a linguist, educator, anarchist, and kind of a genius. He is never a light read.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is the lawyer and radical Black feminist who brought you the concept of intersectionality. She is also a hard-core critical race theorist and scholar. She has been championing equity, anti-racism, and actual feminism since before mp3s.
Carl Crozier is a Black man who wrote a book about the history of racially motivated riots in the u.s., beginning with and centering around the 1992 L.A. Riots. If you need a primer on these riots from a refreshingly nonacademic perspective, get his book Some of My Heroes Died in the Riots (New York: Page Publishing, 2016).
Dolores Delgado Bernal is a feminista advocate for Latinx folks in the education matrix. Her work studies resistance in education and transformative modes of education.
Carol Dweck is far more establishmentarian than most of these other authors. She wrote and developed the theory behind "growth mindset," which has been horribly misunderstood and haphazardly applied ever since. Her original work around mindset is definitely worth a read.
Christopher Emdin is an urban hip-hop educator and radical theorist who uses hip-hop pedagogies to inform his educational worldview. I can't say enough about how dope he is. Read For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood.. and the Rest of Y'all Too (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016). It's critical.
Shawn Ginwright has done all kinds of educating that focuses on Black youth in educational settings, healing in urban environments, and hope over defeatism.
Zaretta Hammondis here to remind you that hard science and sociology coexist. Her book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2015) and her blogs show again and again how racism and implicit bias affect the brain and thus the classroom. She also makes brain science accessible.
Monique W. Morrisis a journalist, an activist, and a mother who wrote a timely book, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: New Press, 2016), which focuses on Black girls and their (our) systematic exclusion (pushout) from educational institutions. She coined the term school-to-confinement pathways (STCP).
Pedro Noguerais a longtime educator and sociologist whose work largely focuses on cultural competency and the so-called achievement gap. I hate and reject the achievement gap, and Noguera's work is vital to understanding how it continues to undermine Black and Brown kids in education.
Damien Sojoyneris one of those badasses who really needs more airtime. A scholar and educator, he focuses on Black futures and the problematic school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) in an effort to destroy and rebuild education in our images.
Daniel Solorzanois an incredible and humble force for Chicanx/Latinx studies, women's studies, and critical race theory in education. His work examining transformational resistance should be required reading for all educators.
Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin study the littler folks. They wrote an informative book, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Connie Wun works hard to destroy the realms of anti-Blackness and violence against women of color. She approaches education from a Transformative Justice perspective and teaches educators how to do better.
K. Wayne Yang is a decolonial/anti-colonial scholar and educator whose work focuses on critical pedagogies, culture, and school disciplinary practices.

Footnotes

Shawn Ginwright, Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Urban Activists and Teachers Are Reclaiming Matters of Heart (New York: Routledge, 2016)

Zaretta Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2015), 110-13.

Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R Feagin, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism(Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 173-74

Ibid., 195.

"Implicit Bias May Help Explain High Preschool Expulsion Rates for Black Children," Yale News, September27, 2016, accessed June 8,2019, https://news.yale.edu/2016/09/27/implicit-bias-may-explain-high-preschool-expulsion-rates-black-children.

Connie Wun, "Unaccounted Foundations: Black Girls, Anti-Black Racism, and Punishment in Schools," Critical Sociology 42, nos. 4-5 July 2016): 1-14, accessed June 8, 2019, http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Black-Girls-Anti-Black-Racism-and-Punishment-in-Schools.Wun_.pdf.

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Noam Chomsky (New York:New Press, 2002, 236-37.

Ibid, 235.

Pedro A. Noguera, The Trouble with Black Boys...and Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2008), 20.

K. Wayne Yang, "Discipline or Punish? Some Suggestions for School Policy and Teacher Practice," Language Arts 87, no. 1 (September 2009): 49, accessed March 30, 2019, https://scholarship.org/uc/item/8Ss5t567.

Ibid.

Ibid., 52.

Ibid., 53.

Claudia Ranking, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).

Damien Sojoyner, "Black Radicals Make for Bad Citizens: Undoing the Myth of the School to Prison Pipeline," Berkeley Review of Education 4, no. 2 (January 2013):241-63, accessed June 16, 2019, https://scholarship.org/uc/item/35C207gV

Footnote

The next essay is by dwayne dixon, writer of the zine Astronaut Etiquette. He is an anthropology professor at University of North Carolina, where he is widely noted for his powerful, conversational and student-centered teaching practice, dixon is also an active member of Redneck Revolt Chttps://www.redneckrevolt.org/), an anti-racist,anti-fascist community defense formation that advocates for broad working-class solidarity and very explicit rejection of structural racism/white supremacy.

Redneck Revolt is well-known for its members who arrive at protests openly armed. This strategy has proven extremely effective in shitstorms like the fascist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, the largest convergence of far-right and white nationalist/white supremacist organizations in recent U.S, history. On the evening before the main rally, over three hundred torch-wielding white supremacists marched across the University of Virginia campus to Confederate statues and then to St. Paul's Memorial Church, where a community prayer meeting to resist racism was being led by Dr. Cornel West and local faith leaders, A relatively small number of armed Redneck Revolt members (including dixon) provided a community defense bulwark against this violent mob of white supremacists (who had already committed several acts of violence that night), protecting groups of unarmed churchgoers from violence, helping them to their cars, and generally serving as security, leading West to later remark that without the ant/-fascists' help at that moment they could have been "crushed like cockroaches."

On August 14, two days after the "Unite the Right" rally (which culminated in the murder of Heather Heyer by a fascist who plowed his car into a crowd of people), the people of Durham helped with a nighttime takedown of the Confederate statue in front of the Durham courthouse. On the August 18, eleven people who had been arrested over that action were scheduled to be arraigned in court, and almost two thousand people showed up in support and in response to a rumored KKK rally. The Durham Freedom Fighters bloc, of which dixon is a member, came armed to help with community defense in the event that KKK members brought violence. In the aftermath, dixon was arrested, along with two comrades, and charged with two counts related to the (fully permitted) open carry weapon he brought with him that day. After a legal battle and trial that lasted several months, he was entirely acquitted of all charges in late February 2018. He urges support for the Durham folks still facing trial for bringing down the Confederate memorial (see http://doitlikedurham.org/ for updates and how to support).

dwayne dixon is writing today on some of the many challenges and joys of teaching at this point in history. He was charged with participating in a mass demonstration in August 2018 at University of North Carolina, during which the Confederate statue "Silent Sam" (erected in 1913) was taken down by protestors. As of this writing (late 2019), many of the legal charges against dwayne and other participants in the protest have been dismissed, but some are still pending, while "Silent Sam" has not been reerected (yet).

From These Classroom Windows We Can See the Confederacy

by dwayne dixon

So how many times must Rome burn Before the crucial lesson of history is learned? Power kills, destroy everything that power builds -Antischism, "Elements of Oppression"

The white supremacist memorial to the Confederate soldiers enlisted from the student population of the University of North Carolina was dedicated on June 3, 1913, by Confederate Army veteran Julian Carr. In his dedication speech, he famously boasted of "horse-whipp(ing) a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds" only two months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and just a hundred yards from the statue's present place of honor on the UNC campus. "Silent Sam," as the statue of the soldier is known, was yet another symbol intended to dominate public space with the official, monumentalized power of resurgent white supremacy sanctioned and enforced through local segregationist laws collectively known as "Jim Crow." The monument was dedicated the very year President Wilson would institutionalize white supremacy even further by segregating all federal offices and workplaces. The bronze soldier, towering over the green space between grand academic buildings, cocked rifle in his hand, continued the violent work of maintaining white power initially undertaken by the Confederate veterans who returned defeated but determined to preserve a brutal racial social order. In his speech, Julian Carr explicitly connected the statue to the Confederate soldiers who, "during the four years immediately succeeding the war" through "their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo -Saxon race in the South."¹ The statue is a testament to this racist violence in "saving" the white race and a mute sentry watching over public space with the dead eyes of the slavers' foot soldiers. From our classroom on the second floor of Graham Memorial Hall, I and my undergraduate students can clearly see Silent Sam, erect and permanent as ever, being watched over by an endless rotation of (almost exclusively white) campus and Chapel Hill police. The serial ironies are not lost on us, of police protecting property that is in itself a celebration of white men fighting to preserve their property in the form of humans--slaves. Throughout class my gaze drifts out upon the unmoving, intractable statue amidst a shifting, frenetic moment when the white supremacy it commemorates and assures sees its foot soldiers violently attempting to take over public space in real, physical ways. From the streets of Berkeley to Charlottesville to Gainesville to East Lansing, anti-fascists have turned back neo-Nazis and Klansmen and denied their leaders the possibility of claiming space--ideological and embodied--as theirs.

In over twenty years of various forms of teaching, I have always struggled to ensure classrooms are bastions of anti-racist refusal and active resistance to colonial, capitalist, patriarchal white supremacy. But never has that struggle been more visibly immediate and close, just a glance out the window. And so too has the classroom never seemed so important.

On February 16, 2018, I received an email threatening an Identity Evropa protest at the offices of my department unless I and other "subversives" were "investigated," largely for the assumed threat of teaching Marxism. The email concluded by saying: "Enough is enough ... we will confront the students to make sure they are aware of the brainwashing and lies being forced on them by your institution."

Critics of academia would generally agree that American institutions of higher learning have become debt traps for students as tuition rises, especially at private schools, while the work of actually teaching falls increasingly on contingent or precarious labor--contract instructors or adjuncts, who compose 66.5 percent of the workforce, with nearly none, if any, of the protections afforded tenure-track faculty. Rather than being brainwashed by disciples of Karl Marx, it would seem that many people in the university classroom are being soaked by neoliberal capitalism. Graduate students and adjuncts across the country are unionizing and striking. The capitalist exploitation of education and its labor is being confronted simultaneously with the exposure of universities colluding with white supremacy-_-from cowardly administrators giving "white identitarians"~-Nazis--public venues to Chancellor Folt of UNC refusing to remove Silent Sam.

Within all the struggles over university space, it is important to recognize the spatial power of the classroom. It is within this small location where I ask my students-and myself--to undertake a reimagining of social relations, continuing the task of creating the world we desire and refusing to be constrained by coercive mechanisms of fear. It is in this room where debt is incurred and low wages eked out. But this is also the room where the world as it is can become únmoored and destabilized. The classroom is a singular location for facing down fascism. The classroom is the space where I articulate with my students the fears we share and begin to unravel them. It is this act of dismantling fear, that fuel of fascism, that makes the classroom such a dangerous place to the far right. I and other faculty are being targeted for our political positions and activism, particularly because of the volatility of the classroom itself. We are assumed to be putting society at risk by naming and challenging normalized power structures of white supremacy, war, exploitation, incarceration, and dehumanization. What are we saying that the students cannot already see with their own eyes? That the statue guarding the campus entrance is a soldier in a white supremacist army intent on killing to maintain a capitalist system of chattel slavery? They can see the nexus of fear standing in plain sight.

The email I received threatened that the Nazis would "confront" students. They imagined they could cause the classroom to be abandoned. They hoped to intimidate me to vacate the seminar table, to cancel the syllabus out of fear, and if I would not respond to fear, they wanted to mark me as a dangerous ideological subject, a threat in and of myself, and thus to have the university remove me. I am sure my job may still be precarious, but, honestly, it always was. I never imagined that joining others in direct confrontation with fascism would earn me job security-or any security at all. Silent Sam persists as an effect of white supremacy being all too secure. But not for long, never for long.

In the classroom we plot out new paths for ourselves, some alone, some together: through mutual recognition of the queer struggle, the refugee struggle, the Black struggle, the immigrant struggle, the femme struggle, the impoverished struggle, the depression struggle. The classroom is the redoubt of enacting the possible and sharing stories. I speak directly about what I am and what I am doing: my solidarity with comrades who pulled down the Confederate statue in Durham, my anarchist ethics, my appearances before the court to face charges for carrying a rifle against the KKK, my subsequent trial. I ask my students to help me to restructure the demands of the university into collectively created projects where autonomy of action is privileged and shared labor is prized. We begin to change things, to destabilize the order of the world to reject the status quo, to build relations anew through experimentation and collaboration and trust; all in solidarity with one another and in deep belief of one another's struggles and experiences.

These last eight months have been the most intense of my life, and the classroom has been a consistent space where I have practiced my ethics and politics. Rather than becoming timid or uncertain, I inhabit the classroom as anti-fascist action itself, a zone of bold expression and unfettered intellectual provocations. As one student wrote, "the deconstructing can never be done." She points out what we all comprehend: even when the last Confederate statue is pulled down, the work persists, and the courage to continue it comes from among us, inside spaces we create, like classrooms saturated in radical love.

This time is fraught with failing institutions and distrust. It is exactly in the dangerous, perhaps frightening, fissures opening up that we can insist on playfulness and non-hierarchical games enjoyed in the shadow of faltering systems. Classrooms are our theaters and pageants for new ways of being, released from fear, shaped through intentional equality and justice.

It is a time for public courage. I endeavor to always renounce aloud the fear and complicity demanded by Silent Sam and the white supremacist system that keeps him there. We are all being transformed and revealed in this crucible of struggle, and I find myself more honest now when I walk through the door to face my students, more myself in ways I never imagined. For those of us who teach, it is a time of great responsibility to fight back, to liberate our classrooms, and to risk ourselves. It is a time to lose our fear completely. There is less of yesterday to cling to and, yet, more to give, more to be received. Nothing to lose.

Footnotes

"Julian Carr's Speech at the Declaration of Silent Sam," June 2, 2013, accessed June 8, 2019, http://hgreen.people.ua.edu/transcription-carr-speech.html

Radical teachers know that a classroom is by no means a one-way information pipeline from teacher to student(s). Radical teachers know that truly resonant knowledge production and learning involves a complex, ever-shifting process of dialogue and mutual respect. Radical teachers are always learning from their students and understand that a student can very much be a teacher as well. One of the core tenets of truly student-centered teaching practice is to listen--not to be afraid to allow students to turn the lens of reflection on us (or our bosses/administrators) so we can start to break down the hierarchical structures and authoritarian tendencies of our profession It is in the wake of radical actions like these that we can all learn to be better human beings together.

The next piece was written by Kadijah Means, who wrote the original draft in 2015 while a student at Berkeley High School, in California. In 2018, when she made a few revisions to the original piece, she was starting her senior year at University of California Santa Cruz. Back at Berkeley High, Kadijah was a student leader, heading up the Black Student Union and Amnesty International groups on campus, and she was regularly interviewed in local media--particularly with regard to her involvement in the ongoing civil rights struggle that is the Black Lives Matter movement.

Berkeley High has an international reputation as an enlightened, modern high school that has sometimes employed radical measures to address systemic educational inequities that are rooted in racism, class discrimination, gender/sexuality biases, and other problems that plague schools across the U.S. (and worldwide); it is generally considered a "model school" as far as social justice issues are concerned. Even in this relatively "enlightened" institution, however, society still exists so the same problems persist, and these problems often end up extra-magnified when they are not addressed well (or at all). In her essay, Kadijah highlights specific examples of major issues at Berkeley High to illustrate the repeated failures of the educational system in addressing racism, both within the school context and in the wider world. She also gives some concrete suggestions for ways that teachers, administrators, and school districts can work long-term to be more responsive and help combat the pervasive reality of race-based inequities and injustice.

How Schools can Address Racism

By Kadijah Means

We know now we want more
Oh ah, oh ah
A life worth fighting for
Oh ah, oh ah
So let them say we can't do better
Lay out the rules that we can't break
They wanna sit and watch you wither
Their legacy's too hard to take
-Santigold, "Disparate Youth"

The topic of racism is again at the forefront of the average American's mind. In response to non-indictments and injustice catching the eye of mainstream media, movements like Black Lives Matter have spread across the U.S. The U.S education system, specifically in "progressive" places like Berkeley, California (the college town often teasingly called as the Peoples' Republic of Berkeley), has found itself scrambling to write lessons and alter curricula to meet the needs of the systematically oppressed. The education system, which serves as a window into this "developed" country's priorities, was completely unprepared to address the idea of anti-Blackness on their campus, let alone the current iteration of systemic racism. The choice to ignore the needs of marginalized groups and children is a disappointing but regular occurrence in this historically white supremacist country. Unfortunately, the popularity of Dr. Derald Sue's term "microaggression" has helped us to define how many well-intentioned but still willfully ignorant residents of Berkeley (and abroad) forget about the frequent explicit forms of bias that impact students on a daily basis. Faculty is ill-prepared to manage any classroom conflict, not to mention explicit racially motivated ones.

There are two major issues colliding in Berkeley's education system:

lack of transparency with regard to preventative and reactive measures to protect and defend marginalized students and faculty;

the neglect of Black and Brown student needs, which prevents them from flourishing in the ways their white counterparts can.

When preparing young minds, building trust requires mutual respect. In order to convince students that what they're learning matters and isn't solely government propaganda, they should trust you. Black and Brown kids know the world doesn't like them, and we're usually right--more on that later.

In order to prove we should value what we're taught, communication must be made a priority. Students should feel included in decisions concerning them. At Berkeley High there are no processes in place to facilitate dialogue between administration, teachers, and students. Furthermore, when concerning events take place, there is no effort made to inform the teaching faculty or students, which results in fractured trust. Here's a solid example of dis bullshit.

On October 1, 2014, a BHS security officer discovered a noose hanging from a tree on campus. The school administration waited more than five days to announce the incident, even after pressure from the dean of students and the Black Student Union (BSU). When they released a statement via email, it was ineffective, as the majority of the student body remained ignorant of the incident. As president of the BS and the Amnesty International club, I reached out to the Gay/Straight Alliance to put pressure on the administration to act decisively. We decided to force a response by releasing a statement to local news notifying them of the occurrence. In addition to organizing for news coverage, employing the tactics of guerrilla warfare, I read a statement over the school's public announcement system to inform all the students of what happened on our campus--not in the 196os (an era people associate with the Civil Rights Movement, although it has not subsided) but in 2014.

There was no plan to tell the students about the noose. A student group (comprised of one Black girl and her faculty advisor Christina Mitchell, with the help of members of the GSA) had to bring this information directly to the student body. The administration planned to put paper hearts in the tree as their recognition of the incident. The hearts were placed in the tree prior to both announcements, some a, dents were mildly curious abort the paper hearts placed in a seeming, arbitrary tree, bit menst of the 2a0 students didn't think to inspeak, especially considering ho they were never directly informed about the none in the first place, Instead of allowing us to feel shitty about this despicable event that occurred on our campus, the administration rushed into a bandaid solution. As presumptuous as this may be, imagine the administration felt the classic "this couldn't have happened at our echoed" or the slen classle "not in we like Black people here Berkeley"

After all, Berkeley High has a reputation for being a picturesque high school, boasting double-digit varsity sports tears, a small learn in community program, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate lass offerings, and the only high school Affican American studies department in the nation. Their reputation as a good school in a good place sometimes abstracts the fact that Berkeley High is a microcosmb of the world around it, a world that does not like Black people, or at best is ambivalent about them, We cannot expect an administration conditioned to feel apathy toward Black and Brown students to prioritize consoling, the students affected.

The noose was a reality check for many much like the recent events in Verguson, Missouri, Charleston, South Carolina, and so many other places, We are not post racial. Putting hearts in a tree without telling the student body what happened was a rush to solve something that is not solvable in the short-term/This incident illustrates the disregard for Black student needs and racial tension stirring on campus felt the administration didn't want to face the fact that this malicious act had occurred in Berkeley and, therefore, attempted to cover it up. In the case of the noose, those affected by the triggering imagery were neglected, This is a prime example of how the burden to educate students and staff falls on the affected community. A racially charged incident took place, and people of color, namely Black girls like me, were expected to respond, Black and Brown students carry this burden, and it definitely impacts them in the classroom. In instances like this the marginalized continue to be actively disenfranchised, even when "it's not on purpose,"

The administration downplayed what happened to make sure the minority in the school, the white students, were more comfortable than lared as if ignoring the noose made the problem disappear. I was contacted as if ignoring the noose made the problem disappear. I was concerned the situation was not being taken seriously. I felt the history of violence against Black and Brown folks (they lynched Mexicans too) was being minimized. We remember the Holocaust, but we constantly try to move past the hundreds of years of racist and violent history against Black people in this country. The discriminatory treatment of Black people is easily ignored today, because it is less tangible than at the height of lynchings in 1895 or the violence surrounding the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, but it is no less insidious. The silence of the Berkeley community around issues of race play out in a very dangerous way for Black and Brown students. Many experience discrimination, microaggressions, and outright bigotry and have nowhere to turn. Learning in this environment isn't impossible, but it is arduous, and that's what matters. Black and Brown students shouldn't be asked to be resilient no matter what. It is integral that we support students, so they feel able to express when inequities occur.

Toward the end of my time at Berkeley High, I was somewhat of an unpaid advisor on race relations. I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to help combat racism as the school had diagnosed it. Unfortunately, their conceptualization of racism centered Black boys and men as the victims of its atrocities. I felt a unique call to place my race before my gender at a time when I was still developing my thoughts about girlhood and its impact on my racial identity. My efforts at the time failed to highlight the reality of police violence against Black women (especially trans-women) because of my ignorance and the pressure to solely discuss race. It is imperative to consider how Black girls (especially transgirls) could feel alienated by initiatives that seldom acknowledged their plight.

Kimberlé Crenshaw' theory of intersectionality is especially salient in this regard. Crenshaw begs us to consider the new oppressions, discriminations, and prejudices created in the center of Blackness and womanhood. This means intersectionality isn't about layering identities on top of one another, but rather noticing the ways freedoms are limited when certain identities intersect. In light of this monumental work, I want to encourage educators to trouble any foundational desire to view anti-Blackness as a Black man's issue. As one of my favorite authors and researchers Monique Morris says, "I believe that the investment in 34 black boys, and other boys of color, is necessary. However, that investment should never be to the exclusion of black girls."' Morris's book, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls (New York: New Press, 2016) addresses how discussions of anti-Blackness in schools often center boys. Recognizing the Black woman and girls (especially transwomen and transgirls) who don't fit the "racism is a Black man's issue" narrative is imperative and not difficult to include in discussions of racism.

At a place like Berkeley High, where the school is dramatically divided by race, class, gender, and worldview, it is intimidating to teach about race and racism (they are different conversations). I have found that difficult topics like these are often avoided. Conversations about racism, how it affects people of color and the community at large, are essential to preparing critical humans. The bare minimum is encouraging creativity to help young people interrogate their world and problem solve within it. The production of race cannot be explained as if it is natural and, therefore, right. It should be taught as a production that is meticulously maintained to produce specific negative outcomes for anyone who is not in the dominant class. Racism's ever-changing tactics should be monitored and dissected so that students see how white supremacy is prioritized and implemented in their learning environments. This is not as daunting as it seems.

I love teachers. I don't want to complicate their job. They are already playing so many roles (mentor, therapist, etc.) in the classroom. I understand that the omission of certain topics is due to lack of training and a fear of discomfort. No one wants to be the racist teacher who said something unintentionally offensive, so they'd rather just skip the conversation completely. I get it, but we must acknowledge their role in indoctrinating kids and help them challenge the sexist, racist, ableist, and classist norms that are usually enforced in the classroom. Teachers simply haven't been taught about systemic oppression, the state's role in how the classroom functions, how to facilitate discussions about these things, and how to resist them. The intent of omission is to avoid hurting anyone's feelings, but the impact of omitting these realities is damaging for all students. I believe that loving teachers must include holding them accountable for their role in indoctrinating kids. The one institution charged with preparing young minds for higher order thinking employs a pedagogy that appeals to rich, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgendered, heterosexual, white male students, and even they are being robbed of the necessary tools to critique this world. We must reframe our approach.

SOLUTIONS

I am not an expert in education. I am a student who is keenly aware of the impact anti-Blackness and negligence has on students. My reflections would be valid whether they included solutions or not, but I have some suggestions to improve the system in any case.

1. Stop Buying Textbooks from Texas Make a conscious note of the values and limits of all sources you bring into your classroom. If all that is available to you is white supremacist propaganda, then make an example out of their manipulative practices.

2. Cultural Competency Training There are skilled educators who can explain the ideas of privilege and power, systemic racism, micro vs. macroaggressions, explicit vs. implicit bias, anti-Blackness, etc., and every school needs attention paid to these concepts. If a place like Berkeley (obsessed with their image of progressiveness) needs this training, then every city in the U.S. needs it. I would suggest integrating an inclusive curriculum that highlights the contributions of all people to the world, as opposed to a solely eurocentric curriculum. That means social studies, math, and science would need to acknowledge contributions from all cultures. This will take time. We have to be dedicated.

3. Diversifying Thought When discussing the Black Lives Matter movement in class, someone said, "They couldn't support such a violent movement." In my experience at Berkeley High, I've had lots of students tell me that "non-violence" is the only way to change things (their idea of violence is looting and property damage, which I do not believe is violence). If I respond, it is usually something like this: "I am not asking nicely for those oppressing me to stop. In fact, I am not asking at all. I am demanding the freedom and equity my people deserve. So maybe that means some windows will be broken, and some noise will be made after ten p.m.-so what?" Unfortunately, I can count the number of teachers who share these radical thoughts on my hand. We can't expect students to question the status quo if the people teaching them aren't willing to question it. We need minds stretching across the political spectrum (though there's a difference between tactical disagreements and advocating for oppression based on inherent characteristics, for example, denying transpeople their right to humanity and life--the latter should be shut down without question). Diversity of thought is what enriches the learning experience. It seems the entire reason educators advocate for ethnic diversity is to expose students to different walks of life. If everyone in the classroom looks different but has a parallel mindset, that is not enriching. Identity politics will never save us. We need to expose students to more radical ideas.

4. Building Trust There should be clear processes to inform students and teachers of current events on campus, especially harmful events. Your students will become adults with a worldview impacted by what you teach them. Treat students as full humans who deserve to know what is going on in their school environment and in the world around them.

5.Sustained Focus on Critique
Read Joan Scott's "The Evidence of Experience."? The essay is a thoughtful critique of politics and knowledge production. Scott's writing can be applied to the concept of identity politics quite well. It explores the limits of how we come to know and view things as important, natural, and true. I think it is an excellent place for educators to begin pondering how they know and what shapes their beliefs. I hope this limited reflection can spark the important introspective journey needed to teach your students and yourself to question what you consider natural.

Footnotes

Melinda D. Anderson, "The Black Girl Pushout" (interview with Monique W Morris), Atlantic, March 165, 2016 accessed june 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-criminalization-of-black-girls-in-schools/473718/.

Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773-97, accessed June 8, 2019, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/ea-media-project/files/2018/02/Scott_TheEvidence_1991.pdf.

If you are a public school teacher in the United States, the likelihood is high that you will be working with at least a couple of students, and perhaps an entire classroom, who are dealing with some kind of trauma. These traumas often dovetail with and stem from poverty and other systemic oppressions (racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.), as well as specific abuse on the individual level. The sad reality is that many (if not most) teachers are overwhelmed and freaked out by this, and unless some form of additional support is available for these students, they often run into problems and fall through the cracks in a crowded public school environment. In light of this, teachers and counselors who have personally survived trauma-including many punks--can be an invaluable resource for these students as they try to navigate an environment that is heavily weighted against them.

This essay's author, Lindsay McLeary, is the academic coordinator for the Upward Bound program for low-income and/or first-generation college students. Lindsay spent his formative years knee-deep in SoCal's survivor-heavy punk/hardcore scene and now has the peculiar distinction of being the most heavily tattooed person in University of California Berkeley's Department of Equity and Inclusion. He has worked in education and educational outreach for well over a decade, including stints as a lecturer at University of Southern California and Stanford and a classroom teacher in Oakland and Richmond, California, public schools.

The Legacy of Trauma

by Lindsay Mcleary

How your body still remembers things you told it to forget. How those furious affections followed you.
-The Weakerthans, "Watermark"

My couples' therapist (the therapist that my wife and I go to for couples' counseling) has been getting a bit frustrated with me. Specifically, she's been getting frustrated with my complaints that I "don't feel safe in the room."

She tells me this: "I think that your wife and I have been very reassuring with you that you're safe here. I would like to reflect on the possibility that your feeling of being judged and threatened is something that you're projecting onto me and onto these sessions."

She's not wrong. But the reality of the situation is that I spent the first decade of my life living in fear of verbal and physical abuse by my parental authority figures, and then spent the following two decades getting into conflicts with every other authority figure in my life: cops, teachers, supervisors, landlords, movie ushers, crossing guards, and, yes, even therapists.

Between the ages of fourteen and thirty, I was either abusing substances or walking around as a bundle of tense muscles ready to defend my very existence. So, yeah, when I'm in a room with a very serious looking therapist and my wife, and they're both critiquing my behavior, it triggers something deep inside of me. Something that says that I'm not safe.

This voice that says that I'm not safe, it's not something I hear intellectually. It's something I feel in my shoulders and in my chest. It manifests psychologically as an atmosphere in the room. I feel like I'm in an eighties horror movie, suddenly sitting alone in a big, scary, empty house, and the lights have just gone out. And there is a cello playing one long, deep note. Everything in my body screams: Get the fuck out right now!

I pause for a moment to think of the most diplomatic way to respond to my therapist.

I tell her this: "Y'know, I think there's some validity to that. And It's something I'm working on. But with all due respect, this is an issue that's embedded very deeply within me, and I don't think we're gonna resolve it in a handful of sessions. Please be patient with me."

That was the best I could muster at that particular moment. Twenty years ago, as a teenager (the same age as many of my students) struggling with trauma, I would have probably just yelled out, "Fuck this!" and left the room. Now, I can get my shit together at least enough to be diplomatic.

MY BACKGROUND AND A DISCLAIMER

For my entire adult life, I have been employed in education in one respect or another. I've taught in high school classrooms, lectured in universities, and mentored student teachers. I went into education for the same reason a lot of people go into education: I wanted to give young people the opportunities that I never had.

After I started in education--teaching in high school classrooms in Oakland and Richmond-I noticed that I had a specific talent for connecting with kids who had discipline issues. I connected with them, because, in certain respects, I was them. I had been where they were. And I knew that discipline issues don't come from nowhere. They often come from undiagnosed and untreated learning disabilities, emotional distress, and (in the worst cases) domestic and environmental trauma.

For over a decade, I helped administer academic services for the federally funded academic outreach program Upward Bound. I worked specifically with low-income high school students from "distressed" urban and rural communities throughout California and Nevada. The kids I worked with, who grew up in these communities (typically communities of color), tended to be exposed to some pretty traumatic stuff (gang shootings, drug addiction, overdose, police violence, domestic violence, etc.) early in life. Part of my job was listening to these kids and their stories.

My reason for writing this piece is simple. I think that most educators working with students in distressed communities will, at some point, find themselves needing to provide trauma-informed care for the children that they work with. I want school districts and administrators to know that they have the responsibility of providing trauma-informed training to these educators. Rather than merely citing statistics, I hope to make my point by focusing on the personal experiences I have had working with these students. My hope is that after reading this you will be moved to champion my cause and put pressure on school districts to provide these resources to educators.

Now, before we start, I want to offer a little disclaimer. Some of the stuff that I'm about to discuss is a bit rough. I want you to know it's okay (and expected) for you to feel a bit of emotional and even physical discomfort reading some of these stories--especially if you have had a history of trauma. If the tone or subject matter of the discussion makes you start to feel uncomfortable, please, please, stop reading and go take care of yourself. Taking care of yourself should be your first and top priority.

RECOGNIZING TRAUMA AND ACTIVATION

When you informally survey the kinds of people who enter into underpaid, service-oriented occupations that work with marginalized and traumatized communities, you often find that they are people who have been marginalized and/or traumatized themselves. I am no exception.

I grew up with two drug-addicted parents, one of whom was physically and emotionally abusive and both of whom were neglectful. As a teenager, I sought refuge in the Los Angeles punk rock scene, which was (ironically) rife with violence, drug abuse, homelessness, and trauma. For better or worse, heavily tattooed, drug-addicted, and alcoholic teenagers became my chosen family.

Besides the fact that I could relate to many of these alcoholic street punks, I think I was also attracted to the fact they seemed to have this ability to listen to difficult and painful stories and to turn toward them when most people would turn away. As I got older, I have tried not to lose this capacity to remain open to people who are sharing painful experiences. It turned out to be invaluable to me in my work.

One day a student (we will call her "Julia") leaves her group of friends, sits down next to me on a bench, and starts talking to me. She tells me about her birth family: Her biological father was African American, and she was born to a drug-addicted Asian woman. Since her mother was unable to care for her, she gave her up to her Asian family who hated Black people and, by extension, her. In their care, she was neglected and mistreated.

"I think they probably were hoping that I would die, so they could be rid of me. I wasn't wanted," Julia tells me, matter of-factly. Stoicallv. There are no tears in her eyes. And there are no tears in mine either. This is common among people with a history of trauma. We have a kind of external numbness when discussing our own trauma and hearing other people discuss theirs.

One day, when Julia was an infant, she suffered burns to her body because they tossed her in a bath of hot water without testing it Arst. She was taken to a hospital and child protective services was called. She was taken away from her family and placed in foster care, at what is called "a group home."

"Things at the group home weren't much better," she comments and smiles at me, kind of sadly.

"I bet they weren't. Those places can be pretty fucked-up." I smile back.

At the time I had been reading Avolution of a Cro-Mag, the autobiography of the punk rock singer Jon Joseph, where he discusses what it was like growing up with a physically abusive and neglectful foster family. Although I had to stop reading it because the homophobia and misogyny were beginning to get to me, the stories he tells about his early life illustrate an important point: it's sometimes better to be homeless than to live with abuse.

"I have to tell you, Julia, I've heard a lot of stories of bad childhoods. But yours is . .. particularly shitty. Maybe one of the shittiest." "I know," she says shyly, kind of laughing a bit.

"But I'm really grateful that you came to me and trusted me with your story. Thank you. Any time you want to talk, I'm here. Seriouslv." She thanks me for listening and runs back to her group of friends. Pretty soon she's laughing again, and everything seems to have gone back to normal.

Nothing was "normal" with Julia's situation, however.

Often, heavily traumatized children play and socialize just like any other kids. Sometimes, as adults, we mistakenly praise their resilience without fully understanding the nature of their situations. The past still lives within them. It resides in their neurons and their nerves, which are so tightly tuned that their nervous systems are put into overdrive whenever they receive the slightest hint of a possible threat to their perceived safety.

Although Julia seemed to play and socialize like any other fourteen year-old, she had endured massive amounts of trauma. When she was activated by a triggering situation, she would struggle with the same kind of PTSD symptoms you might see in a Syrian refugee or a Vietnam War veteran.

When I watched Julia become activated, her behavior no longer resembled that of a "normal" fourteen-year-old girl. Rather, she was more like a perturbed panther that has been forced into a cage. Her eyebrows dipped, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes narrowed, and she paced nervously. She was unable to stay still. Her hands became balled fists. She too was a bundle of nerves and muscles, ready to defend her existence. And what would trigger this? Her teacher asked her to stay after class so they could talk about her missing assignments.

Having worked closely with her, I knew that this was all it took: the slightest hint of a possible rebuke from one of her teachers, and she would become activated.

Julia and I are a lot alike. Her having to wait after class to talk to her teachers is a lot like me sitting in couples' therapy. At the slightest provocation, we can become frightened, caged creatures whose very existence seems to be at stake. Luckily, I am an adult, and I have learned the tools to cope in situations where I am activated. She, on the other hand, is a pubescent fourteen-year-old girl whose prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed enough to deploy strategic long-term decision-making. On top of that, she must cope with some of the worst trauma I've ever encountered.

These are the kinds of challenges we must face as educators working with traumatized students from distressed communities.

UNDERSTANDING TRAUMA IN AN URBAN SETTING

UNDERSTANDING OF TRAUMA IN AN URBAN SETTING

Before we go any further, I want to clarify what I mean when I talk about trauma, because I use this term a bit differently than how it is typically portrayed. Our initial understanding of trauma was informed by studies done regarding the social and emotional difficulties that veterans encountered when they reintegrated back into society_-for example, initial post-World War I observations of soldiers who were "shell-shocked." The way we see trauma played out in the present day, however, encompasses a lot more than the narrow understanding we initially gleaned from observing combat veterans.

My understafnding of this issue is more informed by the problems experienced by the population I have worked with. The trauma encountered by low-income children and families living in distressed urban areas typically involves either (1) a perception that one is in a dangerous situation or otherwise lacks safety or (2) the expectation that one's basic needs--housing, emotional support, food, sanitation-will not be met. Many of my students had families who struggled with housing insecurity. Their caregivers simply weren't able to provide stable housing. Even those who had temporarily secured an apartment or other housing might suddenly get evicted and end up living in hotels, with friends or extended family, or in cars.

The media focus typically makes it seem that a twenty-five-year-old soldier who watches his friend get blown up by an improvised explosive device probably fares worse on the scale of trauma than a twelve-year-old kid with an alcoholic father who has also been housing insecure for six months.

In my experience, that's often not the case.

Adults who have grown up in supportive, loving families have brains that are well adapted to cope with the intense stress reaction that accompanies a traumatic experience. Children don't. Especially if, since infancy, they have grown up in a family that is coping with constant distress. Also, it has to be mentioned that veterans generally have access to some form of psychiatric and therapeutic treatment, while low-income kids often lack access to these resources.

There's a kind of equation that I employ to think about who is most likely to experience trauma. The more vulnerable a population is, the more likely they are to have been exposed to really terrible situations that can leave permanent psychological scars. People of color are more vulnerable than white folks, low-income folks are more vulnerable than affluent people. Young people (especially women) are--quite obviously--more vulnerable than male adults: and so the majority of reported rapes involve girls under fifteen years old.

Low-income kids are in a very dire situation.

They are the demographic most likely to be exposed to unrelenting stress, lack of physical and emotional safety, and food and housing insecurity, and they are the most likely to be exposed to traumatic experiences, which change the way their brains work. Permanently.

Some statistics: trauma affects kids' ability to regulate their emotional reactions. Low-income kids who are exposed to traumatic situatons often act impulsively and destructively, especially children under the age of ten. Far too often, psychiatrists respond to this by prescribing really heavy medications. Children in low-income families are four times more likely to receive antipsychotie medication. In 2008, twenty thousand low-income kids under the age of five were prescribed antipsychoties! These drugs (including Seroquel, Risperidal, and Abilify) carry warnings that recommend against their use by children because they can inhibit learning and development of important cognitive functioning.

With the exception of psychiatric interventions meant to calm the most out of control kids, low-income children who experience trauma generally don't have access to mental health professionals. Further, for many of these children, it is their communities, households, and parents that are the sources of their trauma and their emotional distress.

The reality of the situation is that, for most of these children, the only controlled and safe atmosphere they have is their schools. This presents us, as educators, with a unique opportunity: to use our classrooms as the setting in which they can begin the difficult work of learning to cope with and contain their trauma.

COPING, CONTAINING, CURING

When I say that classrooms and schools can be a setting where students learn to cope with and contain their trauma, there is a very specific reason why I say "cope with and contain," rather than "cure." In tackling my own issues with complex PTSD and trauma, I've learned that "curing" or "healing" from childhood trauma is a complicated and difficult endeavor. The two treatments I've heard about most often--Prolonged Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Processing Therapy--both take around ten or more weekly sessions, and (from what I've heard) each session can leave you pretty activated and edgy, sometimes for several days.

At the time of this writing, I'm thirty-seven years old. I've received neither of the treatments mentioned above. I keep on wanting to and saying to myself, "Someday." First, therapy is expensive. Second, both of the therapeutic treatments that are available to cure PTSD-rather than merely contain it- require one to confront and revisit the very experiences and events that made one traumatized in the first place. The thought of doing this really scares the crap out of me.

In the beginning of this piece, I noted that people who enter into underpaid, service-oriented occupations that work with marginalized and traumatized communities are often themselves people who have been marginalized and traumatized. I want to revisit this point, because there is little doubt in my mind that my own history of trauma has affected my work as an educator of low-income students.

I have worked with students who have witnessed very horrific acts of domestic violence. It isn't uncommon to see the domestic violence that has been perpetrated in their households reenacted by the students themselves, often in the form of extremely intense and aggressive shouting matches between female and male students. The sort of shouting matches that would attract police attention if the shouters in question were full-fledged adults rather than teenagers.

One particular afternoon, during a week I was particularly overworked and underslept, I had to break up a near fight between a young man (let's call him "James") and young woman (let's call her "Jasmin") who were around thirteen and sixteen years old, respectively. James had just told Jasmin to "suck his dick," and Jasmin (who was normally somewhat even-tempered) was crying and screaming at him at a volume, timbre, and pitch that made my ears ring and also made it very difficult to decipher what she was actually saying. It was my job to separate the two and disperse the very large crowd that had amassed around them, specifically by getting everyone not involved in the incident into their classrooms.

I was prompting one of James's friends to go to class, and he was resisting, insisting that he wanted to remain outside with James. At my wits end (and quite activated myself), I angrily told the student, "Get to class right now, or I'm getting you kicked out of this program."

His response surprised me. He looked at me up and down and said, "Why are your hands shaking? Are you afraid?"

That's when I looked down to confirm what he had just inquired about. My hands were, indeed, shaking quite violently. My whole body was shaking. Rather than answering him, I just walked away from the situation, sat down on a set of steps, and waited for the shaking to stop. When it did, I called my wife and told her that I was coming home for the day, that I'd had a rough day at work.

With the exception of audiences of afternoon talk shows, I am not aware of a lot of people who enjoy watching two people go at each other (verbally or otherwise) with the intention of doing the other person harm. It would upset most people with a modicum of empathy and emotional awareness. However, this incident didn't actually "upset me in the typical sense of the word. Rather, it triggered me. Which is to say; I wasn't aware of any particular negative emotion that I was feeling. What I felt was more like a basic feeling of bodily danger. My body was betraying me by shaking uncontrollably. I was, quite honestly, physically unable to do my job.

At the time, I had not considered the possibility that I struggled with trauma-related issues, and I hadn't pursued treatment for my childhood trauma. Looking back now, my lack of awareness of my own trauma-related issues made me a liability. In my own defense, I can only say that until very recently, my organization hadn't been offered training in how to recognize the nuances and effects of trauma in ourselves, much less our students.

Blind to the realities and dynamics of trauma, educators put themselves and their students at risk.

TURNING LIABILITIES INTO ASSETS

Although having staff with a history of trauma can be a liability when they are sent in, uninformed and unprepared, to work with traumatized communities, they may also be an invaluable asset if trained the right way.

One evening, about six years ago, I sat with a girl (we'll call her "Anna"), a high school senior who was spending the summer away from home at a residential academic program at University of California Berkeley. She had just received a phone call from her family informing her that her aunt, who had been struggling with drug addiction, had died from an overdose. Her family did not have any money to fly her home or take the time off work to drive down and get her, so she had to remain in the program. She ended up missing her aunt's funeral.

There was no sobbing. Anna just stared into space while tears streamed slowly down her otherwise impassive face. This is something I've noticed about kids who have grown up in toxic, traumatic environments. They learn to cry in total silence.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "You're too young to have to deal with shit like this."

Anna looked up at me and smiled, but with pain in her eyes. "Do I really have a choice? I've been dealing with this shit my entire life." I could sense her frustration.

"I know. And it's just not fair."

I asked if it was okay to give her a hug. She said yes and reached out to hug me. And when I hugged her the silent tears transformed into vocalized grief, as she finally allowed herself to really cry.

Later that night, I sat and reflected on my own trauma. How my mother overdosed when I was eleven. How the paramedics came to the house. How the doctor came out into the waiting room and told me and my father that he was doing the best he could, but she might not make it through the night.

I realized that when I had expressed to Anna that she shouldn't have to deal with shit like overdoses, I was (to some extent) also talking to my younger self. I was too young. I shouldn't have had to deal with the consequences of my parents' drug addiction. It wasn't fucking fair. Not for me and not for Anna.

For the last two years, I have been getting up in front of audiences full of people who work in education and trying to convince them of one thing: we need more mental health professionals working in low-income neighborhoods and our underfunded, under-resourced public schools. The sad irony is that my students come from the population most in need of mental health care, but because they're low-income, they are least likely to get it.

All too often when I approach educators and say, "This kid has had really stressful traumatic shit going on his life. He's experienced some really heavy stuff," their response is, "That's terrible. But what can I do? I'm not a psychologist or a therapist. This isn't my wheelhouse."

I have something to say to these educators: most of these kids aren't gonna get professional help. They don't have their own psychiatrist or therapist. They have you. So you're going to have to learn how to help them as best you can.

CLIMBING OUT TOGETHER

Its not easy for anyone. Especially if you have a history of trauma yourself.

If you're an educator working with a traumatized population you do have the capacity to help children and adolescents who have experienced trauma. You don't need a degree in psychology to sit with someone who is experiencing grief or to help them process their emotions. You don't need to be a licensed therapist to be able to deliver psychological first aid. You don't need to have gone to college or even graduated from high school. You can still learn to listen receptively to children who have a story to tell you.

By offering educators training in providing trauma-informed care to their students, we can transform educators into nonclinical practitoners. For the last several years, I have been on a mission to convince more educators to become trauma-informed nonclinical practitioners. I feel like all individuals working in education and community services need to embrace and learn trauma-informed care.

Let me briefly lay down the difference between a clinical practitioner and a nonclinical practitioner. A clinical practitioner is a psychiatrist, licensed therapist, or licensed social worker. They're people with degrees and expertise. A nonclinical practitioner can be anyone who is knowledgeable in practicing trauma-informed care. I work in education not mental health, but I am also trained in providing trauma-informed care, so I'm a nonclinical practitioner.

Here's an analogy I've been using, which I shamelessly stole from The Punisher TV series on Netflix.

Imagine that a child is stuck a deep hole in the ground, and they're injured. Some people are going to walk by that hole, look in and see someone stuck and quickly look away. It hurts them too much to see someone in that condition. Some people are going to go to the edge of the hole and shout words of sympathy or encouragement. "You'll get out of the hole someday! I believe in you!" This does no good at all. Some people are going to try and give the person tools to get out of the hole but not show the person who is stuck how to use them. Some people are going to throw down medical supplies, but the person's injuries need to be treated by a doctor.

Then one day a person jumps into the hole with the child. The child freaks out and says, "What are you doing?! I'm stuck in this hole. I have been for days. Now we're both stuck! Can you even help me? Can you treat my injuries? Are you a doctor?"

The person who jumped into the hole says, "No, I'm not a doctor. But I can help you. You see, I've been in this hole before, and I know the way out, so we're going to climb out of this hole together"

I think this is the most powerful thing that educators with a background of trauma have to offer: we come from a community where many of us have experienced and survived trauma and come out the other side as (relatively) healthy and functioning human beings. We have been to some scary places in our lives. These are the some of the same places that our students now find themselves. All we need to help them heal is the courage to go back to those scary places with these kids and help them find their way out.

Confess the faults you hide. Approach what seems repulsive. Teach those who seem unteachable. Give away what you are attached to. Go to the places that scare you.
- The Five Slogans of Machig Labdrön

Teachers, especially radical teachers, are faced with a problem. They are operating within a system circumscribed by state education policy, constrained by curriculum requirements and guidelines that often have little to do with actual education. In the Israeli occupied territories of Palestine, teachers face the same issue, only with the immense weight of the Israeli occupation hanging over everything. To understand how teachers in Palestine experience this situation I interviewed my friend Murad Tamini, a teacher from the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank. Murad is currently a teacher in the classroom after spending many years as an official in the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT). In addition to this experience, he was and remains an activist against the occupation, from the time of the First Intifada in 1987 to the nonviolent Popular Resistance movement initiated by the villagers of Nabi Saleh in 2009.

- Mike Corr

Resistance in the Palestinian Classroom

Mike Corr Interviews Murad Tamini

One on this ground of poison
Alone, we will cry
And together, we will cry
This is the new world
Haram, "What Is This Life?"

Mike Corr: Education in the West Bank was run by the Israeli military from 1967 until 1994, right? What was that like?

Murad Tamini: First, the curriculum was written entirely by Israelis. You couldn't talk about Palestinian history or the Palestinian cause. Of course, the teachers in the schools were Palestinian, so they weren't totally tied to that curriculum, but they had to be careful. You could never talk about current events, like the struggle in Lebanon or anything. Also, the curriculum was terrible. There was no creativity, just memorizing everything. ´

Mike Corr: What were the conditions of life for teachers during that time?

Murad Tamint: In general, teachers had low salaries-900 shekels, about 250 dollars, a month-and if anybody tried to do anything political, to resist, they were fired, or at least moved to another school with no warning, so the teachers were always oppressed and humiliated by the military administration. But you can say the same for the whole Palestinian people. Teachers got involved in resistance, either underground military resistance or forming unions and doing different things. Some were arrested and suffered, others carried on and played a role in the revolutionary movement.

Mike Corr: How did things change after Oslo and the introduction of the Palestinian Authority?

Murad Tamini: After Oslo, let's say from 1994 to 2000, there was a big change. In the schools they started teaching about national issues, Palestine, the PLO, etc. But from the Second Intifada in 2000 until today, it has gone from bad to worse. At first, teachers felt like they had freedom of speech within something like their own state, but the Palestinian Authority (PA) kept paying the same terrible salaries, and the Education Ministry introduced its own curriculum, just like the old one with some superficial changes. Teachers still teach to the same exit exam- the tawjihi. The ministry talks a lot about critical thinking and holds workshops, but it's superficial. The teacher has to cover the book or the text, and it doesn't allow them to do any activities or anything like that. If the teacher misses some pages, then the students can't answer the questions. Teachers are handcuffed to the test.

Since 2000, the ministry also started to remove Arabic and religious studies material from the text books. They blame Hamas, but Hamas is just a symbol. These things are pillars of Palestinian identity and culture. Every two or three years, from 2000 until now, there have been three or four big curriculum changes. It has gone from bad to worse. You can ask any teacher and they'll say, "This is the worst curriculum I've ever taught."

The ministry is not a Palestinian institution! They manipulate the students' and parents' minds by superficial activities. They throw big celebrations and parties for graduation, and you see the officials in their black suits taking pictures for the internet, especially for the donors. In terms of education, I think it's worse than ever. In 2016, there was a big teachers' strike and a march in Ramallah. The PA repressed it using police checkpoints and everything. That was bad for the teachers, because they started to really feel that they are under occupation again and their freedom won't improve.

Mike Corr: What is the reasoning behind changes in the curriculum, especially less emphasis on Arabic and Islam?

Murad Tamini: The Education Ministry is doing a fishy thing. I think the Israelis have a big role in all this. They sent a message to teachers to tell students not to memorize verses from the Quran because it won't be in the final exam. This has never happened!!! I heard people at the ministry are talking about erasing the Quran verses, because it teaches students to be terrorists. I'm not defending fundamentalists and terrorists, but Islam and the Quran, you know, it's culture, it's a pillar of nationalism. Now, in history class they say if you want to teach history you have to teach the other side--the Israeli narrative. I think they're taking away the history of Palestine as a nation. Maybe we'll teach about Ramallah and Nablus, Mahmoud Darwish, etc., but that's it.

Mike Corr: Official public education isn't the only kind of education, right? Can you talk about the popular education during the First Intifada?

Murad Tamini: During the First Intifada, in 1987, we had popular education. From 1987 to 1990, the Israelis would close the schools for months. Students held class in the streets or in homes, and many activists started doing popular education. We had classes in social centers and sports clubs. Of course, we took the old curriculum to prepare students for the test, but the methods were different because the teachers were activists. They started talking about real issues. After Oslo, all the old ways came right back.

Mike Corr: As a teacher, how do you deal with the system?

Murad Tamini: The main problem we suffer is classroom management. The students feel they are going to prison and not school, and there is a big gap between teachers and students. The teachers have one main goal-control the class and cover the text. It's a sort of programming of the mind. They program teachers to be machines without stopping and thinking about what they're doing. They're just a machine going in the morning and leaving in the afternoon. You ask any teacher, "Do you have good results in class?" He'll say, "No, I'm just going there to spend time and take my salary."

As for me, I had a big fight with my supervisor. She came by my class at different times and saw that I tried to teach outside of the curriculum, telling stories and doing activities. She said, "You have to go back to the curriculum." I had a big fight with her, so I was suspended. Before that, they kept moving me from one school to the other. Which is a big problem- if you start telling students the truth, they move you. So you have to be a machine. The administration and the ministry staff go to these workshops and conferences all around the world, spending millions of dollars from private donors and international aid, supposedly for improving the teachers. What are they doing? Just talking about modern teaching, but there is no application. Who's the victim? The students. You can't change curriculum every fucking year, man. And it's not a strong curriculum! At school, everything is a mess. No manners, misbehaving, no respect, and even if the teacher tries to punish or suspend a student, the whole ministry comes and blames the teacher. Nowadays, you see drugs too, which you never saw in the past.

Mike Corr: How do you see working inside or outside of the education system in Palestine?

Murad Tamini: We can't go back to the same system with teachers as slaves and students as prisoners, and nobody feeling like they learn anything. This Education Ministry is leading us toward something, and it isn't good, so we need a big revolution against them. Fuck the donors, and fuck their money. Ask any Palestinian teacher, "What are you teaching? What are the students learning? Do they love the school?" Of course, they will say, "No!" This is what the occupation needs. You want to destroy a people, destroy their education. You ask any student what are they going to be after they graduation, they will say Palestinian Security. They are just recruiting soldiers, illiterate and brainwashed, to fight each other. We are in a 100 percent corrupted situation here, and the only ones who make decisions are the corrupted ones. The ones who speak loud and tell the truth are going to end up like me, suspended and fired.

The occupation is not just Israeli, it's in the mind. I lived in the U.S., and I saw some similarities, even if students and teachers have some freedom. Corruption is everywhere. Capitalism is everywhere. Business is business anywhere you go. Education is big business. They talk about investing in education, but they aren't investing in students. They are investing in education to make money. It's the same all over the world. Here in Palestine, and in the U.S. too, in a way, we're all under occupation. So I want to say if you want to be a teacher, the first thing is you have to be free.

POSTSCRIPT

Murad suggested that if people want to help in a small way, they can donate any amount of money to Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences, in Jerusalem, where thirteen Palestinian teachers are enrolled in the Masters of Arts in Teaching program. This program is one of the very few efforts to really help Palestinian teachers find ways to bring creativity and critical thinking into the classroom. For more information, please contact Ran Al-Surkhi, rsurakhi@staff.alquds.edu.

Pundits and trolls, Republicans and (American) Libertarians, moderate Democrats and so-called "classical liberals," "red pilled" adherents to the reactionary/neocolonialist/hypermisogynist/transphobic politics of the "intellectual dark web," and more traditional fascists/white supremacists, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Breitbart, NPR, and InfoWars alike--all of these devote lots of space to freakouts about the "PC culture" in schools, which they claim is generating a generation of "snowflakes," supposedly unable to handle the "real world." However, in the blur of hysterical mainstream media clickbait taglines/anecdotes and right-wing fragility toward anything that robustly challenges toxic structures like white supremacy (aka the "real world" they always refer to), a more essential question is lost: By what means can educators help fulfill their responsibility to protect students from needless harm while helping strengthen them to tackle the challenges they will face in an often unjust world?

This essay is by Frankie Mastrangelo, a Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies educator in Richmond, Virginia. She delves deeply into a powerful and nuanced discussion of the necessity, effectiveness, and practical reality of "safe(r) spaces" vs. "brave spaces"- the latter of which is distinguished, broadly, as environments in which uncomfortable, even harmful, ideas and expressions are not necessarily prohibited. Rather, they are named and openly acknowledged for what they are, in the express service of ultimately creating new, transformative conversations and deep mutual community support. As my confidant Megan March puts it, 'There's more than one way to fight a cop.

Safe(r) Spces and Future Cops

by Frankie Mastrangelo

we live in a system, it shall always be a system we will get used to it cause we'll always be a part of it - Kebab, "System"

Space is central in teaching and creating. I think about what space can do, how it can be formed, and the ways that it can grow. I also think about what space can limit, how it can be threatened, and the ways it can undermine our goals and objectives. One of my favorite authors, adrienne mare brown, talks about space in ways that inspire my thinking around how i understand teaching and DIX culture. brown is a longtime social justice facilitator and author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds: a book that uses Octavia Butler's science fiction and an appreciation for permaculture to revisit and revise how we understand what it means to envision and create change. I was listening to adrienne mare brown speak recently about the concept of brave spaces. She says that brave spaces function to recognize and name harm, where folks can feel okay with saying "that hurt or offended me" and get back to the work of productive, transformative conversations, where we build critical connections, where it doesn't matter what your intentions are--what matters is what impact your words or behavior create.

brown made me think of how often the concept of safe(r) space comes up in the classroom and DIY communities. I think the concept of brave space distinguishes itself from notions of the safe(r) space in that a brave space prioritizes what a space does rather than what it proposes to do. Despite what the aims of a classroom or DIY space are, " promises to decompo who as bat cuckoone.or beivilege and oppression--we are not atwald- tionships to systems of privilege and oppression- we are not always aware of how those systems will show up in our interactions and cause harm or distress. How can we really ensure that a space will always be safe for evervone when folks may call the police for issues that can be sussed out with a simple conversation or when those who manage a space refrain from holding themselves accountable for causing harm? When students voice racist perspectives or misogynist views in a class- room, how can we say that this space remains understood as safe by those hurt and affected by shitty comments? Recognizing how oppres. sive systems show up for us requires constant reflection, an openness to critique, and commitment to shared growth among all those who move within a space. I think the notion of safety limits us at times in creating the radical spaces we want to see and take steps to maintain. The intention of ensuring safety is often eclipsed by the impact of words and behaviors that inflict harm. I teach in a Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies program and think about what it means to cultivate a classroom that does the work of brown's brave space. How can I build connection and community among myself and students in ways that are defined by the experi- ences and lives of students? How do I work from a place of embracing how students' perspectives are a culmination of their relationships to systems, their histories, and their traumas? How do I facilitate conver- sations in which students lean into discomfort when called to confront their privileges? How do we collaborate on pinpointing where white supremacy or carceral thinking shows up in their lives? These questions guide how I go about teaching, because they're questions that I am con- sistently grappling with in my own life. I've come to realize that there is a power in modeling vulnerability in educational settings, so when I say, "Here's what I struggle with in engaging racist family members," "Here's what I fear in navigating street harassment," or "Here's where I see my whiteness affording me privilege and what it means to decenter myself in spaces where I should listen more than I speak"-those moments can be entry points for collaborating on navigating discomfort. Ithink those moments encourage us to identify what dominant systems make fragile, broken, or tense. Recognizing how dominant systems show up SAFE(R) SPACES AND FUTURE COPS | 59 in each of our lives and how they shape our perspectives creates the potential for the types of conversations brown refers to--those discus- sions needed to transform our world and build critical connection. I want to talk about a recent instance in my teaching that was uncomfortable and difficult but that, I think, represents striving for a brave and radical educational space. One student I had not too long ago told me early on in the semes- ter that he wanted to be a police officer. The Intro to Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies class I teach is considered a general education requirement, so I can get majors that range anywhere from studio art to biology. This particular student was pursuing a criminal justice major and expressed genuine interest in learning more about feminism, privi- lege, and systematized oppression. I'm an abolitionist and will talk with anyone about why police and prisons are antithetical to collective liberation. How I go about these conversations will usually shift based on who is engaging in this conversation with me. So how I talk about why police and prisons contradict liberatory social and political futures will obviously look different for an aspiring police officer than it will for a friend of mine that organizes books to prisoners initiatives. This student of mine began to speak up more and more over the course of the semester, and sometimes his questions were met with resistance, anger, and frustration from fellow classmates. In a conversation about the importance of Black Lives Matter, he asked why people are so distrustful of the police and why the actions of a few cops should be seen as representative of the entire police force. Within that conversational space, other students looked at me with expressions of exasperated irritation, because they saw this person as just not "getting it." In the event that questions like this arise, I would try and push the class to consider his questions and offer suggestions for responding. I think practicing coming up with rich answers to questions like this is a good exercise for anyone interested in social justice. Navigating conversations like this is a balancing act, though, because I don't want to promote a cultural taxation on those most marginalized by an issue being discussed to educate their classmates. In other words, the onus of responsibility for explaining police brutality against Black folks should not fall on Black students. I am constantly learning how to do a better job of handling these conversations in ways that push discussions forward without creating those forms of cultural taxation. Posing gen- erative questions that refrain from positioning anyone as spokesper- sons for an identity group usually helps with this. For instance, asking the class what they think police exist to do or what their purpose is can lead to deeper understandings of how our relationships with police are informed by race relations. Our conversation came around to identifying how experiences with the police differ based on identity and examining what the police force represents. While the discussion got off to a tense start, it ultimately felt productive. When the class ended, I remember the student who wanted to be a cop approaching me to talk. He was concerned that he made people upset with his questions and asked if his questions were stupid. I started off by thanking him for his questions and turned his attention to how he sparked a lively discussion. I think a little bit of validation through expressing appreciation for inquiry can go a long way in engaging people in difficult conversations, especially when they think they may be uninformed or at ideological odds with those around them. I also think there's a fine line between validating/appreciating and unnecessary/disingenuous ego stroking in these situations. I think we enter ego stroking territory when fears of upsetting someone's fra- gility guide communication, as opposed to using conversations for the sake of challenging that fragility. My student then went on to express how he believes in the good that can come from policing and wished that people didn't have such bad experiences with police. "Why do you think people have bad experiences with police?" I asked. He said that he knew racial profiling is an issue and part of this. I agreed and pointed out that he and I would have different experiences with police than a person of color, because we are white. I shared how I didn't always realize that my whiteness afforded me privilege with police, but that it led me to understand how policing in the United States is historically rooted in controlling communities of color. He continued to ask me questions related to understanding white privilege. I think that this conversation continues to stick out in my mind as an example of how important it is for me as a white teacher who facilitates discussions on privilege and oppression to share vulnerabil- ity. Vulnerability takes the form of sharing with students times that I struggled to understand a concept, issue, or aspect of my experience and identities. I didn't always understand what was fucked-up about personal experiences with students goes to show that examining and resisting dominant systems is an ongoing, dynamic process. It's not like you write a song about why cops suck or attend one racial bias training and are set in your politics for life. I'm wary of anyone who gives the impression that their politics are static or fine-tuned and that they have nothing to learn about and grow from. Humility and self-reflection go a long way in creating the spaces we want to see and communities worth cultivating. As the semester went on, that student would often talk with me for a few minutes after class to kind of recap that day's discussions. It's hard to gauge as a teacher if conversations like this will have lasting influence. I'd often walk away from those conversations thinking about what could have gone differently or what could have been explained in greater depth. I try my best to channel those kind of thoughts into reflections for enhancing future discussions so anxiety doesn't get the best of me. I don't know if that student took what we talked about and laughed about it with future cop buddies. I don't know if that student took what we talked about and continued meaningfully discussing it with other white folks and men that could really benefit from those dialogues. I won't lie. I sometimes wonder if they still want to be a cop or if the class had any impact on their goals. Who knows. What I do know is that it's difficult to create and maintain the space(s) that led to making my conversations with this student possible. Yet, any space that does that work of valuing impact over intention is going to be a difficult exercise in challenging privilege and enacting resistance. Prioritizing impact over intention also takes the form of holding ourselves accountable as teachers. I think about what genuine collabo- ration looks like a lot, and I know that it requires me to actively engage student feedback in my teaching. This sort of ongoing forum for cri- tique means cocreating and co-facilitating threads of communication with students that can be messy and difficult. It is messy to keep up, gain interest in, and balance with other responsibilities. It is difficult to acknowledge and put to use. Yet I think when we open ourselves up as teachers to this critique, our egos become less important than collabo- rative visions for radical education and what those visions create. In the last few years of teaching, I've tried my best to make myself accessible to critique inside and outside the classroom. For me, this accessibility can take the form of just presenting specific opportunities for feedback and also of modeling vulnerability (sharing experiences, joking about mess ups, acknowledging fragility). Sometimes this critique led to big points of growth. Last semester, while teaching my first feminist media studies class, one student I would often talk to approached me with some feedback. she felt like the class could do a better job of centering transwomen of color in conversations about media and offered some great thoughts on how. My first instinct was to feel like I fucked up and should have done a better job with this from the get-go (that's my own imposter syndrome, anxiety, and fragility at work), but I realized that my student wouldn't have approached me and offered these thoughts if they didn't care about the class. Not only did they care about the class, they gave enough of a shit about it to promote its growth. Classrooms get stagnant and wind up reinforcing inequitable power dynamics when teachers get scared of criticism. There are enough tenured shit- heads out there who believe what they've been doing for twenty years is amazing and needs no improvement. A classroom that resists critique is like a one-sided conversation (that's probably wearing elbow patches). I'm always inspired by the teachers that are consistently brainstorming ways to "do better" in facilitating radical spaces. By really engaging with criticism, teachers subvert the forms of authority that traditional education offers us by default. Challenging authority and enacting accountability are ongoing processes that pushes us all to do better in confronting privilege, power, and oppression. I know I can always do better, and staying grounded by that realization makes teaching a space that feels radical and brave.

When turning a critical eye toward widespread media and broad cultural landscapes, it can be very revealing to note how and to what extent cracks in traditional facades have the effect of shifting the balance of power. It is worth examining whether the #MeToo movement has restructured power disparities and changed the conversation on consent and sexual violence at a deeper and broader level beyond the headlines and high-profile individual cases it has served to highlight. It is worth asking if any purported shift in power dynamics has been felt in communities where power is experienced differently, particularly by those who are marginalized. Is the epidemic of sexual violence being understood as symptomatic of a deeper set of structural inequities that have been built, in part, to facilitate and perpetuate this kind of abuse?

How does the conversation about sexual violence and consent need to change in the classroom? Anecdotally, if you asked any given group of teachers to name a topic that they are uncomfortable discussing with students, it has often been anything related to the ever-present issues of sex, sexual violence, and consent. Yet in a society-a world-where the dynamics and structures of power imbalance are so deeply intertwined with these issues, it is more important than ever to help students connect the dots and learn how to approach these issues critically. For educators, it is vital to have a strong game plan with regard to navigating these issues in an age where sexual violence and abuse of power are being brought to light at an ever-increasing rate, yet few perpetrators are truly held to account, with a sexual assaulter being appointed to the Supreme Court and another elected president. In a world like this, an eye needs to be turned toward resisting and dismantling the "systems" that make sexual violence and violations of consent so pervasive.

The next essay frankly reflects on doing the necessary (and difficult) task of helping students come to understand what consent means, details differences in pedagogy between widely divergent groups, and discusses how lessons are impacted and must be informed by the existence of very real structural and socioeconomic schisms in society. The author is Sarah Orton, a sexual violence prevention educator and advocate for victims/survivors in the Bay Area. Sarah can be emailed directly at specialagentmcnab@gmail.com.

The Dissent of Consent: An Educator’s Experience Teaching Sexual Violence Prevention

by Sarah Orton

The role of the attacker and survivor become distorted
So the majority of rapes are never reported
The threat of rape is always there
It's like a poison that saturates the air
A society stricken by a cancerous disease
Where men know they can do as they please
Aus-Rotten, "The Second Rape

"Stanford Swimmer Rapes Unconscious Woman Passed Out Behind Dumpster" I read the headline aloud to a class of eighth graders. Twenty pairs of blinking eyes stared back at me, questioning. A few studious listeners in the front row squinted and peered closer at the newspaper headline that I had projected onto the whiteboard. They were trying hard to understand. "After everything we've discussed today about media portrayal," I started, "who can tell me what's wrong with this headline?" I looked into a sea of blank stares. A kid in the back row sneezed loudly and everybody started. "Okay, let's try thinking about this in a new way," I said. "We know from this piece of media that a woman was sexually assaulted, right?" Students started to sit up in their seats; I saw sympathetic nods around the room. "Okay, then. Well, who was responsible for that?" I asked, "Who is at fault in that situation?" THE DISSENT OF CONSENT | 65 Their faces twisted in confusion and discomfort. Some looked at me with disdain, as if they suspected I was trying to trick them. The clock ticked audibly, and I knew we had minutes before the bell rang. Finally, a student raised his hand, and I nodded at him enthusiastically. "It's her fault." he said. My shoulders slumped. I rolled my head, cracking my neck, and took a deep breath. I paused again to let everyone collect their thoughts, hoping for someone to burst out in protest. "Okav, does anyone else think anything different?" My eyes darted pleadingly from student to student, but their heads all shook "no" in unison. "Help me understand, then--if he assaulted her, then how could it possibly be her fault?" Another student raised his hand: "Well, because, she was at the party, and she got drunk and went off with that guy." A girl at the same table chimed in: "Yeah, and she like, passed out in a dumpster or whatever" she snorted. "Who does that?" Suddenly, I felt exhausted. These students had proved and missed my point at the same time, and they didn't even realize it. The bell rang, notebooks slammed shut, and over the shuffle of everyone rushing out the door, I yelled after them that I'd see them next time. As I packed up to leave, two female students approached me. *I think they're all wrong," one said. "It wasn't her fault, it's his." I asked why she thought so. She continued to explain that it shouldn't matter what someone is doing at the time of their assault, and that someone who is that intoxicated is incapable of consent. *The news just wants to make him look good and make her look bad, because his parents are rich and he plays sports," she told me. "It's so stupid, that stuff shouldn't even matter." Her voice cracked, and her eves filled with tears. Her friend put a hand on her shoulder. She was speaking from experience. I told her that she was exactly right, that of course it shouldn't matter. I wanted to tell her that it gets better, and that when she's older, it will be easier for people to understand, but I didn't want to lie to her. Instead, I referred her to the school counselor. When I was in school, we didn't talk about rape, at least not in any us and overheard our parents talking about what that "poor girl" was wearing or how much she had to drink. Our parents wouldn't mention the perpetrator. They'd only express a vague sense of relief that their children would be taught how not to become victims rather than how not to become offenders. Consent, as it applies to sex, wasn't a concept I was familiar with until my late teens, which was long after I had become sexually active. In childhood, I had learned to share and learned to ask if I wanted to borrow something that didn't belong to me but had little information to contextualize my body in this way. Rape, as far my peers and I knew, was something that happened to girls and women who didn't know how to protect themselves and was always perpetrated by a masked stranger lurking in the bushes near the schoolyard or offering poisoned candy to kids in the suburbs. This notion was confusing, though, as no one I knew ever encoun- tered this insidious stranger. When sexual assault happened in our friendship groups, it usually came from one of our peers. There weren't any strangers involved, and no one ever told horror stories about it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about so percent of American high school students are sexually active and one out of four will contract a sexually transmitted infection and/or be victim- ized by sexual assault. The latter statistic is based on sexual assaults that are reported, so it can be estimated to be dramatically higher. According to a statistic cited by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, about 70 percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone whom the victim knows. When one of our friends was sexually violent, it was almost always met with the age-old idiom, "Boys will be boys." Of course, no one ever mentioned that boys were victimized too--contrary to common knowl- edge, one out of six boys before their eighteenth birthday. The absence of discussion regarding male sexual assault implicitly invalidated the boys who may have experienced sexual violence and prevented them from coming forward. This is particularly problematic because a lack of disclosure means a lack of support, which can cause children and teens to be sexually violent themselves. Sexual assault, especially among younger folks, is drastically under- reported, and the scope of its definition is narrow. Commonly cited statistics usually do not account for acts of sexual violence that include sexual harassment, revenge porn, coercive sexual activity, alcohol THE DISSENT OF CONSENTI facilitated sex, and sex occurring between individuals with unequal power dynamics like teacher/student or minor/adult. Sexual violence exists on a continuum, but it seems that if we have the opportunity to potentially prevent most of it, shouldn't we give it a shot? It is a common misconception that people who perpetrate sexual assault are sociopaths with faulty wiring and no moral compass. While this may be true of pedophiles and violent serial rapists who stalk and kidnap their victims, it is not true of most people who commit acts of sexual violence. Sexual violence is an umbrella term used to describe the various ways that consent might be violated during a sexual encoun- ter. This can include rape, sexual assault, "consent violations," and "consent accidents." A consent violation refers to a situation in which someone's consent is ignored or disregarded due to a lack of full understanding. This is common among young people who haven't received consent educa- tion and may believe that a partner saying "no" might be their partner "playing hard to get" or someone who exploits their position of power to get what they want sexually. A consent accident occurs when someone violates consent without having all of the information. Consent accidents frequently occur when one partner doesn't realize how intoxicated the other is, or is unaware of a partner's trauma history and unknowingly re-traumatizes them through seemingly consensual sexual activity. A person who is the victim of a consent violation or a consent acci- dent will often experience the same trauma symptoms as someone who is a victim of a violent rape, and these experiences should never be discounted. Similarly, it is essential to always mirror the language that the victim uses to describe their experience. It is also important to acknowledge that someone who commits a consent accident is usually not someone who should be labeled a rapist. But if someone commits a consent accident or violation, they're not off the hook. If I hit someone with my car-on purpose or by accident- it still hurts them tremendously, and I must attempt to make amends and vow to change my negligent behavior so it never happens again. If I continue to hit people with my car afterward, the punishment for my behavior should escalate. It is necessary to be aware of these nuances as an educator to effectively reach your target audience by using examples that are applicable to their experiences. Standard sexual violence prevention education curricula usually include key issues such as consent (legal and personal), boundaries, sexual harassment, rape, drug facilitated sexual assault, and rape culture. I have developed and administered various versions of cur. ricula exploring these topics with youth spanning a wide range of demo- graphics. One of the most important factors about the teaching mate- rial is that it must be accessible in order to be effective. Common terms like "culturally competent" and "population specific" often translate to simply making our curriculum more inclusive. Examples of inclusive terms are "people with a penis" or "people with a vagina" instead of gendered terms ("you guys") or assuming het- cronormativity. This makes information more inclusive of LGBTOIA+ folks, as we know that not all people with penises identify as male, and not all people with vaginas identify as female. Another example of cul- tural inclusivity might be to make sure the educational materials are translated into a variety of languages, so a student can share materials with a caregiver or guardian who is not a native English speaker. As educators with little or no funding and increasing demand, attempts at classroom inclusivity are usually the best we can do. However, if the intention is to develop a culture of nonviolent, sexually healthy adults, we must do more. It is imperative that sexual violence prevention education relates to the students' lived experiences. I started work as a prevention and sex educator in a small county where there was a stark contrast between affluent residents and res- idents from low-income households. I alternated between teaching some of the most privileged Bay Area youth to those who were incar- crated, usually coming from economically disadvantaged homes. It quickly became clear to me that if I desired to reach both groups, twin approaches would be ineffective. In addition to the disparity of financial and physical freedom, the students in wealthy, preparatory high schools were mostly white, and my students in Juvenile Hall were primarily Black and Latinx. Both of these perspectives must be considered and catered to, especially taking into account the institutionalized racism that makes the incarceration of people of color a trend nationwide. For this reason and many others, students' priorities tend to differ immensely. Both privileged and disadvantaged people can lose empathy for sexual assault victims through environmental conditioning, but those environments are drastically different. The privileged person may have difficulty feeling empathy, because it's never been essential to their status as a "good" person--they were likely born into the world gifted with that assumption. The disadvantaged person may struggle, because they haven't felt as if anyone has been empathetic toward them. This isn't to say that privileged folks are never empathetic and that less advantaged folks are all callous, but these unique conditions often cultivate a similar result. It is human nature to have our capacity to feel for others entangled with our own life experiences. Ultimately, one of the most effective tools for successfully delivering prevention education is conjuring empathy for others, but teaching empathy is a challenge. When considering education as a tool to prevent people from committing acts of sexual violence, one should ask: What is this group's motivation for refraining from a consent violation? Is it compassion for others? Fear of the law? Shame or fear of public ridicule? As educators, we must be aware of the ways various communities are conditioned to accept sexual violence as the norm even if the out- comes are the same. If we recognize that the delivery of the poison is different, then we know that the antidote must be as well. Tailoring curriculum in this way, however, can get us into some sticky territory. It's important to cater to students' sensibilities, while being careful not to assume their viewpoint based on their societal position. In regards to class, however, I've seen a key difference between fortunate and less fortunate youth. Teens coming from extremely affluent families have a hard time accepting the fact that sexual assault is prevalent in their well-to-do communities. Conversely, their less privileged counterparts are well aware of the sexual assault in their communities, but they find it diffi- cult to care about it, because they face many other problems that affect them more directly. Both communities, however, handle instances of sexual assault in strikingly similar ways, which is to ensure that if an assault occurs in that community, the knowledge of it never leaves that community. Generally, well-off kids have an appreciation for the rules. Certainly, many in this position have the tendency to think that the rules don't apply to them as well, and that makes for a dichotomy that's hard to crack. But one can often make the assumption that a classroom full of upper-class teenagers fear and understand certain rules, although many have never experienced the consequences of breaking them. Consequences can seem more severe to people who have never had to experience them. If I explain to a group of affluent teens the defnt- tion of legal consent, they are more apt to pay attention. If they think there will be legal ramifications if they break the law during a sexual encounter, they're more likely to obey that law. For example, I might tell them that the state says it's illegal to get a person drunk in order to coerce them into sexual activity. In my experience, this statement is usually followed by a line of questioning about how close one may walk up to that line without technically breaking the law. Male students often ask, "Well what if we're both drunk?" or "What ifI don't know she's drunk?" or, further, "What if she lies and says she was drunk, how can she prove it?" These are reasonable questions for curious learners, but the ques- tions that never surfaced were disconcerting, like questions about consent and pleasure for all parties involved or questions about ethics. "Does it matter?" I would ask, pushing back. "Don't you want to know that your sexual partners are capable of consent and enjoying themselves too?" Following this challenge, I often noticed female students nod with furrowed brows, and traditionally masculine students roll their eyes or avoid my gaze altogether. It was after these classes that students would most often disclose to me that they had been assaulted by their classmates. They either hadn't known or didn't have the courage to come forward before then. The predominant make-up of these schools--white, affluent males-_are the most dangerous group of potential predators. Caucasian males commit around 6o percent of sexual assaults and a variety of other races and ethnicities account for the remaining 40 percent. After they leave my class, those whom I might have reached are bombarded with informa- ton suggesting that what I've taught doesn't fully apply to them. Many will go to college and join fraternities that encourage the very behavior discussed in my lesson. They will see the faces of Black men not their peers plastered all over the news, being punished for raping white women. Some of these students might feel guilt or fear afterward, but they will soon learn that "Stanford Swimmer Rapes Unconscious Woman Passed Out Behind Dumpster." After a day of giving these workshops in the suburbs of the North Bay Area, I would climb into my truck and begin the thirty-minute drive to the most rural part of the county. Inside an enormous concrete build- ing encased in oak trees and razor wire, I would empty my pockets into the familiar grey bin and walk through the metal detector where a secu- rity guard waited to pat me down on the other side. The receptionist sitting behind bulletproof glass would take the contraband out of my bag- paperclips, stapled paper, ballpoint pens, hairpins--anything that could be used as a "weapon." In the beginning, the staff eyed me suspiciously. "You the rape lady?" they would ask. The residents in my Juvenile Hall groups were usually Black and Latino teenagers, with some white folks from low-income households. Groups were all male, and their offenses ranged from petty theft to murder. Unlike the preparatory middle and high schools, I led groups here once a week for ten weeks, rather than once or twice per school year. I thought I was prepared for the challenge of teaching these kids. Iwas under no assumption that any of them would be interested in my advice, so I didn't expect any miracles. But I still fumbled through my first few groups. To them, I was just another white, female social worker telling them what not to do. Don't drink. Don't do drugs. Don't fight. Don't steal. Don't rape. Group after group flooded these kids with informa- tion that wasn't applicable to their lives and never offered any alterna- tives to all the "don'ts." Even if they had, many of them couldn't return home rehabilitated. It wasn't a safe option for them. A stint in Juvenile Hall paled in comparison to the reprimand they'd face at home if they didn't re-assimilate when they returned. Who was I to expect them to be accountable to me rather than the gangs they had grown up in? I tried anyway. I began these groups with an exercise I referred to as "moral dilem- mas." I explained to the eight participants that this was a lesson in critient thinking and a practice in engaging in respectful discourse. During the activity, I read a controversial political statement aloud, such as "Women should have safe, legal access to abortion." Participante stood under a sign posted in the room that best represented their feel ings on that particular issue. Signs ranged from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." After each student chose their position, they would each have a turn to defend their point of view. One major rule in this activity was that certain arguments that didn't demonstrate critical thinking skill were off limits. These included God or the Bible, the opinions of parents, siblings, or gangs, opinions formed based on provably false informa- tion, and blanket morality statements such as "right or wrong" and "good or bad." As the moderator, I asked students to hold each other accountable and determine if an argument acceptably demonstrated critical think. ing based on the aforementioned criteria. Establishing this framework on the first day usually allowed for this dynamic to carry through to the subsequent group sessions as our topics became more focused. "I don't always have to like your opinion," I would tell them, "but you need to be able to defend it." One of the biggest challenges I faced is that these groups usually had egregiously rigid ideologies pertaining to gender roles, heteronor- mativity, and violence. Violence experienced in their own lives often left them numb in their desire to feel for others. But this could also be used as a tool to explore its relation to their lived experiences. I might ask a group, "What does it mean to have your power taken away?" or "How does it feel when someone else has control over you physically?" Exploring these broader questions in a way that was indirectly related to rape and sexual assault helped them make important con- nections between consent and agency. In every session we would explore news articles on police brutality in the Black community, vio- lence against trans people, or the incarceration rates of people of color or people living in poverty. Eventually, I saw my students zoom out from the microcosm of gang and life in "the hall" to make the connec- tions that I was silently pleading with them to make. Often I was filled with pride and relief watching their synapses fire away as they debated among themselves and pored over current events, "You're the smartest people I know," I often told them. THE DISSENT OF CONSENT | 73 Our groups had another major rule: what's talked about in group, stays in group. They often mentioned crimes they had committed since they arrived at Juvenile Hall but had not been charged for. They had my word to keep their discussions confidential. This was risky, as it directly contradicted my contract agreement with Juvenile Hall, which man- dated that I had to report if I had knowledge of crimes occurring within the facility. In return, my students kept quiet about the fact that I had completely gone off script from the curriculum I had initially proposed. In order to build trust, the playing field had to be leveled. I had been a runaway and sent to a couple of juvenile detention facilities in my teens, and I had always felt that the providers would have been more effective if they had allowed themselves to be vulnerable, to be on the same team. The staff was already suspicious of me, because I was the only group facilitator who refused to allow a guard in the room during sessions. As I walked down the long, sterile corridor to the maximum security unit, I encountered staff members patrolling the halls. "The boys really enjoy your group" one might say to me, but it seldom felt like a compliment. Even the services that were meant to help the residents were supposed to feel like punishment. We eventually had to get to the rape and sex stuff. Around week four, I'd bring in the lesson plan that I used in my high school classrooms. We'd discuss definitions for rape, consent, and the like, but at this point students were able to engage with the material at a level I hadn't seen in the shorter workshops. I still taught it, but I knew information about the law was not going to be relevant here. My group participants weren't afraid of the law and didn't have much use for it anyway. Most of them had already been victimized by racial profiling and stereotyping in the criminal justice system and were jaded and calloused to its effects. Our discussions explored the conditions that allow sexual assault to flourish and the socialization of gender and sexuality. Students started to dismantle their own biases about gender and sexuality, real- izing that the societal rules that they had learned only reinforced the status quo, which, in turn, reinforced their own oppression. Once they began to realize that conventional attitudes about gender, sexual orien- tation, and sexuality are the rule, they became much more interested in breaking it. The last thing left to cover was good sex. What good, healthy sex looks like puzzles most American adults, not to mention youth. While I posed this question, it was often clear in their candor that many of them had not ever received any sort of sex education. Alarmed, I brought in all the diagrams I had on the subject. My students, several of them young fathers, stumbled through reproductive anatomy. I had to help most of them label appropriate anatomical terms on printouts of penises and vaginas. There were always several students who hadn't previously understood the function of the clitoris. Performing oral sex on vulvas had seemed confusing to them as they didn't understand the purpose, and it was not often featured in the porn that they were consuming. Discussions regarding good sex are essential and, in my experience, work well with all demographics, at least those who are or intend to become sexually active. Helpful, exploratory questions include: "What is good sex?" "How do I know if my partner is enjoying themselves?" "How do I know if I'm enjoying myself?" These questions are usually helpful to tie into conversations regard- ing consent, and it can be beneficial for students to frame how they might check in with a partner whom they suspect isn't enjoying the experience. It can also be advantageous for a student to help map out how they might advocate for themselves if an encounter is not what they want. Questions about bad sex can also be pertinent: "What is bad sex?" "Is bad sex always sexual assault; how do we know?" No matter the population, we must have solid foundational struc- ture if we want young folks to grow up into sexually healthy adults. When talking to younger kids, it's important to use words like "safe" and "unsafe," rather than "good" and "bad," so as not to conflate sexu- ality with moralizing language early in sexual development. As kids mature and become sexually active, they begin to develop the skills to know the difference and also know that "safe" sex doesn't necessarily mean "good" sex. Boundaries should be taught to and modeled for children early and often. When children are forced to hug or kiss a relative or wear clothing that they don't want to wear, they are implicitly being told that they don't have any bodily autonomy. Surely, children must be kept safe by their caregivers, and there are many times when a child's "no" must not be respected in order to do so, but people interacting with young chil- dren should be curious about what it might look like to oblige a child's "no" as often as possible. It becomes difficult to undo those messages THE DISSENT OF CONSENT I 75 as the child develops into an adolescent, and suddenly we expect them to understand that they must respect another's "no." It is my opinion that it is never too early to have age-appropriate conversations regarding sexual abuse and sexual health. Another essential component of prevention work is assisting young folks in our classrooms with media literacy. White males commit a disproportionate number of sexual assaults (primarily against women of color), but that statistic is not one that is reflected by many news outlets, particularly broadcast news. These outlets/channels often hold up faces of Black men as the primary perpetrators of sex crimes, a trend not far enough removed from the post-Civil War era, where Black men were wrongfully accused and put to death for the alleged rape of white women. Committing an act of rape is about power and control and so is the way it is portrayed in American culture. Power in societal positionality affects who we deem a victim and who we deem a perpetrator, and there is power in the way that message is communicated. Power dynamics are reflected in the rates of reporting and prosecution. The United States was founded on the rape and pillaging of Native peoples, especially the brutalization of Native women. Today, Native American women are still sexually assaulted at the highest rate of any race or ethnicity. People generally appear surprised to hear this, as most people read the headlines not the research. Children who are born into privileged positions need to be made aware of the power that they hold and, later, held accountable for any abuse of that power. Body rights and sexual/gender inclusivity are of the utmost impor- tance in sexual violence prevention work. Conservative ideologies about same sex relationships and reproductive freedom signal to developing brains that others should have a choice about what happens to some- body else's body. There is an inextricable link between these attitudes and the normalization and acceptance of sexual violence. Perhaps it seems far-reaching, but incorporating a holistic approach to violence prevention is essential to its efficacy. Youth who are raised to believe that only certain people should be able to make choices regarding their bodies and relationships can become confused about bodily autonomy, consent, and respecting the choices that others make about their own bodies. Coupled with the standard bones of the prevention curricula should be an additional three-prong approach, includine umbrella topics such as sexual health, media messaging, and body rights/autonomy. A caveat in my work as I've outlined it thus far is that I am one individual with only one lens. Like my students, I pull from my own lived experiences to make sense of and interact with the world around me. While I like to think I've learned a thing or two, there are volumes more that I will likely never fully comprehend. A more effective curricu- lum could be generated in a collaborative effort with fellow educators spanning a much wider range of backgrounds and experiences, and I encourage readers to continue to pull knowledge from as many sources as possible. The strategies suggested here for implementation are based solely on my own experiences, and much of my evidence is anecdotal. Positive outcomes for this work are immeasurable, and it's difficult to know what the future entails once the class has adjourned. It would be naive to think that two hours or even ten group sessions with students will undo a lifetime of exposure to implicit messaging about the cultural acceptability of sexual violence. But I do know that apathy and compla- cency are twin pillars that uphold a system that condones and ignores sexual violence. Education might be the best tool we have to dismantle that system.

Miriam Klein Stahl is the cofounder and lead teacher of Berkeley High's Arts and Humanities Academy (AHA), where she has taught since 1995. She is also an artist who specializes in printmaking, sculpture, paper cuts, and public art. Miriam is internationally known among activist and punk circles for her powerful, iconic portraits of political activists, misfits, radicals, and radical movements; some of her more well-known portraits include Phoolan Devi, Emma Goldman, James Baldwin, and Harry Hay. In 2011, she collaborated with her former student Gabby Miller to create original interactive artwork for the Occupy Oakland movement and, in 2017, designed original posters for the Women's March and for the mass demonstrations against fascism in Berkeley and Oakland. She also designed the cover for the book you are holding right now. As an educator, Miriam has dedicated her teaching practice to address equity through the lens of the arts, with a particular emphasis on dismantling structural racism, fighting for women's rights, and advocating fiercely for LGBTQIA+ students and staff.
Starting in 2015, Miriam Klein Stahl has illustrated a series of (all ages) children's books with author Kate Schatz called the Rad Women series, including Rad American Women A-Z, Rad Women Worldwide, Rad Girls Can, and My Rad Life. These bestselling books have become household and classroom staples, introducing thousands of kids and adults to profiles of twenty-six inspirational and deeply radical women in public life, including the likes of Angela Davis, Mary Shelly, Sophie Cruz, Yusra Mardini, Hatshepsut, Poly Styrene, Ella Baker, Billie Jean King, Patsy Mink, Nellie Bly, and many more. She has also done art and design work for punk bands including Jawbreaker, Interrobang, and Street Eaters. Miriam lives in Berkeley, California, with her wife, artist Lena Wolff, daughter Hazel, and their dog Lenny. She was interviewed by Teaching Resistance editor John Mink over two separate lunch periods in her classroom at Berkeley High, where students were buzzing around the whole time working on art projects and occasionally interjecting with comments of their own.

Interview with Miriam Klein Stahl

interviewed by John Mink

Try and try
That's the way you want it
If you know
That ain't the way it always goes
A little bit
A little bit more
What you makin', man
Takes time
-Minutemen, "Martin's Song"

John Mink: When did you start to be interested becoming an educator and why? How did your experience as an artist and activist and your overall personal identity impact this journey? Miriam Klein Stahl: I moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles in 1988 and went to San Francisco State and got my degree in printmaking and sculpture. In Los Angeles, I grew up next to an oil refinery, so I developed really bad asthma that didn't really flare up until I moved up here. I was in my late teens/early twenties, living in San Francisco, and I was going to the emergency room all the time with asthma, because it was new to me, and I didn't know what the deal was, and I was figuring it out, and I was getting huge medical bills. So I finished San Francisco State with a Bachelor's Degree in Art and had to figure out how to make money pretty quick, because there's only so many times you can give a fake name at a hospital. I was making stuff and screen printing, getting by.

At the time my rent was two hundred dollars a month for a room in a four-bedroom place in the Mission in San Francisco. I was scraping by, but I was having these bills, and I needed insurance, I needed a decent medical plan, I needed to figure out a job I could have that was real, decent. I'm a creature of habit. So teaching made sense to me in a lot of ways, having a schedule like that. I wanted to do something arts-related, and I wanted to do something that would make the world a better place in some way, somehow--something social justice-related. Art teaching just seemed like an obvious fit for me, just from experience I have had in the world. I really hated high school-it was very painful for me. So I went into it thinking I could make it a better place for the outliers and outcasts and the queer kids and the kids who didn't totally fit in, and that's kind of the lens I went into it with. I really changed to an equity focus pretty quickly after I started working in a school like this that's so diverse- you know, where I did fill that role of providing a haven for the outcast. But I really saw the bigger picture of how the high school is kind of a micro version of our macro world, and all the inequities and injustices that exist in our outside world exist in a really intense way within the school, but there's also hope because [high school] is a small place where you can effect change. You have the prison industrial complex that we see as a whole in the macro world. It is daunting and overwhelming to me. So those are some of the reasons why I started. You know, it sounds shallow to say "the health plan," but the health plan was real to me at the time. John Mink: It is real, yeah. Miriam Klein Stahl: I really needed health insurance. John Mink: It is one of the few middle-class amenities left in any job. Miriam Klein Stahl: And it has been twenty years since then. John Mink: Are you familiar with the Pedro Noguera book City Schools and the American Dream? Miriam Klein Stahl: I have an essay in that book [laughs]. John Mink: Right, so obviously you're familiar with it [laughs]. [The book deals a lot with what you are talking about with equity and what he saw as the differential issues. Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah, I should really talk about that. I was really lucky as a young teacher; I was twenty-two when I started here--really voung. That vear was the second vear of a thing called the diversity project, where Pedro was the principal investigator, the primary on that. It was a project as teachers, students, parents, and grad students--PhD unixtensat University of California. The whole purpose was to hold mitor up to the high school and say this is what you look like, because there was lots of anecdotal stunt. Sot was this young teacher, and t felt really lucky that I got to work with this group of people who were totally like-minded, because it was like an instant community for me. Otherwise, this place can feel really huge and daunting, and at the time it was just one big school-there weren't any small schools. So it gave me a community of teachers who were also trying to make this place better and had an eye on equity. We'd present the research to the larger staff, and it was very eye-opening for me, because we would present how the school is serving one group of students who have a lot of privilege and resources really well, and kids who didn't have a lot of privilege and resources were just being duped, were not being served well, were totally failing and having a lot of trauma. John Mink: It almost feels like kids were being dumped into a university where they were being asked to select their whole program, and that's really difficult because of how large the school is. Miriam Klein Stahl: It was really disturbing but eye-opening for me, as a really young teacher, that there would be veteran staff here who were like, We know this exists. We know that we are failing with these kids. You're not telling us anything new." And as a young person, I was like, wow! I'm working with all these people who know that there is this huge problem, and that there is this is this huge gap between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students in achievement, yet some of the teachers would say the most horrendous things in those workshops we would do as the diversity project. So out of that project grew a couple of things that have become part of our school now. One was the Parent Resource Center, which still exists. A lot of parents that we interviewed for the project felt like they would only come to the school in a pissed-off mode. They were coming to school because their kid was suspended or their kid was accused of something. They were never coming to celebrate their kids' achieve- ments. So there is this. . just pissed off faction of parents, largely parents of color, who were like, *Don't make me come to that school!" John Mink: They're only invited when there is a problem. Miriam Klein Stahl: That was a great thing that happened out of the project, a welcoming place for parents to be treated well and invited. John Mink: Do you feel there has been an effective effort toward outreach with that, actually bringing parents who might not come otherwise? Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah. Another thing that was started was PCAD. parents of Children of African Descent--and that group was very pow- erful and effective in making change happen at school. Another thing that we got out of [(the diversity project] was the small school movement. Our high schools were set up to train people who work in factories, and it feels very much like that. When you hear the bell ring, you get up and you move to another class, you sit down and do your work, you get up and move to another class- it is very much a factory model. There was research about creating schools around themes where you can try to do school in a different way, block time differently, get out of bells and cells, get out into the world. That sounded great to me. lohn Mink: How do you feel in the present, a couple of decades into the small school experiment? How do you feel in terms of Berkeley High and the context here and how [small schools] have panned out as far as increasing equity and social justice? Miriam Klein Stahl: Well, sadly. .. Obviously I am one of the founders of AHA Berkeley High's Arts and Humanities Academy, a "small school" program of a few hundred students among Berkeley High's more than three thousand students], our small school, and I adore our kids, and I think that we have made huge jumps in achievement. We've had kids come in, freshman class, at 19 percent proficient in English and math and end up graduating with 85 percent of them CSU eligible. John Mink: That's major. Miriam Klein Stahl: It's huge. So I feel really good about our student population and what we are able to do with them, and I also like to try to create systems of being in school in a different way; of doing interdis- ciplinary projects where teachers collaborate. As you know, we just got back from bringing our senior class to overnight retreat, and we bring our juniors on an overnight retreat. A lot of students' experience in schools is that they are not seen, and teenagers want to be seen and heard, and we are taking them out of the school and giving them a chance to say whatever they need to say in a safe environment. This is the kind of thing they need to remember and the thing a lot of them need; the kind of social and emotional support that you can't really do in the classroom. John Mink: What are some of the ways that teachers at AHA coordi- nate to create spaces like that and the opportunity for students to have 82 | spaces like that, pull together curriculum, and just try to core things in a more integrated way so that [teachers and students) are really working together? What are some of the methods? Miriam Klein Stahl: There's some big institutional support that's really helpful in the common preps, during which teachers have time to really plan their day, so it's not just free labor after school-that's really key. Being in each other's classrooms. a lot of teachers close the door and have their private realm. John Mink: That's the traditional mode, right? Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah, while all of our teachers are in and out of each other's classrooms all the time, and we do month-long projects where we all study the same thing. So our ninth grade students do a project on immigration, tenth graders do a project on respiratory health linked to geography or location--basically environmental racism--and our juniors do radiation, and then our seniors do an investigative journal- ism project on a topic of their choice. John Mink: Tying radical (classroom) themes to broader social justice themes--not just within the school community but in terms of their overall communities. Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah, and they are in there working on all that in science, history, English, and art, and it culminates in a big exhibition that's on display in downtown Berkeley right now. Bella (student): I am Isabella DeVito Brown, I am a senior at AHA, and I've been here all four years. So the thing about AHA is that we're a huge community, and we are definitely taught to look at the world in differ- ent ways and look past barriers--that's really important. Something that makes us different from the other schools is this interdisciplinary project that Ms. Stahl is talking about, and it's really good because a lot of schools separate this stuff around and between classes, and with the ID (Interdisciplinary Project) we are blending together all of these important aspects of school and creating this project that might help us look at the world in a different way. It's really fun, actually. It's one of my favorite things about AHA, because most other students have finals, and I'm like, yeah-I'm making this really awesome book, and I'm learning all this stuff, and it's not just learning about math or science. It's learning about how all these different things mix together to create something different. John Mink: Kind of makes it all make more sense. | 83 Bella: Yeah, I think every school should do that--an IDP project. It really brings together the whole. Miriam Klein Stahl: ...interconnectedness. Bella: Yeah, it really does. It shows you how the world is not just black- and-white, it is really this whole mess of stuff, and that's one of the greatest things about AHA- that's what they show us, that's what they teach us. John Mink: It shows the point of all these different disciplines too, right? To show how they can actually work together to effect some kind of change. Bella: You are writing about English. You are writing about history and using all of this English you have learned in school, creating art to help emotion, and to help exemplify what is happening in the world, and it's a lot more powerful than just writing an essay about it. John Mink: Thank you for that, and it's really nice to hear how effective these programs are. I just did my student teaching last semester here in the International Baccalaureate program, which is way more exam focused for sure. Bella: Of course the people see that [the exam-heavy curriculum] and go, "Oh, those students are so prepared for the world," but really it is sort of a micro vision of things. Like, "I know exactly what happened in history," but you can't connect that to everything else--which is what is great about [AHA's IDP project). I think every school should do an IDP project. John Mink: I think a lot of the other schools may be emulating that model, but maybe not to the extent that this particular program has. So, Miriam, in terms of one really good question here that you got from one of the students in your classes last week- she was asking about when it is okay to be biased when teaching about our culture or social inequali- ties in our culture, especially when you disapprove of these inequalities. If so, how can you still allow teens to be open-minded/have different perspectives? Bella: We have a teacher who is sort of biased about stuff. John Mink: Well, everybody's got some bias, right? I mean, we all have our beliefs. Bella: Well, the interesting thing is that she's biased on history, so her whole thing is that she shows us all the minorities that were disre- garded in history class, so you come out knowing so much more about the Harlem Renaissance, and I could talk about, say, African Americans in this situation, whereas everyone else gets a sort of whitewashed history. John Mink: Miriam, how do you feel about this question? Miriam Klein Stahl: Well, I think that question is speaking to the Berkelev Bubble, right? John Mink: Sure. I mean, it could be applied in converse in Texas, right? Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah. I am clearly part of the Berkeley Bubble [laughs). I am biased. John Mink: (laughs] Yeah, and transparent about it, right? That's the key. Miriam Klein Stahl: Totally. [pauses] So I don't know totally how to answer that question. lohn Mink: Which is okay. I guess the question, which is from a student, is if you feel it is okay to be "biased," and is there anybody who really isn't biased--I guess that's the issue with the question, right? Miriam Klein Stahl: I don't think so. I think effective teachers aren't scared to bring in their life experience and who they are and aren't afraid to be vulnerable in that way and be honest about how the world sees you. The students see us. They see a white woman who dresses like a boy, and I'm not going to pretend to be something that I'm not. I'm not going to hide that I'm living in the world in this very queer way, and that I have white skin privilege. And I think that you need to be honest about those things to be honest to students, to be real with students and present whatever it is you are presenting. Obviously, it's not relevant for everything you are doing, but I think it's bullshit when these teach- ers get up in front of a class and think that students don't see anything other than what they are delivering as the content. John Mink: The context is so important. Miriam Klein Stahl: Right, so we all have a bias or a perspective we are coming from, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Hopefully in a student's day they are getting a diversity of perspectives, anyway, because we all have our view on the world. John Mink: Right, and of course if you are just teaching the "standard view"-that's a bias as well. Miriam Klein Stahl: Sure. John Mink: But I guess these are the questions that students think about, and when we step outside of our bubble, other questions arise. A mutual acquaintance of ours has had struggles in [a nearby district] INTERVIEW WITH MIRIAM KEEN STAHLI BS ith regard to (their ide ntity an openly queer, and that created a lot of problems for (them]. So I guess the context countatoo-where we are. Miriam Klein Stahl Right, and in a lot of ways I am in a privileged place where I have not experienced homophobia in the classroom. John Mink: Not openly, anyway, Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah. John Mink: So another student question here: When you teach kids to express themselves through art, is there ever a line not to cross in terms of offending people? Miriam Klein Stahl: There's always a line to cross. I think that line does get crossed in my classes, and it's always a good conversation to have. I think the thing they butt up against more is creating something and having an ideu of how they want it to be seen and having people see it in a way that was not intended, so there's that thing, that every artist struggles with. Say you use a swastika in an art piece, and you mean your piece to be anti-racist, is it going to come off as being racist or anti- racist? I think students straddle that line when they choose to make work that can have an emotional resonance with the audience. So that's always a good conversation to have! The other thing we have conversations about. What was that con- versation we were having about the news, intent vs. ... Passing Student: Impact. Miriam Klein Stahl: ...intent vs, impact. So even if you choose to put a naked woman in an art piece-which many people do, it's part of the art canon -what is the intent vs, the impact? Is that piece gonna come off as totally sexist--or not? John Mink: I guess this is an environment where kids can learn about how that goes, which also leads into another excellent student ques- tion-I am leaning toward the student questions, because they are better than mine. Leading into how people develop their own styles and their own ways of expression that make the most sense to them, the question was: How do you motivate a teen to create art with their own style, and how do you help a teen discover their style? I would add, how do you make it so they can express themselves in a way that they can be happy or comfortable with? Miriam Klein Stahl: We started AHA with an eye toward equity-the only reason we started this small school was to address the equity gap-and so, for me, it is really important that students have really strong skills. In freshman/sophomore/junior year, 1 focus go percent on building technique and skill- because I know that my students need to be better than most people, because they are judged a little harsher because of who they are in the world. So I want them to have really strong skills and technique. Then, in senior year I focus more on conceptual work and develop. ing ideas and style, and I don't think you can jump into that before you have skill and technique, or it is just frustrating. The senior Advanced Placement class is 1oo percent student-focused, where they are develop. ing their skill and technique with their concept and their own personal style. It's a balance of keeping everyone on the same page, hammering in skills and technique, and then knowing when -as a teacher--to back off and let them develop their style and their concepts. John Mink: And if they always wanted to express it more rawly, they could always stop in at 924 Gilman for the weekend. Miriam Klein Stahl: (laughs) Sure. [To group of students So what do you all think makes AHA different from other schools? Student 1: Teachers care. Student a: The teachers are much more... people who like each other. [AHA is not just school; it is about how you build relationships and how you think about the world, not just "do some problems," academies etc. It is about social skills. I think teenagers need a platform to figure it out. AHA has teachers who are not just teachers, they are friends, and they care about you. John Mink: You coauthored (illustrated) an awesome looking new book with Kate Schatz coming out this year (2015) titled Rad American Women A-2.' How did collaborating with Kate Schatz come about, and what was the process by which the book was completed? How long did it take to create? Miriam Klein Stahl: Kate is an author and a teacher at the Oakland School of the Arts; she teaches creative writing. I had submitted some images for a previous book project she had done called Encyclopedia, a collaboration between her and two other authors. They went out and talked to a bunch of other artists and writers to make a project [where]I they did a series of encyclopedias and then had authors and artists choose the word they wanted to illustrate or write about. I did that project, and she liked the work that I did for that. Kate and I are both mothers of young kids. I have a seven-year-old, and she has a five-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old. So when she had her daughter, who's five, she had an idea to do a children's book, and there's so few. There's a need right now for diverse children's books. There's a hashtag you may be aware of called #weneeddiversebooks. She had an idea, like, "I want to make a book for my daughter that has rad women in it"-strong, powerful, feminist women. So she thought of doing an A to Z book. [Kate is] part of this group called "Binders" on Facebook. It's all these women writers. The name came out of that thing from when Mitt Romney was running for president, where he said, "I have binders of women." She kind of put the call out onto there, "Hey, if I did a women A to Z book, what women should be included?" It kind of started there, and she sat with the idea for two years, and then called me, and we had coffee and talked about collaborating on it. So she asked, "Do you want to do this book?" And 1 tend to say yes, so I said yes. And I had already made paper cuts of five of the women that were on her initial list. John Mink: What were some of the specific ones that really grabbed you, that you were super stoked on? Miriam Klein Stahl: Well, she had an initial list, and then we worked on that list together, and that's where our collaboration started. We were in pretty much agreement about most everything besides one--she wanted Sonia Sotomayor for S, and I wanted Sister Karita, this radical nun. John Mink: When was Sister Karita active? I think my parents were really big fans of hers. Miriam Klein Stahl: The sixties and seventies, Vietnam War. Yeah, she was awesome [laughs]. So that was our only disagreement. I was mad at Sonia Sotomayor, it was during that Hobby Lobby stuff last summer, and she wasn't saying anything [about it]. I also wanted to kick Patti Smith out at one point, when she decided to play the pope's Christmas party. John Mink: At least Patti hasn't gone full Exene Cervenka yet. Miriam Klein Stahl: (laughs] Aw, man. So [Kate and I] met for coffee, and I just started making paper cuts for the people on the list, and I tend to work really fast, so I think I made about twenty of them in a week. It was summer laughs). We got A thru E together in a week, and she did the writing for those. I had known Michelle Tea for a really long time, who does Sister Spit and Radar Productions, so I emailed Michelle A through B with the images and some of the writing, and I was like, "Hey! Wanna put out a children's book?" Kate and I were busy and didn't have time to do a kickstarter thing, and I'm not really interested in doing that. I see the value of those projects, but my ideal was to work with a local publisher with a feminist perspective. But Sister Spit is known more for queer debauchery and not children's books (laughs], so I wasn't quite sure--though I knew at the time she was pregnant, so maybe she would be interested. I didn't hear back from her for a couple weeks, then all of a sudden I got an email from her, which was like, "I just saw your email and yes I wanna do the book!" Right after that we had a meeting with City Lights, and they said, "Yeah, we wanna do your book," and I had all the images, so I brought them in a portfolio and they totally loved them. Then Kate wrote the book over the summer. John Mink: That came together fast! Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah, it was really, really quick. John Mink: (The book] almost seems like it could be a shelf reference or even assigned for classes. Miriam Klein Stahl: Well, we are both teachers, so we have reached out to teachers to write lesson plans for it in trade for a free book. Wanna make one? I'll give you a book and some posters. John Mink: I'd love to! Miriam Klein Stahl: Yeah, we don't have much for middle school or high school lesson plans yet. My kid's at Malcolm X Elementary School in the second grade, and her teacher's doing a whole project with it for International Women's Month. So for the month her class is research- ing their own rad women and doing drawings and are gonna make their own book, which is really great. John Mink: Are you going to have the lesson plans online? Miriam Klein Stahl: We have radamericanwomen.com, and that's meant to be a resource; there will be lesson plans, etc. online there. The book will be available at many independent bookstores, and I always tell people to order direct from City Lights and avoid Amazon. John Mink: So it was designed as a children's book and an educational tool. Miriam Klein Stahl: It's a really fun kid's book. Me and my daughter, the seven-year old, have been picking one a night- she'll pick a letter and we will read it. She's going to read at some of the local readings. She likes X. John Mink: Who's X? Miriam Klein Stahl: X is the unknown woman. The woman who made you dinner. All the women who do things and don't get acknowledged. [Bell sounds, everybody scrambles.]

While most of the teachers in this book work in public/state educa- tional systems, the importance of autonomous, independent, collectivist, and explicitly anti-capitalist educational projects across the world cannot be understated. Yet as anyone who has collaborated on such justice-oriented projects knows, collectives and counterinstitutional projects face daunting obstacles in almost every case: internal, external, and experiential. In hindsight, we can learn much from these internecine struggles, but the work must always be evolving and ongoing in order to avoid small-scale reproductions of oppressive systems from the macroworld.

Of the countless physical spaces where semi-autonomous zones and collectivist educational projects have taken root, one of the most well-studied are the postwar squats of Europe. As of 2018, there are now fifty-plus years of academic ruminations on the modern history, practice, and societal reaction to cultural and/or political radicals squatting and transforming abandoned buildings in both Western and Eastern Europe. Belgrade, Serbia, has had a long history with squats dating back to the early twentieth century, and the war-torn, often economically distressed era that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia (1991-1992) has been no exception.

Belgrade's InexFilm was a large, multi-sectional building that was originally built as a production studio for the burgeoning Yugoslav film industry of the mid-twentieth century, before its abandonment and subsequent squatting by a group of artists and radicals in 2011. Koko Lepo, an autonomous, collectively run free school, operated in the InexFilm squat from 2013 until the squat was evicted in 2015. Shortly before the squat was evicted, Koko Lepo was described for September 2015's "Teaching Resistance" column by Frederick Schulze, an anarchist, anti-fascist, and teacher who has lived in Central and Eastern Europe for a decade and is an active member of the Koko Lepo youth solidarity program. His scholarly work concerns racism, the state, and political economy in Belgrade. Before he received his doctorate in anthropology on these themes, Freddie worked a lot of odd service and education jobs in Texas, where he developed his anti-capitalist and anti-etatist politics. In this 2018 update of Freddie's original column, he tells the story of Koko Lepo, starting with its inception, and does not shy away from describing the kinds of difficult, real-life internal and external struggles such collectives often face. Freddie has been in Belgrade for over five years and he plans to stay there as long as "they" let him.

Kiki Lepo: Kindergarten and the Struggle in Belgrade, Serbia

by Frederick Schulze

You must learn; spreading fire won't help to light the way. -Replica, "Pitchforks and Torches" In the summer of 2013, a young woman named Tanja thought of a way to make an impact in Belgrade's only squat, InexFilm. A small group of Serbian anarchists had made themselves a little infoshop there amid the ateliers of rabidly apolitical artists, and Tanja took advantage of the developing social politics of the space to propose a free kindergarten for Roma children. she was no radical herself; in an interview, Tanja admit- ted that her primary motivation was to ingratiate herself to an avant. garde space that was rapidly picking up steam in Belgrade's alternative scene. This is not to say that she was uninterested in social activism, quite the contrary. She quickly reached out to her friend's NGO, but they did not manage to accommodate the children of nearby Mali Leskovac for long, as the bureaucratic and monetary strictures that define non- governmental work did not look kindly on the wild informality that defines squat work. Guja was a member of her fresh new collective, a crusty ex-heroin addict from Skopje who sold himself to the general assembly of the squat as an anarchist. He suggested they instead reach out to the nearby Deponija slum which was walking distance away from the squat. Tanja and Guja, along with anarchist feminists Sonja and Maria, went out to meet with Ibn, the patriarch/slum-lord of the fifty- year old "gypsy" settlement, and pitch their idea. Ibn gave them his chil- dren and their cousins to participate. Sonja, a member of the nascent infoshop collective, brought this new vrtié (kindergarten) into her own KOKO LEPO: KINDERGARTEN AND THE STRUGGLE IN BELGRADE, SERBIA1 99 collective's space. It was around this time that I caught wind of their project and asked to join. Back in Texas, I was the "lead kindergarten teacher" of a private after-school and summer program with around thirty kids under my sole care. In my tenure there, I freely experimented with autonomous forms of organizing, super advanced subject matter, and restorative and voluntary systems of justice and redress. I also tried to organize my coworkers into a wildcat union, and my failures and successes there drove me to Eastern Europe in the first place. It goes without saying that the idea of an "anarchist kindergarten" in a squatted warehouse for Roma children from a shantytown hit all my activist buttons, and I was even flattered and intimidated that I could be trusted to join what looked so much like my dream come true. As it turned out, it was not an anarchist kindergarten at all, and my own vestigial liberal tenden- cies toward "cultural diversity" and the "marketplace of ideas" (as well as reflexive anti-imperialist guilt) culminated into a kind of political paralysis under the patriarchal shadow of the manipulative Guja. Sure, there were anarchists among us in the beginning, but the bulk of the collective was made up of apolitical young women at whom Guja obsessively leered. You have to understand, he came from what he sold to us as a similarly radical collective in Shutka, the only pre- dominantly Roma municipality in former Yugoslavia. He spoke a Roma dialect conversationally, and it was his familiarity with what I then believed to be Roma culture, coupled by my total unfamiliarity with Belgrade culture and counterculture, that cemented his position in my mind as our unofficial leader. Sure, our collective acknowledged no formal structure beyond consensus and claimed to be autonomous, but Guja was a master at getting what he wanted. He combined his purported expertise with the charisma of someone who had obviously suffered and, in his own words, "loved too much" to push his vision of the kindergarten into our own. He formed strong relationships with the men and women of Deponija, and his presence is still felt today long after his exile, which we'll get to in a moment. Deponija is Belgrade's largest surviving *gypsy" slum. Between five and eight hundred people live in one of two distinct hemispheres that we refer to as the mahala and the naselje. The mahala, an old Turkish word meaning *neighborhood" but used in Serbia today mostly for Roma-inhabited areas of a city, is significantly older than the naselje, DA ITEACHINO RESISTANCE dating back to the mid-19yos. Residents here are noticeably better.off and more integrated than those in the neighboring section, and thele children attend school more regularly, Families here are commonly employed in the city cleaning services and have strong ties to the cly Itelf, their very presence made possible through agreements with for. merly state run firms that stretched back decades, though today their continued existence there is in question. The naselje's residents are mostly refugees from Kosovo, from which upwards of twenty-elght thousand of the province's Roma/gypsy population were expelled due to retaliatory violence from returning Albanian and Serb populations Immedintely after the war in 1999. These families are primarily occupled an informal want picker, and existing literature argues that their exist. ence in the naselje presents an unwelcome competition to recyclers in the mahala, marginalizing them in an already marginalized urban waneland. The vtié was almont entirely made up of children from the naselle. Here, garbage is everywhere and running water is a precious luxury, while efforts to mix the two neighborhoods have been generally unsuccessful and remain so today. Gula's vrtié was didactically authoritarian; it resembled what Paulo Priere used to call the "banking concept of education," just shoving data into well-behaved little minds. Classes were held five days a week in the carly morning and each was formally subdivided into rigid parts: introduction, calendar lesson, lecture, songs, meal, and closing games. Despite recognizing the unmistakably repressive basis of Guja' "Little Priends" kindergarten, named after his former group back in Macedonia, his charismatic hold over us was blinding, and we all loved the way we felt, each good intention another paving stone toward what had to get better eventually--right? We enjoyed showing off our grand work to visitors, and Guja himself became the subject of at least one student documentary at Belgrade University. He assured us that gypsy children responded to this sort of thing, and the fact was that our new little friends did listen to Guja. Meanwhile, we found ourselves exhausted and panicked as we herded the kids here and there, always dangling at the edges of our own ropes. Guja seemed to have the little ones wrapped around his finger; he spoke, we listened. "Gypsy kids respond to force," he would claim, "Gypsy kids respond to consistent management," "Gypsy kids only understand punishment," etc. Tough love was the order of the day, its edges softened by "cultural sensitivity.”

KOKO LEPO: KINDERGARTEN AND THE STRUGGLE IN BELGRADE, SERBIAI 9s As it turns out, all that shit really was just as racist, authoritarian, and backwards as it surely looks to you now. We anarchists slowly began to raise concerns about these tactics when we finally began to feel some collective ownership over our little project. Guja would respond indignantly and act hurt that we had not accounted for his vast expertise in such matters. Our youngest apoliti- cal. Anja, was the first to raise Guja's gendered prejudice in the collec- tive, though by this time he was already becoming a persona non grata for similar reasons in the infoshop that hosted our kindergarten (then called "Little Friends"). He was, Anja claimed, dismissing female voices in our collective meetings and generally throwing his weight around. This was an uncomfortable truth for a lot of us, and having it out in the air was electrifying. I remember this meeting well. We met in his room in the squat (he was the only person to live there at the time) and shortly after Anja's criticism, he told us he had written down the names of every member in the collective, ostensibly for the sake of records, and showed us the paper. Neither of the men in the collective were on this list, and the names were obviously written in order of whom he found most attractive judging by the attention he gave to each woman listed. We stared at him incredulously. Despite all of this, we anarchists in the group had yet to turn against him. We made him a victim even as he victimized others. He was a recov- ering addict, we reasoned, and poorly acculturated to a radical political environment. As the weeks wore on, however, his arrested development could go unmentioned no longer, and I was selected to confront him on his increasingly obvious sexism and predatory behavior. I invited him into our brand-new unfinished classroom near the entrance to the squat, a room that finally freed the infoshop from the dirty little burden we had become on the space. The meeting did not go well. I spent the next hour in tears, wondering if I had done the right thing. My comrades assured me that I had, and I ended the night feeling the solidarity of those with whom I would continue the struggle for years to come. From that moment, we were determined to excise Guja from our collective body. By this time, the collective had shrunken to about seven or eight of us: Guja and three to four of his apolitical young female defenders on one side and myself and my two anarchist feminist colleagues on the other. Since our naive commitment to consensus prevented us from ousting him from the vrtic - now,after some internal campaigning, called "Koko Lepo"- we decided to stick closely by him so as to ensure that neither he nor his supporters would be alone with the kids or parents. As Guja's spell was broken, at least for us anarchists in the squat and in Koko Lepo, so was his hegemonic hold over the structure of the project. We began approaching the weekly meetings strategically, proposing and achieving fundamental changes to our approach to the kids. Sonia took a Montessori class to introduce us to new tacties, and I began to both believe in and express the value of my own experiences and experiments in Texas, We increased our repertoire of songs, includ ing a number of originals, and started phasing out punishment while making the children more responsible for each other's education by having them lead the calendar lessons and creating multiple simultane. ous activities for them to choose from. Perhaps it was this weakening of Guja's grip over us that prompted him to assault little Elena's mother Ria Gula went over to Elena's family home in Deponija one rainy day with a trash bag full of clothing from the squat's utterly disorganized "free shop." She let him in out of the rain despite her reservations about having a non-family male adult in the house while she was alone. She told us she trusted him. He said the bags were for her children, and then moved on her, trying to kiss and grab her. la resisted, pushing him away and telling him to leave. He continued to press until she shouted out, at which point he fled into muddy slum. Ela told her sister-in-law who then called Sonja. She, Maria, and Guja's closest comrade and staunch defender Una went to visit Bla, who told them the story. Ela said that Guja told her that he was in love with her, that he couldn't stop thinking about her, and that he had to have her. Una knew these words well and heard Guja's voice clearly in Ela's report. She was convinced and became the fulcrum that allowed us to force him out. We asked his other victims to come and speak to their own experiences now that they had an unmistakable context among others and a promise of action- finally. Guja's reign of terror was over. He was banned forever from the squat and, if we have anything to do with it, from Belgrade entirely. With Guja finally gone, anarchy enveloped our little collective. If you'll forgive a little mashing together of our developmental timeline, I would proudly describe to you the day-to-day of our newly liberated vrtié. We reduced our working days to three to keep from burning out but continued to pick each student up at their homes individually at the start of each morning. Our influence spread rapidly in Deponija, and we KOKO LEPO: KINDERGARTEN AND THE STRUGGLE IN BELGRADE, SERBIA/ soon had "students" joining us from areas previously inaccessible to us. I put scare quotes around "students, because we cycled both that word and concept out of our working lexicon. We would no longer be teachers, just older folks who helped these young'uns figure out what they wanted to do with their day. We kept the calendar lesson, but it became optional. the burden moving to us to keep it interesting enough to hold them. Often, we didn't have to lecture at all, as the children who had begun the program with us would take over, particularly a young boy called -Friday," his younger brother "Smiley," and little sister Nora, who lived on the absolute margins of Deponija, both spatially and socially. We abolished all forms of punishment and no longer explained to parents why we had to take some kids home when they posed a danger to others, keeping our business our own and protecting our more violent students from further violence from their family; solidarity means trust. We made sure that the children could expect a hot vegetarian meal every day, a task shared with the children, who often helped us chop, stir, and wash in the squat's dirty little kitchen. Cooking was often done by guests to the squat, some of whom became regular supporters of the project and even minor celebrities among our little comrades. Reforms were somewhat slowed, however, due to the continued influence of Tanja, the founding mother of the old program, and Mara, close friend of the deposed king, who maintained many of Guja's author- itarian and racist sentiments. Both argued that corporal punishment was a culturally dictated necessity despite our ardent demands that all forms of punishment be abolished outright. Tanja would eventually be reprimanded harshly both for these positions and for apparently betraying the trust of Koko Lepo's radicals in a series of messy events in the squat, and she slowly disassociated herself from us. Mara, on the other hand, would be crudely shouted out of the collective in a dramatic collective meeting about Koko Leo's uncertain future by yours truly. More radical members would join up, and apolitical members would leave, until finally the politics of Koko Lepo became so well-defined that we were able to collectively author a shared text spelling out our shared values. Our collective would henceforth be founded on three immutable principles: autonomy, equality, and solidarity. Autonomy meant both autonomy from the state and capital as much as was possible and relying on each other to handle conflicts and reproduce collective responsibility among ourselves, between the ,the way the two mised. Our sense of equality utterly notions of equality of rule and stricture, instead we sought to attack the foundations of inequality by rejecting authoritar. Ian methods of organizing, undoing the iniquitous norms of gender that were beginning to grow in our young comrades' minds just as They were slowly unraveling in our own, and aggressively addressing melam where and when it developed in our collective, our squat, and our elty, Pinally, as alluded to above, solidarity meant creating a condi ton of trust among ourseives in the collective and with the children but also with our supporters in the anarchist and antiauthoritarian seene worldwide, Solidarity with our kids in the naselje and the mahala also meant solidarity against the forces that brought them there and keep them there today. We enshrined these principles in a collectively authored document for future members, inviting all existing members to examine themselves and decide then and there if this was still the collective for them. The real impetus of this text was the loss of our squat in the autumn of 2o15. The property's owner, the ultra-wealthy owner of Jasmin per. fumes, met us with a small contingent of private security and offered us a carrot or a stick. We took the carrot after a lot of soul-searching and hard questions to ourselves and each other, keeping as much of our stuff in the squat as necessary until we found a new space, and began phasing ourselves out of the building. Three more attempts at a social squat were made over the years, before we finally gave in and began renting the building now known as AKAB Okretnica on the border of the Deponija mahala. As the squat vanished, so did the kindergarten. Koko Lepo continued in a new form as a youth program, focusing pri- marily on field trips in the city and encouraging the self-organization of Deponija's young boys and girls, many of them brothers and sisters of our former kindergarteners. We did our best to keep ties with our youngest comrades, but, sadly, as time wore on, our attentions shifted to older participants, finding ourselves with upwards of fifty teens and preteens sometimes joining us. We saw our youngest comrades less and less as the months wore on. With our new space, though, another kindergarten seems inevitable, and there is every reason to expect that we will be made whole once again in due time, one way or another. The last time I wrote a text about Koko Lepo for "Teaching Resistance" (September 2015], I had blood in my eyes. We were on the KOKO LEPO: KINDERGARTEN AND THE STRUGGLE IN BELGRADE, SERBIA I 99 cusp of eviction, and my soul was armored with callouses after fending off attacks from "fucking artists," neo-hippies, and gutless libs for what seemed like a lifetime. Now, InexFilm seems like a lifetime ago, and all the fire in my stomach has cooled. The struggle is still painful, and I find myself lashing out at my dearest comrades in AKAB Okretnica when something stokes the embers of old battles now and then. I'm still angry at the world, as all decent teachers must be, but I am also patient with the world, as all decent teachers must be. In contradiction to the bluster with which I began my article for Maximumrocknroll's original column ("a battle may have already occurred," I wrote), I must now admit that I'm not entirely sure where the Koko Lepo collective will be this time next year; perhaps it will not be at all. I can say, however, that if it goes, something better will rise in its place, and if it stays, it will take on new and exciting experimental forms that only a fool would dare to predict. I love Koko Lepo, because I believe in Koko Lepo. I hold dear both what we achieved and what we could not achieve, as well as all the lessons yet to come. Teaching resistance is teaching love, anger, and the courage to acknowledge that a better world is necessary-and knowing that our path there is paved not by our good intentions but by difficult choices, heartbreaking failures, and the support of our com- rades struggling alongside us.

Miles of ink have been spilled debating and dissecting the fabled school-to-prison pipeline, a problem endemic to the U.S. education system that almost exclusively affects its most socioeconomically disadvantaged students. For these students, realistic options for survival, success, or resistance are always slim and high-risk due to the overwhelming structural obstacles built directly onto their path. Less commonly discussed, however, is the question of what options exist for these students' educational attainment following incarceration at the hands of the state-and what options for survival and resistance remain for them in this most restrictive of mental, physical, and spiritual environments. The next chapter features some powerful reflections from Lena Tahmassian, who has taught inmates at San Quentin State Prison, is an assistant professor at a major university in the Southeast, and is a regular contributor to Maximumrocknroll magazine. Her column focuses on the importance of not-for-profit prison higher education and solidarity in this post-truth, reactionary era.

What Prison Teaching Can Teach us

by Lena Tahmassian

Intro poem I was brilliant at school but not in exams My teachers they could not understand How five years work went to the wall And then I got into trouble 'cause I got in the way When things went wrong, well I got the blame I was idle through no fault of my own None of my own -Newtown Neurotics, "The Mess"

On February 1, 2017, inmates took over a wing of the Vaughn prison in Delaware, protesting Trump and demanding better conditions and "remedies conducive to reform and rehabilitation," with access to edu- cation topping the list. A guard who was taken hostage died, and a civil rights coalition began asking for a transparent federal investiga- tion. Little more than that information was made known to the public at the time. While most prisons are public institutions, there is not much knowledge about what goes on in them. This action was highly symbolic: members of the most marginalized and disenfranchised group in society protesting an administration that more than ever will value private profit over basic human rights, an administration making explicit that various- disproportionately nonwhite--sectors of the pop- ulation are essentially disposable. Returning to the prisoners' demands, this column is in defense of not-for-profit higher education in prisons and of what this can teach us not only because my teaching philosophy is underpinned by a fundamental belief that people are not disposable, but also because believe that teaching and learning go both ways. Teaching in the accred. ited college program at San Quentin State Prison is an experience that has both shaped my teaching practice and informed my understanding of the prison system. I did prison teaching with a team of co-teachers during the last year and a half that it took to wrap up my PhD disserta. ton, juggling it with grad student teaching. Since graduating, I have done a stint teaching at a small prestigious liberal arts college and am now in a tenure-track position at a big state school in the South. Back in California, I got involved in prison teaching through a direct email recruitment from the program director, because there was a shortage of humanities/foreign language instructors. I had been wanting to participate for a while but could never find the moment in which I was not already totally overwhelmed with work and life. I finally just jumped in and found that dedicating an afternoon a week to the cause actually gave me a lot of purpose and helped to structure my time. Happy to have a break doing something less solitary and seemingly individualistic than getting a PhD, I was also hoping to become more comfortable in my teaching skin. I wanted to raise the stakes in what my teaching could accomplish, and I was up for the challenge of teaching people whose experiences would mostly be very different from my own. Some background about the institution reveals that San Quentin's notoriety can be attributed mostly to its famous visitors (from Johnny Cash to Mark Zuckerberg), housing high-profile inmates and California's only death row, and the institution's proximity to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Among the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) men's prisons, San Quentin is perhaps best known for its many programs including the on-site university where students can earn an associate's degree free of cost, so many people end up there through requesting a transfer. Being in a Level a insti- tution that is relatively resource-rich, the average general population inmate spends most of the day outside of the cell, working (for wages so low that it has been considered a form of slavery) and participating in various programs, activities, and groups. For volunteers, getting into the compound is a regimented but streamlined process. The route from the parking lot to the classroom includes passing through two security checkpoints and traversing the prison yard. The yard is a curious scene where all kinds of daily activities WHAT PRISON TEACHING CAN TEACH US I 103 take place together out in the open--exercise, guitar, grooming, laundry, use of urinals, etc. We intruders are typically well received, especially by students of the program who walk and chat with us (as we're not allowed to stop in the yard), while other guys are indifferent, and a few of them stare you down a bit. The geese pecking away at the dried grass on the track is a reminder that beyond the enclosure, just barely walled out from view, is the idyllic bay. After signing in, I grab my box of sup- plies and get to the classroom where the early students greet me and ask me to chime into their debate on current events. Fundamentally, prison teaching is not that different from teach- ing more conventional college students, but with some logistical limi- tations and nuances specific to interacting with incarcerated adults. Prison students have little to no access to technology, and instructors cannot use any technology in the classroom. This imposes obvious limitations, but the success of prison education also raises the ques- tion of the extent to which perpetual classroom "innovation" is a crea- tion of false needs. Awareness of classroom dynamics and building a healthy rapport is important in all teaching, and this is accentuated in the prison classroom, because the stakes are higher. For example, what the prison administrators refer to as "overfamiliarity" with the students is forbidden for various reasons, mostly safety related. Perhaps most importantly, though, even if it's really the instructor's fault for becoming too friendly, overfamiliarity can result in disciplinary action taken against the student, which can interfere directly with their daily life, parole prospects, etc. Also, it is always good to keep an eye on class participation and to try to distribute the space taken up by each student as evenly as possible. Again, this is part of a methodology that I apply to my everyday teaching, but which can carry weightier consequences teaching in prison. Incarcerated students are, in general, deprived of interaction, and many view taking classes as an opportunity to express themselves verbally as well as creatively. Letting one or a few students take up a disproportionate amount of space can generate resentment among students as well as toward the instructor. On that note, when the student's everyday reality is characterized by literal confinement, the classroom acquires a new, liberating dimen- sion. I think this is particularly true of humanities education because studying other cultures and in other languages is a form of traveling and reexamining one's place in the world, especially if one lacks the right to physical movement. Students are eager to speak and share their experi- ences, and the classroom is, unlike their cellblocks, racially integrated The notion that education can transform your life seems epitomized in this highly restrictive environment. For us, as instructors, being a volunteer in a free program is liberat- ing, provided you have the free time to give. This dynamic does seem to partially inform the students' attitudes, which shift more toward "Thanks for teaching us!" than the "Hey, I'm paying for this!" vibe of the increasingly neoliberal academy. I suppose that in defense of the "student as consumer" mindset from a student perspective, the astro- nomical cost of higher education, and the fact that many students will be indebted into the foreseeable future, places increasing pressure on them to see learning as a serious financial investment on which they must see a return (more on this later). Incarcerated students tend to ask: "Is this how they do things at (Stanford, Berkeley, etc.)?" They want to know that they are being chal- lenged and not patronized. It is also a good practice for me to always question and reflect on my methods by having to explain why we assess learning a certain way. I've come to believe strongly, however, that it's not just about importing and adapting methodologies from the elite academy to those who in many cases were never afforded the opportu- nity of higher education, but that prisoners also have a lot to teach us. The average student age is over forty, and bringing all of their diverse life experiences to the table opens up new possibilities for discussion. Living on the outside permits one to slide through life avoiding problems, burying traumas, repeating mistakes, and never facing inse- curities head on. For those seeking rehabilitation, on the other hand, self-reflection is unavoidable and can be a matter of life or existential death. Continuous reflection on the circumstances and choices in one's life that resulted in incarceration is often bound up with understand- ing and identifying a twisted (and all too widespread) conception of masculinity and fundamentally changing these patterns of thought and self-identification. I've observed that the various programs offered, including college education, help develop self-awareness, discipline, resolve, and an intense spirit of cooperation. Those who go through the rehabilitation process have accomplished the very difficult task of confronting their issues head on and facing those whose lives they may have damaged. To survive and thrive within the walls for the time being, WHAT PRISON TEACHING CAN TEACH US | 105 one must be able to imagine something better beyond them. Perhaps this is something we can all learn from. While I've taught in very differ- ent learning environments, my basic objectives are fundamentally the same: to teach students to create meaning out of texts and to critically think and rethink the basis of knowledge production. Yes, there are some truly damaged people who may be incapable of, or unwilling to, change. What seems to ring true for any type of rehabili- tation is that you have to genuinely want (or at least begin by wanting to want) to change yourself. It has been my impression that completely intransigent inmates constitute a minority of the prison population, and they, in turn, are the prisoners who are amplified through media representations of criminals and criminality. My classes were composed of a sample of the general population, from those with a reasonable expectation of getting out of prison to lifers with no possibility of parole. The general population excludes those in protective custody who are likely to be targets (i.e., sex offenders, active gang members, former cops) and those on death row--referred to as the "condemned"-who are deemed by the institution to be unworthy of resources and rehabili- tation programs altogether. By advocating for prison higher education, I know that ethically I may be mostly preaching to the choir here. But when the empathy bridge fails--for the naysayers at your next family function or before smashing the "unfriend" button on someone--it helps to explain that educating the incarcerated also makes a lot of sense from a practical standpoint. Even though most of us don't have much of a clue nor think about what goes on in prisons, we nevertheless fund them through our taxes. Like it or not, most prisoners are eventually released, and access to education while incarcerated dramatically decreases the rate of recid- ivism. Higher education in prison is a common good, and those who initiated the Vaughn prison uprising surely also believed that. But the new status quo of corporate fascism--or to be more precise, authoritar- ian capitalism-is indeed a double whammy, as it seeks to designate enemies of the state and profit off of their subjugation, which can take the form of public prison labor and private prison contracts, border walls, armaments, immigrant detention centers, etc. The college program at San Quentin in its current form, funded entirely by private donors (like many of the programs across the country), emerged in 1994 as a solution to the revocation of Pell Grants (federal higher education funding) for prisoners. The Violent Crime Bill- written by the then senator Joe Biden and signed by Bill Clinton- defunded all prison higher education. Barack Obama reintroduced funding for prison education before leaving office, but its future is unclear. Opposition to federally funded prison education seems to be rooted in a sense of morality or a warped conception of fairness-ie., Why should a murderer get a free education when I did everything I was supposed to and yet I am drowning in student debt?" I would suggest reframing the question: Why is it that you either have to end up in prison or be shackled--so to speak--by debt in order to access higher education? Shouldn't we demand better? The fact that the prison population has nearly doubled since 1994, and that state expenditure on prisons has increased by even more than that- to the point where many states now spend more on prisons than on education--raises serious concerns about American society's values. Meanwhile, slashing taxes has constituted an enticing political platform in America precisely because we apparently get so little in return--education, housing, and health care have become increasingly commodified and unattainable. In the meantime, public funds are poured into waging wars, the prison system, and securing the border- in other words, exercising the sovereign right to exclude. Ultimately, the double whammy is that those who come to power on the platform of the privatization of everything (in other words, the separation of "my" money, goods, and services from that of those other less deserv- ing) people) are those who ultimately benefit most from inequality and exclusion, both materially and politically. A bigger picture begins to emerge illustrating how designating a sector of the population as existentially "bad" people seems to gener- ate valuable political currency (read: "We need prisons in place so that society can function; we need borders so that we can be a country*). Considering prisons as a sort of border space and recognizing the ten- dency to demarcate the space between the "we" and the--often racial- ized-other shines a light on the political value of conflating crime with nonwhiteness. To make matters worse, many of the hundreds of thousands who are processed through the prison system remain disen- franchised (lose their voting rights) for life. How does one combat this self-fulfilling prophecy of retreating to private individualism, either as an adherent to consensus politics, or as WHAT PRISON TEACHING CAN TEACH US | 107 a left-wing defensive position in avoidance of this reality? If there is to be any hope of changing course, we have to avoid the ideological trap of pursuing an agenda of political purity over meaningful engagement. My hope is that promoting critical thinking and cultural competency helps to build the understanding and respect for people's humanity that is lacking in the increasingly dominant political discourse and the worldview it represents and shapes. These days, people seem to be asking a variation of the difficult question: "What is our responsibil- ity to people we disagree with?" This debate has manifested itself in response to highly mediatized issues, such as the cultural phenomenon of the viral punching Richard Spencer meme in 2017, the return of neo- Nazi visibility in its various forms, and the antifa responses, liberals defending free speech over all else, debating the right to defend or destroy confederate statues, etc. There may be a simple formula for tackling this quandary: if your worldview is defined by exclusion and denying people's humanity, then you're actually the one shutting down the possibility for discus- sion. But how do we get this point across? Do we have a better shot at trying to convince liberals or those who have adopted the most trou- bling views? Should we try to change people's minds? Is there a tool to measure when it's no longer worth our breath? I don't purport to have the answers, but if and when it's not too late for discussion, I have come to believe that more than ever it is important to default first to openness rather than exclusion, to try to judge people less. A prevalent attitude I've observed on the left, especially among those who identify with a marginal identity or have endured a lot of hardship, is something to the effect of "It's not my job to school you, to do the emotional or mental labor, just because you don't get it." Fair enough, sometimes there are legitimate reasons for adopting this attitude, but it can also be a symptom of a larger problem of refusing to engage with political power as it stands, which imposes some serious limitations on what we are able to accomplish. For some, it literally is our job to school people and help expand their horizons. The demands of the teaching profession dictate, right- fully, that you must in principle give everyone a fair shot at learning, whether that entails engaging with someone who took another's life for no good reason or a student who is truly offended by Black athletes kneeling for the national anthem. I think that because of this, teachers are in a privileged position to promote dialogue, expand minds, quez ton existing bases for judgment, and also to build empathy bridges in the classroom and way beyond. While a lot of my students, both in the prison classroom and on college campuses, share my worldviews, many do not and in light of the current reality in which the failures of liberat democracy are being effectively converted into political curreney for the far right, I'm all for increasing the possibility of encounters with people you would probably otherwise never engage with. Sometimes I feel like our social media echo chambers will truly be the death of us. However, on a positive note, there is a whole new generation of resistance crop ping up who are questioning what they have been told about who the bad guys" are in the first place. The consensus has fallen out. Let's hope that sliding back to the former status quo is not the best we can do. On a final note, I do not intend here to present incarcerated stu- dents as a uniform group. Rather, I have both reflected on my anec. dotal experiences and called on empirical evidence to highlight some trends- both the hopeful and the troubling, I encourage grad students, graduate degree holders, and higher education faculty to get involved with prison teaching in your area. There are also organizations that take book donations to send to incarcerated people--I've met students who have accessed interesting and surprising literature this way! You will likely talk to many interesting people, learn about the prison system, and subsequently become a prison abolitionist or at least an advo- cate for the humanity of those who deserve a second chance, or even an actual first chance, at a decent life. Compounded by the fact that American reality is now producing marginality at a rapid rate, it has been reassuring to hear the marginal voices growing louder and more plentiful in the last months. We must continue to defend the basic rights of those who have no voice at all.

The reactionary, even neofascist, character of how political power is in the present (circa 2019) seems unrelenting. Its unapolo- petic (almost sleeful) brutality and hyper-oppressive rhetoric toward marginalized people are almost enough to make liberals and some progressives pine for theoretically *simpler" times, such as 2015 (when the following essay was originally written), when ostensible *political centrists" controlled the levers of power in much of the industrialized world and political rhetoric was not quite so openly racist, misogynist, and xenophobic. And it is true, for example, that there was no serious consideration of objectively ludicrous ideas such as arming teachers, and political rhetoric could, theoretically. very well shift back to a purportedly more "civil" tone in the years ahead. The current hypercharged tone and wackadoo ideas of those in power aside, however, the mechanisms and manner of deployment of power and violence by the state has changed little over the last few decades (or centu- res) When we look at the example of policing in the United States, which has consistently and relentlessly brutalized Black and Brown people regard- less of the tone of political rhetoric, it becomes apparent that any real change inhow we approach discipline as teachers will, necessarily, not include cops in the equation. As noted above, I wrote the following essay in 2015 and have watched as militarization and the armed police presence in schools has steadily increased, with the bipartisan political support of both major parties alocal and national government. Nascent restorative justice programs have Seen eliminated (as recently happened in Oakland), active shooter drills bare been ramped up, and cops make the rounds constantly. Meanwhile, ascal teachers fight on the ground to try to keep these cops as far away ton students as possible--it is a matter of life or death.

Cops Out of Our Schools!

by John Mink

Cops Intro poem They already built the fences Clipped your feathers, built your tethers -Poison Girls, "Fear of Freedom"

-Poison Girls, "Fear of Freedom"

Cops and teachers: both have been the subject of shit-talking by punk bands since the first day some zitty kid from nowhere decided to pick up an instrument they didn't know how to play and immediately sing songs about how and why things suck, especially things they have to per. sonally deal with. Both teachers and cops were and are worthy targets of hatred--cops always, teachers frequently. Both serve as instruments of coercive authority that is often institutionally supported, and both can act as lethal agents of oppression in that capacity (often in tandem). Both tend to treat their "charges" in very different ways, depending on the levels of structural privilege said "charges" have from their individ- al circumstances and specific context, with highly dissimilar personal outcomes based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and other factors being the norm. In their modern form, both policing and teaching sprang from colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, and both professions are subject to overwhelming, relentless top-down pressure from those who explicitly support those toxic practices/philosophies from which the modern professions sprung. The difference between teachers and cops, however, lies in their basic functions on the social and individual level and in the methods by which they work. Philosophically, the difference is simple and stark: teachers are (at least on paper) expected to nurture, support, and COPS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS E TI protect their students as human beings, while the function of police is to protect private property and enforce law by capturing and punish- ing those who they suspect of breaking it. On the surface of it, these professions should not share any common ground. In practice, in the modern world these professions often dovetail into interconnected mechanisms of social control that explicitly and implicitly (quietly) maintain established hierarchies of structural inequality and injustice. We ignore the history of these institutions at our peril, and the history of both policing and modern state-directed teaching practice are full of stark disparities that forcefully (and often lethally) marginalize many, while others benefit from levels of structural privilege carefully cali- brated to maintain the status quo. Punks are (and have been) right to go after both teachers and cops, as both have long track records of serving as agents of oppression. Yet we need to keep in mind that the basic function of these professions is different at the core. There is no way that policing can be utilized in a liberatory fashion for marginalized people who necessarily come into contact with police, and it almost always ends up as purely toxic to those people who are being "policed." In contrast, it has been shown time and time again that teachers who are genuinely dedicated to the core (non- institutional) philosophies of their profession can, through radically innovative practices and active subversion of the institutional aspects of their jobs, play a major role in helping empower their students to take greater control over their own lives and potentially become catalysts for effecting real structural/social change. This difference is why there are punks who are teachers, but there are no cops who are punks, at least not by any definition of "punk" that makes any sense at all. Back in the fall of 2015, just about everyone in the U,S. (and prob- ably much of the world) saw the video of a Black girl student in a South Carolina high school being beaten in class, dragged violently from her seat by a white male cop who worked at the school. The reason offered for this abuse of the student's civil rights was that she was being "dis- ruptive" by refusing to relinquish her cell phone to the teacher, and then refusing an order to leave class with the cop-while she never once acted violently toward the teacher or the cop. The defiant student's removal by force, with the cop flipping her out of her seat and dragging her across the classroom, was initially welcomed and approved of by the teacher and school administration The student was arrested, as was another student (also a Black girl) win was filming the incident and verbally confronted the cop. Both students faced charges under a notorious South Carolina law that prohibits -die turbing schools" (there are similar laws in twenty states), with penalties up to one thousand dollars in fnes and ninety days in jail. After the video was posted, amid a massive national outcry and some protests, the charges against the girls were (eventually) dropped, and the cop was fired, though he was not charged with any misconduct or violation. While this individual case was thoroughly and obviously fucked on about ten thousand levels, it is far from isolated. Undocumented versions of incidents like this happen to young Black and Brown stu. dents on a daily basis in public schools across the United States. In the aftermath of such incidents, the law is weaponized against Black and Brown students via statutes like the "disturbing schools" law (partially amended in South Carolina in 2018), under which Black students were four times more likely than their white counterparts to be charged and sent into the juvenile justice system. The core problem, of course, is racism, where teenagers being teenagers are not all subjected to the same structures and consequences for similar actions. Even beyond extreme examples of draconian laws like the "disturbing schools" stat- utes, there are specific structures of racist/white supremacist oppres- sion embedded deep in modern public school disciplinary procedures across the United States. These structures guarantee these situations will endlessly repeat unless things fundamentally change, from the institutional level to one-on-one communications in the classroom. Let's go ahead and state what should be obvious: cops do not belong in schools, period. In fact, as radical educators (particularly in schools with high proportions of socioeconomically disadvantaged students of color), we should be doing everything in our power to insulate and protect our students from contact with police and the punitive, oppres- sive institutions they represent. Just about any contact with police inevi- tably becomes toxic for these students, beginning a downward cycle into the modern slavery of incarceration; the long-term result often being fatal. If we do nothing, the school-to-prison pipeline will only widen and suck more young Black and Brown people into its hungry maw. Obviously, structural racism has been a constant in our insti- tutions (including the schools), but how did we get to the specific, COPS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS I 113 hyper-punitive point we are at? When did schools become an extension of the police state? Cops are only posted to active duty in urban (and low-income suburban) schools because of a lingering Faustian "law and order" bargain made between mainstream liberals and conservatives back in the 198os and early 1990s. This was a time when the drug war and middle-class hysteria about teenage gang violence were at a fever pitch. Highly punitive, often racist legal approaches--mandatory minimum sentencing, increased criminalization of drug addicts, disparate law enforcement/sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine, heightened pro- fling and mass round-ups of Black and Brown "gang members," privati- zation of prisons, etc.- created a hostile new legal environment with dozens of nasty traps set primarily to ensnare young people of color. During the peak of this hysteria, teens were widely tried in court as adults for the first time, setting the stage for lifetimes of total mar- ginalization and prison labor exploitation that bears an uncomfort- able resemblance to indentured servitude at best and slavery at worst. Schools filled their halls with cops, metal detectors, and "zero tolerance" policies that resulted in countless arrests over minor (primarily drug- based) infractions--despite the fact that the vast majority of serious violence between students, particularly involving weapons, occurred off campus and away from the purview of these campus cops. Meanwhile, the gangs, which often provided the most potent social cohesion and sense of empowerment that many poor students of color had, eventu- ally came to a state of relative peace with each other and ceased open warfare in most major U.S. regions (with a few notable exceptions). This slowdown in organized gang violence dovetailed with grass- roots community building efforts, macroeconomic changes, and other factors that together drastically reduced street violence in impacted communities. The decrease in overall violence was either ignored by policymakers or erroneously credited to an increasingly militarized police presence and "zero tolerance" policies (including longer-term incarceration of young teens), which served mainly to increase ten- sions and make things markedly worse in many ways. Experts on the subject tend to agree that the constant presence of cops in urban and low-income suburban schools had little or no positive effect on those particular environments, and the involvement of law enforcement in many nonserious on-campus infractions has, in fact, had a very dis- tinct negative impact that is reflected in a vast increase in the lifelong criminalization of young Black and Brown people. We now must wrangle with the multigenerational fallout from this unprecedented widening of the school-to-prison pipeline. Meanwhile, highly publicized mass school shootings in rural areas and exurbs (well-off, predominantly white outer suburbs) like Columbine, Colorado, and Parkland, Florida, have contributed to lin. gering public acceptance for continuing and even increasing the armed police presence in urban (and low-income suburban) public schools. This is despite the fact that these heinous mass shootings have been almost exclusively perpetrated by young white males and generally take place in schools with predominantly white populations--schools that rarely have a substantial, consistent police presence on campus. Fear and racial prejudice continue to drive support for punitive approaches in schools today, from parents, administrators, politicians, and others. Sadly, these approaches are also supported by many teach- ers, who have bought into white supremacist narratives, have been bamboozled by harsh "discipline" policies that just make us into cops ourselves, or are simply overwhelmed and poorly trained in de-escala- tion, empathetic communication, and restorative justice techniques. With countless resources available for these nonpunitive techniques online, in print, and through direct training seminars, teachers and counselors should not only familiarize themselves thoroughly with them but be ready to openly agitate and fight for their implementation and full support at the district level and higher. As teachers, we need to push for a paradigm shift in schools. We need to leave behind the lazy, oppressive option of violence that we perpetrate by pushing the big, shiny red panic button and calling police in to handle problems that could be handled in a better way. We need to get rid of the cops in our classrooms and in our heads. We need to fight to change the entire system from a punitive model to a healing restorative model, and we need to say cops out of our schools!

Radicals know better than to make assumptions that any nation-state, particularly one based around a capitalist system, will have a govern- ment that will meaningfully provide for all its residents, work consistently to increase universal equitability, and have a system that promotes restorative social justice. At best, even the most seemingly benign of governments must be relentlessly pressed upon, and often actively resisted, to ensure that it maintains basic respect for and accountability to its people. However, living in the United States, particularly in openly neofascist times such as these, it is easy for me (and many other people) to indulge "grass is greener" fantasies about what life must be like living under the robust social welfare systems of other countries. In particular, we are intellectually tempted to idealize governments in Northern and Central Europe, though we are aware that the prosperity and relative social equity found in these countries is often the direct result of colonialist genocides, exploitation, and centuries of theft. We warily watch but still underplay the rise of formerly fringe parties on the neofascist far right across the continent on platforms of racial exclusion and resentment. And while it is true that quality of life for most people is overall better in, say, Germany, if one scratches the surface it can become evident that the brutality of capitalism, exploitation, racism, and intense political oppression of radicals still lies very close to the seduc- tive surface. The following chapter is written by E. Schmuse, a political radical and teacher in the German state of Bavaria. E. Schmuse is a pseudonym used by the author due to the harsh Bavarian state policies about the personal politi- cal ideologies (to say nothing of actual activism) of teachers.

Becoming a Teacher in Bavaria: Making up and Finding Leewaay within Structural Conservatism

by E. Schmuse

Becoming teacher Bavaria

Democracy is a con job they got you fooled if you step out of line they'll have you pulled. You can't go against them it ain't allowed so watch yourself, hide in the crowd. -DIRT, "Object Refuse Reject Abuse"

I hesitate before I tell people that I work as a teacher: the ties between the profession itself and the systemic conservatism in Bavaria just seem indefensibly strong. To give people a rough idea of Bavaria beyond Lederhosen and Oktoberfest, some use the tongue-in-cheek compari- son: "It's the Texas of Germany." Drawing on stereotypes, the implied notion is that of a southern, very traditional, religious, and conservative federal state that sports a strong sense of identity and historical unique- ness. By and large, that is true. Although its history is indeed fascinat- ing and at times quite ambivalent in its political currents, it is more than fair to write that Bavaria is one of the most conservative states in Germany: tough law enforcement, mostly exclusionary and monolithic concepts of identity and language, adherence to the Roman Catholic Church, and the list goes on. Bavaria is the largest federal state in land area and the second most populous state in Germany and has been governed by the Christian Democratic and conservative CSU (Christian Social Union) without coalition partners since 1962. It is important to note that the respon- sibility for the educational system in Germany lies with the federal states. Bavaria's three-tiered school system has a reputation for being BECOMING A TEACHER IN BAVARIA I 117 rather conservative but also for providing a fairly high standard of edu- cation compared to other federal states. That is partly ascribed to the extensive training you have to go through to get a teaching degree here. For the highest level of secondary education at a Gymnasium (some- times compared to British grammar schools or to prep schools in the United States), aspiring teachers complete about five years of studies at a university and sit for final state exams in at least two majors, which amounts to something like a master's degree in both subjects--in my case, English and history, with social studies as a third. After university, the practical part of teacher training takes another two years, followed by a second state exam--the preparatory service, or Referendariat. This is when the political reality of Bavaria hits the student teachers. Structural conservatism is deeply ingrained in the Bavarian civil service, and it becomes palpable during the preparatory period. To apply and register for the training program, you have to sign that you have never--financially or ideologically--supported any of the organizations and parties named in a very extensive list. It includes a variety of religious sects and fundamentalists, extreme leftist and right-wing groups, and terrorist organizations--in short, groups that do not uphold the values of the German constitution. While much of this makes sense (and not only from a state's perspective), two items on that list should be pointed out here, because they epitomize the general political climate in Bavaria. The first is the democratic social- ist party Die Linke (The Left), which is one of the parties represented in the German parliament, the Bundestag. Without question, when it was founded Die Like showed very problematic continuities from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled the GDR, but it is now no longer generally considered extreme left or a threat to the democratic and constitutional order in Germany by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz). This deviation from federal policy is not unusual for Bavaria. In practical terms, you cannot become a teacher in Bavaria if you are a member or supporter of Die Linke. Such caution does not seem to be exercised at the other end of the political spectrum. The right-wing to far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) won 12.6 percent of the vote in the German federal election of 2017. However, membership in this German nationalist and populist party is not an exclusion criterion for teaching in Bavaria.

The second remarkable item listed is "anti-fascist action coali. tions." Although the Ministry of the Interior claims that in this case the individual circumstances are decisive, the broadness of the phrasing is deliberate and dangerous. It leaves every teacher with anti-fascist and leftist stances in a relative state of insecurity at a time when populist, exclusionary, and even anti-democratic views are becoming part of the political landscape. To give a few examples: the ruling party in Bavaria, the CSU, led by Markus Söder, the president of Bavaria since March 2018, and Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CSU since 2008 and minis- ter of the interior, building and community since 2018, has enforced a series of decrees and laws to toughen their law-and-order policies. Fearmongering and soundbite rhetoric against migrants and asylum seekers (Söder: "asylum tourism") translates into harsh border security and so-called "transit centers" to prevent people from (legally) entering Germany and to facilitate deportations. In May 2018, the Bavarian state parliament (Landtag) drastically extended the powers of Bavarian law enforcement at the expense of civil rights and liberties. As of June 2018, Christian crosses are mandatory in all state government buildings in Bavaria to "uphold its cultural traditions." This set of anti-immigration practices, an identitarian and mono- lithic assertion of culture, and the strict security policies are being fulled by the rise of the right-wing AfD and the sharp decline of voter support for the CSU. On his birthday in June 2018, Horst Seehofer joked that the number of deportations that day coincided with his age (sixty. nine). As air-sea rescue is being criminalized, and the external borders of the EU are being fortified, the recorded number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean for 2018 has reached almost 1,500. Looking north, the by and large peaceful protests against the Go summit in Hamburg were portrayed as civil war-like events by the tabloids. Former German minister of the interior Thomas de Maizière announced on August 25, 2017 that Indymedia Linksunten, a German Indymedia site, would be raided and shut down. In June 2018, Bavarian activists of the "Chaos Computer Club" (Europe's largest association and NGO of hackers for governmental transparency and freedom of information) were subject to searches and confiscations under flimsy legal pretexts. Populist demands for tougher stances and prevention programs against the "far left" are not only voiced by the AfD. Right-wing violence reached a frightening peak, with over 3,500 attacks on asylum seekers and shelters BECOMING A TEACHER IN BAVARIA | 119 in 2016 alone. Meanwhile, refugee centres continue to "suffer near daily attacks," and the trial of the extreme-right terrorist organization the National Socialist Underground (2013-2018) has provided crushing evi- dence of institutionalized racism within the German security services. During my brief time as a teacher, conservative, right-wing, and discriminatory views have sometimes surfaced quite openly. I have seen this in the racist or anti-Semitic jokes that are casually told by one fellow history teacher in training, recurring varieties of chauvinist and sexist behaviour in the staff room, and a member of the school admin- istration who openly reads literature from a publishing house known for producing books overflowing with conspiracy theories, esoteric Nazism, right-wing populism, pseudoscience, and far-right politics. These examples provide a glimpse of the level of political normalization that far-right ideologies have apparently achieved, which continues to go unchallenged. Maintaining a political stance in the workplace may seem complicated, but if the very documents you signed to work as a teacher leave deliberate room for interpretation of what is "too extreme" on the left, this adds yet another layer of concern. Needless to say, it is essential to speak out and uphold emanci- patory and anti-fascist views in times like these. But questions arise: Could you be removed from your position as a teacher if you attend a talk or discussion in your spare time that is organized by a local group that might be considered "antifa"? What if you use leftist symbols at concerts you organize, perform at, or attend to introduce emancipatory and inclusionary aspirations into that particular event or space? What if you take part in a demonstration against fascist groups? Could that be considered an unacceptable enough form of an "anti-fascist action coalitions"? Is it necessary to use a pseudonym when you write about a political issue? These questions are not simply hypothetical, because the system of preparatory service does not encourage critical thinking and indi- viduality-it suppresses them. While the Bavarian constitution states, "Schools shall not only impart knowledge and skills but also develop the nobleness of the heart and the character," the opposite is required to complete the two years of teacher training. The reasons are systemic. A short digression might be necessary to understand the various converg- ing layers of pressure here: depending on the federal state, shortsighted hiring policies make the recruitment situation for teachers rather bleak, despite a proven shortage of teachers; teachers in training are used g fill this shortage in Bavaria, and thus are systematically overworked and underpaid. To become a fully qualified and pursue a career as a teacher, it is necessary to complete the preparatory service with a standingly high marks. Given the fact that each seminar instructor for the respective subjects not only coaches but also evaluates and mark, the aspiring teacher, their didactical and pedagogical views develop a dogmatic quality. To put it plainly, teacher training means to fall in line with your instructors without question, discussion, or critical thought. Of course, this description of the overall structural dependency and subordina tion should not obscure the fact that there are, in fact, instructors who deviate from this pattern--there are always exceptions to the rule. Ye the unchecked power structures ensure that sympathy and antipathy turn into favouritism and bias on a systematic basis. Supervision and evaluation of the instructors, as well as confidential complaint manage ment, are scarce. The scope of what the instructors are subjected to varies from the pedestrian to the devastating. It is the 3:00 a.m. email that is relevant for the next workday, the sexist remark about the outfits of female coworkers, and, in some cases, degradation and verbal abuse of teach- ers in training. Double standards regarding professionalism, quality of teaching, organization, and pedagogic reliability are daily fare. Moreover, developing a personal teaching style is hindered when meticulously copying the instructors' views is a prerequisite for success--the graded demonstrations of your teaching skills become showcases of imitation. In short, highly educated, confident adults are systematically turned into yes-people, because they cannot afford to risk their grades. Sooner or later, every colleague has admitted to anxiety, depression, and/or frustration because of the working conditions. The seminar instruc tors, who should be didactically sound trainers of aspiring teachers, often do little more than point out mistakes. This systemic failure of pedagogy is worsened by the aforementioned political issues. In this context, every "let's agree to disagree" uttered by instructors has proven to be not an acknowledgement of intellectual diversity as part of an academic professional discourse but a euphemism for a lowered grade. Ironically, one instructor lamented that he had to view his trainees as "neuters," because the political climate did not allow controversial BECOMING A TEACHER IN BAVARIA I 121 debate anymore. The very same instructor ranted about "multiculti ideology," slandered gender equality, and recommended pseudoscien- tific literature by climate septics. Teachers in training are worn out by the struggle between personal convictions and structural constraints, compounded by the unfortunate necessity to sell one's labour. This might be the time to explain the subtitle of this essay: "Making Up and Finding Leeway within Structural Conservatism." "Making up leeway" is why I decided to become a teacher despite the structural conservatism of the work environment, despite these problems and concerns. Structural change in the Bavarian education system might seem frustratingly slow and maybe even unobtainable. Hence, it is more than understandable why many socially and politically conscious or active people might eschew a profession within the constraints of the education system. However, in practice, I strongly believe that it does make a difference what kind of teacher stands in front of or amid a class of young people. Conservatism is left unchallenged if key positions that might enable us to question and shape society are left to the conserva- tive, or even the reactionary. "Finding leeway" is, therefore, identifying and using the corridors for action in the curriculum to emphasize criti- cal approaches to the educational content. It is fortunate that the Bavarian curriculum, in fact, provides that option: exploring the ambivalence of nationalism in the nineteenth century, teaching about the importance of the Lutheran Reformation, while also challenging Luther's anti-Semitism, giving pupils the oppor- tunity to learn about European voyages across the globe in the Early Modern Age, but also mentioning that "discovery" in this context is far from being a neutral or appropriate term. Not only history lessons but English classes also offer the possibility to discuss current events and highlight progressive perspectives. Some textbooks might still use the word "Indian," but at least they cover the discrimination against Native Americans in the film industry. It is up to the teacher to provide learn- ing opportunities that question exclusionary concepts of society, reveal the political ideologies in phrases and words, and show that some of the text, images, and videos are not just learning materials for defin- ing relative clauses or introducing new vocabulary and are more than just as an occasion to speak English. Given the right approach, they have the potential to inform, to challenge, and to spark critical think- ing. Idealistic? Of course--but not impossible. For me, it was uplifting and sometimes crucial to see that some members of the resident staff shared these views. Despite the forces of conformity within the education system, teaching has the power to encourage "what Brazilian Educator Paulo Freire ….. expressed as the very essence of being human- the ability to act in and (re-)create reality through culture, and to be in the world not just as a participant of history but as creators of history. In this light, revolution and societal transformation is not just an inevitable result of history but an objective reality organized by people conscious of their own consciousness and drawing on their creative abilities mediated by particular historical, objective material conditions."1

Footnotes 1. Curry Malott and Milagros Peña, Punk Rockers' Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and Gender (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), 16.

Personal Pedagogy

How I revised a major assignment since the 2016 presidential election to reflect more critical thinking and evaluation of news media

by Jessica Mills

Community College is Totally Punk Rock

by Michelle Cruz Gonzalez

Insurgent Pedagogies: Decolonization Is for All of Us

by Natalie Avalos

Radical Inclusion and Special Education

by Stephen Raser

Neurotypicals and the Rest of Us

by Ash Tray

Interview with Alice Bag

interviewed by John Mink

Our Students Are Radical Because They Live in the Real World

by Mimi Thi Nguyen

Talking to ESL Students about Anti-Black Racism

by Ian McDeath

Interview with Martin Sorreondeguy

interviewed by John Mink

False Equivalencies and the Resurgent Far Right in a Messy, Violent World

by John Mink

Guide for Youth Protestors

by Jessalym Aaland

Building the Movement to Stop Trump: Lessons from an Anti-Fascist Civil Rights Educator in Berkeley

by Yvette Felarca

The Big Takeover of New Orleans

by Roburt Knife

Letter from the Educatioal Battle Lines in Oaklahoma (AKA Everywhere, USA)

by Taylor McKenzie

Notes on an Anarchist Pedagogy

by Ron Scapp

The People and Teachers unite aainst the State and Neoliberalism in Oaxaca

by Scott Campbell

Maximumrocknroll Radio's "Teaching Resistance" DJ Slot

by John Mink

Who Punk Forgot

Christiana Cranberry

Problem Posing in the ESL Classroom

Ruth Crossman

Lesson Plans for Community Self-Defense in a Time of Resurgent Neofascism

by John Mink

Navigating Spaces

by Mike Friedberg