“An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.”
Lerone Bennett Jr.
The new superintendent of the school district where I work and where my children attend school shared this revolutionary quotation when he spoke to district administrators earlier this month. I am so eager to learn how our new district leader plans to collaborate to create creating change, and watching his speech got me fired up for the school year. In his talk to administrators, which I read about and watched on the district website, he argued that yes, we need to support teacher and administrator growth, but that our primary focus must be on what best serves all our students. And that, he reminded us, means we must all choose revolution over the oppressive status quo.
What would a revolution look like in the largest school district in our state? As I think about what it will take to make our large, unwieldy, underfunded system truly respond to the needs of young people in our community, my mind and heart — informed by my experiences in this district and others — settle on two central ideas that often get lost in the daily workings of a huge institution like ours: research and reciprocity.
Below, I explore how research — an open, active process of gathering diverse and authoritative perspectives — and reciprocity — a genuine, active belief that every person in our organization and in our community can both lead and teach — could lead us to the joyful, humanizing educational revolution that our students need.
Research: Inclusively gathering authoritative perspectives
We need a rich, dynamic research culture. This kind of research is not just buying a curriculum packaged by people who don’t know our students. It’s not just sending administrators or teachers to conferences or hiring consultants to “roll out” the next new program, initiative or model. We need to come together as community stakeholders to DO research, not just have it explained to us by other people. All levels of research can be useful as we gather diverse perspectives to enrich our work, and we need to be intentional about what kinds of research we create and consume.
When we come together to do in primary research, we:
- Interview or survey to a variety of perspectives in the community
- Collect data or artifacts that inform us about our educational community
- Analyze words, actions, data, artifacts, experiences, texts that we have collected to help us know our students better
- Plan, implement, and analyze action research projects to test out new practices (informed by other primary, secondary, and tertiary research)
When we come together to do secondary research, we:
- Read and discuss peer-reviewed research articles and research-based books
- Read and discuss practitioner journals and books
- Invite in, listen to, and talk with with scholars who present their own research (peer-reviewed or practitioner-based action research)
When come together to we do tertiary research, we can:
- Read encyclopedia articles or reference texts to build our background knowledge about educational concepts and theories
- Invite in, listen to, and talk with consultants who share a framework they have developed based on other researchers’ findings and theories
All levels of research can be useful as we gather in new perspectives in our ongoing research, and we should take care to move fluidly between all three levels instead of getting stuck in tertiary and secondary research. Then, we can move toward building reciprocity in our processes for applying research to practice in our community.
In short, as tempting as it seems, given the volume of “research-based” materials, programs, and trainings available for purchase in the educational marketplace, a school cannot buy a research base. Yes, buying programs and hiring consultants saves us from having to read and apply the research ourselves. But every institution needs to build its people’s capacity to read, create, and apply research and think about how it applies directly to their own community. Without that empowered sense of a research culture, we’re just buying off the rack for what really should be a custom tailoring job.
Reciprocity: Everyone is a teacher, everyone is a learner
And just as everyone in a revolutionary school district needs be an active researcher, we all need to be seen and see others as both teachers and learners, regardless of our positions in the organizational hierarchy. What’s the opposite of hierarchy? Unhierarchical, non-hierarchical…a “chill-archy,” as Sydney in The Bear suggested? I went looking, but I couldn’t find any good synonyms that describe an institution that arranges relationships so that power doesn’t rigidly constrain people or decide whose voices are heard.
Through no fault of any one person or group or district, schools are not traditionally set up to truly hear, and act upon—student and teacher knowledge. Schools, like most institutions, are built on hierarchy, and in hierarchies, the decision-makers are often the farthest away from the people who experience the impact of those decisions. What if being revolutionary requires reciprocity rather than hierarchy?
The concept of reciprocity seems to capture the generative back and forth, sharing, and respect between all members of a community that my heart and my gut yearn for. In order to put our community’s diverse research into practice, we need more than the traditional top-down hierarchies that are baked into the structure of schools, from superintendent and district administrators on “down” to building administrators, teachers, students, and families. Instead, on the horizontal plane of give and take, reciprocity means that everyone has something to teach, everyone has something to learn, and research belongs to us all.
What does that look like? Well… I don’t know exactly because I haven’t seen it in action in any school or institution. (Actually, I think the season 2 kitchen in The Bear is as close as I’ve seen to reciprocity and research creating a revolution. More on that in a future post?) I think it would mean truly trusting in the necessity of hearing authoritative voices from every level of the community and organization—and embracing the idea that authority exists at every level. It means not telling people to “stay in their lane”—because we’re all in the same lane for learning and justice. It means that everyone’s sphere of influence is more expansive than a traditional organization chart would dictate. It means that everyone’s expertise is valued, and the expertise of those who do the teaching and learning every day is consistently sought, heard, and acted upon.
What might it look like to grow the revolution?
In his talk to district leaders, I appreciated how Dr. Roberts focused on listening to a variety of perspectives beginning with students, on teaming, on coaching, and on collaboration. He praised the student-centeredness of the district, but he also appears poised to push for changes that happen from the ground up. That’s what a revolution is: a turning over, a rolling back in which relationships and conversations change. The peasants revolt. The workers claim their power. The people take what is theirs.
But maybe revolution doesn’t have to mean violent upheaval, despite these subversive political and social connotations the word carries. Maybe it could look like intentional and relentless questioning, drawing in, coming together, and re-drawing old lines and practices of communication and collaboration. Maybe it could look like a radical (to take the etymological meaning akin on getting to the root of something) reconsideration of how decisions are made, who is at the table, and what the table looks like, sounds like, feels like.
In my more than two decades in education, I have sought ways to broaden the table at the system level, and to be a voice that can elevate student and teacher knowledge—as well as research and practices that come from student-centered, critical perspectives in anti-oppressive education. When asked for feedback on professional development sessions and district initiatives, I raise the need for reciprocity and two-way expertise-sharing between teachers and administrators, coaches and district leaders, and everyone in between. I’ve joined groups sponsored by districts and unions focused on pursuing equity in curriculum and overall systems. And I have reached out to leaders to seek collaboration, build relationships, and discuss additional research perspectives that might support a more reciprocal relationship between teachers and district leaders.
At the building level, I have always felt able to make progress in building and sustaining reciprocal relationships and practices with the people I work together with day in and out. But generally, when my colleagues or I attempt to build those relationships with district-level leaders, the traditional and ubiquitous hierarchies always seem to reassert themselves.
Instead of being ready to empower teacher and student voices in our curriculum development processes, our system is set up to buy curriculum from companies and hire consultants to introduce instructional frameworks. Teachers are positioned as consumers, not creators. Instead of inviting instructional coaches into problem-solving conversations, coaches are positioned as trainees in district initiatives, and then are expected to train those “below” us in the hierarchy. Coaches are positioned as middle-men, not leaders.
Returning to work in public schools after four years in academia, I have found it harder than I had imagined to be the kind of leader who can use her voice, expertise, and experience to elevate and illuminate the work and needs of teachers and students, and to draw attention to research rooted in critical pedagogies. We all seemed to be caught in the nets of our own limited perspectives in our hierarchically entrenched system.
Surely my frustrations come across in my words, but I truly do not mean these as personal critiques of any one person or group in my current district or any district where I have worked. And just as surely, the frustrations of working across different buildings and positional perspectives are mutual. Despite any challenges I encounter in my district, I am happy to work where my kids attend school, and I would not work in any other district in the state right now. The political and racial reactionism sweeping our country makes every educator’s job harder, and I could not work in one of our neighboring suburban and rural districts because they are increasingly unsafe places for young people who are part of historically marginalized groups—children like my own. In a time when traditional hierarchies are attempting to reassert themselves in every facet of our political and community lives, educators everywhere have a tough hill to climb to counteract the pull toward dominant identities and traditional hierarchies.
A revolutionary pursuit
And so, although I am happy to be part of my local community school district, I also know that we can do better, myself included. And to do better, we need to actively and relentlessly confront the hierarchies we have inherited from our educational and institutional forefathers. I need to do that every day in my own work when I listen to early career teachers who have so much to teach me about their disciplines, about our students, and about new ways to think about teaching and learning. I need to do that every time I meet with administrators, remembering that my own expertise and experience with pedagogy does not trump their administrative and leadership expertise and experience.
A change in leadership—and hopefully an ebbing of novel pandemic-era challenges—gives Dr. Roberts and educators like him across the country the opportunity to collaboratively steer school districts like ours towards a new, co-constructed vision of a reciprocal, research-rich revolution. This would be a place where meetings include a variety of voices, where important decisions are made collectively rather than unilaterally, and where we are all vulnerable enough to seek, build, and share knowledge together. It won’t happen overnight…and it probably will be a never-ending pursuit rather than a discrete, end-stopped change. Instead, it will be the revolutionary poem of a messy, joyous, active, reciprocal research community in which each and every member claims the titles of teacher, learner, researcher, and revolutionary.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 