The three of us walked across the street with our sandwiches hand, scoping out a place to sit for awhile during the lunch break, catch our breath, and prepare ourselves for the afternoon discussion. Our class would be together for the first time since a tumultuous day a month ago when our professor asked the class "How are you doing?", which started a racial dialogue that escalated quickly and turned ugly, especially for the two friends I sat with.
Our anxiety about the afternoon and overall disappointment with the graduate program lingered in the air. We had come into the program excited to go deeper into our preparation to become teachers. But we were met with professors who picked books for the class that they didn't recommend keeping, and asked us to turn in assignments like a powerpoint presentation about ourselves and a binder with all our handouts hole punched and organized with tabs. The last time we had to do that was in the 6th grade. What kind of graduate program grades students on their systems of organizing class material?
The emotions periodically surfaced physically, sometimes with a head hung low, resting in the palms of folded hands. Sometimes in eyes staring off towards the tennis courts. We had come to know each other better through being assigned a group project to explore gender hegemony and resistance in elementary schools. But through the intense pain of our urban education class, and through the disappointment with our other classes, we had become each others strongest allies and closest confidants. And we were determined to enjoy an hour in Dolores Park on a sunny November day.
After all, we had been given a glimmer of hope that morning by the guest lecturer, Bree Picower, that as white women who wanted to teach elementary school, we also had a right to be at the table, talking and learning about socially just education. Bree is an associate professor at Montclair State College and a core member of New York Collective of Radical Educators, after having taught elementary school in Oakland and New York. Research in Urban Education is dominated by men who teach high school, so we were incredibly thankful to hear how a first grade teacher can also create a classroom focused on social justice.
Just before we were about to gather our things and relinquish our patch of grass in the sun, three high school students approached us. Two girls held a sign saying "Fundraiser for Wrestling" and a boy held a pan of brownies. "Would you like to buy a brownie to support our girls wrestling team?" they asked. It took a moment to register what they were saying. "Wait, you're raising money for a girls wrestling team?" one of us asked.
They were, in fact. Sometimes 1-2 girls go out for the wrestling team, they said. But this year 10 girls signed up for it. 10! Talk about resistance to gender hegemony. Those 10 girls weren't going to let society dictate what sport was or was not feminine enough. We rambled on and on to the three of them about how excited we were about what they are doing and how important their work was--not just the girls going out for the team, but the male teammate who was standing in solidarity with them.
They were our heroes that day. They gave us a little bit more courage to stick with the challenging conversations, to continue jumping through the hoops that our professors put in front of us. Because we want to be teachers. Not just any teachers. Teachers who are able to use the classroom space to break down unequal systems and structures that create injustice--including the societal ideal of femininity that says girls shouldn't wrestle.
No comments:
Post a Comment