Last summer, I (Sam) led an improv workshop for high school students around the country. I facilitated four, 45-minute improv sessions with nearly 40 students who were enrolled in a month-long summer Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) camp at a major university in the Midwest. The 11th and 12th graders in the camp applied to participate from around the country and the world. I’d been recruited as a guest instructor to lead improv in the evenings. During the days students were taking STEM courses, working in labs, and learning about their particular disciplines. I was one of only a handful of white people in the group. These students of color mostly identified as Asian, Latinx, Asian-American, or Middle-Eastern. There were no Black students in the camp.
Over the four sessions, a small group of students in the sessions kept attempting to engage in horrific, anti-Black racism. I have spent 20 years using improv to build spaces that confront white supremacy and racism. My experience with these young people of color surprised me. Instead of enjoying the experience of doing improv with young people, I found myself struggling both to confront and address anti-Black racism they brought to this space. I don’t bring this up to unpack or make sense of the experience. That’s a paper I’ll need to write on my own. I bring it up because of what the experience did to me.
A few months before this workshop, I learned that I had high blood pressure. Years of experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic have left me more anxious. That anxiety was exacerbated during the workshop described above. I felt physically unwell before, during, and after my work with the students. That is something I had never experienced before, and it weighed on me as I spent a month leading improv with teenagers. Grappling with the anti-Blackness that emerged in our work only complicated a teaching experience that took a very real toll on my white body, a toll that I am sure is nothing compared to what anti-Blackness does each and every day to Black and Brown people as they move through a world rife with white supremacy. All of this is to say that I was not well during the experience described above, and it is my sense that we are not well as a field or a society.
Black author Adrienne Marie Brown (Citation2021) wrote that “every time people are gathered together, the hegemony of dominant culture is playing out unless there is an intention to be/do otherwise” (p. 52). Brown goes further to suggest “the white supremacist heteropatriarchy culture’s relationship to time makes us feel like there is never enough of it—that efficiency is of paramount importance” (p. 52). The workshop described above reminds me that the work of gathering together to be and do otherwise is endless. And resisting the dominant culture takes its toll on our bodies. We need each other. Later in her book, Brown (Citation2021) asks “what kinds of humans do we want to be and become? What kind of structures and practices do we need to be in to generate that future?” (p. 117). I know that improvisational teaching and learning can help to challenge people to resist white supremacy—to become differently. But such work takes discipline. It takes support from each other.
And that is what we (Sam and Erin) hope this journal continues to build. A space for us to be together as we think hard about school and society, resist the hegemonies of dominant culture such as white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and work together to become different kind of humans. Healthier humans. We hope the pieces in this issue contribute to your becoming differently.
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“The “feeling-life” journey of the grade school child: An investigation into inclusive young citizenship in international Waldorf education” by Kate Attfield argues that Rudolf Steiner’s international Waldorf education is comparatively under-researched for a 100-year-old education movement which thrives globally. Attfield’s recommends productive collaboration between schools’ networks and for Waldorf educational studies to forge connections with the wider educational academic sphere, and to share their application of creativity and restorative and inclusive practices.
“Toward affective decolonization: Nurturing decolonizing solidarity in higher education” by Michalinos Zembylas turns our attention to a rather neglected dimension of (de)colonization, namely, the affective elements of (de)colonization in the context of higher education. Affective decolonization highlights that decolonization has to also happen at the level of affective life. The paper proposes that the deployment of a “public pedagogy” of decolonizing solidarity pays explicit attention to affective decolonization and works to create teaching and learning environments in higher education that nurture affective practices of decolonizing solidarity.
“Necessity is the mother of invention: Virtual campus conversations on antiracism during the pandemic and beyond” by Emily Rutter and Gabriel Tait draws on theories of antiracist pedagogy, pandemic pedagogy, and racial identity development to demonstrate the benefits of campus-wide virtual conversations. Using data from two such campus conversations, “Antiracism, Intersectionality, and Empowerment” and “Racial Trauma and White Fragility,” the authors offer a series of effective strategies, lessons learned, and preliminary antiracist outcomes. They suggest that campus-wide virtual forums on antiracism assist in building the interracial, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary coalitions necessary to begin to institutionalize antiracist praxis in a predominantly white university setting.
“Preservice teachers and discursive shielding during critical conversations” by Mike Cook, James Chisholm, and Taylor Rose-Dougherty illustrates how PSTs engaged in a constellation of discourse moves—what they theorized as shielding—that disrupted PSTs’ critical engagement with sociopolitical content and perpetuated whiteness. Although not all talk was protective, some participants responded to peers’ shielding to refocus conversation on critical content. While fewer in number, these critical moments suggest hope. The authors offer implications for the field in supporting PST engagement with and facilitation of critical talk.
“Safe space vs. free speech: Unpacking a higher education curriculum controversy” by Samantha Ha DiMuzio explores how institutions of higher education have recently been embroiled in a series of controversies concerning two related, though hotly contested ideas: the creation of safe space and the preservation of free speech. The article concludes that there is an educational and democratic imperative to resist the false binary of the safe space vs. free speech controversy and instead navigate campus controversies with a democratic lens informed by equal emphasis on Gutmann’s (Citation1987) two democratic principles: nondiscrimination and non-repression.
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Schools and society take a toll on us. There is much critical work to be done. And we need each other as we do it. We hope the pieces in this issue support you as you move through the world to become differently and to be well in so doing.
[email protected]
Erin Miller
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Disclosure statement
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Reference
- Brown, A. M. (2021). Holding change: The way of emergent strategy facilitation and mediation. AK Press.
- Gutmann, A. (1987). Democratic education—With a new preface and epilogue. Princeton University Press.