Stances
I played basketball and soccer as a child. In both sports, I spent countless hours practicing the right to be ready for the ball. My coaches trained me to lean in, keep my peripheral vision on both the ball and my teammates, and maintain near-constant motion. In sports, coaching about physical stance is a part of nurturing skilled athletes.
Just as my coaches showed me how to alter my center of gravity to help me become a more nimble athlete, the educators I spoke with saw the usefulness of seemingly subtle shifts in how they approached thinking, understanding, and teaching about identity. In adjusting their stances toward the work of getting to know themselves and their students, they were able to build stronger relationships. They described greater confidence in their ability to build supportive communities within their classrooms. Just as learning to correct my defensive stance and be a stronger ballplayer, educators can practice particular stances to become more effective educators.
This book introduces several stances for educators to practice on their own and with their colleagues, students, and members of the wider community. When we tend to our stances, we focus in on our unique position in the world—whether that’s our physical stance in a soccer game or our emotional stance within a debate. Finally, I look to stances as a reminder of the need to practice and reflect on how we interact with each other. I think of being poised for action—ready to engage with the world.
Noticing Stance
It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you. —Barack Obama President Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson, “President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation—II,” New York Book Review, November 19, 2015, http://www.nybooks.com/…
To be visible, to see and be seen, is often a metaphor for being understood and acknowledged as a person with humanity. But what does it mean to notice something? Are we not seeing and hearing people all day? What then does it mean to look closely and really see the thing, the artwork, the neighborhood, the person in front of you? And how does that close looking and listening, this noticing of details and nuance, help us understand ourselves and those around us? In a world increasingly segregated by race, class, religion, political perspectives, and many other ways in which our identities can be sliced and separated, we must train ourselves to see and hear the experiences of people who are somehow different from us. Truly noticing each other expands our understandings of our relationships with each other and our awareness of ourselves. Once we start to see the people around us, we cannot ignore them. In acknowledging each other’s presence, we honor each other’s existence.
Activity: Looking at Art
Activity: Community maps
Wondering Stance
I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions. —Lucile Clifton Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2004), 194.
Good questions encourage us to wonder—to reflect on what we know and what might be. In thinking about identity, a caring question can be just what we need to force us out of our comfort zones to consider who we are in relation to each other. Such wondering is thus a call to participate in the pursuit of knowledge—a way of instigating learning. When educators exercise their capacity to wonder with students, they help learners build analytic lenses through which they can view the world. As we talk about the shifting, contextual, and layered nature of who we are, this ability to wonder about nuance, ambiguity, and multiplicity is incredibly important.
Activity: Scenario Comics
Activity: Conversation Portraits
Researching Stance
Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. —bell hooks bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003), 197.
Through research, we identify patterns, points of convergence and divergence, and connections. More so than simply gathering information about a topic, research requires us to hold what we learn up to the light, to look at it with squinting eyes to see what else we can learn from what we have found. Research is about mapping the context of an idea or topic, of seeing the web of factors and relationships that link together. As we research and contextualize, our awareness of the complexity and nuance of an idea deepens. For educators, our capacity to bring a critical curiosity to how we think about our identity and the identities of those around us can make the difference between perpetuating dangerous stereotypes and promoting a multifaceted understanding of who we are in relation to each other.
Activity: Visual Histories
Activity: Altered Books
Connecting Stance
To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to other. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded. —Gloria Andalzúa Gloria E. Anzaldúa, preface to This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.
In education, we expect educators to nurture relationships with students, colleagues, families, and local organizations, often in an effort to foster a feeling of connection. Unfortunately, as is often the case with buzzwords, the specific characteristics of what collaboration and community really look like, let alone how to cultivate them, are rarely discussed. The few times we discuss community building, we often do so without acknowledging the ways in which socially constructed barriers keep people from connecting with each other across differences. Yet, without an ability to connect with people who are different from us, we cannot possibly try to establish caring and reciprocal relationships. These relationships are the bedrock of community; through our connections with people, we can build a deeper understanding of ourselves and the collective work of learning and teaching.