What draws you and keeps you in the classroom? Many days teachers ask themselves this exact question. Dr. Becky Thompson’s vision for teaching is clear: she’s in the classroom to experience those moments of “amazing intellectual work that also [have] some heart in it.” It keeps her coming back, year after year.

Join scholar, poet, and activist Becky Thompson and I as we discuss teaching and learning broadly and the role of contemplative practice as a means of fostering deep connections between teachers and students within the classroom. Important to this conversation is the consideration that not all classrooms are within the four walls of the institution. Dr. Thompson shares her experiences she’s had within a refugee center in Greece, witnessing the resilience and fortitude of people fleeing everything they knew in order to start a new life in a foreign land.

This is a truly special conversation about the important role that teaching can play to open conversations, shape our humanity, and ultimately change our own lives and the lives of those we are fortunate to encounter. In a time when students are increasingly reliant upon artificial intelligence as a source of “safe” supportive information, we need to consider how we change our interactions in the classroom to foster increased sense of safety and belonging? In what ways can we allow students to express their tension and frustrations, leaving them freer to be who they are? What is intellectual work without full expression with access and opportunity to explore, wonder, and be?

Becky’s work that you may consider:

Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice by Becky Thompson

Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi

Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by Refugees by Becky Thompson and Jahen Bseiso

To Speak in Salt by Becky Thompson

Other Texts:

Dignity-Affirming Education: Cultivating The Somebodiness of Students and Educators

Justice Seekers: Pursuing Equity in the Details of Teaching & Learning by Lacey Robinson

This fall I had the opportunity to sit down with John Pellman, Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Capital College and Career Academy (CCCA), a new charter school that opened in August 2023 in North Sacramento.  CCCA’s mission is to ensure that all students graduate having experience taking both dual enrollment courses and internships so they have a clear understanding of their college and career options in order to make more informed choices.  Within that, John teaches a class called Innovation, Design, and Implementation, which uses Makers Education as a means to center student agency to help them take an idea and bring it to fruition.  In doing so, students practice socio-emotional skills such as wellbeing, mindfulness, as well as critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and grit while working with a partner, researching, and putting their project together.  Rather than rely on standardized tests, in John’s class, students complete self-assessments on these various skills and participate in design challenges where they operate in real world situations.  Drawing upon a diverse student population, located in a historically disenfranchised area of Sacramento, CCCA’s goal is to help nudge education in the direction toward helping students access opportunities and situations that help them realize their potential, one student at a time.  Join our conversation as we talk about CCCA, education as a business, and Makers Education specifically in this episode of Uncommon Voices, Uncommon Visions.

John, working in partnership with the Sacramento County Office of Education is offering three more classes for local educators on using Maker Education in the classroom: February 20, March 19 and April 16, 2024.

Suggested Materials:

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnick

Stuck in the Shallow End by Jane Margolis

How does Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. impact your leadership?  How can businesses, schools, and individuals seek to embody his dream today? 

These were two questions asked during a fireside chat at a breakfast I attended this morning.  Two local African American leaders/business owners were asked to respond.  From their responses, I don't believe that either of them were raised in Sacramento.  Interestingly, I found my own experiences fell between theirs.  As a person who came from a poor single-parent household, yet, who did have the privilege of having a mother who'd grown up in the north (Detroit, Michigan) attending all White schools and was the great-granddaughter of an educator, I had the advantage of knowing how to navigate predominately white environments and feel at home in them.  

 As we consider The Dream and how we are still working to achieve it in all aspects of our society, we need to consider a variety of voices and experiences of people to answer these questions because as the new movie American Fiction demonstrates, the Black experience, like any other human experience, is multifaceted.  When we can begin to wrestle with and be okay with the complexity of this fact, we can begin to build the kind of lasting coalitions that can create the reality that so many of us desperately desire.