Celebrating the selfless service of our teachers
While, like many of us, I have experienced the benefits of selfless service, I have never navigated a world like the last 14 months when selfless service would be needed more than ever to advance justice. The global pandemic has highlighted the ways in which entire systems were designed to benefit some – not all. The historical roots of the oppression of Black and Brown people and those navigating poverty run deep and they can no longer be ignored. And while we have witnessed an awakening of sorts, I am reminded the awakening we experience is not immune to the desire for stasis that fuels our complacency. It is evident in conversations about “returning to normal” and ideas that vaccines and herd immunity might essentially erase these past months from our memory.
We are not acculturated to behave in ways that hold community and public good at the center. We are, instead, trained to focus on individual success and gain in the hopes of getting ahead. We are taught to believe that we all have equal access and that if we work hard enough, anything is possible. The problem with these thoughts of individualism widely practiced in the western culture is that it promotes deficit thinking. If the American Dream is really accessible to all then the inability to acquire it must be a problem of the individual – one of race, culture, origin, identity, aptitude, talent, drive, or desire. This way of thinking distracts us from seeing and changing structural and systemic barriers responsible for entire groups of students, like those that are the focus of In4All’s programs, in realizing a future of possibilities that truly is limitless.
Many are free to choose to acknowledge – or not – the social injustices Oregon students navigate. We control our news sources, our social media presence (including the people and groups that we follow and that follow us) potentially building a reality that is myopic and narrow. We socialize (well, we used to) with people who largely believe the things that we do and at the very least people who mostly agree with us. The choice to break out of the world we have constructed for ourselves is ultimately our own.
What I am realizing in this virtually connected, pandemic reality, is that teachers can no longer do this. They have a much deeper lens into the world that is their students’ and they must hold space for it. This means they have to navigate feelings about the structural barriers that impact their students’ access to an education that is equitable and honors their innate talent, ability, and history, all while nurturing to the best of their ability and capacity an environment that promotes learning and curiosity. It seems a most impossible task and one that I do not believe receives enough attention, and credit.
Our worlds are littered with memes about the value of teachers from the perspective of the family member who is now supporting their students through comprehensive distance learning. And, funny as they may be and as true as the struggle is for families with young learners at home, they do not address the inner conflict our teachers are sitting with. They enter virtual classroom after virtual classroom and have now layered on hybrid learning which often means teaching the same content multiple times to meet the needs and accessibility of multiple groups of students. Selflessly – they research and collaborate for ways to engage the student they are worried about who has not had their camera on all term.
When I reflect on ways that I have seen humanity awakened through action this past year I cannot conjure a better example than our teachers showing up for our students the way that they have. Challenged with the need to embrace new platforms and content, they still were welcoming to In4All programs and volunteers. They led with patience for the technology challenges, which were plenty, while holding a smile and a new creative warm up for students as they entered their virtual classrooms. While teachers will always be a critical stakeholder in the In4All community – as a team we coined this the year of the teacher for their selfless service that has elicited courage in our volunteers to show up in their virtual classrooms and for the strength they have demonstrated in what has been an impossible time for their students and for them.
Strength and courage are the first steps we must take to access the reward that is the humanity in one’s heart. When that is awakened, we begin to question the individualistic ideals that keep us marching toward the American Dream at the expense of the public good. We see our neighbor’s success as our success and we realize that the responsibility for dismantling the structural barriers that our students navigate belongs to all of us and that we all benefit when they have been removed. To our teachers we offer our deepest gratitude for taking these first steps. For modeling an awakening that I hope encourages us all to look deeply inward so that we can identify and act on the steps we must also take to advance justice for our students. We see you.