How do we see young people?

How do we see young people?

The connections I see in all three readings are that of empathy and love. Both Carla Shalaby's readings stress the importance of behavior being a community challenge, rather than an individual problem and are designed to think about spaces where youth can understand each other. The dis/ability critical race studies: theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability, I think, help to support Shalaby's focus on treating youth as whole people and challenging the cultural norms we place on them. My take away from Sean: On Being Willful (Carla Shalaby) is one I often complain about around the school day, Carla said it best when she wrote, "The school day is highly structured and intensive, leaving children little time for play...", "an increasingly sterile place, and too often a place in which children are expected to pay attention, not get attention." I have found that as adults, we often demand and expect more from youth than we do ourselves and each other while still revoking their rights as humans. We get upset with youth for asking to use the bathroom but we would never expect that request from an adult while facilitating a meeting. I greatly appreciated this parent who values her child as a human and treats him as such - I believe this is a practice everyone working with youth should understand and implement.

In A Letter to Teachers: On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom (Carla Shalaby), to "be love" is one of the most amazing things I have ever learned. I appreciated the concrete break down of the "regular way" of managing behavior and the "loving way". I was immediately intimated by the first Loving Way, "Discuss the meaning of freedom, and the rights and responsibilities of free people" but the examples and follow up questions makes me feel like its possible. The encouragement to learn along side your students rather than having to know everything puts a lot in perspective. We always talk about how education right now is still stuck in the 19th century way of factories but we don't often talk about how the school day is actually more of a simulation in 21st century prisons. Abolition has always been something that has peaked my interested but I never truly understood how it could work, people often fear what would happen to society if police suddenly disappeared. This reading gave me a different perspective, instead of thinking what would happen right now and then think to the future, Carla Shalaby does the opposite. "I often wonder if we might become unstuck by first imagining a world in which police are not necessary, in which prisons are abolished." This way of thinking reverses people's usual process and give us an a opportunity to almost focus on a utopia and what education is needed today in order to create this utopia for our future. I also believe this way of thinking can be reinforced with Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability (David Connor, Subini Ancy Annamma Beth A. Ferri). While I am not surprised by the high rates of BIPOC youth in categories of dis/abilities, I did not consider the amount of influence by educators placing these youth in these categories has. If educators were to take Shalaby's advice on teaching love and freedom, I wonder how many of these youth labeled with a dis/ability to learn would suddenly be engaging and happy students. My biggest take away over all is the social construct in which we standardize/normalize a certain way of learning or being which harms our BIPOC youth and places them in those boxes of "less than" their white counterparts. I also want to share "A Letter to Teachers: On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom" with my staff and program partners and actively implement Be Love and Learn Freedom across our STEM programs.