How Can We Build Anti-Racist Communities Within our Schools?

A Mid-Year Reflection on Our Learnings from the Abolitionist Leader Fellowship

Brenda Aviles, Curriculum Specialist

Within the Abolitionist Leader Fellowship (ALF), we have a thinking protocol we utilize called “What? So What? Now What?” that helps us frame where we are, what it means, and what we are going to do next. In reflecting on our learnings mid-year, we decided this would be a perfect way to frame our discussion and our conclusions. We also hope, as it often does in our seminars, that it inspires deeper thought and greater understanding of how we can utilize what we’ve learned to improve, grow, and help others who are creating abolitionist communities in their own worlds.

What?

The National Abolitionist Leader Fellowship offers middle and high school teachers the opportunity to work alongside youth in challenging traditional classroom environments that may perpetuate systems of oppression. Through our youth-led approach, we provide our Abolitionist Leaders with the community, education, and individualized classroom support to drive systemic change. Combined, these educational opportunities are integral in supporting teachers in their effort to decolonize themselves and their classrooms. Seventeen fellows have committed to a year-long, 15 seminar learning cycle designed and delivered by both Diversity Talks adult staff and trained youth facilitators with the ultimate goal of giving them the tools to create liberated spaces in their own schools.

Our 2021–2022 fellows come from all across the country, from all walks of life, in both rural and urban systems, and with varying years of experience. They were selected from a large pool of applicants for their credentials and commitment to abolitionist practice, and they all offer diverse and unique experiences and insights to the learning community. By means of the environments they work in, only half of our fellows (53%) reported their districts having explicit diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, and those that did were not seeing these practices implemented, or supported through ongoing professional development. Only 16% reported district incentives offered for completing DEI related professional development. Almost all of them (79%) reported witnessing or experiencing instances of discrimination both with staff and students. These experiences inspired our fellows to seek out and engage in our inaugural program. So far, fellows have completed 11 seminars. Much of what we will reference in this blog will come from fellow surveys, their honest reflections, and our staff response to their needs.

Our vision for this fellowship was to do something different. When we started developing the ALF curriculum, we aspired to design thought provoking, innovative, and educator-centered seminars that challenged our fellows to deeply interrogate their practices. It was our hope they would then carry this community into their classrooms.

So What?

In developing the curriculum for the seminars, we wanted to provide fellows with the content for context. Many times this involved a reading and having both pre-work and post-work. Almost immediately, we noticed that completion of these assignments was dwindling. Once the school year was underway, with the competing priorities and long hours that many of our fellows are keeping, this work was adding another task to their already-full plate. They simply didn’t have the capacity to get it all done. Quickly we saw that we were turning into any other professional development — we couldn’t gauge whether or not the work was meaningful.

At first, in the traditional mode of thinking, we as a staff reflected on how we could hold them accountable to these deliverables and expectations. We got frustrated. We felt like we weren’t delivering ourselves on our own internal goals. But, when we reflected on the actual seminar engagement and thought on the honesty and depth of discussion, the “lightbulb moments”, and the clear takeaways, we realized how easy it can be to slip back into colonized mindsets and behaviors. Great things were happening in every seminar and we weren’t measuring our success against the right metrics. To ground us in our abolitionist values, we turned to our fellows’ survey data. What we found was that our fellows were hungry for conversation. Here are a few quotes from our fellows:

“At times I wish there was more time to get into the deeper parts of the conversation.”

“I wish there would be more time built in for relationship building within the calls, it’s hard to get to know the rest of the cohort.”

“I wish we had more time to discuss things coming up in our spaces, so I really appreciate the lounge opportunity. Thank you for doing that.”

Our fellows didn’t need to spend time reading another book — they needed to talk to each other, to problem solve in community, to connect. We began to recognize that we had to divest from the traditional ways of working in order to meet our fellows where they are. The pandemic has brought a host of challenges to our teaching community and it has exacerbated inequalities. Our fellows needed a chance to both decompress in a safe space with colleagues, and to problem-solve together around the issues they were facing. They needed us to liberate ourselves from the old modes of thinking on what professional development should be so we could better support them. They needed us to release our internal goals and set new, more nuanced ones to meet their needs.

Now What?

This was a big eureka moment for us — we were asking our leaders to innovate their thinking while not innovating our own. While we still see the value in the content we provided, we recognized that our true and immediate value add was the community we were building. In a recent feedback survey, this is what our fellows said about this:

“I love that in open spaces we get to choose what we want to discuss and focus on.”

“Connecting with like-minded people from different regions in the US. I like the activity where we can jump to different breakout rooms to engage in conversation. I like doing smaller breakout rooms. I feel like I am able to get more out of those than whole-group discussions.”

So, we decided to be nimble. We released ourselves from the expectations we had at the start of the fellowship and decided to be responsive to the needs of the people we are serving. Instead of asking our fellows to do additional work and filling our seminars with content, we instead created an intentional community that would help them tackle the work they already had as thought partners and collaborators.

This community building has not come without hard lessons learned — we have had to thoughtfully protect the space, which sometimes required difficult decisions. When we shifted our priority to maintaining and fostering a collaborative community, some participants weren’t as open to challenging their internal biases as they needed to be, and they did not prioritize doing the necessary work that would prepare them for this type of participation. When we had to make a challenging decision to exit a fellow for the greater good, other participants (particularly BIPOC leaders) felt validated and prioritized. They shared with us that these actions helped them feel their value in the space, which supported our difficult decision-making, and fostered a healthier community overall.

Conclusion

What’s resulted from this hard work is a vibrant community of abolitionist leaders who have a strong national support system to reinforce their local work. They are able to share best practices, resources, and act as a braintrust for one another, which is particularly valuable for those who feel otherwise isolated. In such a tense and difficult year, our leaders needed each other to fight through the burn-out and remind them of their ultimate mission. Since we have made this shift to more intentional collaborative work, we have noticed an increase in direct participation. They are invigorated, reinforced, and newly focused on their own practice. Many recognize that they cannot change the system until they first change themselves, and they have a community of co-conspirators that both support them and hold them accountable.

As we reflect on this “Now What”, we realized as a staff we had to practice what we preach. If we want our fellows to be abolitionists, we have to also liberate our own thinking that can sometimes get mired in the traditional approaches to professional development. This conclusion was only made possible because we constantly collect feedback data and use it to evaluate our practices. In order to be truly effective, we had to be responsive, and this was an important lesson for us as an organization. Our ultimate goal is to create a community of abolitionists empowered to make change within their communities, and we are excited to see how this national support system will create just that.