by Sarah M. Fleming
In 2021, when I first wrote a post for this blog, I was reflecting upon the experience of teaching in the English Language Arts classroom one day after the January 6th Insurrection. I imagine you can clearly remember what school was like that day for you too; perhaps you were unsure how to address the context we were living through, or maybe you found your way to make space in class for thinking, reading, and writing about the circumstances. I struggled with what to do, but after consulting my trusted online communities, I found my way to a lesson that I thought would help make space for students to process their responses to the event through their literacies. I reviewed the connected standards, and then began class with a spoken word performance of the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again.” We shared space to quietly write in reflection, reviewed the norms for our classroom discourse, and engaged in a dialog about our responses to the storming of the Capitol. It was not a perfect lesson (see the blog), but it was a good start and a fair attempt at supporting students in a time of crisis.
It was a special lesson for a challenging day; it wasn’t supposed to be the norm. But here we are, four years later, and it still feels like the world is on fire.
It’s now a little over a month into the new presidential administration, a month full of days after. As I write, my social media is furiously responding to the news of the Department of Education’s creation of an online portal by which people can report teachers’ “concerning practices” as they relate to DEI. I am no longer in the high school English classroom – I now work as a teacher educator, helping to prepare pre-service candidates entering our field. But I think about what it means to teach in this new reality, how hard it is to navigate this context with our young people who are witnessing their own erasure. I realize that the lesson I described above could have gotten me flagged for supposed concerning practices (that one, among so many others I engaged in). And now, in addition to reflecting upon my own “subversive” practice, I have to imagine how to support my pre-service candidates in defining their own professional identities as critical pedagogues who will be willing to speak truth to power. How do I prepare them for this dystopian world?
The short answer is: I really don’t know, but I have hope. The more complicated one is that I have a community in which to seek the better answer – here, at EthicalELA. This space has been, and will continue to be, a port in this storm we are weathering together. So for now, let us take comfort in each other and in the words of the poets, and as Langston Hughes demands: “O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”
Dr. Sarah Fleming is an assistant professor of literacy and English Education at the State University of New York at Oswego.
Sarah, thank you for adding your voice here today. Knowing that we have friends and colleagues who continue to fight for logic and truth is a relief. Together we explore our literature, our writing, our problem solving as central tools in discerning what is real and how to navigate what has become a hostile world. Teachers are the light in this dark time where fallacies inundate every pathway to information.