TRANSFORMING SCHOOLS INTO VEHICLES FOR DECARCERATION [ON MORRIS’ SING A RHYTHM, DANCE A BLUES]
Recently, Gloria Ladson-Billings was asked whether the interpretation of her works has changed, to which she quipped: “I think that people don’t actually read the work.” In the last few years, people have interpreted culturally responsive education through mostly singular dimensions: implicit bias, diversity trainings, or recruitment and retention of staff and curriculum, all valid. Where people get lost, as Ladson-Billings states, is that there are three pillars of her praxis: student learning, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. She adds later on:
A hallmark for me of a culturally relevant teacher is someone who understands that we’re operating in a fundamentally inequitable system — they take that as a given. And that the teacher’s role is not merely to help kids fit into an unfair system, but rather to give them the skills, the knowledge and the dispositions to change the inequity. The idea is not to get more people at the top of an unfair pyramid; the idea is to say the pyramid is the wrong structure. How can we really create a circle, if you will, that includes everybody?
People need more cogent examples of this “circling up.” Insert Monique Morris. Best known for her best-selling book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, Morris takes a deeper, metaphysical dive into the work to liberate, unapologetically, Black and Brown girls in our schools in her latest book Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls. Couching the work in “blues women,” Morris provides a plethora of examples that schools can CONTINUE READING: Transforming Schools Into Vehicles for Decarceration [On Morris' Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues] | The Jose Vilson