The Politics of Teaching: #BlackLivesMatter Edition
On a social media group for educators, a teacher asked for clarification about the legal grounds for an administrator requesting that the teacher remove #BlackLivesMatter and LGBTQ+ support posters from their room.
The responses were illuminating since they tended to drift toward larger and different concerns about ideology and of course the standard claim that teachers should “not be political.”
This was a discussion among teachers in South Carolina, where I taught public high school English throughout the 1980s and 1990s; I also attended SC public schools from 1967 until 1979.
Not to be simplistic, but my experience teaching in SC, and my subsequent two decades working with public schools and teachers, has shown that what is technically legal isn’t as important and how administration—supported by community standards—views what is “allowed” or “banned.”
Therefore, at the root of this teacher’s dilemma is the fundamental problem with the term “political” and how teaching and education are framed as “not political” (or more clearly, how teaching and education should not be “political”).
Public schools tend to reflect and perpetuate community, state, and national CONTINUE READING: The Politics of Teaching: #BlackLivesMatter Edition – radical eyes for equity