How Do We Keep Our Roots Alive?

Who is your crew?

In the following IGNITE talk, How do we Keep our Roots Alive? Quinn Ranahan shares her story as a teacher in East Oakland and her radical engagement with systems thinking. By looking closely at the systems that impact school closures and other inequities, she asks,

“How can we challenge the system? Which system will you disrupt?”

Quinn also points to the essential power of relationships that are made along the way. It is our teacher friends who are holding similar intentional questions around equity, teacher agency and systems change that will keep us tethered to our values and guide us back toward joy when we need it most.

How do we Keep our roots alive?

Having a crew that supports you along the way is at the core of the Agency by Design Fellowship. This is especially true when faced with the turbulence of school closures, budget cuts, and a pandemic that shifts everything we love to a distance. In her IGNITE video segment, Quinn shares the story of her previous school, Roots International, and introduces us to her crew that was broken apart by school closure. The Agency by Design Oakland fellowship offered an opportunity to find new co-conspirators. In the photo below Quinn’s fellowship crew enjoyed moments reflecting and laughing in their last breakout room. Top left to right: Chantel Parnell, Quinn Ranahan. Bottom left to right: Sydney Dexter, Bianca Shiu.

Find your crew. Do it Together.

Now Seeking Teams for the 2020 - 2022 Agency by Design Oakland Teacher Fellowship Program. Learn more here or register to join a Zoom information session July 30 @3pm. Submissions due August 15, 2020.

More Ignite talks:

2017 - Keenan Scott, Making Computer Science Relevant in the Hood

2018 - Cicely A. Day. Creativity and Discovery of Self

2019 - Fatimah Salahuddin. Letting go of Power: Who is the Teacher?

REcommended reading and viewing

Abolitionist Teaching and The Future of Our Schools. A conversation hosted by Haymarket Books with Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, Dena Simmons and Brian Jones about abolitionist teaching and antiracist education.

Not Your Average Maker Kit

Now more than ever, it’s critical that kids have hands-on learning materials at home!

This unique moment invites students to become independent learners, and high-quality books and materials have a role to play in empowering kids to develop curiosity and critical thinking. When shelter-in-place started in mid-March, we set out to distribute 1,000 SPARK! Maker Literacy Kits for Oakland youth, ages K-5. We blew past our goal and we are now planning for distance learning in August. Our new goal is 1,000  additional kits delivered to students for Back to School, and we are producing and distributing kits as funding arrives. Please support us today! 

MORE ABOUT THIS PROJECT

We were originally inspired back in 2016 by Nora Peters at the Millvale Community Library near Pittsburgh, PA, who designed maker stickers attaching to the inside of book covers, with prompts inviting young readers to make based on themes from the book. Paula Mitchell, our Fellowship Director, used that inspiration to create take-home Maker Book Bags, which students could check out from her school’s library, at Grass Valley Elementary School here in Oakland. 

When distance learning started and the technology gap was stark, we immediately considered how to expand this idea for a wider audience. We knew that if kids had high-quality books and materials they could learn through reading, tinkering, and figuring out for themselves. We were also inspired by Zaretta Hammond’s Moving Beyond the Packet webinar, in which she talks about a “Skinny Set of Culturally Responsive Instructional Design Principles.” We coupled this with our own pedagogical approach to create the following general criteria during the design process. 

• Juicy Inquiry through Essential Questions: Every prompt has at least one student-friendly question, but most of our prompts have many. We believe and know that inquiry questions are the basis of good thinking. As Ada says in Ada Twist Scientist, “Start with one question, then ask two more.” 

• Builds Background Knowledge: We chose to weave opportunities into the prompts to build background knowledge, like how to mail a letter in the Yasmin the Writer prompt or what kind of birds live in the East Bay in the prompt for Bird Builds a Nest. 

• Hands-on: We believe that creation is a way to reflect, process, and communicate all at the same time. We also see making as a form of assessment. Hammond describes this as “chewing" on the content.

• Routines - Hammond talks about the importance of routines, which we believe in wholeheartedly. We *love* thinking routines, so we sprinkled a few throughout, from See, Think, Wonder in the Drawn Together prompt, to Imagine If… in The Wild Robot. These prompts can be used as a part of an engaging learning sequence in any context, so we help their inclusion here is just a jumping off point. Check out some of our favorite thinking routines here.

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This project is a collaboration with the Oakland Literacy Coalition. It was initially made possible with COVID-19 Rapid Response funding from the Rogers Family Foundation, the Abundance Foundation, and with support from Oakland International High School.  

Prompts were designed by a number of experienced educators and artists. They include Paula Mitchell, Susan Wolf, Miko Lee, Ascha Drake, Brooke Toczylowski, Peter Limata, Sydney Dexter, Angi Chau, and Susie Wise. Interpretation by Aracely Sifuentes-Ordaz, Oakland Educator & Artist. Graphic Design by Juliet Buck.

What counts as a meaningful lesson in the time of coronavirus?

by Bianca Shiu, 2019-2020 Agency by Design Oakland Teaching Fellow

I find myself running through the five cycles of grief on anywhere from an hourly to a weekly basis.

First, there's denial: "Everything is fine! Even though 25% of my students don't have access to the internet, 50% don't have access to a device, and we can't even get in touch with 12% of them, everything is going to be okay in the end!"

Then, there's anger: "So basically, if you're rich you get to learn, and if you're poor, you're getting screwed over for the gazillionth time in every possible way for the foreseeable future."

Next, bargaining: "I'll do anything for us to be back in school in the fall. Anything!"

Depression: "Trying to teach right now is stupid. Everything I assign in Google Classroom is meaningless because only 23 kids out of 115 are doing the work anyway."

And finally, acceptance: "I have to be okay with what's in my control and just try my best, day by day."

This is a story about one of these cycles.

One thing I was in denial about was how Asians are facing more harassment due to the coronavirus. I knew that it was immediately relevant to me as a second-generation Chinese American, but I didn't allow myself to dwell on it. It was terrible, and there were just too many other terrible things going on. Thinking about it was too much.

Unfortunately, my not wanting to think about it had no influence on racism. One Friday morning, I was walking to Walgreens. As I passed the high rises in downtown Oakland and noticed the sunlight reflecting off their windows, I felt like I was rounding a corner in our new reality. It was four weeks into shelter-in-place, and I was finally ready to learn. I was listening to a podcast episode from The New York Times called "I Became a Person of Suspicion." In this episode, a Chinese American writer shares her story of being verbally harassed by a white man who blames her for the pandemic. The next thing I knew, I was the one being yelled at.

"Why are you wearing a mask? Who do you think you are? Why don't you go back to China?"

My own set of questions raced through my mind. What should I do? Should I call him out? What will he do if I say something? Am I safe?

In the end, I chose to keep walking. I kept my eyes straight ahead. I pretended that I couldn't hear him, even though I clearly could, because he was yelling at the top of his lungs, and we were the only two people on the street.

By the time I got back home, I was kicking myself. Why didn't I tell him off? Why was I such a coward? I should have said something. I let his words hit me and, in the moment, I acted like they slid right off, but they didn't. They stayed. I couldn't focus. I was trying to plan Monday's lesson, but I just kept hearing that man's voice in my head and feeling a pit in my stomach. For hours, I felt useless.

Finally, I clicked on the camera button on my phone and started recording.

I told my students this wouldn't be a normal science lesson, and I recounted the story from beginning to end. I looked up a few relevant podcast episodes for kids to choose from and wrote three reflection questions:

1. The anxiety and fear people feel in times of crisis can lead them to focus on an "us" versus "them" mentality. They try to find someone to blame. How has this been happening with the coronavirus? How have people of Chinese and Asian heritage been targeted since the outbreak of coronavirus?

2. Why do you think some people blame and lash out at Asian Americans? What forces or examples from history shape and lead up to these kinds of incidents?

3. Imagine that it's the fall, and you're at your new high school. An Asian American student coughs, and somebody (who is not friends with that student) yells out, "coronavirus!" and starts to laugh like he just told the funniest joke ever. What would you do?

That whole weekend, I wondered whether I should post the lesson. Only 1% of the students at my school are Asian. The two biggest ethnic groups are Latinx (66%) and black (28%). Was I just dragging my own feelings into my virtual science classroom? Would this be relevant to anyone? Was it the right thing to be teaching?

Then I thought about my own experiences as an Asian American student in the Texas public school system. I remembered being the only one in my class in elementary school and feeling alternately invisible and stereotyped. I remembered being one of a handful in middle and high school and feeling interchangeable. I never felt seen for who I really was, and I never felt like anything I learned addressed my experiences.

I posted the assignment on Monday morning and avoided looking at my students' responses until late Tuesday afternoon. When I got to one of my student's responses - my one Vietnamese student, though she's much more than her ethnicity - I cried. I knew I had done something I could be proud of. She wrote,

Asians have been targeted because in the past many people will use race as an excuse to blame people for things that are uncontrollable. Yes, it may have started in Asia, but that does not give people the right to lash out at asian people. Not every single Asian has the coronavirus. Many Asians are yelled at, people make jokes about eating bats. Like what?? People see one thing about it on the internet and it just sticks with them. People can be so cruel, this example of racism is not talked about enough. People need to see that cases of corona is almost everywhere. Asians need to stop being blamed for things they can not control. This is so unfair, not many people talk about racism towards Asians. My whole life I've experienced racism, it's never addressed, and because it was never addressed, people think it's okay to blame the coronavirus on Asian people.

Like I said before, racism towards Asians was never talked about enough. People always assume it's just okay. Racism has always been a big thing in history, and because there aren't big events in history where Asians are being targeted, many people don't learn about it. In school, I've never really learned about racism towards Asians. And I think that's why people think its okay. When people are racists towards other races, it gets more attention. It's talked about, everyone says it's not okay. Now that many Asians are experiencing this, you don't see others sticking up and saying it's not okay.

I saw my middle school self in her response, and I remembered why I got into teaching - to be the teacher that I wished I had. For weeks, I had been focused on one metric: the number of students accessing my work. But that day, I didn't care that only 20% of my kids had done the lesson. Just the one was enough.

---

Bianca Shiu

Science Teacher, Elmhurst United Middle School, Oakland Unified School District

Bianca began working in Bay Area public schools in 2014 and is currently teaching science and computer science at Elmhurst United Middle School. She cares deeply about educational equity, and her teaching practice is guided by restorative justice, culturally responsive practices, and inquiry-based learning. She loves to annoy her students by telling them that she will reveal who her favorite student is, and then says, “I am my own favorite student - because I never stop learning!” Her latest learning adventure was kneading bread by hand.

Elmhurst United, where Bianca works, serves many families that need support during this time. Please consider donating here.

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