ATN's Teaching To Thrive - Podcast Review Ep. 2

I posted a vlog two days ago of me driving through Hocking Hills in Ohio in which I mentioned I was listening to the Abolitionist Teaching Network - Teaching to Thrive podcast. If you haven’t watched it already, you can watch it here. I talked briefly about my thoughts on this podcast but here is my official podcast review for episode 2 of their podcast, “Building Trust With Students Online”. You can listen to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or on their website by clicking here.

This time is very interesting to be a teacher or involved in the public education system. Teachers are burdened with navigating this new space of online instruction and tasked with building community while having difficult conversations with their students. The question in this podcast that embodies this issue is “How are you going to build joy and rigor with your students this year in this virtual space?” Especially with Black, Brown and Indigenous students who already are coming into the education system with distrust. Below are the time stamps in this podcast that I found important to highlight and expand on.

9:40 - “Critical love is the level of commitment to caring for the community in which we work.” *From the Radical Literacy Development Model that is theorized by Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz*

I loved this quote from this section because they are asking critical questions of building community. This is such a difficult task even for in-class learning. The issue that I see a lot of people struggling with is a result of coming into an educational space with the idea that students have to rise up to the level of community engagement that we deem sufficient. However we need to be meeting our students where they are emotionally, mentally and physically. Our students are aware of current events and are impacted in different ways, so how can we redefine our definition of community engagement to fit the community that we are actually in? How can we actively care for ourselves, our friends and family in the community in this difficult space of online learning?

11:30 - “I had kids who didn’t want to leave and I had kids who were emailing me at 7 o’clock in the morning ready to get on with the day and that’s what you want.”

She mentions that at the beginning of the pandemic her goal of learning switched to making fun and engaging performance based activities for her students. This is the goal of education to spark joy and creativity. This virtual community space is possible by interacting with students on a human to human level. We are going through a pandemic and huge social unrest that affects the students and families we are interacting with. As well this is very difficult for teachers themselves to try and mold current events into instruction while being honest and open with students. It’s possible to build that sense of community and hit all the learning targets, but we have to reimagine what our approach looks like. This is extremely important moving forward and especially when we come out of this pandemic era, we aren’t going to be able to go back to having in class instruction the same way as we did prior to this moment. People adapt and change to fit the emotional needs of the students first, are going to be the teachers that are our example moving forward. What is working and what isn’t? How can you change your perspective to fit the needs of your students?

14:05 - “Students were able to really learn a lot about the experiences that they were going to need to have to go into these places and these spaces. They were able to use the skills we had used over the course of the school year to apply to making sure their presentations were strong. Technology was involved, parents were present and kids learned something. They had an experience that was a journey in education.”

In this clip, they talk about a project done with the 4th grade students that has real life implications for the future that is based in the present moment. The goal of this assignment was to give a talk of their dream job by researching and interacting with professionals in the field they are interested in. This has actual real life purpose AND they were able to hit the standards while students actually had fun doing their projects. Project-based learning is critical when we think about teaching in general but especially during this period of online learning. This idea about education being a journey is really important to highlight as this is absolutely true. We have to provide our students with the skills that they will need throughout their lives, this is the whole point of education. We have to meet our students where they are and help them along on their journey to success and we have to not stop them from being their creative, intelligent selves. What experiences are you providing students to help them grow into themselves and towards the future? Are you including critical learning in your virtual classroom space?

Building positive relationships in these spaces isn’t possible without the inclusion of parents as well. This is more important than ever as we are in this virtual space because for a lot of students, the communication from their teacher first goes to their parents. It is important when we talk about building relationships with the parents of the kids in our classrooms that we are making sure to have positive interactions on day one. This allows for the relationship to begin with a strong foundation. I cannot stress enough how important this is.

Building trust is the first step to community building in any space, not just in education. I will continue to talk about different ways in which we can build positive community spaces in future posts and videos.

Stay tuned for more!!