Class community norms (co-generated and revised as necessary)

These agreements became important guidelines for working through some difficult moments when we had to negotiate different uses and interpretations of language and terms.

1. Remind ourselves of the community norms regularly 

2. When there’s a difficult conversation -- there might be differences in opinions -- how to say I respectfully disagree--say “ouch” as a way to indicate disagreement, take a pause to check in, we can come back to something as well

3. Create a space where people feel heard and we can challenge people 

4. If you don’t understand something, ask “can you elaborate, provide more clarification?”

5. Meet people where they are, acknowledge that we all come from different backgrounds, we’re all learning together

   1. Don’t freeze others or yourself in time 

6. Put personal experiences within broader group level patterns and context 

   1. We might need to differentiate on an ongoing basis what is a personal/individual narrative and what are broader patterns

7. Keep personal stories confidential and share lessons 

8. Paying attention to sharing space 

9. Accountability is key but we want to keep thinking about how to do it 

   1. What are our collective expectations about how we want to hold each other accountable and who will hold each other accountable? 

   2. What are we holding ourselves accountable to?

      1. Community norms

      2. Listening to understand, not to respond

Field Trip!

We went to visit a high school in Minneapolis--one of the teachers is a fellow organizer of EdLibMN--and she arranged for her students to take our students on a tour of their school. This happened during the week when we were focusing on carcerality and the built environment. Students reflected on their visit connecting the visit to their own schooling experiences and course readings and themes (posts are lightly edited for clarity):

“I really appreciated visiting [XX] High School, and I found a lot of similarities between it and my old high school. As someone who also went to a school designed by a prison architect, I was comfortable in this building, and I related to the gripes that students had about their school building (no windows!!!). Although I felt like it was normal, I had to step back and remember that this architecture is not natural; it reeks of carceral logic. When the students took us on tours, they needed a signed hall pass to explain their presence in the halls, and the only entrance was heavily surveilled. The building was technically open, but there were a lot of restrictions on who could leave, thereby restricting the freedom of younger students and of students with GPAs under 2.0. It seemed like accessing the liberty that they ostensibly had was often difficult. Also, I may be drawing too much meaning out of this, but the students who were giving me a tour never took me to the third floor. We stayed in the parts of the building where they were more familiar, which was the area with more restrictions. In this space for predominantly BIPOC youth, I saw the school-to-prison nexus at play in many of the ways that Bettina Love and Damien Sojoyner outline.”

“I think that as the instructors, y'all chose for us to see this school because of the assumptions that are made about the school both by ourselves prior to visiting the school or by the larger community about the culture and students within the school. From the outside looking in, it could've been very easy to write the school off and make assumptions about the nature of the school and the students who are within the school without ever having stepped foot into the school. As someone who comes from a community and neighborhood very similar to the one that was surrounding [XX] High School, I knew that the school wouldn't be anything like the negative reports or connotations that are out there about the school. However, because of my identity and background, I am also very aware that because of the demographics of the community, the location of the school, as well as the build of the school, it is very easy to make assumptions about how the school might be without ever going in. A prime example was when we were talking to the students, and they began talking about the news reports that were recently coming out about their school. That the students do drugs there, they were criminals (steal cars and other criminal reports), that they aren't intelligent and so forth. When that wasn't the case at all.”

Zine page

In one of the classes, we all read this zine about the school to prison pipeline by Rachel Marie-Crane Willams. In class, we asked the students to add a page to the zine about their understanding of the school to prison nexus.