Book Tour Event # 3
7-24-20: Educational Leadership and Inspiring Agency in Disruptive Times with Lisette Nieves, Scott MacLeod, and Maurice Swinney.
Scott McLeod:
Okay, time to start. Awesome. So welcome everybody. My name is Scott McCloud. I’m an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Colorado. Denver not Boulder. We are not the buffaloes. We’re in downtown Denver, because that’s where the leadership program is. All those policy folks are from Boulder. I’m absolutely delighted to get the opportunity to play host and moderator today for this wonderful conversation. We have some phenomenal experts who are going to introduce themselves, real quickly here and then we’ll just kind of launch right into our discussion. So welcome to inspiring agency in disruptive times. So Anindya, why don’t you start?
Anindya Kundu:
Sure. My name is Anindya Kundu. I’m a sociologist of education. I’m currently a fellow of research at the City University of New York at LMIS where we assist mission-based organizations who work in the workforce or higher education environment to help vulnerable and underserved populations strive for social mobility. My own research is around the context for student achievement, social and cultural supports that help underserved students from disadvantaged backgrounds thrive. And so that’s kind of what this whole book is about is to think about how the agency of students who come from challenging backgrounds can be fostered in educational environments and the collective role we can all play in helping that happen. So I’m really excited to talk to this amazing panel of experts around it who I believe have read the book and are happy with it so far. So that just means a lot to me so. So thank you all for joining me today.
Scott McLeod:
Maurice, you’re up.
Maurice Swinney:
Hi everyone. Maurice Sweeney: chief equity officer for Chicago Public Schools. Former high school principal, assistant principal, instructional coach, and teacher. I’m entering my 20th year in education. It’s all about equity for me, in particular, racial equity. How do we ensure that those who are least served, or underserved are getting the right access to resources and opportunities? I’m definitely glad to share space with these great people.
Scott McLeod:
Awesome, thank you so much. Lisette?
Lisette Nieves:
Hi, how are you? First, my name is Lisette Nieves. I’m the director of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at NYU and recently published a book on workforce and looking at college and career pathways and disrupting the kinds of divides that we often think about so agency is essential to that as well. Another thing is that my passion and interest is really looking at equity but making sure that we really include a strong class lens around that as well as an intersectional level of class with that. So I’m excited to be here, Anindya.
Anindya Kundu:
Thanks, Lisette. Go NYU!
Scott McLeod:
I’m know we mentioned a couple books here, we should probably mention that our discussion today is centered on Anindya’s new book: The Power of Student Agency and somebody at some point will throw a link in the chat space for that. And if you can get Lisa’s book in there too that would be awesome so that you all can track those down and investigate further. That would be great. I’m gonna guess I didn’t mention sort of my own intersection with this concept of agency.
Although I’m a professor of school leadership, I spent an awful lot of time with instructional coaches and classroom teachers and principals and anybody else who wants to be an instructional leader thinking a lot about learner agency within systems and how do we hand over teacher directed and system directed classrooms and give kids the opportunity to really self-direct and control and own their own learning pathways in ways that allow them to, you know, thrive? So that’s kind of where my piece of all this is so, uh, since I get to lead us off, Anindya, I’m gonna twist our first question a little bit. So on page 64 of your book, you have this wonderful quote from Tyreek I think his name is right? And he says that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. What’s scarier is when you lead a horse to water, and they say what water? I was the horse who didn’t see the ocean in front of me. Not a conscious decision, I was ignorant to the fact that what is in front of me was water. I used to be a middle school teacher in a high poverty Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte had this wonderful program in the city where they would bus kids from subsidized housing neighborhoods to the ocean. A few hours away and even though it was just a few hours away most of the kids that never left the city and I always marveled how excited my kids were to come back and talk to me about what the ocean was really like because they had read about the ocean, they’ve seen pictures of the ocean. They had maybe even heard and seen videos or movies of the ocean, but they hadn’t experienced the ocean. So that quote really resonated with me quite a bit. And I wonder if we can attach that quote to your concepts of student agency? When you talk about agency and you think about this cool entire week, how did those come together?
Anindya Kundu:
Awesome. Thank you, Scott. I knew I picked an amazing moderator making me think on my feet here and you also found one of my favorite quotes from the book that I think really highlights that we want education to be a personalized learning experience for all of our students for them to be able to demonstrate their agency and that implies really understanding who they are as a person. It implies respect for their humanity, but most importantly in this context where educational disparities are so polarized, that implies acknowledging their background.
To be able to think about how to scaffold opportunities for them to then notice that this is water. This is an ocean and that ocean is also equally belonging to me to drink at. And so, you know, I’ll try to build on that by saying my basic premise definition of agency is that it’s a person’s capacity to leverage resources, mentorship or tap into a network. Those kinds of resources to navigate obstacles and create positive change in their lives. For our students, I think this is important because it implies, there’s this social element to success that there’s structural and systematic obstacles that can sometimes be in the way of students’ abilities to thrive in academic settings that it’s not just about individual effort or talent. And thinking about, you know, thinking that education is where the best and the brightest succeed, sometimes those kinds of thoughts, put the onus of success on the individual. That’s kind of the trap that concepts like grit and resilience often fall into is that they take the social context out of the formula for education and what, as a sociologist, I know is fundamental to what it takes to succeed is implying that the environment is just as important as nature. And so related educational leadership or educational justice topics that are dear to all of us, the belief that all students are deserving of a quality education and then working to create the systems and cultures that can allow for that. I think those ideas benefit from a more holistic view of success in order to foster equity and so agency implicitly acknowledges the opportunity gap, it almost encourages us to not use the achievement gap. Something that we’ve all been culturally conditioned to use but the achievement gap kind of furthers our own thinking that the onus of success falls on the individual. Thinking about an opportunity gap makes us realize that things like a student’s birth zip code or their parents’ level of education are incredibly important, if not more important than the school student even attends. During covid-19 we see this because we know that not all students have access to internet and internet access which is keeping them from doing vibrant distance learning that more privileged young people are able to partake in. And so thinking about the opportunity gap, I think, is crucial and helping us realize that there are limits to education, but that there are also possibilities. And so agency is thinking about the potential that students have to succeed. It forces us to think away from implicit deficit perspectives of, you know, “not those kids” mentalities of education are, you know, a product of a school or teachers being strapped for resources. And those ideas can sometimes be normalized, so to flip that, to kind of help uncover that all students are brilliant like Tyreek. Tyreek is the quote you read; he was a student who was incarcerated. And it wasn’t until his prison experience that he tapped into education because someone took him under his wing and was like, listen, you’d be a great mentor for these younger prison detainees who are coming in because they look up to you. So you should be a mentor and in mentoring them, I realized, you know what I should also take more classes. I should take these college level classes. And that’s how he started to see the water and it really came from this cultural competency of that mentor noticing a hidden form of giftedness in him and encouraging him. And so those are the kinds of participants that I profile on my book, The Power of Student Agency. 50 people who have come from extremely difficult, challenging backgrounds, but become professionally and academically successful to make the case that success is possible and we should all believe in the success of all students, but that there is a collective role that we all can play in helping to create the systems to allow that to happen.
Scott McLeod:
Cool. Lisette, Maurice thoughts, comments, reaction at this stage? What’s in your head?
Lisette Nieves:
Go for it Maurice, I’ll go right after.
Maurice Swinney:
I immediately thought, you know, I’m only about a year and a half, almost two years out of the principalship and what was coming up for me just now was there are so many things that young people have to do. Somewhere in the book, you talk about happiness as being dynamic and how young people will wrestle with like, “what does that mean and what is that” and all that, to think about what has happened to our young people that those sort of natural human elements of who we are, are so hidden and space has to be created for young people to see.
Actually the mentorship quality or the leadership quality, that Tyreek had was already in him. And that there were people to support what that evolution is and was. And so now he gets to start to thrive and then he finds happiness and joy in that and it creates, I’m glad you pointed out, like the sort of shift from grit to, you know, really agency. Recognizing that sometimes good can be associated with assimilating into a particular culture like how do I continue to just do well in this structure and not recognize that racism, racial discrimination, sexism, xenophobia, all of those things can be contributing to what’s causing young people not to thrive.
Lisette Nieves:
Hi. I think what excited me about the book and some of it was a bit nuanced was this idea of agency being something that for me, includes the definition of dignity. And the definition of what someone is bringing to the table. So often in adult learning concepts we understand and accept this level of identity and what they bring to the table. It’s a dual learning. We really do that with high school, junior high school, early and so agency to me implies this kind of visibility of dignity and implies this kind of asset piece. And so I appreciate that. I love your definition, what I would say is so important is that we also use an equity lens and deconstructing how we talk about resources. So often and you bring this out, with Tyreek and with others. When we think about resources they have to be seen as assets in our young people. That includes if they work outside of school, that’s an asset, right. That includes if they have responsibilities with their families. That’s an asset and so often through these other lenses that’s where our young people become invisible and feel like they can’t exhibit their agency. So that’s why I wanted to bring those forth because that’s a greater expansion in a way. But what inspires me about the work you’re doing too.
Scott McLeod:
So Maurice and Lisette we’re going to get to some of our primary questions for you that we have on our show notes. But I want to circle back around to this idea of opportunity gaps and systems. You know, I’m also a systems guy. And so you know it’s one thing to think about this idea of student agency and opportunity gaps within the context of, you know, a soulless, heartless, faceless society right? And we throw you out into the world and you have to navigate your way. That’s a whole other thing to think about that, but then the context of schools and universities which you know, get offended if we said that you know they’re not all about student agency and empowering kids. We have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of k-12 educators and university educators like what are you talking about, of course, what about student agency, of course, what about student empowerment? Our whole function of our university system or our school district or school is about giving kids agency and empowering them to be successful in life. And yet, it doesn’t feel like it’s quite happening. So what’s going on there?
Lisette Nieves:
I’m going to jump in on that one. What’s happening there is that it’s still done within an institutional paradigm where one is seen as the expert and the person who is distributing the power of intellect and knowledge to one who’s the recipient. And so when I use the term “dignity” and what I love about Anindya’s work is there’s this implicit kind of true power sharing that happens in order to see the young person for who they are and what they bring to the table. And I think this even happens not even consciously with a lot of teachers. I think the other piece is, I will say this, when you are a new teacher so many are obsessed with and I’m dying to hear from Maurice on this too: classroom management. The idea of control, the idea of having people in their place. Tons is spent on that. And so it’s hard to have a paradigm of that, have a frame of that, while having policing in schools. I’m just saying these are things that send multiple mixed messages and what I do love about young people is they do know how to navigate multiple contexts as we see it in Anindya’s book. And when they navigate them, they know which context and how they have to show up in and they show up in as the passive recipient and context where they know they cannot be truly seen for who they are.
Maurice Swinney:
Yeah. Um, yes to all of that one. What’s coming up for me too is first of all if all of that were true around believing that we do these things in schools, we would have better outcomes. So that’s a lie to us in the CPS equity framework we call out laboratory thinking as a way to disrupt our own consciousness about what we believe about other people. What we believe about ourselves because we always like to believe that we’re the nice, good, superhero doing this work when, at times, you know, we can actually be causing harm. And I think that we have to continually disrupt that. What’s coming up for me, I think, is that there has to be some interrogation of what we think we’re doing for young people and really to take a pause and do what I see happening in Anindya’s book is that there’s a collaboration. Like Lisette said, talked about the power sharing like you have to do that in order to actually serve people better. When we go to restaurants, they’re like, what are your food allergies? Um, you know, what do you like to drink? What do you like to eat? When we go to the doctor, they’re like, what are the pains? So there is this cooperation happening between people. And then we get to talk about what are some potential solutions? And I think we have to apply that same lens to education, so that when I leave these places, I have my agency and I’m clear about some of the talents that are already had, like, Lisette talked about “I have seen as an asset” like I’m actually coming to this place with goodness with power with strength and these institutions should be cultivating that and when they’re not young people have a right to push back on us to disrupt those systems as well.
Anindya Kundu:
And I’ll lastly just chime in. It sounds like a lot of what this power dynamic question is about. Is about dialogue and we should always remember that it’s great when we can invite students to the table and elevate their voices and sometimes that can even be missed. Even though there is a good intention to try to do that. And so I keep on thinking about one example in my book that everyone probably also knows, is about Joe who was homeless. He was homeless with his mom and then his aunt took him into live with her in Edison, New Jersey. So all of a sudden he had access to the suburban public school and within his first few weeks of going to this new middle school anytime the topic of Hispanic culture came up, the teacher would now point to Joe to be the representative of Hispanic culture so all of a sudden, in trying to include him, she tokenizes him and isolated him which could have been avoided if she had actually gotten to know him as a person. She might have realized the challenging background he had come from. That maybe he wasn’t used to having family dinner time all the time. And so, you know, it’s important to again bring humanity and dignity back into these conversations and starting with a place of just acknowledging who your students are can help us get there, I think.
Scott McLeod:
Awesome, thank you everyone. Um, so one of the scholars that has been very impactful on me is Dr. Richard Elmore at Harvard. And one of his key concepts from one of his books is this idea of internal accountability. This notion that we don’t have our act together inside our school system, university, whatever, like it actually doesn’t matter what those external accountability mandates are because we aren’t able to come together and say “this is what we stand for”. And these are the mechanisms we have for making sure they happen. Here are monitoring and accountability mechanisms internally to make sure that we’re living up to the ideals or beliefs that we say, we espouse and are trying to enact. And it feels to me like in many ways what we’re talking about here is that schools and universities, although they talk a good game may have some weak internal accountability in terms of ensuring that they actually happen.
Sort of the institutional approaches, right, or lack of appropriate dialogues and training and support systems within school districts and universities that really allow us to achieve the outcomes that we say we want. So I think this is sort of a nice transition to our big question that we’re going to ask Maurice which is what does internal accountability look like within the Chicago Public Schools as you think about equity driven student agency and student voice work? What are you trying to make happen? What are those structures that you have in place to try and make them happen? And maybe most importantly through the Office of Equity and whatever other avenues within the district. How do you make sure they happen?
Maurice Swinney:
Yeah, I think, first as an office of equity we have young people involved in the writing of our continuous improvement plans and one of the reasons why we did that was, we have to model the behaviors we want to see and we can’t talk about transforming and advancing equity or disrupting the system if we are not living out those values. In the CPS equity framework, we call for inclusive partnerships, which says that if you really want change to happen, you have to have those who are most impacted by inequity at the table, and that usually in educational settings includes young people. So we do that, they push back on us in such a good way that it actually disrupts even sometimes the way in which we’re working to do better work, not just in service of them, but to do collaborative work with them. We’ve created some district wide tools. We have an office of social science and civic engagement and they have what’s called a toolkit, which is about helping us as an organization make sure we have student voices in all elements of schools, classrooms and within the district. And that is helping us to actualize like what does a principal do? What does a teacher do? To cause that in schools. We have student voice community throughout the district. Dr. Jackson, our CEO has a student voice community as well. But I think one of the accountability pieces, um, you know, the framework is still relatively new and what we recognize is this co design process is going to have to be ongoing. And we’re going to have to learn and iterate with young people together. I’m actually reading a book or workbook called Fumbling Toward Repair. And it’s really helping us to think about like what ways we cause missteps and cause harm and be able to heal from that rather quickly so that students are not only engaged in the process, but the things that are designed to be working for them are actually going to help to work for them. So I think those are some of the like broad strokes for the work, but our students right now in the district are asking for big demands and we’re still wrestling with you know, how do we do the right transformative work in a district to do that? So to your question around institutions, assuming I don’t want to paint us as perfect, but I do think we’re making progress on that overall.
Scott McLeod:
Cool. So let’s open that up more broadly and say, I mean, the key word that I think you mentioned: memories is taking out there right and it feels to me that most school systems and often universities are pretty resistant to this idea of together. Why are we so hesitant to give kids, young people and post-secondary students more voice in their own learning?
Lisette Nieves:
You know, Scott, that’s always such a simple question. I think that’s one of the big things. And first of all, just the fact that Maurice is on this panel, the role that he has, says something about a vision and commitment to see this right. The other things are that so often our young people who have the least power in the system are the ones who experience what I call “the trickling down” piece of feeling like they’re not connected. If you don’t inherently have a collaborative structure, how can you assume that every level is gonna recognize the dignity in the other level if there’s a power structure? So I think we can’t ignore that.
And so that’s an important one, too. So how often are teachers feeling that they’re working collaboratively with principals and superintendents and those kinds of things? Right. And so, you know, we can’t ignore how that fits in here. I would say that the other piece about it is that the fumbling through change, I haven’t read that book, but doing a lot on org theory is that I was just talking to a principal who was one of my top students. And he said, when I moved forward, when we have to rethink a school, was when we had to collectively mourn the harm that we’ve perpetuated not even consciously. That is very deep. We cannot dismiss that. How many people have the trust and vulnerability in a collegial and work environment to do that to then expand? So I just push that forward, which I think that doesn’t mean we cannot have that. But there are things that have to happen before then.
Scott McLeod:
So, Lisette, I really like your conception of this idea of vulnerability right. Anindya I was struck in your book that you talk multiple times about how even students with agency have to exhibit that vulnerability in terms of help seeking behavior. And it feels to me like the same kind of help seeking behavior we want from students with agency, we also need from organizations in the sense of, say, here’s what we need, or where we want to go. And we’re going to need help with that.
Anindya Kundu:
You nailed it. And I think that question of help seeking behavior, especially going both ways, now is the moment to really acknowledge that in all of the different things going on.
In the world, we are now invited at a time, particularly unique in the historical context to reimagine education. To rethink that. It’s not this power dynamic of like, what’s that saying like the jug in the mug? The teacher is, the jug and all the students are the mugs being filled up with the same kinds of content and competencies and expect that to somehow work. And in this new environment, especially with social unrest going on, we have to understand again that students and young people are there at the table too. They’re perceiving everything going on and they have very important valued experiences and perspectives, and these are teachable moments, but they’re also learning moments for them. So how can we create dialogue that allows them to have a seat at the table because you know soon, we’re going to be in our, you know, older years and they will be the ones in these positions to make and push forward policy changes. So why not invite them to the table now?
Scott McLeod:
Awesome. Thank you. Um, Lisette, we’ve been talking a lot about sort of schools and universities so far. That’s kind of the way I framed it but I know you also have been thinking about this concept student agency within the broader sort of workforce and workforce education preparation lens. How does this play out in that arena?
Lisette Nieves:
Well I how it plays out is that so often because there may not be collaborative structures in schools, it’s actually through working where young people experience their first sense of agency. Because what it says, is “I’m getting paid the same way as someone else is getting paid”. And there is something, this kind of pride that can only be built through work.
That, I believe, is part of a developmental identity for young people. Which is why when we don’t acknowledge that work is central to so many young people’s lives and we see it as a distraction, we’re really missing that they have always been managing multiple contexts and we should be championing them for that. And so that’s how it fits in here. And I would say with Anindya’s book. And I think one of the things that I love is that his notion of agency challenges this piece of the charity engagement with young people. This is a moment in that young person’s time. This is not everything about that young person. It is a call to stop, to check yourself, to deal with this as a minute. Even uses the example of if so-and-so needs more resources and they’re working, it’s not seen as a negative, right. So, so for me and thinking about that and I say the same thing happens with college students. I have seen people say, oh my goodness, you have to help support your family, you’re contributing to a family wage, which I do not think is a bad thing. We need to make sure you stay at a community college right. So there are ways that we have undermined and made assumptions that are that overlap with class and race where we actually strip people of their agency. So that’s how.
Maurice Swinney:
Yeah, I thank you for bringing that up because what I like in the book. It talks about like
youth networking and this actually triggered my thinking around, you know, people talk about young people in games. But I say, you know, games are families in their networks and if we want young people to have different types of networks and experiences, we need to be providing that and if young people have to lean on other networks, then what does that say about us as institutions and how do we need to also reframe what we think about young people? And so they’re like I just appreciate the connection between class as well.
Because they are working that shows us there is already a lot of grit, resilience, and agency already happening. And how do we acknowledge that and then continue to build on that and even support you know if there are opportunities where they could work less if there are some
economic capital ways in which you know we can invest in young people while they’re going to school that would definitely be a plus.
Lisette Nieves:
Anindya, I want to say one more thing about you before you jump in. One thing that I do appreciate, Maurice you made me think about this too, is that Anindya, when you go into this notion that so often what’s framed in workforce development is that we have to give Latinx and African American young people, a social network so that they can do x. You disrupt that paradigm, you actually say no, wait a minute. This isn’t about giving someone something because they don’t have it. It’s about they already have that and then building on that. And I think that’s radical in the literature. I will tell you that right now for so many people right now all the workforce discussions are about assuming that, particularly people of color don’t have their own networks and they do, that’s a false assumption. And so you also go as far say young people to also have that.
Anindya Kundu:
You know I am nodding, so much my neck is gonna hurt after this, after any of you talk.
But Lisette, what you said was, was brilliant. In an ideal world, what would education look like? Well, it wouldn’t be separate from workforce. We wouldn’t have a K through 12 pipeline, we would think more towards K 16, K 20 and workforce. We don’t, if we think about these pathways as separate then they become isolated and they only work for those who have the networks that the dominant culture rewards. And so I think we also have to change this idea of vocational education, you know. It’s always had this weird, wrong, negative stigma, but there’s nothing more important than being able to work with your hands. And most of the participants of my sample went to an associate’s degree as a pathway to a traditional four year college. Another whole conversation for another day is whether or not four-year college is necessary for everyone. But there’s something to be said about understanding that people’s educational trajectories can look different, and how can we acknowledge that each of those allow someone to bring something new to the table, especially when they’re going to be working someday. Now that I do a little bit of workforce research, the biggest irony that I’m finding in the research is that employers always have all of these requirements for entry level work. But only through working do sometimes people pick up those competencies. So it really requires them to come to the table and be willing to take a young person and train them and understand where they’re coming from and do a lot of internal work. Do a lot of cultural reframing to become more inclusive, you know, giving someone a job is not supposed to be a handout. It’s more of a hand up, but it’s also an acknowledgement that you’re now joining our organization. This is going to be a collective culture. So how can we do this work together and those reframes are things that we need to now start doing together. We have to realize that it’s not just education, but it’s education and work force and I love the thing that you and Maurice both said is that there are so many ways in which participants of the book showed gifts and competencies like Joe who I was talking about was taking care of his sick sister, going to school, trying to find housing for him and his mom that night. Those things aren’t showing up at class when he’s in class and the teacher is about to call on him. So, you know, how can we understand that giftedness shows up in multiple ways? I think that’s a question we can keep asking ourselves to build more inclusive learning environments.
Scott McLeod:
Y’all we’re doing an awesome job in this conversation. I’m just saying it right now. So, um, we got about 10 minutes left. Um, and so I’m going to ask each of you to describe maybe one of your favorite examples of student agency and practice and why you think about that. I’m going to yammer, a little bit myself and give you some lead time. Anindya, I loved the focus in the book about the positive approach that you’re taking here like let’s get away from these deficit mindsets and as you said on page 110 let’s talk about possibilities, but instead of wondering about all the reasons why students with fewer resources can fail, why don’t we look at the many ways in which they can learn to thrive and how do we best reach them? Even if you know as institutions or systems, our capacities may be limited so much. And I think one of the things that has been most inspiring to me in K- 12 education over the last decade and a half, has been the rise of these projects and inquiry-based schools and networks of schools. And, you know, we’re finding some really phenomenal ways to give kids agency and voice and connect them with their communities and workforce and so on. And, you know, whether that’s passion and increased projects within the school day, whether that’s some kind of capstone experience, whether that’s community-based service learning, you know, whatever. Like there’s all kinds of possibilities, and I think about a network like the Big Picture Learning network where they explicitly build into their model, this idea of student internship. So, you know, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, for instance, a student who was provided a free transportation pass you know maybe in the city hops on the bus, train, subway you know hoofs it on their bike or whatever and gets to their local internship. And they have a chance to choose as many as eight of those over the course of their high school career because they can do a new one each semester. And what I love about their approach in the schools that I visited is that they’ve all sent the students out to the internship location, not as free labor. Like, they’re not going there to be cheap, easy labor for the employer. You’re going there to learn how to run the place. And I love that stance on the work. So here I am, I’m talking with a student in Los Angeles and her previous internship had been in a dog kennel because she liked the animals and you know she really loved the business aspects of running your own business and learned a ton about that but realized that too much of the job was cleaning cages, whatever. And so, that wasn’t for her. So this semester that I visited her school, her internship was with a dog trainer and she and I had this phenomenal conversation about sort of what’s the difference between training dogs and training orcas at SeaWorld and the psychological stuff that’s happening here. Right. And she had just submitted her scores to major universities for four-year biology programs, you know, and I think the pathway from one semester internship at the dog kennel to four year Biology major at a major university is shorter than we think. With these pathways and opportunities and we think about possibilities, right. So that’s kind of my long run up answer to my question. Who wants to share an example that you found particularly inspiring?
Maurice Swinney:
I keep thinking about, you know, it’s funny, not being a principal anymore. It’s a different world not being a high school leader for 12 years and I keep thinking about this one student who we were looking at student outcomes by race and gender to really figure out how different young people were and what were the performance outcomes. And so we met with different groups and, you know, ask them about their experience in school and one particular student, his name was Jason. And I remember Jason talking about all of the little ways he was like, yes, we have a football team, but as a Latino I want this type of football team, like I want soccer.
And so all of the guys were like, yes, that’s what we, you know, want like we know that there are sports and programs and all this stuff here. But this is what we’re asking for. So I was like, yeah, well, okay, well, we’ll do this and come back to me with the plan. And they all came back with a plan like in 24 hours. And they were like, this is how much the uniforms would cost, this is how much this is, we know that we would need coaches and just like all of this great sort of stuff that they had designed and the only thing that that I did was, um, say, come back with a plan and they did the research to figure out what exactly they wanted. And so they already know a lot of what they want, it’s I think it’s we have an “adultism” problem that our young people in CPS are starting to talk to us about. Our youth organizations actually do some training and they talk about adultism. And how we need to sometimes get out of the way. And so I feel like the more I invite young people into a conversation and give them the space to talk about things that are important to them, their agency just is right there like a ton of water just starting to flow out. And so we got to keep doing that.
Anindya Kundu:
I love that. I love that, Maurice, I actually didn’t know about adult ism before this. And so I’m going to try to use that too and I love your example, because you mentioned research and just thinking about young people and all they bring to the table we should honestly acknowledge that they’re experts of research, too. And so that’s kind of a little bit of what my effort was in the book is that so much of research, sometimes asks “why did these groups or why did these students fail”? Sociology is very much at fault of doing this, but instead my goal was to try to learn from them to highlight their voices about how they were able to succeed. So giving them that expertise and trying to learn from them and I learned so much. Scott’s question was about a couple of our favorite examples of agency. And so from my participants, I would say, one would be Alicia. She was raised by a single mom and her mom was an English language learner. And so since Alicia was like six years old, she would help her mom do things like talk to a repair person of their apartment and, you know, navigate these adult roles that are very unique for a young child. And she told me about her GPA in college and how she had a ton of different companies trying to recruit her but she was going to become a teacher. And so I kind of played devil’s advocate. I was like, why are you going into teaching? Why wouldn’t you go into something a little bit more lucrative? And then she turned the question back on me, she said how dare I like how dare I go into teaching knowing these problems that I faced a lot of students and young people continue to face? And in the same quote, she said something about everyone is brilliant. So, you know, in the beginning of our talk. I said that, but I was channeling my inner Alicia that if we believe that every child is brilliant, it forces us to rethink education and, you know, we might call that radical, but I don’t think we really need to. And one other example of agency, I think, is Jay studs. He’s the student whose teacher acknowledged his rapping abilities and gave him access to a recording studio. And what’s interesting is that set off this chain where he actually did end up in investment banking because he started getting internships at the recording studio and he realized he liked the financial aspect. And my own undergrads once were, like, why is this the story of success? Jay Stud going to work for investment banking? Like he’s now working for the man. The group that you know disinvests from communities and it furthers poverty and is a complicit in the capitalist process, you know, these radical undergrads. And she forced me to think about it. But there’s something to be said about changing systems from within. And that’s what Jay Stud is doing, you know, he’s making sure that the investment bank is now hiring more men and women of color. And he also chooses to still live in Jamaica, Queens, even though it’s a longer commute to work so that every day, the kids in his neighborhood see him as an example. The kind that he didn’t necessarily have growing up. And so that’s the reciprocal nature of agency that can be systems change. Helping one student’s life get better. I think is systems change because you further their agency to create positive change as well.
Lisette Nieves:
Hi, can you hear me, Anindya?
Anindya Kundu:
Yeah, we got you.
Lisette Nieves:
Okay, great. Well, I had to get on the phone, but it works. So it’s interesting here in the tail end of both and I would say when I think about some examples of agency and I’m glad Maurice brought up the term “adultism” it’s agency, by whose definition? whose terms?
Right. So I think it’s important that we get at that. When agency shows up, we can only inspire it, we can’t control how it represents itself. Right. And I think that there is a letting go of that. That’s where the power issue is the shift that happens there. I’ll think of two quick examples. One is when I was with Europe, and we think about that older age under credited not in school, not in work. And this was a fascinating one. This one was one was related alot to class. students will get a stipend. And so what we saw was that it was around the holidays and there were all the signs in the building that said adopt a family for Christmas, those kinds of things. Right. And so a student came to me and said, we want to do it on behalf of students, but we want to choose the family and we want to donate and we want to do that. I had no problem with that. I thought that was great. My fellow team members, some of the staff are like they don’t have enough money in their stipend, they shouldn’t be doing this. it completely tried to disempower what I thought was very exciting. And they did it on their terms. And this is an example of how when people are placed in boxes even economically, not even recognizing that the working class actually give much more charitably of their income than other groups. Right. And so why wouldn’t we see that amongst our young people? And so they literally found a family. They showed up to this family they adopted them for the holidays and they all 40 of them supported this and it was a very inspiring thing, but it was a great one to push on class. I’d say another thing that I think is important that I thought was great around agency was that there was this assumption that we all know how to work cross collaboratively. And cross-age and cross-experience. And when I actually saw a teacher ask for help to say how can I actually do partnership building in a way outside with workforce development and support our students? Then I know we were on the right path because the framework to even be able to have this we have some people that have that. how do we partner? We have some people are trained in that that’s not what people are trained in. So when we’re talking about collaborative efforts without a framework, which is why it’s so exciting to have Maurice on this panel too is that we see that without that, we are having people stumble unnecessarily. And so one is, I would say this too where I saw great agency is where I’ve seen people recruit multiple young people at one time to be on a board that they have full voting rights. All right, that was an interesting piece around that and also be involved in the pre-agenda discussion then we were talking about really recognizing agency. But many times, that’s not always the case. And I actually got to see that in a couple of Brooklyn schools. So just want to share that.
Scott McLeod:
Awesome. It’s awesome. So we’re kind of at the end of our time here, I just want to note that Anindya’s book takes a really positive approach and vibe toward student agency which is really what he says right there in the intro that he’s defining agency as the capacity to leverage resources to navigate obstacles and to create positive change in their lives. And what we’re talking about when we’re talking about fostering someone’s agency. As he said, it’s not a handout. It’s a hand up. Right. And so I think that’s a great way to sort of end our conversation is for all of us to think about how can we foster the power of our youth to help themselves and to walk away from some of these adultist structures and systems and practices that are getting in their way? It’s a fantastic book, The Power of Student Agency. Lisette and Maurice, thank you for helping us celebrate Anindya’s new book.
Scott McLeod:
It’s available on Teachers College Press, who also hosted this discussion today. Thanks to everybody in the audience.
Anindya Kundu:
Thanks, everyone. And we’ll also send out some resources at the end of this to people who attended about all the different things we talked about. So just in case.