Teaching With Tenderness

I did start to see subtle and blatant ways I had been turning the students away from their own questioning spirits.

no one should be asked

welcomes silence, breath, and movement; and sees justice as key to our survival.

The tendency to create certain designated places where “emotional” people can go and get “fixed” sometimes undermines our own capacity to witness each other’s healing within classroom communities.

came to understand that when we do the hard work of remembering, for ourselves, for our ancestors, what we have been taught to forget, another clothesline of memory can emerge, with clothespins of resilience riding in the wind.

there is no monolithic body.

challenge, isn’t it, to keep our hearts open and receptive while wrestling with the threat of terrorism, the practice of capital punishment, the genocide of Native people, the social death under slavery?

creating multiracial communities required finding ways to teach about power and privilege that loosened people up rather than hardened them, that countered defensiveness, that helped people get to a soft place with each other.

The chronic stress of pace and politics, hurry and waste, is all wrapped around the demands of the marketplace