STATEMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Statement of Educational Philosophy

by Jeremiah Burns

Breaking the molds of abilities and aspirations, education provokes us to intuit, inquire, interrupt, innovate, and reflect on how, rather than racism, does compassion underpin our community?

Guided by the example of the Freedom Now! Movement, education is embodying the right and responsibility each of us has to investigate history with an ear for ways people gently engage the natural world, surmise how cooperative economics sustains us, and create interdisciplinary proofs of our capacity as human beings to hear our existence as a lineage of humanity.

Education is W.E.B. DuBois reading society as a thread we weave, black people and white people co-constructing the reality that humanity is implicitly dignified, and that humanity is a distinction white identity has yet to dignify. Education is Mohandas Gandhi leveraging compassion to awaken us to the energy of provoking fundamental societal change. Education is Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, whose book, Collective Courage demonstrates the inextricable connection between ontological blackness and cooperative economics. Augusto Boal engages the power of theater as a medium for reminding people that the circumstances we face are a script we can learn to hear and remake. John Dewey brings us to the task of incorporating into our every moment the expectation that from an educative standpoint we will hear what life brings us. bell hooks leaves us breathless as she sees and calls upon us to see that transgressing society’s binaries is always considered wrong, and yet is often necessary for education to be effective.

Informed and inspired by the women who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, education proves our power as ordinary people to reframe the world through grass-roots movements effectively demonstrating what it is to be present. From the work of Claudettte Colvin, Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, as well as numerous women whose stories I have yet to learn, we learn that being human means listening to the status quo as a matrifocal community organizing process characterized by non-violent civil disobedient demonstrations.

Cultivating tomato plants and roses on her husband's lot in Peekskill, NY, for my grandmother, Josephine, a black woman who migrated north in the 1920's from Halifax County, Virginia, gardening was her facility to reify the Stars and Stripes as dignifying, and her dignity braids in me the concept of freedom with plants and matriarchs. Recalling my grandmother this way springs into action my ear for my family and soon I am calling my cousin, my uncle, aware of the phenomenal lineage we are that ends with an equitable society as described by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and begins with the essential imperative each of us faces to listen for each other's potential unto grassroots community organizing.

Education exists for the fortification of such facility. After six weeks of research and writing compositions on the Founding Fathers, my eighth-grade students enter the classroom for a mock-Constitutional Convention in which they role-play the positions taken by state delegates. Letting go of self-consciousness about historical theater, students and I mock-debate issues of commerce, taxation without representation, slavery, and the thread that emerges among my students is a sense of resistance to the confirmation that for too much of the history of the United States of America, black people have not been welcome to be partners with white people in making society a place of cooperativity, of educative healing.

Centering my teaching in compassionate listening can exist, Freedom Now! can continue, pushing us along to see a tomato plant as a connection to who we are, planting the seed of what it is to possess a clear-eyed, or drylongso hearing of history, confirming in us that we all must be keepers of the ancestors' contributions to, and faith in, this land.