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| The Eight of Swords tarot card from Ostara Tarot. A falcon (??) stands on an outstretched falconer's glove. While the glove is visible, the person wearing the glove is not. The falcon has been hooded across the eyes, and eight swords, each stained red at the ends, hover in a circle that encloses the bird's body. |
What gifts of education--which is to say, organized learning community--saved my life?
In what contexts have the institutions of education harmed or devalued my spirit?
What responsibilities do I, a person privileged to have had much access to education, have to support liberatory access to education for other people?
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Happy Jupiter in Gemini, everyone 💚
On May 20, 2024, the Sun moved into the first decan of Gemini, that which is ruled by Jupiter. In the mutable Air sign of adaptive relational ideation, Jupiter's voice fractalizes deeply through nonlinear experiences of space/time, inviting us to add our own voice to the great chorus of all who seek to find greater meaning in strange ways and weird places. Jupiter, the planet most conventionally accommodated in the signs of Sagittarius, Pisces, and Cancer, is under-resourced in Gemini. This makes me think of how many of our most impactful teachers have been forced to do their work in the face of a horrid lack of institutional support. So many of these teachers shaped their teaching practices around liberatory values that not only include but center the most marginalized people of our community(ies). This is one of the ways in which Jupiter in Gemini helps me to remember--and recommit to--that education is, in its most benevolent form, a spiritual practice.
I associate the Eight of Swords with disability justice. The reason for this is because the card's imagery asks the viewer consider the central figure (in traditional RWS imagery, the figure is a woman; in the Ostara card above, it's a bird of prey) as problematically constrained by a blindfold while surrounded dangerously by swords. One possible interpretation is that the individual's problem would be solved if they regained their sight in some way--the blindfold in the picture limits her ability to navigate the system she is trapped inside--and if she increased her mobility by extracting herself from the bondage wrapping the woman's body.
However, another reading (one that I find encourages the reader to think with more rigor and depth) focuses not on the individual's responsibility to independently navigate a harmful system, but on questioning the fact of the system itself. This card belongs to the suit of Swords, which evoke challenging ideas and doubts. Disability justice reminds us that ability is defined by the environment that our mindbodies encounter. Disability justice also recognizes the impact of how white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and other forms of oppression are interconnected with ableism. Swords and Jupiter bring us into the realms of thought, ideas, learning, faith, and crises of the above. Thus, my keywords for the Eight of Swords and Jupiter in Gemini are: questioning the institutionally-created boundaries around inherited wisdom and learning a multiplicity of liberatory pathways. The book I read and wrote about for this decan is Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks.
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| The book cover of Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks |
From the cover copy of Teaching to Transgress:
"In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal."
In Teaching to Transgress, hooks arranged her essays in a way that highlights the multiplicity of her intellectual expertise while always centering the expansive, crucial values of her educational philosophy. The greatest gift I received when experiencing this text was the lesson that liberatory education cannot be separated from a commitment to a real practice of freedom on behalf of myself as a teacher, my students, and myself as a student, too. hooks writes that:
"Aware that we are living in a culture of domination, I ask myself now... what values and habits of being reflect my/our commitment to freedom.
...I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a "true revolution of values." "
Jupiter ingressed into Gemini during this decan, and Gemini is my natal house of spiritual philosophy, higher education, and publishing, so I have been very excited for this transition. I have also been pretty sick, so again, the plan I'd set to read/write on a schedule had to be set aside. This bothered me because this particular work by bell hooks is especially meaningful to me, and I had wanted to give more to this book. However, double-edged gifts bring sweetness in their shadow: I quickly realized that my fixation on productivity ("How many pages will I get through this week?") over connectivity ("Am I really listening with genuince presence and care to bell hooks as I read this one page, this one essay?") was an enactment of the educational system I had sought hooks' expertise to resist, and was not an enactment of the educational values hooks advocated through the book. Okay then! I read these essays from Teaching to Transgress: "Teaching to Transgress", "Engaged Pedagogy", "A Revolution of Values", "Embracing Change", "Paulo Freire", "Theory as Liberatory Practice", "Holding My Sister's Hand", and "Building a Teaching Community".
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In "Embracing Change", bell hooks writes about how, when trying to create an environment in which personal and communal change could occur in the classroom, it became crucial to center compassion. She wrote of what it felt like to become willing to accept new ways of learning as a teacher, alongside her students. She wrote that:
"Often when students return from breaks I ask them to share with us how ideas that they have learned or worked on in the classroom impacted on their experience outside. This gives them both the opportunity to know that difficult experiences may be common and practice at integrating theory and practice: ways of knowing with habits of being. We practice interrogating habits of being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community."
Another deeply moving passage in Teaching to Transgress is from hooks's dialogue with Ron Scapp in "Building a Teaching Community", where Scapp says--describing the common values that he and hooks shared as fellow educators--that "our emphasis has, over the years, been to affirm who we are through the transaction of being with other people in the classroom and achieving something there. Not just relaying information or stating things, but working with people."
I have been thinking of setting up an online education space for me to start teaching again. Nothing serious, I tell myself. (What does that even mean, lol.) Accordingly, I've been researching online platforms where people post things like online courses, lectures, workbooks, et cetera. I love writing a syllabus, I have fifteen worksheet ideas rattling around in the back of my head, I have a Gemini's worth of weird, deeply nerdy knowledge areas to share, I'm mildly competent at using the internet to make projects go, et cetera et cetera.
While thinking through all the possible excitements and logistical needs that go into starting an online education space, I asked many questions, but after reading hooks's work, I realized that I never asked: How could this educational space be structured to build community?
When I ask myself What would this internet classroom idea look like if I centered the concerns that hooks planted in my heart?, I realize that entire conceptual frameworks that I took for granted--not just about the course I was planning, but also my expectations/hopes/concerns about virtual teaching, the internet as a communal space, my identity as an educator, and my philosophy about learning--were beginning to loosen and dismantle in a weird, wondrous way. It felt like a cage was being taken down and repurposed to design a new type of structure, one that did not sacrifice freedom for the sake of acquiring knowledge, but uplifted freedom as a prerequisite for gaining knowledge, instead.
Below is a 8-week proto-syllabus that came to mind when I was dreaming ways to design a class differently than what I had assumed a class had to be. The syllabus is a system, ideally adaptable to any focus subject. The point of the syllabus is not planned content, but possible community. So long as the events described below occur, and are facilitated in compassion and trust on the part of the teacher, the classroom will ideally go through a certain type of experience together over the course of eight weeks.
Syllabus for Hopefulness
Week 1:
Each student meets with the teacher in a one-on-one meeting. Together, they discuss the student's relationship to, goals for, and questions regarding the class and its subject focus.
Week 2:
Full class gathering. Together, teacher and students discuss the subject focus and come to an understanding of what collective values and goals the class will strive towards as a community. (This is really important because it will impact the ways we work together in future weeks, due to the structure of the course syllabus.)
Week 3:
Each student meets with another student in a one-on-one meeting. Together, they find a way to support each other's work for the class. Depending on the students' needs and goals, this might involve affirmation/reflection, challenging, or collaborating regarding the other's work.
Week 4:
Full class gathering. Together, teacher and students discuss how the work is going, and concerns, barriers, and problems are present, and try to identify ways to support all community members' needs regarding our work.
Week 5:
Each student meets with the teacher in a one-on-one meeting. Together, they discuss the student's experience, needs, and concerns, and pay deep attention to the student's relationship to their work.
Week 6:
Full class gathering. Together, teacher and students discuss how the work is going, and concerns, barriers, and problems are present, and try to identify ways to support all community members' needs regarding our work.
Week 7:
Each student meets with a person who is not a member of the class in a one-on-one meeting. The student facilitates the meeting to engage the class subject focus with this person in whatever way they choose, so long as the format of the meeting is consensual, compassionate, and caring.
Week 8:
Full class gathering. Together, teacher and students share the stories of their work over the past eight weeks, and celebrate the community we have built together during this time. We will also find ways to foster future connection and collaboration between any classmates who wish to do so, and dream of how our subject focus can be integrated into our daily future lives.
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Closing questions:
In the image of the Eight of Swords, an individual is constrained, their freedom restricted by the system of swords (values) that surround them. In the quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. above, we are asked to consider that individual action/inaction has political impact on the collective world we share.
Who do we deem responsible for dismantling the systems that keep us from being free?
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