After a strange year of working in education during COVID-19, I decided to take a lot of time for myself this summer to rest, reflect, and dream. I’m pulling myself out of that rest phase into a more active educator phase, with the careful deliberation one demonstrates when shifting from shavasana to your side, making sure you feel each one of your vertebrae as you move to a fully upright, seated position.
It’s important to me do move with intention. It’s important to me that I move into this next school year with care.
So for this upcoming school year, as I enter a new school space and begin my doctoral program, I’m trying on the label of abundance educator for myself. I want to teach from a place of abundance, trusting that I and my students and our community have not only the resources we need, but the resourcefulness to learn, love, and thrive.
When I think of abundance, I think of Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy, how he loved and was loved by his childhood friend, their intimate phrase “still that black abundance.” I think about Rachel Rodgers and her book We Should All Be Millionaires and her immense trust in abundance mindset.
In education I see so much in terms of not only deficit thinking, but scarcity thinking. Scarcity thinking shapes the entirety of the field. We don’t have enough resources. We don’t have enough time. The students don’t have the will or the grit or the home life or the resources to succeed. We need to throw more resources at them. We need to siphon off certain kids into Honors and AP classes. The struggling kids need more resources. They need to have more counseling sessions, more remedial classes, more tutoring. They can’t also go on the field trip or stay on the sports team, we just don’t have enough time to figure that out.
We throw resources at children, but we never trust their innate resourcefulness or curiosity. We have a single-track approach to the deficits we see in society, but a capitalist-driven world means that we just throw existing material resources at the problem, but even then we do not problem solve, we do not explore, we do not innovate. And we blame the people struggling when they do not succeed with the resources we have predetermined to be acceptable.
So for me, being an abundance educator demands trust. I trust that students want to learn, have all the skills they need to learn, have all the joy, curiosity, criticality, candidness, and creativity to be on whatever journey they need to be on for their own learning and sense of purpose.
This year, trusting in students and their abundance is going to look like not using the terms “classroom management” or “discipline” anymore, but boundary setting instead. If we are to unlearn hierarchical notions of authority, then I want to be trusted by students to be the facilitator for collective boundary setting. I want their boundaries to be valued just as much as mine. I want us to engage in daily consent, negotiation, and clarification.
Being an abundance educator will look like continuing to relinquish my control over assessment, and crafting a culture of self-assessment and community feedback. I don’t need to be the sole determinant of where a student is in their learning, and in fact I definitely shouldn’t. I hope through project-based learning and my experience in design-doing that I’ll be able to build community connections with students to be embedded into our local San Francisco culture, and recognize that they can be in conversation with everyone and everything, that this beautiful and complex city is so rich in history and possibility. I also want students to learn not only content, but skills and mindsets that foster abundance, so they can tap into the resources they need, self-advocate, and push for change.
As an adult who lives a life beyond teaching, abundance for me also means unlearning narratives of martyrdom that are rife in education. It is reclaiming my time, demanding my value be recognized, and walking away from those who do not see me and my gifts, just as they do not see our students and their gifts. I think to be an abundance educator, one recognizes the power of unions and collective bargaining, of transparency, and saying no to disrespect and exploitation. We do not have to submit to pain and suffering. We can find ways to support each other and find another way to be.
Together, as abundance educators and as an abundant community, we’ll unlearn scarcity thinking. We’ll stretch ourselves and trust in each other and ourselves a little more, day by day. We’ll find our way into the dreams we thought were just out of reach, until we reach the dreams we thought entirely impossible.
