Burn it all down
I quit. I reached the end. There was no way forward. I went sideways.
It was the year of Black Lives Matter. The images assaulted and punished the left, as a demented deterant in a destructive dance of death, imprisoned by state violence to behold the strange fruit hanging in our encroached civil spaces. And here was I, in Australia , where black children are murdered in custody in watchtowers where people did anything but watch them, imploring the children in my digital classroom of the urgency of acknowledgement. I admit it was a humiliation.
Christine “Xine” Yao cautions in #staywoke of the toll of traveresing the deserts of cultural poverty and neglect inherited from early colonialism:
“Even as we must be vigilant against this whitewashing in our teaching, digital engagement in intensive topics like anti-Black racism and social justice makes demands on the energies and emotions of students and instructors that can threaten to lead to burnout. Precautions like safety, care, and strategic refusals to engage must be a part of digital literacy in the classroom for student and teacher; teaching critical engagement with different objects must come with discussions about how we are affected by our objects of study.” (Yao, 2018)
There is a current educational climate crisis where students are increasingly more concerned with a perceived loss of liberties leads to increased disengagement with the critical perspectives in curriculum that are intended to create compassionate responses addressing the greatest discourses of oppression in our society. Students need more than ever a grounding in social justice that ensures they are active participants in correcting the violence of the state. Black lives matter but are obscured and hidden under the movement towards the biomedical security state that intervenes in the mobility and freedoms young people desire the most in their exploration of burgeoning identities as individuals. Compassion is compromised as celebrations and rites of passage are delayed, leading to sense of scarcity bringing out the nastiest brutish and shortest natures of families and learners pushed to the threshold.
Equally disappointing have been the lack of compassion and blindness towards the inequalities of the lockdown state that divides communities on geographical borders of the state by educators. The rupture in our lived experiences is no longer deniable as the home learning environments of students become the playing field of an unfair educational enterprise that betrays Australian values of fairplay. It is a willful ignorance on both sides of the political spectrum that would silence the critical moral heart of liberal democracy as articulated by Adam Smith:
In the race for wealth and honours and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should jostle or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.
The transition to online learning predictable exposed the ethical relationship students have to technology. The first weeks were spent in an absolute cluster of verification as the shift in learning environment and lag was exploited by some, while other more honest students gained the implicit miseducation of neoliberal logic that teaches students that life is a zero sum game in which there are clear winners and losers and the economic entitlements afforded by “winning” excuse blatantly anti-social acts.
This is getting dangerous.
“Xine” Yao, C. (2018). #staywoke: Digital Engagement and Literacies in Antiracist Pedagogy. American Quarterly 70(3), 439-454