Should we teach our students to believe in a better world, or teach them to survive in this one?

There are reoccurring tensions that I encounter at different points in my life. These tensions are open-ended questions that I continually debate, sometimes with others, but often within my own head. This particular tension is relevant to those interested in the purpose of education, the future of education, and what transformative education might look like.

When I was sixteen years old I loved the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” There is one episode, “The Wish,” where a character is granted a wish that creates an alternate reality that, unfortunately for her, is markedly worse than her current reality. Among other things, in this alternate reality she is killed by vampires. At the end of the episode, one of the main characters of the series, Giles, realizes that something is very wrong with the current reality and does everything that he can to undo it. He has a conversation with Buffy, the teen protagonist of the series, in which he states “I have to believe in a better world.” To which Buffy flatly replies, “Go ahead. I have to live in this one.”

This dialogue has stayed with me for 20+ years because it exemplifies a tension that is a critical question I grapple with. How much of my life do I dedicate to navigating and surviving the current world, which I believe is fundamentally unjust, and how much time and effort do I spend trying to enact a better one? At sixteen years old, and still today, I am struck by how very right both perspectives were from their different standpoints. Giles, through his belief in a better world and determination to change it, succeeds in ending the nightmare reality. Still, I feel deeply for Buffy’s harsh but pragmatic expression of the need to survive. It’s one that we all have felt. I remind myself to never judge those who are doing their best to subsist in the unjust systems and brutal realities that we currently exist in. This is, at times, all of us. And sometimes dreaming of something better feels like a privilege.

As an educator, I often face this tension. Do I teach our students to envision a better world and encourage them to try to create it? Or do I focus on how to survive and even ‘get ahead’ in the world that we have? Of course, it does not have to be an either/or; the answer is almost always both. Still, given the finite time and energy that educators have with their students, there are important choices to consider.

I have seen this tension play out in specific ways in the different courses and programs that I design. How much time do I spend teaching correct English grammar usage, and how much time do I spend helping students to analyze the postcolonial world that equates proper English grammar with intelligence and human value? Or to question the supremacy of English? Or to advocate for a world where no language is more worthy than another and where knowledge of multiple languages is recognized as an incredible gift?

Or, how much time do I dedicate to teaching new teachers the practical skill of how to design and deliver a lesson so that they have something to teach in the upcoming week, and how much time do I spend having them question the broader purpose of education? Or the role that educators play in reinforcing or subverting how our current world determines who is worthy of having knowledge and creating knowledge? Or seeking out indigenous knowledge that western hegemony has undervalued and attempted to destroy? Or figuring out how to empower students themselves to be creators of knowledge?

One place where I find this tension particularly challenging is career readiness. Many believe that the purpose of education is to prepare students to become productive members of the workforce, and education policies and curricula are built around this belief. Students often enter institutions with the expectation that their education will prepare them to build a career. This is a fair expectation, and learning relevant skills should be a part of any education. At my former workplace, we were aware that our success as a new institution would hinge on the ability of our graduates to both find jobs and to build careers. We designed our curriculum to prepare students for the ‘future of work’, meaning the jobs that not only currently exist but the skills we anticipate we will need as technology changes the nature of work. We also spent time teaching students practical skills to help them find a job including resume drafting, interviewing, and networking.

It was at a Career Development session where a student reminded me of the importance of not limiting what we teach to the practical skills needed to survive. I was speaking to a group of incoming first-year students in an online session called “Rethinking Career Choices.'' I gave my usual advice on networking that I didn’t learn until graduate school. I have seen students take these tips to heart and enact them much better than I do myself. I made a passing comment which I meant to be encouraging. I remarked that by attending university, this group of students will be better situated to make connections and build networks than many others. After making the comment, a student sent me a private message. “But is that fair? Why should we have more access than others do?” His comment was a reminder of a choice I had made implicitly when sharing my standard networking advice. I was coaching students to play the game and get ahead in the current system, and trying to build their confidence in their ability to succeed. Yet he was right to question this. The system of access to gainful employment is so massively unjust that it is difficult to know where to begin our analysis, let alone imagine a better one. It is a nightmare reality that we are trying to teach our students to survive, because not knowing how to navigate it is terrifying. I wish it weren’t that way, but it’s not like I can do anything to change it, right?

Actually, not right. I do not want to go through life believing that we will never change unjust systems. And it is not the lesson I want to teach my students. Though they might feel intractable, systems were constructed by humans. Anything that was made can be unmade. And while there is value in teaching survival skills, I don’t ever want to only teach how to survive. In fact, doing this is a risk because not allowing for space to question the unjust status quo leaves many students with the impression that you support it, whether you mean to or not. I want to make sure that all students learn to do what this one student did - to see the system for what it truly is, and question it. Why is it this way? How did we get there? Is it fair? Is it a nightmare reality? If we could create a better world, what would we envision? And the most challenging part: how might we get there?

Though dreaming of a better world sometimes feels like a privilege, I don’t believe that it should be one. And as we are bombarded with evidence of how unjust our world is, so many of us are continually realizing that we need to learn how to dismantle unjust systems and dream and create better ones. Envisioning and building a better world is a practical skill that we all deserve to learn so that we are not powerless in the face of injustice. As an educator, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I might teach this. While I definitely don’t have all the answers for how to make the world a better place or how to teach students to do so, when I design learning experiences, here are three components that I’ve learned to include.

Making the road by walking: Building and Testing

This involves creating opportunities for students to build and create, design projects, test things out, prototype, and experiment. I believe that building, tinkering, and making are some of the best ways to learn. When it comes to changing the world, these are critical skills to practice, and so many different great thinkers support this. Critical Pedagogues call this praxis: putting theory into action and reflecting on our actions. Constructionists (education theorists) point out the need to have concrete experiences and mental models to make connections with when we learn new things. So many great pedagogical methods like experiential education, play-based learning, project-based learning, and service-learning come from this school of thought. Design thinking encourages a bias towards action: ideate potential solutions, design and test prototypes, and learn what works from our successes and failures. And finally, my favorite experts on how to change the world, abolitionist organizers, continually reinforce the importance of building the world that we want through actively testing out different methods and ways of doing things. All of these schools of thought emphasize that you don’t need to have all the answers or all of the expertise before you act because you find answers and build expertise through action. But this does not mean that we ignore the wealth of expertise that already exists, which leads me to the next component.

Seeing the world for what it really is: Analysis and Critique

In order to change unjust systems, you have to understand them. How they came to be, why they came to be, and what sustains them. Students need to learn about and question the systems that we exist in. As educators, we need to model how to read deeply and widely, listen to speeches, watch videos, talk to people, and gain exposure to different perspectives. To find theories that help us to understand our lived experiences. This involves asking all the questions and coaching students to form and ask questions of their own. I think a lot about how to build criticality in my students, so that they don’t automatically believe what someone says just because they say it, but are interested in why they said it, the context that it came from, and what they can learn from it. To change the world we need to know what others have tried and already learned, to learn from their failures, to critique what we don’t agree with, and debate and discuss ideas constantly. And we need to recognize that our version of the world is based on our own contexts and the biases that come with them, so we must seek out divergent and underrepresented thinkers who challenge existing systems. There are risks that we take when we teach. The risk that we might indoctrinate based on our own biases. The risk that utopian dreams become as rigid and hegemonic as our current hierarchies, as so many have done in the past. That is why this step cannot be neglected or undervalued because it prioritizes building our students’ criticality and ability to seek truth for themselves above teaching them what we believe to be true. 

Believing in a Better World: Visioning and Dreaming

This is often the most neglected part of my design and teaching. And honestly, if you are teaching your students how to build and test and analyze and critique then you are already an excellent teacher. So do we really need to worry about teaching how to dream? But learning to envision the world that we want might be the most powerful tool that we have to change it. It can motivate us to continue to build and test when our analysis becomes depressing, as it can when we face the reality of our world. When we know what our dream is, can see it, name it, taste what it might feel like, either in totality or in flashes of realization, then it can serve as our guide. It keeps us from compromising or accepting false solutions that are stopgaps that perpetuate an unjust status quo. We often idolize people who are skilled at envisioning alternate futures, calling them visionaries or great leaders. They may or may not be, depending on what they envision and how they enact it. But dreaming is both a right that everyone deserves to be able to do and a skill that we can all get better at with deliberate practice. I’ve found different techniques that educators can draw upon to help teach this skill, and I’m sure that you and your students can find more. Those familiar with Backward Design have some practice in this skill. The first step (and my favorite) is visioning. You imagine what your students will be able to know, do, and debate once they have completed your course first before designing how they will get there. Futures Thinking also provides mindsets and methods for envisioning and enacting our dreams. Afrofuturism gives us excellent models for how to envision future possibilities while honestly reckoning with brutal realities. And artists are experts at visionary thinking, as are writers of fiction, and we should provide students with opportunities to revel in art and books as much as possible, as well as to analyze and make connections with art and texts that they are already engaging with that are visionary.

I started this piece by explaining a tension, but I’ll end it by questioning that same tension. Questioning binaries is, after all, always a good idea. Perhaps surviving and dreaming do not have to be in opposition. We need to survive and make it to tomorrow so that we can keep dreaming. And dreaming might just be the key to our survival. Our students deserve to learn it all. One of the most skilled visionaries that I know, abolitionist activist Mariame Kaba, provides a compelling framework for transformative visioning that skillfully integrates survival and dreaming. In an interview with the Beyond Prisons podcast, republished in her book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Kaba speaks of hope as a discipline. She explains that hope is not an emotion, nor is it optimism; it is a belief in the potential for change. Change isn’t always for the better, but it is always possible. To practice hope as a discipline is to see the world for what it truly is but to simultaneously believe in the potential for a better future, to dream what the world might be, and to work towards that dream every day. Transformative teaching requires this same discipline. It requires a belief in our students and their potential to grow and to believe the same for ourselves. And it requires hope that the work that we do every day to survive is building towards our collective dreams.

*Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a television series that aired in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is a highly problematic text for many reasons, including the abusive and misogynistic behavior of the show creator. However, I reference it here because it was also a text that, as a teenage girl in the US, I identified with and that shaped me during a formative period of my life.

You must have their hearts

I’m leaving a job that I’ve worked at for the past five and a half years, that has, at times, been all-consuming, in the best and worst of ways. I’ve been reflecting a great deal about my experience and all the things I was able to witness and create. There’s enough to write a book if I were talented or disciplined enough to do so. For the time being, I’m sharing a series of vignettes that I hope illuminate what I’ve learned about education and about myself. 

You must have their hearts

“How can you assess a student, if you can’t even see their humanity?” - Shauna Brown, @teachfortheculture

Something I love most about life is when you have an experience that, in real-time, you are aware will become a milestone that you will look back on as a critical moment. Sometimes it might be a revelatory flash where you realize something profound, sometimes an intense feeling of belonging, and sometimes it is a moment when you witness the culmination of an achievement that you have been a part of. This story is about a time that, for me, was all three.

It was winter in Mauritius, July of 2016 when our initial cohort of 58 undergraduate students completed their first year at our ‘startup university.’ They were about to leave for their internships and they had organized a celebration to commemorate the end of the year. I was a part of a group of staff and teachers who attended the event at one of the student residences. We met in the Sky Room, an open space on the top floor of the building where we had gathered many times before for assemblies, celebrations, and even some classes. That first year, despite being a brief period of time, had been an intense experience. We were all enchanted with and burdened by building something new. We sat in chairs arranged like an amphitheater, and staff and students took turns standing at the front of the space to share memories, reflections, and advice. I remember feeling a bit shy, as I often do in larger groups, but impressed by the power of this community.

One of the teachers I was close with and who was beloved by the students stood and faced the group. What she did blew me away like little else that I have ever experienced in any educational setting. She didn’t share the usual platitudes like telling students how proud of themselves they should be. Instead, she stood there and proceeded to recount her first memorable impression of every single person sitting in the room. She did this for each student, and for each staff member in turn. My memory of the details of what she shared has faded, but I remember waiting with bated breath, nervous but also excited to see if she was actually going to say something about me. She did. I remember how it felt to be recognized, seen, and appreciated for my uniqueness, and to know that everyone in the room had this experience as well. And I knew, at that moment, that I was witnessing evidence of the power of what we had accomplished that past year.

When I first started teaching, a good twelve years prior to this moment, I was 21 years old; too young, and very unprepared. I was closer in age to my middle school students than I was to many of my colleagues. They warned me that it was important to be very strict and to show my students that I was in charge so that they wouldn’t take advantage of me.

“Don’t smile for the first three months, at least” was a common piece of advice that I heard several times. “Especially because you are so young, and a woman. They won’t respect you if you are too nice.”

This was terrible advice, and even an inexperienced teacher like myself knew this as I laughed it off. But the broader message about the importance of control and leveraging power over students stuck in my brain. My ‘boot camp’ teacher training had drilled us in the ‘no excuses’ mantra pushed by the education reform movement I was a part of in the United States. It was by no means a mindset unique to that movement.

I had a miserable first year of teaching as I muddled through trying to force my students into compliance so that they would complete enough of the mountains of work required of them and me to say that they had made ‘significant gains.’ I improved by my second year after realizing that it was astronomically easier to motivate students to do their work if you not only smiled but actively worked to make them like you. Still, I knew that I wanted something beyond their compliance.

By my third year of teaching, a student labelled a troublemaker in some of her classes said something that at the time made me proud. Looking back now, it has proven to be some of the best feedback I ever received about how to teach. “Miss, do you know why I like your class?” she asked. “Why?” I replied, glad to hear her so optimistic. “Because I can tell that you want to be here with us.” “Of course I do,” I said, grinning at her and the rest of her classmates. At that moment, at least, I did.

If I am honest, what she observed wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t want to stay up until midnight every night planning lessons and get up each day before dawn to arrive in time to prep my materials and teach six classes of up to thirty students about US history. I resigned from teaching at the end of that year, exhausted by the grueling conditions public school teachers face and the ever-increasing stress of high-stakes standardized testing. Still, I loved teaching like nothing else I’ve done before or since. Despite the constraints of the system, it was a job where I was not only allowed to love my students wholly and unabashedly but where my love for them made me better at my job. When I resigned, I meant for it to be a break, and I thought that I would return to teaching after a year or two. Yet I didn’t end up teaching in a formal education system again for another seven years, when I found myself in Mauritius, helping to start a university.

In the Sky Room that evening I witnessed a practice that might at face value seem simple to some. A teacher publicly recognizing and validating their students for their uniqueness may not seem profound. But this was not recognition for a favorite few. It was every one of us. How many university professors in this world are actually capable of doing this, let alone take the time to do so? It was an act of radical love. 

The level of intimacy that we had built between the staff, teachers, and that first group of 58 students was precious; a privilege that students and teachers alike seldom get to experience in any type of formal education, let alone at a university. A few staff lived with students at their residences, many of us ate meals together, and staff and students were both completely invested in co-creating an education institution distinct from what we had ever experienced before. It was imperfect and completely unsustainable. We were in over our heads in almost every way. But I am so grateful that I was there to witness that first year. My favorite education theorists are ones who challenge the power dynamic of the teacher and the student and envision education communities that embrace the full humanity of us all, but few of them give you concrete directions for how to enact this. I had never lived what that would truly be like, as a student or a teacher, before that year.

Great teachers know that the ability to see every one of their students as unique, complex human beings is a prerequisite to teaching well. On principle, I believe in the humanity of all people, as a part of my faith and the way that I hope to navigate this world. But it is easy to forget this belief or not always spend the energy needed on every person that I encounter to realize its truth. However, when I teach I have the opportunity to put this belief into practice and see how effective it is in enhancing the learning experience for myself and my students. Even then, it is not easy to do this for every single student. Some might question if it is possible, or worthwhile given the investment that it takes. I know that I have failed many times to reach all of my students and to let each one of them know that they are valuable, capable, and loved. But I know that this is not only a worthy goal but an attainable one because I witnessed it firsthand that evening.