RESISTANCE EDUCATION FRAMEWORK
Resistance Education reimagines, dreams up and practices liberatory education for all. This space exists to help move people through what I call a wheel of inquiry; the practice of engaging with our individual and collective relationship to self, others, and the land.
Resistance Education’s Framework is one that honors the legacies of many Black and Indigenous knowledge sharers, educators, and healers. It is consistent throughout all of what I share, understanding that there is always room to shift, grow, and transmute this framework.
To provide an emancipatory space, curriculum, and transformative learning experience I believe in the following practices:
I honor the BlackIndigenous practices of Storytelling: -honoring the legacy, traditions, and culture of African American Folklore
“The most important qualities of our culture are our language and our stories. In oral traditions such as ours, telling stories is how we pass on the history and the teachings of our ancestors. Without these stories, we would have to rely on other people for guidance and information about our past. Teachings in the form of stories are an integral part of our identity as a people and as a nation. If we lose these stories, we will do a disservice to our ancestors – those who gave us the responsibility to keep our culture alive.” (Hanna & Henry, 1995, p. 201) - First Nation Pedagogy Online Project
First Nations Stories
☉ Stories can vary from the sacred to the historical. ☉ Some focus on social, political, and cultural ways.☉ Some are entertaining, even humorous. ☉ Some tell of personal, family, community or an entire nation’s experiences. ☉ Some are “owned” by certain clans or families and can only be told by a member of that group. ☉ Others can be told by anyone who knows them and cares for them. ☉ Stories reflect the perceptions, relationships, beliefs and attitudes of a particular people. - First Nation Pedagogy Online Project
There is a rich tradition throughout Africa of oral storytelling...Oral traditions guide social and human morals, giving people a sense of place and purpose. A storyteller’s tools are not just words, but gestures, singing, facial expressions, body movements and acting to make stories memorable and interesting. Sometimes masks and costumes are used to enhance a performance. -Oral Traditions of West Africa
Oral history is the recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the storyteller’s personal experiences and opinions. It often takes the form of eye-witness account about past
events, but can include folklore, myths, songs and stories passed down over the years by word of mouth. -Oral Traditions of West Africa
I honor the BlackIndigenous practices of Circle Keeping (Space Making):
“ An Indigenous philosophical concept of holism refers to the interrelatedness between the intellectual, spiritual (metaphysical values and beliefs and the Creator), emotional, and physical (body and behaviour/action) realms to form a whole healthy person. The development of holism extends to and is mutually influenced by one’s family, community, band, and nation. The image of a circle is used by many First Nations peoples to symbolize wholeness, completeness, and ultimately wellness. The never-ending circle also forms concentric circles to show both the synergistic influence of and our responsibility toward the generations of ancestors, the generations of today, and the generations yet to come. The animal/human kingdoms, the elements of nature/land, and the Spirit World are an integral part of the concentric circles.”
Example:
“At Congo Square, enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and free Black folx shared the joy of their cultures, of only for a day. Even if they knew pain will follow on Monday morning, Sundays they were using joy, love, and creativity as radical tools for Black expression and healing. Congo Square was a place to heal, recharge, and freedom-dream.” - Abolitionist Teaching by Bettina Love
“I agree that our access to access and the world should not be predicated on desirability or popularity on desirability or popularity or approval of the able-bodied masses - or anyone...When access is centralized at the beginning dream of every action or event, that is radical love.” - Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
“...education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process.” Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
I honor the BlackIndigenous practices of Medicine Sharing:
For thousands of years, traditional indigenous medicine have been used to promote health and wellbeing for millions of Native people who once inhabited this continent. Native diets, ceremonies that greet the seasons and the harvests, and the use of native plants for healing purposes have been used to live to promote health by living in harmony with the earth. - Indigenous Native American Healing Traditions
According to the World Health Organisation traditional medicine/healing is “the sum total of all knowledge and practices, whether explicable or not, used in diagnosing, preventing or eliminating a physical, mental or social disequilibrium and which rely exclusively on past experience and observation handed down from generation to generation, verbally or in writing” and “ health practices, approaches, knowledge, and beliefs incorporating plant, animal and mineral based medicines, spiritual therapies, manual techniques and exercise, applied singular or in combination, to treat, diagnose and prevent illnesses or maintain well-being”...Traditional healing is not a homogenous healing system, but varies from culture to culture and from region to region. It seems to be more established in some countries and regions when compared to others. - M.G. MOKGOBI, Understanding Traditional African Healing
I honor the BlackIndigenous sacredness of Art Making:
“Art that inspires for a better world is rooted in intense design, research, and musings for justice filled with new-world possibilities...Art first lets us see what is possible. It is our blueprint for the world we deserve and the world we are working toward.” - Abolitionist Teaching, Bettina Love
“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Toni Cade Bambara
I honor a BlackIndigenous Queer Technology Freedom Dreaming:
When I think about the word transnational, I do not just think about a global concept but a local one as well. I think about how we, people of color, have been forced to be transnational. How we carry memories of nations inside our bodies. How when we show up in spaces our bodies carry memories. We embody the understanding that, “No one goes anywhere alone, we carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self-soaked in our history, our culture; a memory sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, or the stress of our childhood, of our adolescence…A word for so long attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected—which as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal of risk” (Friere, 1994). Therefore, when we do take risks it is not only us resisting but us healing as well. - Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones
Esther Brown was wild and wayward. She longed for another way of living in the world. She was hungry for enough, for otherwise, for better. She was hungry for beauty. In her case, the aesthetic wasn’t a realm separate and distinct from the daily challenges of survival, rather the aim was to make an art of subsistence, a lyric of being young, poor, gifted, and black. Yet, she did not try to create a poem or song or painting. What she created was Esther Brown. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that. She would celebrate that everyday something had tried to kill her and failed. She would make a beautiful life. What was beauty if not “ the intense sensation of being pulled toward the animating force of life?” - The Anarchy of Colored Girls by Sadiyah Hartman
What is Emancipatory Education?
Resistance Education honors emancipatory education as an educational framework that prioritizes learning as a method to free the mind, body, and spirit from the intrusion of colonial white supremacy. Emancipatory education pushes us towards freedom.
“Abolitionist teaching is built on the radical imagination of collective memories of resistance, trauma, survival, love, joy, and cultural modes of expression and practices that push and expand the fundamental ideas of democracy.” - Abolitionist Teaching, Bettina Love
“Body terrorism is made of both systems and structures, hearts and minds. It is the constant stratification of bodies, placing us into hierarchies where we are valued and denigrated often at the same time, in the same body. Propagating a world of radical self-love is both a practice of individual transformation and a commitment to collective transformation. It is a practice of personal and global thinking, doing, and being. Radical self-love necessitates changed hearts, beginning with our own.” - Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not An Apology