Freedom Teaching by Matthew Kincaid

  Matthew Kincaid asks teachers a powerful question: “Do we believe that our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 10% of the time? 20%? 50%? What percentage of racist policy is it okay for a student of colour to have to navigate on a daily basis?”

He follows it up with an even more powerful question: “What percentage of racist / oppressive policies are we comfortable with students existing in on a daily basis? Is the answer still truly zero?”

I find these two question sets highly provocative. For the first set, Kincaid points to the obvious answer: “in an ideal world, [it] would be 0%” while recognizing that “that is not the case.” The second question points to a fundamental disconnect between our ideals and practicality. While our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 100%, nonetheless there’s a level teachers are able to accept for the sake of the system; it’s not complacency, necessarily, but there are a number of engrained practices that go unchallenged for a number of reasons.

This is where Matthew Kincaid’s Freedom Teaching comes in. In the book, Kincaid elucidates a liberatory philosophy that strives to make the educational world a more equitable place. I found the book to be thoughtful and empowering and Kincaid addresses a number of concerns that I am still grappling with, offering a framework within which to work. The book offers a balance between offering principles of freedom teaching while recognizing that the individual context of particular schools will have an impact on how the principles are executed.

Kincaid offers the following five tenets of freedom teaching and the book explores how to achieve these different ambitions:

1. Maintain hope that is radical.

2. It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant.

3. Free minds, free kids.

4. Trouble doesn’t teach.

5. Cultivate a classroom that values cultural wealth.

I think that #1 can be a particular challenge, given the current context in which we exist. The government is underfunding public schools out of existence. Artificial Intelligence systems are eroding our relationship to truth and imposing a hegemonic perspective of so-called reality. Politicians are engaging in corruption with impunity. Social media is sapping the uniqueness of kids. There is a lot to find troubling, so having the first tenant be to maintain hope is both a necessary precondition and the kind of thing that can only be achieved through a leap of faith.

The second tenet, “It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant” hits like a suckerpunch to the gut. I think about all of the so-called rigour I was subjected to as a student, and while I don’t regret it, I do wonder why reading six books instead of four and writing three essays instead of two is seen as “rigour.” The deeper point that Kincaid is making here, to me, is that being “rigorous” (i.e. challenging) for the sake of adding challenge is not the same as being rigorous by delving deeply into content that is truly meaningful to students. Kincaid adds to the discussion with more detail. He sees rigour and investment as working hand in hand: “Students are less likely to engage in rigorous tasks that they are not invested in, and tasks that are rigorous, that don’t promote investment, probably aren’t meaningful tasks.” As much as I hate having to justify the value of English as a discipline, it is worth considering how to get students invested in developing their writing skills. Whether that’s the content or the end-goal, there needs to be some reason for students to get invested. 

In terms of #3 and #4, I think we are in a particularly reactionary climate wherein the response to children misbehaving is to resort to more policing. By freeing students’ minds to explore and question, we enable their ongoing success in navigating and challenging societal structures. All of this also leads towards cultivating a classroom that values cultural wealth, where a teacher’s role is not to impose a particular view of how to best navigate our lives, but instead to co-create with the communities in which we operate. A noble goal, indeed.

Ultimately, these tenets have the goal to “create educational environments that liberate students and in turn enhance their ability to make choices that give them control over critical elements in their lives.” I think it would be uncontroversial to accept this as a worthwhile pursuit. If our education isn’t assisting students towards being agents of change in their own lives, what is our purpose, exactly?

As I mentioned, Kincaid makes the case that “freedom teaching requires investment in both theory and practice.” Indeed, it is “about finding the intersection between theory and practice.” The author gives a caution for the book: “Using this text to provide a theoretical framework without engaging in the practice of employing the techniques likely won’t yield the results you want. Engaging solely in the practices without internalizing the theory also will yield incomplete results.” I think this is one that gets challenging for people in the teaching world. We are all so busy, so exhausted. We want to be told “do this” and we’ll do it and fix the world. But, the work is complex and requires examining how our particular practices need to be thoughtfully adjusted in response to the context. As Kincaid points out, “One of the reasons why anti-racism initiatives in schools fail to gain continued momentum is because people find themselves so deep in the theory that they don’t know how to apply it in a practical setting. On the other hand, there are people who [adopt a] three-step guide on how to achieve equity without fully understanding the deep and nuanced theory that provides the foundation for those practices.” I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, but if I truly reflect, I’m more on the theoretical side and still need practice actually acting.

Here’s the other major piece that I think Kincaid has identified in a particularly poignant way. One of the things I’ve seen is people enacting performative change and taking credit for how much they’ve made a difference—but maybe unjustly so. Kincaid writes that in his work with schools, “one of the most difficult barriers to dismantle is the barrier of performative change.” He makes the case that a school might eliminate a racist policy without replacing it with an anti-racist one. He gives a great example here where “a teacher changes the names on their word problems to be culturally affirming, but doesn’t shift their pedagogical approach in the classroom.” I’ve witnessed this kind of thing first hand. As we work to select books that are culturally affirming (i.e. change the content), we make no adjustments to what we do with those texts: we still impose, generally, a prescriptive structure of how to write, what to write, what to write about—all under the pretense of being “academic” and “objective” without valuing individual student voice. Changing the content without changing the form still serves to replicate the structures that are leading to undeserving students. Kincaid elaborates that “a school district undergoes anti-racism training, but does little to shift the policies that incubate racism.” When this happens, the change is superficial—”the very changes that we are championing can actually just reaffirm the status quo.” I couldn’t begin to list the number of so-called changes that have had this effect. The solution, Kincaid writes, is that “if we are going to invest the time, energy, and resources to freedom teach, we have to be committed to doing it all the way. If we are going to be committed to doing it all the way, we first have to train ourselves to believe in, and hope radically for, change.”

In trying to accomplish a truly revolutionary approach to education, there are a number of limiting beliefs that Kincaid addresses. One thing that I hear from teachers—and society at large—is that students need to be ready for “the real world” (by which, in my view, always seems to mean ‘the workforce’). In this conception of education, the purpose remains to reinforce the structures of capitalism. (Why is it that companies don’t pay to train their own employees, again? Why is it that public funds are being used to train employees for private companies? I digress.) Kincaid reinforces my view about the foolishness of the ‘real world’ as a standard for our practices through a slightly different angle: “I have witnessed the justification of several unjust systems because ‘students have to get ready for the real world.’ What this basically amounts to is exposing young people to traumatic experiences in the name of preparing them to navigate the brokenness in our society.” I think about things like holding students to strict deadlines and then deducting 50% of their mark, for example, if they hand something in a day late. I think about things like forcing students to answer questions in front of the class without time to prepare because ‘that’s how the real world works.’ Underlying these practices is the idea that somehow school is not “the real world,” despite students spending most of their time in our buildings. Schools are “real world” and when we defer to some monolithic conception of the real world in the great beyond after graduation, it automatically renders schools second-class to whatever idea we have of post-school. The other objection is one Kincaid takes up: “Freedom teaching instead views the world as malleable and teaches students that they have a say in the real world that they will both shape and inherit.” Teachers and students shape the world, so we have the freedom to shape the world we want while the students are in school to prepare them for the world they’ll want to create. In Kincaid’s words, “Freedom teaching is about creating schools that reflect the society that we want our students to live in rather than reflecting the society that currently exists. For this reason, this book will speak directly about replacing oppressive systems with liberatory ones and expanding the definition of what we consider to be success to include a culturally sustaining education for all children.” I think this, too, is spot on to how I want to approach teaching as I move forward in my career.

The challenges to Kincaid’s philosophy come in the form of limiting beliefs. He enumerates a range of perspectives that shy away from radical hope and instead instill a pessimism towards liberatory practice:

“This isn’t the real world. We need to prepare students for the real world. Culturally responsive teaching practices aren’t going to raise my test scores. Restorative approaches let students off the hook when they misbehave. All of this work that I am doing to make change isn’t going to amount to anything. I do not have enough power. If only I were the principal or a district administrator. I want to engage parents, but I know what is best for their children.

I think about my other recent read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. In that book, he talks about how youth movements and minor protests are never taken seriously at the time of their enactment, but then lead to the kind of long-term change they seek and we revise our historical memory. I think the same is true here; we could counter these limiting beliefs by taking small actions and moving forward incrementally, even when it seems like it isn’t making a difference.

There’s been discussion in the last few years around the relative merits of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce. Under it, there’s an implicit racist assumption that Black people just aren’t as good as white people at being, say, a pilot (cf. I think an old Charlie Kirk clip, I think?). There’s the suggestion that DEI leads to a lowering of standards, but as Kincaid points out, “The absolute worst thing we can do in the name of anti-racism is to stop challenging our students.” Kincaid recognizes that the United States are far from being a meritocracy, but still points to the ongoing value of hard work, focus, and determination—esepcially for people of colour who want to have “a full array of choices for what they do with their lives.” This is why rigour is still encouraged (as long as it’s relevant). Kincaid notes that “we push our students to engage in rigorous tasks because we believe that they can do them. Consistently lowering rigour just reinforces external messages of inferiority.” Returning to a previous point, though, rigour without purpose—“rigour for rigour’s sake”—”can have the same detrimental effect.” He notes that having students repeatedly do hard things over and over without allowing them to experience success is a recipe for disaster. 

Implicit throughout Freedom Teaching is an asset-based mindset towards students. On the topic of whether students can do hard things (i.e. persevere throughout rigorous tasks), Kincaid notes that

“Our kids do hard things all the time. For some of them, just getting to school on a daily basis is hard. Caring for your younger siblings while your parents work is hard. Navigating the devastating effects of institutional oppression is hard. I don’t know if I ever taught a kid who couldn’t do hard things. In fact, many of my students had done more hard things by the time they were 13 sitting at one of my desks than I did in my entire lifetime.”

I think that’s a really positive note to consider. We are always pushing students for success; it would just be great to have a broader conception of what counts as success as we try to help everyone rise to their potential.

Overall, Freedom Teaching is a great outline of some principles that can help us to guide our teaching practice towards something more liberatory. I hope that we’re at the stage where we can incorporate this work and make significant change. I’d like to guarantee that we’re all that stage, but I know there’s still more work to be done. But we’ll do it. We’ll make it.

Stay optimistic and happy reading!

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

When reading nonfiction, I don’t necessarily have an expectation of stylistic flair. I think of data, of facts, of figures. I think of research that makes the case for how things are and how things need to be done differently. Every once in a while, though, I’m astounded by the power of words as people tell real stories about the world. Such is the case for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad.

Born in Cairo, El Akkad then grew up in Qatar before moving to Canada. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an account of his personal experiences, his work as a journalist and author, and it all runs parallel to his outrage about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I love the balance of the personal and broad focus of the book. Discussing his own history, his concerns for his daughter, and his own personally quandaries with navigating the literary institution, is beautifully rendered. The context for the book, the destruction of Palestine, is rendered with unflinching courage.

Incidentally, there was a quote from the book that really resonated with me. He discussed the images of the starved and dead that are readily available for Palestinians. He gives an account for the images in grim detail and offers a justification for forcing people to look: when we close our eyes, it flexes the muscle to close our eyes and ignore what is happening; when we keep our eyes open, that flexes another muscle—the one that compels us towards action. Apologies that I don’t have the exact quotation (I forgot to take notes, I was so engrossed and read the book in about two sittings). That quotation, if nothing else, is something I will continue forward with in my life. I want to be the kind of person that flexes the muscles that keep my eyes open. That takes action in small ways until it becomes reflex.

I appreciate the candor of Omar El Akkad’s feelings of hopelessness. I think it’s a pervasive feeling right now. We keep advocating, and progress, at the best of times, does not seem to be forthcoming—and, at the worst of times, we seem to be backsliding. El Akkad wrestles with the question: why bother writing? What’s the point. Nothing matters. El Akkad points out, though, how everything seems futile until we can look back and see that it made a difference. Sit-ins during the American Civil Rights movement weren’t seen as being useful in the moment, but long after the fact we look back as though they were an integral stage in the movement. So, the small things we do now are something. I hope.

The book hits home in particular because of my interest in literature. El Akkad is an author, of course, and there are several parts of the book that address his writing career. For instance, he gives an account of his book American War (written before Trump’s first election, published after) being optioned for a film and then being dropped because the actual political landscape shifted. El Akkad also talks about the way the literary institution routinely ignores the plight of Palestine. One example that caught my attention is the brief reference to Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, which is a novelization of the true story of a gang rape and murder of a young Arab girl by Israeli soldiers. Shibli won for the Literaturpreis award but the organizers chose to “postpone” the award ceremony, citing it as a “joint decision” with the author in response to the “war between Israel and Hamas” (El Akkad points out that it wasn’t and that the “postponement” turned into a cancellation). The literary world saw the book and flinched. Closer to home, El Akkad talks about the protest at the Giller Prize dinner where protestors interrupted because of Scotiabank’s stake in Israeli arms manufacturing. El Akkad talks about the invite to attend the dinner; he talks about not going at the last minute; he talks about the lack of reaction, the lack of voices added to the protest, and he wonders how he would have participated. I appreciate how El Akkad is so honest about the challenges of the writing world—everyone is barely scraping by, and the allure of a major award can be truly life changing, but at what cost?

He emphasizes that in order to protest the ongoing genocide, there are several options. One that seems to gain favour is ‘negative’ participation. That is, withdrawing from the game entirely. This means things like arts institutions refusing to accept money from people invested in the Israeli war machine. Corporations and politicians want their names on awards to give themselves legitimacy and a representative response is to just not let them be involved. It seems inconsequential, but, as El Akkad points out again and again—all these minor youth movements seemed inconsequential until their results were achieved.

The way El Akkad uses language is so powerful; I really ought to have taken notes. I can’t speak highly enough of the prose. What made the book even more engaging for me are the familiar historical and cultural touchstones peppered throughout the book. At the personal level, El Akkad talks about being a student at Queen’s, my alma mater, and living in Kingston. He talks about Guantánamo Bay, which was a watershed moment in my political awakening. As an extension, he draws on the story of Omar Khadr, whom I was very lucky to learn about through my grade 12 politics teacher. Reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This provided additional context to my formative years and the way anti-Arab and Islamophobic perceptions infiltrated the Canadian mainstream—incidentally, El Akkad brings together issues intersectionality, discussing the plight of Canada’s Indigenous people as a parallel to the Palestinian experience.

The central conceit of the book is that Western liberalism is ineffectual in standing up to injustice because the privileged will not forgo their own self-interest. No one wants to be vulnerable. No one wants to be accountable. No one wants to risk their own position. While horrible things are happening, Western liberals pay lip service to the idea with sympathetic nods but will fail to take a stand. It’s only when it’s too late to do anything that we will revere those who protested. El Akkad writes that “While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.” The political cache to be gained by looking back and decrying that which we did nothing to prevent is cynical and embarrassing. Denouncing events like the genocide in Gaza become a matter of expedience, we “say the right thing” long after we have any chance to do anything about it.

In a weird way, I find this book inspiring. It calls me out and I think it’s important to acknowledge how little I’m really doing to make an impact on world issues. I also don’t put my own livelihood on the line to take a stand. (There’s a silencing effect, even in education.) It does inspire me to do better and continue to build community around people who will not wait until Palestine has been totally erased from the map and then say, “Yes, that was too bad. I always knew that was bad.”

I really recommend this one. My review doesn’t do it justice and for that I apologize.

Happy reading and resisting.

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

  “The thing about dreams—and, coincidentally, this applies to work as well—is that once the dream ends you can no longer recollect what happened” (97). This truism is from Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, a novel that explores the nature of dreams within late-stage capitalism. Dreams and work, the narrator writes, are unmemorable, though afterward “You feel that something has happened. A vague memory remains. The exhaustion is there. You are changed” (97). Clearly, both dreams and work hold deep significance for us—the dual-meaning of dreams is resonant here—and “the nature of both dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible. We can try our best to explain it, to understand it, to conceptualize it, compartmentalize it, or track it, but the act of dreaming time is stolen and made unreal” (97). Work and dreams are incomprehensible.

So let’s try to comprehend them.

The titular character of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is distinctly unremarkable. He’s a young man, mid-twenties, with an exorbitant amount of debt, very few redeeming qualities, and a total lack of self-awareness. After a long stint of unemployment, he picks up a job at a hotdog stand in the mall—and also a more insidious secret career as a dream auditor. As a dream auditor, his job is to enter people’s nightmares and report on the elements that are most disturbing. He reports these to his superiors, who come and “sanitize” the dreams of the company’s clients. Picture this: you are having a nightmare that involves a mysterious shadow, a grizzly bear, and a bunch of children playing in the park. The auditor comes in and monitors, assessing the psychology of the dream and reports the grizzly bear. The higher-ups come in and suck up the grizzly bear in a vacuum-like hose. The auditor is swept into another dream, another janitorial site.

It gets more complicated. It turns out that the people whose dreams are being sanitized are employees of a company who is paying for the service with the nefarious idea that, by removing their dreams, the employees will be more efficient at work. Late in the book there’s the even darker revelation that all of the sucked-up elements of nightmares are in nightmare boxes in an archive and are being sold off as a second revenue stream for the Kafkaesque company that’s conducting the whole operation.

The premise of the book is pretty engaging, but I wish it went a little further. There are a lot of elements at play, some of which are really engaging, but I was expecting a little more variation. For instance, Abernathy’s direct supervisor, Kai, keeps appearing to sanitize the dreams and expels Abernathy from the site. Their relationship has some tenderness built in, but there are too many scenes where Abernathy says something stupid or insensitive, Kai expels him from the dream, and Abernathy longs to talk it out with her. Once or twice is fine, but I was expecting some more development there—even the revelations of Kai’s true backstory left things a little bit lacking. Similarly, Abernathy enters the same dreams repeatedly. There’s a narrative purpose for that, but with the premise of being a dream investigator has so much potential—you can do anything, so having recycled elements seems a bit flat. I kept waiting for an escalation that didn’t quite deliver. In one part, Abernathy works his way into middle management and discovers the conspiratorial nature of the organization from his boss, whom he knows in real life as a total prick. The revelation of what they’re doing is haunting, and the consequences are worse than Abernathy could have imagined. I’m being intentionally vague. But, even at the climax of the book, the conflicts seem to get resolved with, essentially, not a hitch. I was waiting for a big burst, but it didn’t really play out.

The book, at its core, is also a kind of love story. Abernathy is falls in love with his neighbour Rhoda, who is an older single mom with a daughter named Timmy. Both Abernathy and Rhoda are awkward with one another and can’t quite bring themselves together. One night, though, they bond and

He looks into his wineglass (a coffee mug) for a moment. He is suddenly overcome by a sweeping wave of feeling that he can’t quite put his finger on. Like he is going to cry out  of sadness, but not really out of sadness, actually, more like out of the inconceivability of life. Like life is an infinity of beauty, and he is only just now realizing it. Except, in realizing it, the beauty and the happiness are suddenly hurting him.
This is the first time Abernathy has ever been happy in love, which means that he is realizing, for the first time, that this type of happiness must end. It is a bittersweet feeling, holding both truths at once. (159)

It’s a simple exploration of a feeling but I think it really works. The balance of sadness and elation rings true—I, too, sometimes think about how the world is full of such infinite beauty that you can’t help but be crushed by it.

McGhee makes use of an allegorical, sometimes aphoristic style. She writes, almost, “from the beyond.” The omniscience of the narrator tells us early on that Abernathy only has a few years to live, for instance. There’s a playful style that points to the disconnect of characters’ experiences and their realities, there are interjections that read kind of like Ron Howard’s narrations in Arrested Development: Abernathy was about to have the best day of his life “...but really he wasn’t.” The book is framed on the cover as “riotously funny,” and I think I have a misplaced sense of sympathy because I mostly just feel bad for the characters. It’s like a dull ache watching their lives so drained of energy and life.

One of the most impactful moments for me was when Rhoda reveals the truth that governs her nightmares. She has a recurring dream of crawling across her driveway, not being able to reach her door, and her ex-husband arrives in his truck. I can imagine the dream pretty vividly and the terror it would inspire. Partway through the book, Rhoda reveals that she had two children. She describes how her father always used to say that deaths come in three. She tells Abernathy about deaths she witnessed and then the tragic story of her son eating mushrooms in the yard, being allergic, and dying while she was caring for her younger child. She narrates as follows, and the conclusion is such a great tragic intrusive thought almost as impactful as the mid-point of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust:

“When I walked into the yard,” she says, “and I saw him I called the ambulance. I called Derek and I said come home. Come home now. But it was too late. I knew it was too late. His face wasn’t — wasn’t moving. I went to go get, I went to go get Timmy. And we all sat together to wait. I held him in my lap. His perfect face. All three of us together. We were all together. All three of us were together but all I could hear in my head was my dad. He was just saying it over and over again. ‘What did you expect? At least now we’re free of it.’ I thought that. At least now we’re free of it. I thought that about my own son.” (200).

Following this harrowing account of her experiences, Abernathy, the coward, abandons Rhoda. At the height of Abernathy’s cynicism, he starts sanitizing all elements of dreams, sucking up the dreams wholesale. As it turns out, people’s memories are tied to their dreams and he starts creating zombies with no connections to the real world: just what companies wanted to achieve. He realizes too late how the banality of evil has crept into his life and makes a last desperate attempt to repair his relationship with Rhoda, which has a tender, if heartbreaking, turn.

Overall, the novel has a number of things going for it. It’s good, but not great. As I mentioned, I just wanted it to have some more escalation. I needed McGhee to give it a bigger push, to take some more wild risks, in order to give the book some more rich layering. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind has a lot of things going for it in terms of premise and social critique. If you’re into a magical realism Kafka / David Foster Wallace, it’s worth picking up. If you want an all-out dreamscape, you might turn your attention elsewhere—or fall asleep.

Happy reading!