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For many, I suspect this book may be a little bit…light(?) given the context of where education has been over the last fifteen years. It’s somewhat of a shift away from promoting educational standards (more on that momentarily) towards a more humanized approach. You won’t find discussion of Bloom’s Taxonomy or the zone of proximal development in any kind of depth here, but you will see a reconceptualization of the connection between students and their teachers. The design of the book itself aims to ‘slow’ us and help us find joy; each chapter has a colouring book page and a playlist of joyful songs to get us in the right mindset. Heck, the foreword is written by Pharrell Williams (the quintessentially “Happy” guy!). In the foreword, he discusses how teachers can be constellations and sources of light to help students become aware of their genius, recognize their limitlessness, and experience joy at school. This is largely rooted in becoming their best selves. He presents the thesis of the book as follows: “Schools must not only create a joyful ethos, but also sustain it to activate the human spirit” (10). He gives a cosmic flare to the preamble that puts joy as the guiding force of the universe that helps to awaken the genius of each student’s spirit: “if you want to see and believe in the infinite possibilities of education, just look up at the sky, look at nature, look at the goodwill inhumanity, and you will know” (10).
The conception of joy that Muhammad offers, however, is more complex than you might be picturing. It goes beyond simple happiness. In a sidebar, she identifies 10 lessons of joy from historical examples, where joy is “defined by one’s truths, justice, problem-solving, anti-racism, and anti-oppression” (69). Joy is also when we “define abolition as education and education as abolition” or “liberty for all” (69). It is about centering love, music, and art, but also about connecting to justice and criticality (69). Joy is “collective and collaborative” (69). Joy is not a passive feeling; joy is an action—a choice that we can cultivate together. Like other pursuits, joy can change over time (72).
Muhammad’s approach in this text mimics that of Cultivating Genius. She is always in the process of historicizing. For example, she looks back to documents like the New England Primer and challenges their usefulness in schools as a white supremacist document, evaluating it based around the five pursuits. I have to admit, sometimes the historicizing feels like it detracts from what we’re trying to accomplish now. Having a few case studies can be helpful for showing how educational frameworks need to shift, but dwelling in the particulars of what wasn’t working makes it difficult to advance in our actual practice. I have a bit of a bias when it comes to professional learning books; I think they need to offer something tangible and applicable. To be fair, none of this work can be done without reflection, but I wanted to see more praxis: how does this new framework actually look in classrooms today? Providing tools and models, in my opinion, deserved more balance in the text.
That being said, the text is partially rooted in classroom teaching but also has a broader applicability. I could see the value of the text for program leads at the level of the school board or curriculum writers at the board. In one chapter, Muhammad offers a list of problems with curricula and some suggestions for curriculum and instruction that would be well worth exploring at various levels of the educational edifice. She offers suggestions like creating a rubric for curriculum writers to follow, asking publishing companies to conduct random focus groups to test curriculum’s effectiveness, and other large-scale actions that could create a significant difference in the types of instruction that are being done.
One of the common refrains in Unearthing Joy is that we are too focused on skill development and standards, which I think is a hard conception to grapple with when so much of our education system is rooted in that which is measurable. I take some issue with abandoning the notion of ‘standards,’ but Muhammad’s framework successfully reorients towards pursuits. In her words, “Standards have a ceiling or stopping point, while pursuits continue throughout one’s life” (17). In reframing the conversation around educational pursuits, it allows us that flexibility to continue growing, to recognize that we are imperfect, and to allow ourselves to shape and reshape our priorities. The pursuits that she identifies are essentially a repetition of her work from Cultivating Genius: identity development, skills development, intellectual development, criticality, and joy. In practice, I find it somewhat challenging to differentiate between these; specifically, “intellectual development” is about “gaining knowledge that connects to the context of the world where they can apply the skills and standards” (17). To me, if the knowledge connects to the world, we’re into the realm of criticality (“helping students to name, understand, question, and disrupt oppression in the world and within the self, and to make the world a better place” (17). If we’re looking at intellect as opportunities to apply the skills and standards, that fits more into “skills development” in my mind. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that there’s ambiguity between the pursuits if you can embrace a sense of interconnectedness, but I think other instructional frameworks are more intuitive.
I’m not entirely sold, either, on Muhammad’s de-emphasis of skills—though I think we have different conceptions of what skills look like in the classroom. I think back to John Dewey’s educational philosophy in which (I’m paraphrasing) teaching children to use a chainsaw is less helpful than teaching them how a chainsaw operates. Muhammad seems to suggest skills are happening in isolation and its their decontextualization that means they should be de-emphasized. For example, learning phonemes with a text that doesn’t promote other thinking is useless; learning calculation skills is useless when not applied to anything practical or real. I agree that teaching skills abstracted from applicability is not ideal—but that’s also not what I see in classrooms. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think students are learning valuable skills that aren’t separate from criticality. Students learn reading strategies, for example, as a way of challenging harmful messages in the media. So, with that in mind, I think learning transferable skills (the mechanics of a chainsaw) actually has a rightful place as central to our work as teachers, though I grant that we need to help students to make those connections to the real world and center their applicability.
Conversely, I find the framework liberatory in a sense. If you’re in the world of teaching, you know you’re supposed to be everything to everyone all the time. You need to be promoting literacy but also numeracy but also you have to be a mental health professional while also an expert in special education and don’t forget that career pathway planning needs to be brought in. The real benefit of the ‘pursuits’ that Muhammad emphasizes for me is that she explicitly says they’re not going to be present in every lesson. She encourages staff to think about the broader unit and ensure that the pursuits are all present in some capacity somewhere, and that, I think is a real benefit of this framework: you are free to emphasize different things at different types responsively to students.
I alluded earlier to my difficulty with removing our emphasis on ‘standards’. I understand why: “standards are stagnant. They are not created for individual learners, whereas pursuits come from and are designed for the learner” (72). I can appreciate that mindset, but it does pose a serious challenge to our education system: how are we to gather data or measure our effectiveness if standards are no longer the aim? Within this framework, we still hold high expectations for students and we promote rigor, but I’m not yet clear on how to measure whether we’re actually rigorous. At the same time, I think it’s Muhammad that expressed how “rigour without relevance isn’t rigorous” and I really like that conception of what it means to be a strong teacher and student. If we’re not doing things that are meaningful and are just doing hard tasks because they’re hard, then it’s a challenge to justify doing that work at all.
Another framework Muhammad applies is helpful for structuring classes. In talking about culturally responsive and relevant teaching, there are different phases that teachers move through. One is to merely highlight contributions—celeberating a holiday here and there at a surface level. Additive means that there’s supplementary material that speaks to the diversity of our world but it’s an after thought or framed as being a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessary. Transformation is when diverse cultural perspectives and voices reshape our curriculum and ultimately we want to move towards a stage of authentic problem solving in our curricula. That, to me, is a great rubric for thinking about how well teachers are doing in their own work as agents of social change and as cultivators of student genius.
I also appreciate that Muhammad has no patience for the idea of teachers ‘buying in’ to the work. It is not her responsibility to ‘sell’ us the vision of CRRP. If it were, though, I think she offers an incisive commentary for why we should be centering (for example) anti-Black racism. When challenged on the idea of why we should be focusing on Black students, she essentially uses them as a barometer for the success of the system: “if you want to transform a system for everyone, start with the group for which we have not gotten it right the most” (78). She suggests that if we can get it right for the most historically marginalized, it advances education for all, and to me that is a perfectly distilled philosophy for how and why we go about educational reform.
Alongside instruction, assessment needs to change to better align with the identities of students and be responsive to their needs. Again, Muhammad offers a step-by-step process of what we should be doing—getting to know students comes first. Much of what she says in the realm of assessment, in my view, is not completely revolutionary. It involves things like giving students choice to show their understanding in different ways or doing a variety of assessments (diagnostic, formative, etc.) to cultivate skills. All of that has been firmly entrenched in Ontario for decades through the Growing Success document and differentiated instruction. Granted, I’m sure it’s not leveraged as much as it could be (is it ever?), but it makes me curious about what’s happening in the states that this is a revolutionary kind of approach. One thing that I think we still need to work on, which Muhammad would I’m sure agree, is that we need more authentic kinds of assessments with authentic audiences. For example, having students engage in a project to make the school more wheelchair accessible or having students develop a policy idea for ending a racist practice at the municipal level—these would be really meaningful learning experiences that could be assessed in conjunction with community organizations or community members. That’s the kind of action I really want to see grow.
As I mentioned, the ‘practical’ side of things is somewhat lacking. There are a few sample lesson plans, but I don’t think of them as nearly as thorough as they would be in my context. There are unit plans presented as half-pages that give key questions or point-form topics that will address each of the five pursuits, but I wish there was a supplement that had more fleshed-out unit plans than those. One of the common complaints about professional development is that its providers are ‘out of touch.’ My fear in providing such cursory lessons and unit plans is that Unearthing Joy opens itself to that attack. To really see how the framework operates, I think we need to see how it connects with other aspects of lesson planning (connecting to specific expectations in curriculum documents, showing the accommodations that might be needed or the ‘plan B’ lesson for when kids don’t understand yet; I wish I could see some assignment sheets and get a timeline for how these parts all flow into one another). The learning goals and success criteria used as examples, I feel, don’t really match what we’re supposed to do in Ontario. For example, when the success criteria starts “I can learn _____”, to me, that sounds like a learning goal. Success criteria would need to be more precise in how the student knows or demonstrates that they’ve learned it. If the goal is to learn about the underground railroad, for example, perhaps the success criteria is that students can give five examples of significant secret codes and explain why the code system contributed to liberation. It’s a minor gripe, to be sure, but one that felt a little undercooked in the example lessons.
Overall, Unearthing Joy offers a meaningful liberatory philosophy for education, and I really appreciate that about it. I think Muhammad and I are aligned in many ways, but have some differences of opinion of how this looks in practice. As a text, Unearthing Joy could probably restore a bit more balance between the historical / theoretical and the practical application of the framework. There is indeed a lot to unearth here, and it motivates me to be the kind of educator that builds connection with students, transforms education in response to their identities, helps them to find meaningful, authentic joy through social action, and beyond—I just hope that more specific examples of lesson plans and units will emerge to clarify some of the stickier points of the book and show its viability in practice. And if not? Well, then, maybe it’s up to me and my students to make and share those resources.
Joyful reading!
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