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!

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

    

        Oh no. I’m going to have to reread In Search of Lost Time, aren’t I?

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton is an interesting nonfiction project, bordering between biography, self-help, and literary criticism. Some of its key topics are creativity, perception, suffering, and wellness, and I have to say, if not entirely practicable, it’s an entertaining read.

Part of what makes the book so entertaining is Botton’s tone. While his work is informative, the selection and presentation of details is outright funny. For instance, Botton explains how Proust took a job at a library and eventually got fired after five years, since he ultimately only worked about one day a year. The way Botton presents the detail is just a fun pithy approach. Similarly, I couldn’t help but laugh when reading about reviews of Proust’s work. When he started writing In Search of Lost Time, he sent it to friends and publishers and Botton quotes peoples’ indifference and rage comically. One publisher was incensed by a sentence that went on for forty-four lines of text. At least a few complained that after four hundred pages, they had no idea where the book was going (and it’s implied that Proust didn’t either.) One of Proust’s friends sent a letter praising the book for its excellence, and how she continually re-read the passage about his first communion—a part that didn’t exist. Botton also notes the cultural legacy of Proust via a contest that Monty Python hosted where people needed to summarize In Search of Lost Time in fifteen seconds while wearing a bathing suit. I like embracing the absurdity of Proust’s project like that.

It’s not all laughs, of course. Proust dealt with some pretty significant health issues (of which many were skeptical), for instance. Botton outlines Proust’s diet, sleep habits, and digestive problems, and about how his severe allergies limited his life. In a rare moment where Proust is critical of his mother, he says she likes to be his nurse and hates when he is well. Later, Botton outlines the factors leading up to Proust’s death, his refusal to take doctors’ orders, and implies that he essentially brought about his own death. It’s pretty dark.

Aside from the literary biography aspect of the work, the book is branded—even in its title—as a kind of self-help book. I wouldn’t say that the book entirely delivers on that promise. Early in the book, Botton provides an excellent breakdown for reasons for reading in general, using passages from Proust’s books and letters to support the benefits. That catalogue of reasons for reading is beautifully developed and Botton offers some personal commentary that I found touching as a literary work in its own right. He discusses how part of why we read is that we find parallels in our own lives. He talks about how In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator falls in love with Albertine and the narration draws parallels to other figures that he knew. Botton describes the various figures in his own life with whom he sees parallels in Proust’s characters. It’s refreshing to see someone’s personal connections on the page like that; it felt relatable in that respect.

Another section that really stood out to me is the commentary on Proust reading the news. At the time, there were news briefs that offered a quick account of an event. Proust came across one involving a murder and wrote a piece that linked it into a literary tradition, offering sympathy to its characters, and so on. He expanded on the sparse details and really paid close attention to its emotional core. The same principle existed in his letters; his mom pushed him to write more, annoyed that she received only the most cursory details of what time he slept, and so on. There’s an ethos of paying attention and of trying to find non-standard phrases to describe experience. In fact, Proust had a great disdain for bourgeois stock phrases that signalled culture. Instead, he was devoted to the particular and unique. Every rainstorm is different, for example. And all of this from expanding on newspaper details!

If the book delivers on its promise of How Proust Can Change Your Life, it is in this notion of paying attention to the particular. It comes to form a ethical stance towards life, to give nuance to every sensation. Botton returns to a similar idea in the final chapter of the book. He documents the number of people who try to visit key locales in In Search of Lost Time, like Combray or the shop that makes the madeleine that inspired Proust’s reminiscences. Heck, I went to Paris to finish reading In Search of Lost Time. To return to the point, Botton sees this practice as a peril: it is us trying to insert ourselves into books. We are trying to live out the experience of someone else, rather than let ourselves have experiences worth communicating. Botton notes that Proust inspires an ethics of attention where it is the “quality of vision” and not “the object of view.” It isn’t what we’re looking at that matters, it’s how we look at it.

Essentially, the book is a compelling case to be original, caring, perceptive, and responsive to others. I admit that it touched a place in my heart and pulled Proust back to the surface. There is so much humour and tenderness in Proust’s work, his biography, and Botton’s account narration that it makes a compelling case to return to Proust’s oeuvre and really give it the time it deserves.

Happy reading; happy living!

The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher

       Mark Fisher is a force. I have to admire the broad range of his interests and approaches, and in The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher latches onto something more literary than his work about politics or music. The text begins with establishing the distinction between the weird and the eerie, with a large difference being that the “weird” is strange but ultimately explicable whereas the “eerie” has an unusual effect because there is an ontological or epistemic gap. There is some kind of missing knowledge that prevents its comprehensibility. Later, Fisher comments on the grotesque, as well, suggesting that it inspires both laughter and revulsion—the laughable and that which cannot be laughed at as a subset of the weird. The definitions are somewhat useful, somewhat flexible. 

To make the distinction clear, Fisher summarizes and analyzes a range of texts, ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to H.G. Wells to Daphne DuMaurier to Margaret Atwood to the British serial Quatermass, the films of David Lynch, the novel and film Under the Skin and the work of Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan. The book is a wonderfully considered primer for weirdness and eerieness as a concept and, given its refreshing brevity, I can’t help but feel it could have gone even further—in fact, when I finished reading it, I went off to explore some of the media Fisher references, and then I immediately re-read his book and still feel like there’s more to say, especially with respect to posthumanism. For instance, if we are alien to ourselves, if our intentionality is ambiguous, how does that impact our conceptions of agency in any number of realms of our lives?

If you’re interested in discussions of horror, eeriness, alienation, the uncanny, identity, time, and capitalism (capital is eerie in that it does not exist in any substantial way but can produce any number of effects), there’s a lot to discuss here. Fisher is consistently insightful regarding his media selections. From here, I’ll comment on some individual sections and share a few insights. 

I have very limited exposure to H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve read a story or two, but they never really resonated with me. As I have mentioned before, a great critic gives me a fresh perspective or new appreciation for works, and Fisher does just that with Lovecraft. In particular, I really appreciated his commentary on how Lovecraft incorporates actual history and simulated scholarship into his work to create “ontological anomalies.” Fisher notes, for instance, how there are many people who have sought out The Necronomicon in libraries, despite it being a fictional text. Fisher notes that “by treating really existing phenomenon as if they had the same ontological status as his own creations, Lovecraft de-realizes the factual and real-izes the fictional.” I find that such an interesting phenomenon, especially in seeing how it developed into works like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, for example. He also comments on the fragmentary quality of Lovecraft’s references to The Necronomicon as being the core factor in being seen as real, as though the incompleteness gives it its reality effect. It is more real by seeing only the citations, rather than providing a full text. I am fascinated by this reality-effect and “ontological displacement” that gives text their own autonomy from their author. 

Fisher’s characterization of texts often makes me want to read them; for example, Daphne Du Maurier’s story “Don’t Look Now” and H.G. Wells’ “The Door in the Wall” are newly enticing. The latter is compelling since the notion of portals and passageways to other places frequently holds its own power, but Fisher’s remarks about the man who continually sees the door but does not go through it give the story an entrancing quality that encourages me to read it. In a similar vein, Fisher comments on doors and curtains in the work of David Lynch, with particular reference to Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. I have memorable experiences of watching both works, and Inland Empire was a particularly visceral viewing experience, given how sick I already was at the time. When Fisher remarks that Inland Empire is an “ontological rabbit warren,” it re-ignited an interest in the film for me and much of it started to click into place. Is it a coincidence that the climax of the film involves watching rabbits in miniature and weeping to a silent sitcom?

On the topic of Inland Empire, Fisher suggests that people are defined by their spaces. Our identities are unstable because when we enter new places we have new identities, new roles to fulfil. When we go down rabbit holes and become new people, the implications are deeply important, philosophically. This could also be connected to Fisher’s commentary on Freud: the psyche is failures of presence (the unconscious) and failures of absence (the drives “that intercede where our free will should be.”

This discussion of something where there should be nothing and nothing where there should be something gets linked to some compelling readings of Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds” and Christopher Priests novels, with which I am unfamiliar. The discussion of the collapse of time in Daphne Du Maurier’s work gives me another angle from which to analyze her work, which is convenient, given that I have another one of her collections ready on my shelf. I appreciate the doublings (indeed, I’ve read Du Maurier’s double novel The Scapegoat) and the agency that seems to exist beyond our perception where it ought not be. I also appreciate the discussion of echoes in Venice as an eerie effect in Du Maurier.

From a literary standpoint, Fisher also has a knack for pulling texts to the fore that often go unnoticed or that seem, in my mind, to be underappreciated in the academy. For instance, his chapter on Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay and its film adaptation is very intriguing, despite my never having heard of it before. Similarly, the novel and film adaptation Under the Skin get their own chapter. After reading The Weird and the Eerie, I immediately the film version directed by Jonathan Glazer and I thought it was a masterpiece. I’m surprised it is not discussed more often. Fisher gave some angles for considering the film, and going into the film with his views in mind enhanced by viewing without overshadowing the thoughts that came to mind throughout. I was inspired by the eeriness of the film and had a wealth of ideas for essays to come.

When Fisher comments on Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Under the Skin, he offers an astute and engaging observation: the adaptation adds gaps, for instance by removing the interiority of Scarlet Johannson’s character that would need to be integral to the novel. The idea of an addition being an omission is very interesting to me, of course, because a negative becomes a positive in a strange ontological switch. It’s a shame that Mark Fisher is no longer with us; from what I understand about Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Fisher would have found it fascinating and well-worth commentary.

All of this and I didn’t even get to mention the commentary on The Shining as a kind of alien eerie film or Interstellar as being eerie in its deployment of love as a scientific force, despite its risk of seeming facile. The discussion of both films is somewhat against the grain of how  I normally hear the films talked about, which enriches my experience of both what I have seen and what I have not.

In brief, Mark Fisher is insightful and inspires me to read more, view more, and think more. Reading the book twice didn’t even feel like a chore—I felt enriched each time and the book successfully maintained my deep interest in Mark Fisher himself as a thinker. I’ll likely need to report some more on his work very soon.

All the best and happy reading!