Thursday 🇵🇸 Reflections

Reflections on Day 258 of genocide

On Sunday, I graduated from Stanford University with a Masters in Education.

Initially, I was not going to attend the large commencement ceremony because I did not want to wake up early and stand in the hot sun to listen to Melinda Gates yabber about neoliberalism. However, when I heard that there was going to be a protest, I joined the appropriate signal chats and did my best to help organize as many graduates from my teacher education program to first attend the university-wide commencement and second walk out to attend the “People’s Commencement.” While the act was more symbolic than material, it felt good to use the power and privilege vested in me with my Stanford degree to make a statement to President “blood on his hands” Saller. The best part of the walkout was walking with my partner and mom to the alternative people’s commencement and hearing from encampment/sit-in organizers, Faculty for Justice in Palestine and students who are from Gaza.

This summer, I have the privilege and responsibility to lead a church school class at my church on Palestine. As the school year as wound down, I have been using some of the skills and knowledge gained through my teaching program in preparation for this church school class. A couple of weeks ago, I started to add a What I’m reading/listening to this week: section at the bottom of this newsletter. I read a lot, and in part, I am able to make sense of what I am reading because I have been trained in and developed frames for making sense of readings. In the teaching social science world, I have strong analysis skills that are used to interpret and make claims based on primary and secondary source documents. But where did those fames come from? How did I learn to read critically? How do we (as teachers) help develop critical analysis tools with our students (or community if we are organizers)?

These questions take on more significance in the current context of extreme anti-Palestinian/pro-Zionist bias in the agenda-setting media as well as in educational institutions around the country, but I am grateful to the teachers and professors in my life who have given me analytical tools to make sense of the world. When I listen to “The East is a Podcast” or listen to KPFA I am an active listener. I can listen and understand because I have a critical literacy that is a gift from all of the various people in my life that have poured knowledge into me over the years. Some of that knowledge is what history teachers might call “content knowledge” or facts/figures/names/dates/places. I also have analytical tools and frames to make sense and categorize information that have come from professors and teachers and writers. Last but not least, I also make sense of things through emotional knowledge and the experiences I have had in various communities in San Francisco and Santa Barbara. An important lesson I have learned this past year as a teacher, and also in life, is that everyone brings makes sense of the world through their own life experience, analytical frames and content knowledge. I come from a tradition that believes that each person is created beautiful and so their unique knowledge has value and should be shared from and learned from. In particular, the knowledge of the oppressed has a special value as it paints a way toward a world where all people are liberated.

As teachers who have a interest and commitment to liberation, our task is to help students develop their own critical knowledge, with the hope that their critical consciousness will shape them to take action for justice. While others more interested in philosophy and critical theory can debate whether or not concientization comes from material conditions or education, I will turn to the nuts and bolts of teaching as I am working on the upcoming church school class.

One key take-away from my year of elite education was the idea of backwards planning. In the process of backwards planning, you start with your learning goals and then consider what vocabulary, analytical frames and skills, and historical content students need in order to meet those learning goals.

The new/reformed method of teaching history involves the idea of “inquiry.” In an inquiry, “do” the discipline of history by being given historical documents, analytical tools and a central question and are told to figure it out. This method is more student-centered because students are not expected to just read and memorize, but puzzle and analyze. It also supports highlighting and celebrating the various knowledges present in a community. Where teachers have power (and the ability to challenge hegemonic and oppressive histories) is that they get to “shape where the question marks are placed” (shout out my curriculum and instruction professor for that one). Teacher committed to liberation not interested in question marks that legitimate oppressive political ideologies (like zionism), but instead desire to placing question marks that help our communities make sense of the causes and impacts of oppression so that it can be undone.

In an inquiry students need more than just a “central historical question” they also need analytical tools to make sense of historical documents. This is a area of growth for me as a history teacher that came up in a conversation with my cooperating teacher this year. She noticed that I can understand the day-to-day lesson plans and activities and have clear big picture objectives, but also encouraged me to consider and develop analytical frames that helped to bridge the gap for students between the activities and unit learning objectives.

In the last week before the end of the fall 2023 semester, there was a gap and I chose to fill that gap with a mini-series on Palestine. If we are to apply Zinn’s the idea of “history from below” (an idea in line with Christian doctrines of centering the ’least of these’) to make sense of Palestine, it was critical that the analytical frames that shaped the mini-unit were Palestinian. After reading a bunch of Edward Said, I chose to use his ideas of “accumulation” and “displacement” as the analytical keys for my students.

In short, effective political ideas like Zionism need to be examined historically … as practical systems for accumulation (of power, land, ideological legitimacy) and displacement (of people, other ideas, prior legitimacy)

- Edward Said, Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, 1979

Today, when thinking about the church school class, I am following the lead of Palestinian Theologian Mitri Raheb, who cuts through the noise of ’eternal religious conflict’ by naming Israel as what it is: a setter colony.

The framework of “conflict” is misleading to say the least. Even the description of the situation as occupation is inaccurate because, despite Palestine’s history, the situation over the past one hundred years cannot be described as occupation. There is a dire need for a new framework and a paradigm shift. This chapter argues that the situation prevailing in Palestine since the Balfour Declaration is one of settler colonialism.

- Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 2023

Settler Colonialism then becomes the analytical frame by which to make sense of the situation in Palestine both currently and historically. Now that a frame has been set, the work of placing question marks can begin.

Through question asking we get to bear witness to the gifts of each individuals experience and spirit as the community wrestles to find answers. My hope is that this process also raises questions about our own position and culpability in the ongoing settler colonial regime and genocide in Palestine and drives us to action to undo injustice.

As the Israeli settler entity continues to commit massacre after massacre, destroying more than half of all buildings in the Gaza strip, it is tempting to despair. It is especially tempting when the mainstream (and even at times alternative) media only depict suffering and loss. However, as someone who’s taxes paid for bombs that have killed 37,000+ people, I am not sure that despair is productive or appropriate. I have been grateful in the past couple of weeks for journalists like Nora Barrows-Friedman who “highlight the resilience, joy and determination of the Palestinian people.” In the face of an extermination and displacement campaign, the echoes of the following tweet are palpable: “I’m still alive.”

Where there is life there is struggle, and where there is struggle there is the discipline of hope. Until next week, B.

What I’m reading/listening to this week: