Whisper Love.
By Lizzie Fortin
Careful cutting around an image. Intentional choosing of a colorful background. I apply glue all around the backside and edges and place down the pieces using my knowledge of composition. Each morning, I create a collage in order to keep my creative juices running. Also to keep the title of “artist” in my life. I am a collage artist, taking bits and pieces from other places, putting them together to create something new. When I started teaching, my artistic practices disappeared. I would say I didn’t have time (because I didn’t), I would say I didn’t have inspiration (because I didn’t), I would say I was too tired (because I was). Over time, I realized that all of my excuses were because I wasn’t finding time to create and since I wasn’t creating, I couldn’t be the fullest art teacher I wanted to be. After nine years of teaching elementary school visual art, I moved to teach high school., Fthen four years later, I became an instructional coach. I felt like a fraud trying to teach adolescents and young adults art without my ownan art practice. As I taught, I reminded students that practicing was the only way to get better at something-- when I wasn’t practicing the very thing I wanted to be better at. I had to find the time to create just as I created time for lesson planning; both were equally important. In the quiet of creating each morning, I learned to listen to my own needs, as I learned in the classroom to listen to the young people I worked with.
As an educator, I must live my values in and out of my work day - wholehearted love, justice, and consistency. There are reminders everywhere. Stuck to my water bottle is a Nelson Mandela quote: Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. I see this quote everywhere - in slideshows, on notebooks, on bumpers, and in speeches. How does this feel for such heaviness to be treated so lightly? Should schools have so much pressure and expectation to do it all? What does this have to do with releasing the responsibility and accountability of harm that is inflicted within schools? How is love weaponized within schools rather than creating a softness within?
Reading Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s book The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other, I was surprised at these lines juxtaposed with Mandela’s quote:
We must not expect our schools to be the primary engines for creating a just and healthy society, the primary institutions on which we rely to fix our troubled cultural fabric. If we continue to expand our aspirations for the schools’ role in society, we will inevitably experience disappointment when they won’t meet our expectations, and these disappointments will take root most prominently and vividly in parent-teacher encounters. (Pg.144)
White teachers wield Mandela’s quote because it allows us (throughout this text when I use a collective pronoun I am referring to white educators) to feel like we are regaining power. Eighty-two percent of teachers are like me - white women often diminishing in power through mandates of standardized testing, scripted curriculum, tight timelines, and emotionless evaluations. As we are squeezed tighter and our power is diminisheding even within the white dominant culture, we squeeze the humanity out of our students, looking towards punitive answers, and demonstrating a lovelessness within school. The urgency that is demanded creates that squeeze between what we intend and aspire, and the impact and outcomes we ultimately have.
I stood in front of a room of 5th and 6th graders, mostly Black and Latinx, with disappointment and confusion after hearing the answers to what felt like a simple question, “Do you know who Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was?” While most kids shook their heads no, a kid eagerly responded, “He was the one who freed the slaves!” While other students nodded in agreement. I was in my first month of teaching and this group of Art Club students was going to be participating in a poster contest. I had been living in Massachusetts for two months and the shock of students not knowing about Dr. King seemed an abomination.
In my public middle school in North Carolina, we were taught Dr. King was a peacemaker, a man who led Black folks peacefully into Civil Rights legislation, across a bridge. We filled out worksheets and watched the “I Have a Dream” Speech (although I now realize we were only shown the “I have a dream” part and not the rest of it). We were taught to honor this man without knowing the radical parts, the parts that would make a difference in our lives. I realized that my seemingly better knowledge was not any better but different - we weren’t taught the reality just as my students hadn’t been taught the reality of who Dr. King was. This was my first lesson in listening closely to young people in the classroom, my first lesson in understanding that something that may at first strike me as a deficit of my students is not actually such, and may in fact be a space for growth for myself. Love is listening closely to young people.
11 years later I was teaching in a high school. I had spent the last school year building relationships with young people and colleagues in order to live into my values, especially wholehearted love. J., a Ghanian-American student arrived at 6:15am the day after the 2016 election, eyes wide, concern dripping from his face. I had promised myself I wouldn’t cry in front of the students, knowing the weaponization of white tears on people of color, but when I saw his face, the tears began again. The full realization of what was to come hadn’t occurred to me just yet, but I knew that it wouldn’t be good. He sat next to me at my desk, reminding me of the words I had spoken the day before, “Miss, but you said that the President doesn’t affect our lives that much and that the local government does.” I nodded but said “I think this time it’s going to affect us much more.” His dark eyes lowered as he thought about what this might mean for his family, his life. “What are we going to do?” I took a deep breath and for the first time in my career, I didn’t have an answer for him at that moment. Love isn’t always having the answers.
Education is love- filled - the process of learning something new and getting better. Spaces where curiosity, practice, and mastery occur, are the actualization of love. Watching students improve on the potter’s wheel, moving from a lump of clay into a floppy mess into a bowl that can be filled with a meal is love. M., a Puerto Rican student who was multilingual and was identified as a special education student, was said to throw her weight around in the hallways in middle school when she needed to. She was loud and very funny. Her world, though, was in the hallways where she could push and shove, laugh and banter, and strut her stuff. She was late to my class because her world was out there instead of inside the classroom.
When we begin the unit on clay, students always get so excited about throwing on the wheel. They’ve watched enough videos on youtube and IG and TikTok to have seen some masterful pots being thrown. M. was no different with her excitement and she signed up for the first day of practice. I modeled how to lean forward and center the lump of clay and then how to slowly put your finger inside to create the hole that will eventually become the inside of the bowl. M. watched so closely, but then when she sat at the wheel that first time, like every other first-timer, she created a lump. She wasn’t disappointed by this lump but rather excited. She returned at lunch to throw some more and teach other students how to center the clay on the wheel. I could see her figuring out that the world she had created for herself out in the hallway was coming to life at this wheel. Her confidence from the hallway was transitioning into the classroom where she stood up tall and held herself proud knowing she was the expert wheel thrower in the classroom. She would stand behind students reminding them of getting close to the clay in English and Spanish. I realized from M. that I needed to relinquish control and allow the young people to take the reins of teaching and modeling. Love is following the lead of young people.
The desperate need for love between and among the adults within schools is where I see my work most urgently needed. When I look deeply into my work now as an instructional coach, I realize that the necessity of love is the only way for it to feel like education. C., a white teacher in my school came down to my office at the end of the day. She looked in the glass jar filled with candy and pulled a few pieces of chocolate out. Her lip began to quiver, “Today was so hard, Lizzie.” I sat across from her at the round table that takes up more space than it should in my tiny office. At first she couldn’t explainWe sat and wondered what made the day so hard. We went through the schedule, the lessons, and C.'s amount of sleep. This kind of sleuthing made being a coach feel good to me. We interrogated whether the daysat and talked about the week itself and if it was actually as hard as it felt today or if the fact that it was Thursday of another long week made it feel so hard. She popped the chocolate in her mouth, dried her face off, and thanked me as the bell rang indicating that she had to go to lunch duty. The text came the next day, “Can you meet today?” I replied, “Sure, what time works for you?” We quickly set up a time to meet and I prepared by taking some quick notes and having a few questions prepared - the most important one being, “How are you taking care of yourself?” Coaching is funny that way; the most important questions and conversations aren’t even about teaching or pedagogy, they’re about the person. They get to the heart of the values of the teacher and how to push forward beyond the current obstacle or challenge. When I ask the question, “How are you taking care of yourself?”, everyone has the same initial response, a deep inhale and a pause. People have to pause when I ask this question because it’s almost never asked. My method of coaching wraps a person up as a whole person - I can’t only be interested in their teaching or their curriculum - I care about the whole person as I did as a teacher, as I do as a human. Love is caring deeply.
We must separate school from education - we can no longer confuse the two, the distinction is the involvement of love. Schools, very often, are not places of love, rather quite the opposite. The mandates squeezing teachers squeeze the love out of the system completely. The current separation between instructional coaching and teaching is the absence of love.
As we observe the atrocities that happen “outside” in the world, do we not see that it occurs within our schools and classrooms? This should invite into our psyche the urgency and the importance of the weight that belongs squarely on our shoulders as educators and teachers. We try to believe there is a space between school and the world, as teachers we often intentionally create that space by not talking about racism and violence or by using statements like “In the real world...” In reality, the world and school are one and the same. Our students, teachers, coaches, administration are all living in the overlap. If we continue to frantically try to respond to the world and shift our practice and classrooms without love at the center, we will continue to burnout, die out, and create a “vivid microcosm” of the world at large. The two cannot be separated.
Dreaming beyond what I have currently experienced in school as a student and as an educator means that every day I hold these stories as proof of the future, of what is possible. I can as a human hold these dreams close as I whisper love into the world we create in our classrooms and within our schools. Without practicing each day the things that we are striving for, we are frauds. Make collages, journal, meditate, sing, volunteer. Find a way to practice daily those values you hold close to yourself, especially love as a practice.