Dear Sophia,
I hope that I am not overstepping my bounds, as I share some thoughts on this frigid day - January 20, 2025. Thank you for entrusting me with your thoughts - your writing.
It is fascinating to me how ideas converge, lives intersect, and connections continue developing across people, places, and time. While reading your writing, “The Urgent Need for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in K-12 Education”, I was inspired by your passion and courage to pursue a topic that has been squashed in the limelight of today’s political leaders and climate.
After responding to your piece, I turned my attention to the book I had just begun reading, Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Liberatory Approach to Literacy Learning in All Classrooms (Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen, 2024), which I had recently been given to consider for this summer’s NWPNET Writing Institute. Although I am still just reading the introduction, I am excited about the promise of this book may offer as a text to support our work as advocates for equity and justice in our schools.
This morning, as I set out to start the day, I found an article in my emails as a New York Times subscriber. In the article, Tressie McMillian Cottom (2025) talks about Michelle Obama’s intentional absence from the inaugural ceremonies in relationship to Inauguration Day also occurring on a national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. legacy. Her opinion piece, “Left Unresolved, the Inherent Conflicts of Democracy will Produce its Extremes”, made me think about convergence and complexity thinking.
Is it coincidence that I am reading these works in a short 24 hour span of time? Perhaps it is a message - a message to stay the course - to applaud your courage and pursuit for vision for equity in education, for me to continue teaching about cultural relevancy in my courses, and that despite this country’s current turn toward anti-equity despotism, I still believe that because we are not alone in the pursuit of equity for all students in our schools; there is hope. The scholarship exists. Research and writing must continue. Cottom writes about anomie and self-care. The dream to eradicate poverty and provide equitable education for Black and other underserved student groups will endure as long as we stay the course.
I don’t suppose that it is a coincidence that these three reading moments converged. The main ideas overlap and resonate because we live in a complex adaptive system. The agents in this system may be unpredictable and turbulence in the system innately seeks coherence. In a definition I found online, Plesk (2001) writes that “A complex adaptive system (CAS) is a collection of individual agents that have the freedom to act in ways that are not always predictable and whose actions are interconnected such that one agent's actions changes”. Therefore, setbacks in the system may occur. Yet, in the natural course of turbulence, implosion of faulty networks will inspire new directions in the system. It would be overly trite to simply say, this too shall pass, as I’ve often been told. Instead, let us stay the course, repose, regroup, and reframe our thinking to reconsider the next wise action (Eoyang & Hollday, 2013; HSD).
Cottom discusses anomie which is our network of like-minded people. We must exercise self-care if we are to find our flow. Sophie, you write about the urgent need for culturally relevant teaching (which isn’t new), but the fact that you define it as urgent, suggests that little has changed, in spite of scholarship documenting the problem and resolutions. To draw from Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen’s book, I believe that we may be experiencing a temporary state of wobble. Perhaps Obama’s absence from at Inauguration Day today is more than a protest, but a reminder to us to identify our next wise action; to reposition ourselves to continue the work that Martin Luther King Jr. stood and died for. This reminds me of the title of my blog that I started while I was a doctoral student, “Imperfect Inquiry” which I should consider reviving. A former professor once told me that “imperfect means unfinished or incomplete” - So I wonder what powerful questions should we ask to inform our next wise action?
Thank you for your inspiration. Stay warm and stay the course,
Dr. Slay
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