A UCW Zine

there'shope

A UCW zine

-NAS

Theworldis yours

WHERE I'M COMING FROM?

Growing up on Chicago's Southside, my school UCW(UChicago Charter Woodlawn) provided a safe space to create life-long relationships, gave me opportunities to grow intellectually and professionally, and taught me to embrace my black culture.

UCW was a predominantly Black School and many of my teachers taught in ways that reflected my experiences and histories, and engaged families. As administrations changed the school slowly shifted as many experienced teachers left for better opportunities. As UCW slowly lost its afrocentric culture, disinterests began to grow in school impacting attendance, grades, and school climate. Ultimately, the school also became more punitive, and dehumanizing. As I graduated in 2019 another administration change occurred, and UCW began to grow back into a healthy black educational space.

As I graduated in 2019, UCW went through another administrative change and began to move towards becoming a healthy black educational space. While in college, I heard news of protests at UCW because their principal was leaving because of tensions with the board, and charter school administrators. The school began to decline again as instability grew.

WHERE I'M COMING FROM?

While witnessing all of this change, I began to realize that teachers, students, and administrators are the life of schools and work together to promote a healthy school ecology. The educational environment that I grew up in allowed me to foster strong skills that would help me out so much later in life.While UCW was going through building, pedagogy, staff, and cultural changes I found myself disillusioned with my education, so I set out to take control of my education. As a student leader I was able to fight for more student engagement, and as students we were ultimately able to challenge many administrative policies and fought to bring the culture back to UCW.

Despite the oppressive and carceral system that I found myself in I was able to work with my community to promote classroom change. As a futurists, abolitionists, and hip-hop educator, I set out to learn what practices contribute to an education that approaches every student individually, fully, and compassionately. I am eternally grateful to the teachers, counselors, and mentors at UCW that fought for humanization, harm reduction, and community control. I will continue their legacy by giving all my students the resources to actualize their dreams.

Bettina L. love

"We must struggle together not only to reimagine schools but to build new schools that we are taught to believe are impossible: schools based on intersectional justice, antiracism, love, healing, and joy."

THE Dilemma

The dominant narrative around schooling today situates schooling as a place for educational development, and social uplift. However, this educational attainment and personal growth often come at the expense of the knowledge and history of oppressed groups like black, indigenous, and non-English speaking individuals. This zine attempts to reimagine education with the understanding that learning should be exciting,engaging, culturally sustaining, and according to bell hooks sometimes even “fun.”

As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitem ent is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. -bell hooks-

"About 7 in 10 current high schoolers reported feeling bored in schools at least some of the time, with about 30 percent saying they felt bored all or most of the time."

- the 74, non-profit news org.

Students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds occupy more than half of the educational system, yet many school policies and practices are not friendly to families, and many school curriculums do not use students funds of knowledge to create curricula.

'20

I think my class just got the wrong end of the stick. We lost all of our teachers and it seemed like everyone stopped caring, especially during COVID. I remember the old UCW and it was somewhere we actually enjoyed coming everyday. I used to be on student government too, and we actually had more student opportunities.

Jasmine Johnson, UCW

David Stovall

...majority of public education was never meant to “educate” the masses. Instead, “schooling” is largely a system that rewards order and rote compliance with whatever authority delivers as instruction. Education, as a space where people are allowed to think and create, is often challenged as too incendiary to the process of creating a docile and compliant citizenry. -"Schools suck, but they're supposed to" (2016)

I Honestly Feel Like UCW Got Me To Where Iam Now As A Person, Yes They We’re Strict And Some Teachers Harder Than Others But They Only Wanted What Was Best For You, I Met Some Of The Most Amazing Teachers There When I Was Giving Up On Myself They Believed In Me. They also sent me to Jail Almost Every Week They Was On Bs Add That -Kasarah Siller, UCW Middle School

It was a very communal experience. The staff and students felt more like family than anything. To this day I can reach out to an older teacher without missing a beat.

-Kennede Coleman, UCW High School '19

Dead Prez, "They School"

Despite the influx of zerotolerance policy, anti-black curricula and culture, there is still hope. Students, teachers, and administrators can promote ham reduction and incarceration prevention through working to make schools more reflective of students lives and knowledges. Many eductional sch

We still here!

Scholars like Bettina Love, Crystal Laura, and Gloria LadsonBillings have long questioned the limits and opportunities of a liberatory education for black students within the public education system, and there have been many who provide strategies and more humanizing approaches to education. This involves getting to know your students, utilizing their knowledges, and utilizing their culture in pedagogy and classroom culture.

And they ain't teachin' us nuthin' related to Solvin' our own problems, knowhatimsayin'?

Keep ya head up

Many abolitionists and social justice educators have created strategies to help mitigate the daily lived oppression of black and brown students, so What are they? What liberating strategies have been created that recognize the humanity and funds of knowledge of oppressed communities? How have black and brown educator mitigate the dehumanization and harm of the public school system?

Subtractive Schooling

Professor Angela Valenzuela argues that schooling subtracts resources from youth in her book Subtractive Schooling Valenzuela argues to generational decline in educational achievement for Mexican immigrant and Mexican American families is due to the subtractive schooling.

"The subtractive nature of schooling virtually assures that students who begin the year with only small reserves of skills, as do most regulartrack, U.S.-born youth, will not succeed; and conversely, those who come with more positive orientations or greater skills, as do Mexico-born students, are better equipped to offset the more debilitating aspects of schooling.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

In 2014 CRT educational scholar, Gloria LadsonBillings, revisited her article on culturally relevant pedagogy to innovate and move towards culturally sustaining pedagogy. According to Billings, "...teachers undertaking culturally informed pedagogies take on the dual responsibility of external performance assessments as well as community- and student-driven learning. The real beauty of from a culturally sustaining pedagogy is its ability to meet both demands without diminishing either." Billings argues that hip-hop and spoken word are pedagogical tools and practices that aid in sustaining culturally relevance, and engaging student and community knowledge.

The 5 E's of Emancipatory Pedagogy

Educator Laurence Tan created a learning approach for teaching inner-city youth called the5 E's of emancipatory education that are useful for educator attempting to humanize in a system that degrades black and brown, and non-english speaking students. "Ultimately, the goal is to have students use the critical academic skills that they develop in the classroom to create change outside of the classroom."

Engage: Building Trust, Respect, and Buy-In with Students, Families, and Communities

Educate: Developing Academic and Critical Competencies

To increase personal and academic self-sufficiency in students, educators must develop two sets of skills in students: (1) the foundational skills for academic competencies, and (2) the critical skills that allow students to analyze society and what they can do to make it more democratic and socially just.

Experience: From Exposure to Lived Experience effective teaching exposes students to different models of social possibility that exist beyond the classroom, school, and local community.

Empowerment of Self: Knowing That There Is Hope To develop students' knowledge of self and sense of self-worth, my pedagogy focuses heavily on communicating to my students that they are genuinely accepted and cared for in our class.

Enact: What Are You Going to Do About It?

Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people.

- Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Sometimes, it was challenging to introduce new ideas to students and families, but it was always worth it. The culture was rich. People were proud of their school and proud of where they came from. My experience was magical because of it’s beautiful, boundless Blackness. All of my students were Black. My boss was Black. Their boss was Black. That is not common, especially in the education field.

King Collier, UCW '19(middlE)

UCW would forever have a special part of me mainly because of the support they gave durning unfortunate circumstances in my life. Some teachers turned into family, some turned into mentors. Most of all my experience at the school was amazing.

Will Torres, Former Director of the College Graduation Office (left)

Although COVID prevented me from having the full high school experience, UCW provided me the environment to grow up, mature, and shape into the person I am. Of course it has its downfalls and things that could be better, but I formed lifelong relationships and friendships, and took lessons from it that i will never forget

Noelani Taylor, UCW '20

aN ode to The w

Sources

Dead Prez. They School. CD. Loud Records, 1998.

Freire, Paulo, Myra Bergman Ramos, Donaldo P. Macedo, and Ira Shor. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 2014.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the Remix.” Harvard Educational Review 84, no. 1 (2014): 74–84. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751.

LOVE, BETTINA. We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. S.l.: BEACON, 2020.

Nas, Kid Capri, Ginuwine, Olu Dara, Quan, and Diddy. The Essential Nas. CD, n.d.

Stovall, David. “Schools Suck, but They're Supposed to: Schooling, Incarceration and the Future of Education.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13, no. 1 (2016): 20–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2016.1138252.

Stringer, Kate. “Bored in Class: A National Survey Finds Nearly 1 in 3 Teens Are Bored 'Most or All of the Time' in School, and a Majority Report High Levels of Stress.” The 74. Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.the74million.org/bored-in-class-a-national-survey-findsnearly-1-in-3-teens-are-bored-most-or-all-of-the-time-in-school-and-amajority-report-high-levels-of-stress/.

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: Issues of Caring in Education of U.S.-Mexican Youth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.