How to Include Social Justice in the Classroom with Corrie & Rabia
One of the most important things you can do is to help your students become critical thinkers. Part of this involves teaching them about social justice and encouraging them to question the status quo.
All too often, social injustices go unnoticed and unchallenged. But by bringing social justice into the classroom, you can empower your students to stand up for what's right. By discussing controversial topics and exploring different perspectives, you can help your students develop the skills they need to become compassionate and effective advocates for social change. In a world that is increasingly divided, the ability to think critically about social issues is more important than ever before.
In this episode, I interviewed Corrie from The Tiny Activist and Rabia from Rabia Reads on how to bring social justice into the classroom and how you can do it too.
Hanna (00:02): Welcome to another episode of the “My Literacy Space” podcast. I am so excited to be able to talk to my friends Corrie, also known as Coco, and Rabia. Coco is from “The Tiny Activist” you can find her on Instagram. Rabia, you can find on Instagram as well at “Rabia Reads.” Welcome friends. Thank you for coming today. Why don't you just give a little introduction of yourself and a little bit about your platform and what you are passionate about? So, Corrie, why don't we start with you?
Corrie (00:32): Sure. Hi everyone. My name is Corrie. My pronouns are she/they-either one is fine. I do a lot on social media surrounding both biographies of marginalized and racialized folks, as well as books that celebrate joy and amplify all the diverse lived experiences that are in our awesome and weird and wonderful world. I think that about covers it. I do some professional development stuff for teachers. I just really love teaching and reading.
Hanna (01:05): I first met Corrie through the Bookstagang in 2020. I met you when we were doing the best of the 2020 list. Then last year we did The Best of the 2021 list. Talk a little bit about your involvement with the Bookstagang as well, and all those kinds of wonderful things when we are talking about books with people.
Corrie (01:26): Yes, absolutely. The Bookstagang is what I like to lovingly refer to as the unionization of books to grammar by our marvelous friend, Alessandra, who runs “Read with River.” She developed a Guild for Book reviewers so that we can trade information to make sure that all of us are treated equally. So that some folks are not falling through the cracks, I guess I would say. The “Best of” list was a scheme that started in 2019. It is a group of judges, last year there were fifteen. In previous years there has been a slightly different amount. Publishers send the judges what they feel are the best books that came out in that year. Then we all vote on them and release the list of the best books that got published the previous year.
Hanna (02:27): It has been an amazing way to discover brand new texts that I have never seen before, and also to have a rich conversation with the judges. People coming from their own experiences have been able to speak into a book and I have taken it to heart because that is not my lived experience. I need to learn to listen to the people that it is their lived experience and see this book through their perspective and learn. We have talked about times when books are windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Being able to have those conversations in a group of people, which I hope today will give us another sort of scope and a perspective, always learning and unlearning things that we have been exposed to. Learning about the biases that we already have ingrained in us. So, Rabia, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Rabia (3:24): Thank you so much. It was so nice to just listen to that introduction. It was so beautiful. My name is Rabia. My pronouns are she and her. Currently, I am a teacher in Toronto- an elementary teacher in Toronto. I am also a first-year Ph.D. student. I guess what I am passionate about is bringing equity and social justice theory to practice, particularly at the elementary age. The early years are foundational in learning how to build a strong sense of self, as well as learning about people and folks who might be different from you in authentic ways. I am passionate about the early years. One of the ways that I strive to do this work of bringing equity theory to practice is through picture books, stories, and books. Like Corrie, I am very passionate about centering voices that are often marginalized, who have historically been silenced and erased because of oppressive structures. A lot of my work is centered and showing these beautiful books, and how they can be used and embedded in the curriculum so that social justice and equity work are not separate, but how we do things in the classroom and at home. I am passionate about that. My social media platforms, I hope, would convey that- just sharing those resources and sharing ideas. Educators want to engage in this work, but they might not know where to start. I think through books, if we can share books, like the beautiful books that are out there, show how we are using them in the classroom, we can build community solidarity. Do our part to work towards a more inclusive and fairer world. I hope that is some of the work that I can do for my platforms.
Hanna (5:32): Oh, I am so glad you are here. One of the phrases that I just picked out right away, and I hope the audience does too, is that it is embedded into the curriculum. It is not like it's a separate sort of, and now we will talk about this and now we'll get back to the, it is sort of two streams. It can absolutely be embedded into what we are already talking about. I love as well, the thought of picture books having that kind of power. I think authors and illustrators do not always think about how powerful their words are and how powerful those illustrations are to be inclusive and to tell the stories. Corey, you touched on something about also including joy. Black history month in February has often talked about the serious connotations in its history of it - which needs to be told. We need to understand that history, but also celebrate the black joy in those pieces and find books that really celebrate. It is not that we are forgetting those I love that kind of holding both sides of the story. So how did you two connect? Because I only in the last little bit of time connected with Rabia. I wondered how the two of you, are in very different spaces of the world geographically. So, I am in Calgary, Rabia is in Toronto, and you are in Massachusetts. We are just all over the place. So how did you connect?
Corrie (7:37): Instagram? Yes, we started following each other right around the time that I started the Instagram account back in 2018. I would say in the last year and a half Rabia, we started chatting and talking and working on things together, which, yeah, you're in Toronto, but I think I could probably drive just like straight up. Four hours and end up at your house. So, watch out just kidding.
Rabia (8:27): I would the same. Instagram was really the platform that brought us together. I remember even before we really connected by speaking to each other or messaging each other, I was drawn to the work that Corrie was doing because of how the platform, “The Tiny Activist,” was really centering on all these beautiful stories. I love that there was such a big following because it showed me that so many different people and stakeholders, whether it was families, teachers, or publishers, were following. I felt happy because I have always believed in and loved, and I am trying to do this work too. The platform is really getting out there. People are listening, they are liking the stuff and they want to do this, they want to bring it into their classroom or their home. I was always drawn to the work that “The Tiny Activist” was doing.
Rabia (8:27): I always really loved the books that Corrie was highlighting and centering. It was just something beautiful to see. And I loved that it was very active. Corrie was updating things on a regular basis, which I think is important. It provides that consistency and “The Tiny Activist” became this place where I was also going to learn more. It was kind of one of the places that I would check out if I would come across a book and I am thinking about it. What is this book like? Is it good? Is it something I should bring in? I would go to Corrie's page to see if Corrie had reviewed it or had not- because I knew that it was coming from a critical place. I knew that when I was going onto this page, there had been critical thought and work.
Rabia (9:11): I knew it was a safe place where I knew it was trusted. Do you know what I mean? I knew this was like a trusted platform where my own ideas were mirrored. I connected to that. Eventually, Corrie reached out because there was a project idea and I think that's kind of how it worked. I was always in awe of the work that was happening, and I felt like it was always a trusted place, which is so important for educators to know that there are people doing critical work. To research, learn and follow what they are doing and be critical of the platforms that are out there. But then if you find a couple- to kind of be connected to them.
Hanna (9:53): Yes. I agree. I think the collaboration that you have created too with your social justice curriculum and the book boxes, I love that. Somebody referred to it, and I saw it on one of your websites, as a toolkit. That was really a powerful thing because it is, sometimes we can look at Instagram and it really is one little like a droplet from an eyedropper. If You can visualize that. It is one tiny little piece to the puzzle. When you connect with those people, it is important to look at what are they doing to further the work or what else are they doing in a different space? Because Instagram is one teensy, tiny little spec in the world of what they are doing. So, what is the background story then of collaborating to create that curriculum? What is the need that you see and the response from educators or families? So, what is the need? And then what is the response? Corrie, you can take this next little piece, and then I will come back to Rabia.
Corrie (10:52): Yes, for sure. And Rabia, I am completely just as obsessed with you. Uh, do not worry. I had to say that quick and get it out of the way. I would say in the summer of 2021, we started talking about doing an event together or doing a class together. We were talking and brainstorming and landed on the idea of sort of chatting about what a lot of people ask us. There are a handful of questions that both of us are asked on a regular basis. And so, we thought, if this is a trend for both of us, why don't we try to create a resource that tends to those introductory questions that people might have.
Hanna (11:44): But what kind of questions would those be? What were you hearing from people either that are following you or wherever access points? Rabia, you can answer. What were some of the questions that people ask you that really generated the idea for creating this?
Rabia (12:01): Yes. Often it is, do you have a book recommendation for this theme? What can you do with this book? How can I teach this tough topic? How can I help my students become aware of their own identities and learn about other people through books? So, those were the themes of the questions. Just to kind of go on from what Corrie said, we thought we could address them in a way that was accessible for educators or families, if they wanted to bring it in. We thought that but could be used and there could be a way that we could show that this work is similar to your other curriculum work, which was important for us because we wanted to show that this is not separate work. It is really the way that you do schooling or curriculum or whatever that looks like at home.
Rabia (12:51): So, that was kind of the premise and to kind of go back a little bit. Oftentimes, we follow tons of people on Instagram. Part of this work was also to show how important it is to get to know people, build relationships, and collaborate. To make social justice go from just being a checklist or I am going to buy that book and then I have done the work. It is important to step back and focus on how we can build a relationship or a rapport or some sort of collaboration with the community or the Instagram accounts we might be learning from. It is not necessarily to say, I am going to reach out to all these people. But to think of it in a more, these are people in your community than these are people I am taking this idea from. That is something that was important to us. We just wanted it to be accessible and we wanted to use the books that we really love to show how this work can be done. Does that answer your question?
Hanna (13:58): Yes, absolutely. I think that furthering that as well, when you said, how to use the book. I could have 5,000 books and they could be fantastic books by wonderful authors and inclusive topics. Then I just read it and then shelve it. That touches somebody, but if I can further it, and help kids understand and the adults -help them make the connections, those deep connections. Then again, not just have it left within our hearts or in our brains. Your name, Corrie, “The Tiny Activist,” you are going out with active participation in your community. You are collaborating and you are bringing attention to and acting on the things that you have learned. First, I purchased the identity chapter first because I, I needed, for me, and for other people, a different chapter a hold piece where you are just going to hold onto this one for a while. For me, it really was identity, because kids - there is so much out there that is impacting them and flooding them with information. We really do have to internalize first and understand what is going on in ourselves before we can understand what is going on for somebody else. So that chapter is wonderful. To be able to, well, for me, it was a good starting point with my own students. And I am a tutor, one-on-one. So again, I am only focusing on literacy pieces, but I can bring these concepts into what we are doing, this vocabulary, I can target vocabulary.
Hanna (15:43): I can target sense of self and sense of community and sense of the world and global. I can target that stuff, even though I am talking about phonemes, graphemes, and things that they also need to learn. They need to know how to spell those words too. Let us talk a little bit about what people may have heard, certain vocabulary terminology, like ABAR floating around. They do not really understand that. You could also talk a little bit about the four pillars that you talk about in your curriculum as well. So, Coco, let's take it back to you and you can just give the introduction to why the curriculum is powerful. Why did you create it not just to further the work, but also for the tenants of the curriculum as well?
Corrie (16:31): Yes, for sure. So social justice education is an umbrella term and there is lots of amazing folks that do a ton of different work. So, folks have heard the term ABAR, which stands for anti-bias anti-racist. It is a specific style of curriculum. It is part of social justice education. You may hear people talk about the four pillars, the six pillars, sometimes folks connect it to the tenants of the Black Lives Matter organization, which is, I think around 12 or 13. It is all centered around the same four things. That is what Rabia, and I focused the first four chapters of our curriculum on. The four pillars you may also hear as IDJA for identity, diversity, justice, and activism. The beautiful thing about these four pillars is they work separately, and they work together.
Corrie (17:33): So, what I was thinking about when you were talking, Hannah, was you were talking about the identity chapter. It is so important that we all cultivate a sense of identity. Self-esteem, self-advocacy skills, and developing personal identity help us to expand our worldview and understand that other folks are developing their own personal identity and it is different. So that brings in the second tenant of diversity. We are all different, we are all the same in all sorts of different ways. And that is something, a side note, that I just think is very cool. The ability to work all these together. To quickly run through the pillars; Identity is an important concept because it impacts our experiences in the world. It is one of the ways that we collectively learn about each other. And it helps when we then work to create more justice, fairness, and equity. And so, identity would be what describes everything that makes you who you are. The social groups you are a part of, the invisible identities, the visible identities. All of these impact in an intersectional way to bring us our lived experiences; positive, negative, somewhere in between. So that is identity in a nice little package. So, let us move on to my elevator pitch about diversity. When all of us hear the word diversity, everyone understands. But discussions about diversity and about all aspects of diversity are so much more than the surface-level topics. There is so much more than an image of ten children that all look different, holding hands around the globe.
Corrie (18:37): It is recognizing that there is a dominant culture and that people of the global majority, and those are rather different than the dominant culture, at least in our Western North America American society, which is the only one I can make a call on. It is very Eurocentric. There is a lot of white supremacy culture that is entrenched in it, and it glorifies imperialism, colonization, and all that real, gross stuff. So, diversity is sort of about consciously including conversations about our differences and how that helps develop better problem-solving skills. When you are in a group, it prepares students and humans for life outside of their classroom, their home, or their community that could be homogenous. Also, a large part of it is emphasizing that just because something or someone is different, it is not bad or scary. And there is a difference between stranger danger and white supremacy, xenophobic.
Hanna (21:17): Stranger danger. Yes.
Corrie (21:20): It is a tricky topic to talk about, especially with young kids, when you are talking about bodily safety. The whole diversity pillar, which also I am so sorry, I meant to say at the beginning, these four pillars are taken from the work that Louise Derman-Sparks, and Julie Olsen Edwards have done for NAEYC. So, if you want, I can send you that link Hannah to put in your show notes.
Hanna (21:52): That would be excellent because I know that maybe some of these concepts, we have heard the term, a little bit of information again, we go to social media or it, something pops by and we are like Ooh, which resonated. But sometimes we do not take the time to unpack it a little bit more. So absolutely, send me those links because I know that there are lots of people who really see that this work is important and they are seeing how increasingly, it is important to be addressing these topics. I loved one of the words that I want to bring attention to. Then we will move to Rabia to talk about justice and activism and intersectionality. This was a new term in the last six or seven years for me personally. So, can you unpack what you mean - what that term means when we are just talking about the four pillars, how it is perceived or perceived by others in the world?
Rabia (22:49): Yes, for sure. I never miss an opportunity to shout out my personal hero, Kimberle W. Crenshaw, who is a legal scholar, and is the one that coined the term. I want to say back in the eighties, it has been a hot minute, she was doing a case. Specifically, it is interesting that intersectionality has found its way into so many of these literacy conversations because initially it was developed to explain how individuals working in an automobile factory could be experiencing bias because they were both black and a woman. So, intersectionality means that all these different identities that we have combine and sort of overlay on each other and that creates our experience. And so, the more identities that we have that are marginalized, historically oppressed, erased, can dramatically shift how you are perceived and treated in the world daily. Depending on what culture you are in and where you are in the world. So, it is a way to explain how oppression affects all of us differently.
Hanna (24:14): I think for me, it was a way that I could understand privilege. It really was a helpful way that I was like, oh, I get it now. I get it now. All those layers, every time something is intersected, and it touches, that is a different impact. And for me, that is not an impact. So that is my space of privilege if it is not overlapping multiple times. So I think that I just wanted to touch on that because I think that's why identity is so important because you have to understand not only your own but somebody else’s in reference to why something is offensive or why something is triggering for them or is a sensitive space for them to be in or an unsafe space for them to be in because of the way that their identities intersect. Okay. So, Rabia, let us talk about them the next two pillars, justice, and activism.
Rabia (25:10): Yes. And just before we get to that, diversity. We had a tough time as well, coming up with the definition or making it our own and embedding it into our work. We wanted to move away from surface-level diversity initiatives, which really creates that binary of white and then everything else like racialized, Indigenous black. We wanted to celebrate identities, but we also wanted that critical piece or that critical conscious piece. So, one of the ways we did that was by showing that there are many different identities. Two people who might have the same racial identity can have different identities and still experience the world differently. That was my learning for that diversity section. We wanted to use that section because diversity is an important pillar, but we want it to be critical about it because the ways in which diversity is championed, I think in our world, or our political or social context is very surface level.
Rabia (26:12): So, we wanted to just be open about that. I think that's kind of what brings us to activism and justice. The justice chapter was very much about developing that language, and being able to see what is fair. What is unfair. Think about the reasons why, and then think about how it connects to the world, what is happening in the story, and then what is happening in the world. Then the activism part was very much about, well, all these things are happening, but what can you do about it? Because we all believe that kids are change agents and they have power in whatever situation or circumstance they are in. They can always do something to make things a little bit better. So, we wanted the activism section to be a place where we could bring forward voices of different people, with diverse identities, and lived experiences, who are making a difference. Those could be role models, and they could offer a blueprint of how to create change.
Rabia (27:12): In activism, we really wanted to think about, are you doing this for somebody? Or are you doing it with somebody because you wanted to move away from, I guess the colonial or capitalistic idea of, oh, I am going to save them, or I am going to give charity. We wanted students to think about their role or children to think about their positionality and how they are creating a change and how it impacts. We wanted to move away from just giving or just doing something. We wanted to center back on community and relationships and show it is much more meaningful and it is much more sustainable when we work together and do things together rather than just something that is a one-time action. Those were the premises around those. My elevator speeches were not delivery dynamic, but the premise was really to teach kids the vocabulary of unfairness, fairness, and take the skills that they already have of being able to differentiate what is fair and what is unfair and utilize those intrinsic skills that many children have. Help them to learn the vocabulary, become comfortable in it, and show them examples of folks making a difference. Help them recognize their own power. Oftentimes we think that, oh, kids, we always like the narrative. My experience has always been, what do you want to be when you grow up or what change do you want to make when you grow up? You want to show that you do not necessarily have to wait, you can do stuff now. That was a key point that we wanted to make.
Hanna (28:51): I love that because the two picture books that right away popped into my mind were books about using your voice and then speaking up like those two right away. Therefore, elementary kids, telling them, there is this important thing that if we, and this is misinformation or misunderstanding by lots of adults, we don't want to teach them something that's too heavy or too big or too serious or too catastrophic. And it is true. We must break it into a five-year old's understanding or a nine old's understanding and experience. We cannot just hit them with the hard facts, but we also must somehow empower them. We do not have to wait until they are 32 years old or this magic number in their mind that they're able to speak up or they're able to recognize that there's an injustice happening, or they're recognizing that not just bullying, but past bullying.
Hanna (29:50): There's a bigger thing that is happening here and why is that happening? And I can speak to it immediately and empower them. I know that we were talking in one of the Bookstagang, Ally does a great Librarian Fight Club, and she is coming on the podcast as well. We are going to talk about some of those big posts that she has done. And there, they are big questions. They are not easy to answer. There is so many thoughts that go into them. But one of them was about Earth Day. When you talk about climate change and then kids are like doom, gloom, and ah! That could just leave some kids absolutely paralyzed and really like building their own anxiety. They might already have those little worries, and then we are fostering more worry instead of fostering change and fostering those activist pieces within them that help them have great ideas. Lots of kids really do understand what they could be doing. So, I love that. And then I love that you have now created the book boxes, so there are themes. Coco, do you want to talk about some of the themes in the book boxes?
Corrie (31:05): Yes. And I also just had one more note about the justice. Rabia was talking about this idea of fairness or unfair, and we really homed in on that because how often do we hear young kids say that is unfair? We wanted to be able to give specific examples of ways to have a conversation when you hear this to ask, is it unfair or did it just not work out the way that you wanted it to work out? Did you not win the game and how we can take this concept that is so integral to early childhood and figure out that developing this worldview that is not so egocentric and to be able to understand that, oh, okay, even though I feel sad that something happened, it does not mean it is unfair. Unfair is when we see different people being treated in different ways, or we see rules being unfairly applied to somebody else. So that is really what we try to convey with the justice piece. And it sort of also dovetails nicely into chatting about the boxes, because we tried to take these four main ideas and assist even further. Rabia outlines so many of the great questions that people ask. I do a lot of professional development seminars for educators. People always ask, but how do I do it? How do I teach?
Hanna (32:48): What does that look like? Yes. Give me the minute-by-minute play-by-play. What does it look like?
Corrie (32:53): Exactly. Yes. And they ask for, they need a checklist to learn how to teach this. So, Rabia and I said, okay. It is like half checklist, half completely changing your brain all around to be picking out things, to be able to like to pull on a thread, to have a really great conversation about justice. When you hear “that's unfair” comment, it is learning and doing enough, self-reflection on yourself as an educator to be able to identify moments that can be meaningful. So, some of that is about justice and we are like, okay, so how can we help even more? Because in each chapter we have a whole bunch of information. We have lesson plans; we have reflection questions.
Hanna (33:46): I love in the chapters that you have -here's stuff for the kids-and then here's stuff for the adults. Go read some more, keep going, keep going. I love that.
Corrie (33:58): And all these things are not taught in teacher prep programs. I can get angry at the white supremacy culture that we are not taught how to impart these important messages to students, but okay, so I am mad, but now what am I going to do about it? I am going to find another radical badass educator who wants to help make these tools for educators. We learn a lot about the zone of proximal development by Lev Vygotsky, who is my favorite educational theist, because, we all have one, all the cool people have one. He talks about how, when you are teaching somebody a new skill, it needs to be a little bit tricky, but not too tricky. There must be a nice, sweet spot where the individual feels empowered with the help of a mentor to work it out themselves. That is what we wanted to do for educators. We wanted to create an outline, a scaffold, which would give them both concrete questions to ask with specific books and additional information so that they could begin to be able to start picking out instances to have these conversations by themselves. To empower the educators to self-reflect.
Hanna (35:36): I love that you have created a curated list. You have already done the work. I get asked all the time in my DMS, “Hey, do you have a book, a book list for blah, blah, blah?” You are like, yes, I want to help you. But this is all unpaid labor. We must honor the people that are doing the work. That means going to the websites and looking at the curated list that you have already put together in the book boxes. It goes together with the curriculum, and it is there, it is there. You have already done the work and people can benefit from it and honors your labor. You have put together and collaborated for hours, putting together lists, questions, resources, and concepts. Taking time, even when we are talking on a podcast like this, to share that information.
Hanna (36:30): So, I am appreciative of that because that is a space where we can go and I think, okay, you touched on something. I wanted to look back on it today for our podcast. I could not find the post, but it was, this week has been heavy, and somebody did a post. It was on Twitter, talking about when the situations around the world are heavy and your heart is heavy. Think about, I forget what they said, something about this thread that you can kind of just start. Do you know what I am talking about?
Rabia (37:02): I think it's in my Instagram stories right now.
Hanna 37:06): OK. Okay. Try and find it, please go to that because it was just that same for me, as we are saying to the kids, you are not powerless. These things can be heavy. Yes. But where do we then go when it is heavy? We absolutely must take the time and do the self-care pieces, and the therapy and feeding our souls. So, we can give back. But this concept of what are you unraveling? Which piece of the thread are you able to do?
Rabia (37:37): Got it. Okay. It is from Twitter, Ursula Wolf Roka at Lady of Sardines, which is an excellent username. So, Ursula says it can be overwhelming to witness experiences and take in all the injustices of the moment. The good news is that they are all connected. So, if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you are helping to unravel the whole damn cloth.
Hanna (38:06): Ah, I love that! Like I was like, that needs to be cross-stitched -needs to be done something with because it is just, it is true. And it is not talking about toxic positivity. It is not that premise of, just be happy even though it is miserable, just choose joy. It is not any of those sorts of fluffy things that are not helpful. What are you doing in this moment? So, I wanted to end with that concept, Rabia, what thread are you pulling? Corrie what thread are you pulling? And I will talk about the thread that I am pulling. Trying to learn the concept that literacy has huge social injustice pieces to it. There's equity, there's accessibility, there is knowledge, there is access to information. There are all these pieces that we understand why there is this inequity piece - some people have access to this information. They become proficient at reading or proficient at writing and they have access to that information. I would like to find somebody to have a whole podcast conversation about that. I am going to a webinar in a couple of days all about it because it has just been something that has been, they are not separate. So that is the thread that I am holding onto and I'm pulling on it. I am tugging hard.
Rabia (39:36): I love your thread.
Hanna (39:38): So, Corrie for you, what would that thread be? And I mean, I guess for maybe many people, it is more than one thread. I don't know. They are all intertwined. I do not know. It is a thought that was just been percolating for the last couple of days when I read that post.
Corrie (39:52): Yes. That is what I was just trying to think of because one specific way that I try to live my life is to work in so many different places that if one of them disappears, it is not my only thing, you know? Yes. Air quotes. So, I think about, okay, if the internet disappeared tomorrow, would I feel weird talking about my activism? You know? But for lack of a better term, we will use that. So, okay. Corrie, you wake up one day, Instagram is gone. What other modalities of activism and education do you have? So that is working in my community for justice that is working with nonprofits for literacy. It is finding a bunch of different things that I can connect with people both near and far that also help educate and treat people with kindness. I like celebrating baby steps.
Hanna (40:58): That. Okay. Rabia, what is the thread you are pulling?
Rabia (41:01): That is such a good question. And I really admire both of your threads. For me, it is twofold. One is the constant learning and relearning right now through my courses and just my work. I am learning about indigenous injustice, but also resistance it is against colonialism and genocide. So, for me, whatever community that I am trying to support, I want to learn first as much as I can. Self-learning is teaching me that it requires so much unlearning because I did not learn this stuff in school or only learned half-truths or something. My thread is always to learn more, to investigate what I know, what I do not know, and what are my biases regarding this situation? How can I be a better ally or how can I stand with this community and amplify their voices?
Rabia (41:01): So, one is always on the self. What am I doing? And then I think the second twofold piece of the thread would be whatever I am learning, how am I putting it into practice? So that practice shows in my teaching or the courses that I am taking or the professional development that I have the opportunity to do for education. So, for me, it is always, how am I putting the stuff that I am learning into practice by bringing that theory that I'm learning to practice through books or through conversations or through modeling how we can just do things more critically in the classroom. Because I think whatever we do has an impact, even if we think our actions are small, it creates that impact. And so those are my two threads and for me, I'm trying to be consistent about it because I think to really achieve justice or inclusion, I think there's that consistency that matters, whatever that consistency looks like, just being consistent and not necessarily doing it for likes or to be centered or to be in the spotlight or anything, but just doing it consistently and thinking about why I'm doing this, is this for me to, to put myself out there or is it because it's something fundamentally what I believe in my heart?
Rabia (43:10): That is something that I am really learning, relearning. What's the purpose of this? Why are you doing this? Why are you amplifying? Why are you learning? Why are you advocating? And it goes back to the self. And what is the ripple effect of this? So, those are the different threads to which I am holding on.
Hanna (43:30): Yes. And it is going to be that idea is going to be percolating for a while in my brain, because it is just a wonderful way to think about it. I am trying to think of how can I even talk about that with my students? Well, you do not have to wait till you are at this magic age of being older. You do not have to do some huge, big, massive thing. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you have to just do some big, massive thing, whatever that might be. But lots of times it is just pulling at the unraveling, the systems that are there. I think somebody said the other day, and it was something else that it was a couple of months ago that I heard that the system is just broken and somebody else said, well, the system is not broken.
Hanna (44:13): It is thriving the way it was designed to thrive. And I was like, whoa, okay. So how do we pull the thread on that and start to unpack it? Why is that working for some and not for others? And we find it in children's books where we can just start to unravel that thought right there before it is deeply ingrained in our brains. We can start to pull that always remembering that we do not always see what is happening in the background on Instagram, we see a one-book post. You do not see what happens behind the scenes in people's lives. So, I also think that's why community is so amazing because you really get to know. Wow. I understand that post a little bit more because I know Rabia, or I understand that because I know Coco and that’s really important when you've done a piece on voting. I get it. I get it. Well, thank you so much. We are going to put all the ways that people can connect with you in my show notes. And thank you so much. I really do appreciate your time and have a great rest of your day.
Want to know more about today’s guests?
Connect with Corrie
Instagram @thetinyactivists:
https://www.instagram.com/thetinyactivists/?hl=en
Connect with Rabia
Instagram @rabia_reads
https://www.instagram.com/rabia_reads/
Resources mentioned in this episode:
NAEYC : https://www.naeyc.org/
Understanding Anti-Bias Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards: https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2019/understanding-anti-bias
Kimberle W. Crenshaw: https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/kimberle-w-crenshaw