Fugitive Learning through a Teacher Inquiry Group: Urban Educators Humanizing their Classrooms & Themselves

Fugitive Learning through a Teacher Inquiry Group: Urban Educators Humanizing their Classrooms & Themselves Oscar Navarro [Humanization] is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity. Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity is stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human (Freire, 2003, p. 43–44). Freire's (2003) notion of dehumanization provides keen insight to the way schooling in the U.S. not only adversely impacts the learner but also a teacher's humanity. This process of dehumanization for students (and also for educators) is most obvious when it involves the over-disciplining and punishing of youth of Color in urban schools. Students of Color, especially those with learning disabilities, in foster care, and poverty, are subject to disproportionally higher rates of referrals, suspensions, and expulsions that exclude them "from opportunities to learn, and thus punishments" (Noguera, 2003; Yang, 2009, p.50). Moreover, they "are more likely to be dehumanized through being viewed as stronger, older, and less innocent. At the same time, the pain of multiply-marginalized Students of Color may be disregarded, and they are more likely to surveilled and punished" (Annamma & Morrison, 2018, p.8). In response to the over-policing and punishment of youth of Color, this article examined the way educators engaged in fugitive learning through a teacher inquiry group. The teachers developed classroom practices, structures, and a learning environment centered on the youth of Color and resisted dehumanizing school policy. The study was part of a larger project investigating how social justice educators were sustaining and enhancing their ability to teach for social justice in urban schools through a teacher inquiry group. This paper highlights the way the teachers processed student discipline in the teacher inquiry group space and also the practices they engaged in their classrooms to create a more humanizing classroom culture. The findings reveal that teachers developed and employed non-punitive classroom procedures, culturally informed caring relationships, and an environment of mutual respect and reciprocity. Moreover, some of the teachers resisted school-wide discipline policies that punished youth. [End Page 157] Learning as Fugitive Learning for youth of Color has systemically involved a denial of education, cultural genocide, deculturalization, and forced assimilation that prepares them for survival (at best), however, learning becomes fugitive when it is affirming, validating, and transformative (Love, 2019; Patel, 2016a; 2016b; 2019; Spring, 2016). Spring (2016) explains that the first attempts to "educate" non-White students in the United States began with Native Americans in the 17th century and schools were an apparatus for colonization. Native Americans endured cultural and linguistic genocide that was not limited to: family and tribal separation, disassociation with cultural practices, brutal punishment, and positioning their ancestors and themselves as inferior to their White educators (Spring, 2016). He further states that for African Americans, schooling prior to the 19th century involved the deliberate project of denying an education to African Americans who were enslaved. This was done as a form of social control to prevent liberation and widespread uprisings. Cultural genocide and the denial of education would shape the way schooling would continue for all non-White students, which Spring terms as deculturalization, "the educational process of destroying people's culture (cultural genocide) and replacing it with a new culture" (2016, p. 5) through cultural and linguistic genocide, forced assimilation, and other tactics that separated learning from their culture. As a result, fugitive learning should not be understood as a simple metaphor but rather as a historical and contemporary act of resistance. Patel (2019) reminds the reader that learning to read and write for enslaved Black people was fugitive, yet literacy persisted nonetheless, at the risk of grave punishment. She further argues that the schooling of youth of Color is part of the larger settler-colonial project that forefronts Eurocentric curriculum, narratives, un-truthful histories, and further subjugates people of Color through inaccurate depictions. Moreover, she elucidates that it is necessary to make the distinction between the schooling...