Abstract
Our futurist perspective here imagines a world where parents can gaze into their child/children’s classroom at the touch of a button. Our paper asks what learning spaces would look like if home can observe school at the touch of a button? What opportunities and constraints would be realized or continue to exist?
The plurality of the “future” concept is key to justice work. Futures can be inspired, and we know they are also often taken away.
Introduction
During virtual schooling, family members can gaze into the schoolroom, watching and listening to how teachers and staff engage with their children. But what happens when students return in person? This paper explores the following question: what if parents could Zoom into their child’s classroom whenever they wanted? We seek to explore the preferable outcome of such a future, where marginalized families are granted the technology to observe and challenge the oppression their children often face in isolation. Although this ability could be seen as problematic, it may also be considered as similar to the affordances that white middle-class parents have been granted for a very long time. Indeed, it is the ability to match that “white gaze” into schooling which gives a potential for a preferable outcome to be realized in the post-virus age.
In order to consider this possible future for education, we make use of work by Walter Mosely and Octavia Butler, as well as our own effort at speculative fiction. These prefactual texts allow us to (re)imagine schooling in a post-pandemic world. In this paper, we also draw from Maisha Winn’s (2019) “futures matter” concept that informs efforts towards transforming education using a justice-centric lens.
Our futurist perspective here imagines a near-future world where parents can gaze into their child/children’s classroom at the touch of a button. Our paper asks what learning spaces look like if the home can observe school at the touch of a button. What opportunities and constraints would still exist?
Family and education as prefactual text
Walter Mosley’s essay “Black to the future” serves as an excellent introduction to discussions of the future of education. In the essay, Mosley states: “The power of science fiction is that it can tear down the walls and windows, the artifice and laws by changing the logic, empowering the disenfranchised, or simply by asking, What if?” (Thomas, 2000: 407). Here, Mosley credits the potential of the genre. However, for our purposes, the metaphor of walls becomes literal, but instead of tearing them down we ask what if the walls became windows through which families can see schooling in a new way? By using his point about “changing the logic” with how our classrooms are designed, Mosley’s essay encourages us to imagine a school that empowers families as an equity partner in education.
In addition, Mosley’s short story “Whispers in the dark” examines the intertwining subjects of race, class, and technology in a world where a man’s organs must be sold to pay for his nephew’s education (Futureland, 2001). Here, we encounter complications to the widely held notion of technological advancement, specifically medical technology, as benign. This is anything but “soft” science fiction. Mosley shows graphically how the future may involve a familiar set of sacrifices one generation must make for the next. And so essential here as well is how Mosley shows us the depths of love and how it can transform a life of potential into a life of action. The fact that this love between uncle and nephew is at once unique and recognizable makes the rendering all the more moving.
Thanks to the sacrifices of his uncle, Chill Bent, the young boy is able to take advantage of the education and … well, we won’t ruin it for you. But the contemporary issue Mosley raises here deals with how education may become further stratified in terms of who can afford it. He asks is it possible that one day the last vestiges of public education will vanish? Although the body of the African American is abused through Chill’s sacrifice in a way we see too often in contemporary literature and film, Mosley is careful to show this sacrifice as done for the sake of the African American nephew. In doing so, “Whispers in the dark” is a story that offers a way for students to view their own familial relationships and consider the variety of ways such relationships may impact the futures they will lead.
In the short story “Speech sounds,” Octavia Butler examines a disturbing mixture of alienation and self-alienation. Here, the loss of the self is experienced through the loss of language. In the story we are shown a future where the powers of speech and literacy have been lost, replaced by powers more brutal and primal. The protagonist is Rye, a woman who had “lost reading and writing. She had taught history at UCLA … She had a house full of books she could neither read nor bring herself to use as fuel” (Butler, 1996: 98). Although the comparison to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is striking here, Butler has more on her mind than the extinction of one form of literacy. As we follow the seemingly speechless Rye on a violent journey across the Los Angeles metropolis, Butler uses the “silences” of speech and diminished memory to investigate how essential language is to both our sense of self and our sense of community. As Rye’s memory recedes, her self-knowledge slips away as well. And in watching the inability of others to communicate successfully, she is witness to how confusion and violence can replace patience and understanding.
However, the end offers a glimmer of hope. Rye comes across two children who are apparently immune to the plague of speechlessness. In these children Rye finds hope: “What if children of three or fewer years were safe and able to learn language? What if all they needed were teachers? … She had been a teacher. A good one” (Butler, 1996: 107). Here, hope for a better future rests in the hands of the young and their teachers.
The power of both stories above exists in how vital and expansive are the forms in which family is education. The role education and communication play in freedom and hope is profound in both texts. At the beginning of “Speech sounds,” Butler (1996, p. 74) renders Rye a “brute”; however, it is through a hope in part inspired by literacy and knowledge that Butler allows Rye to reclaim her humanity. The hope Butler leaves us with in “Speech sounds” is one based on Rye’s continuing belief that a damaged society can be transformed through communication. For Mosley, the uncle’s sacrifice mirrors the burdens still unfairly placed upon Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) navigating structures and systems designed by and for white normative culture. The hope for the nephew, however, remains.
What follows is a futurist vignette imagining opportunities for family to enter into and communicate within the classroom. Like the import of communication and education in Butler’s “Speech sounds,” dialogue across a collective responsible for the education of young people engenders hope. To be clear, this vignette does re-imagine schooling from a revolutionary perspective, and the authors do not believe technology in a post-COVID world will be an immediate salve to existing structural inequities forged through centuries of intentional disenfranchisement of BIPOC. Instead, the focus in this vignette is to present one possible near-future borne out of the very real disruption of schooling-as-is during the COVID-19 pandemic, which creates potential for learning beyond school walls and invites families to participate in the school room.
Wednesday morning, 2 February 2022
Geoffrey readied himself for school. He was used to the routine, the performance of it all. He dressed. Ate his oatmeal – one dollop of cinnamon sugar, the way Margot – Margot was his mother – presumed he liked it because she liked her oatmeal sweet though he really didn’t. A glass of skim milk. Then he brushed his teeth with Colgate sparkle toothpaste, gap-toothed at seven. He ran a comb through his thick black hair, which at 2 AC (After Covid) had grown long and scruffy. The unkempt nature of his hair was a point of contention between him and Margot. The fact that it was his hair and he was bloody well able to do with it as he pleased gave Geoffrey the upper hand. He had control over this one small thing. Helter-skelter, he packed his backpack, donned his Spiderman face mask, and he was out.
The air was crisp, little shards of glass. With each intake of breath, Geoffrey felt his lungs shudder, prickled by the chill. For a moment, Geoffrey wondered about BC – how others felt about the air. In BC – before COVID – did others fear the air? Did they check for shortness of breath? Did they constantly calculate risk in the air and the spaces it consumed? In something as necessary as oxygen, in the before times, did it smother or envelop? Always present and wondrous, or ever present and dangerous? Geoffrey couldn’t remember much about BC. He was in preschool when the schools had closed. Margot had tried to explain to him why it was necessary to stay home and inside. Why he couldn’t see his neighborhood mates. Why masks were required and an alligator’s-length distance between others maintained at all times. Oh, bollocks – he loved that word – it was in The Smithereen series he was reading. Had he remembered to put it back in his school bag? Geoffrey rifled through his backpack for proof of vaccination papers (his V-Card as others called it). There. In the second zipper pocket from the front. A little laminated square: Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination August 13, 2022 Geoffrey L. Holcomb.
Geoffrey walked up the steps of Midview Elementary. At the doors, he masked up. Spiderman was looking spry today. He presented his V-Card to Mr Timblen, who scanned the card and paused a beat with the thermometer on Geoffrey’s forehead. Normal. Midview Elementary had embraced advisory protocols in the AC world. Except for the immuno-compromised, COVID long-haulers, and opt-outs, school-aged children attended school in person, at desks, in rows. Protocol patrols ensured desks were spaced six feet apart. Plexiglass partitions segmented students from the air of others, though Geoffrey didn’t really buy that. Air was everywhere. Others’ air was everywhere.
Mrs Sangui was logged in. Shortly after 8:30, Geoffrey swiveled in his chair. The heads were there all right. He counted quickly. Three rows of four. Twelve of them. More than usual for a Thursday. No Margot. Phew. Margot usually gazed on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. She hated that he called her Margot. Gazing was an expectation at Midview. The principal and teachers encouraged it. They looked favorably upon the children of above-average gazers. To be an above-average gazer signaled investment and care in the child’s education. Gazers were considered “evolved parents.” Teachers inflated the grades of gazerkids, and the simple act of joining the classzoom provided a portal through which to craft a list of demands.
In AC, most of the parents at Midview Elementary work remotely. Companies quickly learned their employees were more efficient working at home than at the office. Plus, remote jobs came without the overhead costs for office space. Margot was a faculty member at a community college, where all of her courses were taught in online modules. Most remotes were also gazers. At least if the remotes had kids.
Geoffrey looked again at the heads. There was Coralle, Jackson’s mom. Systemic disparities in healthcare meant COVID-19 had disproportionately affected communities of color, and Coralle was no exception. Jackson told him Coralle became ill during the last surge, just before vaccines were rolled out to healthcare workers.
“Okay, second graders,” Ms Sangui’s voice reverberated around the room, “the month of February is when we celebrate Black History Month. We learn about African American heroes and leaders in US history, and their bravery in the face of injustice. We’ll be learning about a different black leader each day. Take a look around. There are some new faces on the walls.”
Geoffrey looked around the room. There were posters of the usual … Harriet Tubman, MLK, Rosa Parks, Barack Obama.
“Jackson, I am thinking you might be able to add something to our discussions of Black History Month. Do any of these people or their names look and sound familiar to you?”
Jackson, whose head had been hooked into his arms on his desk, glanced up at Ms Sangui and quickly scanned the room.
“Yes,” Jackson answered, then resumed his pose.
“Well,” said Ms Sangui, “which ones?”
Jackson looked up.
“All of them.”
Geoffrey side-eyed the gazers. Coralle was still on classzoom … her eyes lasered on Jackson.
“Jack, tell her what you know and then some. We are watching. Be proud.”
The chat came through classzoom. Geoffrey saw it. Jackson saw it. Ms Sangui saw it.
At the outset, allowing gazers in via classzoom wasn’t controversial. I mean, parents had been classzooming during the pandemic – had been their child’s teacher really – so to continue classzooming was an opportunity.
Districts touted the potential:
More connection.
Collapsing the home-school divide.
Enabling equitable family–school–community partnerships.
Only recently, when a consortium of gazers began to call attention, had the administration initiated conversations to regulate. First, it was a group of gazers asking about an assignment related to slave-ownership and punishment. Then, several gazers asked about disciplinary infractions. A few other gazers asked about specific teachers’ ways of talking to, with, and about students. Of course, none of this behavior was new in schools. Gazers were the only new.
Jackson read his mother’s chat through classzoom. She was right. He did know a lot more than the portraits of four black faces on the wall. She was watching him. Others were watching.
Jackson started to speak. He told Ms Sangui what he knew. The gazers did too.
It was a lesson like no other.
Black futures matter
As imagined here, the policy and practice of family members zooming into classes and perpetually keeping an eye on teachers and students will disrupt what many have come to see as fixed elements of our educational system. Like taking the proverbial blue pill, the one that puts you back to sleep, the profound relief of post-COVID life will offer a complacency perhaps hard to resist. On the other hand, or rather, in the other hand, the red pill is indeed that hard reset we need. To place this effort within current scholarship, we seek to first acknowledge Maisha Winn’s justice-centric efforts towards transforming education.
Winn’s (2019, p. 10-12) “Transformative Justice Teacher Education Framework” is an effort to use restorative justice theory and processes across disciplines in teaching, as well as teacher education itself. The framework has five pedagogical stances: History Matters, Race Matters, Justice Matters, Language Matters, and Futures Matter.
Her “Futures Matter” concept offers a way to begin difficult conversations that will need to take place for our preferable outcome to become a reality. Winn contends that [f]utures are under siege; they are managed (or mismanaged) by policymakers and practitioners that focus on controlling Black, Brown, and other marginalized bodies while feeding fears that these bodies are dangerous and need to be aggressively policed. Futures continue to be directed, redirected, and even dictated by racist ideas. (2019, p. 12–13)
Preparing for after-COVID now
The purposes, structures, and systems of the institution of schooling in the United States have had their own version of “gazing” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has pared schooling down to its skeleton, zooming into schooling’s inequities in purpose, structure, and system. Insofar as these inequities have been underscored, in “schooling” us, the experience of schooling during a global pandemic has also opened a portal to future the institution itself.
In the opening vignette, fictive futures present a similar possibility. Rather than paring back to what is, the fictive future peers into what could be. With technology often positioned in opposition to humanity, this vignette illustrates one possible future where technology enables schools to confront and dismantle these skeletons of inequity together. In the vignette, the goals and aims of schooling shift to center the voices of parents who might typically be typecast as uninvolved.
In the vignette, the teacher Ms Sangui is presumably educated on microaggressions in the classroom – the mere act of calling on one of the African American children in her classroom to speak on the traditional heroes of Black History Month – suggests the educator and school environment’s lip service to equity without action. Because parents are welcomed into the schooling space through the “classzoom,” parents and caregivers are present in their young children’s education to recenter their children’s voices and keep schools honest in the work that still needs to be done. The futurist vignette also problematizes the ways in which such technology – even with its power to transform – might come to be regulated after the balance of power tips toward previously marginalized parents and children. In the vignette, when gazers begin to ask about systems and structures rather than the actions of just one teacher, discussions regarding how to regulate this new technology threaten to once again contract and recenter the institution of schooling to maintain the status quo.
This fictive future is not entirely out of the question. Right now, parents and caregivers are observing their children interact with the institution of schooling from their homes, over their young child’s shoulder, and they are questioning the goals and aims of schooling. What is the purpose of standardized assessments during a pandemic? Why isn’t there a focus on science and social studies in virtual learning?
If the home can observe school at the touch of a button, there is hope that learning spaces would transform to be more responsive to the families and communities they endeavor to serve. While parents and caregivers could hold schools to account, they, too, can teach. In a learning space where parents readily interact, the classroom teacher can leverage the expertise of parents and their children to support learning, engagement, and transformative teaching practice. Let us not forget, schools used to be one room, with children ranging in ages 4 to 16, taught by a teacher who lived with the family of a student attending that same school. With the touch of a button, technology in a fictive future can create a family, learning together, in one room, back in the classroom.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Jesslyn Hollar and Jim Hollar are now affiiliated with Marist College, 3399 North Road, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601. USA.
