Episode 9 | Our Love Letter to Education

Episode Description

As educators and young folks reflect and engage in end-of-school rituals, we’re closing Season One of Dancing on Desks with our Love Letter to Education. We hear from storytellers, poets, students, and educators who joined us this season to check back and hear about their summer dreams. We have collective dreams of reading books, taking naps, swimming in lakes, oceans, and pools, gardening, swimming, hugging our families and friends, and resting. Erin and monét share their love letter to education, discussing the ways in which abolition is an invitation to living by a love ethic (shout out to bell hooks) and centering practices of care and accountability and R-E-S-T. High school teacher Jessica Rucker shares her abecedarian, “A Love Letter to Education and Unlearning” as she leaves the classroom to pursue her dreams. Poet and graduating high school senior Zoe Bredesen protects her peace in her poem “If the Roles Were Reversed”. Finally, we offer our questions: If we love education, what does this love sound like, feel like, look like, smell like? How might we live there? Send us your responses to dancingondesks@gmail.com or slide in our DMs on IG @dancingondesks. Let’s get free, y’all!

Intellectual Inheritance

• Teaching to Transgress and All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
• “On Knowing: Willingness, Fugitivity and Abolition in Precarious Times,” Dr. David Stovall, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Spring 2020
• Where Do We Go From Here? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
• Piecing Me Together, Renée Watson
• Wonder, R.J. Palacio
• Nnedi Okorafor (Read all of her books!)

Music

• “Blessed”, “Holy Water”, “Los Angeles”, “Pink Cadillac”, “Say Grace”, “Suzie” | Yogic Beats yogicbeats@gmail.com
• “DC GoGo Beat 2018, Pocket Beat” | Slick City Beatz slickdc202@gmail.com
• Dancing on Desks Theme song composed and arranged by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes