We are a School of Education built on hope – not the ephemeral kind that involves wishing for things to work out, but hope as practice (; ), the kind that comes from knowing, acting, and critically reflecting on our actions. Our School of Education draws on to guide our work as faculty, staff, and students. The core tenets of this framework are a recognition of:
Our goal as a School is to create humanizing spaces where we can live, learn, and work with compassion and dignity. Humanizing projects—as we face pervasive practices of dehumanization through structural violence, disinvestment in communities of color, inequities in healthcare, housing, and education—are not only necessary, but can also be healing (Paris & Winn, 2014). They give us the opportunity to work toward a world that is free from the harms and large injustices that currently pervade everyday life. The process will be ongoing; it will certainly be marked with missteps and false starts; it will be hard; and, it will be fueled by the joy, creativity, and love that are always part of genuine pursuits of justice.
Moving forward towards justice requires understanding that contemporary inequities are rooted in historical and intersecting systems of oppression. Moving forward demands that we self-consciously create and continually revise new practices, policies, ideas, and relationships. Moving forward is what abolitionist educators have always done to imagine and embody alternative futures and radical possibilities. This is a movement that lifts each of us up rather than extinguishing ideas and passions. We ground our work in a history of struggle and collective movements for change.
With gratitude for this community, we share resources on these pages to support our collective learning and our compassionate engagement with each other.
In solidarity,
Kathy Schultz, dean,and Susan Jurow, associate dean of diversity, equity and community engagement