Toward a Grotkean Pedagogy: Teacher as Political

Teachers, and teaching, are not supposed to be political. For years this mantra was said and believed to be true. Whenever political queations were encountered in the classroom, teachers, according to the white male patriarchy that shaped modern day schooling, were expected to push those questions aside and continue to teach the "content" dictated by the heteropatriarchal system of public schools. Inspired by Miss Alordayne Grotke's teaching from the Disney show Recess!, this autoethnographic work explores how and why I chose to practice being teacher as political. This article narrowly focuses on specific political choices made inside the classroom and debunks the myth that a teacher should be politically neutral in the classroom. 


Introduction
One week before school starts. At the English Language Arts teacher meeting we all have our novels for the year. I won't teach or tell the story of Black death in my classroom. 3 My Black, Brown, and Hmong students do not need to hear about their unexistence-who wants to constantly read and learn about their bodies being erased? This question lingers as I flip through To Kill A Mockingbird over and over as the other teachers talk about new strategies to teach Shakespeare. Instead, I think, I'll ask the students to inscribe Tom Robinson's name all over our classroom so that we'd never forget what it means to defend the dead, 4 to battle and defy the narratives of Black erasure.
Fast forward eight weeks in time after the moment I told myself I won't teach Black death.
We walked down the hallway to our principal's office side by side; me with a high-top and him with a hipster manbun. It was Friday, a day that we-as educators-were allowed to dress more casually. Without fail he wore one of his NBA jerseys, I wore a button-down shirt I picked up in Vietnam. I wanted to use clothes to show my Brooklyn Center students Black people are not just limited to the confines of state lines; he used his clothes to build bridges with a community he was not automatically a part of. The door to our principal's office was open and a student was just exiting. Gathering her paperwork together, the principal called us in, pointing to the two chairs across from her desk. Once settled, she said, "I got a call from a parent worried about his daughter's education. He said that the two of you were being too political by displaying Black Lives Matter posters." Shrugging away what was more of an accusation than a question or invitation to have a conversation, we both acknowledged our support of BLM. Leaning back in her chair, the principal said, "I support BLM, but if you can't connect it to your respective lessons, take the signs down. We have to think of all our students and not be too political in the classroom." With that, we left with an "enjoy your weekend." Walking back to gather our things from our respective classrooms, the man-bun teacher noted how weird it was that the respective students of the complaining parent were among the few white students who attended the middle school.
Man-bun made his sign less visible the following week by putting it on the side of his desk; I asked the students to make more signs for their classroom. To counter the erasure of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, I made the political choice to create with my students our own literary monuments (art, protest posters, songs, short stories, playlists) to (re)story our visions of what justice looks like for Tom-and our existence.
Skipping through time, it is the last week of August 2020. The first full semester of mass online teaching looms on the precipice.
"Sean, you are ready to publish your Canvas course," the Curriculum and Instruction (C&I 5 ) technology wizard exclaims excitedly, "I know you have been worried for weeks but this looks like it will be a successful asynchronous/semisynchronous course." "Lorrie, thank you for all your help!" I sign out of the Zoom call a little too quickly, as the panic prompts me to go back to perturbedly pacing in my office.
As a queer Black male, my body is used as an entry into my teaching practice and a way to immediately alter the students' public concepts of bodies that are allowed to teach. The first day of class I ask my students how many of them have had a Black teacher before "this" moment. Many of them say I am their first. To exacerbate my worry of online teaching, all my teaching strategies rely on body movements in the classroom. From demonstrating understanding of texts through tableaus to creating Afrofuturist fortune tellers, the body in my classroom is used, seen, and heard to forge a classroom community. HOW WILL I FORGE A CLASSROOM COMMUNITY ONLINE!?! *slow deep inhale and exhale* Months move maliciously fast; we make meaning as we monitor the absurdity of the pandemic.
My fingers twist my hair, curling and curling the curls even more so. I wait "in" my advisor's personal Zoom meeting room. The more I wait, the more nervous I get. Defending my teaching choices always makes me terrifiedperhaps it is the inexperience, but I always feel as if I'm defending my right to teach. The wheel stops and in a blink, I've left the waiting room and my advisor's mouth is moving, but my audio can't keep up. "-good to see you, Sean. How was the semester? Let's start with your recent email… teacher as political and the use of self-determination to counter Black erasure as, you write here…' to privilege conversation and connection as Black imaginative agency is centered by deliberate classroom practices and curriculum choice to aid in the toppling of settler-state literature and practices that were once viewed as monumental to knowledge production....'"

Why Miss Grotke? A Reparative Journey
Around the same moment I was in conversations with the C&I technology wizard, I was also revisiting the Disney cartoon show Recess as a tour through my childhood nostalgia to escape the weight 2020 placed on Black bodies; we were dying at a higher rate from the virus than other racial groups and still fighting the pandemic of killer cops. As a C&I scholar I immediately became enthralled with the teaching practices of Miss Alordayne Grotke. Visibly the only Black educator in the show, and quite possibly the only Black teacher seen in children's programming at the time, Miss Grotke did not shy away from being a radical teacher-each day in her class was an interrogation of the white patriarchal system of public school education. Miss Grotke was displayed as wild and eccentric; she wore flip-flops in the classroom, proudly didn't shave her legs, and constantly redirected lessons to reflect her political views. I was plagued by the exhaustion of constantly having to defend my place and choices as a Black teacher to my white colleagues. From the beginning of my time at Brooklyn Center I was targeted by other teachers for wearing clothes that were not considered to them as "unprofessional"; and constantly talked about for letting students call me by my first name. It was clear the image they saw of me was not in line with their political visions. "Politics of respectability rely upon whiteness as the measuring stick for digestible forms of black woman-ness, and therefore contribute to the 'political economy of domination fostering Black women's oppression" (Ohito,. I replace "black woman-ness" and "Black women's oppression" with Black teacher-ness and Black teacher oppression to help my reflection of why my white colleagues felt as if they needed to question my moves. I felt an allegiance with Miss Grotke in these moments. As seen numerous times throughout the shows, her colleagues constantly questioned her approach to education and how she chose to present herself and interact with her students. Having felt the pain of my historical existence only be acknowledged in confluence with chains, teaching for me was a way to repair the virulent educational upbringing I experienced as a child-which I think was exacerbated by the lack of a Black teacher presence in the classrooms (predominantly in the suburban schools I attended). However, when I entered the classroom at a suburban school that was predominantly Black, I felt the same weight of tokenism, and the same flesh wounds were scratched into me just like when I was a student. It wasn't until I removed myself from the middle and high school environment that I Remaking a Slogan: teacher as political Miss Grotke was radical; she took up the practice of teacher as political by constantly and deliberately making sure to (re)story narratives of consensus (read colonizing) public history. She willed the students to unlearn the biases of an education system, holding its stories accountable for the damages done to marginalized beings. Taken from the second wave Feminist movement, teacher as political is a play on the slogan "personal is political." Derived from Carol Hanisch's essay in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation in 1970, the slogan became a rallying cry into becoming a mindset "to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them" (Hanisch 1969). 7 As a feminist theory standpoint, the "personal is political" suggests the small issues of personal experience should be examined to understand how larger systemic issues play against the personal.
Taking the mantle of teacher as political means the educator is choosing to resist the notions and societal demands that the teacher must be a figure of neutrality; a standpoint in opposition to white patriarchal school systems and the lies its curriculum tells students by surveilling what, where, when, and how learning takes place. Teacher as political is a teaching mindset and standpoint to counter public histories of American exceptionalism born from the oppression of marginalized communities. Teacher as political means the educator is a truth seeker; they examine what is upheld as monumental in our current school systems and rip away narratives that perpetuate Black death that survive in the violent shadows of white tormented imaginations. To evoke Grotkean pedagogy, a teacher must challenge what they are told to teach to promote educational emancipation. The teacher must not remain neutral.
The Myth of Neutrality I start with Jonathan Gold's words from Teaching Tolerance: Students look to their teachers to be the authority on the course material. And even though we may be aware that we are making choices about what content we include and exclude and whose perspectives we endorse and whose we disregard, most of us still like to pretend we are maintaining some level of objectivity. I came to the conclusion that objectivity is practically impossible. What's more, it can hinder our students' moral development. And cultivating morality is uniquely essential to the project of teaching history.
I remember as a student asking teachers about their political views and their thoughts on world issues. The school district I attended is in a white suburb of Orange County--a notable racist hotbed. 8 Lurking racism in the hallways or not, I still held interest in the opinions of my teachers (all white). Zero teachers had any opinions. All would robotically answer "the classroom is not a place for the political opinions of the teacher." I questioned not the political motives of the teachers but how their political choices then influenced their curricular implementation in the classroom. We as educators hold influential positions in our engagement with young minds. It is in the classroom where the world is shaped and built. This is one of the themes of teacher as political; in the classroom we must commit to ending colonial and imperialist agendas through curricular choices.
When I walked out of the principal's office after the first "rebuke" of my pedagogy, I was left stunned and stunted. An authority figure who'd granted me permission upon my hiring to be more socially justice oriented in my classroom was now asking for me to remove a sign that not only showed support for my students, but also me.... Was she suggesting that I be neutral in defending my own belonging?

Neutrality is a problem. It allows for insidious thoughts to ripen if they are not addressed.
Neutrality is a problem. It allows for insidious thoughts to ripen if they are not addressed. Students would draw swastikas in the bathroom of my high school in between classes-is a teacher supposed to stay neutral and let a clear act of hate pass? Teacher as political forces the educators to recognize the political weight their positioning as teachers in society holds. To use this standpoint in the undergraduate classroom is to not only have a Black Lives Matter sign in your classroom or office or behind you on Zoom, but to act like you believe in Black Lives Matter, even if that act potentially risks your job.
Stated earlier, teacher as political means to take a stand against the notion society has that the teacher be a neutral form of knowledge in the classroom. This thinking is a disservice to the education of our students and a disservice to the years teachers put into perfecting the art of teaching. To embody Miss Grotke means to actively make annotations and redactions of public histories; at every moment the classroom teacher must be ready to make the historical corrections to accurately frame history. Teacher as political standpoint does not concern itself with the political ideologies of a racist two-party system. It concerns itself with shaping a more liberatory future out of the ashes of the western epistemes' historical fantasies.

Teacher as Political in Practice
During our To Kill A Mockingbird unit students were asked to design their own protests. To accomplish that, they were required to engage with multiple different prompts. Some composed songs, some made posters, a couple wrote speeches, and others wrote stories about protests. I looked around my windowless classroom as student work slowly became a window into the radical dreams of the young. Tom" were not hidden behind a desk; even the girl whose father complained about an overload "political" messaging, stood in solidarity with her BIPOC classmates as she collaborated on friends' pieces. I sat in the middle of the room on top of the desks swiveling 2 my head searching for my next move.
In the fields of Native and Indigenous studies the idea/concept/theory/practice of self-determination, which is best described for the theorization of teacher as political, is "most interested in the ways through which Indigenous peoples negotiate on their own behalf, claim resilience, take ownership of adaptation, and innovate knowledge production and dissemination" (Huaman, Martin, 2020, pg. 4). Used widely in many different lanes, self-determination suggests that we (the marginalized beings) should have our own right to govern our bodies and make policy decisions about our own cultures. The colonizers' tongues are not allowed to slip into our words. It is with this thinking the teacher as political owns the languages they choose to hear in the future. 9 For thirty minutes I shifted student work around the classroom. One poster came down to go up onto another wall with no rhyme or reason. I was trying to figure out the best way to show student work without offending others. Jarome's poster ends up at the top of pile; Jamere's poster is a big hand with the middle finger grabbing the attention, "F**k Police" is stenciled in red letters that drip down the page. Jarome was a student who was severely allergic to the system of schooling-getting him to finish one poster (which was just one of three components of the project) took us a week and a half. There was nothing suggestive about the "political" messaging behind this work-fuck the police! Thinking through self-determination and the goals of teacher as political standpoint, Deleuze's work on deterritorialization leading to reterritorialization complements both the wants and needs of the respective concepts. 10 Deterritorialization destroyed cultures. An example of this would be the South's eradication of Black schools and Black teachers as their response to the decision to integrate schools after Brown v Board of Education (1954), more swiftly enforced after the second decision in 1956. This decision was championed by the use of the document, The Southern Manifesto. 11 Reterritorialization, used through a teacher as political standpoint, in practice would be hanging up a "F**K Police" poster on their respective desks so students know it is not a "political" standpoint to want fair and unbiased policing where Black and Brown people are not disproportionately killed by the police in the United States; this was countering erasure.
Jamere walked in the classroom the next day with the biggest smile on his face when he saw his poster hanging on the side of my desk. Now having more hindsight of the situation, it might have been a poor decision to blatantly ignore my principal. However, it was imperative for me to display my scholars' work, no matter the language they used: teaching as a political act is not singular; it is communal. All bodies must be accounted for and accountable so that the classroom can be a community working together to decolonize the teachings of white western males. The goal was to create a classroom community that recognized and listened to marginalized perspectives-displaying the posters was my way of acknowledging my scholars' voices.
Educators must do more than just suggest visions of the futures to the students. "...a primary learning objective for black schoolteachers as a professional class was to help students understand the urgent demand to make the work anew" (Givens 2021 159). The classroom is a shared learning community where both educators and students build the future together by dismantling the systems built by white violent imaginations.
Police-once seen as monumental to the functioning of our society-were toppled and discarded like statues in this 8th grade language arts learning community. 12 Unlearning Biases "I thought it was powerful to sit and talk about our storied selves and how they became storied for three hours a day." My chair came to a complete stop as I finished telling the technology wizard of C&I the origins of the Critical Conversations assignment.
"Okay, I wrote everything you said down-sharing the Google doc now. Let's break this apart together. First, you should not ask your students to record themselves talking for three hours, not realistic for a 1000 level undergraduate course," she says in a very Edna Mode fashion. Each meeting, the technology wizard of C&I's linear thinking leaves my brain exhausted.
"I really only want my students to create knowledge with each other. Two people in conversation attempting to build a consensus reality about the socio-cultural and geopolitical issues that plague their lives using texts featuring Indigenous futurites and Black imaginative thought and agency." I stare through the screen as I think about if my students' conversations will hold a flame to the Haymarket Books talk about abolitionist teaching. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZ3RPJ2rNc&t=2521 s) Last June after the murder of George Floyd, a close friend of mine was going through a reckoning of unlearning after watching all eight minutes and forty-six seconds of the crime. 13 In a series of lengthy conversations, my friend and I talked through how he learned or didn't learn about race and stories of marginalized beings. In these moments, he questioned his privilege and positioning as a white cisgender man and his past reactions to works written by non-white folks. As we spoke and listened to one another about our differences and similarities, a knowledge of one another's storied lives bloomed-we became our own curriculum.
Thinking about countering erasure of the Black body in the classroom, I return to the conversations I had with my friend over the summer. One of the first questions I asked him was if he ever had a Black teacher. Like myself and many others who had grown up in the public school system, he had not. As a mixed-race child, one of my parents being Black, I still had access-my aunties provided a wealth of information--to Black educators, so Black thought and art was not foreign to me. When we spoke of our readings in high school and what was being learned in the classroom, woefully my friend lamented about how disappointed he was to have only believed in the colonizer's papers.
The texts that he had believed to be monumental were in fact just tools to shape public history and hide marginalized beings' historical accounts. He'd been taught to think that books like The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, To Kill a Mockingbird (and on and on through the "classic" canon) were necessary cornerstones of our education. And seeing this, I began to question what it is that we find monumental in curriculum and why school systems are still reliant on the implementation of these texts in schools. 14 In our discussion of these texts, the two of us were creating knowledge about the world and our place in it through the directed use of books and other literature, instead of using literature to be the sole proprietor of knowledge.
It was important to me that students knew academic knowledge (i.e., knowledge that relies on Western ways of knowing) could be produced through alternative ways that eschewed the limitations of standardized paper writing. Pinar writes about using conversation needing to be critical to break the barriers of curriculum. As we converse, we enter a shared space that allowed for imagination and critique to be more easily accessed. With texts promoting Black imaginative agency, students talk, and through talking, future worlds are created that fit not just the student but that of the Grotkean thinker; we counter erasure together.

Conclusion
"Can we remember what it is to be alive with each other, beyond suffering and survival?" -adrienne marie brown What does it mean to survive a pandemic? How do we remember what it is like to connect with other humans without using death as an entry point? These were questions I asked myself as I began to construct the reading lists and assignments for my Fall 2020 classes. As Black death played out on screen like Greek tragedies, I wondered how do we best talk about this targeted erasure of Black people in classrooms-and what does it mean to ask students to write and read about the respective pandemics we live in and through?
Reparative reading was chosen because, "A reparative reading directs readers to extract 'sustenance from the objects of a culture -even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (Ohito,. In this article for Radical Teacher, I wanted to center my teaching body alongside Miss Grotke's pedagogy and her performance inside the classroom as a way of selfactualization and curating a Black teacher genealogical lineage. Teaching inside an American school system is not sustainable for Black teachers. The repair and healing for (of) my teaching self is a journey. Care is not spoken about in the teaching profession. This is me giving care to the pain inflicted inside school hallways. The wounds heal like scars; they keloid, festering on our psyche like those lashes from the whips on the backs of the enslaved that acted against the will of white domination. To alleviate the pain we must address the need and reason to continue to be political teachers: as Black teachers we attempt to rebuild the world so that we [Black folk] are no longer seen in confluence with chains.
Teacher as political is a way of being and teaching in critical manners to help students unlearn biases. This is a standpoint that counters erasure of marginalized beings in the classrooms; I do not teach so my students can acquire information, I teach to (re)story my life as a student and help alter my student's perception of what is an education. Teacher as political is a direct attack against 'schooling' and a weapon for educators that want to truly help students unlock diverse histories.
End Notes 1. Stacy Holman Jones writes in Living Bodies of Thought: "In critical autoethnography, theory is a language available to us as we write our stories". I've wanted to become a college professor since I learned about Plato and the great ancient philosophers. (I thought it would be cool to sit on a rock and think). Beyond the superficial, I wanted to prove wrong the racist teachers I had in my schooling career--not only succeed in their realm, but change it. Autoethnography helps to inform my understanding and production of knowledge. Having been and being a marginalized creature in the classroom, my thinking is derived from the knowledge acquired from my survival of and in the racist American school systems. Drawing from my survival, I write my knowledge into and with the knowledge of other Black theorists and borrow knowledge from my Indigenous brothers and sisters who are doing radical decolonial work in academia. To unlearn biases of oppressive education systems is the engine behind teacher as political.
2. Using Miss Grotke as a trendsetter for the concept of teaching as political, Sabzalian's essay aids the theorization as it helps push feminist and native theories together to challenge "hierarchical power relations and dominant ideologies" (362). Furthermore, Sabzalian writes that feminist standpoint theory was a counter to the thinking that knowledge production must be detached and objective; this privileged the "feeling" that drives knowing. Sabzalian writes that using Native feminist theories helps to "counter colonial logics and further decolonial futures" (361). To use the standpoint of teacher as political one acknowledges they become a bricoleur of theories to upend the patriarchal education system by privileging the teaching of histories from the perspective of those shadowed by the oppressors' history books. It is important to note that we as the teacher must be accountable to our own work in the colonial system. "Through reflective dialogue and intersectional critique standpoint theorizing has a long history of engaging the politics of difference" (363); we are looking for ways to exist. classroom spaces. Confronting these sites of suffering Black educators must take on the burden of protecting their BIPOC students from historical harm and protect their respective psyches-school damage haunts. Teacher as political standpoint addresses the Black educator works in these suffering sites and respects the educator's need to rebuke consensus knowledge, and protect the personal psyche of the marginalized being.
4. Christina Sharpe asks Black scholars and educators to become undisciplined as they work within the white ivory tower toward true racial and social equality and equitability.
Writing that these academic systems were not set up to think the BIPOC scholar will succeed, we work in the wake of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to defend the dead; we sit with history as we conduct the emancipatory teaching practices. The teacher as political understands that defending the dead means to always (re)story the dominant narratives of American curriculum. To defend the dead means to disregard Western knowledge production and privilege ancestral knowledge and embodied histories. To defend the dead means to hold a Black Lives Matter rally in your 8th grade classroom for Tom Robinson. 8. If interested, here is an article that goes into the history of the KKK in Orange County: https://fullertonobserver.com/2019/01/07/a-brief-historyof-the-ku-klux-klan-in-orange-county-notes-on-thebanality-of-evil/. This is necessary information because many think Orange County is a liberal hotbed, but it has proven time and again to be an unfriendly place for Black faces.

The Curriculum and
9. Much of this essay and theorization around Grotkean Pedagogy/teacher as political is a bricolage. Bricolage requires one to be interdisciplinary and smart, what are they using, how are they using it, and why is it needed to emancipate and reimagine stories [when I say "it" I allude to various theories or conceptual tools]. Almost an inspired act, bricolage as research emphasizes creativity and diverse thinking as it "challenge(s) the hegemonic status quo" of Western society and knowledge. Bricolage and the collaboration of knowledges can help fight erasure of the settler states. Bricolage, as Komea writes is, "adopt(ing) and adapt(ing) tools and theories from variety of sources to ho'oku'iku'i or stitch together a rich tapestry of analyses that privilege Indigenous perspectives, expose and 'speak back' to Western domination, and promote social justice and Indigenous self-determination" (190)(191).
10. From Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) this philosophical concept is about how bodies are territorialized and coded within a system of power. Deterritorialization is for the separation from cultural and political practices of colonization and imperialism (italics are my original thoughts on the subject). In my interpretation, reterritorialization is what Jarvis R. Givens argues in his book about Carter G. Woodson, that fugitivity is the analytic mode we as emancipatory educators need to operate in to remake the world anew, without systems of oppression.
11. Signed by about one fifth of congress at the time, the document gave southern parents (white parents) a right to revoke integration and continue segregationist practices. The document advanced beliefs that Black folks were subordinate and did not have enough intellect to teach white people. This was issued in 1956.

Teacher as political standpoint uses Monumental
Mobility's use of memory work to confront historical memory: "memory work is the myriad ways in which monuments imbedded in a social fabric play a role in how individuals and collectivities make meaning of the past as distinct from the concrete matter of what actually happened," (7). I propose we think of curriculum as a sort of monument, what is monumental in our curriculum? How do these curricular monuments shadow the narratives of the marginalized? When and why should the educator make the political move to "topple" these monuments from the curriculum? These are the questions those working from the lens of teacher as political are to answer.
13. Teacher as political adopts the analytic of fugitivity to "investigate the precarity of the interstitial space between life and death that Black people inhabit in an anti-Black world" (Ohito 2020 188).
14. Paraskeva starts with the Galeano quote, "incapable of fighting poverty, it fights the poor, while the dominant culture, a militarized culture, worships the violence of power," to describe our society. Taking knowledge acquired from Monumental Mobility, the books that we consider to be monumental (like Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird), are violent representations of our society. With the continuation of teaching these texts, we promote the worship of violent language toward BIPOC communities. Itinerant Curriculum Theory is Paraskeva's invention to "delink(ing) from the totalitarian worship of the archetype of modernity," the modernity being western knowledge systems. ICT is a tool to aid the "decolonial struggle against curriculum epistemicides," (262). Drawing heavily from Deleuze and his work on becoming and deterriolization, Paraskeva seems to suggest the teacher and student should be in a symbiotic learning community. This is further supported by the authors use of Huebner writing teachers interact with students like "a jazz quartet, each one find[ing] his own way of adding beauty to the jazz form," (265). The issues of gendered language aside, teacher as political standpoint firmly suggests that the teacher is not the holder of knowledge in the classroom-directly opposing consensus understanding of the teacher as know-it-all.