Last weekend, I had the pleasure of keynoting the Progressive Education Network’s National Conference 2024 in Columbus, OH. The theme of the conference “The Space Between: How Progressive Education Fosters Curiosity, Creativity, Community and Connection” felt germane to the moment. As I formulated my remarks on Friday, I watched Game 4 of the New York Yankees versus the Cleveland Guardians. (No, I didn’t go in person even though it was two hours away.) Words failed me in preparation, so rather than force it, I let my mind take a step back a bit. The game barely started when “The Generational” Juan Soto smack a two-run homerun out the park to start the game.
As I watched Soto circling the bases, it made me think about the genius behind his at-bat. He has a unique stance (a “Soto Shuffle” that now has its own theme song), but it’s deeper than that. His at-bats seem less like structured and well-practiced swings and more like nimble, artful strokes in response to the environment and the situation. He might say, “I do what I need to do for my team in the moment.” Some interpret his chest thumping ebullience as cockiness. But, those of us who’ve watched players like him for a long time know his braggadocio aligns with Dominican culture.
Suddenly, I had something to say about progressive education and the way forward.
Over the last decade, baseball as a sport has had several conversations about cultures clashing and the American pastime ethos. Major League Baseball has seen international players for decades prior, but ideas of playing “the right way” have permeated over the last 15 years. Unwritten rules become common parlance for adhering to societal norms that no one really asked for, but must be maintained for some obscure reason. Fights break out when batters flip their bat high or pitchers show too much emotion on the mound. Things got so bad that MLB hired Ken Griffey Jr. to encourage the younger, more diverse generation of players to “just play.”
With Soto, as with the Guardians’ Jhonkensy Noel or any number of players, their showmanship isn’t just for fans. It’s a way to raise their energy for the moment and a tip of the cap to the culture where their cultures normalize and encourage those behaviors in the name of sport.
So it goes with progressive education. For what it’s worth, the term “progressive education” includes a plethora of frameworks. Dewey, Emilia, and Montessori are some of the names that come up, though other philosophers inform the concept. Regardless of the original thinkers’ intentions, these pedagogies are typically found in schools with more resources and autonomy. This doesn’t mean every school that espouses progressive education is a predominantly white school. Other thinkers including Paulo Freire, Deborah Meier, and Mildred Johnson pulled in progressive tenets with contextual adjustments and students of color in mind. Over the last century, a bunch of schools past and present provided progressive-type pedagogies to Black and Latinx students.
Currently, people have an easier time telling people what progressive education is not, but not what it is. To complicate this boundary setting, the perception of progressive education as belonging to the upper echelons of society has as much to do with who attends the school, too.
In too many of our schools, four deceits overcome the four C’s. We have children whose curiosity arouses suspicion of adults across the board. We see children’s work, but some of their creativity gets discarded offhand. Other adults see some students’ communities as deficit without any real inquiry about them as people. Some students seek connection and some adults see these connections as disruptions. In our progressive schools, many students have negative experiences, but based on many informal conversations I’ve seen with students and families, race plays a role in how schools mete out these experiences.
Yes, every school has to contend with students of color not feeling included, progressive or not. However, with its attention to student agency and constructivism, the lack of racial justice feels more poignant.
Near the end, I added a fifth C to the theme of the conference: culture. Putting it all together, attention to culture ensures that adults and students’ peers have more expansive and inclusive visions for genius. If the “progressive” in progressive education means to move forward (shout-out to Liza Talusan), then it means our success in these efforts leaves no one behind. Every child deserves voice, agency, and the opportunity to co-construct their education. It also means the rest of us have to believe students can do so.
Too many people label “progressive education” as loosey-goosey, but I prefer to think of the way it unearths academic gifts.
After finishing my talk, I got to see Soto’s genius on display in one of the greatest at-bats I’d seen. Based on the feedback I received, my treatise framed the rest of the conference well. But, as calm as I had been all day, my adrenaline shot back up thanks to this game. The duel between him and Hunter Gaddis was thrilling baseball when you add in the playoff implications and the vibrato from the sold-out stadium. The beauty of baseball now is in how these approaches to the game become expressions of their innermost super-selves.
But we miss the greatness when we don’t open up our racial and cultural views of what’s possible. That along ought to provoke more of us to make progress for all of our students.
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