Freedom Dreaming.
- What is the freedom dream you are dreaming regarding revolutionary education? What has
informed your vision? Who has inspired you to continue? - How have you/will you execute your vision?
As children, we are taught that through our imaginations, anything is possible. Therefore, at a young age, it is instilled in us that imagination is a profound source of innovation and creativity, and what we envision can lead to unlimited possibilities for the world to grow. Comparably as adults, we are forced to see the world only as it is and are no longer trained to see the world as it could be, and thus, forfeit the ideological training we have received regarding the usefulness of imagination. A quote that has inspired me are the words of Maxine Green “to commit to imagining is to commit to looking beyond the given, beyond what appears to be unchangeable. It is a way of warding off the apathy and the feelings of futility that are the greatest obstacles to any sort of learning and, surely, to education for freedom… We need imagination” (Love, 102). This quote shows the importance of imagination in achieving freedom. Bettina L. Love’s chapter “Abolitionist Teaching, Freedom Dreaming, and Black Joy” in her book We Want To Do More Than Survive, is what has shaped my thought of how dreaming and imagination can fight for freedom through arts education.
Imagination is required for freedom dreaming within revolutionary education because students and teachers have to be able to imagine the world they want to create rather than perpetuate the same ways of life. Freedom dreaming has given me the ability to envision practical ways of fighting for freedom through education. My freedom dream that I am dreaming entails inspiring, empowering, and allowing students to have agency over how they express themselves. This work can be done in a theatrical space, which is a physical space that I hope to create in the future, or a traditional classroom setting. Many of the tools that have been used in my education classes and praxis work have given me practical ways to create a space where students can express themselves, dream, and execute.
Learning about Freedom Dreaming has given me the ability to name what I had envisioned my future professional practice to be. Since my passion is theatre; theatre is an amazing way that dreaming can take place since imagination is a vital element that is needed to create theatre. Theatre has always been an art form of envisioning and creating what has not yet been created and seen. Theatre is and can be used as a tool to imagine and find ways to make a dream tangible. A threat to freedom dreaming is what Love calls spirit murdering, which is when students are exposed to narratives and experiences that discourage dreaming that makes freedom dreaming seem inaccessible. The work that I hope to do with theatre is to encourage youth to continue to use their imagination to make their life and the world around them a better place. To execute my dream, I would like to begin to involve myself with youth by going into the public school system and/ or becoming a teaching artist.
People who have inspired me to do this work are the activist artists that advocate for those who are marginalized by engaging in different art forms, some of those people include Toni Morrison and Anna Deveare Smith but a more personal inspiration is Lela Aisha Jones. I am inspired by Jones because her life’s work has involved caring for and providing people with tools to properly care for themselves in their multifaceted lives through the art form of dance something that I hope to do through theatre.
Strike as a Learning Experience.
- How did you engage in learning during the strike and how did you tend to your being/body as a part of the process?
In continuation of thinking about ways to freedom dream, the strike was also a place where imagination and execution existed. After years of what seemed like unanswered prayers from the administration, both Bryn Mawr and Haverford’s tensions could longer be hidden anymore and suddenly what was once tolerated was now intolerable. Whether people decided to support the strike or not, it was and was meant to be an inconvenience in everyone’s lives. Reflecting on my experience during the strike, the inconvenience that I experienced helped me to see how I was physically and mentally complacent with how things had run for the 4 years that I had been at Bryn Mawr. One aspect of myself that was challenged was my physical and mental space within myself and on campus. Like many students on campus, a student’s identity is placed in how well they do in a class. For classes to stop and for our focus to be on something much more important, made me stop to realize the false sense of security I had in my school work.
The way that I choose to combat the feeling of unworthiness and uselessness, was making sure that I breathed throughout my day. While breathing is an involuntary function that our body enacts, my body was often not connected to that breathing. I have learned by engaging in the readings surrounding the Black Pentecostal Breath that I was exposed to by Dr. Lela Aisha Jones the importance of breath to the body/being and how breath can connect to one’s spirit. Therefore, the ways that I took care of my being/ body was connecting my breath to my spirit and to God so that I could ground myself in something that
- Where and how did you locate your action? Where and how did you locate your rest? Describe your process and where you landed.
- If you engaged with Fred Moten and/or Nia Love please reflect on their influence upon your experience during the strike? What did you archive from your time with them?
- If you as an individual are planning on continuing/evolving the strike, describe what that might look like.
The fall semester of 2020 was the most intensive learning I have experienced because learning was not only subject to the classroom but also outside of the classroom. Breaking free from my complacency to Bryn Mawr’s system was initiated by the strike. My experience with the previous conflict within Bryn Mawr systems was resolved by my constant advocating for myself; however, I rarely pushed for how things needed to be changed to make it easier for other students to accomplish the same things I have. I am grateful for the ways that the strike has pushed Bryn Mawr’s campus to grow.
Fred Moten and Nia Love’s teach-in began the start of what it means to learn and work through the strike from different perspectives. Fred Moten’s, a poet, philosopher, along with many other titles, framework of the strike came from contextualizing black people’s role as fugitives and being in the under commons, while Nia Love used her body to understand and analyze the strike. Engaging in both of these scholars’ work showcased how a revolutionary action can be viewed from a variety of viewpoints and ways of actions. Both Love and Moten displayed how there is no one way to engage in a strike of any form except to disrupt and change was is being stood up against.
Understanding how there not being one way to engage in the strike, my work centered around the title of this 360 course, centering blackness. Entering my senior year I knew that I wanted to highlight and empower black people through my thesis work, and the strike gave me the opportunity to focus on centering black voices and stories in a time where we need it the most. I gained inspiration from those involved in the strike collective and from the work that had been done in our class. Also, Chanelle Wilson gave me the opportunity to reach back and help educate and guide discussions around abolition, freedom dreaming, and revolution by co-facilitating a teach-in. Co-facilitating the teach-in gave me the opportunity to reflect, analyze, and connect the things I had been exploring in class to the strike.
As the semester has come to a close, I am currently in a space where I am intrigued to find innovative ways to be involved in the continuous strike that happening in decolonizing ways of knowing. The statement that there is no one way of doing the work of anti-racism/ decolonizing our world is what is sticking with me as I continue to move through this world. I will continue to be creative and actively find ways to engage in this work and challenge myself to challenge things that promote injustice.
Centering Blackness as Embodied Radical Action.
- What was the inspiration for your final movement project.
- How has your relationship with your being/body shifted over the semester?
- Describe a being/bodily practice you are developing or that you want to develop as a part of your life. How have or will you move this into action? What resources from this course and beyond are grounding you in this practice?
- Imagine we had infinite resources for embodied radical action and we could manifest the impossible with our 360 cluster. Offer one embodied experiential element you would ask us to create for our next cohort on Centering Critical Blackness. (For example: Go to the moon or a dance in a non-gravity space.) Tell us why you imagined this experience.
“We hold all of our experiences in our body”, a song that I continue to hear Lela Aisha Jones’s singing. The body/ being is an entity that is constantly dwelled in but often not acknowledged or cared for. Because we are embodied beings/ people our body holds knowledge and is the birthing place for emotions to emote. Having taken a class with Lela before that centered around the body/being, I learned how my past experiences (positive, negative, or neutral) reside in places in my body and how those experiences can impact the way that I move in the world today. Transitioning into this dance course with Jones this semester, I have moved from a place of acknowledging how my experiences impacted my movement in this world and into working through those experiences with my body. In the first movement class, we did an activity that surrounded memory escaping, and doing this began my work of recognizing how I did not want to continue to escape from my embodied experiences but to work through them to find the lesson and take that lesson and move forward. A person who continues to further my thinking about embodied experiences is Nia Love through practicing in her workshops. She is a representation of what it means to always be conscious of one’s body and how information and experiences impact the body’s movement through space.
Throughout my learning with Nia Love and work in Diasporic Citizenship, I have recognized how much breathing needs to be apart of my bodily practice. Beginning class with breathing and acknowledging where my body is at certain times has been helpful to notice where I am holding tension. Breathing deeply has allowed me to release places of tension that I might not have known that was there previously. This semester was the first time that I did a breathing prayer with a Christian religious group on campus, and it was so refreshing to walk around campus breathing and listening to God’s promises for peace and rest. As this year has been stressful for many, taking time to walk and breathe helped me to reconnect myself with God and myself so that I could lead a day feeling grounded and supported. I plan to continue doing this bodily practice and making it a tradition in my life at least twice a week. Some resources that I am using to inform this bodily practice that I have learned in this course are the breathing sessions that happen at the start of class and the understanding of how movement can help release energy.
Being able to confront my experiences through my body is highlighted in my final dance movement video. I centered my exploration on how my life in education has built me up in learning but tore me down in dreaming. Bettina L. Love speaks about spirit-murdering in her book We Want To Do More Than Survive and I use her phenomenon of spirit murdering to contextualize my educational experiences. I embody my spirit-murdering experiences in the way that I remember them and try to learn and heal from them in order to physically be in a space where I can begin to freedom Dream. Bettina L. Love’s book has shaped how I am thinking about liberation in education, especially as I prepare to help students step into freedom dreaming as well.
Taking this 360 course was extremely refreshing and helpful for me to find ways to take care of my body and aid the black community. If our class was able to continue to engage in the work of centering blackness and had an unlimited amount of funds I would choose for us to take the journey that our ancestors took during the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. I want to be able to visit Ghana and see the slave “castle” and go to a port in America where Africans would be sold into slavery and then visit a plantation. Going on this journey would help give me a deeper insight into the journey that our ancestors involuntarily made and would give me a perspective on how much they endured and fought so that their descendants, I, could be free. Overall I am extremely grateful for the learning that has been done and the action that will be continued to be done in my own life.