Education

Whispers of Defiance

A note to teachers as you begin a new year

Photo by Lora Moore-Kakaletris on Unsplash

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“Name the way
rebellion’s calm spirit has served you,
and how you came
to unlearn the lessons
of that teacher,
your land’s omnipotent defiler.”

~Tino Villanueva

Years ago, I was observing a kindergarten classroom in a school that was making an effort to incorporate more play and student agency into its early childhood classrooms. After some time, watching the children sit in small clusters around toys they seemed hesitant to even touch, I decided, along with the colleague I was observing with, that simply watching and sharing feedback with the teacher later wasn’t going to cut it. The culture of the classroom was so tight and regimented that offering the children time and enticing materials—usually enough to get any group of young kids to jump into action—was, instead, paralyzing. I put my notebook down and moved off of the child-sized classroom chair onto the floor to join a group of three students, who were sitting quietly with a bin of untouched Lego bricks between them.

I started poking around in the bin, pulling out pieces to connect, and then nudged the bin toward the child next to me with a smile. Many years in the classroom have taught me that when play is stalled, adult questions and dialogue are not particularly helpful. It’s much more enticing to simply begin to play and to make the play itself an invitation to join in. This is how children engage with each other after all; they just begin, often without words, and their creations become the draw to peers. But, in this case, it didn’t work. Each of the children halfheartedly pulled a few bricks out, as if to humor me, but otherwise continued to sit still, glancing quickly at each other and at me.

The Lego bin was tall and narrow, making it almost impossible to find pieces. And, as any experienced Lego builder knows, finding the right piece is half the work. So I said aloud, “It’s really hard to find the pieces you want in here, isn’t it? I bet it would be easier if we dumped them out.” I proceeded to scatter about half the pieces in the bin onto the rug between us. The children’s eyes widened, as they looked from the pieces on the floor to each other and back to me. The boy sitting next to me, whom I’d offered the bin to a few minutes earlier, craned his neck to register where his teacher was standing in the room. Then he looked back to me and whispered, “If she comes over here, I’m gonna tell her you did that.” I smiled again and said, “That’s fine. I’ll tell you what. If she comes over here, I’ll tell her, okay?” The kids slowly started to dig around in the pieces themselves, now much easier to see, and to begin putting a few together. They were still tentative. Their structures were small. But I could see a sliver of permission beginning to work its way into our little cohort.

To be clear, I don’t think the restraint and trepidation the children felt was their teacher’s fault. Like them, she had also been trained to fear disorder and risk-taking. And, though adults always bear ultimate responsibility for the experiences of children, sometimes grown-ups are also caught within the constraints of systems they’ve learned to see as necessary or unavoidable. Teachers are charged with building the culture of their classroom community, but that classroom exists within the culture of a school, which exists within the culture of all the pressures and contradictions that bear down upon our education system.

I think about that little boy a lot, though. I think about how he was learning to be still and quiet, how he was learning that restraint was the most important skill for navigating school life and maybe life in general, and how he was learning to quickly discern the structures of authority in any room. Most of all, I think about how he was learning to protect himself, and how brave it was for him, in that context and at five years old, to let me know what he was going to need to do to shield himself from the potential consequences of my disobedience.

There were no consequences, of course. What he could not know, from his kindergarten seat, was that I was there that day to tug at the threads that were winding their way around him, to try to loosen them a bit, and, hopefully, to create enough slack in the knots to allow him to be a little less quiet and a little less obedient himself. He couldn’t know was that I wanted his teacher to see me dump the Lego bin out, to see what he and his friends could do with a little more freedom, and to see, through my actions, that she also had the capacity to break rules that weren’t serving her students' learning—that this was, in fact, the entire reason for my presence there.

As adults in children's lives, whatever our role, we have a responsibility to establish the structures, expectations, and assessments that help to keep them safe and to ensure they are growing and learning. Of course, there is authority, intrinsically and often necessarily, embedded in this relationship. To deny the inherent power we hold in children’s lives doesn’t erase that power. It only masks their reality and makes it even less likely that we will be able to offer them thoughtful opportunities to hear their own voices and to recognize their own developing agency.

It is often our job to establish boundaries and limits for children and to act as guides, as they grow and learn. But it is tempting, as we navigate our own grown-up constraints, obligations, and systems of authority, to create environments that teach children to prioritize compliance and self-protection above all else, including above their own voices, their own questions, and even their own ability to learn. It’s easy to slip into these patterns and to pull children into them with us, especially as systems of fear and compliance are increasingly amplified by the highest authorities all around us every day.

Shortly after the 2024 election, I wrote about the educator Herbert Kohl’s advice to teachers on the importance of cultivating what he called “creative maladjustment" in ourselves and in our students. As we head into the coming school year, it feels important to resurface this idea. Kohl borrowed the concept of choosing “maladjustment,” when accommodating to existing systems becomes personally or morally untenable, from Martin Luther King Jr., who warned of the dangers of growing “adjusted” to an unjust social order. Kohl notes that similar systems of repression often exist within educational contexts, cutting students off from learning, from personal agency, and, at times, even from their own dignity and humanity. He says,

“The ability to break patterns and pose new questions is as important as the ability to answer questions other people set for you. This is as true for teachers who care about their students as it is for the students themselves…A central teaching skill consists of detecting and analyzing dysfunctional patterns of obedience and learning, and developing strategies to negate them. It means that teachers have to become sophisticated pattern detectives and sleuth out ways in which the practices they have been taught—or have inherited—inhibit learning.”

As was clear sitting on the rug with a group of kindergartners, who were afraid to empty a Lego bin, children are already experts at detecting and analyzing these patterns. It is usually adults, not children, who have to relearn this skill, because we’ve become so accustomed to the environments that they’ve just arrived in, and because we carry more agency in those environments, often allowing us to perceive them as less rigid than they are. Whether they are five or fifteen, kids are constantly moving between systems of authority that are not always consistent or aligned with one another, but where they are almost always the least powerful. So, they become adept at determining which environments allow them to take risks and experiment in the open, which environments necessitate that they be covert, finding small, subtle moments to sneak their voices and their play into hidden corners, and which environments make compliance the only possible mode of operating.

Sometimes all we have to do is drop our own shoulders and remind ourselves to loosen some of the constraints we have set ourselves, making it a practice to periodically reassess which boundaries are genuinely essential to safety or learning, and which might be there just to buffer against our own nervousness over our planned outcomes taking a more circuitous route, or over our classrooms becoming a little more rambunctious. But, sometimes, the constraints we pass along to children stem from firmer limits set by those who hold power over us, as adults. Breaking free of those threads, when we see that they are holding children back, often requires more bravery and, as Kohl advises, more creativity. These are, however, the most important moments to question the rules we set for children. When children see us questioning our own acceptance of the implementation of rules that apply to us both, not only to them, their relationship to our authority, to their own autonomy, and to broader systems of power all shift at once.

Perhaps more than ever, I think we owe children these invitations to interrogate structures and expectations that require them to silence their own thoughts and voices, and to accept narratives that limit their belief in their own capacities and in the possibilities of their own future. As with all good teaching, offering these invitations requires our willingness to be models, because raising courageous kids necessitates that we show courage ourselves. Sometimes this modeling only requires small adjustments: closing our classroom door while we read a book instead of ploughing through another test-prep passage, skipping a quiz and going on an impromptu field trip, finding a tree to gather under with pen and paper instead of in front of screens, or dumping the Lego bin out on the rug. And sometimes it requires bigger, riskier changes.

Whatever the adjustment, modeling these moments of rebellion, big or small, also requires that we clearly communicate a willingness to stand between children and the consequences of our own adult rule breaking. It’s not enough to dump the Lego bin out; we also have to be willing to take responsibility for doing so. Otherwise, all we accomplish is to exacerbate an environment that already felt threatening to a child and to solidify their instinct for self-protection and accommodation.

There’s a picture book I’ve long loved by Toni Morrison and her son, Slade, called The Big Box in which the adults determine that the children are not capable of handling their own freedom and confine them, one by one, to a deceptively pleasant box. The box has everything they could possibly want, but “the doors have three big locks" and "only open one way.” Each child objects to their confinement in turn:

“Mickey sat still and avoided their eyes
By lowering his little-boy head.
But he heard their words and he felt their eyes
And this is what he said:
‘But I comb my hair and I don’t do drugs
And every day I vacuum the rugs.
I feed the hamster and water the plants
And once a week I hang up my pants.
If owls can scream
And rabbits can hop
And beavers chew trees when they need ‘em,
Why can’t I be a kid like me
Who doesn’t have to handle his freedom?
I know you are smart and I know that you think
You’re doing what is best for me.
But if freedom is handled just your way
Then it’s not my freedom or free.’”

I’ve found over the years that most adults have an instinctively negative response to this book. It’s brightly illustrated by Giselle Potter and it ends optimistically, with all of the children pushing down the walls of the box and climbing out into the grass, seemingly cheered on by the rabbits and beavers. There’s nothing frightening about the words or images, and the book ends on a gently triumphant note for the children. Other than the one mention of drugs in the line above (a feature of its original 1990’s context), there’s nothing illicit or shocking in the text. Even the adults, while certainly appearing stern and serious, are not depicted as scary or villainous. Perhaps that is, actually, what often makes grown-ups uncomfortable—not that it’s too abstract or developmentally inappropriate (which are the objections I usually hear), but rather that it is too familiar. It’s a little too easy to see ourselves in those stern adults, sincerely thinking they are doing what’s best for children by insisting they temper their questions and creativity to gain acceptance and to avoid disrupting the status quo of a dull and limiting grown-up world.

As we head into a new school year, I think it’s always a worthy task to examine the walls that confine us and our students, and to ask ourselves if they are genuinely creating contexts for growth (as some well-crafted parameters certainly do), or if they are locking us all into a paradigm that teaches quiet acceptance and constraint over thought, connection, and humanity. Now more than ever, I think we need to insist on the latter, even if doing so requires us to cultivate a little rebellion in ourselves and in our children.

Whether you’ve created the rules yourself or feel bound by systems bigger than your own classroom, I hope that anytime you observe children—or students of any age, or even yourself for that matter—growing increasingly quiet and vigilant, that you won’t be afraid to dump out the Lego bin on their behalf.

Wishing you a year of creativity and courage,

Alicia

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