Abstract
Racial inequity in urban education remains a long-standing issue that compounds and regenerates the many systemic hardships children and families of color face. Remedying the inequity requires implementing both system- and individual-level solutions. Urban educators are charged with strengthening the academic, social, and emotional skills students need to reinvent themselves and become free (hooks, 1994) as well as designing educational programs that promote students’ holistic well-being and development. Fulfilling that charge requires that urban educators be aware of students’ social conditions and locations as well as their own, so they can effectively partner with students in both critically examining and dismantling the root causes of unjust circumstances. When the foundation of all classroom interactions is a positive relationship and the ultimate instructional goal is the students’ preparation for resistance and liberation, then students are experiencing both valuable connection and transformative social and emotional learning (TSEL; Jagers et al., 2019).
The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, edited by Niobe Way et al. (2018), presents readers with a collection of chapters that underscore the role that human connection plays in the current human condition across multiple systemic levels. They proffer, “. . . as the bonds of solidarity and cohesion weaken, our ability to address our societal problems and pursue our common interests is severely damaged” (Way et al., 2018, p. 2). Throughout the nearly 500-page discussion of (dis)connection, readers can find embedded critiques of sexism, racism, state-sanctioned violence (i.e., police brutality, economic disenfranchisement, educational inequity, etc.), and a variety of other societal atrocities. The thesis undergirding the entire text is that “humans are inherently responsive and relational beings” (Way et al., 2018, p. 3), yet there is a dissonance between human nature and modern culture, which has led to an epidemic or crisis of connection in society. The editors note how academic silos have limited our ability to remedy the crisis of connection effectively. Through their offering, Way and colleagues (2018) provide an exemplary model for leveraging transdisciplinary insights to demonstrate how substantive human bonds improve human development and social conditions—including education—around the world.
Connection is among our most basic human needs; people build communities to establish stable social networks that provide safety, developmental resources, strong self-concept, and a greater sense of belonging. Healthy human connection is about establishing relationships with a mutual commitment to empathy, care, co-operation, and interdependence (Way et al., 2018). The authors use the universal “we” as a conceptual reference point to define connection, and readers are invited to imagine “a collective consciousness and state of communion, if not community” for all of humanity (Way et al., 2018, p. 1).
A close reading of Crisis of Connection reveals its significance for TSEL. Robert Jagers et al. (2019) wrote that SEL: must cultivate in [minoritized youth and adults] the knowledge, attitudes, and skills required for critical examination and collaborative action to address root causes of inequities. To this end, transformative SEL is primarly concerned with advancing educational equity—fostering more equitable learning environments and producing equitable outcomes for children and young people furthest from opportunity. (p. 163)
The Crisis of Connection helps readers realize the link between human connection and educational excellence in the pursuit of social justice and equity (Way et al., 2018) and reminds readers of the critical role that schools and communities play in youth’s social development and emotional wellbeing. Thus, the book is particularly relevant to a special issue addressing the social and emotional learning (SEL) needs of urban Black youth.
The edited volume includes 20 chapters divided into three major sections that highlight root causes, manifestations of consequences, and possible solutions to the crisis of connection. The first two sections reveal how disconnection factors into social and scientific developments at the individual and societal levels; the third section presents exemplars of solutions. As each of the contributing authors thoughtfully engage questions of race, gender, religion, political affiliation, and the power dynamics shaping the conditions that facilitate or impede human connection, readers are presented with a paradox. That is, those social identity categories both give language to shared social experiences and function to create social disconnection. The chapter authors help readers explore and understand the stated paradox from various perspectives and approaches, ending with examples of promising, evidence-based solutions.
Perhaps most practically, The Crisis of Connection provides readers with both theoretical frameworks and empirical examples to inform critical reflection and intentional action toward greater connection. The text quite comprehensively addresses connection and the risks of prioritizing individualism over relationship, and the authors’ discussions of connection provide pathways for understanding the social development of not just individual people, but also of nations and greater humanity. Particularly in urban communities, where schools are being turned into carceral states, the under-resourcing, demonization, and institutional abuse that Black youth too often experience are largely related to the gross systematic disregard of educational leaders and policy makers. Racists and racism still plague our educational system, corralling Black bodies for funding while not valuing Black lives. Moving to dismantle divisive social dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression is particularly critical to the enfranchisement and wellbeing of marginalized youth. Hereafter, I offer a general overview of the book’s major sections and some closing comments about the significance of this text to TSEL and advancing equity in urban education.
Section 1: Human Development and Social Locations
The four human development chapters of the book remind readers that societal expectations for individuals’ performances (i.e., how they show up in the world), particularly around race and gender, reinforce systems that cause disconnection among young people. The chapters present a range of topics, from the factors that inhibit girls’ embodied freedom to the way masculine hegemony impedes adolescent boys’ friendships, and several of the human development chapters move toward an intersectional analysis. An example of this is found in Chapter 3, where Janie Ward introduced a discussion about Black girlhood that calls attention to differences between resistance for survival and resistance for liberation, desiring the latter. Ward teaches the reader that resistance is, in part, about the full recovery of one’s voice, and a part of effectively resisting is critically interrogating one’s sociopolitical position before, during, and beyond the liberation project.
Section 2: Science and Social Progress
The four science and society chapters highlight the importance of research that meets social needs as to not disconnect our scholarship from our lived experience—past, present, and possible. The book’s second section discusses why researchers must challenge methodological biases that minimize the validity of storying human experiences, narratives through which we conceptualize our common humanity and uncover opportunities for empathy and connection. Pedro Noguera wrote about empathy in Chapter 5, where readers learn how our global pains (e.g., war, famine, and poverty) are not seen as shared adversities, but rather local issues. Particularly for the United States, those global pains are only addressed when it serves a more local economic benefit (i.e., capitalist gain). Noguera (2018) wrote, “World history is full of examples of moral detachment, which is the essence of the crisis of connection” (p. 155). Moral detachment is rooted fundamentally in our lack of willingness to acknowledge the harms we each experience and seeing those instances as opportunities to act in solidarity toward rectification and reconciliation. Out of self-interest, we create distance from one another, the environment, and paradoxically ourselves.
Section 3: Solutions
The chapter authors contend that active resistance to disconnection and the factors that contribute to such is foundational to solving the crisis of connection. Across the remaining 12 chapters, authors describe solutions—theater programs, research interventions, trauma therapy—in schools and communities. Lisa Arrastia’s Love pedagogy is one example of a school-based solution. Way and colleagues (2018) describe Arrastia’s love pedagogy as “a significant educational methodology that radically resists the criminalization of poor and working-class young people within and outside of schools” (p. 39). Other chapters on solutions discuss foregrounding students’ voices when examining common issues, such as the experiential impact of education reform initiatives. Among community-based solutions, authors discussed possibilities for creative and performing arts programs to serve as sites for healing, resolving traumas of the past, and aiding individuals through life transitions.
These solution chapters reveal that social and emotional learning can occur in a variety of programmatic and organizational contexts. From classrooms to after-school performing arts programs and even in religious organizations, there is space to foster a greater commitment to positive social interaction and societal healing. In the final section of Crisis of Connection, the chapter authors offer a unified call for the creation of spaces to practice collaboration and trust as well as share opportunities for creative expression; through those intentional spaces, students stand to connect, grow, and learn together.
Conclusions
From birth, children yearn for connection and relationship. However, systems have been created within society that often socializes young people to avoid connection, or those systems inhibit the establishment of healthy social relationships. As educators, we must resist replicating those systems as well as teach and encourage student to resist. In keeping with the goal of transformative SEL specifically, we must teach urban youth how to navigate the complexities of life at their sociopolitical locations in ways that foster deeper, more nuanced understandings of themselves and others. That nuanced understanding will help students more acutely recognize and combat the acts and powers that move to subjugate them. Effective resistance requires significant personal insight, and the critical, reflective interrogation of one’s social and political positions is a learned skill which begets the need for deliberate instruction with that explicit aim. Urban schools then ought to be places where Black youth are expressly taught to examine and vanquish the evils of housing discrimination, environmental degradation, gentrification, and any other manifestation of oppression that keeps them from experiencing the fullness of their lives, joy, health, freedom, and enfranchisement into society at large.
Ultimately, Way and colleagues (2018) call for the centering of the greater we (over the me) as both our individual and collective modus operandi while ensuring that everyone is included in the we. Among the causes of our disconnection is a fundamental failure to fully see, understand, and affirm one another’s whole being and accept our interdependence. The volume editors made a comment that stands out to me in their introduction: “As the barriers to human connection calcify, our ability to see beyond them becomes ever more limited and our awareness that we are part of one human family becomes even more faint” (Way et al., 2018, p. 4). Focusing on the terms “our ability to see,” that language signals a call to expand our imagination for the possibilities of a united future. This text is important for equipping educators to notice the systems and structures that impede connection or sustain disconnection. Several school-level solutions were presented. However, those solutions primarily situate the institutions and adults as the facilitators of change. Greater emphasis on student-led approaches also is needed as those types of interventions disrupt the standing power dynamics that impede youth agency while giving students an opportunity to practice their newly learned skills.
Finally, reflective questions must also must be embedded in our curricula and undergird educators’ liberatory educational praxis and everyone’s social interactions. What are the assumptions that we carry into spaces where we have the opportunity to connect? Do we actually believe that we need one another—globally—to survive? If we do believe we need one another, how can we act based on that belief without including subjugation and hierarchization as parts of our social contract or the relational reality? Through the Crisis of Connection readers learn: Connection is an antidote to some of our social ills, and it creates an opportunity to generate solutions drawn from our collective imagination for others.
