Abstract
What you seek is seeking you. Rumi
In 2010, with the inequities and racial bias in sight, a former superintendent and several community and justice organizations in conjunction with community organizers and a whole host of community stakeholders to start the Office of African American Male Achievement (AAMA) with transformative as the shared goal. This main effort, the one that began in 2010, grows from the Office of AAMA and the district’s commitment to address and eliminate institutionalized racism. As will all transformative learning, change comes in slow increments. Watson’s documentation of these efforts has a time-lapse and cinematic quality that engages and moves the book along, telling the story of AAMA over the course of 7 years.
As a warrior for equity, social justice, and educational reform, Watson (2018) characterizes her work as contending with and “moving ecosystems of oppression towards ecosystems of equity” (p. 1). Watson herself is scholar-activist, and in her role as the director of Research and Policy for Equity at UC Davis, she works to align people and systems that advance social justice. She also works with young people in schools and community-based organizations. In 2008, Watson founded Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS), a social justice movement and literacy program designed to empower students as agents of change in their own lives. (says.ucdavis.edu). Watson echoes and puts into practice what Leigh Patel outlined about the difference between critical analysis and the actual work of reform. Patel (2015) wrote “Critique is necessary for noting the contours of colonial logics but it is insufficient for imagining into existence praxes that decolonize” (p. 3). Likewise, Transformative Schooling shows but does not tell how the wheels of transformative praxis are rolling forward and how decolonizing schooling and creating positive change in the lives of African American males provide authentic models for improved and equitable educational opportunities for all.
Transformative Schooling highlights educational reform in Oakland using portraiture as qualitative methodology; Watson takes the reader into the inner workings of the system and into the inner workings of the change agents in and around Oakland who make a difference. She shows how these efforts at community making and “building” improve the educational experiences of African American males in both social and academic ways. Using targeted universalism, a framework that moves those who are the most marginalized to the center of school reform, Watson tells the stories of AAMA. Through powerful narrative and critical analysis, Watson shows how those who are the most marginalized can become successful in schools and in life. Through this framework and her storytelling talents, the good news about AAMA is detailed. As of 2018, AAMA has spread to many other states and cities in the United States. The momentum is palpable.
Watson provides important background information and history of the ways in which Black history is often taught in American schools. Social justice is not something that simply lives in our heads—as Watson points out, social justice is in the “doing,” and this provides part of the rationale for the needed work of AAMA. First, she points out that most curriculum about AAMA has been overlooked and that “many students and teachers alike has been misled by an ideology that reifies and worships whiteness” (p. 17). In Black history curriculum, across American schools, students learn AAMA in a frame that begins with slavery and ends with the civil rights movement. She explains, “Blackness preludes a Western worldview and predates the United States of America” (p. 17). Black history cannot just be defined by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, although they were important figures in the United States. Watson urges that Black history curriculum should be embracing world history.
Watson draws inspiration from people who make a difference; throughout Transformative Schooling, she introduces us to the change agents involved in AAMA and the Oakland Unified School District. As a change agent herself, she makes explicit to the reader why she is sharing these portraits and stories: The change agents who you will meet in the subsequent chapters became vulnerable to me in order that they might become real to you and inspire you to consider your own areas of expertise and spheres of influence so the dissonant voices of discontent across the world become harmonious chords in the choir of liberation. (p. 5)
It is Watson who identifies Chatmon as a visionary; Chatmon himself is quite humble. He explains to Watson that although changing an educational ecosystem is possible, change comes slowly. Watson explains Chatmon’s philosophy for how system change happens. She writes, “It is a slow, multi-dimensional process that works when teams of people align their priorities, policies, and practices” (p. 46).
In Watson’s (2012) previous work Learning to Liberate, one community organizer she wrote about was Rudy Corpuz’s (United Playaz) whose approach to community building was that all who come to the group are welcomed with hospitable care. In similar ways to Corpuz’s approach, Watson resonates on how Chatmon “prides himself on building connections, a practice linked to a philosophy of inclusivity” (p. 46). He treats all people with care. In fact, Chatmon’s personal style and praxis revolves around the importance and development of personal relationships. The pedagogy of love supersedes content and test scores; he sees the full development of human potential in each student, educator, parent, or other stakeholder as much more than quantitative measures can ever illustrate.
Watson herself promotes positivity and has the unique ability to identify changemakers. Her work echoes and aligns with Chatmon’s own personal mantra, which is all about moving forward step-by-step and finding good people with whom one can collaborate and build dynamic relationships. Even as Chatmon outlines the successes and pitfalls of his work, he remains positive and displays humility.
As Rumi reminds us at the beginning of this review, what we are drawn to is also drawn to us. It is interesting to note the energies and confluence of the change agents in Watson’s book in terms of how their work becomes a web of both serendipitous and intentional positivity. It was Chatmon himself who reached out to Watson after Chatmon had read Learning to Liberate. Chatmon found Watson’s (2012) work in documenting successful community organizers to be inextricably connected to what he was trying to accomplish with AAMA. Echoing Rumi’s notion of what we seek is also palpable here. Watson and Chatmon both work to transform the lives of young people and sought out each other.
Watson champions the work of Matin Abdel-Qawi and Jahi Torman as two other change agents involved in AAMA. She first introduces Matin Abdel-Qawi, who is the current principal of Oakland High School, and later to Jahi Torman, a program manager for AAMA. The students refer to Abdel-Qawi as “Pops,” and Watson illustrates how Abdel-Qawi creates and sustains networks of familial relations in the school system; these networks and relationships have elements of mentoring, fatherhood, and brotherhood. In collaborative effort with Chatmon, Abdel-Qawi was tasked to coordinate and oversee the Manhood Development Program (MDP) initiative as part of AAMA. The goal of MDP is to provide African American male role models and instruction for students. The MDP courses involve mentoring and identity formation. Abdel-Qawi outlines four important elements and goals for the MDP courses: Create a safe space for African American young men inside of school Recruit and retain African American male mentors and educators Utilize a culturally responsive rigorous curriculum Provide opportunities to experience life outside of school (p. 73).
In Watson’s interview with Abdel-Qawi, she asked him what he looked for in MDP instructors. Patience was his answer, and Abdel-Qawi recounted how he spent lots of time interviewing candidates to make sure that potential hires saw this work as more of a vocation or a calling than just a job. Watson characterized this kind of instruction as a “Pedagogy of Patience.”
Jahi Torman, also known as Brother Jahi, is a performer as part of KRS-One that Chatmon met at one of Jahi’s concerts. Chatmon was drawn to Brother Jahi’s positive messages in his performance and was initially recruited to run the MDP program at one of Oakland’s middle schools. Watson gives details about how Brother Jahi engages and grows agency in students and teachers through positivity. Brother Jahi takes a holistic view of students and believes that learning happens in an ecosystem; to grow these healthy connections, he makes links between and among students, their families, and staff at the schools—all in a frame of calling out positive attributes and actions of all. Watson explains Brother Jahi’s pedagogy of “I Do, We Do, You Do” (p. 77). She resonates with Brother Jahi’s vision and praxis, a straightforward manner for teaching and learning that engages and empowers youth by bridging knowledge and action.
Another one of the community builders in AAMA that Watson introduces to us is Brother Jennings. Brother Jennings is a teacher who shares with Watson how teachers can help one another as part of this community building. In response to another teacher’s request for help with teaching, Brother Jennings recounts the advice he gives to colleagues; he advises them to “open their selves up more and allow students to learn about them in the most authentic way” (p. 87). This resonates with Watson’s other work. For example, in her work with SAYS, she advocates that teachers need to bring their whole selves into the classroom. The individuals involved in system change also need to do the same.
Watson characterizes the ongoing work of AAMA and provides essential context for how Chatmon started the Office of Equity, as an initiative designed to “pilot several programs and take to scale the work of racial equity and healing” (p. 123). As part of this ongoing work, the Office of Equity has started a new program focused on African American Female Excellence (AAFE), and Chatmon explained that this was “desperately needed.”
Watson offers caveats involved in her scholarship. Just because AAMA focuses solely on providing educational equity for African American male students, as part of a targeted universalism framework, she certainly does not mean to imply that only African American students need improved educational experiences. All students and teachers need transformative education. Watson shares wisdom growing out of her portraiture work with AAMA; she writes, “The soul of social change is learning” (p. 144) and “Equity is the manifestation of justice on earth” (p. 145).
Watson always resonates on the larger goal of education as transformative and liberatory. Transformative Schooling also keeps the eyes on the transformative prize. Again, Rumi’s ideas come into play. Watson seeks models for equity, and these models and people related to this work continue to seek her and her work.
As Watson explains in her opening, “Throughout this journey to uncover seeds of the solution, I discovered that the opposite of racism is not equality; it is empowerment. Empowerment releases us from the entrapment of the social reproduction of racism. What unfolds in the subsequent chapters is the ways racial justice unlocks human justice.” In a world full of complexity and fraught with problems, Watson illuminates through the successes of AAMA that there is hope for transformative education and radical school reform.