Why Am I Here? The Role of Relationships, Hope, and Love

• In Event: Visions of a Racially Just Teacher Education Professoriate: Future Dreaming for Meaningful Change

Abstract

This paper explores a question, cloaked in a conundrum that’s wrapped in an enigma: Why am I here? As a teacher educator with a focus on teaching in my scholarship, I work in a place that in many cases was put together specifically to exclude people who look like me, which makes my relationship to schools a little complicated.

Historically, my family has taken a strong stance for education. My 9th great grandmother was a White Irish Dairymaid who was sentenced to the colonies in Maryland instead of being put to death because she could read. After she served her seven years, she bought a farm and married a formerly enslaved man. She taught her grandchildren to read because it was illegal for them to go to school at the time. One of the descendants of those grandchildren, Aquila Let, moved his family to Ohio where he was a landowner, a farmer, and a tax-payer. In 1845, he sent his kids to school. The local community fought against his children going to school from firing the teacher, to shutting the school down to even tearing it down and burning the school. Eventually, Aquila sued and a judge agreed that his children deserved to go to school, but not with the White children. The White school re-opened in 1853, and the Negro school on Aquila’s property in 1864. Everybody in my family from Aquila’s children down to me, attended schools that were racially segregated by law. Also, many people in my family became teachers. My mother, father, sister, aunt, cousins, I could go on. Which now makes my question a little more relevant: what tethers my family to these institutions that worked so hard to keep us away?

I was a first-year teacher in 1984 in a Title I, desegregated dual language school. My students were economically, racially, and linguistically diverse. Once, we were brainstorming to come up with scenarios where kids could get in to conflict in preparation for presentations we were going to do for our monthly all-school assemblies. One kid said, “What if there is a White kid and a Black kid and the White kid calls the Black kid a name and they start to fight?” Silence. Perplexed looks. “That doesn’t happen here,” somebody said. And the kid with the suggestion said, “You’re right,” and moved on. I got goose bumps. In that moment, I realized something that my students took for granted, that school could be a place where kids come together to learn and celebrate and accept each other’s differences.

Drawing from the lessons of my family history as well as my teaching experiences, this paper weaves a narrative suggesting the answer to my question of why I am here has something to do with love. We can create places that are heavy with love, hope, and full of possibility, despite the trauma and legacies of racism that still haunt our institutions. I believe in the possibilities of love and hope to achieve racial justice.

Author

• Teddi M. Beam-Conroy, University of Washington