“It’s Seven Generations All the Time”: Repurposing Schools Through Educational Leadership for Transformation and Healing

• In Event: We Didn’t Just Happen: Toward Critical Educational Leadership as Renewal

Abstract

Objectives
The seven generations principle provides a means to connect and contextualize one’s actions to both ancestral experiences (the seven generations prior) and to the impact one’s actions have on future generations (the seven generations to follow). In March 2018, the concept was centered in an interview with a school leader at the Roses in Concrete Community School (RiC) in East Oakland, California: “Every time you see a student, you have to look at the seven generations of trauma they carry with them at all times. You must also recognize the seven generations of gifts they possess. It’s seven generations all the time.”

For centuries, state-sanctioned schooling in settler colonial societies such as the United States have been used to forward the assimilationist and often violent white imperial project, resulting in the loss of languages, literacies, cultures, and histories for students and families of color in order to achieve in schools (Paris and Alim, 2017). For these reasons, an attempt to repurpose (Noguera, 2020) a traditional school into a community responsive learning center for transformation and healing is worthy of inquiry.

The Roses in Concrete Community School (RIC) in East Oakland, California, was conceived as a counter-hegemonic schooling project. Its founders hoped to respond holistically to the community’s demand for self-determination in education by repurposing the traditional school into a community responsive learning center of well-being. Drawing from a longitudinal study of RiC, this paper examines how the seven generations principle informed the strategies, practices, interventions, and supports utilized by the school’s leaders to support healing and transformation within and through the school.

Theoretical Framework
Relationality refers to the belief that reality is constructed from our many relationships. As articulated by Wilson (2008), relationships are reality. Relationality explains “how the universe is held together” and is central to understanding the self as part of a web of interconnected relationships (Wilson and Wilson, 1998, p. 157). This paper utilizes critical relationality and a healing-centered (Ginwright, 2018) lens to examine the systems, structures, practices, and processes used by RiC to understand how school leaders conceptualized and supported individual and collective transformation and healing.

Data & Methods
This qualitative study draws from a critical ethnographic case study of RiC that took place from 2014 to 2020. Data used in the study include semi-structured interviews, observations, and artifact/document analysis. Critical Race Methodologies (CRM) (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002) and Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (CIRM) (Brayboy et al., 2012) ground this research inquiry.

Results & Significance
School leaders utilized Ethnic Studies and Community Cultural Wealth to forward justice and cultivate joy at RiC. In addition, the school was organized to be responsive to both wounds (community and individual) and day-to-day hurt. As an attempt to repurpose a traditional public school into a center of healing and transformation, this qualitative study of RiC provides insights relevant to those who hope to forward meaningful social change in education.

Author

• Joaquin Noguera, Loyola Marymount Universtiy