Waiting for Home

As many of you know, my time at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy is coming to a close. I am still here for a little while longer (until around mid February), to finish up a racial equity project for DC Public Schools. As my time here winds down, I am in a state of reflection and one thing I realize is that my time here has been a gift. When I applied to my PhD program at the University of Maryland, I was on the path to researching the relevancy of the arts in the K12 classroom. At the time, I was an advocate for arts integration and UMD had just started an arts education program, which included theatre in education. I was accepted with the understanding that I would be researching using the arts in the ELA and/or social studies class. Soon after starting my doctoral program, I had a sudden epiphany. I was the music, drama and Great Books teacher at a classical school while working on my PhD and used the arts to help my students translate what they were learning in Great Books. Each year, the students would end the school year by writing an original play that brought together all of the themes they learned from the Great Books we were reading. To help my students value Great Books, I began teaching them about various Black authors and artists who also read Great Books. The more I taught this, the more fascinated I became with the Black Intellectual Tradition. Before long, it consumed me more than my original topic. My focus was more on the importance of classical education in the Black community, but how the arts and other creative forms of expression (i.e. creative writing) have always helped us to connect our human experience with the West.

The creative works of the Harlem Renaissance are a perfect example of this. Each of the creators from that time were inspired by the classical tradition and they each used the arts to translate the Black narrative so the Western world could hear and understand their human experience. Where some may see the Western canon or classical education as a danger to keeping our stories alive, history shows that diverse communities have used classical studies to help keep their unique human stories alive. This make sense, because we see this in how a North African like Augustine or someone of Spanish descent like Cervantes or the Middle Eastern authors of the books of the Bible (we must always be sure to clearly say NONE of the authors of the Bible or Torah were of European descent), reference the Western canon as a way to share their human experience (the Bible references Greek and Roman literature and culture frequently). When I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I am almost sure that Zora is translating the experience of a Black woman through the lens of Odysseus and they both made it back home. Odysseus doesn’t hide Janie’s experience, but it helps the world relate to the common human experience of finding one’s place in the world.

Chinua Achebe even talks about the best way for him to keep the stories of the Igbo people alive, was to use his classical education as a way to translate his stories into a universal language. Nigeria included so many different languages and cultures, it would be hard to preserve the true narrative in a way that the world could hear and value it. It was essential for him to become “bilingual” in Igbo and the Western tradition, so he could be the owner of his story and give it to the world. Only in modern times has humanity deemed the Western canon as irrelevant or a “danger” to keeping the stories of diverse communities alive (the aftershock of slavery, White supremacy, racism and Jim Crow).

The revelations I was having during my doctoral research were so illuminating that the light blinded me from seeing anything else. I had to sacrifice gaining more research experience by choosing to do work connected to what was popular or accepted at the time, to instead run after the call of the ancestors who beckoned for me to tell a hidden story. An opportunity that I thought was lost, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy restored to me. They embraced my passion for classical learning, but also invited me to research all types of topics relative to K12 education. In fact, the research I did confirmed even more why we need a philosophy of education that all of our ancestors have proven WORKS. If done equitably, inviting all our human experiences to translate their stories for the world to hear, then classical education works and it works without erasing our individual human experiences. The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy gave me the research training I need to make a great impact in the fields of classical education, arts integration, and racial equity.

So where is home for me? I still do not know. I have been interviewing quite a lot and I am excited about the possibilities. I promise to invite you on this journey with me and will keep you updated along the way. Johns Hopkins was an unforgettable experience for me, but it also made me very aware of my desire to truly find home in academia. “Home” is where we can be our truest selves. Home will create a safe space for me as a person of faith (some secular institutions do misjudge me for my openness about my faith), a Black woman (most non HBCUs struggle with creating a welcoming space for us), artist (I am trained to teach and lead in academia, but I am actually more of an artist than an academic…lol) and classical educator (Some HBCUs and university K12 education departments are very resistant to this) who believes in equality for all people (sadly many Christian institutions struggle with this). It is going to be hard to find “home”, but I know “home” is out there somewhere. I am at a point in my life where I want to wait for “home”, wherever that is. I am passionate about classical education, arts integration, racial equity AND racial healing (my goodness I just want racial relationships to finally heal) and to me they all work together for one purpose: weaving humanity together (I sort of wrote about this for the Society for Classical Studies). Home for me will not require me to sacrifice any of those things (I am so done with doing that now), but instead will invite me to continue my work in them, while also welcoming my unique perspective into that particular academic community. In turn, I am excited to listen, grow and learn from the community and maybe we can see how our perspectives intersect for the good of humanity.