 Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Keeping your eyes closed, I want you to imagine your 11-year-old self walking through your school hallway. Throughout the day, you go to your classes where you co-create what you learn. You get to be comfortable in class. You move as you need. You use learning tools that best suit you. You aren't monitored in the halls as you go to use the bathroom. You mess around with a friend and you break the rules. Your heart's racing, your breathing quickens as you wait for your punishment, but instead of getting in trouble or being sent home, you're met with grace and still held accountable by people you trust and have relationships with. You spend the rest of your day learning, feeling safe, valued, respected, and cared for. Now open your eyes. Does this sound like your experience? Because what we just imagined is not the reality for most young people in our country. This is a dream. Right? Our schools for many children are places of trauma, discrimination, oppression, exclusionary and wildly disproportionate discipline, and an expectation that students be anything but what they actually are. Whole children with inherent dignity, capabilities, and brilliance. And this is not a case of brokenness, right? Our education system is working as designed to reinforce systems of power in a culture of white supremacy and capitalism from which our country and therefore our schools were founded upon. Despite all this, our education system is also our most strategic of institutions in creating long-lasting and widespread social change. So I believe our schools are where we reproduce society's social ills and they're where we can begin to relieve them. Right? I believe in our ability to radically imagine and create what our world looks like. So we can dream what a more just and beautiful education system can be. It's still important though to first acknowledge what are we fighting against? Disproportionate and racialized discipline is one example of the many deeply embedded issues that plague our students. So I worked in a child care program in college and there I saw my own students be disciplined by the program and by their schools so differently based on their race. In multiple cases, my Latinx students were punished more often and more harshly than my white students were for the same behaviors and actions. One day one of my white students had harmed a classmate. Luckily, he was able to return to his classroom and his day very quickly. But one of my other kiddos, a first grader, a student of color, he came up to me and he said, Miss Alana, if I have done that, they would have sent me home. How come he does it and it's no problem? And that kid was right. We discipline students with harsh punishment rather than accountability and we assign that discipline very differently based on their race. So all students of color, especially black and indigenous students, are punished again more often and more harshly than white students are. And to exemplify this, I want to bring your attention to the disciplinary experience of black girls in schools which is particularly alarming. So black girls are 4.19 times more likely than white girls to be suspended by their schools. And they're 3.99 times more likely to be expelled. Again, these are for the same behaviors and actions between groups. On top of all this, black girls are also 3 times more likely to be referred to law enforcement by their schools and 3.66 times more likely to actually be arrested. And this violence against children begins as early as preschool, right? Where young black and brown kids are handcuffed and arrested in response to normal child behavior. And this school prison nexus or school to prison pipeline is one example of the ways in which schools, police, young people's bodies enforce compliance and obedience and recreate the same inequalities and brutalities that we see out in the world right in our classrooms. This is all really angering, right? Knowing all this, understanding what we're up against, it's a brutal undertaking. But as I first heard from Dr. Angela Davis, even when there's pessimism of the intellect, we must maintain optimism of the will. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. No matter how hopeless reality may seem, hope is an inevitable experience when we're fighting for human beings and from a place of radical love. Robin D. G. Kelly wrote a book called Freedom Dreams about black radical activists and all that they have brought to us and taught us, including the work of dreaming. And in it, he highlights a poem which begins, When the clouds clear, we shall know the color of the sky. These seemingly indomitable issues that we face sometimes block us from being able to see what's on the horizon. But if we take a moment to look past the clouds, what do you see as the color of the sky? What is this more beautiful world that we're all dreaming of actually look like? What are we fighting for? I do this work. I'm in this fight because of my kiddos and my students who I've gotten to love, care for, and most importantly learn beside. I was a preschool teacher before I came back to school and those radical little humans taught me everything I know about imagining and dreaming. They taught me to dream in such big ways and they taught me that the only limitations to our dreams are the ones imposed by adults who live in a world that has to be realistic and tempered. But the impossible and outlandish become reality all the time, right? So with them, I actively dream about schools that will embrace them, empower them, and be spaces in which they all get to thrive as they are. Let's think about that issue of disproportionate and racialized discipline that we talked about earlier, right? Think about the young kids being handcuffed and arrested, physically assaulted by adults, enforced into their first interaction with the criminal justice system, all for doing things that kids do. We need to imagine better for them and for all of us, right? So when I dream of this, I imagine schools that are filled with teachers and staff that reflect the identities of their students. Our discipline policies could replace suspensions and expulsions with accountability, community building, mentorship, right? Our schools could be and should be places that do not involve police, that do not surveil their students, that do not reinforce compliance and obedience over relationships and learning. So we can be radical in imagining what our schools can be, and in doing so, we become so much better at creating revolutionary change. So how do we do this work of dreaming? Number one, listen and learn, right? What I've shared with you today aren't just my own ideas. I've learned these things from so many different people in so many different places, especially from the work of activists and academically from the work of thinkers and artists like Dr. Bettina Love, Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings, Bell Hooks, right? So we can find people like them and we take the time to learn from them. Number two, be a co-conspirator. Get involved with local efforts or community organizations, right? We need to be radical dreamers alongside the community members, the organizers and the leaders that are already doing this work. We need to remember we are not saviors, right? We don't know what's best for people. We are here to listen and to learn and to be co-conspirators. Number three, be vocal, right? Do not be neutral. Speak often and boldly and amplify the voices, the messages and the efforts of the people that you're fighting alongside. And number four, be radical. So often in this work that we do, people tell us change probably won't happen. Or they tell us you just need to be patient. Or they try to convince us that the only changes worth making are small ones that won't disrupt the status quo. Disrupt it anyways, right? As thinkers, researchers, teachers, students, some of us activists, we're constantly faced with reality. People tell us all the time we need to be realistic and pragmatic as we approach these exhausting issues. But sometimes we get to dream. And those dreams help us see what we're fighting for. And that is such an important part of the work of building a more beautiful and just education system in a better world. So one more time, close your eyes. Imagine your 11-year-old self sitting in your classroom. What would it have felt like to have been so explicitly respected and cared for every day you went to school? What would it have been like to have been met with love and guidance when you messed up? When you hurt others because you were hurting? What would it have felt like to have been in a space where the adults in your life empowered you? Believed in your capabilities to make decisions and gave you the space to actually be you? What would it have felt like? Now open your eyes and let's go make it happen. Thank you.