As a continuation of the Healing While Black and White series, we are sharing the third part of a moving conversation between two women—one black, and one white.

“Oh, this is not just about work.” The proliferation of race and equity training in the workplace has created the opportunity to see the lines that govern our private lives in public. But when the commitment to equity work is not just about professional development but getting better at the personal job of becoming a better human, the relationship between the powerful and the powerless holds the greatest potential for change. This is the foundation of a love ethic.

To honor the last day of Black History Month and the beginning of Women’s History Month, we are publicly sharing a moving conversation between two women—one black, and one white.

With their permission and care, these two women, Courtney Bell and Angela Bond, tell the story of how they became each other’s “people”—experiencing a sense of belonging to one another. Their bond has created a becoming in their personal lives, as well the life of their shared organization.

We’re excited to introduce our newest offering, the Xdesign Experience: Accountability in Reconciliation. Unlike our courses, which are self-paced, this new experience is a hybrid online course that combines audio playlists, weekly Hatha yoga classes, and live monthly design sessions to create a more immersive learning journey.

While COVID-19 shaped our lives in the foreground, 2020 reminded us of another chronic pandemic—white supremacy—and its impact on our relationships.

We need to look at the schools and leaders that are using an equitable design lens to respond to the impact of both pandemics, and study how they have impacted the student and family experience. 

The stories of the past are important. They remind us of our superhuman capacities to transcend our limits in the face of insurmountable obstacles. These stories feed us a healing soup of triumph, self determination, greatness, and brilliance. We retell stories of our humanity; an important practice in a society designed to dehumanize.

Today, as our coalition grows and becomes more diverse, we need new roadmaps and tools that are grounded in the wisdom of the past, that are oriented toward a radically inclusive future, and that keep us focused, informed, action-oriented, and courageous during this time. Read more and download a tool to help you continue to Speak the Future and Design the Future in your thoughts, designs, and actions.

My process — sticking to what I knew, even as I became aware of its wrongness — had kept me from growth. But my habits and the stories I told myself didn’t allow me to acknowledge it until that moment. When the teacher said, “That is what you should feel,” I realized that I hadn’t felt that sensation of stretching, uncovering, and discovering a new pathway in that part of my body since the beginning of my practice. I realized that I had discovered something new and different. 

In my work, I often ask people to “trust the process” — and to trust me, the designer of it. However, it has been a long time since I was a learner, and I forgot what it meant to truly trust a process until I took a month to become trained as a yoga teacher. Never have I had an experience that created simultaneous physical, emotional, and mental challenges. With these challenges, it became clear to me what “trusting the process” really means in practice — and how it can help us create a more just world. 

We need a new value proposition for the public school system. What purpose must it serve, in the face of three pandemics, that can bring our communities and our country back together? What has to be true of the public school system to convince the most privileged of us of its merits and the most oppressed of us its virtue so we all can learn together? What version of the world are we creating?

In more ways than one, it’s a time of reckoning for American education.

Just as the COVID crisis has forced us to re-consider the very structures of learning in the US, citizens have taken to the streets in frustration with systemic power relationships.

As school closes this week in many states and as our cities burn, I’m sure that question keeps school leaders up at night. Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery joined the long list of martyred tributes in 2020 who remind us that while many may be able to socially distance and work from home via Zoom, others are literally suffocating under the oppression of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. We are reminded that our letters from the most elite institutions and our assimilated, “non-threatening” habits don’t protect us from all of the threats. And our country’s children are watching and learning. They are watching us. They have questions.

Right now, many of us are being asked to lead — perhaps in familiar ways and perhaps in new ones. We have seen deaths that we cannot unsee. We are collectively experiencing a loss of comfort and uncertainty as the ground beneath us trembles under the weight of universal suffering. Especially during crises, we crave strong leadership and direction. But when we are the ones being asked to lead in the moment, how do we do it?

As schools scramble to establish a stable and balanced posture in the face of COVID-19, the need to do so with equity at the forefront is greater than ever before. The student–teacher relationship is being transformed daily as educators scramble to teach virtually and parents — especially the most marginalized — step into the role of managing instruction (often in addition to many other responsibilities). This universal experience has forever changed our relationship with school.

In times of crisis, tumult, and despair, finding the spaces of quiet, the stillness of calm, and the resolve of peace can be difficult. This is one of those times. Our lives have been upended by COVID-19. Our schools, stadiums, churches, temples, and mosques are empty. And leaders and teachers are trying to figure out how children’s bodies and brains remain nourished in the pause.

A conversation with Caroline Hill, Founder, 228 Accelerator

The new year welcomes us to engage in instants of reflection. We collectively pause, reconsider, recollect, and remember. These rituals may manifest in commitments to our bodies — to drink less or lose weight — or they may be slower, otherworldly journeys that challenge the beliefs about the body, its purpose, and its home. For the latter, each step is a pilgrimage of sorts: a journey intentionally crafted to remember and to put the self back together again.

In August 2019, I began a pilgrimage.

When I was a teacher, we often used a model called the black box concept to facilitate inquiry and understanding of natural phenomena. In this model, students are asked to discern the inner workings of an opaque box using only the inputs and outputs that they observe, in addition to their understanding of how the world works, without being able to see into the box itself. (For instance, one year, we poured specific quantities of water into the box and observed how it did — or didn’t — flow out to learn about a principle of fluid dynamics.) The goal of the black box model is to practice reasoning skills, explain observable phenomena, and provide a framework to understand and make sense of future phenomena.

The notion that we must eliminate bias has paved every path that we walk as educators. As a community, we have spent significant emotional and financial resources attending to and trying to rid ourselves of bias. There is the Implicit Bias Test; there are anti-bias trainings. We reflect, journal, discuss, agonize about how not to be biased.

This anti-bias movement isn’t wrong. But it isn’t entirely right, either. Equity work needs bias. It just needs a different kind.

After learning my home address, how to tie my shoes, and how to just say no, “stop, drop, and roll” was one of the earliest standards that I mastered in childhood. If I found myself engulfed in flames, it would be “stop, drop, and roll” to the rescue — a conditioned response that would kick in and save me from the danger of the flames. We practiced it in class and saw it on after-school specials. It was automatic and universal.