What if Active Learning and Activist Learning came to mean the same thing at an imagined Michael Brown’s Ferguson Missouri high school? Maybe Ferguson would not have been inhabited by an occupying army. Students with authentic teachers, meaning not adults simply drawing down a paycheck and going along with the educational atrocities, would have called a community meeting. Maybe Michael would have lumbered in to listen, curious, skeptical but reflective.

In this meeting, students would have announced that they were alive and in search of an education, one they were not receiving in their current situation. They would have made it quite clear that rich Missouri men with “budget experience” had no business being assigned a phony administrator title and phony authority anywhere within the district’s school hierarchy.

They would have declared that deliberately impoverished school budgets and segregated learning centers were nothing new. Just the old, stale, sick repetition of the same old racism.

Video, protest art, interviews, dance, drama and public exhibitions would have begun to document what passed for high school in Ferguson. Out of control students, teachers, police and politicians would have been denounced and then put on public display for all to see and censor.

This is what Active and Activist Learning is capable of and it is exactly why we only catch glimpses of it on the cover of an aging high school newsletter from the 1970’s.

Rest In A Disturbed Peace All Ye Who Love Democracy!

As you might guess, there was no resting in the imagined Ferguson Missouri Normandy HS. Active and Activist Learning requires action, action that disturbs the peace and prosperity of right wing, reactionary eejets like the Silver Dollar City Theme Park tycoon from Branson, MO and his state school board cronies.

The community of learners at Michael Brown’s high school recognized an oppressive colonial model when they saw one. Some secret somebody announced the arrangement one morning by gaining access to the Public Address system and airing an up tempo version of Gil Scott-Heron’s hit song, Johannesburg, with revised lyrics that inserted Fergusonburg. And for that historic week, What’s The Word? Fergusonburg! was the chorus chanted over and over in every hallway, assembly, food line and sports team warm-up.

Michael Brown had never heard of Johannesburg, Steve Biko or poet Dennis Brutus but pretend for a moment that his teenage school mates made certain that he began to listen up and learn. If Normandy High was to be their Robben Island, then there was a rich history of resistance that cried out for absorption.

The first rule of survival in such a degraded, Power Over Paradigm is self discipline and unified action.
When Michael behaved like a bully or was spotted hanging out with the wrong crowd, he got called on it in a community meeting. He didn’t like it much. He even stomped out a time or two but in the end, he embraced the upbraiding delivered in his best interest. He was no bull in a china shop and he could not muscle his way through life in Ferguson. Though oblivion was a logical choice, his friends cautioned him not to get lost in a haze of drugs and illegal misadventures. They needed his intelligence, his humor, his loyalty, his affection and his strength. A dead hero is no good to no living body. These kids were fighting for a good life and Michael’s spiritual muscle was a Must Have.

It was in this fashion that Michael Brown began to master the art of channeling his outrage at the conditions that surrounded him. He was not alone, an aberration, a menacing giant or a renegade. He became a young man with a purpose, the very big purpose of revealing Ferguson to the world for what it was, an oppressive arrangement, repeated across our USA in countless communities of class and color.

Did you really think the Ferguson Teens needed to read that the White House authorized U.S. torture centers around the globe? Of course not, because militarization of the entire culture was obvious on their neighborhood streets day after day.  It was obvious in the corridors of Normandy High where students roamed freely outside of assigned classes while unable to read and comprehend the front page of USA Today. Time to take the bull by the horns.

Michael Brown first argued that he did not have time to tutor anyone but he was soon persuaded otherwise by his affirming affinity group. They would set up shop after school at the library, in a church basement or barber shop, using whatever was at hand to launch their improvised adventures into literacy.  It was crazy, sometimes raucous and rowdy but they were effective and they knew it.

Numbers swelled and soon bands of teen tutors and tutees began mounting voter registration drives across the most under-served sections of Ferguson.  They fashioned themselves after the freedom-seeking literacy/voter movements on John’s Island SC in the 1960. They knew full well how literacy and grassroots empowerment were linked and they also knew that the cops would interfere the moment their work began to pose a challenge to the White Power Structure.  What’s The Word?  Fergusonburg!  And in Fergusonburg it became a badge of honor to be stopped by the police and interrogated or threatened for distributing handbills that laid out the particulars on how and why to register and vote out the ruling junta.

Well, you know how youth are. They talk to each other. They post and twitter, message and selfie and before too long surrounding high school student bodies began to hear about the active/activist Ferguson learning movement. No one needed sanctioned internships or co-op experiences. It was not a phony resume citation they were seeking nor did they request official credit. They knew the real deal when they saw it and they wanted in. Soon, the P.D. was hassling the sons and daughters of county clerks, plumbers, beauticians and practical nurses. These parents were having none of it and so their dignity and influence brought an entirely new audience to the inhumane horror that was Fergusonburg. 

When the private schools arrived, it really went viral. After a day of voter reg sidewalk pounding, they all headed home with iPods and iPads full of video, audio, photos and instagrams documenting the paramilitary protocols practiced in Fergusonburg. These parents were fast and furious with a response that rained official censure all over the pathological parade that passed for a community police presence in Ferguson. Talk about class warfare.  The 1% were finally throwing their weight around someplace where it would do some good.  A whole new world of energy, citizenship and inclusion began to take shape.

We are sending our children and youth into War Zones disguised as schools. In Springfield Ohio classrooms found themselves under a siege of politicized Bomb Threats.

In Uvalde Texas & Georgia’s Apalachee High, pupils endured a morning of AR-15 death, destruction & evacuations

These terrible first hand experiences of violence are now a cornerstone of growing up & being educated in America.

Sand Trays are psychologically soothing for all ages. In the photo a young hand draws a Rhoda Kellogg style sun with rays eventually forming into a mandala. An ancient universal meditation on form and movement.

Sand slides quietly, deeply and easily. Flowing through fingers. Providing the space for thought, reflection and emotion.

After having your school shuttered just in case a homemade explosive is hidden somewhere on the premises or after witnessing your 14 year old friends grievously wounded by an assault weapon, perhaps it is time to revisit sensory/somatic remedies for the trauma narrative that follows.

Words are not necessary. In fact they often fall severely short of communicating or comprehending the horror one has just survived. But sand just might speak to the entire catastrophe.

Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld’s Sand Tray/Sand Play Therapy preparation was the intensity of a 1920’s Russo-Polish War. She worked with troops along a 400-mile front, in prisoner of war camps & helped feed/clothe the demobilized Polish college students. She treated 1,000’s with the diseases which followed the war and she witnessed “the larger number of the population displaying the waxy transparency of famine.” She was impressed with the resilience of children under stress. And later back in London she observed children with the same “expressions, postures and gestures that resembled those with which I had become familiar in prison camps and famine areas.”

Sand Trays are one way of acknowledging and providing the material & method required for healing one’s self. The self that used to believe her classroom was a safe space. The self who assumed her playmates were protected by adults & community. When that self is shattered, a revised consciousness must be constructed. One that admits the unthinkable into the equation of SCHOOL.

https://worldsandtherapy.org/page/history

Sand Tray Therapy Miniature Props For School Violence Events: Handcuffs, Cops, Angels, Smartphone Miniature, Tiny Tombstone, Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing, Roaring Lion, Mother Wolf With Pups, Explosion, Military Vehicles, Red Devil, Bomb, Miniature Weapons, Green Grenade, Warrior Woman, Miniature AK 47 Rifle, Coffin, Praying Hands, First Aid Box, Ambulance, School Desk, School Bus, Miniature Hospital, School Building.

https://www.playtherapysupply.com/sand-tray-therapy

“I was drawn to and inspired by a photo taken by Charles Harris in Pittsburgh in 1949. The photo showed a group of schoolchildren getting ready to cross a road. One child is a safety patrol officer. He has his arms out to the sides, keeping the children behind him on the curb until it is safe for them to pass. He wears a cap and a pair of stylish round sunglasses that give him the air of a confident traffic cop. I saw this boy as a representation of young Black children looking after each other without any need for adults to intervene. You can see the other children respected their peer leader and were patiently waiting for his permission to cross. That image gave me some hope.

For the safety patrol officer, I chose to make his sash out of kente cloth, a woven Ghanaian cloth that used to symbolize wealth, status, and even royalty. Here the kente shows that the boy has been chosen as a leader by his teachers. I also used a Nigerian wax-resist fabric with the word “OK” printed all over it. The words act as a mantra protecting the children, just as the eye over his breast pocket serves as a talisman to ward against evil. Such protective symbols are used in African and Mediterranean cultures, while in ancient Egypt, these ideas come together in the Eye of Horus, a symbol of protection, royal power and good health.”

https://www.artic.edu/articles/878/the-quilters-playlist