Manifesting a Pedagogy of Love: Deepening Student-Teacher Relationships through a Postsecondary Team
When Wadleigh Secondary School faced the threat of closure, its families and students called for change. In response, in 2018, led by new principal Kyleema Norman, Wadleigh took up a Pedagogy of Love, an approach to teaching and learning that aims to build students’ self confidence, ownership, and love. Wadleigh has manifested a Pedagogy of Love through structures that support student-teacher relationships, most notably the Post Secondary Team (PST). As a result of the trust built between students and teachers through PST, Wadleigh launched a unit that not only reflects high academic and artistic expectations, but celebrates Black and Latinx achievement.
When reflecting on Wadleigh’s threat of closure in 2018, Kyleema Norman notes that in order for Black and Latinx children like those served at Wadleigh to succeed, a school must reflect them in the material, hold them to high expectations, and above all show them consistent love. Building on pedagogues like Paolo Freire and bell hooks who describe love as a choice we make to challenge harm and pain, Norman and Wadleigh developed a pedagogy of love that 1) responds to the lived experiences of Black and Latinx students, 2) centers Black and Latinx achievements, including those of students, and 3) holds Black and Latinx students to high artistic and academic expectations.
To manifest this pedagogy requires trusting relationships between students and teachers. Therefore, during the 2018-19, 2019-20, and 2020-21 school years, Wadleigh made a series of changes that began with critical conversations among teachers, and included the development of initiatives that both provided new support services for students and strengthened student-teacher relationships. These changes eventually made possible what Norman calls Unit 0: Black Lives Matter. Emerging in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Unit 0 led students to closely examine existing curricula, and demand that more Black and Latinx lives, accomplishment, joy, and history be represented and valued in their curriculum.
In the 2018-2019 school year, Norman guided teachers through critical reflections with one another about racism, deficit mindsets, and implicit bias. She initiated “courageous conversations'' during staff meetings. Informed by Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations About Race and Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, teachers reflected on their approach to teaching Wadleigh students, and the assumptions they held. This led faculty to share and discuss strategies for centering student inquiry and assets, and laid the foundation for them to develop initiatives that reflect a Pedagogy of Love.
In the 2019-2020 school year, Wadleigh began working with The Ascenders, a service started by one of Wadleigh’s families to help seniors complete college applications and Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) documents. The Ascenders also support students academically through college. This service was critical in holding students to high academic expectations while working with students’ lived experiences, as the Pedagogy of Love contends.
Then, during the 2020-2021 school year, Wadleigh created an Advisory course, led by the guidance counselor, which helps freshmen orient themselves to high school and college readiness, learn to read their transcripts, and use progress reports to set academic goals. Simultaneously, Wadleigh launched a course called I Have a Purpose for students in grades 9 and 10, led by author Carmen Ashe. Ashe, who published the memoir I Have a Purpose, provides space for students to share and discuss their lived experiences as Black and Latinx youth, work through problems and challenges, and imagine a future past high school. Together, Advisory and I Have a Purpose actualized some of the foundational tenets conceptualized by Norman’s Pedagogy of Love. However, it was Wadleigh’s creation of a Post-Secondary Team during the 2020-2021 school year that manifested all three aspects of a Pedagogy of Love: responding to Black and Latinx students’ experiences, centering their achievements, and holding them to high artistic and academic expectations.
Recognizing the need to center students’ assets and identities, and more deeply understand the challenges they face, Wadleigh developed a Post-Secondary Team (PST) in collaboration with New Visions College Readiness Network for School Improvement. Made up of volunteer teacher mentors from various grades, the PST is meant to provide ninth graders with consistent adult contact, positioning teachers to learn about and respond to students’ lives in order to help them feel more comfortable and capable at school. Teachers Judy Olsen and Theadora Lecour, and teacher/Assistant Principal Dulyne Desmangles, noted that PST, more than any other structure has, for them, helped make tangible a Pedagogy of Love.
Following a fall welcome celebration, a social-emotional survey, and a check-in with their groups, PST mentors review mentees’ attendance records and grades, and hold an initial meeting to identify students who may need extra adult support. For the rest of the year, PST mentors regularly check in with mentees (and sometimes students who are not their mentees) during breaks, lunch, after school, and downtime in their classes, and log check-ins on a shared Google doc. They then meet on Tuesdays to review students’ grades, attendance, and check-ins, and on Thursdays to develop goals, and strategize responses to individual student situations.
Lecour notes that one-on-one check-ins have revealed many unique and oftentimes adult responsibilities students have outside of school, ranging from caring for siblings to living independently, all of which she says is “no less important than their school life.” Olsen similarly points out that, had it not been for PST, she would never have known these critical facets of students’ lives.
Desmangles also stresses the importance of creating a space where students feel comfortable advocating for support in the classroom as well.
But PST does not just focus on addressing students’ challenges: they also celebrate their successes. PST mentors review report cards with students individually through a guided reflection, then celebrate students’ meeting their Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely (S.M.A.R.T) goals publicly during ninth grade community meetings, and pin accomplishments to a bulletin board. Ultimately, PST has led to stronger student-teacher relationships through a pedagogy of love, ensuring that Wadleigh students recognize their own genius, as well as Black and Latinx genius, writ large.
In May of 2020 George Floyd was murdered, galvanzing protests against racial injustice across the country. In response, Wadleigh’s teachers and students, working from a foundation of trust and solidarity developed through various structures and particularly through PST, engaged with what they call Unit 0: Black Lives Matter. Norman and the educators at Wadleigh built a one-week curriculum for all students to engage with across all subjects, and implemented it in fall 2021. The curriculum prompts students to ask critical questions of their subject curriculum like, Where is the Black and Latinx literature, art, innovation, and success? and Who are Black scientists and mathematicians? In History and English, teachers use the Courageous Conversation model to analyze with students how and why certain terminology, language, and history is omitted within the History and English curricula, and how this perpetuates anti-Black racism.
In its first year, Unit 0 culminated with students writing letters to the New York Board of Regents documenting their findings and analyses, and demanding that change be made to more completely represent the history, knowledge, and accomplishments of Black and Latinx people. Wadleigh educators then selected 10 letters to officially send. As a result, when the New York Board of Regents initiated an Equity and Diversity Plan, they cited the voices of Wadleigh's students. Looking forward, Wadleigh educators plan to launch the Unit at the start of both the Fall and then Spring semester so that students can continue to analyze and act upon documents that impact their education, and their lives.
As Norman observed in 2018, equitable education cannot happen without the enactment of love. As a result of new structures that support students’ academically and social-emotionally, and strengthen student-teacher relationships, Desmangles, Olsen, and Lecour note that they see “more smiles” and greater confidence in students. Reflecting on a group of students who asked to take over planning, organizing, and leading their ninth grade celebration, Desmangles hopes that Wadleigh’s students continue to take the lead in their learning.
Wadleigh now celebrates over 63% of its student population hitting an 80% or higher GPA, a marked increase since their threat of closure in 2018. Although Norman left Wadleigh in June 2021, she is confident that the educators and the students they serve will only continue to flourish through a pedagogy of love.
