If classroom management is a curriculum – a series of lessons students learn from us – this talk invites us to ask: what do we teach now through our classroom management, and what we might want to teach instead? We will consider the troubling relationships between traditional classroom management approaches and carcerality, and begin to wonder how intentionally shifting our models of power and authority in the classroom might instead support the teaching and learning of freedom. By seeing our troublemakers as a resource to leverage instead of a problem to solve, this talk invites us to imagine classrooms as a space in which we might practice the world we want by rejecting disposability in favor of the struggle for love, justice, care, and healing.
Carla Shalaby's professional and personal commitment is to education as the practice of freedom, and her research centers on cultivating and documenting daily classroom work that protects the dignity of every child and honors young people’s rights to expression, to self-determination, and to full human being. Specifically, she is interested in practices of critical pedagogy and critical literacy at the elementary level; classroom community and "management" as the practice of democracy; and the relationships between the daily work of teachers and the ongoing struggle for justice. Carla previously served as director of the Elementary Master of Arts in Teaching program at Brown University, and as the director of elementary education at Wellesley College. She started her career as a teacher of grades four and five in her New Jersey hometown. She is the author of Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School and the co-editor of an annual social justice plan for educators called Planning To Change the World.
The Longfellow Lecture series, inaugurated in 1987, honors the memory of Cynthia Longfellow '72, who devoted her professional life to bettering the lives of young children. This lecture is funded by an endowment established by family and friends.