Today’s post is the third in a series offering advice to educators grappling with teaching during these turbulent times.

‘To Teach You, I Must Know You’

Christopher Emdin is the Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the director of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship at the Schupf Family IdeaLab at Skidmore College:

“Every lesson, every interaction, every moment with young people is a conversation with the future. We can’t afford to teach without reverence. We cannot continue this work without recognizing that we are part of a long line of spiritual workers, that we are standing in the classroom with our ancestors behind us, our students before us, and generations ahead of us waiting to be shaped by what we do.

“This changes everything. It means teaching is not just a job. It’s a calling. It’s not just professional, it’s prophetic.”

— The Sacred Art of Teaching, Lisa Delpit and Chris Emdin

I spent most of my career teaching in neighborhoods where many of my students were immigrants. They were English learners, children who spoke more than one language at home, and sometimes, none of the language that school demanded of them. They were also children whose families had crossed physical and metaphorical borders for greater opportunity and came from families who had endured things most of us could not imagine, simply to arrive in a place that promised safety and possibility.

What I loved the most about working with these children and getting to know their families was the way they valued education and revered school. Even when some of my fellow teachers didn’t quite understand these children and their stories, the collective sentiment was that they were special and brought something to the school that made us better as teachers and as people.

These children did not come to school empty. They came carrying stories, fear, brilliance, grief, hope, and they entered classrooms asking for little more than a desire to be seen, to be taught with care,and held to high expectations. For them, the classroom was not just a place where they received instruction, it was a sanctuary. School was one of the few spaces where they were treated like everyone else, and the many things that made them different were also things to be proud of.

I remember so many moments where I had to learn names and the joy on children’s faces knowing that I cared to learn about them as much as they cared to learn math and science from me. Some days, I would struggle to roll my r’s and take deep pauses while forcing my brain to accept the spaces between consonants where vowels didn’t exist in order to say a name the right way. My effort to get names right always paid off in smiles and appreciation; and we all knew that the classroom was where their humanity was affirmed.

The classroom was where the world outside the school with its hostility and suspicion could be held at bay. Because of the way that the school respected students and their families, the community around the school held the children with similar care. This is not to say that we never inherited the harshness of the real world beyond the schools. We did, but somehow, that callousness seemed contained when it came to teaching and the children that are the center of our work.

For centuries, the sacredness of teaching and the reverence for schools seemed to emanate outward from the classroom and into society. That season appears to be over.

Today, as I look at the landscape of education and the world beyond it, I find that there are no longer any protective boundaries around our children, those who work with them, and the buildings we work in. The signals have been prescient; the decimation of the Department of Education, increased violence in and around schools, and the intentional positioning of sacred space as a battleground for ideological beliefs that have very little to do with the actual art and craft of teaching.

When a 5-year-old is ripped from the arms of family and taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after being picked up from school by his father, it is a signal that cruelty has become procedural and nothing, including children, those who are charged to protect them, and the sacred spaces where they gather is sacred. This event is not a final straw or breaking point, but it is a signal that we cannot sit idly by and lose the essence of our craft. When a child who has just left school can be snatched off the street, what happens to them in schools?

In Minnesota and across the country, thousands of people are braving frigid temperatures and protesting. They are standing up not simply to resist a policy but to defend a moral boundary. For teachers, our protest is in the classroom. It is one of the last remaining spaces where children can experience safety without surveillance, care without conditions, and belonging with or without documentation.

The only way to retain the sacredness of our craft is to teach in ways that celebrate and honor our immigrant students. We have a responsibility to wrap them in safety and belonging because it is the only way that we can protest against the inhumanity in the world beyond the classroom.

The modern schooling project is intent on stripping teaching of its sacredness. Classrooms that are solely focused on accountability, efficiency, and control at the expense of connection and centering the students who need us the most cannot work. This is not the time to turn teaching into a purely technical act. Anyone can follow checklists, pacing guides, or scripted curricula. To truly teach in a season of inhumanity is to return what happens in the classroom to sacred practice. We must make every interaction in the classroom grounded in presence, care, imagination, and spirit.

It is important to remember that protest works. Because of the courageous voices on the ground that did not allow policy to dictate humanity, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, recently were able to return home to Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis.

For the teacher, that courage doesn’t manifest as loud voices on the street. It emerges in the quiet, daily willingness to step into the unknown with the most vulnerable students. That courage shows up in admitting uncertainty, being vulnerable, taking pedagogical risks in service of deeper connection, and understanding that may mean learning to roll your r’s and pronounce a name properly. A courageous teacher creates the conditions for bravery, where students feel safe enough to speak, imagine, and fail forward no matter when or how they and their families found themselves in the school.

At the heart of sacred teaching is a simple but radical idea: To teach you, I must know you. Knowing students means lingering with them, listening beyond words, and honoring the knowledge they already carry. It means recognizing that young people arrive in classrooms with courage forged through lived experience.

Our task is not to manufacture grit but to create environments where their existing strengths have value and currency.

In this season, so much is happening all the time that threatens who we are as teachers and the sacredness of our craft. I want us to remember that our pedagogy is our protest. Teaching is not merely what we do. It is who we are being in relationships with young people. When we honor teaching as sacred work, we do more than improve schools. We restore something essential to our collective humanity. Despite all that is going on in the world, don’t worry, just teach!!!!

Thanks to Chris for sharing his thoughts.

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