Re-Inventing Leadership Practices to Organize Collective Action With and Among BIPOC
Conventional visions of “leadership” value characteristics of assertiveness, competition, and individualism at the expense of collective-oriented action. Teacher activists re-invent leadership practices to organize collective action with students, teachers, families, community members, and educational leaders that refuse systematic oppression in all forms, center BIPOC well-being, and redistribute power and resources to marginalized groups.
Citation
Pham, J.H. & Rodriguez, N. (2023). Learning and leading in collectivity with Lucia. Mai Pedagogy Project. www.maipedagogyproject.com
Nicky Rodriguez
Nicky Rodriguez
Nicky is a disabled, queer Puerto Rican comic artist, flatter, and colorist. She is the creator of the ongoing webcomic, The Unlucky Ones and the Edge of Nowhere, and the illustrator of Con Papá/With Papá. She started making autobio zines in 2018, exploring mental health, the impermanence of time and memory, existential ennui, and the meaning of home. She continues to explore these subjects in her fiction comics and is currently focused on her graphic novel endeavors and making zines about living with chronic migraine and occipital neuralgia. She is represented by Emmy Nordstrom Higdon of Westwood Creative Artists.
“What I love about this resource as a facilitating dialogue tool is I see these two extremes that show up when you’re trying to organize dialogue around equity and justice: (1) we’re looking at data and the conversation ends up being this stunted formal “let’s interpret the numbers” and people’s lived stories and experiences end up getting left out and sanitized because it becomes this conversation about numbers and percentages, and (2) you come in and ask people to tell their stories as a way to bring in lived experiences, and it ends up being this traumatic thing where the learning has to happen as a result of someone having to spill and explain themselves. And this comic offers something in between, it is a telling of a story based on curated choices using data, theories, and lived experiences… and it can be a tool where I can show it to people who are able to speak on lived experiences without requiring them to share their own trauma. It facilitated bringing up stuff without it having to be excavated and extractive in the dialogue”
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