Balancing Urgency and Slowness
Reflections from the 2022 Educator Summer Institute
By: Kathleen Harrell (she/her/hers)
“A Co-Conspirator functions as a verb, not a noun” Dr. Bettina Love
“You shouldn’t have to self-care your way out of oppressive systems.” Dr. Alex Shevrin Venet & Rhiannon Kim
“Leading from the back”
“Balancing urgency and slowness”
“Curiosity”
“White women’s mobility between spaces”
“Discernment about when to step up and when to step back”
“Nothing about us without us”
“...any word can be racially coded language. It’s every word.”
These are the words swirling around in my notebook and in my mind as I reflect on my time at the Educator Institute last week. This was my second time attending the Institute and it was markedly different from the first. I also fully intend to engage in a third next summer. Here’s why: I am not the same. The 2021 Institute brought me boundaries. It allowed me to find the space and words and actions to say “I can no longer be in this space.” For me this looked like leaving conversations that were not longer productive, it looked like saying out loud, “What about the disproportionate number of student of color…” It looked like asking my white, middle class cisgender identifying boy what he noticed about race within his school and organized activities. It looked like digging into books, conferences and learning that helped me broaden and push my thinking. That was 2021 and I began to move with a sense of urgency.
Kathleen Harrell
2022 Educator Institute
I entered the 2022 Institute a day late from traveling, deeply committed to what I imagined being progress toward my next step. Then it happened. This year’s institute brought me gritty self reflection. A hard stop. I heard about self-soothing, self-care, and now I can see the ways these phrases have been used to create a story, a belief even, that I can self care my way out of a system. My sense of urgency and energy, enthusiasm even, is white supremacist culture at work (if I let it be).
I silenced voices in 2021. In my effort to be anti-racist I caused direct harm. I did not know that I should or even how to balance urgency and slowness. I mistook what I understood to be personality traits and allowed them to stifle black and brown voices around me. By doing so I could push this observation down. I could excuse and rationalize these behaviors. At the Institute, we-are, gave me the tools to lean into it. To acknowledge and name my own discomfort and the harm I caused with self soothing and self care. Not from a place of making myself feel better about the harm, but from a place of working towards repair, towards action, toward disruption, toward liberation.
I’ll spend 2022 moving into this space. Balancing urgency and slowness. Learning to build in pauses and accountability measures for myself. I’ll enter 2023 with a new way of knowing and being and understanding that there will continue to be so much to unlearn and know.