About Us

By the time I moved to Memphis for Teach for America, I thought I had a good grasp of history. I had passed the A.P. U.S. History exam in high school and fulfilled my history requirements at the University of Washington.  It wasn’t until I moved to the South that I realized I knew very little.  

 

During my first week teaching 3rd grade summer school, my co-teacher prepared a Juneteenth lesson and I was puzzled by this significant holiday that I’d never heard of. I had to Google many historical figures that were referenced in my new classroom library (Ruby Bridges, Claudette Colvin, George Washington Carver, to name a few).  And I am embarrassed by this, but until I visited the National Civil Rights Museum for the first time, I didn’t even realize that Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, much less anything about the 1968 sanitation strike and “I Am A Man” movement. .  

 

Realizing how little I know about Black history was painful.  I felt like a fraud.  How could I teach all Black children, but not even know the basics of their history?  

 

I knew I had to do better.  I wanted to be able to infuse my 1st grade classroom with elements of my students’ history and honor the historic city that we were in.  From that moment forward, I’ve tried to educate myself on Black history, the struggle for Black liberation, and immerse myself in the celebratory aspects of Black culture.  I knew that in order to do better, I had to know better. This also meant confronting the violent history of my white ancestors and learning how racial oppression has evolved into contemporary inequities evident in the challenges facing my students.   Working, both to learn critical perspectives missing from my 16 years of schooling and unlearn the whitewashed curriculum I was taught, has been an ongoing process. 

 

Around the week of George Floyd’s murder, I was moving away from Memphis, back to my small, conservative, and very white hometown of Battle Ground, WA for the summer.  As I drove cross-country, I watched as people I had never before seen engage in activism share black squares, circulate James Baldwin quotes, and donate money to the ACLU.  While the new energy around the BlackLivesMatter movement was exciting, I thought of my Black students who deserve to be supported and nurtured by society. As time went by, posts dwindled, and conversations returned back to normal. I became frustrated by the amount of performative allyship I saw and the lack of real action I encountered, particularly from my white community.  

 

When I got home, I asked my 13-year-old sister what she thought of the Black Lives Matter protests and she responded with “I don’t know much about it.” I was so frustrated by her lack of knowledge, but how could I expect anything less? I knew the public school district that she was going through (I am a product of the same one) and understood that most of her teachers wouldn’t be talking about the movement.  

 

That same week, I took her to a Portland BLM protest where I watched her learn the names of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and ask questions about police violence against Black people and their liberation.  When given the opportunity to learn and participate, the protests became important to her; the struggles of Black people more visceral.  I knew that other kids would react with the same compassion and conviction, if given the information, and especially if taught at an even earlier age.  I knew I had to do something to help educate others from my hometown about oppression, privilege, and the BIPOC histories we never learned. 

 

The next day I posted about my frustrations on instagram and asked who might be interested in working with me to lead a campaign to update the social studies curriculum in my own small town.  BIPOC and white friends alike were excited by the opportunity for impact with this project.

 

However, while a diverse group of people expressed interest in the project, after our first meeting, I recognized that the final team who had showed up was not as diverse as I had hoped.  A couple of my BIPOC friends who expressed interest in the project were already engaged in other powerful and time-consuming work, while others shared that they were focused on emotional healing during this time.  While I considered trying to recruit a majority-BIPOC team, I ultimately came to the conclusion that if we were committed to centering BIPOC perspectives, why shouldn’t it be majority white people putting in the work to create a more just education system?  If I, as well as other white people, had the capacity to put in months of work towards this important project, why should we put that burden predominantly on our Black friends during a time of such emotional trauma? While I would have welcomed more Black team members, why should it constantly be the role of Black people to organize against an oppressive education system?  I didn’t want to tokenize any of my friends by forcing them to join a project they didn’t have the time for, but I felt like I had their support to move forward with this project, based on personal conversations between friends and colleagues. If we maintained the commitment to always elevate the work of BIPOC thinkers, research, academia, literature, curriculums, projects, authors, and books, and put useful campaign tools in one, centralized location for any new or veteran activist to use, I felt that we could still do this project justice. The goal has always been to  create the resources for people to easily create their own local campaign and infuse it with their own identities and stories, not control the narrative of stories being told. 

 

We know this project is neither perfect nor complete.  That’s what we think the beauty of Rewrite is—you can complete it with your own experiences and adapt it to the needs of your community.  Please edit, add, or delete any recommendation, alter any petition sentence, and provide us unlimited feedback on our website.  We’ve spent the last 2 months working on this project, attempting to make it the best we possibly can.  Given the time of year, with schools starting and districts setting their yearly priorities, we felt it was urgent to release our first iteration of the project now.  We’re calling it the first iteration, because our hope is that you will help us improve our resources by using them as a baseline to create a Rewrite campaign that works for you and your district.  Hopefully there will be many iterations of our campaign resources out there, influencing hundreds of districts around the country.  We recognize that there has already been lots of great work started around decolonizing education and shifting anti-racist practices in schools, but what we noticed was missing, was streamlined resources to make this work accessible to any community member.  So infuse this campaign with your thoughts, experiences, and identity, which is why we chose the route of creating editable resources for anyone to use.  Let us know what we got right, what we got wrong, and where we could improve.  

 

While I know we will ultimately miss the mark in some capacity, I also know that over the past few months, I had to do something beyond performative actions.  I have been restless thinking about the injustices Black people face across our country, and more personally, how I can be involved in working towards essential change. The 150 Black children I had the privilege of teaching in Memphis deserve an education system that treats them better.  My little sister needs to learn the history of our country so that she can do better as a white person. And I had the time and resources to dedicate a significant part of my life to a project like this over the summer.  I had to do it. 

 

Rewrite the Curriculum is meant to start a conversation.  Whether it’s positive or critical, our goal is to get people talking about our current education system and how we can improve it to foster a more anti-racist society. Our resources are not the end, but the beginning of what we hope will be many impactful, local campaigns.  While we admit and take responsibility for this campaign’s imperfections (and reference places in our guidebook that we are working to further develop), what we do know is that this work is urgent.  Our resources are a starting place and a tool for you to make real change in your community.  If you too have been looking for a way to make an impact in this movement, this could be it.  After 2 months of teamwork, the only way we can improve this project is by opening it up to the greater community, because this campaign relies heavily on each of you making it your own.

 

We look forward to hearing your feedback.

 

Taylor