LUKE WOOD: When we started working with schools, colleges, and universities many years ago, one of the things we noticed is that the deficit framing was really pervasive. At first what would happen is we would say, let’s do a root cause analysis and let’s look at it a way of turning it into an equity practice.

And it came down really to just one thing, having acceptable language and unacceptable language. And at the top of a piece of paper, we do a big circle with whatever the problem of practice might be. So maybe it’s high suspension rates for Black male students. And then we do these circles out from it and we’d ask them a really powerful question, which is, why, which gets to how they rationalize what’s the actual issue.

And then so what some people would say is they would go back to those old tropes that were used to, it’s the students, their families, their communities. They’re lazy. They don’t care. Or it would even be like kind of the subtle deficit, the one where you say, well you know, it’s not that they don’t care. They just came from a bad school that just didn’t really prepare them.

But these notions of externalizing that responsibility and we write them in as part of this process. And then what we recognize is that we were trying to get them to think about what that problem was, but also getting them to the kind of thinking that they needed, which would be different.

And so what we would do is we would talk about how we have to move away from these deficit perspectives. And then we would be performative. And we’d have that piece of paper and we take it, we’d rip it up and we say, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to think about this not with their language but with we language.

Not they, themselves, their families, their communities, them, what they do. But we as educators, what are we doing, what are we not doing, where are we, we aren’t, we don’t. And so we take that same activity then we do a circle at the top and then we would say to them, we now have what is acceptable language and unacceptable language.

Acceptable language is you can start out whatever you want to say and you can say it with we are, we aren’t, we don’t. Whatever it might be but it has to be we because it’s on us as educators.