A Radical Relational Practice
Listening, Reimagining, and Anti-Racism
This post is part of a series on anti-racist practice and Montessori education, adapted from a recent presentation I gave to the Bristol Early Years Forum for Anti-Racist Practice. In my first post (read here), I explored how Montessori education, while rooted in radical principles of child liberation, can also be used to uphold systems of privilege and power. And in the second post (linked here), I looked at the impact of systemic racism on my classroom dynamics.
This time, I want to zoom in: what does anti-racist practice look like at the classroom level, where relationships are built, communication happens, and power is either shared or withheld?
This piece is about what happens when we stop assuming we know what children and families need, and instead ask, “What would real partnership look like?”
Listening to Families
In 2019, while working at a public Montessori magnet school in the U.S., I found myself struggling to connect with the Hispanic families in my classroom. I wasn’t hearing back from them, and they weren’t getting classroom updates. This was the first time I’d worked closely with families who primarily spoke a different language from me, and I felt like I was failing.
I was lucky to have a parent in my class who was an incredible advocate for the Hispanic community in our school, and so I asked if she’d be willing to help me understand what I was missing. She suggested hosting a meeting specifically for Spanish-speaking parents, where she could act as a translator, and we could find out what was going on.
So we set it up. We held it right after school drop-off to make it easy to attend. I arranged cover so I could be fully present. And when the day came, every parent who could attend showed up. They communicated through our parent translator, and what they shared was illuminating.
These families had been feeling left out of school communication for years. They were confused, disconnected, and isolated from the process in ways that were deeply unfair. While they sometimes received whole-school messages in Spanish, individual teachers rarely translated their classroom-specific updates. Many of these parents didn’t have access to email, and those who did often struggled to understand the messages they received. This meant they couldn’t support their children with school in the same way other families could, and they felt like outsiders in a space that should have welcomed them.
What became clear was that the current system wasn’t working for them. Most didn’t have computers, and some didn’t have smartphones, but every single family had a mobile phone that could receive text messages. So we worked together to find a way to send translated information directly to their phones—no apps, no emails, just simple, clear communication that kept them in the loop (TalkingPoints). It wasn’t as sleek or high-tech as the platforms we had been using previously, but it was effective. For the first time, this group of parents was receiving real-time updates about both their children and the school community, and it made a huge difference.
That meeting changed everything. It wasn’t just about fixing communication; it was about making these families feel valued and included. I could now work with them to support their children more effectively. I could share concerns, celebrate successes, and invite them into our classroom community in a way that had never happened before. And they responded with enthusiasm—they wanted to be part of their children’s education, and now they had the access they needed to do so.
A Systemic, Relational Approach
For me, the biggest lesson from this experience was about the importance of listening. To be an anti-racist educator, you have to start by truly engaging with your community. I highly recommend Dr. Chris Emdin’s For White Folk Who Teach in the Hood, And The Rest of Y’all Too for more on this. You have to talk to families, spend time with them, understand their different cultures, trust them, and ask them what they need. Too often, schools operate on assumptions and stereotypes that create unnecessary barriers between educators and the communities they serve. Breaking down those barriers requires active effort—it means being present, being curious, and being willing to make changes that prioritize inclusion over convenience.
Too often in schools, we have linear or transactional relationships with families, where we only communicate to share information or ask them to do something. At my school, whether these families received communication or not was seen as incidental, because ultimately, the teacher’s focus was limited to what was happening within their classroom. A systemic approach recognizes that the child is part of a greater system, and that that system works most successfully when all parts are involved and supported (see this great NAMTA article by Sarah Werner Andrews for more on this idea). In this approach, children, families, other school-based adults, and the wider community are seen as equal partners in this work.
In my story, I may have been the one implementing the change, but it was that parent advocate who led the way. She taught me more than I ever could have learned on my own, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked alongside her. The impact of that meeting, and the relationships it helped to build, started to move my classroom (and then eventually other classrooms in the school) towards becoming a space where every family, regardless of language or background, felt like they truly belonged.
Reimagining School Systems
This reminds me of the thinking of Cornelius Minor, author of We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be. Minor refers to himself as a radically kid-centered educator, which I love so much. He’s definitely a Montessorian at heart. In the book, he speaks about decolonizing the teacher’s role in the classroom: moving from power and compliance to equitable relationships grounded in student voice and agency.
In a webinar I attended, Minor described what it takes to uproot deeply embedded unjust systems in schools—systems like grading, communication, curriculum, adult-child relationships, family engagement, and discipline policies—and replace them with ones that are radically kid-first.
He shared a tool he calls the Imagination Protocol, a simple but profound process of classroom-level action:
Who is most often left out in my school community?
(Gather data: grades, attendance, behavior referrals, engagement, etc.)What are they left out of?
How might I reimagine this thing to give more people access?
How might I test my idea?
This process mirrors what I did with the text-message solution. It wasn’t grand or perfect, but it was real—and it worked. Minor emphasizes that you don’t need permission to make these changes. Test new ideas, gather evidence, and bring that evidence to your leaders. Change can then start from below and move upward.
He also talks about how important it is to enroll children and communities in self-determining these solutions. In We Got This, Minor writes, “Kids’ voices do not belong just in their writing and in their schoolwork. They belong in my thinking and my decision-making.” Or, as he put it in the webinar, “What do youth have to say about their own liberation?”.
That question lands deeply for me. Because ultimately, anti-racist education is not something we do to students or families—it’s something we co-create with them. It asks us to listen—not just for feedback, but for vision and possibility. To follow your community, and follow the child.