Radical Joy

and the Difficult Discipline of Happiness

Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

Maria Montessori’s Joy

I recently came across the following excerpt from a talk by Maria Montessori’s youngest grandchild Renilde Montessori at the Educateurs sans Frontières Assembly in 1984. In the excerpt, Renilde addresses an aspect of Maria Montessori’s philosophy that is rarely discussed but that I think should be considered a central tenet of the method. Joy.

I would like to suggest that as you listen to all the practical and ideological information on Montessori you will be offered, you allow a reality, rarely mentioned, to permeate your understanding of the things you hear. This reality is Maria Montessori’s joy.

Montessori was a blithe spirit. She delighted in the beauty of the universe, the marvels of nature, above all man’s achievements and man’s potential. Her love of life was the leitmotif of her teaching. If we wish to understand, adopt and implement education as an aid to life, then it is the blitheness in our own spirit that we should seek to nurture in our dealings with the child. Joy is seldom considered in any serious discussion on education. Yet one of the greatest privileges of being human is the acquisition of knowledge, of understanding, of awareness at all levels of perception, is a limitless source of rejoicing. We live in a spiritually bleak climate of anxious and violent times.

It is incumbent upon us to bypass prevalent despondencies and build on our potential for exuberance, strength, intelligence and versatility. It is our highest obligation to be happy. Happiness is not an easy discipline- it is one of the most demanding. Our great good fortune as parents and as educators is that we have the most expert guides in our attainment of true happiness: the children. The children, bound to the very essence of life by love in its purest form. Let us, with Maria Montessori, follow the child. Let us, with her, always be willing to learn from our children.

There is so much I love about this speech. Joy and happiness are not treated as lightweight, syrupy concepts, but as serious disciplines - as urgent obligations in a world that is so often in direct conflict with joy. And, as always, our attentions are directed towards the real teachers in our world: the children, the “most expert guides in our attainment of true happiness.” In this post, I want to unpack joy as a discipline, and discuss the radical role it can play in education and our lives.

Taking Joy Seriously

At this summer’s AMS Conference (“The Montessori Event” 🙄), I attended a workshop entitled “Reinvesting in Valorization” in which we explored and discussed the characteristics of valorization and the ways we’ve fostered these characteristics in our adolescent communities. I learned that in 2001, John Long identified eleven observable behaviors that constitute valorization in an adolescent environment: joy, selflessness, optimism, confidence, dignity, self-discipline, independence, cooperation, helpfulness, ability to work with others, and good judgement. Chart paper was posted around the room with each characteristic, and we were invited to travel to each poster in order to write down and discuss how we had succeeded or struggled to elicit that behavior in our classrooms.

I went straight to “JOY” for a number of reasons. Last year was one of the most joyful years I’d experienced as a teacher, and I wanted to both celebrate and reflect on why this might have been. I attribute a lot of it to the shift in priorities many of us experienced post-Pandemic, and how excited both students and teachers were about being back together in community - see my post The Importance of Hanging Out for more on this. So I started to add to the chart some of the practices that I think led to the emergence of joy in our adolescent environment - increased outdoor time, spontaneous group singing and dance sessions, group games and team building initiatives, a focus on wellbeing and mental health, etc.

But my little joy bubble was quickly popped. A younger teacher in her 2nd year joined our small group, and wanted to share that she had come to “JOY” because of how consistently joyless her classroom was. She talked about how stressful her job was on a daily basis, how little the students listened or respected her, how unkind they were to each other, and how she couldn’t see any way out of the situation she was in. She talked about how much she’d like to dance with students, for example, but knew that if she did anything fun it would immediately descend into chaos as a few students were guaranteed to derail the experience.

All the teachers in our group empathized. I remember how hard my first few years of teaching were, and how often I worried that my classroom was just not a very happy place for children. I also really recognized where she was at with feeling like she couldn’t given even up even an inch of control, because if she allowed for any fun or frivolity then everything would spiral out. We’ve all been through it. And there is no easy fix. She was describing a problem with her classroom culture. A healthy, happy culture takes a lot of time and intention to build, and even more time to reconstruct. So each of us recommended some small steps she might consider taking to gradually shift the culture of her environment in order to eventually rediscover joy.

My biggest tip for rediscovering joy would be to turn to what Renilde said: “Our great good fortune as parents and as educators is that we have the most expert guides in our attainment of true happiness: the children.” This young educator had lost faith in her students, and in return they had lost faith in her. Counterintuitively, the most adult thing you can do in this situation is to recognize that you are probably the issue, not the children. Instead, trust that they are going to become your solution. If you invest in the students, discover who they are, play games with them at recess, have fun with them in class, connect with them as individuals, allow for lots of student agency and voice, and shape your days and curriculum around their passions, interests, and needs, you will build a culture that is centered around your students. And the product of that culture will be joy.

Joy as a Radical Act

It is incumbent upon us to bypass prevalent despondencies and build on our potential for exuberance, strength, intelligence and versatility. It is our highest obligation to be happy. Happiness is not an easy discipline- it is one of the most demanding.

Inevitably, talking about joy can be triggering for some people. Expecting teachers to be happy and joyful in the face of their widespread exploitation - low wages, long hours, burnout, unrealistic expectations, etc. - is asking a lot. The “prevalent despondencies” can be pretty crushing at times. Yes - joy shouldn’t be used to silence protest and whitewash reality, but likewise pain and suffering shouldn’t prohibit joy.

It is our responsibility as teachers to show children that in the midst of difficulty and struggle we can hold space for joy. Joy is a form of resistance. We know this from radical expressions of black and queer joy as forms of resistance in the face of an oppressive capitalist society that constantly wants to grind the joy out of everything and everyone.

I also find that there is a strong cultural pressure within teaching to celebrate joylessness at times: a cynicism that focuses on teaching as an act of survival. Take, for example, the classic teaching mantra “don’t smile until Christmas.” I was told this when I first started - the idea being that students prey on those teachers who don’t put on a show of force, discipline, and strength at the beginning of the year. I have worked on teams where I’ve seen teachers take pride in publicly chastising students because it somehow validates their ability to control and manage children.

I think if we started the year instead by telling young teachers to try to find their joy in teaching it would help with survival and burnout. Rather than focusing on the grind, on classroom management, on setting up unrealistic expectations for discipline and academic outcomes, we should focus on creating positive classroom cultures. I believe that great classroom management comes from students experiencing a teaching presence that appears to be positive and in control of their circumstances - if you exude trust and self belief, the students will follow. My Montessori trainer, J McKeever, told us that when the children enter our classroom, they should feel like they are being invited into a new adventure everyday. This is a teaching mantra to live by. Begin with joy.

Resources for Joy

Trick them into thinking they aren’t learning, and they do. Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski

To conclude, I would like to share a couple of resources that have helped me to harness the radical power of joy in the classroom. One book that really taught me about student agency, culturally responsive teaching, and joy is For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. This book taught me to play sports with my students, how to share the classroom space and curriculum with my students, how to bring their cultures into the space, and how to have fun.

This book pairs nicely with Season 4 of HBO’s The Wire, one of the best TV shows of all-time, which tackles the education system in Baltimore. One storyline in Season 4 involves the story of Prez, an ex-cop turned Middle School Math teacher. Prez begins his career as a teacher using traditional classroom management techniques, and he struggles to make inroads with his students. One day, watching them gambling peanuts in the cafeteria, he realizes his students are already practicing Math for fun, and so he decides to harness that passion and joy for learning…

Finally, I found the Mindful Schools training to be one of the most impactful trainings of my teaching career. The mindfulness teacher training not only provides you a curriculum for teaching to students, but it trains you to be a mindful presence in the classroom. It gives you tangible practices you can use to be the sort of positive, joyful, mindful presence in the classroom that your students need you to be.

Sources

Montessori, R. (1984). Talk at the Welcoming Reception of the First International Forum in San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 1984. Educateurs sans Frontières Fifth Assembly Selected Readings Booklet.

Long, J. (2001). Characteristics and needs of adolescents: A comparative study. NAMTA Journal, 26(3), 79-83.