Radical Joy (Revisited)

Follow-up from the IMI Conference 2024

Last Saturday, I was invited to speak at the International Montessori Institute Conference on the theme of “Montessori Leadership in Challenging Times.” I was privileged to speak alongside some amazing Montessorians, including Lobana Alabbas, who introduced us to the concept of servant leadership, Diana Bradley, who spoke about the value of Montessori coaching, and Hannah Joy Baynham, who examined leadership through a feminist Montessori lens. Thank you to Nathan Archer and the team at IMI for a wonderful conference that was enlightening and enriching for all involved.

Nathan invited, or rather challenged, me to speak further on the topic of Radical Joy that he’d read in this previous post of mine. To summarize, I examined the nature of joy as a teaching tool, and as an act of resistance against the pervasive culture of cynicism, exhaustion, and negativity in education. This is still just the seed of an idea and not yet fully developed. With that in mind, I’d love any feedback or comments that challenge these ideas and help push me to flesh out the central concept.

Here is the talk, adapted for substack:

Radical Joy

I'm a huge fan of using joyful design as an act of resistance against the ever-encroaching dullness of adulthood. Here are a few ways I bring joy into my daily life as an educator and parent. In schools, I’m probably most recognized for my red beanie, long hair, and floral ukulele. The photo above shows both my uke and my laptop. Yes, I love stickers. But these little acts of joyful design serve a meaningful purpose. Both of them help tell a story about who I am to children - my playfulness, creativity, joyfulness, gentleness, etc. They soften me - they make me - a 6’2” bearded adult male - more approachable - and they make me intriguing.

I also love mood-socking. This is where I wear a pair of brightly-colored, mismatched socks that reflect my mood or lesson plans for that day. This habit started during my Montessori training. Every day, my trainer, J McKeever, would turn up in clothes that matched the lessons she presented - such as a fossil-themed dress and trilobite earrings. Her mantra was that you should make every single day feel like an adventure for the children. Mood-socking was one small way I could bring a little of that energy and joy into my work. And in their little ways, these expressions of joy play a central role in my teaching practice and my approach to life. The adult world is such a drag sometimes. The daily grind of our working lives is often stressful, isolating, exhausting, and overwhelming.

But as educators we are lucky, because we work with children. This is one of the greatest gifts that teaching has given me - it has kept me in frequent contact with the exuberant joyfulness, brazenness, and silliness of youth. Just last week, I line-danced with teenagers, sang with six-year-olds, and played tag with nine and ten-year-olds. Unlike many of the adults I talk to, my working life has been predominantly joyful, fulfilling, and energizing.

However, this is not the story we often hear about teaching. The dominant narrative about teaching is that it is something that has to be survived. Teachers are famously overworked, underpaid, and worn out by classroom management, SEND provision, mental health issues, needy parents, and academic demands.

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 children prey on those teachers who don’t put on a show of force, discipline, and strength at the beginning of the year. This cynicism and joylessness is endemic in education.

But also these narratives and attitudes are understandable because they are rooted in real issues.

A record number of educators are leaving the profession because of the ever-increasing demands of this work.

Our teachers and administrators are currently facing a record mental health crisis. In the 2023 UK Teacher Wellbeing Index, 78% of teachers report being stressed out and 81% of teachers reported experiencing mental health symptoms because of their work. These numbers are even higher for school leaders.

With this in mind, talking about joy can be triggering for some educators. Expecting teachers to be happy and joyful in the face of their widespread exploitation - low wages, long hours, burnout, and unrealistic expectations - is asking a lot.

But that is just what I will be proposing. I want to propose that one of our most effective tools for meeting this current moment is joy.

However, I hope that what you'll discover in this article is not a "don't worry be happy", "keep calm and carry on" approach to teaching. On the contrary, what I want to talk about today is radical joy - a purposeful and intentional joy, a joy that partners with protest and that calls for systemic change. I want us to start taking joy more seriously.

Taking Joy Seriously

I am particularly inspired by radical expressions of black, trans, disabled, and queer joy that are used as forms of resistance in the face of an oppressive capitalist society that constantly wants to grind the joy out of everything and everyone. These forms of resistance loudly affirm resilience, hope, celebration, and agency in the face of great difficulty.

Kleaver Cruz, founder of The Black Joy Project, writes:

“Black Joy is not … dismissing or creating an ‘alternate’ black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustice…in tension with the joy we experience. It’s about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them."

Joy shouldn’t be used to silence protest and whitewash the reality that teachers and children experience, but likewise pain and suffering shouldn’t prohibit joy. It is our responsibility as teachers to show children that amid difficulty and struggle we can hold space for joy. That we can turn to joy as a form of resistance.

This idea of "radical joy" was first inspired by the following speech from Maria Montessori’s youngest grandchild Renilde Montessori that she gave at the Educateurs sans Frontières Assembly in 1984:

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.

So, what does this all mean on a practical level? What does it mean to "be happy" as a form of discipline, to practice joy, and to cultivate blitheness in our spirit as educators?

Bypassing Prevalent Despondencies

First, I think it helps to look at where many teachers end up, overwhelmed by the prevalent despondencies, and then we can work backward from there.

Last year, I attended a Montessori workshop in which we explored and discussed the 11 characteristics we'd hope to observe in children as the outcomes of our Montessori adolescent communities: Joy, Selflessness, Optimism, Confidence, Dignity, Self-discipline, Independence, Cooperation, Helpfulness, Ability to Work with Others, and Good Judgement. In the workshop, chart paper was then posted around the room with the different characteristics, and we were invited to travel to each poster to write down and discuss how we had succeeded or struggled to support these characteristics in our classrooms.

I went straight to “JOY” for a number of reasons. The year before, 2021, had been 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 the joy we experienced as a community to the shift in priorities many of us experienced post-COVID and how excited both students and teachers were about being back together. We were in this magic post-pandemic bubble where nationally everyone accepted that academics, rigorous scheduling, and curriculum benchmarks all needed to take a backseat to physical and mental health, and to social connection.

And so this is where we put our attention as a team - on cultivating joy and connection - on playing, singing, dancing - on having fun and being happy. We were a healthy community that year. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the students were also academically successful: a byproduct of this healthy and fun learning environment was that students wanted to learn! I saw increased engagement, rapid growth, and a deep investment in learning from the teens in our community.

Here is a quote from an email one of my students sent me at the end of that year...

“I want to say thank you for everything you did to make my 8th grade year the best year of my life! One specific memory I always think back to is when you gave us a quick break from work cycle to go to the porch. You handed us all sheets of music, and with ukulele in hand somehow got [the class] to sing “I Say a Little Prayer” by Aretha Franklin. It was a magical moment.”

It is not surprising to me that one of the stand-out memories this student has from his 8th grade year is one of spontaneity, hanging-out, and joy. This is just one moment among many. And what a gift this was for these students - to see their teachers, in the midst of a global pandemic, still finding space and time for joy.

So, back at the conference, 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, increased time and space for student agency and self-directed learning, spontaneous group singing and dance sessions, time for irreverence and silliness, meaningful, ambitious work, group games and team building initiatives, a focus on wellbeing, 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 to 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 perhaps just not a very happy place for children. I also really recognized that feeling of not being able to give up even an inch of control, because if she allowed for any fun or frivolity then everything would spiral into chaos.

Often when approaching difficult behaviors, we enter a sort of grim, zero sum game where we focus on control, endless accommodations, reduced freedoms, and discipline, and this sucks the joy out of the experience for yourself and the child. And, I find, ultimately, makes the problem worse.

I’ve worked with a number of teachers, who have found themselves in this situation. They've moved further and further away from the Montessori method - shifted to adult-centered methods of discipline and control, taken away agency from the children, capitulated to the anxiety of parents and administrators, and they've backed themselves further and further into a corner that is joyless and draining.

This is the direction that the current educational and parenting climate seems to be pushing all of us. As Montessorians, we are constantly swimming against the tide of intense cultural pressures. And it is difficult not to get swept away.

Supporting teachers who have reached this point is hard. Because, at first, the problems seem insurmountable. These teachers will respond to any and all suggestions with defensiveness and negativity. They have tightened the reins of control around them, and now refuse to let go.

And, of course, there is no easy fix - no magic wand. Because the problems they have created in their environments are systemic and cultural. A healthy, happy classroom culture takes a lot of time and intention to build, and even more time to reconstruct. This can only be done in small steps, taking the time to gradually shift the culture of the environment towards one of agency and joy.

Whether you are a teacher with a class environment that feels overwhelming and stressful, or a manager supporting a teacher who is overwhelmed, or a school leader whose school culture as a whole currently feels joyless and stressed-out, here are some simple steps you can take to reclaim that joy…

—End of Part One—

I will be releasing the second half of this article later in the week to all my subscribers, but if you want to go ahead and finish it now, please sign up as a paid subscriber below!