Episode 8
Artists for Educational Justice: Kim Cosier

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   Race remix mix.

Welcome to Race Remix, where we explore the intersections of racial justice and the arts. We talk with artists, educators and thought leaders from around the world. Building Knowledge One conversation at a time. This podcast is produced by the Racial Justice Studio, an initiative of Arizona Arts at the University of Arizona. Welcome to Race Remix. I’m your host, Amy Craig, and my co-host is Gia del Pino, an activist and artist currently working on her Ph.D. and the art and visual culture education program at the University of Arizona.

Welcome, Gia.

Gia Del Pino   It’s great to be here. I’m thrilled that we’re joined today by Kim Cozier Kitchens, an artist and activist who teaches at the Park School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   We’ll be taking time to talk with Kim about the role of the arts and social justice movements.

Gia Del Pino   So welcome, Kim.

Kim Cosier   Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here.

Gia Del Pino   You live, work and play as an artist, activist and educator. What is activism?

Kim Cosier   What is activism? So, for me, activism is about building community and working together with others to fight systems of power and privilege that keep people oppressed and, you know, keep other people in positions of power. I think activism can be part of your teaching. It can be part of making art. And, you know, everyday activism can be just being kind to the people in your neighborhood.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   You talked about surviving. Could be a form of activism. What do you mean by that?

Kim Cosier   I think there are many people for whom survival is not guaranteed. And I think that there’s structures in place in the U.S., for example, that, you know, for indigenous people, for example, African American people, there have been, you know, policies many policies over the years that have been put in place to to try to keep people from surviving or to stamp people out.

And I think, you know, being alive for some folks is really in a sense, it is a form of activism because of the fight that’s had to happen to make that the case. Right.

Gia Del Pino   I’m curious, what brought you to do arts activism? How is that different from all the activism you just described?

Kim Cosier   It was really it was a visit from an artist named David Solnit, who is from San Francisco. He’s an incredible, incredible activist and artist who is working nonstop. He’s tireless, and he was invited by a colleague of mine, Nicholas Lampert, to do an artist lecture at our university. And he said he would only come and do it if we would do an hour filled with him.

And Nicholas had worked with David at Standing Rock and in Paris with the climate marches and things like that. So that was my first kind of entree into doing artists artistic activism, and I was just hooked. You know, we spent the whole weekend with a bunch of activists from various groups in Milwaukee and learning from David Solnit like.

So that was really what got me interested in it.

Gia Del Pino   What strikes me about that story is your coming to activism and artistic activism. I’m curious if you also think about your identity in these multiple ways and if there’s a particular order that feels meaningful to you.

Kim Cosier   And I think the order changes depending on what I’m what I’m up to, you know, when I’m when I’m wearing my teacher hat, then the educator is first. And over time, too, it changed in my life. Like, you know, at the beginning of my life in academia, of course, I had the publisher, publisher perish. So, I put a lot of energy into doing the writing and things like that.

And over time, when I got more freedom, you know, when you get tenure, you get a little more freedom and then you get to full professor, you get some more freedom that those hats started to shift a bit. And so, I think the order is moving more and more toward the artist activist. And, you know, now I’m teaching part time rather than full time.

Kim Cosier   So it’s been an interesting kind of transition over my life. And I did activism actually, when I was in sixth grade, I led a walkout and my I went to a private Baptist school, and I organized a walkout. And so that I think that was probably my first my first foray into stirring up trouble.

Gia Del Pino   Always been like an agitator, like a social arsonist of sorts.

Kim Cosier   Yeah, I like to stir up trouble.

Gia Del Pino   That’s also. I’m curious. Can you define what an art build is?

Kim Cosier   Sure. Absolutely. So, in our building, it’s a form of activism where we work with community partners to develop messaging for whatever fight they’re in. So, we do a lot of work with immigration rights group called Voces de la Frontera. We do a lot of work with teachers’ unions all over the country. And so how that plays out is we meet ahead of time with our community partners and talk about what their messaging might be and then we we help them kind of distill those those notions down into more sound bite and more impactful statements.

And then from there, we start developing the artwork with them. We create banners, painted banners. We do 24-foot parachute banners, you know, screen printed picket signs, all kinds of artifacts like that that we make that that are in service to whatever the issue that is that they’re organizing around. So, our most recent art build was with the Portland Association of Teachers, and they just voted a week after we did the art build there.

They voted 99% of the members of the teachers’ union voted to go on strike. And so right now, if you want to go on social media, you can see there’s all the artwork that we made with them is now being employed, deployed in the streets to fight for just causes within the education realm in Portland.

Gia Del Pino   Amazing. Do you do this work alone or I mean, I know you’re in collaboration with other organizations, but your part of a collective.

Kim Cosier    Yes. Right. So, it’s the collective is called the Art World Workers. And we formed shortly after the David Sonnets visit was in 2016 for that first art build we did, and we were sort of the core group of people that stayed the entire time, you know, work the 14-hour days, did all the grunt work, you know, like we’re there in service to the groups that we work with.

So then other requests for these kinds of community-built art builds were coming to us. And so, we decided that we were going to, you know, sit down and have a half a day retreat and figure out what we want to call ourselves and, you know, all that kind of thing. We started working with the National Education Association, the teachers’ unions.

So, it’s been this kind of evolution of the group over time and we invited Janette, Arianna to join us as well.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   Kim, you don’t use the word artist and the name of the group. I’m wondering if that’s intentional. I mean, you’re using the word workers.

Kim Cosier    I wanted workers to be part of it because we really feel like we’re doing work in service to people. It’s not you know, we’re not there to promote our own art. It’s, you know, we’re making work that is for those other social justice movements. And so, I felt like, and others felt like that idea of being workers for those movements was much more salient than being artists who make work for movements.

Gia Del Pino   I appreciate that defining of roles and in service of the movement. It seems like the art build workers travel to different locations to serve different causes and campaigns. How does the place you’re working in influence the art build?

Kim Cosier   It’s very much influenced by it. And and the art build isn’t just when we come there for the weekend to do the work, we start months in advance working with the community partners, particularly when we’re traveling. And so, we’ll have Zoom meetings for four months. You know, as I mentioned before, coming up with the slogans that are going to be in the in the screen prints and banners and things like that.

So, it’s you know, it’s got a kind of cohesion to it. And just listening to them to see, like, what are those issues that are really important to to the group that we’re working with?

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    Do they find you or how does that work?

Kim Cosier   So, the traveling we do is almost all teachers’ union related, right? And so, then so what happened? How this kind of came about is our first build was with a group called Coalition for Justice, which is a group that was started by a family of an African-American man, D’Andre Hamilton, who was murdered by police in Milwaukee, Voces de la Frontera, which is this really amazing immigrant rights group and a group of old lefties who were trying to stop oil being transported on railways and the teachers union in Milwaukee.

And so, our Joe Brodsky, who’s a member of our group now, was there, and he’s a photographer and a videographer, and he works for the union. And so, he really heavily documented the work that we did for the union. And then they asked us to do about six months later, they asked us to do a bill that was just on educational issues with them.

Again, Joe, you know, took these really amazing photos and videos and this beautiful documentation and also the work deployed in the streets later. Right. So, when the teachers went out and did a demonstration, Joe was there taking pictures and then those made their way to the national office of the National Education Association. And this man named Nick Gunderson, who’s just an incredible human being, realized the potential of this.

And so, what generally happens is Nate’s an organizer. He knows, for example, that Portland was, you know, gearing up for a strike. So, he reaches out to the local, explains kind of what we do, puts them in touch with us, and then we begin that process of the months long planning.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   It sounds like there are a lot of roles that are being played. Yeah, organizing.

Kim Cosier    Yeah.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   I don’t think a lot of people realize that it doesn’t.

Kim Cosier   Yeah, people think, you know, like people will show up for their build and they think, we’re having a party and we’re, you know, we’re making stuff. But it is a tremendous amount of work. And then Nicholas and Paul are both members of the Just Seeds Collective as well, a printmaking collective. And so, they know artists all over the country.

And so, it really is important to have people who are on the ground in that in that city. And they know the city and they know the people that we’re, you know, that we’re dealing with. They don’t know the specific people in the union, but they know the communities right. That you’re advocating for. And so, we learn a lot in that way, just even, you know, on that level, in addition to, like learning more nuanced stuff about the kind of activism that’s happening in those regions.

Gia Del Pino    Yeah, it sounds like a guiding value or principle is the relationship. It’s very relational and very reciprocal, too.

Kim Cosier     Yeah, we’ve made some amazing friends.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   So, Kim, you’ve talked about place. I’m wondering how does your background, you know who you are, your subjectivity, how does that play into your organizing work?

Kim Cosier    So, I was raised in a really religious family and in fact, my my parents were so involved in their kind of system of beliefs, they sold everything we owned and moved us into a mission, homeless mission to serve people. And so, I think that idea of service has been very much a part of my life, my whole life.

And when I was a kid, I was sort of resentful of it. But it you just can’t it is sort of its drummed in. There’s so much that you can’t get away from it. And I think that’s partly why I became a teacher, because we serve the people, you know, teachers. And so, there’s that piece and then there’s a part of my queer identity that I, you know, that necessitated hitting the streets.

Sometimes I would as a young person, after I first came out, my my first girlfriend was involved in a group called Arabia in Grand Rapids, which was kind of really powerful, second wave feminist group of people. And they were always organizing marches and things like that. And so that was my kind of my entree into learning how to do that kind of work, where you’re out in the street doing protests and kind of creative, you know, theatrical interventions and things like that.

Although I wasn’t like a core member of that group by any means, I don’t want to give that impression. And so, from that to organizing for like Take Back the Night marches and things like that, a lot of, you know, things around feminist issues and that that’s sort of where it started. But it wasn’t art activism at that time.

It was it was there was activism. And then I made my own art on the side but not put together.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    So, your home base is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a very large African American population there. And a lot of your work is within that community. So how does your your subjectivity in terms of race or your racialization and how you understand yourself as a race person? How is that present in the work? How do you negotiate and attend to those dimensions of your relationships with others?

Kim Cosier   I think that is a lifelong project too. You just have to, as a as a white person, I think it’s an ongoing project always. And so I never you know, it’s not like I’m there yet by any means, but I feel like in a sense I think that that idea of service was trained me well for just listening and not feeling like I have any answers when I’m dealing with communities that have different experiences for me or if I’m working with, you know, for example, the Coalition for Justice group, It’s my job to listen and not not feel like I have answers all the time.

And sometimes to a fault like people have called me out for not speaking up, you know, when they invited me here to do something. And so that’s a very good learning experience, too. So, I think, you know, I tell my students that you can’t grow up in this country and not be racist. You know, you just the first thing you need to do is go, you know, look in the mirror and say, I, I grew up in this country that you breathe the air and so they’re racist.

You know, constructions that happen within us. And we just it’s a lifelong project to continue to work on that.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   And if you, how do you bring that alive for them?

Kim Cosier    And one of the key things is that we have the shared field experience. And so, they come to care about a group of kids. So, the way that we have our field experience set up in our in our program, we team teach a six-credit course. My new teaching partner is Deborah Hardy and she’s wonderful, but I’ve had different teaching partners over the years and then we do readings and preparation.

You know, most of our students, like many, our education programs, they’re predominantly white students, mostly not from the city of Milwaukee. And they go in, they’re terrified of even kindergarten kids just because it’s unknown. And then after they’re there for a while, they come to love the kids. And so I think learning about yourself and your own ways that you need to work on race and relation to coming to actually care about and love a group of people so that we’re talking about real kids and kids that hug you when you get to the school and think the black Lives Matter movement made a huge difference because I would come up against a lot more resistance to talking about this until the last couple of years, where I just feel like now, we can have these conversation that students are actually eager and they sometimes bring stuff up that I haven’t even brought to the table. So, I’m very excited about that.

Gia Del Pino    I’m hearing like concepts of like love and service. And to me they speak of like a certain kind of lexicon or, you know, or and I and I’ve read in some of your literature that you see this praxis, this practice as spiritual.

Kim Cosier    I do really feel like it’s a spiritual home for me that that I for a long time when I when I was younger, my, you know, my early adulthood, I felt really adrift without that kind of spiritual home and growing up in the kind of religious family that I did. And being queer, you could see people belonging to that community.

And I never felt like I really belong to that community, but I still longed for it. You know, we have this concept within the queer community about chosen family. In a sense. That’s what I feel like we’re constructing in an education as well, that you’re making this kind of chosen family. Yeah, I feel like. I feel like when we’re doing our builds, for example, like I’m going to church and it’s, you know, and just being in communion with other people around issues that we all care about deeply and that we’re all being able to articulate and share our experiences while we’re making art in service to these movements.

To me, it just feels like, okay, I’m home.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe     At the same time in movements and movement work, there is a great deal of burn out. You haven’t burned out yet.

Kim Cosier    Not yet. And I’m old.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    You’ve been at it a long time. So. So what are you doing to sustain yourself?

Kim Cosier     When we act silly? We have the. Our group is just laughing all the time while we’re working. You know, like I said, we work 14-hour days a lot of the time, but we’re dancing and we’re just laughing and making jokes. And I think I think we all agree that finding joy and finding ways to be silly and have fun together and just laugh together is is really important.

And that’s that’s how I managed to do all the stuff I do, is that, you know, I’m not going to do it if I can’t have fun at the same time, which is why I retired recently too.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe     So, congratulations. You’re doing more play than I am.

Kim Cosier    I’m in search of more play. I always tell our students, you know, reach out to others, start start a collaborative studio, start, you know, like working together and supporting one another from when you’re still in school and then, you know, moving out into the world. Because once you leave, like we know, once you leave school, you lose access to all the tools and equipment that we have, but you also lose access to mentors and and peers in a sense.

So, you know, to me and maybe not, you know, some people want to be solitary in their work and that that’s cool that, you know, that’s a way of being in the world for sure. But I just feel like for me, having those connections is just really important. And so that’s always my advice to young artists.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    That’s great. I want to pivot. You founded a media literacy program for young children or teens, rather, called Milwaukee Visionaries Project. It has won awards. So, tell us about this.

Kim Cosier    And so MVP we call it. I founded that with Laura Trophy Prats, who is now in Manchester, England, and I miss her very much. And an art teacher named her Kobo Lover, who the three of us founded it in I can’t remember the year but 13 years ago. And those two have moved on to other things now. But our original idea was to look at what it would look like to have a kind of relational pedagogy where we would have a low teacher student ratio.

We’ve trained a bunch of interns to do video editing and animation and things like that, and we began working with the kids where you probably have one adult for every five kids or something like that quite often. So, we have this again. It’s a space, a loving space, and it and it’s turned out to be there are many kids who come to us who are on the autism spectrum, you know, lots of little queer kids.

It’s a kind of a place, safe place for kids who don’t fit in other places. And and then they we actually have a number of young adults who keep coming even though they’re not in high school anymore. So, the program is for middle and high school kids, and they do media literacy, but also film production or video production and animation.

And now more and more, they just want to make art. And so we just its very, very student driven. We sort of sit back and let the kids take the lead and then, you know, push them and help them. Well, what.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   What compelled you to focus on youth and the media, that intersection?

Kim Cosier     So, the youth part was definitely I used to be a middle school teacher. I was a middle school art teacher. And as I was in academia, I was like, why did I leave middle school? And I had so much fun with those kids. And then Laura Tressie Prats was really interested in the video because she had done video work with kids in Barcelona when she was there.

So, she brought that piece and that’s probably not something that I would have been drawn to, except that I’ve always loved animation. And so, you know, she wanted to do more like documentary video. And then I brought an animation because I love it.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe     So, there’s a long history of literacy and education more broadly, being a driver of social change, right? I mean, change in racial justice movements in particular. We can remember the citizenship school program that Septima Clark helped found in the mid 20th century. This connection between individual literacy, in this case media literacy and wider political systems is is something I’m intrigued by.

It’s not the typical way I think a lot of people think about literacy. For a lot of people, literacy simply means the ability to read and write.

Kim Cosier   Right?

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe     It’s …It’s pretty basic. Write your ABCs. And often I think we associate literacy with having some kind of economic value. For example, we talk about literacy as the key to, you know, your future success, employability, workforce readiness. These these kinds of concepts are attached to literacy. So, essentially we’re used to thinking of literacy and in terms of providing an economic advantage to a young person over their lifetime.

What is media literacy to you? It seems like it might be something a bit different.

Kim Cosier    Yeah, I think, I think so. So, the impulse to focus on media literacy came from my seeing how urban youth are represented by others all the time and not by themselves. And so, I felt like I wanted to create a space for them to tell their own stories.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    So, when you say urban youth, what do you mean?

Kim Cosier    Okay, excellent question. I mean, all the kids that live in that live in our city. I think that we have a range of kids. We have a population of Latin students who come up from through my connections with a heck of a level. And then we have a connection with a group called Running Rebels that is from the central city that they know where code word in Milwaukee for where black kids live and then other kids come from all over.

So, I think it’s, you know, kids of color. Generally speaking, although our program has kids, all different kids, you know, they’re framed in media as well, and sometimes by ex-presidents as thugs and, you know, unsavory types. And they don’t having yourself framed in a certain way and seeing that over and over again can sometimes limit even your imagination about what you might be.

Not that I know what they want to be or want to cast aspersions on what they come in, you know, thinking they want to be. But I feel like if you’re for all of us, I think in this in American culture, there’s, you know, it’s a very narrow way that you’re supposed to act. Right. And so, you can’t cross over these kinds of barriers about who can do what and that kind of thing.

And so, I felt like and, you know, this sort of stems from very early when I was doing my dissertation research. I worked in a high school that was for kids that had been expelled from other schools. That was an alternative high school. And at that point, they had so much to say. And there was nothing in the literature that was really in their voice.

But if you just give kids the tools to tell stories without having them look at other stories, to find out how, you know, like how subconsciously we’re being framed by these things, then they start repeating the same stories. And so that was where that kind of marriage of looking at media and looking at imagery and talking about it with each other and with the adults in the room and then translating that into making their own stories.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe     So, I want to add in a little bit of statistics from the Pew Center for Research, because I find it really just helpful context. So, the Pew Center for Research has reported pretty spectacular statistics, although they might not surprise anyone in this room or anyone listening, 97% of teens say they use the Internet daily. About half of teens say they use the Internet almost constantly.

And that’s up from only a quarter of teens saying the same thing ten years ago. Right. So, when we put some numbers to it, it’s kind of mind blowing. So, here’s what I’m wondering. Young people often face racism directly in their digital, online and media encounters. You’ve alluded to some of this right through the the framing and the representations that they consume that they grow up with and so on.

Young people can be the targets of online racial discrimination or witness it, right? Witness racial events, racist jokes, symbols of hate. You know, the list, unfortunately, goes on and on. Media illiterate children and adults, I would argue, are also more susceptible to being lured into extremist ideology and social movements that are not so progressive. There are also positive uses of the media is there a connection between helping young people become media literate and the pursuit of racial justice?

Kim Cosier    I think so. I think our goal is for them to tell, to help, to be able to imagine a future for themselves in a sense. And then doing that through a story is really important. And I think your point about the change over the last ten years is really important because we started this, you know, 13 years ago and the access that they have to stories that are being told by that, by people that look like them and, you know, people their age has blown up through TikTok and things like that.

But at the same time, the kinds of stories are being told might still limit how they are in the world or what they can imagine for themselves. And then, like I said, you know, in terms of intersectionality, there’s a lot of kids who are also on the autism spectrum and African-American and queer and, you know, like so being able to have a space that maybe they can’t talk about certain aspects of their lives at home, either, it becomes a really powerful part of what we do in the program.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   Thank you for that response. Okay. So, yeah, we’re going to shift a little bit, but it continues in the same trajectory with your wife, Jessie Osborne, who’s also an artist, right? Yes, she is. Yeah. So, the two of you founded Arts Eco, a program that develops school teachers as change makers. Why are you focused on teachers as changemakers?

Kim Cosier    Well, I’m a teacher, educator, and in a lot of my research has been on that that hat that I wear. You know, I think teachers there’s been you know, a push to the professional rise and take the power away from teachers. And in my work with the unions has taught me that teachers want to be powerful change agents in their in their students’ lives.

And so, we both felt really strongly that teachers are change agents, whether they are well, teachers can also help prop up the status quo, but it’s a political act to do that. And I think a lot of new teachers don’t realize that propping up the status quo is a way of being political as well. Right. And so. it’s integrated with the content of our program that’s centered on anti-racist teaching and about, you know, kind of centered in the same sorts of things we’ve been talking about with love being at the core of what we do.

And so, it was just a general like a further extension of what we had built in the art education program. UW And I feel like, you know, we talked earlier about burnout, but there was there’s so much that burned teachers out and where some down and doesn’t give them the sports they need or the tools they need to do things.

Everything in schools, you know, it’s just like all you know, the focus on testing and all these rules coming out about what you can’t say and can’t, you know, the things you can’t have. You know, you can have a gay pride flag in your classroom, for example. You know, just a kind of drumbeat of you can’t do this.

And you can’t do that, and you have to do this. And so that takes that kind of creative juice out of the teachers. And so, we wanted to make a space that we wanted to be able to support people in learning more about ways to do a social justice movement, work in schools while also creating, you know, like we have the teacher meetups, monthly teacher meetups, where the people come together, we have happy hour and shared studio time and also professional development.

We have mentorship programs, things that can support teachers and make them feel powerful enough to go forward and, you know, back a system if need be. But but we yeah, just trying to try and make a space where teacher feel connected, they feel like they have back up as well like along with the union we’re there to back them up if they need.

So, when they were working on that resolution, we were there to help support them through the way.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe     So, let’s zoom out a little bit. Right. And think about across the United States. I’m sure this is happening in Milwaukee, but not just there. It’s, you know, all over the United States, we’re seeing bathroom bills. We’re seeing book bans, so-called don’t say gay laws like the one that passed in Florida, which limits discussion of gender and sexual identity in all of the state’s classrooms.

There are organized attacks on ethnic studies here in Arizona and elsewhere. African American history is under attack as well. And, of course, efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in D-I from elementary all the way up through university education. This seems like a backlash to the effectiveness of Black Lives Matter and other movements for Black life and a number of major wins around gender and sexuality and the rights of trans people.

How do you see these events? Is there an intersectional dimension to it? I’m very curious on your perspective to this moment.

Kim Cosier    Absolutely. There’s a connection, I think, you know, I mean, if you if we’re going to like you said, we’re taking a step back. So, if we take a step back and look at the arc of history, this always happens when people make you know, after the civil rights law, the civil rights actions came into place, there’s always backlash.

And so, in some ways, I am shocked at how quickly, for example, the LGBTQ community has made headway and particularly for trans kids. And so, it’s kind of like growing pains, I think, for some people. But I think about it like the last gasp of the dinosaurs and the pendulum will swing back. We’re in a really a time when the pendulum has stayed over for way too long to the right.

But it will swing back, I think. But that doesn’t help those teachers and students who are suffering from the kinds of laws that are being enacted. It doesn’t you know, it doesn’t replace my friend Melissa’s job for getting fired, for speaking out about censorship in her school. If you look at one of my favorite books is Howards End History of American Empire.

And I always joke that I want I wanted to read it because I want to see how it ends. But if you read history texts that are like that about social justice movements, you see how it’s been cyclical in this country that over and over again, you know, labor unions made headway and, you know, government and other, you know, corporate forces.

There was a huge backlash to that included murder of people. Same thing like each time a group works to get some sense of equality with the people that are in power already, there’s backlash to it.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    Can I? I mean, I want to push on the metaphor of the pendulum swinging, right? There’s movement in different directions that that sometimes seem to have seems to happen on its own. And so, I think it’s easy for folks to think, well, this will blow over, right? We don’t really need to get too worked up.

Kim Cosier    That’s an excellent point. The pendulum don’t swing unless we get out in the streets and do the work, you know? I mean, it is it’s not a natural cycle. This is all human made cycles. And so, I don’t mean to imply that it just is going to happen that way. That’s just the way it happens. Labor unions across this country now are making headway again.

And, you know, ever since the seventies and Reagan, you know, smacking down the air traffic controller’s union, this country has been in decline. And union, you know, the power of unions. And but what happens is then those folks just push so far over the edge of people can’t take it anymore. And little people like myself and all of us at this table stand up and say we’re not going to take it anymore.

And so, that Black Lives Matter. That’s a say. You know, that was people just take to the streets that I had never felt so hopeful as one just all over. And I was, you know, going to communities and Wisconsin that you never would have imagined to see Black Lives Matter signs in people’s yards and things like that. Now that’s kind of backed off again.

So, we can’t we have to be vigilant and keep at it. And it’s very much the idea of people coming together to make change. So, it’s not it’s not that that’s just going to happen on its own right. So, thanks for pointing that out. But I do feel like there’s a groundswell right now of people who and not only individual movements, but there’s so much more intersectionality across movements, like I’ve never seen that in my lifetime that the Women’s March is very much focused on racial issues, very much focused on LGBTQ stuff, which in the past, you know, that we didn’t want to talk about that within feminist movements and because it could cause trouble, you know? And so, it’s just to me, even though there’s awful things happening, the awful things are these loud dinosaurs that are crashing around because they see their way of life is being threatened. And so, then I feel like that’s a sign that we’re actually doing good work. And even though it can be uncomfortable, and it can be life and death for some people, these laws that are that are happening, that are, you know, restricting access for health care for trans kids, for example, or any of that, you know, like not letting kids see themselves in schools, African American studies and things like that.

It’s a cynical grab for power that they’re losing. That’s how I see these bills happening and all this kind of, you know, push for restricting, you know, these this these group of people that always talk about freedom, you know, all they want to do is restrict other people’s freedom. And it’s only just to keep hold on to that power that they’ve taken for granted.

And now they said that they see that they can’t always take it for granted. So, I feel like even though it’s enormously frustrating and scary, it’s also a sign that we’ve pushed, and we got to continue to push.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    So, you mentioned that your program is grounded in anti-racist practice. Can you give me an example of what that looks like or walk us through a method or technique that you like to use that you’ve found pretty effective so that we can learn from that?

Kim Cosier    Sure. A few years ago, I wrote an article that was called On Whiteness and Becoming Warm Defenders, and that the article really described a failure to to enact this and a particular with a particular group of students and come across this notion of Warm Defenders which it originated with teachers of Native American kids but then it got transferred over to this notion of people who are effective teachers of African American kids.

And the characteristics of those teachers were that they held the kids to high standards while at the same time showed care, got involved in their lives at home, you know, and became like really became a part of their lives emotionally as well as educationally. And so, I brought that to them, and I was thinking, this is such a great concept and we’re going to engage with this.

And then we’re also doing the field experience where we’re with the with kids that we can talk about real kids. And that particular group was just not having it. And it was so frustrating to me to just like, be so excited intellectually about this, this new concept. And I thought, this is this will be a great key to having them open up to having these conversations.

And so, I ended up writing the article about failing to have that happen. But through that, I learned a lot about the ways that I, I was not preparing them to have those conversations. And so now we back up and I know I can use that article that I wrote about failure to with my students in the present day.

But, you know, we have so many more tools to talk about it than we when I started 23 years ago, like we now, you know, we’re starting to look at Bettina Love and her work on an abolitionist teaching. And, you know, there’s just there’s so many more tools I think from the mentors that we have as academics and teacher educators that I’ve been able to employ.

So, I don’t feel like I have any like this is the trick that I, you know, is it’s a long process.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    No tricks there. No, the trick is to keep at it. And yeah, well, you did you did talk about something many things that are interesting. But one thing that that maybe is worth underscoring and if you want to say more about it but is this you wrote about a failure and then use that right as a as a as a tool or a way for students to enter into a conversation that they might not otherwise enter into.

Kim Cosier     And I think that’s something that my new teaching partner, Deborah Harty, is very interested in this notion of how we learn from failure. I think maybe our teachers are a little better at understanding that that’s part of what we do, but not necessarily. And I think that a lot of the at the core of people, for example, not feeling confident to talk about queer issues in school is that idea of like, I’m going to fail, I’m going to say the wrong thing.

And also, that bubbles up from our conversations that they that my students who are white, who come from rural towns and suburbs, feel like they’re going to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing with kids of color, too. So, I think there’s that piece that’s really important that if you make a mistake, you just say you’re sorry and you mean it you don’t like.

But that’s not an excuse to not try and move forward. And so, and that’s where I talk to them. I often use this quote by a Buddhist teacher pretty much around that says, lean into the sharp points. That’s when you learn the most is when you’re feeling that discomfort. So, we practice that. My students end up saying that, you know, they bring that up later when we’re having discussions that that was something that they thought was, you know, there’s privilege.

Kids in America are taught that they should have no hardship. And a lot of my kids, my students are not there, working class kids. But there’s still this kind of ethic of we shouldn’t have any hardship, we should be happy all the time, you know? And so, the notion of leaning into those sharp points is new to them.

And they resist it at first a lot of times. But then over time, if we just like I said, it’s not a one off. I think that’s part of our brand. You know, as our teachers, like we don’t have one right answer.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe   Thank you. Can thank you. It’s been a wonderful education.

Kim Cosier    Thank you so much.

Gia Del Pino    Thank you, Kim.

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe    Thank you for joining a Race/Remix today. This episode is made possible through the generous donations of our sponsors and the efforts of our team of students, staff, faculty and community partners. If you enjoyed this conversation, listen to more episodes at Race.Remix.Arts.Arizona.Edu.