Barrie Summit for Social Justice 2025!
Now more than ever, student voice and responsibility are key to education. And I’m grateful that we recognize that work here. In so many ways, school teaches us how to express ourselves. We learn how to speak up for ourselves, advocate on behalf of others, make claims and support them with research. At the same time, we also immerse ourselves in the training grounds of citizenship and democracy. In school, we either cultivate the habits of courage or learn the habits of cowardliness and complicity. Of course, habits are hard to break, especially when they hide in plain sight. For example, on March 7, 1965, armed police attacked the unarmed peaceful civil rights demonstrators attempting to march to Alabama’s state capital of Montgomery in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday. Many of you have walked along that same bridge. Civil rights activists called attention to a climate of exclusion in these United States and blatant racism among their fellows. Sixty years later, activists are making a similar claim, but under different conditions. It is one of the hardest lessons to learn, particularly when we are young: that substantive and enduring change doesn’t happen overnight. That our commitments to improving Barrie, our country, or the world can’t be fleeting. Those commitments don’t work like a tweet or a post on Instagram or a TikTok. They ought to animate the spirit of a life lived over time.
This is why days like this matter so much: They offer us a chance to recalibrate, to reset, to remind ourselves that our education is more than just what we experience in the go-go-go pace of school: of tests and papers, of grading, of meetings, of all these things. To take a break and learn for learning’s sake? I don’t know about you, but that certainly fills my cup. It reminds me why I got into teaching in the first place.This is what I hope this day can be for us: a day to think about big ideas, hold deep conversations, make lasting connections and friendships, and engage in meaningful work on identity and belonging. And of course, a day committed to joy: joy in teaching, joy in learning, and joy in simply being. Being ourselves—fully and unabashedly. Being present.
Let's go!
