The Magical Forest (Explained)
Many scholars suggest paying “particularly close attention to those stories that naturalize themselves through common sense or familiar cultural myth” (Boler & Zembylas, 2003, p.115). Often times people who are labeled “disturbed” are really just “disturbing” someone in their “ecosystem” (Kuriloff, 1973). In other words, the “disturbance” is not innate to the individual, but part of the environment and so we need to look at “the problem” or “issue” as belonging to (norms and values of) the ecosystem, not on the individual “outlier.” This is consistent with my advice to students to “wander” through the magical forest -- a forest filled with “curious forest creatures” (the faculty) who want (need) to share with (teach) you how to “perform” their particular dance (curriculum).
The Magical Forest framework allows all of us an opportunity to think about the different discourse norms and expectations we understand as “common sense.” For teachers, recognizing ourselves in the forest creatures offers us an opportunity to reflect on our ways of being in the world. It is important to note that our “dance” is not the dance of just one discourse, but rather a compilation of multiple competing discourses that “speak through us” as we engage with the world around us (Gee, 2001). And it is through this nuanced understanding of these intersecting discourses that we (e.g., students and faculty) can begin to acquire the “meta-level knowledge” of multiple discourses needed to “seriously criticize and thus change a discourse” (Gee, 2001, p.6).
For students and their families, the magical forest offers them a framework to understand why their teachers seem so “picky” and critical of their written work and/or level of participation in class. In other words, the framework allows students to see this feedback is not a referendum on their intelligence, but rather a signpost guiding them toward and through the nuance of this particular discourse. This is similar to teaching students how to enact a second-order change because while the “facts” remain the same, the conceptual and emotional setting has changed. As Watzlawick and colleagues (2011) assert, “it is the premise that things should be a certain way which is the problem and which requires change, and not the way things are” (p.60) and “it obviously makes a difference whether we consider ourselves as pawns in a game whose rules we call reality or as players of the game who know that the rules are ‘real’ only to the extent that we have created or accepted them, and that we can change them” (p.27).
There are two potentially problematic aspects of the magical forest framework that I point out to students. The first is that the idea of wandering through the magical forest can invoke the independent cultural script, i.e., potentially the myth of the “rugged individual.” I remind them that we do not journey through life alone and to always be on the lookout for fellow travelers: Take care of each other. Another potentially problematic aspect of the curious forest creature archetype is that it could be seen as downplaying the reality, toxicity, and violence of racism and white supremacy in a community in which whiteness is considered the norm. Weiston-Serdan (2017) cautions,
...if the mentoring field first recognized that racism is normal in America, part of the water we drink and the air we breathe, it would also understand that program elements established to help young people avoid particular appearances or behave in respectable ways do not, in fact, offer young people innovative ways to survive or challenge racism. Instead these elements actually serve to promote the existing structure of racism by teaching youth that assimilation to white and middle-class culture makes them more respectable and, therefore, less apt to suffer from racism.” (Emphasis added, p.15)
This is why it is important to start by asserting that the magical forest “exists outside the bounds of reality” -- that is, a reality in which the current status quo is both oppressive and supported by a toxic culture of white supremacy (Freire, 1993; Bell, 1993).
Many scholars suggest we white people use various techniques to avoid experiencing and grappling with our emotional and financial investment in maintaining an anti-Black racial hierarchy (Leonardo, 2009). That said, Yancy (2016) asserts,
Much more is required at the level of white everyday practices and the ways in which those white practices re-center white power or challenge white power. [...] White self-interrogation, however, is a form of striving, etymologically, “to quarrel [streiten]” which means that one is committed to a life of danger and contestation, one which refuses to make peace with taken for granted “legitimating” white norms and practices that actually perpetuate racial injustice. (p.xii)
I do not see The Magical Forest framework in competition with or in conflict with the conceptual framework of hegemonic whiteness (Jay, 2003). My conceptualization of an individual is that we sit at the intersection of multiple discourses which are 1) historically and politically positioned relative to each other and 2) resistant to internal criticism (Gee, 2001). Because critiquing a discourse positions the individual offering the critique outside the discourse, encountering an ideological dilemma within ourselves is expected.
The world of the magical forest was inspired in part by the work of Jemisin’s (2018) Broken Earth Trilogy. During an interview on The Ezra Klein Show podcast, Jemisin explains,
Revealing the performance for writers is a necessity for them because you’ve got to be able to see behind the curtain in order to write the curtain. So for writers, they don’t have the luxury of living with the performance or just the mask over thing. You’ve got to understand the inner workings of people. (Klein & Jemisin, 2018)
As Klein points out during his reflective introduction to this episode, one lesson he learned from Jemisin is that “building new worlds is about thinking more clearly about our world so that you can imagine what would happen if you began changing parts of it” (Klein & Jemisin, 2018). Like Grace Lee Boggs, I believe we might be able to imagine what the revolution looks like if our imaginations were rich enough (Lee & Lee, 2014). Imagine if we foregrounded and grappled with the influence of institutional and political history on the present-day rules and values of our predominantly white independent school community. How might this impact the way our students made sense of themselves and the world? As Wortham (2011) reminds us,
Youth define themselves and organize their action partly in response to their accounts of adult ideals and practices, and adults do the same thing as we develop educational practices that we apply to youth and as we imagine the future of our societies.” (p.viii)
I love The Magical Forest framework because it sits at the intersection of my lived experience as an educator, American science fiction and fantasy, psychology, and educational scholarship.
One way I have tried to reimagine my contracted role(s) in our community was inspired by David Stovall who spoke about the importance of “fugitive space” during a keynote delivered at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in March 2018. Stovall (2017) explains that these spaces are not hideouts -- rather they are for people engaged in the struggle for justice to gather, learn, strategize, and recharge. This is what I try to create in my classroom -- a strategic refuge from the dehumanizing aspects of institutional life in which you can find and offer care and comradery to others wandering around the #MagicalForest. #conspiracyoflove