Interview with Tucson Teaching for Black Lives Group Coordinator

Interview Transcript

Jesse Hagopian: Welcome, glad to be with you. Tell us your name and your current role in education.

Brianne Buttner: My name is Brianne Buttner. Currently I am a parent advocate for my child in second grade here in Tucson at TUSD. I’m raising a full time 10-month-old baby. I was most recently a teacher at Tucson High School, the magnet school here in Tucson. I taught U.S. history from a Mexican American perspective and U.S. history from a Native American perspective.

Hagopian: You’re doing such great work, both the work you did in the classroom and raising a 10-month-old. Thank you for sharing. I was hoping you could talk more about what you and fellow educators organized for Black Lives Matter at School.

Buttner: We coordinated between three high schools a Week of Action with events at the three different high schools, and it was super exciting [and] challenging, but we felt successful. In our dominant Mexican American culture there can be, and often is, a lot of anti-Blackness, as well as, of course, the racism that people experience from living in the United States, especially here in southern Arizona.

I think the book does a really good job of bringing you in and then making you comfortable and then challenging [you]. It took a minute for us to get settled and figure out what we’re doing and why, and then to really be hit with some important questions about not only our own internal biases and racism, but also how we’re willing to challenge them, like actually challenge them.

Hagopian: That’s great. It sounds like the Teaching for Black Lives study group really helped bring people together to make organizing and coordinating for Black Lives Matter at School Week a lot more straightforward. I’m wondering if there were any lessons or activities that you did during the Week of Action that you felt were impactful.

Buttner: I was already, and had been for the last several years, wanting to really do a lesson on the original Rainbow Coalition, because I’m just a huge admirer of, obviously, the Black Civil Rights Movement. As a Chicana, and as a Chicano studies major, I give a lot of recognition and honor to that being where the Chicano studies movement was inspired. From Tucson, where we have so many different cultural groups and a lot of movement, a lot of history, I think the Rainbow Coalition is a perfect example of how to bring all those people together.

Another friend of mine is a science teacher, and she agreed to work with a community organization here in southern Arizona called Lucha Latinos United for Change in Arizona. They wanted an opportunity to help bring some of their work into the school, and they decided to work with the science teacher and do a science of organizing workshop. So, basically our whole theme was around understanding and making more organizers in our school community. So in the morning we had a breakfast program inspired by the Black Panthers, also inspired by a co-worker at Pueblo High School who was doing the same thing. And then in the evening we had a movie night where we showed Judas and the Black Messiah, particularly because of the lesson that I did on the Rainbow Coalition.

So it was a full day, and it was really cool because some of the kids did stay the whole day, so the lessons flowed into each other. After me was the science of organizing, and once we identified these groups and issues and thought about what we would even want to organize around, then the students were challenged with, “Okay, now try it.” From here in the room, how would you organize the students that are here around the issue that you guys think are important? We had a large population of ninth graders who just didn’t want to be in class, so they came to us because we are not their usual class, and we got them to participate in these challenging activities, and they thought they were gonna kick it in the back and hide from their teachers. So they didn’t get to do that, but they also were having fun and talking to each other, it was just great to see that. It’s always the biggest joy as a teacher to see those kids that you know don’t really want to necessarily check in, to check in and actually start to think and share.

Hagopian: When they feel like you’re actually teaching them something important that could help us solve some of the problems that they’re dealing with. That’s a beautiful thing.

Buttner: Yeah. When they can actually place themselves in history and place their families in history, then it’s like, right? Then they’re like, “Oh, my family lived through something” that makes it actually important. That makes them important, that makes me a product of that, then everything connects differently.

Hagopian: I feel like that connects to another question I had about how the Zinn Education Project network has supported you in doing that kind of teaching to help kids see themselves in the curriculum. How did you and study group members benefit from that support?

Buttner: The check in sessions on Zoom, because it just keeps you accountable, it keeps you moving forward. It’s very easy for us as educators to commit, to over commit really, to over commit to everything, and then just things fall through the cracks. So it made it a priority, and it made it something that you couldn’t necessarily forget about.

We went to one of the sessions and people had heard about just all the ways that people had participated in the build up to the Week of Action, and actually the Week of Action, and then through this network to all their ideas. After we went to that session, we were like, “Oh, okay, okay, okay. Now I have an idea of what I want to do, or what resources we already have that we can pull into this project.” Basically what professional development should feel and look like that we don’t often get access to from our district resources. That’s always exciting, because when you go to an actual good PD you’re like, “Oh, okay, this is why I’ve been teaching. This is why I’m in this institution, because I have these creative ideas, and so do all these other people, and if I can just pull some of these things together, I can make something interesting.” But, often the experience is not that when we go to district-led PDs. So to have that…

Hagopian: I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m so glad to hear that the Zinn Ed Project has helped you have a meaningful professional development experience.

Buttner: Exactly. It has. And Rethinking Schools also, the stuff that I’ve been able to get from that space has basically made me the teacher that I am today. And I’ve been interacting with both of those institutions since before I was a teacher, hearing about the resources that they have, seeing the magazine, seeing the different books and stuff. But these last couple years it’s really all come together. I’m really appreciative. 

Hagopian: That warms my heart. It’s just amazing to hear your experience interacting with the magazine Rethinking Schools and with the Zinn Ed Project, and then developing your own incredible day of action workshops and curriculum lessons about the Rainbow Coalition. Engaging kids that way is so powerful. One more question about your students. I want to know a little bit more about them. Do you feel like you and the teachers in your work are exposing your kids to a critical lens that they wouldn’t otherwise get in their curriculum, and if so, what’s the impact you think that’s having on your students?

Buttner: One of the students that interacted with me at this Day of Action that we had at Tucson High, she was probably one of, I think, two kids that went to every single thing, including the meeting and the movie, his kid was like, “This is the best day of school I’ve ever had.”

Hagopian: That’s amazing.

Buttner: Especially because he was I think a senior last year, so already over it, didn’t have to even be there and stayed, and already had been exposed to and interested in the Black Panthers, but wasn’t hearing about anything like that in their schooling. The part that hit me in the heart was when we were talking about the Rainbow Coalition, they said, “Oh, so it’s more about class, right? These people all united around their class, as working class people, and they were all being oppressed on a certain level.” I could see, as an educator you see the kids go [motions], right? And all these things connect. It makes you just want to cry.

Hagopian: Revealing how the world works and getting it.

Buttner: Exactly. So to see that person do that, it made me stop and be like, “This is why I did all this work. This is why I sacrificed all this time with my family and with my day to day lessons, and why I’m risking my job to try to bring this kind of lesson and this kind of information and this kind of knowledge to more and more students.”

So no, I don’t think that outside of our CR curriculum and outside of this specific project, a lot of these ideas the students haven’t been exposed to. When we hide them or we don’t teach them, it doesn’t give students that home base or that inspiration that they need to say, “Okay, I need to do something now. This energy that I have, this frustration and anger that I’m feeling, this sadness I’m feeling, this vulnerability, I need to put that into action.” So I know that this was something that influenced people and will influence, ripple effect of people for generations to come. So I am happy with what I did, and I’m happy with the colleagues’ work, the conversations we had, the ways we challenged ourselves and stretched ourselves and just found new ways of connecting to each other, our curriculum, and our role in the community.

Hagopian: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your stories. I hope that educators across the country learn from them because there’s such rich wealth of insight you had about helping develop kids to understand their role in the world and how they can change the world.