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By: SENSE

What do you get when you cross a 10th grade English teacher with Paulo Freire’s liberation theology, Tupac’s Thug Life mentality, and all kinds of Oakland flava? Sound crazy…? What you get is Jeff Duncan-Andrade, the dynamic keynote speaker at this year’s Teachers 4 Social Justice Conference.

Duncan-Andrade spoke to a large auditorium full of activist minded K-12 teachers from the Bay area and all over the country. Jeff, declining the mic, elevated his voice and with it our way of thinking. This high school teacher of 16 years dropped all kinds of knowledge for the first 2 1/2 hours of the day. Born and raised in Oakland, the Ph.d. having, baggy clothes wearing, community based thinking teacher is a revolutionary among K-12 educators.

Duncan-Andrade, also a professor of Raza Studies at SFSU, spoke about the need for teachers to care about their students as if they were their own children. His Thug Life Pedagogy for the classroom is rooted in liberation theology and the Thug Life philosophy of the late Rapper, Tupac Shakur. He talked about giving students something to fight for, the need for instilling hope, and about instilling in young people the discipline needed to become warrior-scholars. He spoke of the injustices in our educational system and delivered concrete suggestions for how to flip the script on school curriculum and policy to inspire and not disenfranchise our students.

I am new to the Bay. Originally from SoCal, I moved here on August 27th hoping to immerse myself in a community that is activist minded, community oriented, and tapped into music, art and social justice. On a sunny Saturday morning in San Francisco, I found all of the above. Being around the 1200 educator-activists in attendance at the 7th annual Teachers 4 Social Justice Conference and listening to Jeff Duncan-Andrade speak about social justice in our schools was just what I needed to know that I have landed in the right place.

Teachers 4 Social Justice [website]