Frameworks that Guide Design

The Bridge to Thriving Framework

A framework for thriving that centers marginalized communities goes beyond resilience or integration. People experience thriving when they:

• have supportive, affirming communities (often affinity community focused on applying critical consciousness to advancing social justice and equity) and feel a sense of true belonging (not just fitting in);

• can come to know their true selves, love themselves, and self-assert in a self-determined and empowered way;

• have not just economic stability but also abundant resources for thriving, including time, space, and—crucially—hope, aspirations, and dreams;

• can engage in pleasurable activities (with or without others), pursue their passions, and be joyful; and

• can heal and experience relief from stressors like unsafety, erasure, economic hardship, and social isolation, among others.

In particular, people describe an optimal state of thriving—one in which all five “petals” of the thriving model below are activated—as “simply being,” or being able to exist fully and wholly.

The conditions for “simply being” usually include being able to know and value one’s authentic self, which calls for activation of a resistant identity—one that positions people as central and treasured, not marginal, and that refuses the ways in which the world conspires to make them feel impossible or small. Simply being typically happens in the company of a close community, like chosen family; in spaces that feel shielded from unsafety; with the resources of space and time (and sometimes money) available; where the outer world’s stigma and stress are impotent; and where there is joy, pleasure, and even a sense of purpose.

Possibilities for thriving grow when people are invited to (1) recognize themselves as someone who is entitled to thrive, (2) imagine what their thriving can look like, and (3) receive the affirmation and resources to support their vibrant, present and future designing and dreaming.

It is easiest when we are partnered with people who believe in our thriving possibilities and who honor that each of us, regardless of age, stage, or position, is entitled to exert authority over our lives, needs, and futures.

Moving along the Bridge to Thriving reshapes people’s ideas about themselves, their present, and their future. Pursuing the Bridge to Thriving is a both/and proposition. It acknowledges the need to pay attention to survival and healing, but urges us to balance that with dreaming in order to advance a visionary remaking of our relationships with one another and our world.

The Bridge to Thriving Framework invites educators to reflect on the following questions for each of the model's six dimensions:

1. Community: How does your pedagogy and curriculum support conditions for each student to experience true belonging, affirmation, and critical consciousness?

2. Selfhood: How does your pedagogy and curriculum help students see and embrace their authentic selves in affirming, autonomous, empowered, and self-determined ways?

3. Abundance: How does your pedagogy and curriculum provide opportunities for expansiveness, imagining, dreaming, creating, and building hope? How does your practice invite students to drive their learning experiences?

4. Pleasure: How does your pedagogy and curriculum leverage play, joy, pleasure, connection, and students’ passions for learning?

5. Relief: How does your pedagogy and curriculum reduce or eliminate stressors like feelings of unsafety, scarcity, confinement, unfreedom, or illness? How does your design make healing possible?

6. Simply Being: How does your pedagogy and curriculum create conditions for wholeness - a sense that people can exist fully? How does your practice honor students holistically (mind, body, spirit, and heart)?

Historically Responsive Literacy Framework

From A Plea for Identity and Criticality (2018)

“When people learned to read, write, and speak proficiently, they were then able to accumulate knowledge in other areas and use these skills as tools to further shape and define their lives. Defined this way, literacy was not a single skill to master; instead, it was the means to navigate their lives. For example, if literacy was practiced, they used it as a tool to understand, critique, and improve conditions in society. In addition to this, I found that literacy was largely conceptualized in four ways: identity develop- ment, skill development, intellectual development, and criticality.

When collecting primary source documents, I have found artifacts from this time period that speak directly to these four goals. Black people throughout this time had these four goals of learning, and each time they came together to read, write, and think, they were making sense of who they were (identity), developing their proficiencies in the content they were learning within (skills), becoming smarter about something or gaining knowledge (intellect), and finally, developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, authority, and oppression (criticality).

[...] Criticality is also related to seeing, naming, and interrogating the world not only to make sense of injustice but also to work toward social transformation. [...] Students need spaces to name and critique injustice and ultimately have the agency to build a better world” (p. 138).

From Why We Need Identity and Equity Learning in Literacy Practices (2021)

The historically responsive literacies model asks teachers to reflect on the following questions for each of the model's five focal points:

1. Identity: How does our curriculum and instruction help students to learn something about themselves and/or about others? Identity learning should encompass anti-racist [and anti-oppression] approaches so that students learn the truth and excellence of marginalized communities.

2. Skills: How does our curriculum and instruction respond to or build students' skills in literacy [including] language arts?

3. Intellect: How does our curriculum and instruction respond to or build upon students' knowledge and mental powers? What are they becoming smarter about?

4. Criticality: How does our curriculum and instruction engage students' thinking about power, equity, and the disruption of oppression?

5. Joy: How does our curriculum and instruction elevate beauty, truth, and happiness in humanity? (p. 194)

Lesson Sample 2: Learning about Haiti in Historical Context

Reproduced from Cultivating Genius, p. 153-154

Identity: students will think of Haitian family culture and consider their own family when there is adversity (familial identity)

Skills:

• English/Language Arts: Students will describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect.

• Mathematics: Students will learn about measuring the strength or magnitude of an earthquake and understand a Richter scale and seismograph.

• Science: Students will study earthquakes and natural disasters.

• Social Studies: Students will learn about the history of Haiti and Haitian people.

Intellect: Students will learn about the country of Haiti and the earthquake that struck in 2010.

Criticality: Students will learn about the concept of resiliency and how it relates to the history and people of Haiti.

Layered Texts:

• Eight Days: A Story of Haiti by Edwidge Danticat

• Audio interview with author Edwidge Danticat

• Informational text/article and a video on earthquakes

• Map of Haiti

• Images of earthquakes, Haiti, and Haitian culture

• Primary source documents related to Haiti and Haitian culture

Gender Identity Complexities Framework

We strongly encourage contributors to consult sj Miller's Gender Identity Complexities Framework in the text:

About Gender Identity Justice in Schools and Communities

Teachers College Press, 2019

There's powerful guidance in Chapter 4 of the book.

The Gender Identity Complexities Framework invites you to ask design questions like:

1. Complexity -

   • How do you advocate for complex gender identities?

   • How do you demonstrate that gender and gender identity are fluid and can shift over time and across contexts?

2. Authenticity -

   • How do you hold space for others to be who they are without ascribing a gender or gender identity to them?

   • How do you actively support various and multiple performances of gender and expressions of gender identity?

3. Self-Definition -

   • How do you invite students to self-define or claim their gender, name, and/or pronouns?

4. Critical Consciousness -

   • How do you provide opportunities for students to explore, engage, understand, and push back against gender and gender identity constructs?

   • How do you challenge gender and gender identity norms and stereotypes?

   • How do you attend to the ways that gender identities are influenced by social, historical, cultural, economic, religious, linguistic, and other forces, including age, body size, disability, national origin, and so on?

   • How do you create opportunities for students to be proactive change agents?

We also recommend that you check out Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess' article, Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood, which you should be able to download for free at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621.

EXAMPLE: Putting It All Together

Thriving Dimension Collage Activity

©Wise Chipmunk LLC

Topic/Subject Areas:

• Visual Art

• Social-Emotional Learning

Audience:

• Secondary and up

Description:

Participants will learn about the Bridge to Thriving Framework^© and the healing power of play and art, then apply their learning by creating a collage that represents their future thriving in one or more dimensions (artist's choice). This activity can be adapted to be visual, descriptive, or tactile.

In learning about the Framework, participants will be introduced to its roots in Black LGBTQ+/SGL youth experiences, narratives, and dreaming, with attention to the ways queer, trans*, and same gender loving communities have innovated around expression, pleasure, joy, and affirmation.

Framework Application:

Making use of the Bridge to Thriving Framework:

Community - There are several opportunities for participants to get to know one another through explorations of intergenerational stories, values, and identities, as well as by sharing their creative work.

Identity/Selfhood - In addition to exploring selfhood through reflection and community building (above), participants use their particular needs and desires to shape a vision of future thriving.

Abundance - By engaging in dreaming/hoping/imagining, participants are practicing the application of an abundance mindset.

Pleasure - This art creation activity is intended to be pleasure-, passion-, and interest-driven. Guidance reflects this with reminders that there are no “right” or “wrong” approaches. All that matters is people’s truth.

Relief - It is well-documented that making art can help people achieve a state of relaxation and relief. In addition, this activity is carefully scaffolded, carries no assessment, and is undertaken in a time-abundant way.

Simply Being - This activity seeks to create conditions for wholeness, and potentially even achieving a state of flow through relaxed art-making in a psychologically safe environment.

Making use of the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework:

Identity - This activity highlights the contributions of Black LGBTQ+/SGL young people as wise guides for designing thriving. In addition, as noted above, participants explore selfhood through reflection and community building and use their particular needs and desires to shape a vision of future thriving. They imagine themselves and others as people who can thrive.

Skillfulness -

Critical thinking - Participants will reflect on the intersections between identity, power, and possibility, grappling with the tension between limiting beliefs and visionary imagining.

Communication - Participants will be invited to convey their thoughts and feelings verbally and artistically with attention to building increasingly abundant conceptions of thriving for themselves and with others.

Artistic Expression - Participants will play with symbolic and literal representation in the creation of their collages.

Intellect - Participants will ponder the question of what it might mean to cast beyond resilience and coping toward thriving.

Criticality - Participants will engage with the ways that communities are expected to not thrive along dimensions of identity, with particular attention to sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, race, and age.

Joy - Participants will design vibrant futures while connecting with one another.

Making use of the Gender Identity Complexities Framework:

This activity aligns to the 5th and 8th Principles of sj Miller's Queer Literacy Framework (2016), recently evolved into the Gender Identity Complexities Framework. Specifically it “opens up spaces for students to self-define with chosen (a)genders, (a)pronouns, or names” (Principle 5) and “understands that (a)gender intersects with other identities [...] that inform students’ beliefs and thereby, actions” (Principle 8).

By explicitly grounding learning in Black LGBTQ+/SGL youth wisdom, this activity signals openness and welcoming. At the start of the activity, the facilitator offers their identities (i.e. Black, pansexual, auntie, elder, etc.), as well as their values (i.e. community, mutuality, trustworthiness). After modeling this, participants are invited to do the same - to share who they are to whatever extent they want.

By anchoring the framework in its community of origin, one that grapples with compound oppression (intersectionality theory helps us see this), participants are explicitly invited to engage with the complexity of intersecting identities and how these can shape beliefs and actions.

Pedagogical Strategies:

• The facilitator makes use of multi-sensory relaxation supports (animated, labeled breathing gif; soothing yet energetic instrumental music; simple visual and verbal instructions; a roadmap for the activity and participant expectations, accessibility modifications and augmentations, including alt text, transcription/CC, and a document describing all visual elements of the deck, etc.)

• The facilitator begins by sharing insight into who they are as a person, including their multiple identities, values, and history to open the space for participants to share authentically. The facilitator names and celebrates an array of identities to demonstrate universal welcoming. Note: sharing one's accolades and accomplishments may not create optimal conditions for participant vulnerability or authentic sharing.

• This activity is meant to be done at a leisurely pace. It's important to provide ample time for art-making and to allow participants to work under conditions that work for them. In this activity, collages are given 30 minutes of design time (minimum), participants can choose to listen to music or not, turn off their screens or not, etc.

• Group work is scaffolded so that participants know how to engage with one another once they are in groups and how to engage with the larger group once they return.

• Community-building is consent-based. No cold-calling. No expectations. People can share about themselves if they want to. The activity offers several "warm up" opportunities for people to opt in to interaction before the art-making and group breakouts.

• The facilitator models each activity verbally and/or visually from breathing into the space at the start to offering a collage to engaging in story-telling. They are a facilitator-participant.