Unlearning in Education: A Deeper Dive with Jonah Canner

Chloë-Arizona Fodor, MTS ‘25, CRPL in Journalism, and RPL’s Affiliate in Religion and Conflict with the Religion News Service, sat down to talk with Jonah Canner, RPL Education Fellow 2024-25. Jonah is an educator and consultant offering mentoring, training, and support for individuals and organizations at the nexus of racial equity, restorative justice, and experimental education. On the faculty of the Avodah Institute for Social Change, the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s Cornerstone Fellowship, Jonah focuses on helping people learn how to work through conflict.

In this segment of their conversation, Canner takes a deeper dive into the topic of unlearning in education.

Chloë-Arizona Fodor: Jonah, you have spoken before about the two-part process of learning and unlearning. As a concrete example, I know that you provide a ‘learning and unlearning’ course for white educators who are building their antiracist practice. I think that it’s often easier to frame teaching around a process of progressive learning, but it’s harder to frame it around a process of unlearning ways of thinking. I’m curious: what is the most difficult kind of unlearning for educators to do?

Jonah Canner: When I was teaching in a high school, we got some new teachers that came in through Teach For America. They were almost exclusively high-achieving white women from elite universities . . . who then worked in almost exclusively Black and Latino public schools in the Bronx. I have a vivid memory of a conversation with a couple of these teachers where they just couldn’t understand the students who didn’t do well in school. For the teachers, school had always been an arena that they did really well in. It was a culture that they understood and could achieve in. It was culturally affirming to them. But, they had students for whom school is the exact opposite of culturally affirming, for whom school is culturally exploitative, culturally destructive, for whom, in every way, school was the opposite experience of being told, “This is for you. You’re good at this. This is a place where you belong.” The teachers and their students had grown up receiving the exact opposite messages about school.

It raised the question: how do you unlearn what school is, so that you may actually be useful to the students who have a completely different experience of school than you?  How do you unlearn the conditioning that tells you that if you follow the rules, everything will go well? Because for your students, that’s not true. The assumption that “If you do what you’re told, you’ll achieve! If you do your best, you will be the best!" is not true for them. Society was not set up for it to be that way. You have to unlearn the pieces of every assumption in order to actually understand the environment that you are in and then break out of the cycle of perpetuating racial harm.

CAF: What does that look like in practice?

JC: One type of situation, which happens a lot, is where guidance counselors or educators only see the racialized story and tell a student that they have limited options despite being at the top of their class. They might be thinking “I really, really like this kid, but I’m seeing them through a racialized lens and the world is gonna eat them up.” They don’t think less of the student, but in an effort to protect the kid, we limit their options. This is one way that racism insidiously plays out in well-meaning white people. It’s paternalism: in trying to protect you from this big, bad, world, I’m going to make decisions for you. A different approach would be to say, “I really believe you should shoot high, and so I also need you to know that it’s gonna be rough out there if you go to that school. You tell me how I can help you through that.” That’s an example of moving from a well-meaning but paternalizing lens, to an actual antiracist lens.

CAF: Can the same process apply to unlearning for educators who hold those racialized identities themselves?

JC: Yes, but it looks different. For example, I was teaching a class on learning and unlearning–an anti-racism class for white educators—and  also working on a statewide initiative supporting educators of color. We were leading events on Zoom, so we would frequently use breakout rooms to help facilitate conversations. For the white educator course, we would send participants into breakout rooms and tell them that we’re going to call them back. They get 6o seconds to talk and then pull them back into the main group and close the small breakout rooms. We would always joke, “we hope you were interrupted!” However, in the fellowship for educators of color, we didn’t close the breakout rooms. We would tell people what time we would like them to come back to the main group, but we ultimately gave them the autonomy to decide when to come back. It was an intentional effort to flip the convention around agency. For the white educators, we were breaking their habituated, conditioned entitlement to be in charge of their time and space. For the educators of color, we were breaking this perpetual sense that they’re subject to some centralized authority’s decision about how their time is going to be spent. It was a small but very specific pedagogical step to subvert racialized ideas about where agency lies.