Amy J. Ko
1 min readMay 7, 2020

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I’m not sure I understand your question. There are no enemies here, especially not students or parents. Just a bunch of people trying to reconcile challenging value tensions, such as whether to prioritize student access to a major or our own work/life sanity (e.g., working more than the 80 hours a week often already do). Perhaps you’re overinterpreting Freire’s word “oppressor”. It doesn’t mean “enemy”, it just means person responsible for unjust treatment. For example, I don’t think my students view me as the enemy, but they do view me as one of their oppressors, because I am responsible for the structures that treat them unjustly. I am with them, together, in the struggle to find a solution, and yet I still am responsible for their oppression.

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Amy J. Ko

Professor, University of Washington iSchool (she/her). Code, learning, design, justice. Trans, queer, parent, and lover of learning.