Living Their Genius: Alcine Mumby
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
The Living Their Genius series is dedicated to profiling the organizations and people who compose the wider community of The Equity Lab. Even when you may feel alone in this work, we hope these highlights will remind you that we are always doing this together. As bell hooks encourages us, “When we talk about that which will sustain and nurture our spiritual growth as a people, we must once again talk about the importance of community. For one of the most vital ways that we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”
Alcine Mumby knew she wanted to be a teacher at 5 years old.
By then, she was already a reader; her older cousin (when trying to practice her own alphabet and words out on her baby cousin) had inadvertently become one of Alcine’s earliest instructors. Even at that age, Alcine says knowledge felt powerful. In this case, reading specifically felt like a key unlocking new experiences and allowing her to navigate the world more independently. From then on, the power of teaching, of learning, and of helping learners unearth their own power has driven Alcine’s work.
It’s easy to imagine Alcine as a student: as vibrant as she is now, full of ideas, big ideas, and laughter. In school, Alcine was given room to explore through an inquiry-based education, “I wasn't taking tests, I was doing demonstrations of learning, I was learning how to play chess and then playing in chess tournaments as my assessment.” Much later, as an educator, she was sure that this was the kind of education every kid deserved. She studied progressive education during her time at NYU, taught at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, and then went back to grad school at Stanford to study evidenced-based learning. All the while, she was helping schools in California to become performance assessment schools.
Not too long after, the CEO of Envision schools approached her about starting a school. Alcine remembers, “And I was like, sure! I don't know what that means. So I started high school in Oakland, once again, rooted in project-based learning and performance assessment, and didn't give a flying fig about the state test.” Instead, she says, “Our metric was around family engagement, our metric was around student engagement…We did holistic grading…We were fully inclusive, in that any child who was experiencing academic issues (not just students with IEPs) could go to the academic support room to get help from one of our special ed teacher.”
In every aspect of her work as a school leader, Alcine was clear about her vision for eliminating the kind of testing-heavy, high-stakes, no excuses environments that were the norm in education at the time. “I've never thought the assessment system in this country —standardized testing—was equitable. And I know that because I went to Stanford, Stanford-Binet testing, one of the birthplaces where a lot of these eugenics-based testing ideas came from.” This focus on equity continued when Alcine’s work transitioned to adult learners. She’s resolute she says, “I lead adult learning with an equity lens to really create and dismantle a really entrenched system, which is assessment and education.”
But standing against standardized testing in an education landscape that celebrates, maybe deifies, standardized testing and its results —especially as a Black woman— is daunting. Alcine is a person whose vibrancy and energy is palpable, whether you are sharing a room with her or sitting across from her in a Zoom. However, she recalls encountering The Equity Lab at a point in her career when she was at her lowest. She remembers, “When I got to Nexus, I was just depleted. I was like, I'm just here. My goal for the week, that first meeting was to drink water and breathe.” But what she found was a place and a space that affirmed the work that she had been doing at that point for years. A more equitable, liberated education system had always been her vision, but TEL gave her permission, in a lot of ways, to double down on that dream. She said it felt like the June Jordan poem, “A Poem About My Rights.” In it, Jordan writes:
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who in the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life.
Alcine says, “Nexus gave me: a) permission to be myself, but then b) how to use systems and structures to promote and create the conditions and promote the well being of black women in particular.” She has and will continue to center Black women in every aspect of her equity work, but finding Nexus gave her the next breath, the next jolt of energy and community to take her work that much further. Alcine also says that she now knows how to take care of herself within inequitable systems: how to ensure that non-Black colleagues help carry the load of potentially harmful conversations, help advocate on behalf of her and other Black colleagues, and how to step back when she needs to regroup and refocus.
On the other side of that experience, showing up more authentically in her work has meant she’s been able to create the kinds of environments where other Black women, who are also fighting for equity for students, can also. That means bringing play into her work with adults, encouraging them to move their bodies, asking them to embrace silliness, and encouraging them to utilize experimentation in their school and classroom design. The end goal is what it’s always been for Alcine, “My radical dream is also that little humans can be whoever, whatever they want to be. And so I work like hell to create that space for them. And every child deserves that. Every human deserves that.”
About Alcine Mumby
Alcine Mumby is a dedicated educator who has spent the last 25 years teaching and leading traditional and charter public K-12 schools all over the U.S. She currently supports and coaches district and school leaders to develop high-quality performance assessment systems that center student demonstrations of learning and metacognition as the Vice-President of Program at Envision Learning Partners (ELP). At ELP, Alcine is also the director of the Deeper Learning Leadership Forum (DLLF) that supports ed leaders to more boldly work at the intersections of equity, deeper learning, and change management so that every child has access to high quality deeper learning experiences. Before joining ELP in 2017, Alcine taught Humanities at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School – one of the first small schools in the Bronx – where project-based learning and portfolio defenses served as the foundation of instruction. Afterward, Alcine became a founding principal of Envision Academy in Oakland, a high school with a similarly progressive approach to preparing students who would be first in their families to attend and graduate from college. She has also served as an administrator in several small middle and high schools in Atlanta and Washington DC, and a leadership coach in DC, Charlotte, and Philadelphia. While she has played many roles in support of transforming education for young people across the country, she is most passionate about her role as BAE (Best Auntie Ever) to her nephews and niece.