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Chalkbeat
‘Moments like now are why we teach’: Educators tackle tough conversations about race and violence — this time virtually
By Reema Amin, Caroline Bauman, and Stephanie Wang
May 31, 2020
Reading about Brown v. Board of Education over Google Meet. Holding
one-on-one Zooms with students struggling with their emotions. Planning
lessons on criminal justice reform for the fall — both in-person and
remote, in case school buildings don’t reopen.
Educators across the U.S. already adapting to remote teaching due to
the coronavirus pandemic now find themselves facing another challenge:
supporting, educating, and engaging students during waves of protest
and unrest. The outrage stemming from the death of George Floyd in
Minneapolis and other recent police killings of black citizens has led
to demonstrations, violent clashes with police, and curfews in numerous
cities.
Navigating discussions about race relations, police brutality, and
systemic racism can be challenging for teachers even during normal
times. But grappling with these topics during a pandemic, when school
communities can’t learn together in person, is even more difficult.
Students who may have been willing to share fears for their safety in
person might not open up over a classwide Zoom. Teachers who previously
picked up on students’ emotions while watching them in hallways now
have no window into their frames of mind. Some students may not even
have reliable internet access to join live instruction.
Still, many educators know that it’s during these challenging moments that they are needed the most.
“For many schools that serve predominantly black and brown low-income
communities, moments like now are why we teach,” said Leslie-Bernard
Joseph, chief executive officer at Coney Island Preparatory charter
schools in Brooklyn.
Chalkbeat spoke with educators across the country about how they are
trying to meet the needs of their students, faculty, and parents during
this challenging time. Their answers reveal struggle and frustration
but also ingenuity and compassion. If you’d like to join the
conversation, tell us how your school community is handling this moment.
As protests continued late into Friday and Saturday nights across the
country and the five boroughs, Principal Robert Michelin lesson
planned. He and faculty stayed up until midnight both days, planning
the next two weeks of school at Gotham Professional Arts Academy:
check-ins with students, a town hall, compiling historical texts and
video clips about race, and a Day of Action on June 12.
“For some reason, George Floyd’s murder is hitting me really, really
hard,” Michelin said. “And I think part of it is because I’ve never
been in a position where this has happened and I have almost 200
babies. And it’s this moment where you have to decide whether or not
you want to keep their rose-colored glasses on or you want to share the
truth. ... We have to give them something that gives them some power
back.”
Protests have taken place in all five boroughs of New York City over
the past few days, some leading to violent confrontations with police
and hundreds of arrests.
Gotham is part of the city’s Performance Standards Consortium, a group
of more than 30 schools that graduates students based on projects and
portfolios. Last week, Michelin held an emergency faculty meeting after
a freshman student, during a Zoom class discussion, typed in the chat
box, “What if gotham presented a zoom call to protest about racism?”
On June 12, the school will host a “Day of Action” on Zoom and invite
other consortium schools to attend. Students will spend the next two
weeks designing activism projects to share that day, which could
include music playlists, art work, or even Zoom-coordinated performance
art. The final product will be up to students.
“The beauty of this and the value of this is that we’re still
committing to our values as a school, which is, we don’t want to tell
students how to demonstrate their mastery,” he said.
On Monday, teachers will check in on students, some of whom are also
processing the trauma of losing relatives to the coronavirus, Michelin
said. The school will also host a town hall where staffers will talk
about the news and the history of police brutality. Students will break
into subgroups to talk about how they’re feeling. And if students feel
prepared to watch, the school will show the video of Floyd’s death.
“They need to understand that sometimes it’s better not to look away so
they can actually hold on to the feeling, that raw feeling, so they can
turn those feelings into actions,” Michelin said, adding the school
will offer links to news coverage if students don’t want to watch the
video.
Michelin is hoping that this helps fill in some of the gaps for students who want to participate in protests but can’t.
“I think the fear of being out in the streets is really real because they’re not trying to contract the virus,” Michelin said.
At Lawndale Community Academy on the west side of Chicago, Michael
Bryant teaches middle school math and science but slips in a daily
current events lesson. His students often say they don’t read or watch
the news, but he tells them it’s important to know what’s happening
around them and around the world. He wants to get them thinking.
On Monday, Bryant plans to post articles about the looting and
destruction that spiraled out of some protests over the weekend and
open up the topic for discussion: “Do you think this is right?”
He guides them through how to have respectful debates, how to identify
when articles take different viewpoints, and how to evaluate facts
without jumping to conclusions. He’s proud of them for asking
questions, such as why former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin
wasn’t immediately arrested for Floyd’s death, or why the other
officers involved haven’t faced charges.
Talking about current events also lets Bryant, who is black, open up a
bigger dialogue about systemic racism and police brutality with his
students, who are all African American. Reading about the coronavirus
outbreak, for example, led to conversations about the disproportionate
health care issues that African Americans face.
“I feel it is my responsibility to inform the students of what’s going
on and how this education is going to help them better themselves,”
Bryant said. “Education changes a lot of things. Look at the community
we live in, health care, jobs. A lot of this stuff is going on because
people are frustrated.”
Last week marked the final week of the school year in Denver. At Manual
High School, located in the historic heart of black Denver, those final
days of remote learning time revolved around giving students time to
make up missed work, with no time to introduce new material.
But that didn’t mean that school leaders were not already working on
how to incorporate frank discussions about policing, race relations,
and racism into classes next fall.
William Anderson, who heads the social studies department, described
“heavy discussions” among the social studies and humanities teachers he
works with — all of them black men.
“Do we teach our students that the police are a terrorizing, occupying
force within our communities?” Anderson said. “Do we teach them about
what the police should be? Do we teach them about the origins of the
police? Do we urge them to be the police?”
That last question provoked a range of thought, he said, from “hell no”
to the idea of graduating an entire class from the police academy to
reform the institution from within.
“Where we left off was being able to create a space for the conversation,” said Anderson, 37.
With so much uncertainty about what school will look like in the fall —
Denver, like many school districts, is contemplating a mix of in-person
and remote learning — Anderson said he is urging teachers to avoid
dwelling on logistical questions.
“This is the time to be dialed into the content we want to teach.
Use this time not to worry about whether it’s remote or not, in class
or not … Screw all of that. Don’t worry about any of that ‘til we are
in August.”
He said he’s confident that teachers can teach these tough issues
regardless of what school looks like, in part because remote learning
will no longer be new or different after the last two-plus months.
“Yes, 100%, these kinds of conversations can take place,” he said.
“It’s just going to be slightly different. If anything, it might allow
us a broader and bigger opportunity to have these kinds of
conversations.”
Leaders at Coney Island Preparatory charter schools — where 74% of
students are black and Hispanic and where nearly 83% of students are
from low-income families — view this as a pivotal teaching moment. The
network has an elementary, middle, and high school that together serve
about 1,000 students.
“This is what we’re preparing our students for and so we have a
responsibility to help our kids process this moment,” Joseph said.
The Brooklyn school is first focusing on staff. This week, the school
will host several optional group discussions for teachers about the
recent turmoil. There are specific discussions planned for educators
who are black, Asian, white, and specifically, white women. (White
teachers make up 44% of the staff, while 31% are black, 6% are Asian,
and nearly 6% are Hispanic, according to data Joseph provided.)
“I think there’s a desire from leaders of color within our organization
to both protect our own mental sanity and our kids,” Joseph said. “I
think there is a desire from white leaders in our organization to do
more, personally reflect on whether they are the ‘Amy Coopers’ of the
world,” he added, referring to the white woman who gained infamy for
calling 911 on a black birdwatcher who asked her to follow Central Park
rules and leash her dog.
Leaders at the school are creating lessons focused on recent events for
student advisory periods and sent tips to teachers for weaving recent
news into their daily lessons. This includes anti-racist guidance for
teachers that suggests books and articles to read, television series to
watch, and social media sources to follow. Teachers were also sent
information how to teach about racism, race, and police violence from
the group Teaching Tolerance.
One of the challenges staff will face, he said, is explaining to
students how they can safely advocate for change “when we know there is
a danger and that they’re at risk just by virtue of being black or
brown.”
The other challenge is tailoring lessons for students in different
grades. Talking about systemic racism looks different with their high
school students, who have read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,”
versus chatting with second graders, he said.
“Our kids know they are entering a world that is deeply unfair, deeply
inequitable and the generations before have failed them,” he said.
“While our kids are excited about the opportunities ahead of them to go
to college, they’re also deeply skeptical.”
It didn’t take long for Katherine Palmer to hear from a worried
student. She was logging into Google Meet Thursday morning to teach
language arts and math to her fourth grade class in Trenton, N.J., when
a student asked, “Did you see the news?”
Palmer asked her class for time to prepare. She came ready during live
instruction on Friday, armed with several articles about Brown v. Board
of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled state laws
establishing racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. She
hopes her students would read them and see the power of one person
speaking up about injustice and enlisting others to create lasting
change.
The conversation ran two and a half hours, covering the Black Lives
Matter movement and running into their math lesson. But for Palmer,
that was OK.
“From a teacher standpoint, the goal is not to teach and say this is
how you have to do it, but show this is one way to do something,” she
said. “If I could teach the kids nothing else from this moment, that’s
what I want.”
As a white educator teaching mostly students of color, Palmer was glad
her students asked her to talk through the violence they were seeing,
particularly during remote learning. But she said the fact that they’ve
been meeting virtually for several months made the conversations less
awkward than they might have been.
“I don’t know if we could have had that dialogue if we weren’t seeing
each other’s faces, live over Google, every day for the past weeks,”
she said. “I feel some may be less likely to say something online
moving forward than if we were meeting in person, but I want to keep
the dialogue open to see what happens.”
For Sabrina Anfossi Kareem, one-on-one conversations with her students
at a Chicago charter school are happening through email, a platform
called Remind, and over the phone. But the high school English teacher
began that relationship building in person months ago in the classroom.
“Students are being honest with me only because we spent time at the
beginning of the year going over that I want honesty, to see the
student’s humanity, and then develop that relationship over time,” she
said, adding she worries about building that closeness if schools start
remotely next year.
Kareem reached out to her black students in recent days to ask, “How
are you holding up? Do you need an ear?” And the answer from some was
yes — but they wanted to talk more than they needed a lecture. “I’m not
talking a lot during these conversations,” she said.
Aside from listening to students, Kareem believes she needs to use what
she hears to influence change at her school. This includes ensuring
administrators know black students don’t always feel their concerns are
heard, as well as advocating for high-quality anti-bias and anti-racism
training.
“I don’t want to attend another peace circle led by an untrained adult
who thinks they’re being restorative when they’re really harming
everyone in the room with their lack of self-awareness or ability,” she
said. “There are plenty of quality organizations doing this work.
Schools should not be spending out the nose for instructional or
testing products while ‘making it up as they go’ when it comes to
[anti-bias and anti-racism] work.”
Classes are out at Westerville North High School in Ohio, but history
teacher John Sands is still thinking about how he and other white
teachers should approach educating students about events like Floyd’s
death and its aftermath.
Sands and his students grapple with these tragedies in a contemporary
world issues class at his suburban Columbus school, which is
predominantly white with a growing black student population. He said he
is sensitive to the issues that come from a white teacher tackling
these topics in classes with black students. “I always tell my kids,
I’m the white middle-class guy ... that to many of them represents a
lot of what’s wrong,” he said.
In the class, Sands and students discuss identity, read the works of
Malcolm X and James Baldwin, then eventually work up to discussing
systemic racism and its role in their lives.
Some students choose to open up about experiences from their lives,
making racism tangible and personal and not just an abstract concept
for classmates. “It’s much more powerful when it comes from their
friends and their classmates,” he said.
Sands and English teacher Cat Stathulis are launching the schools’
first African-American studies program in the fall. He hasn’t started
considering how he’d have these discussions remotely, but his instinct
is that discussion board posts won’t be enough. “I think I would want
to be live with everybody, in some format, to have the discussion,” he
said.
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