In private schools, time is often the scarcest, and therefore most valuable, commodity. How a school decides to invest that precious time tells you what that school truly values. Accordingly, I am proud of my school for carving out a day to talk, deeply and deliberately, as a 7-12 community about the role of our country’s racial history in shaping our community today. (And, yes, one day does not even begin to be enough. But I’m going to celebrate the win for a few minutes.)
(Another caveat: I’m a White woman talking in a privileged setting to a largely White student body about experiences of Black people, which, um, raises issues. That said, I deeply believe that White people need to be talking about racism; as those with privilege in our society, it’s largely our problem to solve.)
Once we got the go-ahead, I and my colleagues spent a good deal of time hunting good resources and thinking, arguing, and rethinking about what the day should look like in order to be successful, meaningful and authentic. I think it worked.
Now that that work is finished and it’s over, I wanted to share our materials here, not because I think we are any kind of experts, but because I learned a lot and think it might be worth sharing. I’m a committed recycler and I hate to throw things away. (Thanks to my amazing colleagues–Alyson Barret, Sharanya Naik, Paul Prior-Lorenz, Mike Buckley, and the whole faculty–for making this day happen).
We framed the day around the legacy of the United States’s history of slavery and racism in the current moment. The goal was to begin shifting students’ understanding of the history they’ve learned in class–slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, etc., etc.–from something safely tucked away in another century–to something that has to be dealt with today. This might seem pretty basic, but in my experience teaching this stuff, teens’ first reaction is nearly always some version of, “Why were those people so awful? I’m glad things are better now,” or, at the most nuanced, “It’s sad that some people are still racist today.” Neither of those ways of viewing it is likely to generate an understanding that impels students to action, as we are charged in my school’s mission to do.
The heart of this experience–in my opinion–was a series of small group conversations in which we asked student and adult community members to grapple with one particular aspect of our history’s racial legacy in detail.
We laid some groundwork beforehand. I think that’s important, because it provided a context and also gave students a degree of confidence, a sense of knowing what was coming. We worked lessons on the historical events we would be alluding to into as many history classes as possible in the weeks before (they are already important parts of the syllabus, of course, but we wanted to adjust timing, moving concepts up or circling back, to have them fresh in students’ minds, and also to specifically introduce excerpts from our visiting author, Annette Gordon-Reed). In chapel and advisories, we talked about the way we tell stories about history and imagine our nation. The library arranged book groups and libguides. The catalyst for the day itself was a lecture from the fall visiting author, Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, about Thomas Jefferson’s complex relationships to race, slavery, and liberty, which served as a point to which we could return throughout the day. This was barely enough–in some cases, not enough–to set the stage, and if there is one thing I would most like to change next time, it would be to do much more of this preparatory work, over a longer time.
I’m focusing in this post on the dialogue sessions because those are the most transferable part. We had a few guiding principles for them:
- For coherence of message, they had to touch, in some way, on both history and present consequences.
- They had to center on an issue that in some way went beyond a simple binary of good and evil to ask participants to grapple with the problem of “what now?” This one is key, I think, because White students seem often to perceive the true question of days like this as “Are you sorry for being racist?” which provokes one of two reactions, resistance (“I don’t see race,” “why do we have to always talk about this?”) or pro forma repetition (“I agree with Sarah, Jennifer, Kylie, and Jane: racism is bad.”) To move beyond that, I think you need to help students simultaneously recognize that ending racism is important and that ending racism is hard. It’s not something you do by just saying, “Let’s everyone please don’t be racist.” There’s a reason we haven’t managed to do it yet. And an understanding of that very difficulty is the reason we need minds like all of theirs to engage actively with the problem of how it can nevertheless be done.
- We decided, somewhat dictatorially, that for this day we would only host sessions on race. Other minority groups and other forms of oppression–homophobia, colonialism, gender inequities–are all deeply important issues, and teaching them obviously overlaps in a myriad of ways with teaching about racism. On an equity level, though, we felt that–back to that precious resource, time–one very small piece of what our community owed African Americans was some uninterrupted time thinking about their specific experience without having to share that mental space with every other oppressed group. On a pedagogical level, we have also observed that addressing too many issues all at once tends to lead discussions back to broad platitudes and reductionist solutions. (This was our arbitrary call: the drawback, of course, is that it obscures the fact that people are not, in fact, only Black, only lesbians, only immigrants–intersectionality, in other words, tends to disappear. But another lesson from Classroom 101 is that you can’t teach all the important concepts at the same time. For this time, we chose the already huge field of systemic racism, particularly anti-Black racism, while hoping that we will have a chance to come back again to take the lesson further and in other directions).
We framed the dialogue sessions as follows:
- In each rotation, students chose (or were assigned–there were some procedural hiccups!–to a particular topic.
- All the students and teachers assigned to that topic met first together for 15 minutes in a big zoom (this was all on Zoom for cohorting reasons: we thought it was important to mix ages and genders, creating groups that were truly a slice of our whole community). In that larger group, a teacher who had volunteered to anchor that topic framed dialogue norms for the day, introduced the particular problem/controversy briefly and neutrally, and posed the central, touchstone question.
- The larger group then split into breakouts with two faculty members and 12-18 students for a 45-minute dialogue. We specifically asked faculty to join the groups as participants, rather than as teachers: their role was to model respectful, curious, engagement, to provide safety and support in any “hot” moments, and to nudge conversation along if needed. We did not ask or expect them to have any particular expert knowledge to share or to try to take command of the conversation in any way except to insist on the established dialogue norms when needed. We thought this was important to make space for student viewpoints, to ease faculty anxieties, and to set this process in which we were engaged as somehow distinct from what we do in our classrooms every day.
- In the breakouts, we shared a “provocation” for discussion, a brief text excerpt or video clip that helped frame the issue for participants and gave them the evidence from which to draw in discussion. Hedging our bets, we provided each faculty member in the breakouts a set of questions and activities and some additional resources/provocations that could be thrown into the mix if discussion lagged. We also gave them permission to throw all that out the window if dialogue was proceeding well organically. Before the event, the number one concern I heard from faculty was that 45 minutes might be too long. Everyone I talked to afterward reported that conversation was still bubbling when time was up.
- Everyone came back to the larger groups in the last 10 minutes to share out their take-aways and (we hoped) experience a sense of closure and reconnection to the larger community.
The driving force behind structuring the sessions this way was the desire never to have a faculty member feel put on the spot. Talking with students about race in the present day can feel very difficult for teachers, even those who routinely lead academic discussions. Some are afraid of saying something wrong. Some fear they don’t know enough. Some teachers of color feel pressured to discuss their personal experiences in a way they would not usually choose to do with students or to grant a kind of blanket absolution, as though they could speak for a group far beyond themselves. We didn’t want to put colleagues in an uncomfortable position, but even more, we were very aware that when the adult in the room is uncomfortable, the kids know it. The conversation can go from difficult to counter-productive very, very easily. (I made the mistake years ago of underestimating how hard this might be for some teachers. I blithely assumed that we history teachers could easily lead any discussion and was blind-sided when one of my most experienced and passionately social justice-oriented teachers was reduced to fury and terror at the prospect, a state which essentially torpedoed the whole session).
So my promise to teachers was that, (1) they could simply be their thoughtful, curious, respectful selves and should not feel called upon to be either experts or guinea pigs in these conversations but also, that, (2) I would give them such a clear structure to follow if need be that they would never have to feel on their own in this endeavor. These two things may seem contradictory, but I think, paradoxically, the existence of the structure gave people the confidence to let the conversations flow.
Here are the materials we shared for some specific topics (I’m not including all our topics here, because some were specific to our school or not materials I have permission to share. These three are quite readily generalizable, though, and I hope they’ll be useful to someone):
A dialogue on cognitive dissonance
A dialogue on monuments (curated by the inimitable Alyson Barrett–thanks, Alyson!)
I hope these materials will be useful to someone else. Feel free to use and repurpose in any way you like.
wordsarestrong 