This is Democracy – Episode 3: Educating Citizenship

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Intro voices: This is Democracy- a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.
Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of “This is Democracy”. Today we’re going to be talking about educating citizenship. How do we educate and inspire young people to be good citizens today? What does it mean to think about citizenship as a young person? And what are some of our most innovative and thoughtful school leaders doing about this to help protect and encourage citizenship in our world today? We’re very fortunate to have two of the leading educators in Austin, Texas with us today. They’re also former students of mine in our Executive Master’s in Public Leadership program, and they’re also two of my favorite people. I might even say two of my favorite students. But don’t tell all my other students that.
Amber Pleasant has nine years of teaching experience in third through eighth grades. It’s amazing she survived that. She also has four years of experience in the Austin Independent School District working in social and emotional learning. She was a social and emotional learning specialist. And Zachary at some point was a student of some of those programs at Bryker Woods Elementary. And now Amber is a program director at the super cool Amala Foundation, which does all kinds of great programs for young people, youth summits and things of that sort.
Melissa Scheinfeld is our other guest today. She has eight years of teaching experience in high school, as a high school teacher and as an instructional coach, which is extraordinary that she survived that. She’s now at the IDEA Public Schools in Austin, Texas, where she’s a vice president of teacher advancement and works on teacher retention, which is so important, and teacher development. We’re going to hear their thoughts in a couple of minutes, but first we’re going to start as always with a poem from Zachary. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem today?
Zachary: “With Every Breath.”
Jeremi: And what’s it about?
Zachary: It’s about where I’m from and my place and history and where I feel like my voice is important.
Jeremi: Great, let’s hear it.
Zachary: I spring from the snow filled driveways and iced over sidewalks outside the old house on Chadborne near Spooner. I spring from the soft radio playing in the living room on Sunday morning, my father reading on the couch and the beaten up fur of my silky stuffed bear. I spring from cramped apartments in the center of European cities. Munich, London, Oslo, and car trips through Tennessee Mountains and Missouri prairie. I spring from historical analyses from the depths of academia, overcrowding my father’s office. I spring from Yeats, Whitman, Thomas, and Steinbeck stories. My flow is drawn from my mother’s warm hug, bickering loudly with my sister and philosophical conversations with my father in the car after school. I spring from the times that I rose my hand in the lecture halls of the world’s great universities and knew the answer. I spring from the near white-out drives between New Haven and Boston, Harvard and Yale, taking the turnpike at I-91.
From Turkish rooms and Anatolian bazaars. I spring from the dusty clothing store in northern Maine, whose proprietors, my great-grandparents, were the children of Jewish immigrants seeking freedom from the czar and his men. From my forefathers spread across the Indian subcontinent, from Lahore to Bhopal. I spring from the shtetl and the sacred waters of the Ganges. I spring from great-grandma Emily’s yogurt cup glasses which my father recounts with laughter every time we speak about his favorite grandmother. I spring from knowledge and stories stretching over oceans and centuries to the point that I write this reflection. It seems to all lead here but it could’ve ended with a billion different paths and a billion different stories. And it ended here with every breath of mine a remnant of something lost.
Jeremi: That’s fantastic, Zachary. So autobiographical. Including Grandma Emily’s yogurt cups. How do you think about citizenship in the context of this poem?
Zachary: I don’t know. I also chose this poem because I wrote it at school for an assignment in sixth grade and I think that it’s sort of about how I placed myself in history but how I also have my own unique things that I do and my own unique family traditions, and I think that’s really important when you’re thinking about being a citizen– [crosstalk 00:04:40]
Jeremi: That’s true and–
Zachary: It’s knowing your own personal place too.
Jeremi: Right, and being confident in who you are, right? Well, that’s so important and maybe that’s a good place for us to transition to our experts here, Amber and Melissa. Amber, it seems to me one of the challenges is getting young people from various different background with various different experiences to think about citizenship. How do you approach that?
Amber: Well, I think that is a challenge. First I just want to say thank you, Zachary, for sharing your poem. That was beautiful, and I’ll be thinking about that throughout my day today and throughout my week. I think the first challenge comes from the fact that we live in such a segregated city and our school district is really segregated, so when we’re talking about bringing together diverse groups of kids, that’s a challenge. What we can do is expose kids to diversity through literature, through different ways of looking at math, through different ways of thinking.
And also recognizing that even when we have a pretty homogeneous-looking group in the classroom, we have a diversity of learners in terms of how kids make meaning of the world. And teachers can really benefit by getting to know their kids individually, getting to know kids in the ways that Zachary shared in his poem, getting to know what makes kids feel at home and feel connected and feel safe. That’s one way that I’ve seen teachers do that is by providing, creating rituals in their classrooms like circles in the morning, or kids get to know each other’s names and find out what is important to them and make connections to their learning.
Jeremi: And of course a challenge is sometimes the numbers in the classroom.
Amber: Oh yeah.
Jeremi: Melissa, how do you think about this? How do you approach citizenship and diversity?
Melissa: Wow, it’s such a big question. First off, thanks for having me here today, and Zachary, what a beautiful poem! Have to admit I was totally caught off guard and now I’m having so much fun dreaming of the images that you painted in that poem. I love what we just heard about helping people get to know themselves and who they are as individuals. I think Zachary beautifully modeled that. That’s what the foundation of all of these components, and then I just want to build on not only do we need our students to know who they are and have an opportunity to know who they are. Of course I come from this also from a teacher retention standpoint and we do a lot of work to make sure our teachers are seen and heard as individuals and people.
So we’ve been doing a lot of work to create quick and easy get-to-know-you strategies that teachers can use with one another that administrators can use with their teachers. Ideally teachers are using them every day very frequently with their students. But understanding who each student is so essential to running an effective classroom and of course we spend so much time thinking about the K-12 continuum in our work that our students spend the majority of their lives not in a school setting and school atmosphere, and we have a pretty rigid framework for what K-12 looks like and then we expect our students to pack up their bags and leave us and be ready for an incredibly not rigid or formulaic or bell-ringing schedule-driven world. And how do we set up our students that they’re critical thinkers and confident in themselves and ready to take on challenges and pursue the obligations of citizenship that require them to be involved and engaged and eager to participate?
Jeremi Suri: How do you get teachers and students, Melissa, to feel that they matter? It strikes me that one of the real challenges today, and this is not specific to our politics only of this moment, but the attacks on education and also just the emphasis on other values sometimes, it seems to me, can make educators and those in the educational system perhaps feel like what they’re doing is spinning their wheels. How do you make them realize that it’s valuable?
Melissa: It’s so interesting the way you asked the question, the educators that I interact with on a daily basis are so driven by their love of their students that there is meaning everywhere.
Jeremi: That’s great.
Melissa: Our job is to pull the bureaucracy out of the way so that we don’t sabotage that inherent, wonderful desire and quest for meaning and knowledge with students.
Jeremi: That’s interesting.
Melissa: And I think as far as a strategy to pull ourselves out of it, is asking questions of teachers.
Jeremi: Right.
Melissa: When was the last time you had an “aha” moment with a student? Describe that moment in your own, mathematical education when you remember getting something and it clicking. Describe a moment when that happened with a student and those kind of questions ignite the spark back in each and every one of us. I don’t know a single teacher who went into this noble and challenging profession without a passionate desire for helping students.
Jeremi: Wow, wow.
Melissa: I definitely know people that have a lot of questions years down the line about whether they’re still making as much progress as maybe they thought they would, but reconnecting to that which brought them into the profession in the first place, to me is an almost instant cure.
Jeremi: Sure, sure.
Melissa: That being said, we need to do a lot of work to get all the other headaches out. We need to make teaching a more sustainable profession in many ways, but the core heart of teachers, in my experience, is always very squarely in the camp of each student’s success.
Jeremi: And I can feel that in the passion of your words also, that’s wonderful. Amber, your thoughts on this?
Amber: Yeah, I think teachers are leaders in their classrooms and a lot of times teachers are not able to be leaders in their schools. And I think there’s room for growth there. Teachers are learners, a lot of teachers got into education because they care passionately about learning and sharing learning. And so when they’re kind of in their classroom and they’re constantly having to make these split second decisions and think long-term about the impact of what they’re saying and what they’re doing and how to respond constructively to kids’ needs, that’s leadership. And so finding pathways for teachers to be able to share the load of leadership that’s placed on the administrative team– when I’ve seen that happen in a school, I’ve noticed transformative results. So when teachers have been given access to some of the bigger decisions, not just like, “Okay, you get to join the social committee and decide when we celebrate birthdays.”
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But actually thinking about, what is it that we care about kid’s learning? What do we want kids to know? What are the skills, what’s the knowledge that we want kids to be equipped with when they leave us? And actually having those deep, philosophical conversations that then turn into concrete actions that are fueled by teacher input. And staff input and I think that’s– those kinds of practices that open up opportunities for teachers to expand their leadership outside of the classroom, really hold promise because it’s what we do with teachers is what trickles down to what happens in the classroom when teachers have– feel like their voices are heard, their stories matter, that they are also being cultivated as leaders within the structure of the school, then they reinforce those same things with kids in the classroom.
Jeremi: Wow, wow. You know it strikes me that one of the real challenges– and this, I think, connects your comment with Melissa’s, is that there are all sorts of things that are done, well-meaning perhaps, by those outside of the classroom that make it harder for teachers to do what you just said. I mean what I’m hearing from both of you is how engaged teachers are, how much democratic work there is by teachers, but then I think about all of the restrictions created by testing regimens for example. How do you manage that? That must be incredibly frustrating.
Amber: Yeah, and again I think teachers are problem solvers and so when they’re given an opportunity to kind of look at all of the parameters, here are the things that we kind of have to deal with, this is our current reality and also think about how do we want it to be? What are some steps we can take now to start moving it in a different direction that feels more grounded and what we believe is the right way of going about educating all students? I really, I have seen teachers on campuses that have been focused, heavily, on standardized testing really make changes to be more inclusive, more open because they simply gave teachers time to talk to each other and to problem solve with– and to really consider deeply what do we care about? What do we want kids to be thinking about? And it really, it wasn’t about spending any more money, it was about time and we know time is a precious commodity on campuses, but there’s something about being told my voice matters and we’re not just going to sit and talk about this, actually we’re going to put some things into place based on the recommendations of our staff. When you have a leadership that’s willing to make– to take that risk to give teachers a voice, I’ve seen that happen even in the most unlikely places.
Jeremi: That’s fantastic.
Amber: Yeah.
Jeremi: That’s fantastic. Melissa, what are some of the things you do, I know you’re super creative in doing a lot of this, in helping teachers to find voice and meaning and encouraging creativity. And one of my concerns is that, when people think about democratic creativity and innovation, they often don’t think about teachers because they don’t know what’s going on in the classroom, they think about, you know, people doing technology stuff and maybe they think about people writing novels, but what’s happening in the classroom and what are some of the things you do to help teachers unleash that democratic energy?
Melissa: Wow, such a big question, Jeremi, unleashing democratic energy. I’m going to speak from my social studies background because I spent a lot of time as a high school social studies teacher thinking about how to–
Jeremi: And that’s the most important class in every class, there’s no doubt about it.
Melissa: (laughs) Absolutely, no doubt about that– at least the most fun. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure my students had the historical context they needed to understand the world in which they live in today. History–
Jeremi: Music to my ears.
Melissa: That’s right, history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it always rhymes, right? So we want to make sure that our students have a framework and a context that they can refer back to. The second thing that I think is so particularly important today, I think a lot about, “Did I leave my students with the skills they need to accurately assess the source of the things they read? So when I look at the political discourse happening in our society right now and the majority of my former students I know are getting any and all news they consume through social media, it’s not clear immediately what the source was. Well that is arguably the most important thing I worked with them on in high school social studies, are you looking at the authorship of every single text you ever read? Are you looking at the background of this person? Are you identifying whatever biases they might have had without judgement? I don’t care if this person has a perspective one way or the other, I just need to know what it is so that I can read this and not be carried away by the words on the page.
And so, I think there’s incredible opportunity to promote democratic citizenship in our social studies classrooms and I found that the frameworks and curricula that I was given in the state of Texas to do this, were fantastic, but it did take creativity and it took me realizing the bigger picture. There will never be a standardized test question that asks someone to read and analyze that morning’s news and assess how it fits into a bigger picture context. I found that advanced placement courses did that to a degree that I was excited about. The schools I work with, we also have international baccalaureate programs and the students coming out of that are learning to be great critical thinkers. So I think we have curricular frameworks and assessments that actually can help drive teachers towards these kind of questions in this kind of rich teaching environment, but we have to remember the bigger picture of it is what are students going to do with this once they leave the classroom?
Jeremi: Right, right. So really connecting the lesson to the context of the world they’re in, that’s wonderful. Amber, I know you worked a lot on these issues also, especially through social and emotional activities, right?
Amber: Yeah, so one of the ways that I really saw democratic principles blossom in the classroom is through writing workshop and the structure of that because it’s an opportunity for students to really build their writing skills and writing is all about voice and writing is all about choice. And you think about democracy, it’s, you know, we’re talking about having a voice and also having choices.
Jeremi: Exactly.
Amber: And those are– it’s really hard to be in fourth grade and make hard choices about your writing, about something that matters to you, to even think deeply about what does matter to me? And to feel like you have an audience who’s going to pay attention to that.
Jeremi: Yes.
Amber: So in writing workshop, what I’ve seen, is kids giving each other feedback– really constructive, thoughtful feedback. And that it really is a student-centered structure. So you might have like a ten, fifteen minute mini lesson that’s teacher-directed and then you open it up from there into the workshop where students are working. And it’s one of the few times that I walk into a classroom and I can see right away, know right away what’s going on. And that it’s– the majority of the work that’s happening is being generated by students and not by the teacher, which is what we see in classes that are really focused on preparing for standardized tests. The teachers working really, really hard in the front of the room a lot of the times and the kids are trying to, you know, fill in those little circles, it doesn’t promote voice and choice nearly as much as the open structure of a writing workshop that prepares kids to ask each other tough questions about the content, why did you choose this word? What made you think about, why did you decide to tell it this way? So that’s one concrete structure that I think we should– I would love to see more of whenever I walk into– I mean you can it in pre-K classrooms, you can see it in high school classrooms, and there’s lots of literature on how to run a writing workshop, which is exciting.
Jeremi: This is fantastic, it’s bringing out, I think, so much of the creativity that happens in the classroom and so much of the democratic energy that can be unleashed if we only give it a chance, it seems to me. Zachary, was this your experience in school? I mean you’re still in middle school in a sense, in eighth grade, but did you feel this energy when you were in these classes?
Zachary: I think… I don’t know, I think it really varied. I think in like, I mean when I went to– when I was in a public elementary school I felt like, I felt it was more like, it was inconsistent, like, some days it was there and some days it wasn’t. And then, I feel like where I am now, which is a private school, I think that like, I don’t know I think the difference was really that they were like smaller classes so the teachers– and also like less restrictions, so the teachers had like more, more space to work in. So I do feel like it’s, I feel like it’s still a little inconsistent, but most days I feel really engaged. At least in some of my classes.
Jeremi: That’s great. Well I think one of the things we’ve learned today, among many things, is how important it is to actually get beyond the– I think simple ideological debates we often have about education and the stereotypes. And really look deeply about what’s going on in the classroom and I take from Melissa and Amber, I take your points about how creative and innovative teachers are and how instead of commenting, we should be encouraging and trying to help them, help them pursue that creativity and deal with, perhaps, the inconsistency that Zachary brought up. Thank you so much for being with us today, Amber and Melissa and Zachary, of course.
Melissa: Thank for having us, it was a treat.
Amber: Thank you, yeah.
Jeremi: This was a really wonderful discussion and it’s really great that we can hear from teachers and students together at the same time, that is where democracy happens and that’s why “This is Democracy” thank you.
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Speaker 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlempke.com.
Speaker 3: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.
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