Empowered and engaged citizens. This has always been our ultimate goal. It proves more critical now than ever.
While our country of diverse communities reacts to the insurrection at the Capital and works to find a way forward through the chaos and hate so visibly demonstrated that day, our young people watch. While we as educators share our perspectives on the events, influenced by our own racial identity and experiences, our students listen. While the media necessitates a new form of literacy to navigate polarization and propaganda, our students form their beliefs. In our classrooms, our future citizens and leaders grow up before our eyes. Their education shapes their engagement in and the future of our American democracy.
The historic words and warnings written by past thinkers and leaders remind us of the fragility of democracy and the imperative of an educated nation of citizens to carry it forward.
When current events are on the hearts and minds of our students, our teachers do not hesitate to redesign lessons and create safe spaces for processing. While some schools may need to pause their content-driven curriculum and ask permission to incorporate current events into their lessons, Building 21’s model is designed for this pivot. Our teachers seize the opportunity to directly confront challenging issues in real time. It’s expected that the world will make its way into our classrooms and that, with a firm commitment to student voice, restorative community, and cultural competence, teachers will guide students to learn and grow.
We spent time reflecting on the intensity of this moment in history with some of our lab school Social Studies and ELA educators. Our takeaways illustrate our teachers’ commitment to and passion for civics education and their unwavering belief in the agency of our students.
Our ultimate learning goal. Reflecting on our model, competencies, and learning.
Throughout our discussion, teachers credited their students’ ability to have hard conversations to the Building 21 competency-based model, anchored by Restorative Practices. This approach gives students the tools they need to learn passionately and process constructively. A teacher reminded the group: “Unfortunately it takes moments of stress like this to test their skills, but they pass the test when it happens.”
It’s hard to imagine a more challenging time to navigate high school. Even while learning apart from one another in the midst of a global pandemic and political unrest, our students continue to demonstrate the skills outlined in our Social Studies continua, such as analyzing multiple perspectives and evaluating the importance of people’s actions in shaping outcomes. As our teachers work to virtually support our students, here are some of their reflections.
Relationships and safe spaces.
Relationships create the foundation of our model. Given this, our teachers’ first reactions to the Capital riots included considering: How will these events impact my relationships with my students? How do my relationships with my students support my work as a teacher?
Our teachers reflected on how the riots trigger trauma and distrust within students. How students may call into question the relationships they have with their teachers because of the actions of others who look like them. It is important to our teachers that they create a safe space to process this distrust, disillusionment, and fear. Right now, they find themselves relying on their Building 21 TriChange skills to establish the space for the hard conversations and community healing.
Confronting our own perspectives, bias, and room to grow.
For some, the events of January 6th may have been one of the first times they felt shock and anger over political polarization and radical action. For others, this event may be just one in a constant barrage of events witnessed and experienced over a lifetime. When the reaction of many white people is amazement and shock, it only serves to amplify the pain BIPOC people feel, as their voices are continually dismissed, racism remains systemic, and calls for justice go unheard.
As a community of educators, it is imperative that we understand our collective perspectives, our bias, and the impact they have on our students. Our model embraces a framework of adult development, which includes growth in our understanding of race and class. While these introspective conversations have been a part of our practice, we continue to push ourselves to expand them. Our teachers reflected on our room to grow as an anti-racist organization committed to embracing the same skills we teach our students.
At the end of our conversation, a teacher of senior students offered her reflection for the group: “I wish you could sit on the wall of my classroom. …[You would see] all the skills in our model were manifested in our students’ thinking after four years of practicing these skills and it’s these moments that always convince me that we’re on the right track. Our students are developing these critical thinking skills that are so important to having agency as a citizen.”
Our students give us hope that the future of our American democracy is in their courageous, informed, and empowered hands. Our appreciation for our teachers is endless. We thank them for their commitment to the hard work of Civics education, to ongoing personal development and growth, and to creating safe spaces for our nation’s young citizens and future leaders to learn and grow.
