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Tips for Tackling Sensitive History & Controversial Events in the Classroom

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Tips for Tackling Sensitive History & Controversial Events in the Classroom

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Racial Justice, Our Classrooms, and Right-Wing Attacks

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Racial Justice, Our Classrooms, and Right-Wing Attacks

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By Rethinking Schools Editors

Illustrator: Barbara Miner

As of the middle of August, more than two dozen states have introduced - and 11 states have enacted - bills or rules to restrict the teaching of history and contemporary social realities. Right-wing activists have mounted similar attacks at school board meetings throughout the country. This stunning barrage of legislation and policies aims to ban teaching critical race theory (CRT), and supposedly "divisive topics" in the curriculum.

But the real target is the truth.

The anti-CRT campaign echoes the Big Lie that Trump won the election. It is the curricular counterpart to the wave of voter suppression laws promoted by the same far-right political forces that have tried to rewrite the history of the 2020 election and cover up the attempted coup on Jan. 6. Although the particular framing of these laws and penalties varies across states, they are all part of a coordinated campaign of repression meant to enforce a single emphatic message to educators: Shut up or else. The Republican sponsors of these measures fear that in the wake of last summer's massive Black Lives Matter protests, the anti-racist debates and discussions that have permeated society are seeping into the classroom. With scary buzzwords and misleading framing, both right-wing and corporate media have amplified and spread the perception that classroom teachers are poisoning the minds of children, inviting a wave of harassment against them.

Some provisions of these laws are so sweeping one can imagine teachers finding it virtually impossible to follow the law even if they wanted to. In Tennessee, teachers are prohibited from even including any material in the curriculum that promotes "division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people." This law would make it impossible to teach Thomas Jefferson's letter proposing colonization of formerly enslaved people outside the United States or Andrew Jackson's justification of the Indian Removal Act or Franklin Roosevelt's "second bill of rights" speech. The penalties for violating these teaching bans range from fines levied against individual teachers and revocation of their teaching licenses, to withholding state funding and rescinding accreditation of school districts, to the threat of lawsuits by parents.

A City Journal article by Christopher Rufo (the architect of the current right-wing culture war against critical race theory) placed the blame for more than 100 consecutive days of Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, at the feet of the city's schoolteachers, naming several individuals and inciting a doxing campaign against them. After the Zinn Education Project (coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change) invited educators across the country to " pledge to teach the truth" ("We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events"), the right-wing website The Daily Wire published the names of the roughly 5,000 educators who signed the pledge, and organized this hit list by state and community. Since then, we have heard from dozens of teachers who have received hate mail, online harassment, complaints to their administrators, and calls for their dismissal. A longtime teacher in Tennessee was fired in June after teaching two lessons about racism: a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and Kyla Jenee Lacey's spoken word poem "White Privilege." We fear and expect that he will not be the last casualty of this war on anti-racist teaching.

Educators have a duty to teach young people uncomfortable truths about the past and present, including the histories, legacies, and current manifestations of systemic oppression. But the Right gets it backward when they paint educators as agents of indoctrination. The demand that our classrooms become sites of discussion and inquiry about racism, sexism, and the long struggle for freedom does not come from the top down. Anyone who has spent time with young people knows that interest is organic, urgent, and comes from students themselves. Young people are not blank slates; they live in the real world. They see the viral videos of the murder of Black people and the anti-Asian racism and violence that escalated in sickening relationship to the pandemic. They see the segregation in their own schools. They see how COVID infections have disproportionately decimated Black and Brown communities. They see these "savage inequalities" in every corner of their daily lives, and they want to know "Why is it like this? How did we get here?"

Implicit in young people's hunger for explanations is dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire for change. The Republican policymakers behind this spate of bills no doubt know what polls have revealed since 2004: Young people aren't voting for them. On climate change, young people want robust and immediate action by the government; to combat economic insecurity, they want increased taxation of the wealthy, college debt relief, and affordable health care; they see the increasing racial diversity of the United States as good, and cite racial justice as a worthy goal. The party of Trump does not provide a single credible policy to address any of their most pressing concerns. By pointing the finger at K-12 education, conservatives avoid the cause of their own unpopularity - a free market, serve-the-rich political project.

Of course, these latest efforts to criminalize teachers go hand in hand with the wave of voter suppression bills that have swept the country. Indeed, in many places, Republican legislators are introducing "anti-CRT" bills alongside efforts to restrict the vote. Their reasoning seems to be "If they don't like our policies, let's take away their vote. If they don't like our ideas, let's take away their education."

Educators should reject this authoritarian logic and continue to use our classrooms to promote democracy. We have an ethical responsibility to answer students' questions - and to raise additional ones - about the world they're inheriting. Students deserve facts, not fables. From the Underground Railroad to lunch counter desegregation sit-ins to Vietnam draft resistance, there is a long and storied history in the United States of everyday people defying unjust laws. By requiring educators to lie to students through omission, euphemism, and sanitized accounts of the past and present, these bills are anti-education laws as surely as those that once made it illegal for enslaved people to learn to read. They are an attempt to hide this nation's racist past to more freely pursue a racist future. Wherever possible, educators should challenge them and, if necessary, defy them.

One obvious site of defiance will be our classrooms. One need only scan the table of contents of any recent issue of Rethinking Schools to find the kind of teaching and curriculum that would be off-limits under many of these bills: "Shape-Shifting Segregation Policies: Using Mexican American School Segregation to Discuss Structural Racism" (Winter 2020-21), "Tulsa and the Fight for Reparations" (Spring 2021), "Teaching the Radical Rosa Parks" (Fall 2020). We must continue to teach for justice by helping our students see in justice, imagine possible remedies, and develop the tools to enact them. These laws are history unfolding, and they too belong in lesson plans, for students to analyze and judge, as with any other current event of national significance. If our curriculum is silent about this contemporary struggle over what we teach in school, we rob our students of a critical lesson about the politics of knowledge and education.

Another way we can challenge these attacks is to commit to collective organizing and resistance. When one is the victim of hateful social media posts, the recipient of a vile anonymous email, or the subject of a baseless parent complaint, it can be easy to retreat into individualism, to seek the shortest path to eliminate the headache. But these attacks are part of a coordinated campaign and our response needs to be equally coordinated. We encourage educators to work through their unions to track attacks on teachers - as well as through their professional organizations like the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Council of Teachers of English. Our organizations need to offer concrete support to those who are targeted, provide political education to members about their rights, and powerfully defend teachers' ethical responsibility to teach the truth.

Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have made important statements critical of the legislative attacks on racial justice teaching. AFT President Randi Weingarten denounced "culture warriors" who "are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history." In July she said, "Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history." And at the NEA's Representative Assembly this summer, delegates affirmed the union's support for racial justice teaching and indicated that the NEA will "Join with Black Lives Matter at School and the Zinn Education Project to call for a rally this year on October 14 - George Floyd's birthday - as a national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression."

We recognize how demoralizing, scary, and destructive these attacks can be, particularly for educators already vulnerable in any number of ways: teachers of color, LGBTQ educators, early-career educators, and those working in states without strong unions. Overt resistance may not always be possible. That is why educators cannot wage this campaign of resistance on our own. We need parents, students, community groups, civil rights organizations, labor unions, and elected officials to join us in our defense of teaching the truth by testifying at school board meetings and state department of education hearings, writing letters to the editor and op-eds, and advocating to unseat the elected officials across the country who are the architects of these attacks.

In 1964, James Baldwin delivered "A Talk to Teachers." His opening paragraph, except for his references to the Soviet Union, could have been written today:

Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible - and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people - must be prepared to "go for broke." Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen.

We do not pretend that teaching for justice is easy or will not invite "the most determined resistance." We affirm that it is critical and righteous work. And that by doing this work, we join an esteemed collective of educators, past and present, who went for broke teaching children that, to paraphrase Eduardo Galeano, tomorrow can be more than just another name for today.

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Racial Justice, Our Classrooms, and the Right-Wing Attacks

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By Rethinking Schools Editors Illustrator: Barbara Miner As of the middle of August, more than two dozen states have introduced - and 11 states have enacted - bills or rules to restrict the teaching of history and contemporary social realities. Right-wing activists have mounted similar attacks at school board meetings throughout the country.

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Hearing Race: Reframing the Popular Music Narrative

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Hearing Race: Reframing the Popular Music Narrative

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Hearing Race: Reframing the Popular Music Narrative

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This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxWUSTL, an independent event.

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What Beyonce Taught Me About Race | Brittany Barron | TEDxPasadenaWomen

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Today is the United Nations' International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We wanted to take this commemorative opportunity to shed some light on this extremely painful part of global and North American history, to both celebrate the purpose of the UN's dedicated day of remembrance, and to have a chance to talk about the ways in which slavery contributed positively to the artistic development of American culture.

When remembering the transatlantic slave trade, it's easy to dwell on the horrors of the experience of slavery. However, as a product of the African diaspora myself, I can definitively say that I am grateful for the legacy I inherited - a legacy that contains brilliant scholars, inventors, and artists who, within the 20th century, managed to change the course of music, literature, and culture in profound ways. The resilience and resistance African slaves demonstrated in the face of oppression was the catalyst for an unprecedented amount of innovation. American music as an idea has been largely shaped by the byproducts of this resistance: blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, gospel, hip-hop, and so much more.

In 2014, I was fortunate enough to visit the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England. There I saw images that disturbed me to my core. But the beauty of this museum is that in addition to all of the traumatic images on display, there was also a section that focused on the many cultural gifts that have been given to modern society as a result of the antiquities of the slave trade. Despite that the after-effects of this era still haunt much of North America and the world, we are all beneficiaries of these cultural and artistic gifts.

Let's unpack how the legacy of the slave trade has made it from the early music of African slaves to genres that have become "as American as apple pie."

Slave Songs/Spirituals

One of the main casualties of slavery was language. Africa is a continent rich with many different countries, cultures, traditions, and languages. Most of the slave population that was taken across the Atlantic Ocean between the 17th and 19th centuries came from West Africa, and that region alone is just as diverse as all of Europe. So when the first African slaves arrived on American soil, many of them could not communicate with each other. Families and people from the same region were also separated, on purpose, so that ethnic and tribal communication would be even further limited amongst the slave population.

Because slaves were often prohibited from practicing traditional religions and customs from back home, new languages and dialects were created in the New World to hide elements of culture and communicative devices from their captors. These elements from African culture were able to subversively survive through music, among other ways.

Early slave songs known as spirituals were adaptations of the hymns that new slaves were taught during Sunday worship. One of the most interesting paradoxes of slavery was that despite the blatant cruelty of this dehumanizing practice, there was still an insistence that slaves worshiped "God" and become Christian. On most plantations in the American South, Sundays were considered a day of rest and slaves were allowed time to study scripture, learn about the Lord, and practice worship. This meant that Africans were allowed to play music, sing songs, and commune.

In places like Congo Square in New Orleans, slaves made use of this allowance to play the drums. And although this may seem like a minor detail, the rhythms and songs they learned and taught each other would go on to lay the foundations for so much of modern gospel music, let alone spread across New Orleans and the rest of the South to influence delta blues, jazz, and swing.

Singing hymns during Sunday worship was one of the few moments slaves were able to express themselves freely. As more of the population began to adopt Christianity, slaves were allowed to sing these songs while they worked, and stories of their lived reality began to seep into the narratives. Tales of freedom and salvation, their current plight mixed with a religious sensibility, forged together to create new spiritual songs to teach younger generations how to escape this earthly nightmare - in some cases, very literally.

A great example of this can be found in the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" below.

Although there are many different interpretations of this spiritual song, many believe that it was used as an instruction for runaway slaves to escape to the North, disguised as a biblical story. The drinking gourd refers, of course, to a literal gourd used to gather water, but was also used as a code to follow the Big Dipper constellation which points to the North Star. Many of the other lyrics speak of specific places to run to, and how to travel there.

It is even believed that Harriet Tubman used songs like this to help guide runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. The legacy of "Follow the Drinking Gourd" extends beyond the 19th century, and has been performed by artists as diverse as Taj Mahal and John Coltrane, whose "Song of the Underground Railroad" is based on the melody of this song.
"Wade in the Water"
"Wade in the Water" was first published officially in 1901, but it's been around for much longer. Scholars believe that this song was used to transmit secret codes to runaway slaves. Wading in the water referred to instructions to hide in the water and leave the main trails, so as to evade the search dogs. Metaphorically, though, water is a symbol of rebirth and transformation in Christianity and other religions. The song also makes reference to the Israelites who famously crossed the Red Sea to escape their own bondage in the biblical story of Exodus.

"Wade in the Water" has made an imprint on pop culture and has been covered by a wide range of artists including The Staple Sisters, Ramsey Lewis, Eva Cassidy, Billy Preston, and more. In my opinion, its popularity is a testament to the transcendental nature of the song's meaning and melody: a haunting call to be still and wait in the face of impending danger, which is a sentiment with which many generations of Americans can identify.

Spirituals were some of the first music by African Americans to eventually be published and recognized by Americans nationally. Ensembles such as the Fisk University Jubilee Singers popularized spirituals by performing them on tour and recording them, leading to more groups doing the same and helping bring these songs into the mainstream.

Work Songs

After the abolition of slavery in the mid-19th century, the economy of the southern states took a devastating blow. Unable to adjust to the efforts of reconstruction to try to provide a balance to the population, new laws were made that essentially criminalized much of the behaviors of the newly freed African American population. Those who were unable to find work were arrested for loitering and other minor offenses, and were sent off to do prison labor. Others who couldn't find work ended up becoming sharecroppers on plantations and doing the same grueling work of plantation labor for next to no money, and slave songs started to turn into work songs.

Recordists John and Alan Lomax traveled throughout the South in the early and mid-20th century recording these work songs in a variety of places, but significantly in prisons. Oftentimes prisoners would have to chop down trees, and the push and pull of two different groups alternating strikes with their axes created a two-beat rhythmic pattern that the workers could sing over.

The music of these work songs was similar to the spirituals, but the content took on more secular material - often using metaphors to personify their labor as something else, and with way less scrutiny from the plantation owners. These songs were sung by prisoners, sharecroppers, and the now-freed slaves, who still had to resort to grueling manual labor either by force or financial necessity.

Scholars have noted a similarity between the work songs of the Antebellum South and the work songs of Ghanaian fishermen. Listen:

Musically, work songs tend to be more harmonious than the spirituals in their basic form. At this point, African Americans had had access to instruments and were allowed to sing more freely. This is not to suggest that all spirituals were sung in unison, monophonically, but rather to point out how singing and music began to change post-abolition. Most of the new recordings of spirituals we hear have been rearranged for choirs, in a hymn-like style that mixes Bachian choral harmony and gospel syncopation. Yet at the root of spirituals and work songs is this feeling of being able to overcome a seemingly insurmountable pain.

Eventually, the guitar and the piano became the weapon of choice for a new crop of singers who would combine both the secular and the spiritual into a new genre that would change the world...

The Blues

The blues is often oversimplified as a three-chord progression over which a blues scale melody is improvised on either an electric guitar or harmonica. (For a deeper exploration into the blues, check out Soundfly's free online course, A Conversation with the Blues, which traces the through-lines of the blues in jazz, improvisation, rock 'n' roll, and even modern American poetry.)

The blues truly represents the transition from African slave to African American citizenry.

The blues was the soundtrack of those who, in the midst of this newfound freedom, struggled to define themselves within the aftermath of slavery, the industrial revolution, and the birth of a new form of slavery: Jim Crow.

One element that differentiates the blues from its predecessors is that it's inherently more complex. For the first time in their history in America, African Americans had leisure time to sit and think deeply and critically about life, as well as learn instruments. In fact, it is the influence of instruments such as the guitar, banjo, piano, and various brass instruments that spawned a new sonic language for African Americans. Using various techniques like slides, trills, and bending notes, blues musicians were able to get their instruments to sing with the same inflections as a vocalist.

In poet Amiri Baraka's groundbreaking book, Blues People, he states that the blues in its primitive form is without a definitive structure. Over time, though, the added definition, structure, and wider instrumentation allowed the blues to evolve in a way that started to make it digestible for more mainstream American audiences. This classic early blues style was popularized in the American mainstream by artists such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and countless others.

One element that makes blues music so effective is the blues scale and its functionality. Most early blues songs were in major keys featuring mostly major and dominant chords. The blues scale superimposes a minor pentatonic scale over a major key, with the addition of a very important note: the raised fourth, or sharp eleventh. This note adds chromaticism to melodic ideas and creates tension within the home key.

Therefore, both musically and metaphorically, the blues represents an unorthodox juxtaposition of ideas, which is arguably reflective of how the African American experience fits into American society as a whole.

Modern Innovations

As I previously mentioned, Congo Square in New Orleans is a very important site in regards to the evolution of American music. On Sundays, the slaves were allowed to play their drums during worship services and even for themselves. Gatherings in Congo Square provided the perfect environment for drummers of various backgrounds to share ideas and eventually incorporate European instruments. This sparked the rhythmic catalysts for what would eventually become dance-based musical forms such as ragtime, the boogaloo, the backbeat, and the shuffle.

The African thread throughout American music can be most notably traced through rhythm. As the blues migrated throughout the country and began affecting the way Americans rethought song form, singing styles, and storytelling, the rhythms began to shift and permeate American music in other ways, slowly giving way to new styles such as rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, funk, and gospel. Syncopation, riffing, blue notes, and call and response are all elements of African music that have permeated the American mainstream, thanks to the ingenuity and "kitchen-sink" musical mentality of African Americans during and after slavery.

But as these various musical forms that derived from slave songs started to develop and become integrated into larger artistic contexts, they were swiftly abstracted from their original source. Hip-hop is the latest derivative of slave songs. In hip-hop's foundational years, the music being created was a reaction to disco. Hip-hop stripped away the musical frills of disco and left just the drums and an emcee talking over the beats. This represented a return to the elements that made up the earliest forms of African American music: drums and voices.

Today, as music continually evolves and transforms, there are artists who have sought to draw inspiration from the earliest relics of the African diaspora. In particular, two New Orleanian trumpet players have released projects within the last couple of years that focus on connecting different elements of the African diasporic tradition with innovations from electronic music (drum machines, sampling, the use of effects, etc.). Those are Nicholas Payton's Afro-Caribbean Mixtape and Christian Scott's Centennial Trilogy, which includes songs like "Ruler Rebel," "Diaspora," and "Emancipation Procrastination."

In the realm of hip-hop, artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, and Common have all recently released recordings that speak, much like the blues, directly about the conditions of African Americans, while drawing sonically from elements of jazz, funk, and gospel.

Unfortunately, new forms of slavery still exist in a world that, although modern and vastly more tolerant, is still deeply flawed, unequal, and cruel. The number of men, women, and children considered to be locked in modern forms of slavery or unjustly imprisoned today is estimated at 40 million. Imagine a world where 40 million people could contribute to the world from a space of equality rather than bondage. It is this hope of a better world that gives spirituals, work songs, and the blues a power that perseveres through the most difficult times.

As we remember the history of slave songs and their plentiful musical offspring, it's important to honor and respect that these genres are not simply subsets of musical variation, but relics of a culture born out of the cruelty of slavery. Because when you don't honor the culture and history of a musical genre for its past, there's a chance you might end of up creating a work like SLĀV.

To dig deeper into the music referenced in this article check out my playlist below.
+ What are you working on? Share your musical goals with us and we'll pair you with a Soundfly Mentor from our team of professional musicians, composers, producers, educators, and music industry veterans to help you achieve them!

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The Lasting Legacy of the Slave Trade on American Music - Soundfly

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Today is the United Nations' International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We wanted to take this commemorative opportunity to shed some light on this extremely painful part of global and North American history, to both celebrate the purpose of the UN's dedicated day of remembrance, and to have a chance to talk about the ways in which slavery contributed positively to the artistic development of American culture.

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Transcript of "Why it's so hard to talk about the N-word"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor leads a thoughtful and history-backed examination of one of the most divisive words in the English language: the N-word. Drawing from personal experience, she explains how reflecting on our points of encounter with the word can help promote productive discussions and, ultimately, create a framework that reshapes education around the complicated history of racism in the US.

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Black Lives Matter at School: Curriculum Resources

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Black Lives Matter at School: Curriculum Resources

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We lead with the heart and courageously work to address racial injustice in education, embodying Black joy, confronting anti-Blackness, and building authentic partnerships with all who support creating equitable school communities across the nation.

​In September 2016, DeShawn Jackson, along with Black Men Uniting to Change The Narrative, planned a day of encouragement. The previous school year, another local elementary school had more than 200 Black men show up to greet students as they arrived at school. The men wore their uniforms, regalia, and Sunday best in hopes of disrupting the inaccurate imagery students have of Black men. Black men make up only 3% of teachers in k-12 education.​

DeShawn had taught at the school for six years and even attended the elementary school as a child. He wanted students to see Black men in a positive light, not like they often are portrayed in media. A bomb threat was called into the school on the day of the event, so school leadership officially canceled it. Yet, after the threat was investigated, nothing was found, and the school remained open. So, DeShawn personally greeted students and about fifty others joined him.

When students arrived at John Muir Elementary School, they were greeted with cheers and high-fives while drums played in the background. Black men showed up because they wanted to counter the perception students have about education and race. Inside the school, staff wore shirts that said "Black Lives Matter We Stand Together."Julie Trout, the art teacher, designed the shirts. Teachers' lessons for the day were focused on racial justice.

​Social Equality Educators (SEE), a group within the Seattle teachers union, decided October 19th would be "Black Lives Matter At School Day." They'd wear Black Lives Matter shirts to school, created a second design with "#Say Her Name," and educators picked from several options. Parent Teacher Associations made buttons and stickers for teachers and students to wear. This attracted national news, which spread to Philadelphia, where the Racial Justice & Organizing Committee of the Caucus of Working Educators was inspired to plan a similar action.

We envision a nation in which we live in authentic and conscious relationship with ourselves, each other, and the lands we occupy with the least amount of harm and violence, in which we are unapologetically Black and collectively love and care for one another as extended intergenerational families. To achieve safety, equity, and liberation for all Black lives, we attend to systems and networks of care to make the domination, erasure, and dehumanization of Black life obsolete. ​

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National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

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We Can Create Change Together (Black and Asian Solidarity)

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We Can Create Change Together (Black and Asian Solidarity)

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The morning of March 17, 2021, I woke up with puffy eyes, a pounding head and a mouth that felt stuffed with wool. I'd stayed up too late the night before, grieving. Eight people had been kille d in the Atlanta area, six of whom were Asian women, and the anger and pain had overwhelmed me. Those women looked like my aunties, like my ancestors, like me.

I fumbled for my phone and was surprised to find it full of unread messages. One was from my cousin who lives in New York, expressing her sorrow and her fear, reaching out to make sure I was OK, for some reassurance that she was OK. But the messages were not only from other Asian people. A multiracial group of friends and colleagues had reached out to say, "I know you are hurting. I know what this hurt feels like. I want to hold it with you. Together, we can change this."

This last belief- Together, we can change this -is foundational to the practice of solidarity, to working in diverse coalitions toward positive change.

Over the past year, we have seen massive movements for racial justice. Much of the focus has been on fighting anti-Asian and anti-Black racism, and these struggles have often been represented as separate fights, parallel lines that will never intersect. And yet, all forms of racism, as well as successful efforts against them, are deeply interconnected. Teaching about solidarity, including Black and Asian solidarity, can help students recognize ways that they can work together for justice.

As educators, we can support students' understanding of what solidarity is and encourage their sense of ownership and empowerment around acting in solidarity with others. To do this, however, we'll need to lift up a few key concepts about solidarity that students should know. This includes teaching and celebrating the history of multiracial solidarity, recognizing with students the ways white supremacy makes solidarity challenging, and stressing for young people the ways solidarity pushes beyond connection or empathy into shared action for change.

Solidarity Requires Relationships

In California, Lailan Huen is Oakland Unified School District's Program Manager for Asian Pacific Islander Student Achievement (APISA). This March, in the wake of recent tensions and violence in the Oakland community-tensions that have long existed and have flared up in the past-Huen worked with high school students to organize a workshop series: Black & Asian, Pacific Islander & SWANA (South West Asian & North African) Student Solidarity.

The three goals of the series were "Knowing Our History," "Current Issues" and "Building Forward Together." In the workshop, students shared and listened to each other's stories with the aim of building stronger solidarity between groups. They started with understanding each other's identities and their communities' histories, an intentional choice.

Huen emphasized the foundational importance of storytelling to solidarity efforts. "A big piece of the recommendations from students and our community," she explains, "is that we have to learn about each other through ethnic studies, through storytelling and sharing across our communities. ... That has to happen before we can really meaningfully build solidarity."

Deepa Iyer, a writer, activist and staff member at the Building Movement Project, describes solidarity this way: "Some people think it's sort of like a buzzword and it doesn't mean anything beyond a hashtag or a slogan. And that's our challenge: How do we move towards using our sense of connection and common cause with each other to create change, to build collective power, to transform our communities?"

Solidarity Isn't New

As the goals of the Oakland workshop make clear, understanding a shared history-building connections, recognizing what solidarity really is, and understanding the legacies upon which today's solidarity efforts build-is a necessary first step for students to take meaningful action. For educators, that means teaching not only the histories of individuals and communities but also the history of solidarity movements.

In the last year, we've seen increased public awareness of social issues that affect all of us, with young people showing up to support efforts ranging from climate justice to immigration rights to Black Lives Matter and more. Media coverage has focused on how racially diverse these protest movements appear, especially when compared to similar protest movements of the past.

In news photographs of the Stop Asian Hate marches, for example, the faces I saw in the streets looked like the group of people who had reached out to me privately. And yet, even though multiracial solidarity might be more visible than ever before, it is not new.

One example of historical solidarity to highlight with students is that of the San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) student strike of 1968 and 1969. Led by a multiracial coalition of students of color known as the Third World Liberation Front, the strike built on the groundwork laid by the Black Student Union (BSU) at San Francisco State, the very first BSU in the United States.

This story is particularly valuable because it can help students understand some key points about solidarity itself: that solidarity is built on activism, that solidarity is a necessary response to policies that seek to divide marginalized groups, and that young people have the power and agency to create change through solidarity.

At San Francisco State, the BSU students had previously organized around Black studies and guaranteed admission slots for Black students. When Asian and Latinx students learned about the admissions guarantees, they wanted the same. But the college responded by saying the Black students would have to share their allotment.

In a moment that led to political awakening for many young people, the Third World Liberation Front showed that collective organizing was key to a fundamental shift toward justice, an effective alternative to a zero-sum model that encourages communities of color to fight for a scarcity of resources divvied up amongst themselves.

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The morning of March 17, 2021, I woke up with puffy eyes, a pounding head and a mouth that felt stuffed with wool. I'd stayed up too late the night before, grieving. Eight people had been kille d in the Atlanta area, six of whom were Asian women, and the anger and pain had overwhelmed me.

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“I’m Going to Keep Doing What I Do” (Iowa Educators Resist New State Law)

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“I’m Going to Keep Doing What I Do” (Iowa Educators Resist New State Law)

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Iowa Educators Resist New State Law

By Monique Cottman, Lisa Covington, and Jesse Hagopian
In May, Jesse Hagopian, Rethinking Schools editor and high school ethnic studies teacher, interviewed Black Lives Matter at School-Iowa educators Monique Cottman and Lisa Covington. Cottman (blmatschoolsiowa@gmail.com) is a 6th-grade teacher in Iowa City. She is an NEA member who works with teachers across the state on social justice and cultural competency. Covington (profcov1@gmail.com) works with youth and is a doctoral candidate in sociology of education at the University of Iowa. She teaches a community ethnic studies class in collaboration with Sankofa Outreach Connection.
Jesse Hagopian: I understand that Iowa is one of a number of states to pass a bill banning the teaching of structural racism, with similar bills having been introduced into state legislatures in more than 20 states. Tell us about the Iowa bill.

Monique Cottman: In 2016, Iowa Democrats lost their three-seat senate majority. When those senators were there, every time all these conservative bills would come up, they would never get past the senate. The anti-trans, pro-racist stuff that we're seeing this year, people in Iowa are used to seeing those bills come up every single year. It's just that people didn't have to worry about them getting traction when the Democrats ran the senate. Now, the Republicans have the house, the senate, and the governor's office. Everything just keeps coming back again and again and again - anti-labor, anti-love, anti-education, anti-Black.

With Trump, the national political landscape completely shifted to where the legislature felt "Yeah, this is the time to get everything pushed through." So as soon as this legislative session started, we saw bills coming out saying we're going to require the Pledge of Allegiance, we're going to ban trans people from sports, we're going to ban the 1619 Project, and we're not going to do any diversity training. I've been in Iowa since 2006, and six years ago I would have said there's no way in hell that any of that would pass. But all of that stuff skated through virtually unchallenged this year.

House File 802 says that public schools can't do diversity training or teach real U.S. history. And what's messed up about their argument is they claim to support anti-discrimination. They are saying because you can't discriminate against anyone for their race, you cannot teach about white supremacy culture - because that makes white people feel bad. They say, "Teach about racial discrimination, but not about structural racism." But it doesn't make any sense. The bill really protects white fragility by trying to hide from students the fact that there is white privilege. Yet the bill itself is a clear example of how white supremacy culture presents itself in our schools.

Lisa Covington: That's right. The bill bans teaching that "the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist."

Jesse Hagopian: That is really outrageous. Given that according to Merriam-Webster "fundamental" means "serving as an original or generating source." How can we teach the fact that our country originated by taking land and lives of Native Americans and with the enslavement of African people? You literally can't teach about the founding of this country or its long history without talking about systemic racism.

Monique Cottman: Well, Senator Ernst said in a 2020 interview that there is no systemic racism in Iowa. People should know that an earlier house file would have banned the 1619 Project explicitly, but that bill didn't end up passing.

Lisa Covington: That would have been especially wrong to ban the 1619 Project given that the lead author of it, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is from Iowa. But the bill they did pass is about trying to stop educators from using resources like the 1619 Project or BLM at School - even if it doesn't name them specifically.

Jesse Hagopian: What impact do you think this is going to have on teaching in public schools? What are you teachers in the movement prepared to do? How do you think this will play out?

Monique Cottman: It's already playing out. White teachers who started doing a little bit more teaching about race and racism are now going back to their old way of teaching. I've had conversations with teachers who said things like "I'm getting so much pushback for teaching Alice Walker, I'm going to go back to teaching what I used to teach." So teachers who would have done a little bit of what I was doing - anti-racism work and culturally responsive teaching - they're not going to do anything next year. They're already declaring "It's not safe" or "I don't want to lose my job."

These are the kinds of decisions that teachers are making because they know they're not going to get any support from their administrator or the school board when white parents start reporting teachers who teach real Black history. And nobody wants to deal with that. And that's exactly what the government intended with the passing of this new law. It was about shutting down any momentum that we had from the mass Black Lives Matter marches and protests and things that were going on last year. They want to try to stop us from continuing to build up a base of allies who follow and listen to what we're saying.

But let me be clear: I'm going to keep doing what I do, because that's what I do. I'm going to teach the truth. As Assata Shakur said, "I have nothing to lose but my chains."

Jesse Hagopian: And know that when you teach the truth, we've got your back and there will be a lot of folks around the country who rise up in support of you. I'm excited for the national day of action on June 12, in opposition to these bills banning the teaching of structural racism.

Lisa Covington: Yes. And this work is so important right now. This year we are getting students and teachers from all over Iowa to come together in community with each other to do this anti-racist work, and to ask them how would you like to contribute? How can we support you? We may be in Iowa City, and you may be in Des Moines or in Waterloo, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be connected. I had a meeting on Monday with the Des Moines BLM folks, and we're working on supporting their Juneteenth event. We also are working on an event for the June 12th national day of action to teach the truth about structural racism. We will be focusing on honoring the legacy of Black folks in Iowa like Alexander Clark, who desegregated schools in Muscatine in 1868 and was the first Black person to graduate from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1879; Harriette Curley, who was the first Black teacher in the state during the 1940s; and countless other Black people who contributed to make the state a place where Black people can thrive. The June 12 Pledge to #TeachTruth Day of Action is a necessary reminder of this information. This kind of resistance is what's going to bring us together in a struggle to allow teachers not to lie to their students.

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By Monique Cottman, Lisa Covington, and Jesse Hagopian In May, Jesse Hagopian, Rethinking Schools editor and high school ethnic studies teacher, interviewed Black Lives Matter at School-Iowa educators Monique Cottman and Lisa Covington. Cottman (blmatschoolsiowa@gmail.com) is a 6th-grade teacher in Iowa City.

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Right-Wing Legislators Are Trying to Stop Us from Teaching for Racial Justice. We Refuse.

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Right-Wing Legislators Are Trying to Stop Us from Teaching for Racial Justice. We Refuse.

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By Editors of Rethinking Schools

Illustrator: Boris Séméniako

"The alphabet is abolitionist."

This powerful statement comes from an 1867 Harper's Weekly editorial rallying its mostly Northern readers to the fight for robust public education as part of the post-Civil War reconstruction of the South. It rightly rooted this struggle in the violent denial of literacy under the slavocracy. In that context, learning - or teaching others - to read and write was indeed abolitionist.

The political project of white supremacy has always included attacks on education and those attacks continue in 2021. Today's Republican Party is not so bold as to suggest educators be prohibited from teaching their pupils to read the alphabet, only that we be prohibited from teaching them to read the world.

Lawmakers in a growing number of states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the past and present. The bill introduced in the Missouri legislature exemplifies a rash of similar bills - in Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and others. It bans teaching that "identifies people or groups of people, entities, or institutions in the United States as inherently, immutably, or systemically sexist, racist, anti-LGBT, bigoted, biased, privileged, or oppressed."

Since these laws seem to be written with the intent to confuse, let's focus on just a few terms from the comma-laden lists of the Missouri law: institutions, systemically, racist. Under the Missouri legislation an educator could not, without penalty, teach their students that the authors of the U.S. Constitution (establishing the institutions of the U.S. government) included multiple protections for enslavers and slavery (another institution), making white supremacy ( racism) foundational ( systemic), to the United States.

To put it another way, in 2021, when children look around at the vast inequalities apparent in every corner of their daily lives - where the wealth of a typical white family is 10 times that of a typical Black family, where a Black person is three times as likely to die in childbirth as a white person, and where African Americans are five times as likely to be in prison as their white counterparts - and ask, "Why? Why is it like this?" that child's teacher would be prohibited from answering their student's earnest and urgent question.

These laws peddle in bait-and-switch tactics, using the language of anti-discrimination to mask their perpetuation of a discriminatory and unjust status quo. Louisiana's "divisive concepts" law lists "That one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex" as its very first banned concept. No disagreement there. But further down the "divisive concepts" list we find "That either the United States of America or the state of Louisiana is fundamentally, institutionally, or systemically racist or sexist." Using the bait of anti-racism and anti-sexism, the law switches to demand educators repudiate the very existence of racism or sexism at all. This in a state where Black women face the worst pay gap in the country, earning a median $26,488 a year in wages, compared with $55,386 in median annual wages earned by white men there.

By banning educators from teaching about these realities, lawmakers seek to deny young people the right to understand - and so effectively act upon - the world they've been bequeathed. These bills are an attack on democracy itself.

And they are part of the larger white supremacist project of disenfranchisement and starvation of public goods. For the last decade, voter suppression has been a signature of Republican state legislators: voter ID laws to voter roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures, all of which disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Brown, poor, young, elderly, and disabled voters. The rich get richer while public schools (in which a majority are students of color and poor) literally crumble, educators scrounge to make sure students have basic supplies, and school nurses, counselors, and librarians are treated as optional. During the pandemic, U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by $1.6 trillion or 55 percent. Yet, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has called any increase to the corporate tax rate (which was eviscerated under President Trump) a "red line." In the context of these policy priorities, it's worth asking what function this recent spate of anti-education bills serve.

Noting that many of these bills seek to regulate or ban educators' use of "critical race theory" and the New York Times ' "1619 Project," Dr. Greg Carr, associate professor of Africana Studies at Howard University, said, "It's not about critical race theory. The numbers you must keep in mind are not 1619, nor 1776. The four numbers you need to keep in mind are 2022." Indeed, these bills are not just about a struggle over history, but an effort to seize control of politics in the present. The bill in Texas is particularly instructive as it specifically targets how teachers address "current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs." It also bans schools from providing course credit for student activism, including practicums, service learning, and internships. These bills attempt to deny our students not only an honest history of our country, but also models of activism for making it fairer today. They are a recipe not for democratic engagement, but for ignorance - and obedience to the status quo.

As dangerous as they are, we view these bills as a victory for the movements of which we are a part and with which we act in solidarity. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked, "One doesn't make laws to prevent the sheep from planning insurrection." In other words, no one creates a law based on what they believe to be impossible. Republican lawmakers across the country are acting because the ground is shifting. Following the summer uprisings for racial justice in 2020, which were by some accounts the largest in U.S. history, thousands of teachers committed to learning more about the United States' long history of white supremacy and to teaching their students about the equally long struggles for justice that continue to this day. Thousands of teachers attended dozens of webinars and teach-ins, sponsored by Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project, or purchased Teaching for Black Lives and other books to help them infuse racial justice into their curricula and classrooms. Last year three times as many schools participated in the Black Lives Matter at School's week of action compared to the year before. School districts across the country voted to eliminate or suspend their policing-in-schools programs, making progress toward one of the key demands of Black Lives Matter at School: Fund counselors not cops. Young people across the country are witnessing the power of activism firsthand; as key places where they are invited to reflect, analyze, and learn more about what is happening and why, our classrooms have become the target of reactionaries.

The good news: Educators everywhere are refusing to be silenced.

But we can and will fight back. Unions at all levels should organize against these attacks on teachers' right to fulfill one of their core ethical responsibilities: to not lie to children. We welcome the opposition to these bills offered by NEA, AFT, and professional organizations like the National Council for the Social Studies. Now they must take the next step by marshaling their resources and members to coordinate robust national and local resistance.

Many teachers are already resisting. Thousands have signed a pledge, organized by the Zinn Education Project, that reads in part:

We the undersigned educators will not be bullied. We will continue our commitment to develop critical thinking that supports students to better understand problems in our society, and to develop collective solutions to those problems. We are for truth-telling and uplifting the power of organizing and solidarity that move us toward a more just society.

The bad news is that right-wing legislators across the country are attempting to reach into our classrooms to censor a curriculum that encourages students to question injustice and to see themselves as capable of making the world a better place. The good news: Educators everywhere are refusing to be silenced, refusing to let a conservative agenda dictate what they teach their students. Erin Chisholm, a high school history teacher in Glendale, Arizona, defiantly wrote in her "Pledge to Teach the Truth": "The truth is worth more than the $5,000 fine the state of Arizona wants to slap on me if I allow my students to become critical thinkers." And elementary teacher Trechiondria Lathan, from Iowa City, Iowa, wrote: "I will not simply comply with racist laws, or be disrespected, dismissed, and traumatized by administrators and political leaders who proudly inflict harm on BIPOC students, families, and educators across the nation. In the words of Angela Davis, 'I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.'"

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Right-Wing Legislators Are Trying to Stop Us from Teaching for Racial Justice. We Refuse.

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By Editors of Rethinking Schools Illustrator: Boris Séméniako "The alphabet is abolitionist." This powerful statement comes from an 1867 Harper's Weekly editorial rallying its mostly Northern readers to the fight for robust public education as part of the post-Civil War reconstruction of the South.

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Educators Fight for Authentic Ethnic Studies

By Jody Sokolower

Illustrator: Leila Abdelrazaq

In a struggle that is eerily similar to the battle for the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson a decade ago, teachers, students, and community activists in California are fighting to defend the content and pedagogy of ethnic studies. Their opposition? California politicians and right-wing lobbyists who are trying to turn transformative knowledge into a pale, ineffective shadow of itself.

At first it seemed that educators who have spent years pushing for ethnic studies as a high school requirement had won a major victory. In September 2016, almost 50 years after the historic Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley that gave birth to ethnic studies as a discipline, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation directing the state's department of education to create an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) to provide direction for districts interested in implementing high school ethnic studies courses. As a Palestinian American teacher and parent of twins, Samia Shoman was elated. "I don't want my children, or any other children, to have the experience I did as a student," she says. (See "Independence or Catastrophe? Teaching Palestine Through Multiple Narratives," Rethinking Schools, summer 2014.)

"I am the daughter of Palestinian immigrants," Shoman explains. "At my Sacramento elementary school, we had class parties for holidays like Halloween, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Chinese New Year, but no parties that reflected my culture or religion. I didn't see my parents in the room or my history in our lessons. My parents taught me at home to love my Palestinian culture, but I couldn't find a place for it at school and, apparently, neither could my teachers.

"All this made me just want to fit in with the 'Americans' - and to me that seemed like the white kids. When I reflect back, there are so many details that make me see how colonized my mind was. I never invited my parents to school. I didn't like my name and had all kinds of ideas for changing it. I was a senior in high school when the first Gulf War broke out, and the news was full of negative stereotypes of Arabs and the Middle East. I worked hard to distance myself from that, even leading a campaign to tie yellow ribbons around trees in support of our troops bombing Iraq. I never fully felt like myself. I was living in two worlds - a U.S. world at school and an Arab one at home. I didn't understand that I could be both."

So when the California Department of Education (CDE), responding to the new mandate, created an advisory committee of ethnic studies K-12 teachers and university scholars to create the ESMC, Shoman applied. "At the time," she says, "I was leading a push to bring ethnic studies to my district and we visited ethnic studies classes at James Logan High School in Union City. Seeing how engaged the students were and how meaningful the curriculum was to them - it was life-changing.

"Our social science curriculum remains predominantly Eurocentric. In my 21 years in education, 16 of them as a full-time classroom teacher, I have seen too many students like me - lost in navigating multiple identities, not knowing their histories, and trying to change themselves instead of the society and world. Ethnic studies is an opportunity for teachers to create a classroom community that is grounded in a humanizing pedagogy that uplifts and revitalizes students, especially those who have been largely ignored in our school systems," she says. "It is an opportunity for youth to explore what is happening in their communities and why, and to build their capacity to change things. It has the power to save lives. That is why I wanted to participate."

"Ethnic studies is an opportunity for teachers to create a classroom community that is grounded in a humanizing pedagogy that uplifts and revitalizes students, especially those who have been largely ignored in our school systems."

Shoman and the other members of the advisory committee designed the ESMC to give students the tools to understand U.S. history so they can be confident, critical thinkers and activists for change. Centered on the voices of Native American, Black, Latinx/Chicanx, and Asian/Pacific Islander communities, the curriculum focused on how struggles against settler colonialism, slavery, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression have defined U.S. history and current reality. Following decades of ethnic studies practice, Arab American studies was housed within the Asian American studies section.

In August 2019, the draft curriculum went up for public comment. A well-organized right-wing campaign headed by a pro-Israel lobby committed to preventing any critical discussion of Israel, flooded the CDE with demands to remove the Arab American curriculum - especially all mention of Palestine - and the anti-colonial, anti-racist framing of the entire curriculum. The CDE and Gov. Newsom bowed to the pressure. As Melissa Weiss reported in a Sept. 25, 2020, article in the Jewish Insider, "After an uproar, Newsom apologized for the language of the draft, promising an overhaul and that the original draft 'will never see the light of day.'"

The CDE disbanded the original advisory committee and the ESMC was revised under a cloak of secrecy - they refused to release the names of the consultants or the writers in charge of the revisions. They did, however, continue to meet with pro-Israel lobbyists. Media headlines targeted the ESMC's mention of BDS (the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its human rights violations against Palestinians) in a list of social movements students might want to research. But, in fact, the pro-Israel lobby's opposition extended to any mention of Palestine or acknowledgment of Arab American studies as integral to ethnic studies.

Arab American, Asian American, and other ethnic studies educators, students, and community members started organizing to defend the ESMC. University faculty joined forces with K-12 teachers and community activists to enlist support and public comment. The Association for Asian American Studies, the Arab American Studies Association, Black Lives Matter, Jewish Voice for Peace, veterans of the 1968 strikes, and internationally recognized scholars - including Angela Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley - all came out in support of the ESMC. Progressive Jewish educators and activists made it clear that the pro-Israel lobby does not speak for them.

Ten days before the Aug. 13, 2020, public meeting of the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC), the body charged with overseeing the process, a revised version of the ESMC was released. The Arab American curriculum - including all mention of Palestine - was gone. The Asian Pacific Islander lessons were gone. And the ethnic studies values, principles, and pedagogy throughout had been turned into a watered-down "all lives matter" curriculum.

As thousands of comments from ethnic studies advocates flooded the public comment email, the CDE realized that a lot of educators were angry, and that the ESMC was in danger of losing credibility with teachers and parents across the state. In a last-minute reversal, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond started the Aug. 13 meeting of the IQC by saying: "There is an acknowledgment that Arab American studies is part of ethnic studies. . . . We look forward to continued dialogue as we collaborate to finish this critical resource at this critical time."

But, after the meeting was over and a new round of revisions began, there was no continued dialogue with the original advisory committee or with recognized ethnic studies scholars. Once again, the revision process was opaque and the original advisory committee, ethnic studies scholars, and the Arab American community were ignored. Then, on Oct. 1, Newsom went a step further and vetoed AB331, which would have mandated an ethnic studies course for all California students and set a deadline for implementation. Were we back at square one?

Once again, the movement took their campaign public. About 4,500 people attended four Save Arab American Studies Coalition webinars that discussed the significance of ethnic studies, analyzed the problems with the revisions, and mobilized public comment. Shoman taught an online workshop, demonstrating what an Arab American studies lesson steeped in ethnic studies pedagogy looks like. (See "Resources" at the end of this article to watch her lesson.) Arab American, Asian Pacific Islander, Muslim, Chicanx, Sikh, and other activists collaborated on joint campaigns, supporting each other's demands. Almost 20,000 people submitted public comment in support of Arab American studies as central to authentic ethnic studies curriculum. Students posted selfies saying why they need ethnic studies.

That solidarity and collaboration is an important advance for the movement, but it seems to have had no impact so far on the CDE. The most recent version of the ESMC was discussed by the IQC on Nov. 18 and 19. Despite Thurmond's commitment only a few months earlier, the few Arab American lessons aren't in the main document as part of Asian American studies; they have been relegated to an "interethnic bridge-building" appendix. The lessons submitted by Arab American studies teachers - e.g., a study of the reasons for and impact of Arab immigration to the United States, an exploration of Arab American identity through hip-hop, important historical and current Arab American figures - have been rejected in favor of a problematic lesson that focuses on Arab American stereotypes in The Great Gatsby. The principles and pedagogy of ethnic studies as a discipline are gone, buried, or twisted out of recognition.

Once again, ethnic studies advocates turned out in force for the public comment section of the virtual IQC meeting. A number of the speakers were young students, who made it clear what's at stake. "I am a Palestinian Arab student," said Hedaia. "Do you know how it feels to be called a terrorist by your teacher and classmates? It's dehumanizing. As much as I tried to assimilate at my high school, I was always a scary Arab with a hard name to pronounce. This is how I grew up, facing Islamophobic and Arab slurs in and out of school. Explaining myself in classes where Arabs and Muslims are mentioned for one day each year: on Sept. 11. My people are not the stereotypes. We are teachers, students, healthcare workers, politicians, everything. By removing Arab American studies from the central curriculum, you are removing the existence of people who have contributed to this society and need to be represented in a positive light. Representation matters."

Ethnic studies educators were incensed by the process and the lack of respect for experts in the field. "I am deeply disturbed by the hijacking of ethnic studies," said Elias Serna, professor of English and Chicana/o Studies and president of the Association of Mexican American Educators, West LA chapter. "Since when does a one-sided public comment determine the tenets, principles, and pedagogy of an established academic discipline about the study of race, racism, class, gender, sexuality, history, intersectionality, and power? Where are the ethnic studies scholars and practitioners? It takes audacity to attempt to redefine the field of ethnic studies, and the ease and arrogance with which it is going on has to remind some of us that colonization has not ended. Ya basta!"

It was also clear, from the public comments of the opposition, what their goals are. "We don't want 'critical' ethnic studies," caller after caller said. "We want 'constructive' ethnic studies." Their comments echo Trump's Sept. 17 announcement of a 1776 Commission to promote "patriotic education." "Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history," Trump said, "is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country." "Constructive ethnic studies" - even with the inclusion of uplifting stories of people of color - is not ethnic studies at all; it is another name for the dominant narrative of U.S. history.

As Jason Ferreira, associate professor in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, explained to the IQC in an open letter: "Ethnic Studies is not diversity studies, nor another name for multicultural studies. Ethnic studies explores the intersection of race and power. . . . The sidelining of the original committee, composed of actual ethnic studies practitioners, echoes an all-too-familiar feeling amongst people of color of having our experiences and our expertise denied because it makes others uncomfortable. But the avoidance of that discomfort for most of U.S. and California history is precisely why ethnic studies is necessary."

There is one more set of revisions before the CDE approves the ESMC in March 2021. The Save Arab American Studies Coalition and other activists are frustrated but determined. "The curriculum is so far from what we originally created," says Shoman. "Arabs have been taken out of our rightful place in Asian American Studies. Palestine has been identified as a polarizing issue and deleted. We are constantly having to defend our existence, and this seems like another of those moments.

"I need my kids and others like them to see themselves in their classrooms. To be proud of who they are - not only because we say that at home, but also because it is being reinforced at school. I don't want my kids, or any other kids, to feel embarrassed about who they are or their ancestral roots. I want them to find their voices and speak up for justice," she says. "That's why we're going to continue fighting for ethnic studies that is anti-racist, decolonial, and liberatory for all our children."

RESOURCES
For more information on the Save Arab American Studies Coalition and to sign an educators' petition in support, go to: savearabamericanstudies.org

For more information on teaching about Palestine, including the Arab American studies lessons from the original ESMC, go to: teachpalestine.org

For Shoman's webinar on Teaching Arab American Studies, access the video here: bit.ly/3rG06iy - and the slides here: bit.ly/2WR551B

Support independent, progressive media and subscribe to Rethinking Schools at www.rethinkingschools.org/subscribe

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By Jody Sokolower Illustrator: Leila Abdelrazaq In a struggle that is eerily similar to the battle for the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson a decade ago, teachers, students, and community activists in California are fighting to defend the content and pedagogy of ethnic studies. Their opposition?

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Teaching Palestine: An interview with Palestinian educator Ziad Abbas

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Teaching Palestine: An interview with Palestinian educator Ziad Abbas

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An interview with Palestinian educator Ziad Abbas

By Jody Sokolower

Illustrator: Ericka Sokolower-Shain

Many teachers are reluctant to teach about Palestine. We worry about negative reactions from administrators or parents. Few of us learned much about the Middle East in our own schooling, and it's difficult to find good curriculum.

But just as it's important to teach the real history of Columbus, it's important that students learn factual history and are able to think critically about Palestine and Israel. Otherwise, they are left with the stereotypes so widely disseminated in the mainstream media. The increasing volatility in the region only makes the issue more urgent.

As program manager for cross-cultural programs at the Middle East Children's Alliance (mecaforpeace.org) in Berkeley, California, Ziad Abbas works with teachers, teacher educators, and students. As a Palestinian refugee himself, born in a camp in the West Bank, he shares his family history, his knowledge of the region, and his commitment to critical thinking and social justice. He spoke recently with RS Managing Editor Jody Sokolower about his own background, the context for teaching about Palestine, and ways to approach the topic with students in the United States.

Jody Sokolower: I know you have been an educator for a long time, both here in the United States and in Palestine. Can you tell us a little about your background?

Ziad Abbas: I was born in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, which is in Bethlehem in the West Bank. In 1948, 18 years before I was born, my parents, my sister, and brother were living in Zakarriyah village near Jerusalem. My father's family had lived there for centuries. As part of what we Palestinians call the Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic), Zionists attacked and destroyed the village - burning houses, firing mortar rounds from tanks, and shelling homes by air. The villagers - farmers and shopkeepers - were unarmed and had no means to defend themselves. My family fled to hide in the mountains. Before they ran, people locked their houses and took their keys with them, imagining they would be gone for only a few days until things were safe again.

The Red Cross and United Nations set up temporary camps to help people to survive. The camps were nothing but tents, and life was extremely hard. Everyone waited for the international community to bring justice and allow them to return to their homes.

I was born into this situation. My mom worked hard and did all her best just to help us to survive. We didn't have any programs for children, so the only place we went was the United Nations school. The school was just a room where we could spend some time. The curriculum was censored by the Israelis. Sometimes we learned things, of course, but I remember my classrooms had 60 or sometimes 70 students with one teacher.

As a result, much of my education came from home or from the narrow alleyways of the camp where we tried to find enough space to play. Much of the time we lived under curfew. After the United Nations added buildings to the camp, entire families lived crowded into small rooms, unable to breathe. There was not enough water or even enough food. Even today, 13,000 people, mostly children, live in less than a square mile, controlled by the Israeli military. We learned to share everything, and people developed a strong commitment to our community and its struggle for justice. This was the way we grew up.

Dancers as Activists

JS: How did you start working with children?

ZA: My training is as a journalist. Through journalism I encountered many human rights organizations; one was a French group called Discovery. Back in 1994, Discovery wanted to take 20 Palestinian children, ages 12 and 13, to France to meet French children the same age. The children would spend three weeks together, teach each other about their communities, and do a common project. Discovery wanted to connect children facing hard times in Palestine with children in France.

So they approached me. No one had done a program like this in Palestine before, and especially no one had done it in a refugee camp. I said, "Let me think about it, just give me some time."

I contacted a friend of mine (we played on the same soccer team) who was teaching in a school. He told me I was crazy. In that period, my camp was surrounded by a fence 8 meters high. We had one gate, and the entire camp was under Israeli military control. It was a struggle for us to go outside the camp. How could we go to France? But I thought, what do we have to lose? Nothing. Let us try to do something. I was dreaming. I wanted to travel, I wanted to go outside and see new things. My friend, the teacher, he said, "OK, let us try."

So we started Ibdaa, which means "creativity" or "to create something out of nothing" [in Arabic], because we were missing even basic necessities in the camp. We had nothing except our dream to gain our right to return to our homeland. The idea was to create a pure refugee initiative, a place that young people could express themselves and a forum for them to communicate their situation to the larger world.

Our young people are determined to never accept the degradation and humiliation the occupation puts on them. They throw stones at the Israeli soldiers and tanks in the streets. It is very dangerous. Many of our children have been killed or injured or become disabled at an early age.

In that period, we had many children who were injured. They had a lot to say about the solutions they hoped for, but they had only one way to express their anger at the occupation, in the streets. We decided that our children deserved more ways to express themselves, to express their struggle for their right to return home. So we started this project, born inside the refugee camp and protected by the community.

One of the first challenges we faced was how to choose the children. We decided to have an election. An election was a new idea. We had two schools, a school for girls, a school for boys. We spent the next two weeks teaching all the children the meaning of elections, how to vote, why do we do it. Because of the occupation, we had never had experience with democracy. In the end, we elected 20 girls and 20 boys.

From the beginning we had girls and boys together. This was a conservative community and they didn't accept girls and boys together. Even for the children, it was hard. One thing that helped to connect the children was talking about reality: "We are refugees living behind the fence. We want to come together as a team to represent what's happening on this side of the fence, inside our refugee camp. It's not something that only affects us as individualsÑwe want to represent the community."

Discovery asked us to present something from our culture during our visit to France. We decided to tell the Palestinian people's story, not through speaking, but through dance. So we designed a show called The Tent because it was going to be about refugees. We tried to make it a story.

When we elected the children we weren't thinking of them as dancers, but in a few months they became a dancing group. We were prepared to dance for only one time in France.

We performed the first show in Paris. We ended up traveling throughout Europe and later to the United States, telling the story of Palestine through dance. I did that for 15 years. During this period I learned a lot from the children. They were the main contributors to who I am today.

You Say "Palestine."
They Ask, "Pakistan?"

JS: Now, after many years of working with Palestinian youth, you're in the United States, teaching about Palestine. What do youth here know about Palestine? Are they interested?

ZA: The Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) receives many invitations to speak in schools about the situation in the Middle East in general and about Palestine in particular. When I ask the children, "Do you know Palestine?" I will be lucky if I find a few hands raised. Sometimes there are children who have their own connections - they are immigrants from the Arab world or they come from a family of political activists, something like this. But the majority of the children, no. And with the adults, it is almost the same. You say "Palestine," they ask, "Pakistan?"

JS: How do you begin to build ties with those students? To make them care about what is happening in a country on the other side of the world?

ZA: When I traveled with the Ibdaa dance group, we performed in many places and gave workshops at schools. One experience we had was at the South Valley Academy in New Mexico, a very poor school with many immigrant students. The Palestinian children were all of a sudden very relaxed. They felt at home, like there was a connection when they danced. One of the Chicano students even said, "This is a story about us, not just about you."

So I learned from the children to make connections between Palestine and their lives. I try to reach out to the students in front of me, to understand where they are coming from. Privileged, unprivileged, immigrants. Sometimes I try to be funny so they can accept me. And I try to connect things to their reality.

I was in a school in San Jose and most of the students were from Latin America. I started talking about the borders. What the borders mean for them and anyone from their family, for anyone deported, and what borders have meant for my own family. I told them the story of my family, how my parents had to leave their homes and now my family is scattered in countries all over the world. I try to connect their story to my story.

Sometimes I push, to encourage them toward critical thinking: "Why are we seen as different from other people? Why is this happening that some people are forced from their homes? Why are Palestinians living like this?" I show them the map - the tiny space where Palestinians are allowed to live in the West Bank and Gaza. "Why are the Israelis trying to control this?"

It is similar for many new immigrants here. I explore with the students why people are forced to leave their homes and have to live here without the right documents. Being called "illegal" makes people feel insecure all the timeÑthey are afraid to be arrested and deported. What does it mean to be deported? To be jailed? This is where I can make a connection.

We can only plant the seeds. I try to use different ways to approach the meaning of oppression: If someone came to take your house, and after that pushed you to the garden, and later pushed you and your family out of your garden and even your city, what should you do? This is what happened to Palestine. How would you react if this happened to you? How should I react, because it has happened to me? This is the best way they can take my story. I target their hearts, their minds, their feelings. I want them to feel what this means.

Sometimes I speak about jail, and the experience of going to jail. When I talk about my going to jail as a child, when I tell them that children their own age are in Israeli jails because they are struggling for their rights, it motivates them to start asking more questions.

JS: You were young, right?

ZA: Yes, I was 14 the first time. Along with dozens of other teenagers, I was accused of throwing stones at the Israeli troops. When I speak about that, it shifts the feeling in the room. I get different questions. Instead of questions about how I grew up in the refugee camp, the students ask about jail. Did they torture you? How did they treat you? And they compare it with jails here in the United States. So this is the frame I use. I want them to be in my shoes. To start thinking about this.

In U.S. history, students learn about Manifest Destiny. I compare that with the Israeli concept of the Promised Land. I ask them: "Why would God give the land to these people and punish these other people because of their color or who they are? Why would this happen to Native Americans? Why to Palestinians?" Israelis say that God promised the Jewish people the land to make it their country. I encourage the students to go deep inside themselves and think about this. "Does this make sense? Did God say this?" These concepts - Manifest Destiny and Promised Land - do not fit when it comes to justice or political rights.

I talk about who gets resources and who doesn't. For example, for us water is a big issue. The aquifer under the West Bank where I grew up goes to give water to Israel - the Palestinians living right on top of the aquifer only get to buy the water from Israelis at high prices, while Israeli settlers get the water at very low prices. For many summers, when we didn't have enough to drink, I saw settlers filling their swimming pools and washing their cars.

Because of the theft of our groundwater, Palestinians are left with little water or polluted water. This is why MECA started the Maia Project. We build small water purification and desalinization systems for schools in the Gaza Strip.

Since I came to the United States I am enjoying two things: I can take a shower every day. And I can drive my car wherever I want. At home it is very hard because of the hundreds of checkpoints. For example, I can't go to Jerusalem even though it is less than 10 miles from my refugee camp.

A Framework for Curriculum

JS: What are the most important things for students to learn about Palestine? What is the framework through which we should be seeing this situation?

ZA: There are certain principles: oppression and oppressors, justice and injustice. As Martin Luther King said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." I don't want someone to support Palestine and be against women's rights. I don't want someone to support Palestine but be against gay rights. All these issues are connected to each other. We need to teach children the principles. And Palestine is one of the clearest examples of injustice in the world today.

It is important to look at the whole history. If you start it from the Holocaust, you cannot understand what happened. It distorts the history. I try to start with how things developed. The first Zionist settlement in Palestine was in 1878; the first Zionist Congress was in 1897. In 1917, in the Balfour Declaration, the British, who were the colonizers then in Palestine, promised it to the Zionists. By the 1920s and '30s, Zionists were organizing Jews all over the world, especially in Europe, to settle in Palestine. Before World War II began, the Zionists had maps of all the Palestinian villages, lists of local leaders, and plans for how to force Palestinians out of Palestine. So it is important to put the history in 1948 and beyond in this larger picture.

Teaching about Palestine should be based in international law and respect for human rights. Under international law, especially U.N. Resolution 194, Palestinians have the "inalienable right" to return to their homeland. There are 11 million Palestinians in the world; 7 million of us are refugees in the Gaza and West Bank, in neighboring countries in the Middle East, and around the world. Resolution 194 was first passed in 1948; we are still waiting to go home. I have the key to my family house that my mom gave me before she died.

Palestine has been facing an apartheid system, especially in education. Most schools are segregated. Palestinian classrooms have poorer buildings than Israeli classrooms, fewer teachers, larger class sizes, fewer resources. Sometimes teachers can't even get to the school because of the checkpoints. This discrimination is another connection that children in the United States will understand.

JS: Why do you think so few teachers in the United States teach the history or current reality of Palestine?

ZA: The education system in the United States, like the media, is controlled. As Palestinians, we do not exist. If I see a map in the classroom, I ask the students, "Can you find Palestine on the map?" They go search and they will not find Palestine. "OK, can you find Israel on the map?" They go and they will find Israel very fast.

The U.S. education system, it is censored in that it dehumanizes "the other" so they do not exist. The focus is on teaching Manifest Destiny and Thanksgiving and Columbus-discovered-America. It means that you hide the Native American. It's the same thing as teaching the beginning of Israel as if it were because of the Holocaust - that somehow Israel was the solution to the Holocaust.

Teachers are victims of this education system, too. I wish that all the teachers in the United States knew about Howard Zinn, and that they were trained to teach children to think critically about the information they receive from teachers, their parents, and from the community. To help them to build their own perspectives and ideas.

Those teachers who are teaching about Palestine, it's often because they feel secure, they don't feel afraid for their jobs if they are attacked by the Zionists. They believe in social justice and struggle. And, also, they know their responsibility for what the United States is doing to other peoples, they make those connections. Many other teachers want to speak but they don't know what's happening in Palestine, or they have never examined this issue in their school.

JS: Another barrier to teaching Palestine is fear of negative reactions from parents and administrators.

ZA: I know that teaching Palestine is a risky thing to do. I had one experience where the teacher was forced to leave the school by the end of the year because she invited me to speak.

JS: She didn't realize what a firestorm that would cause.

ZA: She didn't realize at all. She's African American, the headmaster was African American. They were teaching about social justice and human rights. They thought they were very radical. She didn't realize the minute it comes to Palestine it's a different issue. This teacher, however, never regretted that she invited me. She told me that as someone committed to social justice, she needs to teach about human rights abuses everywhere, whether they are in Africa, in the United States, or in Palestine.

These Zionist groups are very well organized. They try to target everyone who talks or teaches about Palestine. They want to shut down everyone who tries to put this issue on the table or tries to teach about it. But people are resisting these attacks. Recently I've been invited to many schools and conferences to present about Palestine. Many teachers are refusing to be intimidated and are insisting on their right to teach about human rights. Because of this, things are changing. I am very proud that there are many teachers doing this.

Getting Started

JS: I think there are many teachers who would like to teach about Palestine, but they feel they don't know enough. If someone wanted to get a basic understanding of the history and current situation, what would you suggest?

ZA: When I care about an issue, I follow it in the news. That's a place to start (see Resources).

Then, to understand the background, I recommend The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan PappŽ, who is an Israeli Jew; his parents were Holocaust survivors. He puts what happened in 1948 in historical context. He explains, using international definitions, why what the Israelis did to the Palestinians in 1948 was an ethnic cleansing. For Palestinian culture, you can read Ghassan Kanafani. He was assassinated when he was 36 years old, but he documented what happened to Palestinians through short stories. His best-known book in English is Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories. There are documentary films, including Occupation 101, which is a good introduction. Roadmap to Apartheid compares South Africa and Palestine. Promises is a documentary about Palestinian and Israeli children. Frontiers of Dreams and Fears explores the lives of a group of Palestinian children growing up inside refugee camps.

Why Teach Palestine?

JS: There is so much pressure to teach subjects that show up on standardized tests. Why is it important to make time to teach Palestine?

ZA: In the United States, there are special reasons why students need to learn about Palestine. First, it's a basic human rights issue. People in the United States care about human rights and have a right to know what is going on in the world.

Second, the main supporter of the Israeli occupation is the U.S. government. The United States gives money and human resources to support the Israeli military - this is $3 billion dollars a year that could support school budgets, but instead goes to support the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The United States gives political support to Israel, especially in international organizations like the United Nations. They try to protect Israel from Security Council resolutions that will criticize Israel or try to enforce Israel's compliance with international law.

Third, this issue directly involves the people of the United States. Many of the settlers who occupy the West Bank are actually U.S. citizens. They vote in U.S. elections, but also Israeli elections.

Fourth, just to understand world politics, we need to understand the dynamics that involve Palestine. U.S. policy in the Middle East uses Israel to try to control the resources in the region. The United States presents itself as the mediator for peace in the Middle East. In reality, they are supporting the Israeli occupation.

Finally, we cannot have peace in the world without justice in Palestine. It could lead to a third world war; I hate to say it. The new generations in the United States and the world, they need to know about Palestine. They need to know what's happening in Palestine; they need to know the principles of human rights, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, so they can bring peace. Without changing U.S. public opinion and actions about Israel, without the new generation taking a lead toward justice for themselves and for those outside the United States, I don't think we can have peace in the world.

Sometimes teachers are not just educating children, they are educating their parents, too. You are planting seeds in the children that bear fruit even after they go to the streets, after they go home.

You don't teach Palestine because you are against Jewish people. You teach Palestine because you believe in certain principles. Teachers need to take a stand. And they should be protected by their principals, by the education system, by their union. This is very important.

Every school is a specific community with its own issues. You need to respect rules, but there are certain rules you need to break. You cannot continue to go along with rules that mean the system can confiscate the right of the people to think - to take a stand and to take initiative.

Educators are creative. It's beautiful when they connect what's going on in the world - in Palestine and elsewhere - to the classroom and to their students' daily lives.

Resources

Websites for Information About Palestine

Books

Kanafani, Ghassan. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories. Translated by Hilary Kilpatrick. Three Continents Press, 1998.

PappŽ, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2007.

Documentary Films

Frontiers of Dreams and Fears. Mai Masri, filmmaker. Arab Film Distribution, 2001.

Occupation 101. Sufyan and Abdallah Omeish, filmmakers. Triple Eye Films, 2003.

Promises. Justine Shapiro, BZ Goldberg, and Carlos Bolado, filmmakers. Roco Films, 2001.

Roadmap to Apartheid. Ana Nogueira and Eron Davidson, filmmakers. Journeymen Pictures, 2012.

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By Jody Sokolower Illustrator: Ericka Sokolower-Shain Many teachers are reluctant to teach about Palestine. We worry about negative reactions from administrators or parents. Few of us learned much about the Middle East in our own schooling, and it's difficult to find good curriculum.

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The Rich Tapestry of Religion in the United States

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The Rich Tapestry of Religion in the United States

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"The Rich Tapestry of Religion in the United States" features three lessons that help students assess the religious diversity of the United States, explore different religious and non-religious worldviews, and consider how freedom of religion relates to their own lives and the lives of others.

The religious landscape in the United States is shifting rapidly. In the past, most Americans identified as Christian; today there are not only more Christian sects but also growing numbers of people who belong to other faith traditions-and many people who are unafilliated with any religion.

According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, religious affiliation in the United States is both very diverse and extremely fluid. Every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing members. With this series, students learn about many belief systems and consider the benefits of religious freedom.

However, teaching about religion can be controversial. According to the First Amendment Center's A Teacher's Guide to Religion in the Public Schools, "For most of our history, extremes have shaped much of the debate (about teaching religion). On one end ... are those who advocate promotion of religion (usually their own) in school practices and policies. On the other end are those who view public schools as religious-free zones. Neither of these approaches is consistent with the guiding principles of the Religious Clause of the First Amendment." Comparative religion studies need taught through a neutral position, by teaching, not preaching.

This series has been designed to focus on religion through the lens of understanding, awareness and tolerance. As teachers move through the lessons, their goal should be to academically inform students about all religious and non-religious worldviews.

Lesson One: One Nation, Many Beliefs introduces students to several different religions and asks them to examine data to determine how many people across the United States follow those religions as well as how many people do not have a religious affiliation.

Lesson Two: My Way Is Not the Only Way asks students to identify similarities and differences between different belief systems.

Lesson Three: Free to Believe! introduces freedom of religion to students and asks them to consider how they might respond in an authentic situation related to religious freedom.

Professional Development

10 Tips for Starting a World Religions Curriculum
Tips for developing a world religions curriculum with inclusion and sensitivity.

What's a Teacher to Do?
Tips for setting up a culturally sensitive classroom.

Maintain Neutrality
Illustrates how schools can teach religious tolerance-and stay within constitutional law.

Seven Principles for Inclusive Education
Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding provides principles for inclusive education.

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The Rich Tapestry of Religion in the United States

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"The Rich Tapestry of Religion in the United States" features three lessons that help students assess the religious diversity of the United States, explore different religious and non-religious worldviews, and consider how freedom of religion relates to their own lives and the lives of others.

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A Matter of Life and Death (Teaching Religious Literacy)

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A Matter of Life and Death (Teaching Religious Literacy)

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Benjamin Marcus is the religious literacy specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute. Murali Balaji is the director of education and curriculum reform at the Hindu American Foundation. Both men think about, teach about and witness daily the value of teaching religious literacy-and the problems that arise when we don't. Teaching Tolerance sat down with Benjamin and Murali to talk about how educators can broach tough topics like religious freedom and how to respond to pushback from parents and administrators.

Can each of you speak to the definition of religious freedom that you use?

Murali: I define religious freedom as freedom to worship. However, it's also the freedom of others to not have religion imposed upon them. I think that's a delicate balance that we continue to negotiate. We've seen, for example, bills being passed in different parts of the country "banning" Sharia law, which is interesting because they're irrelevant; we have a constitution that specifically prohibits any religious group from having its own set of norms that are outside of constitutional jurisdiction.

For us, religious freedom is something that we are constantly negotiating with. Oftentimes, we look at religious freedom within the context of whether an action taken in the name of religion violates the principle of "do no harm."

Benjamin: I just wanted to give a few examples of different ways that people have defined religious freedom, because I think it adds on to what Murali was saying about the tension between religious freedom and do no harm. That tension, in some ways, is represented in our own First Amendment. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Those are the two religion clauses: the free exercise clause and the establishment clause.

What happens when someone's sincerely held religious belief prohibits them, in their own eyes, from sanctioning same-sex marriage, for example? To what extent do those beliefs get enacted in the public? Whose conception of harm? And, especially, what happens when different conceptions of harm come into contact with one another?

Here are two examples from the history of the United States of leaders talking about religious freedom: One comes from James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance [Against Religious Assessments in which he quotes from the Virginia Declaration of Human Rights]. He writes, "Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth 'that religion or the duty which we owe to our creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.'" The other comes from the [A Bill for Establishing] Religious Freedom, which was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777. He says, "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever. Nor shall he be enforced, restrained, molested or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief."

I think you can see in these different quotes that there are different emphases. Some of them emphasize the actions, the exercise of religion from the translation from beliefs into behaviors. Some of them emphasize just the beliefs alone.

Why should educators teach about religious freedom? How is this topic relevant to students' personal and academic lives?

Benjamin: We're seeing a dramatic increase in religion-related hate crimes in the United States. There have been studies that show the connections between that spike in crimes and the 2016 presidential campaign, and the aftereffects of that campaign. Attacks against American Muslims surged last year, and there was also an overall increase in hate crimes.

The conflation of religious categories and racial categories has also led to an increase in hate crimes against Hindu Americans and Sikh Americans, in large part because people don't know the difference between Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs. Not that that makes it any better, but it shows that religious illiteracy is actually a matter of life and death, and that the protection of religious minorities and the societal emphasis on the importance of religious freedom for all Americans is really critical right now.

Murali: Educators need to emphasize that religious freedom is not "giving special rights" to one group or another, but that religious freedom is enshrined in our democracy.

I think this is why teaching about religious freedom at the K to 12 level is so critical towards restoring a common purpose and the importance of civics engagement. None of these things are happening in a vacuum. Islamophobia did not happen overnight. It actually didn't start with 9/11. I think what's really lent itself to the increase in hate is our lack of willingness to really talk about civic engagement and the importance of diversity in a pluralistic democracy.

What are some of the biggest challenges that educators face when addressing this topic?

Murali: The biggest challenge to teaching about religious freedom is the pushback teachers often get from parents and community organizations that are opposed to a more pluralistic understanding of religious freedom.

Benjamin: Very closely related to that is that teachers don't know that they can teach about religion. It's constitutional. It's been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court that actually learning about religion is really necessary for learning about our society and history.

Do either of you have any thoughts or recommendations on addressing parent pushback?

Murali: A supportive administration that can really go to bat for them and say, "Look, this is constitutionally protected. We're not trying to 'convert' your student, your child. What we are trying to get them to do is get them to understand the different faith groups that make up this country." It really does take teachers having this strong administrative support network.

Benjamin: I think one powerful piece of evidence that teachers can use is a study that was conducted [at a school] in Modesto, California that required a world religions course be taught to all students.

What that study showed was that not only did the world religions class increase students' willingness to take action when they witnessed one student insulting another based on religious beliefs, but it also did not affect their own religiosity. That might be one piece of evidence that teachers can use to show that this isn't some subterfuge or back-way exercise of trying to make all students nonreligious. Students of religion and none can flourish in a course that teaches about religion.

I would also say the discussion of what to do to allay the concerns of parents is really, like Murali said, it's community to community. Different parts of the United States are just very different, so I hesitate to give a one size fits all model. I will say that I work with some teachers in the suburbs of Chicago who have run classes now for many years teaching about religion. I think they're so successful, and they have so few parent complaints, because they engage parents directly.

One of the teachers has students complete activities that require interviews with their parents about different religious subjects. When parents feel involved and they feel like the school isn't trying to take away the religious formation of their students but is trying to teach about religion in an academic way, I think that can also allay some concerns.

Is there anything else you'd like to emphasize for Teaching Tolerance readers?

Benjamin: The historical view is really critical when talking about religious freedoms. There can be false assertions that the United States has had a standard or stable conception of religious freedom since its founding. That's just not true, but we have idealized religious freedom from the beginning. The ways that we negotiate that are very different, and I think it can shed some light on today's conversations when students understand that this isn't new, that we've negotiated concepts of religious freedoms since the beginning.

Murali: I would just add that cultural competency is paramount. Cultural competency and religious literacy are vital to understanding our changing country, and in many ways are critical to upholding our democracy. The attacks on our democracy can be prevented with a more culturally aware and religiously literate society. That's really important as we move forward. Our teachers need to have those tools at their disposal.

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Two scholars make the case for teaching religious literacy.

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Last spring, I got a call from a student's father. He was angry that we had forced his son to participate in a rally calling for action to curb global warming. Images of the rally appeared online and in the local papers. What if someone had seen his son's face in those pictures?

The parent was concerned about bias and the imposition of an ideology other than his own. There are two sides to the climate change story, he asserted. As one of the school's two principals, I affirmed his concerns and said I would look into it.

After talking to his son's teacher, I learned that attending the demonstration was fieldwork for a documentary film class; permission forms had gone home and been signed. Students were learning about how to use their cameras, how to conduct interviews, how to capture live action. They were attending the march as documentarians, not to protest or affirm any one side of the story. I asked the teacher to call the student's father and discuss this with him. She did, and it helped.

She and I talked further about how, in today's political climate, more than the normal dose of preparation may be necessary when engaging with politically charged topics-and our schools must not shy away from the task.

The core purpose of public schools is to help young people become able contributors to our society, informed and critically thinking members of our democracy. Topics of potent political and personal relevance must be the stuff of the curriculum. Public schools are among the few public settings where the adults, by the very nature of our vocation, must have high expectations for evidence-based and respectful dialogue.

Feelings can get hurt. Students can feel that their values are being challenged-and perhaps they are. Teachers might be accused of bias or indoctrination. None of this risk is new, and our democracy desperately needs diverse voices to engage in mature dialogue if we are to ever find compassionate solutions to our common problems. Schools must be where young people learn to do this.

So, in a time of profound polarization and division, how can responsible educators safely situate teaching and learning in personal and political contexts, and embrace the plurality of identity in our society? Here are a few suggestions.

Plan lessons that value family histories.

Every student deserves to feel that their family, history and culture have worth. Early in the school year, teachers can establish trust with students and families by explicitly exploring and valuing elements of where each child comes from. For instance, lessons like this one from Teaching Tolerance invite students to explore the diverse religious heritage of the United States. And this TT lesson invites students to reflect on the values and traits of their cultural backgrounds.

The "Where I'm From" poems that I see on the walls of eighth-grade classrooms in my school are written in this spirit. I take pictures of those poems each year, focusing on specific words and phrases. I put them in slideshows for our assemblies and for the eighth-grade graduation, during which every graduate makes a "This I Believe" statement. Every student's voice sounds in an auditorium packed with families: an affirmation that each child holds dear a belief that deserves to be heard.

Use discussion norms that de-personalize disagreement.

That we all have beliefs we hold dear is one thing that makes it hard to have discussions that challenge those beliefs. But even when our assumptions are challenged, no one should be personally attacked. With this in mind, a very simple discussion norm can help: Disagree with the idea, not the person.

A seventh-grade teacher I work with enforces this norm vigorously when hosting Socratic Seminars, prohibiting students from using their classmates' names when disagreeing with an idea. These seminars are the culmination of a multi-week interdisciplinary unit about what makes a healthy community. Students draw from what they've learned in science class about ecological and biological systems, as well as personal experience-opioid addiction is a concern in our community. Content for the discussion also comes from social studies, where students study topics such as immigration, drug legalization and gun control.

When we open up the space for political debate and personal stories on such topics, a norm like the one my colleague uses helps keep students from feeling devalued by name, even when their ideas are being challenged.

Inform through engagement.

At a community forum that my co-principal and I held last year, a parent asked us to make a commitment to "no surprises." This parent was referring to a lesson on sexual and reproductive health, but he was asking for a general commit to more fully inform families of what is going on in classes. I agreed. I don't think that we should routinely give opt-out opportunities to kids and families, but we should ensure that families know the standards, research and rationale for the work in which we are engaging their children.

However, simply sharing information in a syllabus or a form letter only goes so far. It's a one-way communication to which there's not much room for meaningful response. Instead, we can find ways to engage families as a means of informing them. Even a very simple task can help ensure "no surprises" and allow voices from the home to become part of classroom conversation. I could imagine, for instance, a simple prompt given to students in the documentary film class prior going to the march: "Ask three adults in your life outside of school for their opinions on how climate change is covered in the media. What do they hear? What do they believe?" Homework thus becomes fieldwork, and families both participate in the work and gain an understanding of what students are studying.

Forge curricular partnerships.

A teacher working in concert with respected members of the broader community is in a much stronger position when controversial topics surface in the classroom. A school that values adults in the community will have adults in the community who value the school. A science teacher I know does a great job of this. I recall a mini-term course he taught on the topic of life in winter. Three generations of one local family came into school to share their traditions of sugar on snow, canned pickles and making donuts. I have pictures of the grandmother in the science lab plucking donuts from hot grease. I have another picture of one of the town's snowplows in our parking lot, the driver having just given a tour of the truck. A student is grinning ear to ear in the front seat.

The middle school years at our school are rich with experiences like this. Simple as they may be, projects and assignments that help each family feel valued are essential. They build trust and lay a foundation that schools need when we do work that challenges assumptions and puts politics and identity on the table.

I'm heartened that I got the call from the father about the climate rally. He didn't choose to post his frustration online or silently resent what had happened. He called and confronted me with his concerns. I'm grateful for this, and I think the work my colleagues did with this student and family over the years helped shape this father's willingness to talk. I hope encounters with difference will inspire more conversations with more students and families as we work together toward a more just world.
Hawkes is a co-principal at Randolph Union Middle/High School in Randolph, Vermont. You can follow him on Twitter @ElijahHawkes.

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Last spring, I got a call from a student's father. He was angry that we had forced his son to participate in a rally calling for action to curb global warming. Images of the rally appeared online and in the local papers. What if someone had seen his son's face in those pictures?

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