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Defending a Teacher's Right to Disconnect

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Defending a Teacher's Right to Disconnect

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Written in 2021, this article still rings true 2 years later. Useful tips included for disconnecting at the end of the work day!

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Technology is compromising the health and well-being of teachers, blurring the already-indistinct boundaries between work and home and leading to an unsustainable "always on" mentality, researchers assert in a new study.

It's not an entirely new problem. For decades, educators have labored under the twin pressures of expanding responsibilities at work and increasing domestic demands. As dual-income families became the norm, larger class sizes, more paperwork, and a gradual shift in caretaking duties toward school systems have strained the capacity of educators, encroaching on personal time traditionally set aside for family and friends. Well before the pandemic, stress topped the list of reasons teachers quit, according to a RAND study, which identified long hours and the burden of taking on second jobs to supplement income as primary factors in early retirement.

Technology is rapidly pushing things toward a breaking point. The proliferation of computers, and especially cell phones, is putting the last vestiges of personal space at risk, compelling teachers to spend more time outside of school hours planning tech-enriched lessons while responding to nighttime emails and text messages. This pattern of incursion-researchers call it "techno-invasion" or "pervasive connectivity"-can make them feel as though they're on call at all hours of the day and even late into the night, explains Caroline Murphy, a researcher at the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick, in the current study.

For teachers, there are few places to turn to for respite. While the public sector has typically traded lower wages for better work-life balance, the commodification of teaching-driven by a greater focus on test scores and evaluating teacher performance-has led to what some experts call the "marketization of education." Increasingly, the profession looks like the private sector, "in particular in relation to demands around working time, and the development of an 'always on' culture," Murphy points out. In what amounts to a broken promise, the expectations keep growing, but the pay hasn't kept pace.

Without new policies defending teachers' fundamental right to disconnect-to reclaim time with their families and friends, and to relax and restore themselves-the outcomes are all too predictable. Rising job dissatisfaction and deteriorating mental and physical health are real risks, according to the research. The issue is serious and growing, and it demands immediate attention.

Internet Leakage

Online communications have led to a pervasive "encroachment of work on individuals' time off through ubiquitous connectivity," says Murphy. The mere expectation that an email or text may arrive from a principal or student, and demand a response, is an intrusion into a teacher's personal space.

Theoretical emails eventually become real ones. The average teacher receives up to 100 emails each day, a staggering amount that can feel insurmountable-and the pressure to reply quickly can feel irresistible. In a 2019 study, employees reported that they started responding to emails 6 seconds after receiving them. Meanwhile, in a 2015 study, researchers observed that employees experienced "significantly lower daily stress" when limiting the frequency of checking email to three times a day, compared with those who had no restrictions.

There's also a significant cognitive tax to checking emails and other notifications, like texts or reminders: According to a 2017 study, the barrage of pings and warnings emanating from our phones are almost impossible to ignore, even when the phone is off and turned upside down on the table. "The mere presence of one's own smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources," the researchers conclude, "thereby leaving fewer resources available for other tasks and undercutting cognitive performance." Shutting the cell phone off and abandoning it in another room was the only way to restore sanity.

The Technology Learning Curve

The deluge of new technologies unsupported by adequate training-from learning management systems to new apps, videoconferencing software, and multimedia lesson-planning-is undermining competence and professionalism, Murphy argues.

"I have NEVER been this exhausted," exclaimed Sarah Gross, a veteran high school English teacher who did hybrid teaching last fall, according to the New York Times. "This is not sustainable."

Gross isn't alone: In 2021, researchers analyzed over a decade's worth of studies and found that teachers were being pushed to adopt technology in their classrooms without the "technical resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use," a particularly insidious problem that culminated in "conflicts between teachers, as well as in their relationships with colleagues or with other people involved in the environment, eventually producing, in the worst case, damaged personal and interpersonal relationships that affect their health."

In a study published earlier this year, researchers found that nearly half of the teachers surveyed spent 20 or more hours per week creating new lessons, adapting materials to online classrooms, and troubleshooting tech issues. Notably, this pattern is expected to continue past the pandemic as schools commit to deeper integration of technology and even offer some form of remote instruction permanently.

A Heavy Toll

This new source of anxiety is not only linked to decreased job satisfaction, motivation, and competency but is also a health and safety concern, "causing physical ailments such as headaches, sleep issues, muscle cramps, back aches and high blood pressure," according to Murphy.

It's not technology itself that's the problem-it's that technology erodes the boundaries that have historically constrained altruistic teachers. "We may feel that if we don't get a task done, our students will suffer or programs will fail," explains John McCarthy, a former teacher and current consultant. "However, if we become mentally exhausted, overtired, or drained of energy, we risk a complete shutdown mentally or physically-and at that point, no tasks will get done."

According to a 2015 survey, 78 percent of teachers feel physically and emotionally exhausted at the end of the day, and while technology isn't the sole source of stress, it is "one of the most significant contributing factors to increasing stress levels," Murphy points out, adding that educators routinely report that "invasion of privacy" is a "significant source of work exhaustion."

Pushing Back-Without Going Back

That's not to say that Ludditical solutions like banning technology should be pursued; technology creates enormous efficiencies and is here to stay, but it must be carefully managed. Murphy asserts that we need to establish and adopt policy that "supports the healthy adoption of technology outside of school hours by both teachers and students."

While the United States is lagging behind other countries, "right to disconnect" legislation has been proposed in New York to protect workers from being penalized if they choose not to respond to emails after work hours. Meanwhile, major companies have begun to acknowledge the problem. Volkswagen banned internal emails from being sent or received through its servers during off-work hours in 2012, following "complaints that staff's work and home lives were becoming blurred." And in 2016, France adopted new labor laws giving employees the right "to not have to take calls or read emails related to work during their time off." The law's stated goal is to "ensure that the employees' non-work hours, vacation time, and personal and family life be respected."

So what should be under consideration for schools?

Model better practices: Consider developing policies or guidelines that encourage school leaders to avoid sending emails after school hours, except in the case of emergencies. What may seem like a simple question or request can have bigger implications as teachers feel the need to regularly check email at night to avoid appearing nonresponsive.

Give "permission to disconnect": Leaders can provide explicit permission giving teachers the right to disconnect from work-related communications outside of normal school hours. The policy should be socialized among all stakeholders in the learning community and honored with no questions asked.

Survey your staff: Conduct work-life balance surveys to gauge staff well-being. Ask questions such as "How often do the demands of your job interfere with your family life?"-good lists of questions can be found in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Quality of Worklife Questionnaire and the Staff Distance Learning and Wellness Survey from Broward County Public Schools.

Keep your cell phone clean: Teachers should consider removing access to work emails from their smartphones, and school and district leaders should encourage it. "You may find it more helpful to only check email on your computer-that way, when the school day ends, you can close your computer and walk away from the pings and the temptation to check your inbox," suggests classroom teacher Lauren Huddleston.

Be transparent about your obligations: Block visible time on your calendar for typically unstructured tasks like writing emails, grading papers, and planning lessons, suggests educational consultant and former teacher Marissa King. Consider clearly demarcating your work hours on your calendar as well, and set up out-of-office messages that state your work hours and indicate when you'll respond to late emails.

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Defending a Teacher's Right to Disconnect

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Technology is compromising the health and well-being of teachers, blurring the already-indistinct boundaries between work and home and leading to an unsustainable "always on" mentality, researchers assert in a new study. It's not an entirely new problem. For decades, educators have labored under the twin pressures of expanding responsibilities at work and increasing domestic demands.

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Informative article about TikTok and how it uses data from users.

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TikTok's in the news constantly, whether it's stories about our decreasing attention spans or threats to national security. Today's TikTok story is that US lawmakers have introduced a bill to ban TikTok entirely

In an attempt to understand all of this, I've been digging and researching about TikTok and have come up with some decent resources (and opinions - of course)! Thought I'd share:
My personal problem with TikTok:

The version that the Chinese kids get is totally different from the version we get. Not only does the app limit their daily time to 40 minutes, they get

clips about science experiments

clips about museums

clips about fitness

with some Chinese propaganda thrown in (of course)

When asked, Chinese kids say they want to be astronauts. American kids say "influencers".

Check out this clip from 60 Minutes

"If you allow these two societies to play out for a few generations, I can tell you what your world is going to look like." - Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology

TikTok from a news/information perspective:

Kids are using TikTok as a search engine. New York Times Sept 2022
(This is problematic for a host of reasons...have you SEEN some of the videos on TikTok? Google's not perfect but I trust Google more than I would trust TikTok)

In one study, 20% of the videos on TikTok contained misinformation CNN Sept 2022

"News on TikTok is generated by social media influencers, activists or ordinary people rather than journalists." Reuters Institute December 2022
(This isn't any different than Twitter or Facebook, frankly...but with TikTok being used so much by teens, I worry that they're not able to distinguish what is valid and true...especially when it is delivered in entertaining, short clips)

Around half of the top news publishers are now regularly publishing content on TikTok.
Many news orgs worry about this, as they think the platform would trivialize important stories

TikTok from a health/safety perspective: From the national security perspective:

"If a tech company operates in mainland China, the Communist Party can easily gain access to its data through China's Data Security Law, which allows the government to regulate data and its storage." Wall Street Journal July 2022

"According to the company's privacy policy, it collects consumers' real-time location, search history and biometric data like fingerprints or facial imprints." Wall Street Journal July 2022
(The article states that this information could be sold to commit identity theft or fraud as well as used by hackers to impersonate officials)

"TikTok's popularity among policy makers and journalists could give the Chinese Communist Party unfettered access to the data of influential Americans." Wall Street Journal July 2022

The latest bill would "block and prohibit all transactions of social media platforms with over one million monthly users that are based in or under the influence of companies considered foreign adversaries." Here's the bill.

There's also a movement to get Apple and Google to change the age label on TikTok in their app stores so that it's not longer listed as "appropriate for teens". Wall Street Journal Dec 2022
(These lawmakers know that nobody pays attention to age labels, right?)

What if TikTok gets banned?

Most apps already include some SFV (short-form video) features, this is primarily because of TikTok's success

That doesn't mean that all the GenZ TikTok fans would migrate to Facebook (gasp! Too old) or the lifestyle-focused Instagram or the YouTube "Shorts". But it could open up opportunities for another app to fill in the gap.

Amazon is actually starting a SFV feature called "Inspire" which will show users a continuous feed of photos and videos featuring products. Wall Street Journal Dec 2022

How did this get started, anyway? From "TikTok's Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History" :

"It's dazzling and it's frightening, both together. It's this massive uncontrolled experiment, to unleash the most powerful persuasive recommendation algorithms in the history of the world on brains that are not fully formed. We don't yet know what that means." - Shalini Kantayya

The algorithm learned what type of content each individual person wanted to see based on how much time they spent watching or lingering over specific videos. The more time users spent on the app, the better TikTok got at feeding them.

"You could tell there was a kernel of people truly trying, wanting to entertain more than wanting to be seen." - Veraldi, an early TikTok employee

"Anyone, if they were entertaining and they were putting out content and saying something interesting, they could find an audience." -Nino De Guzman, former TikTok employee

"A recent Pew survey found that two-thirds of teens say they use TikTok and nearly a fifth say they are on it 'almost constantly'"

I don't have any solutions other than increased media literacy education (big shock). But I've fallen down the TikTok black hole before (thank you #cookingtok and #airfryertok) and I know how easy it is to become a zoned-out zombie while on that app.

And our world does not need zoned-out zombies. Our world needs creative problem solvers.

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Did you know this about TikTok? - Julie Smith

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TikTok's in the news constantly, whether it's stories about our decreasing attention spans or threats to national security. Today's TikTok story is that US lawmakers have introduced a bill to ban TikTok entirely In an attempt to understand all of this, I've been digging and researching about TikTok and have come up with some decent resources (and opinions - of course)!

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Insightful article from Paul Gorski on the ASCD website

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We were sitting-Tina, several other economically marginalized students, and I-in a meeting room tucked behind Park Run High School's media center.

"How do you purchase it?" I asked.

Another student, Aiden, grew animated. "You own your band instrument, you buy the school hoodie."

Tina nodded. " And you definitely don't ride the bus to school, not as a junior or senior."

I asked why some juniors and seniors had to ride the bus.

"I can't afford a car," Tina explained. "But even if I had a car, I couldn't pay the $100 a year parking fee."

I haven't managed to stop those words from rolling around in my head. Inclusion is a commodity. Belonging is, too. Many students are priced out of it at school.

When I ask school leaders what they perceive to be the biggest challenges their students experiencing poverty face in school, they almost always point to concerns about peer approval. But Tina, Aiden, and their peers didn't seem concerned about how their classmates saw them. Their concern was how the adults perpetuated school practices that made them feel they didn't belong and that robbed them of opportunities their wealthier classmates took for granted.

These are conditions that we, the caring adults, too often perpetuate in schools. I presume most educators don't want to perpetuate them. But if you work at a school, conditions like these likely are operating there right now. They can be difficult to recognize for people who don't know how it feels to be injured by policies or practices that perpetuate barriers. And if we're unable to recognize inequitable conditions, we can't fix them; that makes us complicit. So we must practice this recognizing. We can begin by identifying which students in our schools are priced out of belonging and denied equitable access, and how.

Unfortunately, for many students experiencing poverty, being priced out of inclusion is only the tip of the inequity iceberg. If I had to capture that iceberg with a single phrase it would be: Schools punish poverty.

That sounds harsh, I know. Perhaps you're thinking that I'm making the problem out to be too deliberate. No part of me believes that educational leaders go out of our way to pile disadvantage onto students and families experiencing poverty-not most of us, anyway. But if we dig beyond intention and examine our impact, it's difficult to deny.

We can't fix individual or institutional equity blockages that we're unwilling to name honestly. In that spirit, I detail here four ways schools exacerbate disadvantage for economically marginalized students, and consider how we might reimagine our actions to be more just.

Students experiencing poverty often contend with the harsh impacts of economic injustice outside of school. They might not have access to preventive healthcare or stable housing. They might struggle to find reliable transportation. Their families likely can't afford professional tutors. When those students come to school, they often face additional barriers, from teacher bias to policies and practices that fail to respond to the impacts of economic injustice. For example, research has shown how, on average, students experiencing poverty are subject to less engaging curricula and teaching than their wealthier peers and are disproportionately assigned to more remedial academic tracks.

Sometimes, when we think we're measuring ability or potential, we're really measuring the impact of access and opportunity disparities. This especially happens if we embrace a deficit ideology, a worldview that attributes educational disparities to supposed "deficiencies" within the cultures, behaviors, or attitudes of economically or otherwise marginalized students and families (Phyak, 2021).

We live in the United States, after all. Everybody has equal access if we work hard and take advantage of the opportunities afforded us, right?

Wrong. Eight-year-olds don't control whether their parents can refill their lunch accounts or afford tutors. Their parents have no control over the scarcity of living-wage work or the costs of preventive healthcare.

Due in part to this sort of ideological blockage-which may cause us to ignore the impacts of inequity and presume a fair distribution of access that doesn't exist-schools often respond to outcome disparities caused by inequities with initiatives meant to fix something about economically marginalized people. Perhaps we offer parenting classes while failing to transform family-engagement opportunities to ensure they're accessible to all families. Maybe we provide lessons on grit, not realizing that our most economically marginalized students often tend already to be our most resilient students. When we focus on adjusting those people, we risk failing to attend to our equity failures.

If we hope to eliminate the potential for this particular "punishment," we must commit to never letting deficit ideology survive in our schools. In equity literacy parlance, we call this the fix injustice, not kids principle (Gorski, 2018). Watch for times when conversations about equity veer toward how we need to "fix" people: If only those students cared more about their education. If only they had role models at home. How can we convince their parents to take school seriously? When we hear these sorts of sentiments, we must realize we are off the equity track, and bring the conversation back to, " What are barriers, inequities, and biases people experiencing poverty face?" " How are we perpetuating them?" " What can we do differently to distribute access equitably?"

Imagine that you have a student, Candace, who is experiencing poverty. She excels in class but struggles to complete homework on time. Name one reason Candace might make a responsible decision rather than an irresponsible one not to complete her homework.

Economically marginalized students are more likely than their wealthier peers to care for younger siblings or elders after school or to work after school to support their families. Perhaps Candace is assuming one or more of these roles. A student responsible enough to take on these duties does not need lessons on responsibility, and neither do parents who miss family-engagement opportunities to work a second or third job.

Let's be clear. Students who are experiencing poverty don't need us to teach them responsibility. From an equity perspective, this savior-ish presumption is among the most troubling aspects of institutional culture in many schools, especially if we, the adults in those schools, aren't embracing our responsibility to eliminate the inequity with which students contend. What students do need from us is equity. Not equality, but equity.

A second common way schools exacerbate inequity for students experiencing poverty is by claiming a commitment to equity, then offering equality as though it were the same thing. The key distinction between equity and equality is that equity accounts for context. Equality presumes a level playing field that never existed. With this in mind, it has been heartening recently to watch many schools transform homework policies, partially to strengthen equity efforts and also in response to recent research on homework's effectiveness. For example, an equal homework policy might be based on the idea that teachers assign all students the same homework, so they all should be held equally accountable for completing it. By contrast, we would base an equitable policy on the idea that students' contexts differ, that some, like Candace, contend with barriers with which others don't. We realize it's irresponsible and unjust on our parts to pretend those barriers don't exist.

If your school has moved the equity needle on your homework policy, apply the same equity spirit to other policies or practices. Start with the many day-to-day policies that ignore context, such as $100 parking fees that might be manageable for some families but are clearly unaffordable for others. All school fees are inequitable, really. Despite being equal, they have disparate impact; they risk elevating harm for the students already experiencing the most harm while elevating opportunity for those with the most opportunity.

I understand, of course, that many leaders working in cash-strapped schools use fees to help pay for essential resources for students. When we consider bigger contextual factors like inadequate school funding, we realize that perfect equity solutions can be elusive. The key is to remember that those bigger factors have the harshest effects on the students already contending with the most inequities. So, we should be careful not to respond in ways that exacerbate those inequities. Maybe we can't eliminate all fees immediately. But that is what we ought to be working toward.

We can find similar dynamics in many common policies and practices. Here are a few:

Be alert to temptations to slide back to equality, to redefine fairness around that concept, when equity efforts raise the ire of families accustomed to enjoying the benefits of disparate access. In my experience, the most vehement advocates for "equality" tend to be people bent on sustaining their children's advantage. They shouldn't influence our equity efforts.

When I insist that fees are inequitable, education leaders sometimes counter-insist that they've solved the fee problem by waiving most fees if the student or family lets the school know they can't afford them. I appreciate this effort at equity. But this "solution" requires students to ask, perhaps over and over, for what we already ought to be guaranteeing: equitable access.

"It's humiliating," Tomás, an 8th grader in a historically wealthy but increasingly economically diverse school, explained to me. "I constantly have to remind my teachers I'm poor just so I can do what other kids are able to just do." Like many students, Tomás is forced to "perform his poverty" in exchange for access to field trips, extracurriculars, and other opportunities. When I asked Tomás what happens when he doesn't have the energy to let somebody know he can't afford the fees for something, he answered, "I sit that one out."

In an elementary school in the same district, 4th grader Elise fought back tears while describing how adults shamed her in the lunch line because her family "ran out of money" after her father passed away. Her mother didn't have the resources to replenish her lunch account. I shared Elise's story with the principal, who sympathized, but then said, "I wish she had told us what was going on." Elise was nine. She had just lost her father, then she was humiliated by adults who should have been protecting her. But she was the one who was supposed to take responsibility?

In far too many schools and districts, rules that force adults to single out or embarrass children because they can't pay for something are encoded into policy. In my organization's work doing school equity policy analysis, I've often come across language in policy documents like After three days of an empty lunch account, the student will receive a cheese sandwich for lunch. Or, A student otherwise eligible to graduate who has unpaid library fees will not be allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony. I find it difficult to type these examples without quivering.

Whatever financial or other reason a school, district, or state might have for adopting these sorts of policies, there's no way to jibe codifying a requirement that we humiliate children in these ways with anything educationally positive or equitable. Even if we never actually deny students access to the graduation ceremony or make them go hungry, the presence of these policies sends a message about who deserves access.

These aren't the only ways economically marginalized students can be humiliated at school. For some students, common practices like show-and-tell and dress-up days can create anxiety and the potential for humiliation, as they may expose economic hierarchies and even contribute to troubling consumerist culture.

When I've spoken with elementary-school families experiencing poverty about what practices they find most embarrassing at their children's schools, they most often point to book fairs. "They march my son around that book fair so he has to watch wealthier classmates buy books and toys and trinkets and feel ashamed he can't afford anything," one mother told me. "Then I'm humiliated, too, because he comes home upset, asking why we can't afford a book." Parents of older students usually refer to fundraisers, especially ones requiring students to compete with one another to sell, say, chocolate bars or wrapping paper.

The solutions here are straightforward: Find ways to raise money that don't require students to compete over whose families and neighbors can afford the most chocolate bars or wrapping paper. If we're going to host book fairs, let's structure them around the joy of reading, not the sale of books and trinkets.

For all that is good and equitable, let's eliminate any policy or practice that could humiliate children for conditions that might be tied to their families' economic hardship or for any conditions at all. And let's work vigorously toward ensuring we're fulfilling public education's promise of free access.

In my conversation with Tina, Aiden, and their peers at Park Run High, I asked whether they ever missed out on learning opportunities in which they wanted to participate because their families couldn't pay for them. Cindy sighed, then described "senior trips" the school sponsored every spring break. "This year there's a trip to study ecology in Costa Rica. It costs $1,800."

Lin added, "Those trips aren't for us."

Cindy agreed. "A lot at this school isn't for us."

When I shared the students' concern in a meeting with their school's leadership team, Jason, the principal, responded, "It's a shame some students can't afford these trips. But should we stop offering them, denying the opportunity to students who get a lot out of them because some students can't afford them?"

Jason wasn't some sort of devious oppressor. He was committed enough to doing better by economically marginalized students to arrange for me to talk with a group of them and report back candidly. But ideologically he was stuck, and he wouldn't be able to lead for equity unless he had the humility and courage to look at some things very differently.

I pointed out to Jason that allowing families literally to purchase learning opportunities for their children that are inaccessible to other students is the epitome of inequity. It's a perfect inequity, expanding access for those who have the most access while deepening disparities for people already contending with economic barriers. As we examined other ways in which access and opportunity were for sale at his school, Jason embraced a deeper understanding of what equity required of him.

Like many school leaders, he was in a tough spot. He knew the ire he would face from wealthier families if he messed with those senior trips. He also came to realize that, in some ways, he'd conditioned himself to be more responsive to that anger than to the most marginalized students in his building.

Eventually, Jason came to believe that if he denied learning opportunities to his most economically marginalized students, then in a sense the school should deny them to all students. All of this denying sounded negative at first. But he realized that this policy change could be understood, and even described to parents, more positively, as "investing the school's resources, instead, into learning opportunities everybody can access." From an equity leadership point of view, these changes are expansions of access, not denials of access.

This work of expanding opportunity, of institutionalizing equity, isn't easy, of course. It can elicit blowback from families accustomed to disproportionate access. (In a 2020 blog post, Marceline DuBose shared suggestions for responding to this eventuality.) The key is not to pick one or two obvious instances of inequity and imagine our work is done when we've solved them. We can dig deeper, mapping out all the ways this sort of inequity operates so we can address its root causes and adopt more equitable policies and practices. I suggest beginning with the mapping exercise below.

The worst of inequity happens when we perpetuate conditions that harm the most harmed students and advantage the most advantaged students. I encourage all of us, as educational leaders, to take a deep, humble look at the ways we might uphold conditions that punish poverty and, as a result, amplify inequity. But let's not just admire the problem. Let's cultivate institutional and ideological change.

Yes, let's stop humiliating children in lunch lines, right now. But let's also examine how any of us, as caring educators, ever embraced a practice like that. Let's uproot our own ideological blockages about poverty and equity. And let's change whatever we need to change, from hiring practices, to procedures for creating school policy, to how we view a struggling student, to ensure that sort of thing never happens again.

Author's note: all names of schools, students and teachers are pseudonyms.

Mapping Costs for Learning, Joining, and Belonging at Your School

This exercise has two purposes. First, it provides an opportunity to practice identifying inequitable conditions-in this case, how families experiencing poverty can be priced out of equitable educational access. Second, it demonstrates the potential accumulative impact of day-to-day educational practices when it comes to equity and opportunity.

First, make a list of all the basic material resources and resources for which parents must pay so their children can attend and participate in your school: things like immunizations, book or technology fees, and school supplies. Estimate the cost of these things for a single school year (remembering that some families have more than one child).

Next, list the sorts of things parents don't have to pay for, but which can expand learning opportunities for their children if they can afford to purchase them. These might include band equipment, a computer in the child's bedroom, or costs associated with dual enrollment programs. Again, estimate the total cost.

Finally, list and estimate costs associated with experiences that might not have obvious learning value, but could improve students' social experiences or sense of connectedness at school, like costs for dances, hoodies and other school swag, and yearbooks.

What is the total cost across these categories? What might be the impact of this total cost on families experiencing poverty?

Reflect & Discuss

➛ Do any policies at your school "punish poverty" as Gorski describes?

➛ How does your school raise funds? Do you see any way these methods might cause embarrassment or a feeling of exclusion for some students or families? What could you do differently?

➛ What steps could you take to "institutionalize equity" in your school or district?

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We were sitting-Tina, several other economically marginalized students, and I-in a meeting room tucked behind Park Run High School's media center. "How do you purchase it?" I asked. Another student, Aiden, grew animated. "You own your band instrument, you buy the school hoodie." Tina nodded.

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This is a very insightful article about physical responses in your body when you suppress emotions.

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Article by Mark Brackett author of Permission to Feel

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When's the last time you made a bad decision? Maybe you bought a fancy kitchen appliance or a piece of exercise equipment that ended up collecting dust? Or perhaps you agreed to do a favor that now seems like a burden? We've all been there.

I've been traveling more than usual lately, giving talks on my book, Permission to Feel. From red-eye flights to sleepless nights tossing and turning in hotel beds, airport food to quadruple espressos, it's all left me tired and irritable. When I finally arrive back to the office or home after a trip, I find myself to be more critical than usual-of the idea a colleague shares enthusiastically, or the way the barista makes my cappuccino. "No, I do not want to move forward with that research project." "No, I do not feel like paying for this ridiculously priced cappuccino." "I'll skip my morning workout because I really need rest." And, then, after a few nights of sleeping in my own bed, and getting back on track with my routines, I approach my colleague about his brilliant idea. I compliment the barista on the beautifully-shaped heart on the cappuccino. And I'm eager to get out of bed and exercise.

Does any of this sound familiar? Though I can't always leverage its truth in the moment, I often refer to neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio's quote, "Affect is not just necessary for wisdom; it's also irrevocably woven into the fabric of every decision." Emotions are information. In this way, they can guide us to make better-informed decisions. However, emotions also can unconsciously cloud our thinking and our ability to make good choices.

When I train leaders and educators on RULER, I tell them about a study we conducted at our Center that really underscores this point. In this study, we recruited a random sample of teachers and divided them into two groups. We asked one group of teachers to write about a "good" day. We asked the other group to write about a "bad" day. Immediately after writing about their good or bad days, both groups of teachers read and graded the exact same student essay.

What did we find? Teachers who wrote about a "bad" day scored the student's essay, on average, a whole letter grade lower than teachers who wrote about a "good" day. In other words, when we asked teachers to reflect on times when they felt different ways, they judged the same essay differently and decided it deserved a different grade. Interestingly, when we asked the teachers if they thought how they were feeling affected the grades they assigned, 87% of them said, "no."

The study suggests two things: (1) that our moods influence our judgements, and (2) that it happens outside of our awareness. Think about it: would teachers intentionally give a lower grade if they knew they would do so when in a bad mood? Who would admit to that kind of bias?

Other researchers have run similar studies, but with one key change: before study participants are asked to make a decision, they reflect on their mood. They are asked, "how are you feeling right now?" In these cases, the effects disappear. Moods no longer affects decisions when people are aware of how they are feeling.

The takeaways here? First, it's not that our feelings directly bias our judgment; it's that when we are unaware of our feelings, we're likely to be biased (positively or negatively) based on how we're feeling. Second, it's important to check in with ourselves and be aware of our feelings. When we do that, our feelings are less likely to bias our thinking. We can ask ourselves if we're making the purchase or assigning the essay an "A" just because we're in a good mood, or because it's actually the best course of action.

With this in mind, I challenge you: Over the next week, before you go into important meetings or conversations, before you make any big decisions at work or at home, ask yourself: How am I feeling? And, how might that influence my thinking and my choices?

With the wisdom of emotion,
Marc

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When's the last time you made a bad decision? Maybe you bought a fancy kitchen appliance or a piece of exercise equipment that ended up collecting dust? Or perhaps you agreed to do a favor that now seems like a burden? We've all been there.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) - Graphic

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Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) - Graphic

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This graphic demonstrates the relationship and intersection between adverse childhood experiences and adverse community environments.  These two types of ACES can compound adverse effects later in life.

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Wheel of Power/Privilege - illustrated by Sylvia Duckworth

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Wheel of Power/Privilege - illustrated by Sylvia Duckworth

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This graphic highlights marginalization and intersectionality

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Sylvia Duckworth's illustration of Wheel of Power/Privilege can help us get a more intricate visualization of what the term "marginalization;" the further you are from power, the more ignored and unimportant you feel. However, as you try to place yourself in the different categories, notice how your level of power/marginalization shifts between categories. A different way to interpret this illustration is through an intersectionality lens (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw).

Do you think there are categories missing?

What do you think about the categories that are depicted here?

illustration of Wheel of Power/Privilege can help us get a more intricate visualization of what the term "marginalization;" the further you are from power, the more ignored and unimportant you feel. However, as you try to place yourself in the different categories, notice how your level of power/marginalization shifts between categories. A different way to interpret this illustration is through an intersectionality lens (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw).

Do you think there are categories missing?

What do you think about the categories that are depicted here?

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Spin The Wheel of Power & Privilege [Marginalization & Intersectionality]

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Sylvia Duckworth's illustration of Wheel of Power/Privilege can help us get a more intricate visualization of what the term "marginalization;" the further you are from power, the more ignored and unimportant you feel. However, as you try to place yourself in the different categories, notice how your level of power/marginalization shifts between categories.

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The closer you are to the center, the more privilege you have

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Graphic taken from https://ccrweb.ca/en/anti-oppression as referenced in blog post from Shawna Coppola - "Why Race?"

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Powerful insight on why conversations about equity and social justice start with race.

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Credit: wildpixel

In my work as an aspiring co-conspirator helping to "call in" my fellow White* folks and explicitly supporting equity and justice efforts within my community and beyond, I am often asked in conversations- most often by fellow White folks-why I (frequently) choose to "focus on race." Why not draw attention to all kinds of oppression? they ask. We don't have those problems here, they often argue, "those problems" being a semantic proxy for the kinds of interpersonal conflicts that make it into national headlines or viral TikToks.

Let's set aside for the moment that "those problems," which more often than not take the form of microaggressions, are often invisible to the vast majority of White folks until their neighborhoods, their schools, and their businesses find themselves on the receiving end of the enlightened public's disapproving gaze. Let's also set aside the facile notion that "focusing on race" is done so to the exclusion of (or is decontextualized from) other kinds of oppression-e.g., misogyny, homophobia, anti-fat bias, etc.

I am certain, in talking with others who engage in equity and justice work in predominantly White spaces, that I'm not alone in being asked such a question. And because I have been asked "Why race?" a lot, and foresee this not stopping anytime soon, I thought I would lay out my usual answers here in an effort to 1) conserve my (future) time and energy, 2) help others, potentially, who often face this same question, and 3) open myself up to feedback in the event that I am missing something important.

That said, the following encompasses how I most often answer this enormously complex question when working in these kinds of spaces.

1. The very fact that this (community, institution, organization, space) is predominantly White is reason itself to focus on race. In a nation whose racial and ethnic diversity is ever-increasing, it is becoming more and more difficult to justify (if ever there was a justification for) the predominance of Whiteness in our organizations, our communities, and our institutions. For example, the last time I was asked "Why focus on race?," I was sitting around a table of town leaders, all of whom, including myself, were White. The town's largest employer, a public university, is predominantly White, and its property tax rate is among the highest in the state. Some questions worth asking in a situation like this might be, "How did we get here?," "Why does our [community/organization] look the way it does?," and "What is our [community/organization] missing out on due to its lack of diverse perspectives and lived experiences?"

2. There is no racism-historically, no concept of race itself-without Whiteness. Despite what most White people are socialized to believe, to be White is to have a race. Race was intentionally constructed in the United States in order to legitimize the social control of certain populations (e.g., poor European laborers and enslaved Africans), to justify oppressive practices (e.g., colonization and enslavement), and, most importantly, to confer the advantages and protections of Whiteness onto those who were deemed by the ruling class to be White. For these reasons, spaces and places that are predominantly White have an obligation to grapple with concepts of race and racism.

3. Every other kind of social oppression is connected to race in some aspect or form. When we consider the ways in which different social identities intersect (Crenshaw, 1989) to confer advantage or disadvantage on an individual or group, race-and/or one's racialized identity-is often a compounding factor due to the fact that racial inequities exist within every single system and institution (education, housing, health care, etc.) within the U.S. For example, let's consider one's socioeconomic status. While women's hourly wages in the U.S. on average continue to fall behind those of men's (on average), greater disparities are made visible when accounting for race, regardless of the individual's gender identity. In addition, while disabled people all over the world experience discrimination and oppression, statistics show that those who are both disabled and Indigenous experience higher overall rates of incarceration, unemployment, and even premature death due to their inability to access appropriate (and non-discriminatory) health/medical care. In our work to eliminate racial oppression, we would also, potentially, be working toward eliminating other forms of social oppression.

4. As a result, many of the tools often used by myself and others in helping White folks like me acknowledge, disrupt, and work toward eliminating racial oppression are useful when considering other forms of social oppression. And while my Black women colleagues (special shoutout to Dr. Towanda Harris) have drawn my attention to the ways these tools can often be used to avoid explicitly talking about race and White supremacy due to their broad applicability, the fact also remains that by helping folks become comfortable with using tools like the Courageous Conversations Compass (Singleton, 2015) and the Power Wheel (Canadian Council for Refugees), they are more likely to return to them when thinking about/discussing their relation to other forms of power like patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc.

This, in its most simplistic form, is how I answer the question, Why race?. What am I missing? How would you answer it?

*Note: In this piece I have chosen to capitalize the words White and Whiteness in order to acknowledge these terms as racial and political concepts and to signify their racial and political significance. Many thanks to my colleague Lorena Germán for alerting me to this practice.

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In my work as an aspiring co-conspirator helping to "call in" my fellow White* folks and explicitly supporting equity and justice efforts within my community and beyond, I am often asked in conversations- most often by fellow White folks-why I (frequently) choose to "focus on race."

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My High School Never Talked About Race...Article

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My High School Never Talked About Race...Article

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Article that highlights why it is important to talk about race even in schools that are predominantly white or with very little diversity

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I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; an incredibly white kid in an almost entirely white school. I've been thinking a lot lately about the education I got in those schools, an education that would please those calling for no critical race theory, no politics, no controversy, nothing that would have made a young white guy like me feel bad.

The most recent hyper-politicization of our schools, of the histories, identities, and perspectives being attacked in board meetings and legislatures will harm every student it touches. It will especially harm those already underserved and marginalized in our system, and those students and families are not being heard from enough.

It's not shocking, I guess, that anyone trying to "both sides" slavery isn't interested in hearing what Black folks have to say about that. They should. They should read this article by Josh Adams about the impacts the anti-CRT movement will have on Black kids, and this piece by Kayla Higgs , who graduated high school in 2020, and especially this piece (and everything ever) written by Sharif El-Mekki- Why the Time Requires us to Teach Like Malcolm .

And when they're finished reading those, I would ask them to reflect on this: I was a white boy in a school that worked hard to protect my comfort, and it sucked.

A school that doesn't teach the truth is damaging for white kids too.

We're Going Back to the Future I Lived As A High School Student

My Wisconsin suburban district was ahead of its time in being far behind the times. We learned a lot, were held to high standards, and worked hard to meet them. I learned a lot, but was asked to think very little. I was never asked to be uncomfortable. I graduated with good grades, an impressive enough transcript, and a shocking amount of ignorance.

I read Shakespeare, Melville, London, Steinbeck, Frost, Lee.

We rebellious and bookish boys were lent books from our teachers; Kerouac and Salinger and, in one memorable miscalculation that left me scarred, Bukowski. I'm assuming the girl bookish rebels got other girls rebel books.

I didn't read Angelou or Baldwin or Lorca. No Butler, DuBois, Achebe, Tan, Hurston, Erdich.

We read Twain, but in AP Lit and Comp, the highest level English class for seniors, we weren't allowed to mention Jim in any class discussions or essays, because he was a "controversial" character.

We learned that Lincoln and the North freed the slaves, but didn't learn about slavery before the war, or how its central tenents were reconstructed after. We didn't learn about lynching. We learned Jim Crow was about water fountains. We didn't learn about voter suppression or racial covenants.

We learned about Westward Expansion and not the Dakota 38 or AIM or Wounded Knee. We only said "genocide" when we talked about Europe.

In February, we learned that Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream," and everyone said, "yeah, that sounds pretty good." We didn't learn about anything else he said, didn't read the words of Malcolm or Assatta or Davis or Newton and Seale.

In March, we moved on.

I was a white kid going to school with almost all white kids and entirely white teachers learning mostly about white people and reading white writers. My high school had one of the highest percentages in the state of students accepted to college. We heard about that a lot. We also had one of the highest rates of students leaving or kicked out of college after the first year. This was not included in the school fight song.

We never learned how similar the lives of people across the planet could be to our own. We never learned how very different lives, opportunities, and experiences could be just a few miles away.

We never learned to talk about race, and most especially never learned how to listen about it.

If I had known what I was missing then, I would have been offended at how little was expected of me.

Of course, I could handle big ideas. Of course, I could handle the full truth of our history and our present. Instead, I got less than a full education, less than what I needed to be as ready as I could have been when I left school.

My Diploma Didn't Prepare Me for Life in a Multiracial Democracy

Since it was absent from our classrooms, our conversations about race took place in hallways and homes. There weren't social media or cell phone cameras to make every stupid statement instantly public and permanent. Someone from my school would have made the news once a week. Maybe we ought to teach our students enough about the world right now to keep their ignorance from making them internet famous and unemployable.

My diploma came with hundreds of racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes, but with no lessons on how or why to challenge them, on how to understand and be respectful of other cultures than our own, on how our own skin color may have shaped our lives and how to process our feelings around that.

I left my school, my hometown, for Minneapolis. I left without any real tools for navigating a multicultural society, without any understanding of what it could mean to live in a multiracial democracy. I'm lucky to have found good teachers and patient friends, but there is no doubt that my first steps into the bigger world were taken from far behind my peers on much of what is important to succeed in that world.

And so I'm flummoxed. Yes, flummoxed, at how hard some are working to remake schools in the model of the ones that failed me, at the fervor in the fight for intentional ignorance.

This anti-anti-racism, these 'just the facts (but not those facts over there)' mandates, this idea that our classrooms could be somehow independent of the world we live in, of the world that lots of different kinds of people live in, this panic is being stoked in some misguided attempt to protect the little white boy I once was. It will fail.

We need to respect our young people enough to give them the best and fullest education we possibly can. Anything less is worse for everyone.

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My High School Never Talked About Race, and Oh Man Did I Miss Out

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I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; an incredibly white kid in an almost entirely white school. I've been thinking a lot lately about the education I got in those schools, an education that would please those calling for no critical race theory, no politics, no controversy, nothing that would have made a young white guy like me feel bad.

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Ditching Diet Culture at School - website

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Ditching Diet Culture at School - website

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Comprehensive resource website with articles and books targeted for all age levels.

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#DitchingDietCultureAtSchool

Digital Resource Library

Size diversity and inclusivity is for everyone.

This resource library contains hours of content and curated links, books, and more to open up conversations about size diversity, fatphobia, weight stigma and being inclusive of all bodies in our communities. There are resources for students, teachers, and families to dive into!

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Size diversity and inclusivity is for everyone.

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Weight Bias Hurts Kids, and We're Not Talking About It

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Article from Edutopia about weight bias and discrimination.

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For Angelica Gauptman, the self-consciousness never seems to switch off.

"I am a 17-year-old who needs to lift up her shirt and look at her abdomen to see if it looks the same each time I pass a mirror," she wrote in a July 2021 essay for the San Francisco Chronicle. "I am the girl who counts every single calorie I eat, and hates myself after bingeing on that single ice cream cone or a cookie that I've been craving for weeks... I am the teenager who tucks my chin into my shirt so that people don't see my weak jawline."

Gauptman isn't the only kid so exquisitely attuned to the way her body is perceived by others, nor is she the only one trying to pull off a seemingly impossible trick: to appear and disappear at the same time. In a trove of new research and in numerous articles filed in publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, kids as young as 9 or 10 years old are trying dangerous fad diets they discover on social media, and saying that cultural expectations around beauty and ideal body size are driving a desperate, often public game of comparison and body shaming. Like Gauptman, they feel compelled to show up-and anxious when they do.

But social media is only exacerbating the situation; the language of body shame and fatphobia has a long history, reigning as one of the most persistent and "widely accepted forms of discrimination," explains Haley Neidich, a licensed clinical social worker and mental health counselor. As early as 2011, adolescents were reporting that weight-based bullying was one of the most commonly experienced forms of harassment, eclipsing bullying based on race, religion, or disability, according to Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health. For kids with the highest body weight, Puhl says, "90 percent report they've been bullied about their weight. For most of them, it has been going on for several years, so it's a chronic experience-and a chronic stressor."

Within schools, the implications are both moral and practical. As more and more students grow up with the all-consuming feeling that something is wrong with the body they occupy, the consequences can range from toxic environments that marginalize the physically nonconforming to the prospect of classrooms full of students so anxious about how they look that learning itself is compromised.

Getting to the root of our own weight bias means unlearning harmful stereotypes. "Anti-fatness is purposeful and systemic and learned," says middle school English teacher Cait O'Connor. Confronting the stigma around weight can begin with conversations about positive body image and student identity, as well as direct conversations that challenge the way we talk about, joke about, and think about our bodies. "We continue to let fatphobia slide," O'Connor warns, "and that's how it continues to live."

Getting Ahead of the Problem

Size awareness and size shaming starts early and is evident in children as young as 3 years old, researchers have found. If left unchecked, it festers: By the age of 9, weight bias is as common as racial bias is among adults, reports Jane E. Brody for the New York Times. The findings suggest that efforts to confront weight bias should begin early-perhaps even in preschool-and then continue as bodies rapidly change through elementary, middle, and high schools.

A good place to start is with an examination of the values entrenched in the language used by staff and students, says Health Ed Content Specialist Christopher Pepper. Jokes about larger people, nicknames that emphasize body size or shape, myths that link large body size with laziness, and even well-intentioned compliments about outfits or an acknowledgment of weight loss can signal who is accepted in school and who isn't.

"Language evolution around body acceptance and around fat shaming is still in its early stages," Pepper says. "Teachers need to get some practice about how to intervene when they hear fatphobic things in their classrooms, and how to do so in a way that's truly supportive. Sometimes people intervene and end up accidentally reinforcing the very thing they're trying to curtail."

Extending the process into an audit of books, pictures, posters, and materials used inside of classrooms ensures there are a number of vehicles to reinforce positive body image messaging and affirm the identities of students in the classroom.
Courtesy: Nancy Paulsen Books
"Making a conscious effort to discuss books about size-diverse characters and infusing conversations around those experiences into students' reading lives is really important," O'Connor says. Try assigning books like Bodies Are Cool, by Tyler Feder (for young kids); Dress Coded, by Carrie Firestone (grades 5-7); or Dumplin', by Julie Murphy (for young adults); or supplement your library with resources from the Ditching Diet Culture at School Digital Resource Library.

Incorporating more books that touch on size diversity and inclusivity, according to O'Connor, can start a ripple effect: "If one kid reads, let's say, Starfish, by Lisa Fipps, and they're really affected by it, they learn the language of how to talk about this stuff to their friends. The word fatphobia itself is in those early-grade-level texts and when they learn that language and see those words, it creates conversation and changes attitudes."

To Change the Future, Study the Past

In the Tamalpais Union High School District, in Marin County, California, students take nutrition workshops that focus on the media's role in distorting perceptions of body image. "We teach some of the basic science around food and nutrition first; then we talk about what students are seeing on social media, and we teach them to be critical thinkers as well as questions they can ask when they see certain messaging online," explains the district's wellness director, Jessica Colvin.

Outreach specialists like Danya Axelrad-Hausman lead workshops on topics like body image-highlighting the "social factors and systems feeding us the information we're taking in about body image" and the origins of fatphobia. These sessions are used to train students as "peer educators" so they can support and educate other students in the school community.

"In the past, there's mostly been focus on different signs and symptoms of eating disorders," she says. "I'm trying to give more context about why we have such fraught relationships with our bodies and with food-how we got here, what we are contending with."

Not too far away, in the San Francisco Unified School District, students are also learning to look at food and nutrition through a critical media-literacy-informed lens.

"If you are on YouTube, watch TV, listen to the radio, there's lots of ads for food," says Pepper. "Students should be thinking about who made these ads and what they're trying to sell. You can talk about the tools that advertisers use to try and convince people that they should buy their products, and then have students create a positive alternative. If you were going to make an ad for your own favorite fruit or vegetable, what techniques would you use?"

In the past, advertising and health education relied heavily on guilt and shame as a tool, Pepper says. That's something the district is actively trying to move away from.

"Students should leave the classroom with more knowledge than when they walked in, but they should not walk out feeling bad about themselves or bad about choices they've made," Pepper says. "We want to give more information about all of the things that they encounter or are likely to encounter in their lives so that they can make good decisions."

Rethinking Identity
Courtesy: Nalgona Positivity Pride
In order for schools to effectively support students of all body types, experts say, they must work to cultivate an identity-safe environment-one free from weight-related judgments.

Educational consultant Becky Cohn-Vargas suggests starting this process by introducing students to the concept of identity safety and inviting them to help "formulate schoolwide norms for respect, acceptance, and inclusion." School leaders can update policies that prohibit appearance-related teasing and body shaming. Enforcing the policies vigilantly and providing support for students who may be teased, bullied, or harassed because of the way they look, their body size, their weight, or their shape is crucial.

While most state laws or regulations do require school districts to implement an anti-bullying policy-citing race, ethnicity, gender, and disability as common targets for bullies-body weight is often absent, Puhl explains.

"The fact that weight-based bullying is not commonly referenced in anti-bullying policy language tells us that this has not been adequately addressed," she says, noting that when it is, "schools tend to have higher levels of teacher intervention, improved levels of student safety, and lower rates of bullying."

Inside the classroom, identity-safety work begins with students feeling seen. Shana V. White, a middle school teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, asks students to create identity portraits. Students draw portraits of themselves-their head and shoulders-on a piece of paper and then draw a line down the middle of the face. On one side, students color in their skin tone as well as the shirt they are wearing, but on the other, White asks them to add in their visible and invisible identity markers, which can include attributes like race, ethnicity, gender identity, or body size.

"I put their projects on the wall, so they see them every day and know that all those identities are accepted in this place," she explains. "It's a really big growth point for a lot of kids, that they are able to be comfortable with who they are, and recognize and respect the identity markers of anybody."

Of Subtexts and Subliminals

From the time that students enter school buildings to the time they leave, they encounter subtle messaging about their bodies, says O'Connor.

"The desk itself sends a message," she explains. "If you don't fit in this desk, you don't belong here. And that's a huge tell in terms of whose body is valued and whose is not."

But the messaging doesn't stop there. Weight bias and prejudice have the ability to infiltrate a classroom and hide-imperceptibly influencing the way students are perceived and treated, altering the teacher-student relationship, and in some cases negatively affecting educational outcomes. An increasing volume of research demonstrates that a student's body changes expectations and attitudes regarding their performance in school. Students with bigger bodies are graded more harshly in subjects like mathematics, language fluency, and physical education, where they're thought to have " poorer physical condition and exhibit inferior physical performance compared to their non-overweight peers " even before they're given the chance to compete, the study suggests.

Additionally, school policies can translate into harmful subtexts about student bodies, says Laura Ross, a middle school counselor in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Last year, student members of the building equity leadership team worked alongside administrators to make dress code policies more inclusive.

Students noticed that a lot of the policies applied only to female students and expressed frustration about inequitable enforcement. "There was a lot of talk about how some of the dress code policies really depended on who wore the clothing," explains Ross. "If you're a curvy girl, you might get dress-coded, but if you're thin and wearing the same thing, you wouldn't. Students talked about adults policing their bodies and the messages that we're sending through the dress code as well, which was then changed."

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Weight Bias Hurts Kids, and We're Not Talking About It

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For Angelica Gauptman, the self-consciousness never seems to switch off. "I am a 17-year-old who needs to lift up her shirt and look at her abdomen to see if it looks the same each time I pass a mirror," she wrote in a July 2021 essay for the San Francisco Chronicle .

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A powerful documentary series with two episodes (2 hours each) that follows children who have mental illness.

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Skip to Main Content

Now Streaming

A documentary about the mental health crisis among youth in America. More More

Follow the journeys of more than 20 young Americans from all over the country and all walks of life, who have struggled with thoughts and feelings that have troubled-and, at times-overwhelmed them. Hiding in Plain Sight presents an unstinting look at both the seemingly insurmountable obstacles faced by those who live with mental disorders and the hope that many have found after that storm.

KEN BURNS PRESENTS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: YOUTH MENTAL ILLNESS A FILM BY ERIK EWERS AND CHRISTOPHER LOREN EWERS is a production of Florentine Films, Ewers Brothers Productions, and WETA ... More

About the Film

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: YOUTH MENTAL ILLNESS features first-person accounts from more than 20 young people, ranging in age from 11 to 27, who live with mental health conditions, as well as parents, teachers, friends, healthcare providers in their lives, and independent mental health experts.

The film presents an unvarnished window into daily life with mental health challenges, from seemingly insurmountable obstacles to stories of hope and resilience. Through the experiences of these young people, the film confronts the issues of stigma, discrimination, awareness, and silence, and, in doing so, help advance a shift in the public perception of mental health issues today.

Ken Burns Presents Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness a Film by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers is a production of Florentine Films, Ewers Brothers Productions, and WETA Washington, D.C. Directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers. Written by David Blistein. Produced by Julie Coffman. Co-produced by Susan Shumaker, Erik Ewers, Christopher Loren Ewers, and David Blistein. Executive produced by Ken Burns. Executive producers for WETA are John F. Wilson and Tom Chiodo. WETA project management by Kate Kelly. WETA production management by Jim Corbley.

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Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness | PBS

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Skip to Main Content Now Streaming A documentary about the mental health crisis among youth in America. More More Follow the journeys of more than 20 young Americans from all over the country and all walks of life, who have struggled with thoughts and feelings that have troubled-and, at times-overwhelmed them.

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Website with series of videos and podcasts - It's no secret that being 12 years old can be tough. At 12, kids shed layers, test new roles and transform before our eyes as they explore what kind of adult they want to be.

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Being 12: The Year Everything Changes | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News

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It's no secret that being 12 years old can be tough. At 12, kids shed layers, test new roles and transform before our eyes as they explore what kind of adult they want to be.

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Vol. 78

No. 6

Abstract

Opposing SEL Mindsets

In Need of Collective Healing

An Antiracist Approach to SEL

Freedom-Dreaming for an Antiracist Future

Social-emotional learning

Credit: Neil Webb / IKON IMAGES

Abstract

Opposing SEL Mindsets

In Need of Collective Healing

An Antiracist Approach to SEL

Freedom-Dreaming for an Antiracist Future

As a college student in Vermont more than 15 years ago, I took a child development course as one of the requirements of the teacher education program. In that class, my peers and I learned about the stages of childhood development as well as the social, emotional, and academic supports necessary for students to thrive.

I remember what happened one day, in particular. My best friend, Alicia Hernández, a Honduran woman, and I rushed into class just in time after running from another campus building a mile away. We took front-row seats next to each other so that we would not disrupt our classmates with our almost-late arrival. As was customary, our instructor, a white woman, took attendance before her lecture.

Since Alicia's last name begins with an H, the instructor called her name before mine.

"Alicia Hernández," the instructor read, anglicizing the pronunciation of my friend's name.

Busy rustling through her bookbag for a notebook and pen, Alicia did not hear her name, leaving our instructor to scan the room looking for an Alicia Hernández. When the instructor's gaze landed in our direction, she looked at both of us, and without skipping a beat, said, "One of you two."

With a roomful of white classmates, she assumed that one of us had to be the obvious owner of the Central American surname.

Our instructor called the next name after Alicia's and proceeded as if she had not just insulted us, as if she had not just reduced us to a blob of one-of-you-two.

I could not concentrate for the rest of the period. My heart raced. My body grew tense. My mind filled with questions: How come she didn't make an effort to learn our names after four weeks of taking attendance? Why did she think it was acceptable to diminish our individuality? When will these public assaults, these public erasures, stop?

With her actions, our instructor communicated to us and our classmates that, like her, they did not need to learn our names. They did not need to get to know us. They did not need to regard us as more than one of the two girls of color in a sea of whiteness.

Opposing SEL Mindsets

While my instructor taught us the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL) in child development, she was not culturally competent. She illustrated how an educator could be well-versed in textbook SEL practices and still inflict harm on students. Simply put, to be effective equity-centered educators, we cannot be emotionally intelligent without being culturally responsive (Simmons, 2019a).

That college experience, along with many others from my schooling and work life, exemplifies why SEL faces the risk of becoming white supremacy with a hug if we do not apply an anti-oppressive, antiracist lens (Madda, 2019; Simmons, 2019b).

Through my work with school districts nationally, I have learned that some educators share distinct reasons for implementing SEL depending on who their students are. In mostly Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) school districts, SEL is often about compliance and control. SEL then becomes another way to penalize and police BIPOC youth for their non-whiteness and to justify their supposed inferiority for lacking "these necessary skills" (Kaler-Jones, 2020; Simmons, 2019c). What is even more perverse is the implicit belief that SEL skills are exactly what BIPOC students need to function in underresourced classrooms and to smile through the pain of racism. On the other hand, for white, privileged students, SEL is about supporting college and career readiness. These opposing mindsets lead to different practices and outcomes, which ultimately perpetuate a racial hierarchy that positions white students on top.

As we confront our country's sin of racism, we must acknowledge that our nation's schooling has always been an education in whiteness (Brooks & Theoharis, 2018), which manifests as textbooks lauding white heroes, excuses about too few "qualified" BIPOC teacher candidates, dress codes that criminalize Black hair, productivity over people, and well-meaning educators who correct Black diction but claim color-blindness. In this context, any curriculum, policy, or practice in our nation's schools that is not deliberately and actively combating racism, bias, and oppression can easily be used as a weapon to put BIPOC students in their place.

Relatedly, the overwhelming number of articles that cite SEL as critical to employability (Committee for Children, 2016) also puts white hegemony on display. It seems we cannot talk about SEL without talking about what we deem, in a narrow sense, as employable and professional. For me, that has always meant talking white, dressing white, and acting white-unspoken rules I have learned on my educational and professional journeys. If we laud SEL for how it supports youth with career, business, and economic success, we must also reckon with our blind obsession with capitalism and its relationship with the white supremacy upon which it was built. We can still prepare students for future success without diminishing their identities, without sending them the message that there is only one way to be successful. We have to begin to open our minds to the possibility of genius outside of whiteness.

SEL that fails to address our sociopolitical reality and combat racial and social injustice will not prepare our young people for the world they will inherit-one fraught with hate, misunderstanding, and bigotry. SEL alone will not keep politicians from making laws that disenfranchise BIPOC communities. SEL alone will not keep educators from suspending BIPOC children at disproportionate rates. SEL alone will not keep teachers from having low expectations for BIPOC students. SEL alone will not prevent cops from killing BIPOC people. If SEL alone were the magic bullet, perhaps George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Walter Wallace Jr. would still be alive today. We need more for our collective healing.

Is SEL, alone, enough to provide this? Absolutely not.

In Need of Collective Healing

Over the past year, there has been much talk about the importance of SEL in schools as a necessary response to our pandemic reality. There has been an influx of stand-alone courses about managing stress and anxiety, pushes for educators to focus on self-care, and free student resources offering mindfulness strategies for the uncertainty. As a long-time proponent of SEL, I could not be happier.

However, as we embrace this new urgency, we must address not only the trauma of COVID-19 but also that of racism. Pushing for "neutral" SEL only aims to protect white comfort. That is, courses that teach educators how to manage stress and anxiety without speaking to the stress and anxiety stemming from racism disregard the experiences of BIPOC people and contribute to the trauma of erasure. Likewise, pushing for teacher self-care without also advocating for school systems to value teacher health and well-being puts the onus on educators, making collective care nearly impossible. And asking students to practice deep-breathing in response to systemic oppression is simply offensive.

Collective healing starts with committing to eradicating our country's wound of racism and not looking away, sanitizing history, or advocating for neutrality. It means taking a stand against the injustices we witness in our districts, schools, and classrooms, whether that happens through community organizing, peaceful protest, or speaking up in-the-moment. It means creating space for processing the collective traumas of the pandemic, racism, and other forms of oppression in our school communities. It means abolishing white supremacy culture from our schools to prevent the constant spirit-murdering of BIPOC students, educators, and families. It means implementing culturally and contextually responsive practices. It means prioritizing care through partnering with community therapeutic providers and building healing-centered practices into the fabric of schooling. It means ensuring equity, justice, and humanity in our teaching and learning. And it means loving and honoring BIPOC members in our school communities, not just saying we do.

An Antiracist Approach to SEL

Last June, while in quarantine, I became the victim of a hate crime. Shattered, I had no choice but to focus on my healing. I reflected on what was important to me, what inspired me, and what made my spirit feel most whole. In the process, I rediscovered my voice, the one that had been tone-policed, silenced, and punished for the past six years because it was, as I was told, "too strong" and "too powerful."

As part of my healing journey, I left my job, in the middle of a pandemic. I needed my voice to ring louder than other people's doubts, slights, and limitations. I left so that I could save myself, so that I could dream. And I left so that I could invest my time into changing the very system that failed me and is failing so many others.

For me, that has led to the development of LiberatED , a new program that takes an anti-racist approach to SEL and healing. Instead of assuming what people need, the LiberatED team and I are connecting with school communities through a listening tour to collect stories, needs, and ideas about healing, SEL, racial justice, and abolitionism. From what we learn from educators, families, and students during the listening tour, we will create resources, curricula, and training. In this way, LiberatED will become a community-generated, student-centered approach to SEL, racial justice, and healing. In our preliminary conversations with school leaders, we have learned that educators have great interest in implementing SEL and diversity, equity, and belonging (DEB) practices in their districts. However, many do not know where to begin or how, especially as it relates to racial justice. Above all, schools want to do well by their students, but I remain steadfast in my belief that good intentions are not enough. While the interest in SEL and DEB work is heartening, interest does not always result in action. We need to start our racial justice journeys now.

To this end, I invite educators to start a practice of reflecting on their identity, positionality, power, and privilege. Had my college instructor understood the damaging effects of her white-centered perspective, perhaps she would have called Alicia's name again and waited for a response. Perhaps she would have admitted to the class that she was still learning names. Perhaps she would not have left Alicia and me scarred with her nonchalant erasure. Bound to white supremacy's need for urgency and productivity (Western States Center, 2003), my instructor breezed through attendance in her desire to be efficient. However, there is a tension between equity and efficiency. Equity takes more time. Efficiency saves time, but at what cost?

Additionally, schools could collect data and devise action plans from their own listening tours about what belonging means for their school communities, especially since many of us are physically apart this school year. In the process of transforming how we teach for our new virtual and hybrid settings to build connectedness and engage students, we could check in with our students through surveys and one-on-one conversations to ensure we are meeting their needs.

Though we are already exhausted and overwhelmed with so many pressures related to the pandemic, we still must find the time to take inventory of our curricula, pedagogy, and policies to ensure they prioritize student safety and belonging. That is, affirming our BIPOC educators, students, and families must be a part of every pandemic-safety plan. This moment calls for developing partnerships with community organizations to support children and adults with healing, SEL, mental health resources, food security, and basic needs.

Freedom-Dreaming for an Antiracist Future

So much time has passed since that college experience. Yet I still shudder at the memory of my instructor's reduction of my individuality. Too many others have a collection of similar reductions, similar scars, from well-meaning educators, whose unchecked privilege and a lack of cultural competence harmed them. The field of SEL cannot similarly fall victim to this pattern. We cannot rely solely on good intentions, on how we teach empathy, without being self and socially aware enough to interrogate how such a kind field could perpetuate white supremacy culture.

Ultimately, my hope is that, through projects like LiberatED and through schools committing to racial justice and collective healing, we can begin to dismantle structural, institutional, and individual practices that harm young people, that inhibit their optimal social, emotional, and academic development. Educators and students deserve to express themselves freely without fear, to be treated with respect and valued, to feel safe, and to go to schools that challenge bias, discrimination, and oppression.

As I've written before, the pandemic is our equity check, our opportunity to do and be better. LiberatED is one part of my effort to be and do better, part of my freedom-dream for a future where we are liberated from the burden of hate and oppression, where we are all free to live and learn in the comfort of our own skin.

References

Brooks, J. S., & Theoharis, G. (Eds.). (2018). Whiteucation: Privilege, power, and prejudice in school and society. New York: Routledge.

Committee for Children. (2016). Why social and emotional learning and employability skills should be prioritized in education. Seattle, WA.

Kaler-Jones, C. (2020, May 7). When SEL is used as another form of policing. Communities for Just Schools Fund.

Madda, M. J. (2019, May 15). Dena Simmons: Without context, social-emotional learning can backfire. EdSurge.

Simmons, D. (2019a). You can't be emotionally intelligent without being culturally responsive: Why family and consumer sciences must employ both to meet the needs of our nation. Journal of Family & Consumer Sciences, 11(2).

Simmons, D. (2019c, October 4). A call to action for SEL's next 25 years [Conference presentation]. 2019 SEL Exchange, Chicago, IL.

Western States Center. (2003). Dismantling racism: A resource book for social change groups. Portland, OR.

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Vol. 78 No. 6 Abstract Opposing SEL Mindsets In Need of Collective Healing An Antiracist Approach to SEL Freedom-Dreaming for an Antiracist Future Social-emotional learning Credit: Neil Webb / IKON IMAGES Abstract Opposing SEL Mindsets In Need of Collective Healing An Antiracist Approach to SEL Freedom-Dreaming for an Antiracist Future As a college student in Vermont more than 15 years ago, I took a child development course as one of the requirements of the teacher education program.