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Educators, You Can Lead the Charge for Change

As a public school teacher for the last 15 years, I have seen quite a bit. I was fortunate enough to spend the majority of my career taking in these experiences in a truly beautiful place, Framingham High School (FHS), which sits within a wonderfully diverse urban district. “It’s a school that really looks like America,” former president Bill Clinton once said. Clinton signed the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act there.

And it did, and still does. In the halls, you hear multiple languages spoken. For 40% of our students, English is not their first language, and more than a third are on free or reduced lunch. Our students represent many backgrounds in terms of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and political affiliations. I am so grateful that I was able to teach social studies to young minds in this environment.

The last several years in our country have been a sad and confusing time. We are facing a global pandemic and police brutality that disproportionately affect communities of color, and many Americans live in constant fear fueled by misinformation and undemocratic practices. I have many poignant memories of my years as a teacher at FHS, but there are two that really stand out in my mind for how they illustrate what our nation is going through.

The first was on November 5, 2008, the day after the election of Barack Obama. I walked into my classroom; most of the kids had already arrived. There was an exuberant sense of joy in the air. I was greeted by Nemo, one of my brightest students. He ran up to me, gave me a hug and lifted his fist in the air. “Change!” he exclaimed. “Ms. Stevens, this is really change!”

Nemo, who later would go on to law school, said finally he could see himself in our president. We spent the rest of the class talking about the historical roots of racism and the barriers that have existed for people of color in this country, and why this election was so significant. At the end of class, Nemo raised his hand and said he felt there was proof that the country was changing, and he was right.

The second is eight years later, on November 5, 2016, I again walked into my building the morning after a presidential election. But this was a very different scene, one of frustration and fear. When I arrived at my classroom, there were students waiting for me at the door. They had many anxious questions: “What does this mean?” “Will my parents be taken from me?” “Will I be deported?”

Once again, I gathered my strength and spent the rest of class talking about the historical roots of racism, the barriers that have existed for people of color in this country, and how people have resisted, responded, and survived through difficult times. I told the students we would have lawyers in next week to run Know Your Rights seminars in multiple languages and that at school they would always be safe.

Later in the day, as I walked down the hall, I heard a group of white students chanting at some of our Latino students: “Build a wall! Go home!” My colleague and I tried to track down the students, but they ran away laughing before we could identify them. I had never heard this type of blatant racism in the halls of my school. I closed my eyes and pictured Nemo, eight years earlier, chanting “Change!”

The depths of pain felt by marginalized and underrepresented communities in the United States have driven more and more people, organizations, and institutions to ask for what Nemo chanted twelve years ago in my classroom: Change. And though it often feels too slow, change is coming. The Black Lives Matter movement has gained national attention, women are standing up to sexual assault saying #MeToo, and we are gaining (albeit slowly) acceptance of those who do not define themselves in binary terms.

People are hungry to learn, to grow, and progress. For some, it is a matter of life and death. As educators, we have an opportunity to help promote change. My coauthor Christopher Martell and I are hoping our new book Teaching History for Justice will help history teachers to make these changes by teaching history from a new perspective. Teachers can use this book as a roadmap to teach how activism was used in the past to seek justice, how past social movements connect to the present, and how democratic tools can be used to change society.

How we learn about the past can impact our behavior in the future. We cannot predict what the next eight years will bring. But we can do our best to bring about change that starts in the classroom.

Kaylene Stevens is a lecturer of social studies education at BU Wheelock. At Boston University, her work specialized in teaching about race and using culturally relevant pedagogy in the social studies classroom.