Ethical Schools

We speak with New York State Regent Luis O. Reyes on the evolution of multilingual education in New York, beginning with the ASPIRA Consent Decree that in 1974 established bilingual education as an entitlement for Puerto Rican and other Latinx students. NY is gradually transitioning to bicultural and bi-literate education. The Regents’ Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework represents the way forward.

*Overview and transcript below. 

Image: hostos.cuny.edu 

Overview

00:00-01:04 Intro

1:06-04:09 Relevance of John Dewey, Paolo Freire, Eugenio Maria de Hostos

5:00-26:37 ASPIRA Consent Decree 45 years later

26:38-37:10 Regents’ “Social Emotional Learning: Essential for Learning, Essential for Life”; culturally responsive-sustaining education

37:11-41:35 Resources and resource needs for implementing Regents’ Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework

41:36-48:56 Recruiting and supporting Latinx and other culturally-competent teachers; creating teacher-development pipelines; increasing early childhood teacher salaries

48:57-52:57 Need for more state funding; Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision; equitable access to funds for all schools

Transcription of the episode

Amy H-L: 00:15 Hi, I'm Amy Halpern-Laff. 

Jon M: 00:17 And I'm Jon Moscow. Welcome to ethical schools, where we discuss strategies creating inclusive and equitable schools and youth programs that help students to develop both commitment and capacity to build ethical institutions. 

Amy H-L: 00:33 Our guest today is Dr. Luis O. Reyes. Dr. Reyes is member of the New York state Board of Regents, the body that oversees all educational activities in the state, including the New York State Education Department. Regent Reyes is the Director of Education at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. He was a member of the New York city Board of Education from 1990 through 1998 and has been an educator for more than 48 years. Welcome Luis. 

Luis R: 01:04 Thank you. Amy. 

Jon M: 01:06 John Dewey wrote about schools modeling democracy and preparing students for democratic citizenship. You have talked about the influence on your work of Eugenio María de Hostos and Paolo Freire, who talked about education in the context of liberation. What's the relevance of these perspectives for schools today? 

Luis R: 01:25 I think the relevance of John Dewey and Paulo Freire and Eugenio María de Hostos is that these were all men who were educators, leaders of movements to ensure that education was not just about rote memory or about testing, but education in pursuit of living in a democratic society and living a fully participating, using one's mind, one's will and one's understanding of the social realities of our times to ensure that education becomes an instrument, not of dictating to people who they are, what they know or what they must do, but giving them the tools to help be co-creators of their own reality. Eugenio María de Hostos, a Puerto Rican educator after whom Hostos Community College in the South Bronx is named, was one of the preeminent leaders in education in Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean as part of the Confederación Antillana. He's actually buried in the Dominican Republic and is revered there as he is in Puerto Rico. 

Jon M: 03:10 And didn't he say that he didn't want his body to be returned to Puerto Rico until it was independent? 

Luis R: 03:15 He did say that and that has been respected all these years. There's no element of any part of Puerto Rican society trying to recover his remains irregardless of Puerto Rico's status. So that's Hostos. John Dewey obviously is a very famous and noted progressive educator leader in the United States affecting education throughout the world, not just the United States. And Paolo Freire was an educator leader in Latin America who pushed for education as part of a view of the world that says education has to be part of liberating individuals to participate fully in their life in this society. And so critical pedagogy or Freirean pedagogy is very much tied to the concept that we go to school, we get, we become educated, we work with other students, with teachers, our parents and others to liberate our mind, to liberate our bodies and ourselves from oppression, from ignorance, and to use that education and knowledge to make change and to make democratic change (small r, small d) in the societies in which we live. 

Amy H-L: 05:00 Luis, a big part of that is language. Of course, in 1974 the ASPIRA consent decree established bilingual instruction as a legally enforceable entitlement for New York City's Puerto Rican and other Latinex students. In the 80s, as ASPIRA's director of research and advocacy, you monitored the Board of Ed's compliance with the decree. 45 years later, what are your thoughts on the consent decree in New York City? 

Luis R: 05:28 And understanding that, uh, we went to court in 1972, not I, but the leaders of ASPIRA, other educators, parents, went to a federal court, I believe in the Eastern district, basically arguing that the rights that children have to education was being taken away from them because the students whose first language was Spanish, Puerto Rican and other Latino students in New York City, were unable to participate and to profit from a monolingual English education in the New York City public schools despite the fact that federal law indicated that children of whatever background have a right to public education and in 1974, in a case brought by Chinese-American parents in San Francisco, Lau vs the Board of Ed, had won a lawsuit. The Supreme Court declared that they had a right to special language assistance and the nature of that assistance was determined to be English as a second language classes. In fact, the judge in the case that ASPIRA took in 1972 and had not been resolved over two years, indicated to the ASPIRA plaintiffs and to the Board of Education defendants that they needed to come back to court and actually he did this from one day to the next. He said, I need for you to come to meet tomorrow with an agreement, a consent decree that would be signed by both sides, agreed to by both sides and have the imprimatur of the court and that's what happened. The consent decree, however, was based on a compromise, the compromise between the ASPIRA plaintiffs, their educational advocates, the lawyers of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund that was founded precisely in 1972 to accompany and be the lawyers for the ASPIRA plaintiffs. The lawyers argued from the perspective of that legally at that time students were being described as limited in English proficiency, having something that was missing in terms of their skills, their language, English language arts skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing. And therefore the Lau case said English as a second language. The plaintiffs, ASPIRA, came with a vision that was founded in the Puerto Rican community and ASPIRA's vision of education to prepare students to graduate from school with full skills in all subject areas, be able to get a high school diploma, go on to college. ASPIRA was founded as a student leadership organization with clubs in high schools throughout New York City. And the, the goals of ASPIRA and of the education that we were supporting is that not only that they graduate from school and that they be prepared and able to apply and get into college and graduate from college, but also have a career, have the skills to have a career. And the third point, which today is as important as it was in their original vision, that students would become active citizens and participate in the, not just economic and academic sphere, but in the civics sphere. So the founder of ASPIRA, Dr. Antonia Pantoja, was a social worker and had a master's degree from Hunter College School of Social Work and later had a doctorate. The vision was that education and leadership development of youth was for students to create community organizations and institutions to serve youth, to serve their families, to serve the community. So we had the Puerto Rican Forum, we had PRACA, we had a number of organizations that were founded by Dr. Pantoja and people in her time to meet the needs, the various needs of the Puerto Rican community. And in fact, the purpose for her of ASPIRA and of an education was to develop the community. So if we have aging people, we have people who are on welfare, we have children who, in foster care that we create. If the city and governmental agencies are not serving those children, we should create the agencies to serve them ourselves. Today, there is something called the Hispanic Federation throughout the state and New Jersey and Connecticut. And there are hundreds of organizations that serve our community at all levels. And so what we saw, which a developmental bilingual program that would build on the first language, the home language, Spanish , of the Puerto Rican Latino students in 1972, but that students would be able to participate in learning content and they could do it by learning through Spanish. So Spanish, as a native language was a subject area, language, Spanish language arts. In addition, math, science and social studies classes would be taught in Spanish and students would also get English as a second language class in which they learn the four elements of language arts - listening, speaking, reading and writing. The Consent Decree saw that the goal would be that the end of the process was children and the students graduating from the schools would be biliterate, a word that probably wasn't even used back in 1974. Bilingual, bicultural, meaning they knew about their own history and culture, and the ASPIRA Clubs were part of that process, teaching students about the history of Puerto Rico, the great migration from Puerto Rico to New York and to other states in the United States. The goal was that they would build on and develop both skills. The court said that a transitional bilingual program was sufficient because that's what we agreed to with the Board of Ed. The Board of Education at the time was not supportive of bilingual instruction and they supported what they saw as an English-as-quickly-as-possible alternative, transitional bilingual, which is to say when taking a English language proficiency test, it was called the LAB, the battery of tests. When you reach the 10th percentile, you would be actually the 20th percent, excuse me, that you would be able to do well in English only classroom. In 1972, 1982, Dr. Frank Macchiarola went back to court and tried to argue that that should be brought down to the 10th percentile. So ASPIRA eight years after the consent decree had to go back to court. What we originally got in 1974, by 1984, 40% of kids who were identified as Limited English Proficient, now most recently called English Language Learners and today described as Multilingual Learners. 40% of the kids who were eligible for any kind of service were getting nothing, which is why we had to go back to court and say they are not living up to the letter of the Consent Decree and the judge in the case in 1984 threw out the arguments that Chancellor Macchiarola was making and in fact they had to reinstate and ensure that the 40% of children who were getting nothing, not ESL, not transitional bilingual instruction to two languages, that they had to then become, to correct their actions and you had to be able to verify it by visiting the schools, by looking at the data that was being received. The Consent Decree and Lau were joined in New York such that in later time, if there were enough children speaking other languages, other than Spanish, what covered by the ASPIRA consent decree, meaning that the right to instruction in two languages, including English as a second language, was available to all students. If there were enough students in a grade level to form at least at least 20 students at a grade, first grade, fifth grade, ninth grade to form a class in one language. So if you had a community where there were Haitian Creole or Chinese Mandarin speakers and there were enough, they had a right to ESL and they could opt if they wanted, out of a bilingual program, but they also had the right to have bilingual instruction in Mandarin Chinese and English. And so over the years we have seen bilingual programs in the various languages being implemented and in some cases well, in other cases poorly. The history of the Consent Decree has to be seen in the context of the law, but also has to be seen in the context of the financial bankruptcy of New York City in 1974 so that the Consent Decree was implemented in ‘75, at the same time that New York City was declared bankrupt fiscally. And a Control Board like there is in Puerto Rico because of the deficits in Puerto Rico, the bankruptcy in Puerto Rico, the Control Board had control over the finances. And the New York City and monolingual teachers, mostly white, mostly women in large part Jewish, but Italian, Irish, German Americans. Many of those teachers had to be fired. Guidance counselors, school psychologists and nurses who were part of the professional staff in schools had to be fired in many cases because of the budget cuts that were imposed on the City. And the United Federation of Teachers, the UFT, under the leadership of Albert Shanker, was very opposed to the ASPIRA consent decree and bilingual education. And in fact, Shanker in his New York Times columns, wrote about bilingual education as very un-American and divisive and it was just a job programs for Hispanics because he saw that bilingual teachers had to be hired by the school system to teach in these newly formed bilingual programs and the ESL teachers, if there was only ESL, while the monolingual teachers were being not hired and many of them being excessed. And so it took all the way till 1984 when Macchiarola was trying to cut back on the requirements for the bilingual educators, ASPIRA. And this is where I came in in 1982 at the request of Dr. Pantoja to support ASPIRA and to support the school system's implementation of bilingual programs that we were able to have a dialogue with the second president of the United Federation of Teachers, Sandra Feldman, who became president after Albert Shanker retired or passed away. It was under her leadership with now AFT president Randi Weingarten head counsel to the president and counsel of the United Federation of Teachers that we came to an understanding and agreement to work together to implement the decree and to get beyond the us vs them. And so we went to Albany and through the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus and the Puerto Rican Hispanic Legislative Task Force under Angelo Del Toro and others were able to get funding for what was then called LEP Aid, Limited English Proficient Aid, so that people couldn't say, well, there's no money to form these classes. So we got state funding along with funding from the city and slowly built back so that the percent of students not getting anything came to what it is today, in the single digit percentages. Yes, there are still children not being served, but the vast majority are getting some sort of English as a Second Language or bilingual transitional bilingual services or in schools that have been created over the last number of years, dual language programs where 50% of the class are English speakers and 50% of students who speak a language other than English. So you could have a Spanish dual language program in an elementary school, let's say in East Harlem whereas in Queens or in some other part where there's large Chinese populations as in Chinatown, Lower East Side, you might have a dual language program that was Mandarin-English. The English speakers get the benefit of learning content as well as Mandarin Chinese in their classrooms with the EL students, the Mandarin EL students becoming part of the resources that it's not just the teacher of the children who can speak the language and so the students are models for each other of the two languages and that creates an environment that's closer to what Paolo Freire, I'm not sure about John Dewey, but certainly Eugenio Maria de Hostos, what they had in mind, that students learn together both languages and they learn content. And this is one of the biggest problems today, the lack even in 2019 for curriculum content that tells the story of African American, Caribbean, Latino, Native American, Asian. The content of the syllabus is not determined by the state. What needs to be taught is decided locally. And we have yet to, unlike other cities and states in the United States that have mandated an inclusion of African American history and culture. And today. that's something that I think is part of the work that has to be done by all educators, not just to have teachers who reflect all the students, which is another issue. Language issues, culture issues, race issues among the students and the teachers and the educators and leaders and the parents. All of these issues are intertwined because we live in a world where we can't put language in a compartment and separate it. A child who was homeless, a child who's in a foster care home, a child who comes from China, comes from Dominican Republic or from some other nation migrates or emigrates and comes to New York. Even from Puerto Rico being citizens, they know one reality or a different reality. Oftentimes, it may be they're coming because of economic need. It could be because of other reasons. We have children who came because of Hurricane Maria and there are more Puerto Rican children in Buffalo and in Rochester, displaced by Maria, attending and enrolled in public schools. than there are in New York city. Why? We're eight million people. Well, the cost of living in Buffalo and Rochester is much lower. And so if you have relatives there, you can send your child or maybe accompany your child. It doesn't mean you have a residence, your own apartment or any other things, but you can stay with relatives. But you then become eligible. as It turns out. And this is something that the courts and the state have determined. You have a right to resources from the federal government and McKinney Vento legislation law, which is funds that are provided to children who are homeless. That's a long answer to a complicated question. 

Jon M: 26:38 Thank you. Thank you very much. So one of the questions we definitely want to, you know, dig into some of the questions around culturally responsive and sustaining education. But I wanted to ask you, last year in 2018, in its document "SEL, Essential For Learning, Essential For Life," the State Ed Department, the Regents called for organizing schools around the importance of social emotional learning, including teaching students to make ethical decisions. And I was struck in reading it, that the Department acknowledged that this would require a huge cultural shift for many schools and districts, and that implementation would require lots of institutional obstacles. How has the State Department been implementing these changes and how has the, how have the decisions in the document been reflected in budget priorities, staffing priorities, things like that? How does, how do the Regents see helping schools and districts make this kind of really fundamental alteration in many cases and how it views what goes on in schools? 

Luis R: 27:52 In many ways, the decision that you saw in 2018 is aspirational, meaning that we are in the process at the level of the Regents, the State Education Department, its own leadership of, we're in a process of transition, we hope a process of transformation. We've had a number of changes in leadership. Just this August, the commissioner, Mary Ellen Elia, resigned. The deputy commissioner for student support, Angélica Infante-Green, became commissioner in Rhode Island. She had been in charge of the office of bilingual ed and when she moved up to deputy commissioner, her assistant and colleague, Lisette Colon-Collins, stepped into that Office of Bilingual Ed and World Languages. She went to Yonkers several months ago as an associate commissioner. So we've had changes and loss of a number of very important people, Lissette and Angélica in particular, when it comes to bilingual education. But we're also in a transition from a focus on high stakes testing and standard core curriculum under Obama, President Obama, Secretary Arne Dunkin, the No Child Left Behind apparatus and structure, followed by the Race to the Top and now the elementary, no, educational success, ESSA, the new mandate from the federal government where still we're very much tied to a focus on math and English language arts, oftentimes social studies, science and other areas getting short shrift. What we said in that document is that education is not just about math and language arts test scores and high stakes tests on which not just students are being measured and evaluated and rewarded or not, but teachers as well. And so the whole infrastructure around high stakes testing and Common Core has distorted the goal of education, which includes socio-emotional learning or as the recently passed regent, Judith Johnson, who was a deputy assistant secretary under Richard Riley when he was in Washington under I believe, Clinton, President Clinton. She says, “how are the children doing? Are they well?” And so she was making the point that wellness was the goal that children be well-educated, well housed, well supported, well counseled, well cared for. Children come to us whether it's in the ninth grade from another country or they come to us in pre- kindergarten in what are now UPK4 and UPK3 programs that New York City has implemented over the last three years under Mayor de Blasio with funding from the state. But pre-K is not about testing little three year olds and four year olds on some types of tests, but is meeting them where they are and what is appropriate in terms of educating a child. They need to be socialized to work and play and learn with other children and behave and respect the rights of everybody around them. And that means socio-emotional learning, play based learning, storytelling, listening to stories, being able to speak up, listen to others. And so we are trying to transform the nature of education to be beyond test prep where you become judged by whether you, uh, you have an 800 on the SAT or some other, some other tests. So ethical questions become important because teachers have to be ethical in how they treat the children. We don't accept that parents abuse their children physically, sexually, or let anybody else do it and we certainly don't expect teachers to be involved in any way allowing students to be abused. And so I would say that we are, there's a long history going back to Dewey, Freire, Hostos and others, and even further. We don't want schools to be factories either in preparing products or in how they treat the workers as just punching out products. And it's a long way to go. We are talking about a culturally renewing, sustaining education. That means the teachers themselves have to be knowledgeable. And diverse. And we have to ensure that there are more people of color, more people from both male and female backgrounds. We have to ensure that they are competent, not only in subject matter in all of the subjects that are possible, that are taught, but that they be competent in understanding how to bridge their culture, the culture of children from different backgrounds in the same classroom, the families, how do they engage the parents as partners and ensure that the teaching materials also reflect the diversity of the community, the diversity of the United States and New York City, New York State. And that's a problem we don't see in even out of some of the major institutions, higher ed institutions. We don't see necessarily content and books that reflect authors from across the racial, ethnic sexuality spectrum. And that's something where I work at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, we are just beginning to look at our own curriculum materials. We've developed a Cultural Ambassadors training program that uses all of our resources: oral history documents, books that have been written, research books, children's books. But we realized that Puerto Ricans, like, Italians like Jews or any other group have a variety of diversity of sexual orientation and gender identification and what materials do we have available to them. And so the materials by themselves are not going to teach. The teachers have to work with the student, with the parents and with others to read those stories, to discuss them, to understand them, to learn how to write your own stories about your own experiences. And that means being open to accepting and respecting the diversity that's in the school, in the daycare center, in the nursery, in the college. 

Amy H-L: 37:11 How does the State Education Department allocate resources for the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework that the Regents adopted earlier this year? 

Luis R: 37:20 That's a good question. We don't mint our own money. We get funds from the federal government and so issues of cultural competence can be embedded as they are in Head Start for federal dollars for Head Start are years ahead of New York City and New York State. And when it comes to educating children and, and acknowledging and building on the linguistic cultural background of the children, the families, the materials, we don't dictate what textbooks people use. So the school system, New York City, makes decisions at various levels locally. The school district, now they have regional superintendents or executive superintendents who are responsible for districts and release funds from the City to the schools. We have a long ways to go to be able to fund these these efforts. Teacher education, professional development. We just put into our budgetary requests on Tuesday at the Rregents meeting, funding for workforce development, of programs, starting with infants and toddlers all the way through age five, meaning there are daycare centers, there are Head Start, Early Head Start, three year old pre-K and four year old pre-K programs and we have staff that need to be trained to understand issues of language, culture, ethnicity, race, economic diversity and be competent. And so we're asking for funds over a three, five year period going forward, starting next year's budget to train the workforce in this area of nursery through pre-K. Anything that's covered under kindergarten to 12th grade has much more funding available for professional development and it's built into the budget. And so we're saying not only do we need to fund UPK programs throughout beyond New York City because in many rural and other municipal areas in the state that don't have UPK programs, which have depended on funding from the state, from the governor and the legislature over the last three years. But not all of the kids are, by far, are in programs who are eligible. So there's a lot, there's a lot of work at that level. And the culturally and sustaining is P-20, so think about how many thousands and thousands of teachers, teacher aides, guidance counselors, school board. If you weren't a bilingual teacher who went through a bilingual certification, but you're the principal of the school that has 30-40% of your kids are in a bilingual ESL program, how is the principal trained? What kind of requirements are there? Have there been in the certification of and licensing of teachers? And so we were talking about making changes in those areas, the licensing and certification course content. At the same time we're talking about getting funding for professional development and getting funding for curriculum and instruction materials. 

Jon M: 41:36 So picking up on one specific aspect of that, in addition to the funding and this kind of training and pre-service and inservice education, what are you seeing as the most effective strategies specifically for recruiting and supporting Latinx teachers and teachers who may not be Latinx but are culturally sensitive and culturally competent to recruit and support teachers to, to overcome the shortages of culturally competent teachers for Latinx and other groups of students? 

Luis R: 42:12 I think we have to understand that it's about creating or building a new or renewing and expanding an education pipeline and pathways to the teaching profession and the other educational professions that are associated with guidance counselors, et cetera. And that means in some ways going back to the middle schools and encouraging students to start thinking about what they should be studying now and what they want to study when they go to high school and what high school they want to apply. So we have to create a pipeline that in many ways is similar to, maybe earlier than, the pipeline that ASPIRA created in 1961 through the ASPIRA organization and youth leadership clubs. ASPIRA at one point had 200 ASPIRA Clubs in high schools - public high schools, Catholic high schools, private schools throughout the city, and the purpose of those schools were to create leaders. One of the areas of leadership was teaching and so today we have a colleague, Professor Tatiana Kleyn, who just presented a series of videos that were created about how to support immigrant students at all levels of the school system. This was done with state funding, a small amount of funding, and that was presented to the Regents and the State Education Department this week along with a resource guide. All of that needs to get into the hands of teachers and school administrators so that they can support students. One of the things that Tatiana and her colleagues have done has been to support Dreamer clubs. We're talking about clubs at the high school level of students who are themselves immigrants. They may be documented, undocumented. It doesn't matter. The clubs are the idea of students who are immigrants who can have the potential and funding. We hope soon that the New York State Dream Act that was signed, that that Dream Act, which allows for eligibility for Dreamers to continue their education, that we now need funding so that the dreamers who were in high school can stay in school, graduate, apply for college and be, even if they are not citizens, be able to participate in higher education programming that could lead to a teaching degree. You know that lawyers, there was a decision a year or two ago that you don't have to be a US citizen to get a law degree in the state of New York. So I would say that we need to create at the high school level at least if not before, that opportunities for students to participate in clubs that honor that or show interest in education and having college students become mentors. If you had Dreamers who are in college, DACA recipients who are in college, for them to go back to the high school or to the middle schools that they come from and support other students. We have to also make teaching an area that gets support and funding. The United Federation of Teachers, the AFT, are very much able to gain the credentials and the salaries over the many years. But there are people in Head Start and daycare centers in nonpublic school settings that are in community based organizations who have to get food stamps because they are not paid enough and many of them are able to work in these nurseries or daycare centers with a high school diploma. So we have to create a pipeline for people who are in early childhood to be able to get certification and licensing and get a BA and an MA. That means you have to start recruiting among this very poor class of teachers. Or if you get a master's degree from Hunter College in early childhood education and you're working in a daycare center, tomorrow, if you left, if you resigned, you would be getting paid at least $15,000 more in a New York City public school pre-K program because you're covered by the contract that was negotiated between the United Federation of Teachers and New York City. And the good news is, I think in the last few days, we saw that Mayor De Blasio made a commitment to start paying more to the people working in these daycare centers and community based. But I don't know if it's one or two years down the line that it will be implemented. There's an understanding that you can't have quality education, P-20, if you don't have a contractual system, a salary system, of parity so that teachers, educators, like  parents and others, move from one part of town to another part, from one city to another and move from one job to another and we have to make sure that they're able to make a living that's appropriate. 

Jon M: 48:57 Absolutely. Is there anything that you'd like to add that we haven't talked about? 

Luis R: 49:02 I'd like to say that my sense is that we are at a very critical time, uh, on all levels of our government when it comes to funding for education. We're talking about being owed still three, four billion dollars from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and the settlement and the agreement at the end of that, Judge Leland DeGrasse, who indicated seven elements of a sound basic education that's guaranteed by the state constitution. And the class size is one of them. ELL model ELL and services for students with special needs, professional development. All of those things are needed and yet we still are short in the funding that had been agreed to under the court's mandate because of the last recession in 2008, Governor Spitzer stopped adding funds and then he left. And subsequently the governor has not added beyond whatever gets agreed to from year to year. So we have a long ways to go and we can talk, the Board of Regents, we pass resolutions, we have a Commissioner and a State Education Department that can develop guidelines and all kinds of other regulations. But we depend on the other branches of government. And when I say the branches of government, I'm not just talking the legislative, executive and judicial in New York State, but at the federal level as well. We depend on the federal government, the state government and the local government, knowing that we are living in a society where we are economically, racially and culturally oftentimes segregated, the schools themselves. And so I could live in one part of my district on the Upper West Side and go to a school that has the resources that well off middle class, well educated parents are able to add and yet there are other schools where the working class parents do not have the ability to make up for what's missing. So we've got to insist that government does everything it can to ensure equal education opportunity, to ensure the resources and the professional development needed for equal educational outcomes. And we can try to close the various gaps in achievement, whether by level or by subject. And that while we're doing all of that, we're not just being reactive, but we are being creative, ensuring that the students are learning the skills that are needed in a world in which you and I can communicate by radio, by electronics, and are able to communicate with thousands of people and hopefully more in the future so that ethics in education is not a course or a weekend workshop, a webinar that you attend. 

Amy H-L: 52:58 Thank you so much, Regent Luis O. Reyes. 

Jon M: 52:58 And thank you listeners for joining us. We'd like to hear how you've incorporated ideas you've heard on our podcast or read on the blog. Are there topics you'd like to hear more about? Please email us at [email protected]. We also offer professional development for schools and afterschool programs in New York City area. Contact us for details. Check out prior episodes and articles on our site. We've recently begun posting transcripts of episodes as well. We're on Facebook, Twitter @ethicalschools and Instagram. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.

We speak with New York State Regent Luis O. Reyes on the evolution of multilingual education in New York, beginning with the ASPIRA Consent Decree that in 1974 established bilingual education as an entitlement for Puerto Rican and other Latinx students. NY is gradually transitioning to bicultural and bi-literate education. The Regents’ Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework represents the way forward.

*Overview and transcript below. 

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:54:16

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Image: hostos.cuny.edu 

Overview

00:00-01:04 Intro

1:06-04:09 Relevance of John Dewey, Paolo Freire, Eugenio Maria de Hostos

5:00-26:37 ASPIRA Consent Decree 45 years later

26:38-37:10 Regents’ “Social Emotional Learning: Essential for Learning, Essential for Life”; culturally responsive-sustaining education

37:11-41:35 Resources and resource needs for implementing Regents’ Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework

41:36-48:56 Recruiting and supporting Latinx and other culturally-competent teachers; creating teacher-development pipelines; increasing early childhood teacher salaries

48:57-52:57 Need for more state funding; Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision; equitable access to funds for all schools

Transcription of the episode

Amy H-L: 00:15 Hi, I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. 

Jon M: 00:17 And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to ethical schools, where we discuss strategies creating inclusive and equitable schools and youth programs that help students to develop both commitment and capacity to build ethical institutions. 

Amy H-L: 00:33 Our guest today is Dr. Luis O. Reyes. Dr. Reyes is member of the New York state Board of Regents, the body that oversees all educational activities in the state, including the New York State Education Department. Regent Reyes is the Director of Education at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. He was a member of the New York city Board of Education from 1990 through 1998 and has been an educator for more than 48 years. Welcome Luis. 

Luis R: 01:04 Thank you. Amy. 

Jon M: 01:06 John Dewey wrote about schools modeling democracy and preparing students for democratic citizenship. You have talked about the influence on your work of Eugenio María de Hostos and Paolo Freire, who talked about education in the context of liberation. What’s the relevance of these perspectives for schools today? 

Luis R: 01:25 I think the relevance of John Dewey and Paulo Freire and Eugenio María de Hostos is that these were all men who were educators, leaders of movements to ensure that education was not just about rote memory or about testing, but education in pursuit of living in a democratic society and living a fully participating, using one’s mind, one’s will and one’s understanding of the social realities of our times to ensure that education becomes an instrument, not of dictating to people who they are, what they know or what they must do, but giving them the tools to help be co-creators of their own reality. Eugenio María de Hostos, a Puerto Rican educator after whom Hostos Community College in the South Bronx is named, was one of the preeminent leaders in education in Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean as part of the Confederación Antillana. He’s actually buried in the Dominican Republic and is revered there as he is in Puerto Rico. 

Jon M: 03:10 And didn’t he say that he didn’t want his body to be returned to Puerto Rico until it was independent? 

Luis R: 03:15 He did say that and that has been respected all these years. There’s no element of any part of Puerto Rican society trying to recover his remains irregardless of Puerto Rico’s status. So that’s Hostos. John Dewey obviously is a very famous and noted progressive educator leader in the United States affecting education throughout the world, not just the United States. And Paolo Freire was an educator leader in Latin America who pushed for education as part of a view of the world that says education has to be part of liberating individuals to participate fully in their life in this society. And so critical pedagogy or Freirean pedagogy is very much tied to the concept that we go to school, we get, we become educated, we work with other students, with teachers, our parents and others to liberate our mind, to liberate our bodies and ourselves from oppression, from ignorance, and to use that education and knowledge to make change and to make democratic change (small r, small d) in the societies in which we live. 

Amy H-L: 05:00 Luis, a big part of that is language. Of course, in 1974 the ASPIRA consent decree established bilingual instruction as a legally enforceable entitlement for New York City’s Puerto Rican and other Latinex students. In the 80s, as ASPIRA’s director of research and advocacy, you monitored the Board of Ed’s compliance with the decree. 45 years later, what are your thoughts on the consent decree in New York City? 

Luis R: 05:28 And understanding that, uh, we went to court in 1972, not I, but the leaders of ASPIRA, other educators, parents, went to a federal court, I believe in the Eastern district, basically arguing that the rights that children have to education was being taken away from them because the students whose first language was Spanish, Puerto Rican and other Latino students in New York City, were unable to participate and to profit from a monolingual English education in the New York City public schools despite the fact that federal law indicated that children of whatever background have a right to public education and in 1974, in a case brought by Chinese-American parents in San Francisco, Lau vs the Board of Ed, had won a lawsuit. The Supreme Court declared that they had a right to special language assistance and the nature of that assistance was determined to be English as a second language classes. In fact, the judge in the case that ASPIRA took in 1972 and had not been resolved over two years, indicated to the ASPIRA plaintiffs and to the Board of Education defendants that they needed to come back to court and actually he did this from one day to the next. He said, I need for you to come to meet tomorrow with an agreement, a consent decree that would be signed by both sides, agreed to by both sides and have the imprimatur of the court and that’s what happened. The consent decree, however, was based on a compromise, the compromise between the ASPIRA plaintiffs, their educational advocates, the lawyers of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund that was founded precisely in 1972 to accompany and be the lawyers for the ASPIRA plaintiffs. The lawyers argued from the perspective of that legally at that time students were being described as limited in English proficiency, having something that was missing in terms of their skills, their language, English language arts skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing. And therefore the Lau case said English as a second language. The plaintiffs, ASPIRA, came with a vision that was founded in the Puerto Rican community and ASPIRA’s vision of education to prepare students to graduate from school with full skills in all subject areas, be able to get a high school diploma, go on to college. ASPIRA was founded as a student leadership organization with clubs in high schools throughout New York City. And the, the goals of ASPIRA and of the education that we were supporting is that not only that they graduate from school and that they be prepared and able to apply and get into college and graduate from college, but also have a career, have the skills to have a career. And the third point, which today is as important as it was in their original vision, that students would become active citizens and participate in the, not just economic and academic sphere, but in the civics sphere. So the founder of ASPIRA, Dr. Antonia Pantoja, was a social worker and had a master’s degree from Hunter College School of Social Work and later had a doctorate. The vision was that education and leadership development of youth was for students to create community organizations and institutions to serve youth, to serve their families, to serve the community. So we had the Puerto Rican Forum, we had PRACA, we had a number of organizations that were founded by Dr. Pantoja and people in her time to meet the needs, the various needs of the Puerto Rican community. And in fact, the purpose for her of ASPIRA and of an education was to develop the community. So if we have aging people, we have people who are on welfare, we have children who, in foster care that we create. If the city and governmental agencies are not serving those children, we should create the agencies to serve them ourselves. Today, there is something called the Hispanic Federation throughout the state and New Jersey and Connecticut. And there are hundreds of organizations that serve our community at all levels. And so what we saw, which a developmental bilingual program that would build on the first language, the home language, Spanish , of the Puerto Rican Latino students in 1972, but that students would be able to participate in learning content and they could do it by learning through Spanish. So Spanish, as a native language was a subject area, language, Spanish language arts. In addition, math, science and social studies classes would be taught in Spanish and students would also get English as a second language class in which they learn the four elements of language arts – listening, speaking, reading and writing. The Consent Decree saw that the goal would be that the end of the process was children and the students graduating from the schools would be biliterate, a word that probably wasn’t even used back in 1974. Bilingual, bicultural, meaning they knew about their own history and culture, and the ASPIRA Clubs were part of that process, teaching students about the history of Puerto Rico, the great migration from Puerto Rico to New York and to other states in the United States. The goal was that they would build on and develop both skills. The court said that a transitional bilingual program was sufficient because that’s what we agreed to with the Board of Ed. The Board of Education at the time was not supportive of bilingual instruction and they supported what they saw as an English-as-quickly-as-possible alternative, transitional bilingual, which is to say when taking a English language proficiency test, it was called the LAB, the battery of tests. When you reach the 10th percentile, you would be actually the 20th percent, excuse me, that you would be able to do well in English only classroom. In 1972, 1982, Dr. Frank Macchiarola went back to court and tried to argue that that should be brought down to the 10th percentile. So ASPIRA eight years after the consent decree had to go back to court. What we originally got in 1974, by 1984, 40% of kids who were identified as Limited English Proficient, now most recently called English Language Learners and today described as Multilingual Learners. 40% of the kids who were eligible for any kind of service were getting nothing, which is why we had to go back to court and say they are not living up to the letter of the Consent Decree and the judge in the case in 1984 threw out the arguments that Chancellor Macchiarola was making and in fact they had to reinstate and ensure that the 40% of children who were getting nothing, not ESL, not transitional bilingual instruction to two languages, that they had to then become, to correct their actions and you had to be able to verify it by visiting the schools, by looking at the data that was being received. The Consent Decree and Lau were joined in New York such that in later time, if there were enough children speaking other languages, other than Spanish, what covered by the ASPIRA consent decree, meaning that the right to instruction in two languages, including English as a second language, was available to all students. If there were enough students in a grade level to form at least at least 20 students at a grade, first grade, fifth grade, ninth grade to form a class in one language. So if you had a community where there were Haitian Creole or Chinese Mandarin speakers and there were enough, they had a right to ESL and they could opt if they wanted, out of a bilingual program, but they also had the right to have bilingual instruction in Mandarin Chinese and English. And so over the years we have seen bilingual programs in the various languages being implemented and in some cases well, in other cases poorly. The history of the Consent Decree has to be seen in the context of the law, but also has to be seen in the context of the financial bankruptcy of New York City in 1974 so that the Consent Decree was implemented in ‘75, at the same time that New York City was declared bankrupt fiscally. And a Control Board like there is in Puerto Rico because of the deficits in Puerto Rico, the bankruptcy in Puerto Rico, the Control Board had control over the finances. And the New York City and monolingual teachers, mostly white, mostly women in large part Jewish, but Italian, Irish, German Americans. Many of those teachers had to be fired. Guidance counselors, school psychologists and nurses who were part of the professional staff in schools had to be fired in many cases because of the budget cuts that were imposed on the City. And the United Federation of Teachers, the UFT, under the leadership of Albert Shanker, was very opposed to the ASPIRA consent decree and bilingual education. And in fact, Shanker in his New York Times columns, wrote about bilingual education as very un-American and divisive and it was just a job programs for Hispanics because he saw that bilingual teachers had to be hired by the school system to teach in these newly formed bilingual programs and the ESL teachers, if there was only ESL, while the monolingual teachers were being not hired and many of them being excessed. And so it took all the way till 1984 when Macchiarola was trying to cut back on the requirements for the bilingual educators, ASPIRA. And this is where I came in in 1982 at the request of Dr. Pantoja to support ASPIRA and to support the school system’s implementation of bilingual programs that we were able to have a dialogue with the second president of the United Federation of Teachers, Sandra Feldman, who became president after Albert Shanker retired or passed away. It was under her leadership with now AFT president Randi Weingarten head counsel to the president and counsel of the United Federation of Teachers that we came to an understanding and agreement to work together to implement the decree and to get beyond the us vs them. And so we went to Albany and through the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus and the Puerto Rican Hispanic Legislative Task Force under Angelo Del Toro and others were able to get funding for what was then called LEP Aid, Limited English Proficient Aid, so that people couldn’t say, well, there’s no money to form these classes. So we got state funding along with funding from the city and slowly built back so that the percent of students not getting anything came to what it is today, in the single digit percentages. Yes, there are still children not being served, but the vast majority are getting some sort of English as a Second Language or bilingual transitional bilingual services or in schools that have been created over the last number of years, dual language programs where 50% of the class are English speakers and 50% of students who speak a language other than English. So you could have a Spanish dual language program in an elementary school, let’s say in East Harlem whereas in Queens or in some other part where there’s large Chinese populations as in Chinatown, Lower East Side, you might have a dual language program that was Mandarin-English. The English speakers get the benefit of learning content as well as Mandarin Chinese in their classrooms with the EL students, the Mandarin EL students becoming part of the resources that it’s not just the teacher of the children who can speak the language and so the students are models for each other of the two languages and that creates an environment that’s closer to what Paolo Freire, I’m not sure about John Dewey, but certainly Eugenio Maria de Hostos, what they had in mind, that students learn together both languages and they learn content. And this is one of the biggest problems today, the lack even in 2019 for curriculum content that tells the story of African American, Caribbean, Latino, Native American, Asian. The content of the syllabus is not determined by the state. What needs to be taught is decided locally. And we have yet to, unlike other cities and states in the United States that have mandated an inclusion of African American history and culture. And today. that’s something that I think is part of the work that has to be done by all educators, not just to have teachers who reflect all the students, which is another issue. Language issues, culture issues, race issues among the students and the teachers and the educators and leaders and the parents. All of these issues are intertwined because we live in a world where we can’t put language in a compartment and separate it. A child who was homeless, a child who’s in a foster care home, a child who comes from China, comes from Dominican Republic or from some other nation migrates or emigrates and comes to New York. Even from Puerto Rico being citizens, they know one reality or a different reality. Oftentimes, it may be they’re coming because of economic need. It could be because of other reasons. We have children who came because of Hurricane Maria and there are more Puerto Rican children in Buffalo and in Rochester, displaced by Maria, attending and enrolled in public schools. than there are in New York city. Why? We’re eight million people. Well, the cost of living in Buffalo and Rochester is much lower. And so if you have relatives there, you can send your child or maybe accompany your child. It doesn’t mean you have a residence, your own apartment or any other things, but you can stay with relatives. But you then become eligible. as It turns out. And this is something that the courts and the state have determined. You have a right to resources from the federal government and McKinney Vento legislation law, which is funds that are provided to children who are homeless. That’s a long answer to a complicated question. 

Jon M: 26:38 Thank you. Thank you very much. So one of the questions we definitely want to, you know, dig into some of the questions around culturally responsive and sustaining education. But I wanted to ask you, last year in 2018, in its document “SEL, Essential For Learning, Essential For Life,” the State Ed Department, the Regents called for organizing schools around the importance of social emotional learning, including teaching students to make ethical decisions. And I was struck in reading it, that the Department acknowledged that this would require a huge cultural shift for many schools and districts, and that implementation would require lots of institutional obstacles. How has the State Department been implementing these changes and how has the, how have the decisions in the document been reflected in budget priorities, staffing priorities, things like that? How does, how do the Regents see helping schools and districts make this kind of really fundamental alteration in many cases and how it views what goes on in schools? 

Luis R: 27:52 In many ways, the decision that you saw in 2018 is aspirational, meaning that we are in the process at the level of the Regents, the State Education Department, its own leadership of, we’re in a process of transition, we hope a process of transformation. We’ve had a number of changes in leadership. Just this August, the commissioner, Mary Ellen Elia, resigned. The deputy commissioner for student support, Angélica Infante-Green, became commissioner in Rhode Island. She had been in charge of the office of bilingual ed and when she moved up to deputy commissioner, her assistant and colleague, Lisette Colon-Collins, stepped into that Office of Bilingual Ed and World Languages. She went to Yonkers several months ago as an associate commissioner. So we’ve had changes and loss of a number of very important people, Lissette and Angélica in particular, when it comes to bilingual education. But we’re also in a transition from a focus on high stakes testing and standard core curriculum under Obama, President Obama, Secretary Arne Dunkin, the No Child Left Behind apparatus and structure, followed by the Race to the Top and now the elementary, no, educational success, ESSA, the new mandate from the federal government where still we’re very much tied to a focus on math and English language arts, oftentimes social studies, science and other areas getting short shrift. What we said in that document is that education is not just about math and language arts test scores and high stakes tests on which not just students are being measured and evaluated and rewarded or not, but teachers as well. And so the whole infrastructure around high stakes testing and Common Core has distorted the goal of education, which includes socio-emotional learning or as the recently passed regent, Judith Johnson, who was a deputy assistant secretary under Richard Riley when he was in Washington under I believe, Clinton, President Clinton. She says, “how are the children doing? Are they well?” And so she was making the point that wellness was the goal that children be well-educated, well housed, well supported, well counseled, well cared for. Children come to us whether it’s in the ninth grade from another country or they come to us in pre- kindergarten in what are now UPK4 and UPK3 programs that New York City has implemented over the last three years under Mayor de Blasio with funding from the state. But pre-K is not about testing little three year olds and four year olds on some types of tests, but is meeting them where they are and what is appropriate in terms of educating a child. They need to be socialized to work and play and learn with other children and behave and respect the rights of everybody around them. And that means socio-emotional learning, play based learning, storytelling, listening to stories, being able to speak up, listen to others. And so we are trying to transform the nature of education to be beyond test prep where you become judged by whether you, uh, you have an 800 on the SAT or some other, some other tests. So ethical questions become important because teachers have to be ethical in how they treat the children. We don’t accept that parents abuse their children physically, sexually, or let anybody else do it and we certainly don’t expect teachers to be involved in any way allowing students to be abused. And so I would say that we are, there’s a long history going back to Dewey, Freire, Hostos and others, and even further. We don’t want schools to be factories either in preparing products or in how they treat the workers as just punching out products. And it’s a long way to go. We are talking about a culturally renewing, sustaining education. That means the teachers themselves have to be knowledgeable. And diverse. And we have to ensure that there are more people of color, more people from both male and female backgrounds. We have to ensure that they are competent, not only in subject matter in all of the subjects that are possible, that are taught, but that they be competent in understanding how to bridge their culture, the culture of children from different backgrounds in the same classroom, the families, how do they engage the parents as partners and ensure that the teaching materials also reflect the diversity of the community, the diversity of the United States and New York City, New York State. And that’s a problem we don’t see in even out of some of the major institutions, higher ed institutions. We don’t see necessarily content and books that reflect authors from across the racial, ethnic sexuality spectrum. And that’s something where I work at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, we are just beginning to look at our own curriculum materials. We’ve developed a Cultural Ambassadors training program that uses all of our resources: oral history documents, books that have been written, research books, children’s books. But we realized that Puerto Ricans, like, Italians like Jews or any other group have a variety of diversity of sexual orientation and gender identification and what materials do we have available to them. And so the materials by themselves are not going to teach. The teachers have to work with the student, with the parents and with others to read those stories, to discuss them, to understand them, to learn how to write your own stories about your own experiences. And that means being open to accepting and respecting the diversity that’s in the school, in the daycare center, in the nursery, in the college. 

Amy H-L: 37:11 How does the State Education Department allocate resources for the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework that the Regents adopted earlier this year? 

Luis R: 37:20 That’s a good question. We don’t mint our own money. We get funds from the federal government and so issues of cultural competence can be embedded as they are in Head Start for federal dollars for Head Start are years ahead of New York City and New York State. And when it comes to educating children and, and acknowledging and building on the linguistic cultural background of the children, the families, the materials, we don’t dictate what textbooks people use. So the school system, New York City, makes decisions at various levels locally. The school district, now they have regional superintendents or executive superintendents who are responsible for districts and release funds from the City to the schools. We have a long ways to go to be able to fund these these efforts. Teacher education, professional development. We just put into our budgetary requests on Tuesday at the Rregents meeting, funding for workforce development, of programs, starting with infants and toddlers all the way through age five, meaning there are daycare centers, there are Head Start, Early Head Start, three year old pre-K and four year old pre-K programs and we have staff that need to be trained to understand issues of language, culture, ethnicity, race, economic diversity and be competent. And so we’re asking for funds over a three, five year period going forward, starting next year’s budget to train the workforce in this area of nursery through pre-K. Anything that’s covered under kindergarten to 12th grade has much more funding available for professional development and it’s built into the budget. And so we’re saying not only do we need to fund UPK programs throughout beyond New York City because in many rural and other municipal areas in the state that don’t have UPK programs, which have depended on funding from the state, from the governor and the legislature over the last three years. But not all of the kids are, by far, are in programs who are eligible. So there’s a lot, there’s a lot of work at that level. And the culturally and sustaining is P-20, so think about how many thousands and thousands of teachers, teacher aides, guidance counselors, school board. If you weren’t a bilingual teacher who went through a bilingual certification, but you’re the principal of the school that has 30-40% of your kids are in a bilingual ESL program, how is the principal trained? What kind of requirements are there? Have there been in the certification of and licensing of teachers? And so we were talking about making changes in those areas, the licensing and certification course content. At the same time we’re talking about getting funding for professional development and getting funding for curriculum and instruction materials. 

Jon M: 41:36 So picking up on one specific aspect of that, in addition to the funding and this kind of training and pre-service and inservice education, what are you seeing as the most effective strategies specifically for recruiting and supporting Latinx teachers and teachers who may not be Latinx but are culturally sensitive and culturally competent to recruit and support teachers to, to overcome the shortages of culturally competent teachers for Latinx and other groups of students? 

Luis R: 42:12 I think we have to understand that it’s about creating or building a new or renewing and expanding an education pipeline and pathways to the teaching profession and the other educational professions that are associated with guidance counselors, et cetera. And that means in some ways going back to the middle schools and encouraging students to start thinking about what they should be studying now and what they want to study when they go to high school and what high school they want to apply. So we have to create a pipeline that in many ways is similar to, maybe earlier than, the pipeline that ASPIRA created in 1961 through the ASPIRA organization and youth leadership clubs. ASPIRA at one point had 200 ASPIRA Clubs in high schools – public high schools, Catholic high schools, private schools throughout the city, and the purpose of those schools were to create leaders. One of the areas of leadership was teaching and so today we have a colleague, Professor Tatiana Kleyn, who just presented a series of videos that were created about how to support immigrant students at all levels of the school system. This was done with state funding, a small amount of funding, and that was presented to the Regents and the State Education Department this week along with a resource guide. All of that needs to get into the hands of teachers and school administrators so that they can support students. One of the things that Tatiana and her colleagues have done has been to support Dreamer clubs. We’re talking about clubs at the high school level of students who are themselves immigrants. They may be documented, undocumented. It doesn’t matter. The clubs are the idea of students who are immigrants who can have the potential and funding. We hope soon that the New York State Dream Act that was signed, that that Dream Act, which allows for eligibility for Dreamers to continue their education, that we now need funding so that the dreamers who were in high school can stay in school, graduate, apply for college and be, even if they are not citizens, be able to participate in higher education programming that could lead to a teaching degree. You know that lawyers, there was a decision a year or two ago that you don’t have to be a US citizen to get a law degree in the state of New York. So I would say that we need to create at the high school level at least if not before, that opportunities for students to participate in clubs that honor that or show interest in education and having college students become mentors. If you had Dreamers who are in college, DACA recipients who are in college, for them to go back to the high school or to the middle schools that they come from and support other students. We have to also make teaching an area that gets support and funding. The United Federation of Teachers, the AFT, are very much able to gain the credentials and the salaries over the many years. But there are people in Head Start and daycare centers in nonpublic school settings that are in community based organizations who have to get food stamps because they are not paid enough and many of them are able to work in these nurseries or daycare centers with a high school diploma. So we have to create a pipeline for people who are in early childhood to be able to get certification and licensing and get a BA and an MA. That means you have to start recruiting among this very poor class of teachers. Or if you get a master’s degree from Hunter College in early childhood education and you’re working in a daycare center, tomorrow, if you left, if you resigned, you would be getting paid at least $15,000 more in a New York City public school pre-K program because you’re covered by the contract that was negotiated between the United Federation of Teachers and New York City. And the good news is, I think in the last few days, we saw that Mayor De Blasio made a commitment to start paying more to the people working in these daycare centers and community based. But I don’t know if it’s one or two years down the line that it will be implemented. There’s an understanding that you can’t have quality education, P-20, if you don’t have a contractual system, a salary system, of parity so that teachers, educators, like  parents and others, move from one part of town to another part, from one city to another and move from one job to another and we have to make sure that they’re able to make a living that’s appropriate. 

Jon M: 48:57 Absolutely. Is there anything that you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about? 

Luis R: 49:02 I’d like to say that my sense is that we are at a very critical time, uh, on all levels of our government when it comes to funding for education. We’re talking about being owed still three, four billion dollars from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and the settlement and the agreement at the end of that, Judge Leland DeGrasse, who indicated seven elements of a sound basic education that’s guaranteed by the state constitution. And the class size is one of them. ELL model ELL and services for students with special needs, professional development. All of those things are needed and yet we still are short in the funding that had been agreed to under the court’s mandate because of the last recession in 2008, Governor Spitzer stopped adding funds and then he left. And subsequently the governor has not added beyond whatever gets agreed to from year to year. So we have a long ways to go and we can talk, the Board of Regents, we pass resolutions, we have a Commissioner and a State Education Department that can develop guidelines and all kinds of other regulations. But we depend on the other branches of government. And when I say the branches of government, I’m not just talking the legislative, executive and judicial in New York State, but at the federal level as well. We depend on the federal government, the state government and the local government, knowing that we are living in a society where we are economically, racially and culturally oftentimes segregated, the schools themselves. And so I could live in one part of my district on the Upper West Side and go to a school that has the resources that well off middle class, well educated parents are able to add and yet there are other schools where the working class parents do not have the ability to make up for what’s missing. So we’ve got to insist that government does everything it can to ensure equal education opportunity, to ensure the resources and the professional development needed for equal educational outcomes. And we can try to close the various gaps in achievement, whether by level or by subject. And that while we’re doing all of that, we’re not just being reactive, but we are being creative, ensuring that the students are learning the skills that are needed in a world in which you and I can communicate by radio, by electronics, and are able to communicate with thousands of people and hopefully more in the future so that ethics in education is not a course or a weekend workshop, a webinar that you attend. 

Amy H-L: 52:58 Thank you so much, Regent Luis O. Reyes. 

Jon M: 52:58 And thank you listeners for joining us. We’d like to hear how you’ve incorporated ideas you’ve heard on our podcast or read on the blog. Are there topics you’d like to hear more about? Please email us at [email protected]. We also offer professional development for schools and afterschool programs in New York City area. Contact us for details. Check out prior episodes and articles on our site. We’ve recently begun posting transcripts of episodes as well. We’re on Facebook, Twitter @ethicalschools and Instagram. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.

We speak with high school science teachers and trans men, Sam Long and Lewis Maday-Travis, who have developed resources and trainings to help biology teachers develop gender-inclusive curricula.  Science tells us that sexual and gender diversity is both normal and positive.  

*Overview and transcript below.

[ss_player]

To know more about Lewis and Sam's projects, please go to sam-long.weebly.com, fishyteaching.com and transeducators.com. 

00:00:54 Introductions

00:56-03:19 Experiences as LGBTQ high school students

03:20-06:15 As teachers, coming out as trans men to colleagues and students

06:16-11:13 Key elements of a gender-inclusive biology curriculum

11:14-16:26 Working to help make other teachers’ instruction more accurate and inclusive

16:27-19:38 How teachers respond to trans students’ lied experience

19:39-21:42 Relevance of Dewey’s ethical framework

21:43-29:21 Success stories in demarginalizing students

29:22-30:51 How teachers can develop this work

30:52 Outro

Jon M: 00:15 Hi, I'm Jon Moscow.

Amy H-L: 00:17 And I'm Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools, where we discuss strategies for creating inclusive and equitable schools and youth programs and help students to develop commitment and capacity to build ethical institutions.

Jon M: 00:30 Our guests today are Sam Long and Lewis Maday-Travis. Sam and Lewis are both high school science teachers, Sam in Denver and Lewis in Seattle. Both are trans men. Since the start of this year, the two have been creating resources and providing training to help teachers develop accurate and inclusive biology curriculum. Welcome Sam and Lewis.

Sam L: 00:53 Thank you.

Lewis M-T: 00:54 Thank you.

Amy H-L: 00:56 So what were your own experiences as trans high school students?

Sam L: 01:01 Well, I could start on that one. My experience as a high school student was that I was starting to transition while I was in high school and not pertaining to science class, but in general most of the adults around me didn't know what to do. It wasn't something they had heard of. It wasn't something they had had any training or experience in. And what that led to was some kind of poor decisions on their part and trying to figure out, well, uh, where should I use the restroom? How should I participate in overnight trips? And so that was only 10 years ago, but now we're starting to see policies crop up and model policies be made available online for helping school districts to include trans students in kind of a standardized way or at least to have a guideline to follow in accommodating students. And then in the science classroom I learned nothing about it in health class they learned nothing about sexuality and gender identity. And one of my goals as a science teacher is to make sure that our students that are coming out now and identifying as LGBTQ see themselves represented in some way at school.

Jon M: 02:23 Lewis, did you want to add to that in terms of your experience?

Lewis M-T: 02:27 Absolutely. So my experiences were slightly different. For one, I didn't come out as trans or I didn't actually realize that I was trans until after leaving high school. And so most of my experiences around inclusion in high school were around identifying as queer. And I actually went to a high school where I was very well supported as a queer and gender nonconforming young person. And I think that the teachers that I had who really supported me have really been a model for me as a teacher about what inclusion and really knowing your students and really accepting them can look like. I will say that in terms of trans content or thinking about like trans issues or intersex traits or other kinds of gender diversity, I know that my school worked really hard to try to be as inclusive as possible and I know that folks made mistakes, which, you know, I think it's also a good lesson for me as an educator bLewiecause heavens knows I make mistakes all the time.

Jon M: 03:20 So as teachers, how, and when did you introduce yourself to your students and your colleagues as trans men?

Lewis M-T: 03:30 I, um, I talked about this a little bit before with some people. So when I started teaching, I was not out as trans during the interview except that when I came in they thought that they were interviewing a female candidate. So it was kind of this funny thing where I did my whole interview day and like it seemed to go really well and it was like a lovely experience but was kind of weird around pronouns and things like that. And at the end of the day someone called me and was like, by the way, I just want you to know that I'm a man. I came out to colleagues right away at my previous school and folks were generally fairly accepting. I was the first out trans faculty or staff member as far as I know at that school and I didn't come out to my students for a couple of years after that. And I think that a large part of that was both. I was working with young students, I was working with sixth graders at the time, but also just general attitudes and awareness around trans issues were significantly different. That was over seven years ago now. And I chose to come out to my students during a unit where I was leading them in thinking about identity in STEM so you know, who does science, why is it that some groups are over underrepresented in science, um, and told some of my own story as a trans person in science and my experiences and the response was overwhelmingly positive and I found that it allowed me to be much more myself as a teacher and also talk more about the justification for why I talk so much and work with identity so much in the science classroom.

Jon M: 05:04 Sam, did you want to add to that?

Sam L: 05:06 Yeah. My experience with introducing myself as transgender in my school has also been positive. I've come out to students and staff every year that I've been teaching, which is, I'm in my fifth year now and I've been very fortunate to have a supportive my school leaders and uh, have positive responses from students. I see my had an annually coming out as serving two functions. One, it's how I'm most comfortable interacting with my students. Having them know that part of me and knowing that I am willing to support that part of them or any differences or identities that they may hold. And then the other function is as a form of setting the culture, the classroom setting a culture of inclusion and showing, uh, from the first day now, when I tell them about my identities, that we're not tolerating any prejudice and we are all here to learn together and we respect diverse identities in our classroom.

Amy H-L: 06:16 What are the key elements of a gender inclusive biology curriculum?

Sam L: 06:21 So to me the key elements of a gender inclusive biology curriculum are approaches to teaching. And so it's not teaching something new or separate. But in everything that I teach, I try to make sure that there is authenticity and what I teach. So everything is based on research, everything is accurate and modern science, everything is continuous. So we're not talking about gender once or doing one big project and leaving it at that. The messages are consistent from lesson to lesson. And so students can feel a sense after the semester, after the year that well, you really touched on that and we developed these ideas in a continuous way. Another element is there needs to be affirmation of student identities. So we need to not just teach that there is diversity and living things, but that it's a positive thing and not a disorder the way that it's often talked about in genetics, not just an exception, but really the rule in biology is that there is diversity in the way that living things reproduce. And another key element of it is student agency. Students need to have a voice in what they learn about. And I've generally found that all students are interested in learning about ways in which biology represents gender diversity and sexual diversity. Um, but some students may have an interest in learning specific topics and so I try to start with gathering a lot of questions. What would students want to learn about before we start on a new unit where I know there's going to be these opportunities to talk about gender diversity.

Lewis M-T: 08:14 I love that framework. I think it really fits the work that we're doing and it's also something that we're trying to share with other science teachers as they are considering creating a gender inclusive biology curriculum. Um, I think for me the big thing it boils down to is they, would you mean to say and don't lie. Like I'm really trying to create a space where science reflects the diversity that exists because in a lot of ways the biology that, that most of us are taught in middle school and high school is oversimplified and excludes a number of experiences including Sam and my experiences as a trans, as trans people.

Sam L: 08:55 Yeah. I think we could kind of, um, should I really put in an example when teachers are teaching about when one biology teachers are teaching about genetics, sex chromosomes, reproduction, there might be a tendency to start with what, what is canonical, what we already know. We're going to talk about the XX and the X, Y chromosomes. We're going to talk about the egg and the sperm and then to leave mentions of any exceptions to that, so called exceptions or differences to the end or of just to be mentioned. But as Lewis is saying that it is oversimplifying reproduction and not all species have two kinds of gametes, one bigger than the other, also known as the egg and the sperm. And not all organisms have this X, X, X, Y, sex termination system. For some organisms, sex determination is not based on chromosomes at all. It might be based on environment, like the temperature or the place in which life is occurring. And so to us, not oversimplifying, not only avoids referring to these stereotyped human gender binaries, but also pushes the rigor of what we're teaching. So for example, when we're talking about reproductive strategies in evolution, how do you pass down your genes to the next generation? It might be tempting to go with these very common examples. Um, birds, they're monogamous, they mate for life, and it's always usually always the case that the males are bigger and flashier in color. Then the females so that they can compete for a mate and then the females choose a mate and that's something that you can teach. Everyone's going to understand it. It kind of follows these human gender stereotypes of men have to compete for a date and then women choose, but it doesn't do a lot to help students understand the core idea, which is that no matter how you're passing down your genes, whether it's through that female mate choice strategy or some totally different strategy, the functional thing here is passing down your genes.

Jon M: 11:14 How do you work with your colleagues in other fields to enable their teaching to become more accurate and inclusive of trans individuals?

Lewis Maday-Tra: 11:23 That's an interesting question. There's evidence that actually students explain encounter trans and queer inclusive content more often in the humanities than they do in science classes at a national level, and so Sam and my work has primarily focused on working with other science teachers and thinking about biology, science, health. I will say that I have collaborated with colleagues in other departments before to think about approaches to talking about gender, trying to include examples of people from history or characters in books, things like that that reflects diverse identities. But that's more, that's like, yeah, more in sort of a roll around equity in general at my school and less sort of the thrust of the work that we've been doing. Would you say that, Sam?

Sam L: 12:14 Um, yeah, the GLSEN survey in 2017 found that

Jon M: 12:18 I'm sorry. GLSEN for our listeners?

Sam L: 12:21 Um, so the GLSEN youth climate survey is, I believe it's the largest national survey of LGBTQ youth and asks them about their experiences in school and outside of school. And one of, uh, things they ask about is, are you seeing positive representations of LGBTQ identities in any of your classes? And if so, what classes? And what comes up in the data is that most students, if they say yes, they're reporting that it's happening in English or social studies class and science among the lowest, I believe it's 2% that are recording they're seeing positive representations of LGBTQ identities in science class. And so that's why we feel that our work is important, although it certainly can be integrated in other fields. And as well. Louis, when you were talking about working with other colleagues and other subject areas, ah, one thing I'd like to add is that any teacher can learn some approaches to working with diverse students such as asking them what name and pronouns they want to be referred to that make a really big difference in the lives of our students. And it doesn't really have to do with any content area. There are a few ways to do that. You can do kind of a a paper survey or a Google form or just orally when talking to students join that you're not going to assume something about their identity based on how they look or what it says their name is on the roster, but caring about what they want to be called.

Jon M: 14:03 So given what you're saying about science being one of the lagging areas, what kind of work are you doing with other science teachers to try to get them to be more inclusive?

Sam L: 14:16 So since the start of this year, early 2019, the core work that we've been doing to work with other science teachers has been to give presentations at conferences and to publish essays about this work, about creating gender inclusive biology curriculum because we feel that that's a core area where it's like there's underutilized potential in there. There's so many topics in biology that you're teaching anyway and it'd be very high leverage and high impact to rethink some of the language or rethink the way that something is taught in a way that will include your trans students, your gender diverse students, while also furthering their understanding of the topic. So we've put together basically, in line with our framework are five key elements of a gender inclusive biology curriculum. We've put together some, I'd say example lessons and non-example lessons that we have teachers in these workshops look over in small groups and think about them through the lens of this framework. Is this lesson authentic? Is there student agency in here? Is this using precise language? Is it affirmative of student identities? And we have students, I mean we have teachers. I think of where the lessons can be improved and they always naturally do a pretty good job with that, but identify things that can be improved about these lessons and that way we've been able to reach a lot of teachers. It seems that this work is kind of making the rounds, um, on the internet as well. And we've been really lucky to have it shared on Facebook and Twitter and we now have a listserv called the gender inclusive biology education listserv and we send out a newsletter once a month to teach us that or in the group with resources.

Amy H-L: 16:27 That's fantastic. A question that comes up a lot in all sorts of sort of groundbreaking types of professional development, which is the teachers who come to your trainings and who are interested in this sort of thing are obviously the ones who are going to be open to modifying their curriculum and accepting of, uh, a spectrum of identities. So putting aside your, your own curriculum and trainings, do you find that most teachers in 2019 respond competently and compassionately to the lived experiences of trans students or does it still vary a lot?

Lewis M-T: 17:14 I think it's been clear based on the conversations we've had with teachers at our workshops, that there is a really wide range of where folks are at. At a recent conference presentation that Sam and I did together, there were a number of teachers there who spoke about being first year teachers and being worried about losing their contracts if they bring up trans issues in the classroom because of parent backlash or because of administration being hostile towards those identities. Um, there are also a wide range of laws either supporting or not supporting educators doing this work. That varies state by state and sometimes district by district. So it is true that the folks that we are currently reaching out to are folks who are very receptive and excited about this work and that's exciting for us. I think I, I know that for me, I hope that these conversations start getting boosted to the state and national levels because it's really, really crucial that trans students receive more support than they're getting because there's a lot of evidence that trans students have a really, really hard time at school.

Sam L: 18:17 Yeah, I agree. And the teachers that tend to be interested in our work and come to our workshops, yes, they, there are teachers that already want to do the work whether or not they may feel supported in their schools or districts for that. Um, somebody pointed out at the previous conference that the audience tends to skew young, younger teachers, but I work in a big public high school where I'm by far the youngest science teacher. Folks who have been teaching here a long time and they've been receptive not only to my personal story and identity, but to my mission in changing the biology curriculum. Not that they've implemented it yet this year, but I tried to kind of drop it into the conversation anytime I'm doing something that I know that they're probably not doing and say, well, this is research space. This is accurate, modern biology, this, you have no idea what great things this will do for your LGBTQ students. Just to hear you mentioning that because they notice, you think your students aren't listening. They're going to hear that and they won't forget it, that you said something that affirms their identity or you said that chromosomes are not the only thing that make you a man or a woman. They need to hear that from their teachers.

Jon M: 19:39 The patron saint in a secular sense of Ethical Schools is John Dewey. Um, in what ways, if any, do you consider Dewey and his ethical framework relevant to your work? Is this something that you've thought about?

Lewis M-T: 19:55 It's something I've thought about a little bit. Um, I don't know Dewey's work super well, but it's my understanding that Dewey really believes that classrooms are not just a place where students receive information but also a place where they learn to become citizens in a community and really engage in a democracy in a really like participatory way. I would say that for me, trying to create a inclusive biology classroom and inclusive science classrooms, not just of gender identities and diversity but of many forms of diversity is a really crucial part of creating students who are ready to engage in the like beauty and mess that is American democracy.

Amy H-L: 20:42 Did you have something to add to that, Sam?

Sam L: 20:44 Just a little thing. I know that Dewey wrote about experiential education and that you need to, before you take something to be true and correct, it needs to be empirically proven. And I think that relates to some of the emphasis of our work because there are these accepted truths, um, in society that you're either a boy or you're a girl that's immutable, gender is immutable, that don't really turn out to be supported by the research in biology. And it's quite a discovery for students to see that and to be faced with the research and to be faced with real diversity, the 10, 20 plus possible combinations of sex chromosomes you can have and still be a human when they haven't learned that before.

Amy H-L: 21:43 So what are some examples of success stories you've seen where either through curriculum or academic discussions or through intentional relationships, teachers have been able to successfully demarginalize trans students?

Lewis M-T: 22:02 It's so interesting that term, the marginalized I'm very uncomfortable with because I feel like there are so many ways, like I want to bring trans kids into the center. And also I think that the trans experience is it inherently marginalized in our society. So I'm like, Hmm. Um, I will say that I have had many students come up to me, not just trans students, grateful for the ways that conversations have been held and sometimes providing feedback about how to create more inclusive spaces. But I think that the relief and the sense of kind of being on the same team that I have had with some students who have marginalized identities, including trans students, has been really powerful. And those students have even come to me later and be like, "Hey, like I'm having this issue in my science class. Like I want to talk to you about it and I want to like work through it with you." I'm not being very specific here. Sam, you might have some better specific examples.

Sam L: 23:03 Yeah, I could give an example. When I teach about genetics, one of the first lessons and conversations that we have is about the language that we're going to use and whether that includes everybody. So we look at a couple of sentences, very common sentences like, "We get, we each get half our DNA from our mom and from our dad" or "Men produce sperm cells and women produce egg cells." And these are things that they've learned in middle school, if not before that, somewhere in their lives. But I ask them to take a minute before answering and think "Does this include everybody?" And they are always able to come up with a huge list of people that it doesn't include. People who are adopted. The people they call their mom and their dad don't share much of their DNA. People with same sex parents, trans parents, people who are infertile. They don't produce sperm or egg. Um, people who transition. And naming those things and specifically talking about how gay, lesbian, trans people fit into this, that they are still humans despite not following these rules, I think is really impactful to students. And what I generally see that to me is a big early indicator that, that this is affirming for them or at least starting to help them is they kind of perk up in class. They raise a hand more when they wouldn't normally participate much in my class. And sometimes they breathe a sigh of relief like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna learn about this genetics topic and it's not going to be like it's been before. It's not going to be only about heterosexual, cisgender people and it might've been like that in their middle school science classes or their middle school health classes. And students talk to me after and say that, that made sense that I appreciate the way that you talked about that. Um, in my first year I had one student stay way late and wanted to talk to me about the way that theories for how primates can have homosexual behavior and how it could may contribute to the fitness of species in primates and I could just feel that he had never gotten to talk about this before in any other class and that's something that was of interest to him. He identified as part of the LGBTQ community and the students will want to talk about this and they'll want to learn about this if you allow them to learn about it in a safe way and a way that feels it is a part of the curriculum, it's what we need to learn in order to understand the complex world around us. Lewis, did you have another example?

Lewis M-T: 26:05 Oh you just, you, I mean you did such a good job there. I would say that the thing that came to mind for me actually, especially related to how these conversations changed student perspectives and try to do that work of demarginalization is last year I was teaching a unit where we had a lesson about intersex traits and we talked about the prevalence of intersex traits, which you know the numbers vary between 0.5 to maybe 2% of the population and a student who does not identify as in the LGBTQ umbrella as far as I know, was like "If it's that few people, like why does it matter?" And like having that conversation with students because I think that's something that sometimes comes up for people where when talking about folks in the LGBTQ umbrella, like because we are not a majority group, they're like, well but does it really matter? Like we can just, you know, meet the needs of the majority. And I was able to talk about my experiences as a trans person in science classes and also wanting to see myself represented and knowing that there are many different forms of diversity that may not be that common but are really important to understand. And I think that that conversation was a way of like doing that work of centering what is considered other and actually just treating it as a part of the natural diversity of what exists out there.

Sam L: 27:30 I would love to quickly add onto that. Yes, it's a common comment that I hear, that this is a small number of students we're talking about, we're talking about a really small group of people, but things that are uncommon, that has nothing to do with how they're regarded in society. There are genetic traits that much less common than intersex traits. Something that's kind of been over YouTube lately is this super color vision gene for types of cone cells. And there's all these tests to see if you can have it. It's really rare. It's regarded as something good. You can see more colors than everybody else. And one conversation that I have with students when we're talking about genetic traits is that we need to be reflective about what we're calling a disorder, a disease, a variation, a difference. For example, why students are, they have a lot of thinking to do when I present them with this idea that well, a red hair is caused by a genetic variation, a genetic mutation. So are some of these intersex traits. What's the difference? Why was one called a disease or disorder for so long? And they're quite surprised to learn that red hair, that gene is actually associated with some statistically significant, worse health outcomes due to a resistance to anesthetic that apparently it makes you 20 times more likely to die under general anesthesia due to resistance to that general anesthetic. So what we're treating as a disadvantage or merely a difference or a positive difference, there is no gold standard for that. That is completely determined by society, what we're calling a difference versus a disorder.

Jon M: 29:22 Is there anything you'd like to add that we haven't covered?

Lewis M-T: 29:24 I think one thing that was really powerful for me in a conversation that Sam and I had with Ashes Amenic, another person doing this work but at the undergraduate level, um, is that there can be this idea that if you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of LGBTQ issues or if you aren't an expert or if you are going to make a mistake, that it's better to not try. And I would say that there are very small moves that you can make as an educator that can really make a difference in the lives of transgender, nonconforming and intersex students, including just being like, Hey, like we have this textbook. The textbook is not perfect. Let's learn about this together. But like my apologies, but we're going to go with it because you know heaven's knows that us teachers don't have months and months of paid leave to write beautiful gender inclusive curricula and materials that are going to reflect exactly the identities of our students and so you know it's messy dive in but also don't feel like you have to do it all at once.

Sam L: 30:28 Definitely. This is a, an emerging topic really. There is no textbook that it's going to help you do this work right now and it's so, so individual relative to the class and the teacher that I can only encourage teachers to dive into the messiness of it and to be a part of the development of this work. Right.

Amy H-L: 30:52 Well listeners, you can find links to Sams' and Lewis's inclusive biology curriculum resources on our website. Thank you so much Sam Long and Lewis Maday-Travis,

Jon M: 31:04 And thank you listeners for joining us. We'd like to hear how you've incorporated ideas you've heard on our podcast or read on the ethical school's blog. Also, if there are topics you'd like to hear more about, let us know. Please email us at hosts#ethicalschools.org. Actually, I'm pleased to say that that's how we met Sam and Lewis. You were the first people to email us at that particular email, so thank you. We also offer professional development for schools and afterschool programs in the New York City area, and you can contact us for details. Check out prior episodes and articles on our site. We're on Facebook and Twitter @ethicalschools and Instagram Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.

We speak with high school science teachers and trans men, Sam Long and Lewis Maday-Travis, who have developed resources and trainings to help biology teachers develop gender-inclusive curricula.  Science tells us that sexual and gender diversity is both normal and positive.  

*Overview and transcript below.

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:33:00

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To know more about Lewis and Sam’s projects, please go to sam-long.weebly.com, fishyteaching.com and transeducators.com. 

00:00:54 Introductions

00:56-03:19 Experiences as LGBTQ high school students

03:20-06:15 As teachers, coming out as trans men to colleagues and students

06:16-11:13 Key elements of a gender-inclusive biology curriculum

11:14-16:26 Working to help make other teachers’ instruction more accurate and inclusive

16:27-19:38 How teachers respond to trans students’ lied experience

19:39-21:42 Relevance of Dewey’s ethical framework

21:43-29:21 Success stories in demarginalizing students

29:22-30:51 How teachers can develop this work

30:52 Outro

Jon M: 00:15 Hi, I’m Jon Moscow.

Amy H-L: 00:17 And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools, where we discuss strategies for creating inclusive and equitable schools and youth programs and help students to develop commitment and capacity to build ethical institutions.

Jon M: 00:30 Our guests today are Sam Long and Lewis Maday-Travis. Sam and Lewis are both high school science teachers, Sam in Denver and Lewis in Seattle. Both are trans men. Since the start of this year, the two have been creating resources and providing training to help teachers develop accurate and inclusive biology curriculum. Welcome Sam and Lewis.

Sam L: 00:53 Thank you.

Lewis M-T: 00:54 Thank you.

Amy H-L: 00:56 So what were your own experiences as trans high school students?

Sam L: 01:01 Well, I could start on that one. My experience as a high school student was that I was starting to transition while I was in high school and not pertaining to science class, but in general most of the adults around me didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t something they had heard of. It wasn’t something they had had any training or experience in. And what that led to was some kind of poor decisions on their part and trying to figure out, well, uh, where should I use the restroom? How should I participate in overnight trips? And so that was only 10 years ago, but now we’re starting to see policies crop up and model policies be made available online for helping school districts to include trans students in kind of a standardized way or at least to have a guideline to follow in accommodating students. And then in the science classroom I learned nothing about it in health class they learned nothing about sexuality and gender identity. And one of my goals as a science teacher is to make sure that our students that are coming out now and identifying as LGBTQ see themselves represented in some way at school.

Jon M: 02:23 Lewis, did you want to add to that in terms of your experience?

Lewis M-T: 02:27 Absolutely. So my experiences were slightly different. For one, I didn’t come out as trans or I didn’t actually realize that I was trans until after leaving high school. And so most of my experiences around inclusion in high school were around identifying as queer. And I actually went to a high school where I was very well supported as a queer and gender nonconforming young person. And I think that the teachers that I had who really supported me have really been a model for me as a teacher about what inclusion and really knowing your students and really accepting them can look like. I will say that in terms of trans content or thinking about like trans issues or intersex traits or other kinds of gender diversity, I know that my school worked really hard to try to be as inclusive as possible and I know that folks made mistakes, which, you know, I think it’s also a good lesson for me as an educator bLewiecause heavens knows I make mistakes all the time.

Jon M: 03:20 So as teachers, how, and when did you introduce yourself to your students and your colleagues as trans men?

Lewis M-T: 03:30 I, um, I talked about this a little bit before with some people. So when I started teaching, I was not out as trans during the interview except that when I came in they thought that they were interviewing a female candidate. So it was kind of this funny thing where I did my whole interview day and like it seemed to go really well and it was like a lovely experience but was kind of weird around pronouns and things like that. And at the end of the day someone called me and was like, by the way, I just want you to know that I’m a man. I came out to colleagues right away at my previous school and folks were generally fairly accepting. I was the first out trans faculty or staff member as far as I know at that school and I didn’t come out to my students for a couple of years after that. And I think that a large part of that was both. I was working with young students, I was working with sixth graders at the time, but also just general attitudes and awareness around trans issues were significantly different. That was over seven years ago now. And I chose to come out to my students during a unit where I was leading them in thinking about identity in STEM so you know, who does science, why is it that some groups are over underrepresented in science, um, and told some of my own story as a trans person in science and my experiences and the response was overwhelmingly positive and I found that it allowed me to be much more myself as a teacher and also talk more about the justification for why I talk so much and work with identity so much in the science classroom.

Jon M: 05:04 Sam, did you want to add to that?

Sam L: 05:06 Yeah. My experience with introducing myself as transgender in my school has also been positive. I’ve come out to students and staff every year that I’ve been teaching, which is, I’m in my fifth year now and I’ve been very fortunate to have a supportive my school leaders and uh, have positive responses from students. I see my had an annually coming out as serving two functions. One, it’s how I’m most comfortable interacting with my students. Having them know that part of me and knowing that I am willing to support that part of them or any differences or identities that they may hold. And then the other function is as a form of setting the culture, the classroom setting a culture of inclusion and showing, uh, from the first day now, when I tell them about my identities, that we’re not tolerating any prejudice and we are all here to learn together and we respect diverse identities in our classroom.

Amy H-L: 06:16 What are the key elements of a gender inclusive biology curriculum?

Sam L: 06:21 So to me the key elements of a gender inclusive biology curriculum are approaches to teaching. And so it’s not teaching something new or separate. But in everything that I teach, I try to make sure that there is authenticity and what I teach. So everything is based on research, everything is accurate and modern science, everything is continuous. So we’re not talking about gender once or doing one big project and leaving it at that. The messages are consistent from lesson to lesson. And so students can feel a sense after the semester, after the year that well, you really touched on that and we developed these ideas in a continuous way. Another element is there needs to be affirmation of student identities. So we need to not just teach that there is diversity and living things, but that it’s a positive thing and not a disorder the way that it’s often talked about in genetics, not just an exception, but really the rule in biology is that there is diversity in the way that living things reproduce. And another key element of it is student agency. Students need to have a voice in what they learn about. And I’ve generally found that all students are interested in learning about ways in which biology represents gender diversity and sexual diversity. Um, but some students may have an interest in learning specific topics and so I try to start with gathering a lot of questions. What would students want to learn about before we start on a new unit where I know there’s going to be these opportunities to talk about gender diversity.

Lewis M-T: 08:14 I love that framework. I think it really fits the work that we’re doing and it’s also something that we’re trying to share with other science teachers as they are considering creating a gender inclusive biology curriculum. Um, I think for me the big thing it boils down to is they, would you mean to say and don’t lie. Like I’m really trying to create a space where science reflects the diversity that exists because in a lot of ways the biology that, that most of us are taught in middle school and high school is oversimplified and excludes a number of experiences including Sam and my experiences as a trans, as trans people.

Sam L: 08:55 Yeah. I think we could kind of, um, should I really put in an example when teachers are teaching about when one biology teachers are teaching about genetics, sex chromosomes, reproduction, there might be a tendency to start with what, what is canonical, what we already know. We’re going to talk about the XX and the X, Y chromosomes. We’re going to talk about the egg and the sperm and then to leave mentions of any exceptions to that, so called exceptions or differences to the end or of just to be mentioned. But as Lewis is saying that it is oversimplifying reproduction and not all species have two kinds of gametes, one bigger than the other, also known as the egg and the sperm. And not all organisms have this X, X, X, Y, sex termination system. For some organisms, sex determination is not based on chromosomes at all. It might be based on environment, like the temperature or the place in which life is occurring. And so to us, not oversimplifying, not only avoids referring to these stereotyped human gender binaries, but also pushes the rigor of what we’re teaching. So for example, when we’re talking about reproductive strategies in evolution, how do you pass down your genes to the next generation? It might be tempting to go with these very common examples. Um, birds, they’re monogamous, they mate for life, and it’s always usually always the case that the males are bigger and flashier in color. Then the females so that they can compete for a mate and then the females choose a mate and that’s something that you can teach. Everyone’s going to understand it. It kind of follows these human gender stereotypes of men have to compete for a date and then women choose, but it doesn’t do a lot to help students understand the core idea, which is that no matter how you’re passing down your genes, whether it’s through that female mate choice strategy or some totally different strategy, the functional thing here is passing down your genes.

Jon M: 11:14 How do you work with your colleagues in other fields to enable their teaching to become more accurate and inclusive of trans individuals?

Lewis Maday-Tra: 11:23 That’s an interesting question. There’s evidence that actually students explain encounter trans and queer inclusive content more often in the humanities than they do in science classes at a national level, and so Sam and my work has primarily focused on working with other science teachers and thinking about biology, science, health. I will say that I have collaborated with colleagues in other departments before to think about approaches to talking about gender, trying to include examples of people from history or characters in books, things like that that reflects diverse identities. But that’s more, that’s like, yeah, more in sort of a roll around equity in general at my school and less sort of the thrust of the work that we’ve been doing. Would you say that, Sam?

Sam L: 12:14 Um, yeah, the GLSEN survey in 2017 found that

Jon M: 12:18 I’m sorry. GLSEN for our listeners?

Sam L: 12:21 Um, so the GLSEN youth climate survey is, I believe it’s the largest national survey of LGBTQ youth and asks them about their experiences in school and outside of school. And one of, uh, things they ask about is, are you seeing positive representations of LGBTQ identities in any of your classes? And if so, what classes? And what comes up in the data is that most students, if they say yes, they’re reporting that it’s happening in English or social studies class and science among the lowest, I believe it’s 2% that are recording they’re seeing positive representations of LGBTQ identities in science class. And so that’s why we feel that our work is important, although it certainly can be integrated in other fields. And as well. Louis, when you were talking about working with other colleagues and other subject areas, ah, one thing I’d like to add is that any teacher can learn some approaches to working with diverse students such as asking them what name and pronouns they want to be referred to that make a really big difference in the lives of our students. And it doesn’t really have to do with any content area. There are a few ways to do that. You can do kind of a a paper survey or a Google form or just orally when talking to students join that you’re not going to assume something about their identity based on how they look or what it says their name is on the roster, but caring about what they want to be called.

Jon M: 14:03 So given what you’re saying about science being one of the lagging areas, what kind of work are you doing with other science teachers to try to get them to be more inclusive?

Sam L: 14:16 So since the start of this year, early 2019, the core work that we’ve been doing to work with other science teachers has been to give presentations at conferences and to publish essays about this work, about creating gender inclusive biology curriculum because we feel that that’s a core area where it’s like there’s underutilized potential in there. There’s so many topics in biology that you’re teaching anyway and it’d be very high leverage and high impact to rethink some of the language or rethink the way that something is taught in a way that will include your trans students, your gender diverse students, while also furthering their understanding of the topic. So we’ve put together basically, in line with our framework are five key elements of a gender inclusive biology curriculum. We’ve put together some, I’d say example lessons and non-example lessons that we have teachers in these workshops look over in small groups and think about them through the lens of this framework. Is this lesson authentic? Is there student agency in here? Is this using precise language? Is it affirmative of student identities? And we have students, I mean we have teachers. I think of where the lessons can be improved and they always naturally do a pretty good job with that, but identify things that can be improved about these lessons and that way we’ve been able to reach a lot of teachers. It seems that this work is kind of making the rounds, um, on the internet as well. And we’ve been really lucky to have it shared on Facebook and Twitter and we now have a listserv called the gender inclusive biology education listserv and we send out a newsletter once a month to teach us that or in the group with resources.

Amy H-L: 16:27 That’s fantastic. A question that comes up a lot in all sorts of sort of groundbreaking types of professional development, which is the teachers who come to your trainings and who are interested in this sort of thing are obviously the ones who are going to be open to modifying their curriculum and accepting of, uh, a spectrum of identities. So putting aside your, your own curriculum and trainings, do you find that most teachers in 2019 respond competently and compassionately to the lived experiences of trans students or does it still vary a lot?

Lewis M-T: 17:14 I think it’s been clear based on the conversations we’ve had with teachers at our workshops, that there is a really wide range of where folks are at. At a recent conference presentation that Sam and I did together, there were a number of teachers there who spoke about being first year teachers and being worried about losing their contracts if they bring up trans issues in the classroom because of parent backlash or because of administration being hostile towards those identities. Um, there are also a wide range of laws either supporting or not supporting educators doing this work. That varies state by state and sometimes district by district. So it is true that the folks that we are currently reaching out to are folks who are very receptive and excited about this work and that’s exciting for us. I think I, I know that for me, I hope that these conversations start getting boosted to the state and national levels because it’s really, really crucial that trans students receive more support than they’re getting because there’s a lot of evidence that trans students have a really, really hard time at school.

Sam L: 18:17 Yeah, I agree. And the teachers that tend to be interested in our work and come to our workshops, yes, they, there are teachers that already want to do the work whether or not they may feel supported in their schools or districts for that. Um, somebody pointed out at the previous conference that the audience tends to skew young, younger teachers, but I work in a big public high school where I’m by far the youngest science teacher. Folks who have been teaching here a long time and they’ve been receptive not only to my personal story and identity, but to my mission in changing the biology curriculum. Not that they’ve implemented it yet this year, but I tried to kind of drop it into the conversation anytime I’m doing something that I know that they’re probably not doing and say, well, this is research space. This is accurate, modern biology, this, you have no idea what great things this will do for your LGBTQ students. Just to hear you mentioning that because they notice, you think your students aren’t listening. They’re going to hear that and they won’t forget it, that you said something that affirms their identity or you said that chromosomes are not the only thing that make you a man or a woman. They need to hear that from their teachers.

Jon M: 19:39 The patron saint in a secular sense of Ethical Schools is John Dewey. Um, in what ways, if any, do you consider Dewey and his ethical framework relevant to your work? Is this something that you’ve thought about?

Lewis M-T: 19:55 It’s something I’ve thought about a little bit. Um, I don’t know Dewey’s work super well, but it’s my understanding that Dewey really believes that classrooms are not just a place where students receive information but also a place where they learn to become citizens in a community and really engage in a democracy in a really like participatory way. I would say that for me, trying to create a inclusive biology classroom and inclusive science classrooms, not just of gender identities and diversity but of many forms of diversity is a really crucial part of creating students who are ready to engage in the like beauty and mess that is American democracy.

Amy H-L: 20:42 Did you have something to add to that, Sam?

Sam L: 20:44 Just a little thing. I know that Dewey wrote about experiential education and that you need to, before you take something to be true and correct, it needs to be empirically proven. And I think that relates to some of the emphasis of our work because there are these accepted truths, um, in society that you’re either a boy or you’re a girl that’s immutable, gender is immutable, that don’t really turn out to be supported by the research in biology. And it’s quite a discovery for students to see that and to be faced with the research and to be faced with real diversity, the 10, 20 plus possible combinations of sex chromosomes you can have and still be a human when they haven’t learned that before.

Amy H-L: 21:43 So what are some examples of success stories you’ve seen where either through curriculum or academic discussions or through intentional relationships, teachers have been able to successfully demarginalize trans students?

Lewis M-T: 22:02 It’s so interesting that term, the marginalized I’m very uncomfortable with because I feel like there are so many ways, like I want to bring trans kids into the center. And also I think that the trans experience is it inherently marginalized in our society. So I’m like, Hmm. Um, I will say that I have had many students come up to me, not just trans students, grateful for the ways that conversations have been held and sometimes providing feedback about how to create more inclusive spaces. But I think that the relief and the sense of kind of being on the same team that I have had with some students who have marginalized identities, including trans students, has been really powerful. And those students have even come to me later and be like, “Hey, like I’m having this issue in my science class. Like I want to talk to you about it and I want to like work through it with you.” I’m not being very specific here. Sam, you might have some better specific examples.

Sam L: 23:03 Yeah, I could give an example. When I teach about genetics, one of the first lessons and conversations that we have is about the language that we’re going to use and whether that includes everybody. So we look at a couple of sentences, very common sentences like, “We get, we each get half our DNA from our mom and from our dad” or “Men produce sperm cells and women produce egg cells.” And these are things that they’ve learned in middle school, if not before that, somewhere in their lives. But I ask them to take a minute before answering and think “Does this include everybody?” And they are always able to come up with a huge list of people that it doesn’t include. People who are adopted. The people they call their mom and their dad don’t share much of their DNA. People with same sex parents, trans parents, people who are infertile. They don’t produce sperm or egg. Um, people who transition. And naming those things and specifically talking about how gay, lesbian, trans people fit into this, that they are still humans despite not following these rules, I think is really impactful to students. And what I generally see that to me is a big early indicator that, that this is affirming for them or at least starting to help them is they kind of perk up in class. They raise a hand more when they wouldn’t normally participate much in my class. And sometimes they breathe a sigh of relief like, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn about this genetics topic and it’s not going to be like it’s been before. It’s not going to be only about heterosexual, cisgender people and it might’ve been like that in their middle school science classes or their middle school health classes. And students talk to me after and say that, that made sense that I appreciate the way that you talked about that. Um, in my first year I had one student stay way late and wanted to talk to me about the way that theories for how primates can have homosexual behavior and how it could may contribute to the fitness of species in primates and I could just feel that he had never gotten to talk about this before in any other class and that’s something that was of interest to him. He identified as part of the LGBTQ community and the students will want to talk about this and they’ll want to learn about this if you allow them to learn about it in a safe way and a way that feels it is a part of the curriculum, it’s what we need to learn in order to understand the complex world around us. Lewis, did you have another example?

Lewis M-T: 26:05 Oh you just, you, I mean you did such a good job there. I would say that the thing that came to mind for me actually, especially related to how these conversations changed student perspectives and try to do that work of demarginalization is last year I was teaching a unit where we had a lesson about intersex traits and we talked about the prevalence of intersex traits, which you know the numbers vary between 0.5 to maybe 2% of the population and a student who does not identify as in the LGBTQ umbrella as far as I know, was like “If it’s that few people, like why does it matter?” And like having that conversation with students because I think that’s something that sometimes comes up for people where when talking about folks in the LGBTQ umbrella, like because we are not a majority group, they’re like, well but does it really matter? Like we can just, you know, meet the needs of the majority. And I was able to talk about my experiences as a trans person in science classes and also wanting to see myself represented and knowing that there are many different forms of diversity that may not be that common but are really important to understand. And I think that that conversation was a way of like doing that work of centering what is considered other and actually just treating it as a part of the natural diversity of what exists out there.

Sam L: 27:30 I would love to quickly add onto that. Yes, it’s a common comment that I hear, that this is a small number of students we’re talking about, we’re talking about a really small group of people, but things that are uncommon, that has nothing to do with how they’re regarded in society. There are genetic traits that much less common than intersex traits. Something that’s kind of been over YouTube lately is this super color vision gene for types of cone cells. And there’s all these tests to see if you can have it. It’s really rare. It’s regarded as something good. You can see more colors than everybody else. And one conversation that I have with students when we’re talking about genetic traits is that we need to be reflective about what we’re calling a disorder, a disease, a variation, a difference. For example, why students are, they have a lot of thinking to do when I present them with this idea that well, a red hair is caused by a genetic variation, a genetic mutation. So are some of these intersex traits. What’s the difference? Why was one called a disease or disorder for so long? And they’re quite surprised to learn that red hair, that gene is actually associated with some statistically significant, worse health outcomes due to a resistance to anesthetic that apparently it makes you 20 times more likely to die under general anesthesia due to resistance to that general anesthetic. So what we’re treating as a disadvantage or merely a difference or a positive difference, there is no gold standard for that. That is completely determined by society, what we’re calling a difference versus a disorder.

Jon M: 29:22 Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t covered?

Lewis M-T: 29:24 I think one thing that was really powerful for me in a conversation that Sam and I had with Ashes Amenic, another person doing this work but at the undergraduate level, um, is that there can be this idea that if you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of LGBTQ issues or if you aren’t an expert or if you are going to make a mistake, that it’s better to not try. And I would say that there are very small moves that you can make as an educator that can really make a difference in the lives of transgender, nonconforming and intersex students, including just being like, Hey, like we have this textbook. The textbook is not perfect. Let’s learn about this together. But like my apologies, but we’re going to go with it because you know heaven’s knows that us teachers don’t have months and months of paid leave to write beautiful gender inclusive curricula and materials that are going to reflect exactly the identities of our students and so you know it’s messy dive in but also don’t feel like you have to do it all at once.

Sam L: 30:28 Definitely. This is a, an emerging topic really. There is no textbook that it’s going to help you do this work right now and it’s so, so individual relative to the class and the teacher that I can only encourage teachers to dive into the messiness of it and to be a part of the development of this work. Right.

Amy H-L: 30:52 Well listeners, you can find links to Sams’ and Lewis’s inclusive biology curriculum resources on our website. Thank you so much Sam Long and Lewis Maday-Travis,

Jon M: 31:04 And thank you listeners for joining us. We’d like to hear how you’ve incorporated ideas you’ve heard on our podcast or read on the ethical school’s blog. Also, if there are topics you’d like to hear more about, let us know. Please email us at hosts#ethicalschools.org. Actually, I’m pleased to say that that’s how we met Sam and Lewis. You were the first people to email us at that particular email, so thank you. We also offer professional development for schools and afterschool programs in the New York City area, and you can contact us for details. Check out prior episodes and articles on our site. We’re on Facebook and Twitter @ethicalschools and Instagram Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.

Margaret Blachly of Bank Street’s Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice describes how to fit materials, curriculum, and relationships together to create an emotionally safe classroom.  Emphasizing the importance of a deep understanding of child development, she tells how important it is to know each child’s "story." Margaret shares what she’s learned as a dual-language and special ed teacher and gives advice to new kindergarten teachers. Reflecting on Dewey's Education and Experience, she talks about the ethical dimensions of teaching and the connections between the classroom and the larger society.

*Overview and transcript below.

[ss_player]

0:00-1:46 Introduction

1:46-5:02 Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice; importance of deep understanding  of child development

how each child’s life experience affects who they are, act, think, connect

5:03-11:59 Components of emotionally responsive classroom; “inviting and “containing”

11:59-16:06 Influence of John Dewey

16:06-22:00 “Aha” moments; growth and change in teachers

22:00-35:33 Immigrant experience; using reflective techniques; loss; inviting stories in that are hard

35:33-39:46 Changing school culture; teachers bringing their whole lives into the classroom; reflecting on their

experiences; feeling valued

39:46-48:33 Dual language, translanguaging; Ofelia Garcia

48:33-54:09 Advice for beginning kindergarten teachers

54:09-1:01:35 Connections between special education, bilingual education, and dual-language education; 

decentralizing white experience as the first or only experience

Amy H-L: 00:00:15 I'm Amy Halpern-Laff.

Jon M: 00:00:18 And I'm Jon Moscow.

Amy H-L: 00:00:18 Welcome to ethical schools where we discuss strategies for creating inclusive equitable schools and youth programs that help students to develop both commitment and capacity to building ethical institutions.

Jon M: 00:00:34 Our guest today is Margaret Blachly. Margaret is a psycho-educational specialist at the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College. She's also an advisor and instructor in the early childhood special education and bilingual programs at the Bank Street Graduate School of Education and a learning specialist at the children's learning center of Morningside Heights. She has been a teacher for two decades. Welcome Margaret.

Margaret B: 00:00:57 Thank you.

Amy H-L: 00:00:59 Margaret, how would you define the term psycho-educational?

Margaret B: 00:01:03 That is a wonderful question and it's funny you ask because when I first saw my contract for taking on the job at emotionally responsive practice, I said, "Is that what I am?" And my, my director Leslie Koplow said, well, that is what you are. So I had to do a little thinking about it. Um, psycho-educational specialist to me means somebody who knows about and thinks about and can advise and teach about the impact of emotional health and wellbeing in the educational setting.

Amy H-L: 00:01:40 And what is Bank Street Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice? What does it do?

Margaret B: 00:01:46 So the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice is 20 years old and it's a professional development branch of Bank Street College. It's a staff at this moment of six people with our director and founder, Leslie Koplow, and we work with teachers, we work with administrators and we sometimes also work with children. We work with paraprofessionals and we sometimes also work with parents. We work with individual schools. We sometimes work with districts and we come to the schools or they come to us to learn about children's emotional health and how it impacts their learning and their behavior in schools. We do seminars and we do coaching. We do support groups and we do parent support groups and parent workshops. We have an annual conference and each of these events or each of these different ways in which we work, operates on a similar premise that people who are in contact with children in an educational setting need to understand child development and they need to not only understand the development of the age of the children that they work with. They need to understand child development starting with birth and they need to especially understand child development over the first three years, four years and five years of life. We also operate on the premise that people that work with children and families need to honor and value that each child has a story and that that child's story, aka their life experience, affects who they are and how they act and how they think and how they connect and that sometimes their story impacts how school feels for them. In fact, it always does. So whenever, whenever grownups come to us saying, we're having so much trouble with child X, can you help us? The first thing we say is how old is child X? And tell us about who they are. And then the other is what do you know about this child's story? Let's make this child more of a whole human then, uh, this behavior that you're seeing in your classrooms setting. And it's usually through beginning of the conversation that way that we are able to offer a space for the grownups to consider that child in a fuller way and thus to find a way to respond to them in a fuller way and in a way that's more that, that values them more, that honors why they're doing what they're doing and who these grownups are. Who is this teacher to this child? Who is this principal and who do they want to be? So we think a lot about development, a lot about experience and a lot about relationship.

Jon M: 00:05:03 So building on that, can you give some examples of what emotionally responsive practice looks like in the classroom?

Margaret B: 00:05:12 Okay. There's some very basic components to an emotionally responsive classroom. However, it can look different from classroom to classroom. So I want to, I want to lay that premise out from the beginning that with the same idea in mind, two classrooms can look and sound pretty different but the effect can be the same, that children feel safe, secure, known, and able to engage. So one example is having a space like a cozy corner. Some classroom teachers call it a peace corner, some teachers call it a peace nook. But here's the physical environment that says sometimes living in a group feels like too much. Sometimes a child, sometimes a person. Needs to retreat. Sometimes a person needs to regroup and have some space to be on the edge looking in and get ready to rejoin. So the presence of a peace corner or a cozy corner and then the way that it's used is one really clear component of an emotionally responsive classroom. We talk about a framework of inviting and containing. And this has been very helpful to me to think about and it's one of the things that we challenge ourselves to explain to teachers and to get them to be thinking about. So inviting and containing. is a balance that a classroom that it teacher wants to create an a classroom and I think that a school leader wants to create an a school that a coach wants to create in a coaching session that a graduate instructor wants to create in the graduate classroom. There needs to be invitation for who's in the room to be welcomed and heard in the room. There need to be structures that contain the activity and the way things work within the classroom. So a classroom that's overly inviting can feel really chaotic and I'm the first to say that my very first kindergarten classroom was overly inviting and it wasn't containing enough and I needed a Bank Street advisor to tell me that actually many years ago. When she told me, you can't open so many areas for your project time at once, I was very resistant and I said project time is the most important time in my classroom.This is when these children are going to get to engage with materials on their own terms. This is what I come from in Bank Street pedagogy. This is experience. So learning, if I don't open blocks today, that's one day less that the children in this room will have to play with blocks and their life because I knew that they wouldn't have blocks first grade. and this was really it. I felt the stakes were really high, but my advisor said it's too chaotic. You're not able to. um, you know, the kids are throwing blocks, they're throwing sand and over on the other corner they're throwing baby dolls. And it took me a while to, to admit that she was right and scale back and look at the goal of having all of these open for children, but realizing that I needed to be more containing and more structured in the way that I open them one by one, set out clear expectations and shared knowledge of how the things were going to be used and got the room full of kids, used to working in a lot, a lot of different centers at once. So I think that that's one of my personal stories of inviting and containing before I even knew these terms. I'll share another from my own personal experience because this is one that I often share with teachers who I'm supporting, and it's interesting because it just came up recently with a parent who I ran into who was telling me about a classroom where the teacher just wasn't progressive and made the kids sit in assigned seats when they were having meetings together and I, I thought about it and decided to just tell her that personally I have come to really value assigned seats, particularly for new teachers. And this was another thing that happened for me early on in my career where I felt very tied to value of choice and I really wanted children to be able to choose seats that they knew were going to be good for them, where they want it to be. I wanted to honor them. I didn't want to tell them where I thought they had to be, but I found that every time we came to the carpet together to have a conversation, there was so much anxiety about where kids sat. There was so much arguing, there was so much getting in each other's spaces that when I made the hard decision to give them assigned seats, it actually really relieved that anxiety and allowed our conversations to go on. And so it's an example that I don't think, you know, I'm not saying every single teacher must assign seats because there are teachers who have really figured out how to make, not having assigned seats work, but for teachers who are having a tough time managing that, I say assign the seats, relieve the anxiety so that you can get to the content of the conversations you want to have, the community that you want to create. And it's a way of saying to kids, there's a space for you. You can depend on it. You don't need to worry. You don't need to wonder. You don't need to think my friend's not near me, does she like me anymore. You can kind of relax into that space. And the funny thing is I've found that when I teach grownups, once they've figured out their seat, they always come back to the same seat in the graduate classroom or in the ERP [emotionally responsive practice] seminars and it's very comfortable to feel like you've got a spot, you belong there and you can join the group. So there are a couple of real life examples of inviting and containing.

Amy H-L: 00:11:59 Thank you. As you know, our podcasts and blog are strongly influenced by John Dewey's approach to ethics in education. Do you see connections between Dewey's ethical framework and the work that you do?

Margaret B: 00:12:13 So I think a lot about Dewey. When I did teach the courses at bank street in early childhood curriculum, Dewey's experience in education, which is one of his later works in which he reconsiders and re States many of the things he said in his other books about pedagogy and the educational approach was one of the main texts that we needed to ask graduate students to read and think about and apply to their work. I'm not currently teaching these courses in the graduate school. But for me, going back to that Dewey text, which I had read long ago in the same course myself many years ago, was extremely helpful to think about the experiences that we offer children and to honor the fact that for every child coming into our spaces is part of their experience and is itself an experience. So we make choices as educators about the kinds of experiences children can have and as an extension, the kind of experiences their parents can have, their families can have. Um, I think about engaging with materials and Bank Street's developmental interaction approach, uh, which asks educators to think about the materials, the curriculum, and then also the relationships that are in the room. All of these things fit together more and more. The more I repeat my reading of them and Dewey to me says that the educational experience can be and should be a parallel to the larger social experience and the very hopeful view that experiencing democracy in a classroom setting in a school setting prepares kids to grow up and engage in a democracy. In the very idealistic view of what a democracy can be, a social and political construct where people have voice, where people consider others, where people have choice and where they also have responsibility. Then in terms of thinking about the ethical framework, I understand this as the macro level of what our teaching means, and perhaps this is just another way of saying what I just said before, but our, our work as teachers and educators exist within a much bigger framework, a social, a political framework. And when we take the time to consistently reflect on ourselves at the macro level, thinking, what does my work with these children mean as a part of a larger institution of education in this country? And then on a micro level, what does my relationship and my, my educational offering to these particular children and these families this year, this day, this month, how to use my creation of a learning space that honors and welcomes and esteems children and their families and considers a developmental moment and how does it affect them personally? So I think there's an ethical responsibility to see our role in kids' experience and in their development of self within our spaces.

Jon M: 00:16:06 So Dewey of course talks a lot about change and how people make decisions and dramatic rehearsals is his phrase. And you were talking about how you changed in your practice, how you grew as you saw that some things seem to work better than others. And you of course were also coming out of, for example, a Bank Street background where you, you came to teaching from this. Um, what's the change process that you see as you're working with teachers who may not have come out of these backgrounds as they move towards sort of a more emotionally responsive practice? Do teachers, and I'm sure it's different for every teacher, but do teachers describe aha moments? What are sort of getting at is we have so many traditional schools, you know, for all the people who study him in graduate schools, Dewey was never the dominant impact on American schools. It was always much more hierarchical and top down and so forth. And as you're working with teachers in classrooms and also in schools that may not be progressive as such, um, how do you see this process of change and how do you see lasting change taking place? I don't know if that's, that may be a whole bunch of questions all bundled into one, but take whichever pieces of it you like.

Margaret B: 00:17:34 Okay. Yes, that's a bunch of questions. Um, the first thing that came to my mind as you started to ask that question or those questions was it's not always an aha moment and that has been something that I've needed to make peace with and that my colleagues at ERP whose training is in social work rather than pedagogy have really helped me to understand the process of growth and change over time in relationship with people. So I actually, I could tell you a couple of stories with aha moments in them and I've got one in mind and I can also tell you some stories of change over time. And I think both of them offer something for teachers to think about and maybe self-reflect, whether you're thinking about your own practice or thinking about how to support other people who you would like to see grow. So there was an aha moment that happened several years ago when I was working at a school way out on the edge of Queens near the ocean. And our work at that time was responding to hurricane Sandy. And we had in that work more than we usually have. We had a curriculum planned out where we would come in and actually offer some lessons to the children and teachers and some invitations to share and express their stories. And one of the stories was about feeling scared in a storm. One of the books that we read was about a bear that feels scared in a storm and how this bear and their friends figure out feeling safe. And the thinking behind this lesson was that children needed to have an invitation to talk about the hurricane being a scary experience being a storm that was very scary. And then thinking about how they stayed safe or how they could stay safe in the future. Not on the practical level, not on making an emergency plan or anything, but really on the idea that after a scary moment there can be safety. And it's important to know both of those feelings that hopefully the classroom can be that safe place. Now that was the idea. The story had these pictures of a dark woods in the night with rain and the minute I opened this book, now this was in a classroom with a lot of children who, who were themselves recent immigrants into the country or were the children of recent immigrants into the country. And interestingly, this work post hurricane Sandy was actually maybe a year and a half after the storm because of the amount of time that it took for funding to come to come through. So that our proposal for supporting these schools post-Sandy happened a year and a half later. However, it felt very impactful because a year and a half later people who had experienced the storm still were processing and still really responded to the opportunity to process together, to make sense of and to find comfort. However, some of these children were not even in this country when the storm happened, but here we were bringing this curriculum. And the minute I opened this story book, a six year old boy looked at it and spoke in Spanish, and I speak Spanish because of my year abroad during college and because it was something that I really wanted to learn to do and I became a dual language and bilingual educator. So I felt very fortunate to be understanding of what the child was saying because what he said to nobody in particular was that dark woods looks like when I was coming here with my mom and we had to hide in the dark scary woods and I was really scared.

Jon M: 00:21:59 Wow.

Margaret B: 00:22:00 And all of a sudden his teacher looked at me with this sort of aghast and shocked look on her face. Um, the teacher herself was an immigrant from a central American country and was a very experienced educator, but she had been worried about working with this boy who had been running out of the classroom. And when the school security guards approached him, he screamed and ran further. And so she had just been asking me what I thought about this boy and then he offered this, um, quite amazing statement in the middle of this story. And, uh, we got to write about this story in an article that I co-authored with two of my ERP colleagues, uh, because it was, um, it was sort of like an ERP moment that, so you can, you can read that story if you're interested to hear more about our thinking about work with kids for whom an immigration story is part of their own experience. But the reason I'm bringing it up right now was really about what happened when the teacher looked at me and when I said to her, after I read this book, I'd like to work with him. And so I used emotionally responsive practice technique of being reflective and simply said to the boy in Spanish, that sounds like a scary story. Maybe after I read this book, you can tell me more about it if you want. And the reflective technique is offering a mirror to the child. I heard what you just said. It sounds scary and you can, you know, it's, it's invited here. So I read the story to the class and I set them off on their writing and drawing activity. And I said to this little boy, would you like to tell me more about your, about your story of coming here with your mom? And another little boy joined in and, and I actually felt a little overwhelmed by having both of them, but the teacher looked at me and said, well, he, he just arrived here, too. And we, I ended up having this conversation in which the two boys told their stories and the teacher listened. And then they both drew pictures about their stories and the teacher listened. And she said to me, as I was getting ready to leave the classroom, I had no idea that they had an experience like that. And she was visibly moved, shocked. Um, and really clearly thinking about this. Well, when I came back two weeks later, she said, after hearing that story, I decided to make a curriculum about our heritage countries. So all of the kids have made little presentations and little diorama's and little posters about their heritage countries. And it was quite lovely and it was, you know, you might even say it was traditional, but the place it had come from was this teacher realizing the need for these children's stories and experiences to be part of what was happening in her classroom. And the fact that she heard the child tell his story changed the way that she acted with him. She became more nurturing and more comforting and that helped him not feel the need to run out of the classroom. So there's a story of an aha moment. Um, then there's a story of a teacher who used her relationship with the ERP coach to help herself grow and to push herself to offer something to the kids in her class. This is a story that took place at a school out of state where we've been working for several years and this was a fourth grade teacher and it was only her second year as a teacher. Um, she was young and she was a white teacher and most of the kids in her class were not white children. They were African American, African immigrants, Latino, Latina, Latinx, um, how they define themselves. And she was really grappling, I think, with how she could offer these children a space to share their stories. She was not yet saying things like, I'm a white teacher teaching kids who aren't white yet. She was clearly trying to think about it. She had read some books over the summer that she was considering reading to her class and one of them she felt like was maybe a little too old for them, a little too scary. And it was the book Ghost Boys by Jewel Rhodes, Jewel Parker Rhodes. And I was not familiar with this book. It is quite an amazing book in which that that addresses police shooting of unarmed black boys and brings Emmett Till in as a character from beyond the grave. And she couldn't decide whether to read this book to her class or not. But she listened to them and the kids told her some stories that made her think this might be a good book to read. And she decided to take a risk and read this book. And the risk was really that the material was going to be too sophisticated or too complicated for her to explain to the kids or for them to process. There was a lot of loss in this particular group. And when she started reading the story, some of the kids' experiences of loss came up. And it was loss across the spectrum of loss, - death, separation, immigration stories, moving and some, some tragedy. There was somebody who had experienced a shooting in their family. And so she decided to read this book and then she wrote to me saying, I started reading this book and everybody started crying and I don't know what to do. Can you help me? And so I consulted with Leslie, my director, and we talked about how inviting hard stories into the room, it can be scary and can be overwhelming, but giving them a place to live can be therapeutic, can be comforting. And so I told the teacher that when I came back we would do an activity.

Jon M: 00:29:15 When you say giving them a place to live, could you elaborate what you mean by that sentence?

Margaret B: 00:29:20 Yeah, I think my story will give the example,

Jon M: 00:29:25 Go ahead.

Margaret B: 00:29:25 So, um, we thought, what if the kids make, what if we give them an invitation to make a page of a class book where they can tell the story of somebody that they're missing and we're going to keep it open ended because we don't want to pressure anybody to tell a story they're not ready to tell. But we want to open the space for kids who want to tell whatever story they want to tell. And so I did bring that invitation and I said, I heard from your teacher that you started reading this book, Ghost Boys, and that some of you started thinking about people that you miss and that it was sad and it can feel really sad to miss people. And so today I'm going to invite you, if you want to make a picture or write a letter or write a story about a person you're missing, we're going to put them all together in a class book. And so it turned out that this group of kids was very, very responsive to this invitation and created these pages for a book that ran the full spectrum of, you know, people who had died, people who had stayed home in another country or had moved away. And it felt very connective. But I didn't, I didn't want to say, this is so perfect, this is so connective. So I asked the kids, what was it like, what was it like to make this book? And these, this group was very sophisticated and very thoughtful and a whole bunch of the kids wanted to participate all the time. And said things like this felt really good. It felt like I wasn't the only one who had a loss. This felt really special. It felt like it was okay to be sad. And they were saying things that reinforced my hunch and Leslie's theory that inviting stories in that are hard can be helpful, can diminish isolation if you give them a place to live. And so this book was a place that the stories could live. We didn't need to walk around talking about this loss all day long, but if we, if we wanted to check in with it, we could look at the book and kids didn't have to be thinking and be distracted by this idea that they'd experienced loss because it had been acknowledged that loss is a part of human experience and that community sharing can can make you feel less alone with your loss. So this is a long-winded story and I think has a lot of other layers that I don't know if there's time in this podcast to go into. It's one I'm still thinking about. I'm thinking about the questions that the children had about prejudice and about racism and about how this teacher and I encountered their questions and offered them answers, but we were both white women offering them these answers or these ways to think. And it's made me think a lot about how much kids need a variety of voices, helping them understand the complexities of their own experience of the world, of this moment in the country too. From the emotionally responsive practice perspective, I felt that the teacher taking the risk to open a topic and to really invite reflection on this topic was an aha moment for her. And this group of children took the journey with her and they ended up making posters at the end of the book. And she did the entire book as a read aloud, leaving as much time for conversation as the kids wanted, which was a lot. And one of the things she was worried about was that she didn't want the children to feel a complete sense of hopelessness about history and about racism. So we talked about the children being able to express both their understanding of racism and prejudice in this book and to be able to share if they had any experiences of racism and prejudice in their own lives. And then also to think about the word empowerment and to think about ways to find empowerment. This was also a theme that the book ended with. And so she had small groups of kids make this project where they depicted prejudice and racism in the book, prejudice and racism in our world, and ways that people find empowerment to work towards repair and change. And it was, it was very, very powerful. Then it's hard to go away and not work with that teacher anymore and to think, where did she take this experience? What's she going to do next? Where's she going to grow? And that's part of, I think, any ERP, we think about planting seeds for people and often not knowing when or where they're going going to grow. And I think that what my coaching offered her at that time was partnership and thinking about something and thoughtfulness about how to care for children's feelings while also having more of a macro picture of wanting to give them access to understanding about the forces of history, race and racism, and activism and collectivism, which all, which all stemmed from this book. Perfect.

Amy H-L: 00:35:33 Margaret, this seems to me to go to school culture and the idea that inviting children to bring their entire experiences, their life experiences into a classroom and feel safe about it does in a sense change the culture.

Margaret B: 00:35:57 It does. And in our different experiences with schools, depending on how many people in the school we work with and depending on whether we really work with the administrators, um, this kind of work can exist in the small bubble behind the closed doors of the classroom or can begin to have bigger effects on a school. I think some of the most important and most successful models we've had are when we're able to have explicit time with administrators. And a lot of our work with grownups is giving them experiences. And I was thinking about this when I talked about Dewey and the importance of experience. We feel very deeply both in ERP and at Bank Street that in order to teach something, a grownup has to be able to have experienced something akin to it, to know what they want to try to provide, to try to create. And so we offer experiences for grownups to delve into their own memories and to try things like using a feelings chart to tell about how they're feeling, using, uh, a journal to write about what's happening for them that day. Before we get started on the content, I'm doing a go-around doing a check-in, a quick exercise about what color comes to your mind today, what's .a landscape that you're feeling like, and these beginnings are so important because the grownups connect to themselves first, then they connect to each other and then they're able to listen to ideas that we might bring from a place of having experienced it themselves. We do have some aha moments for teachers in our seminars where we've heard things repeatedly. Like it felt so good to be able to just sit and write about what I was feeling. I'm going to make space for kids to do that in my classroom. And it's pretty simple. It doesn't mean that every teacher that comes in and has that experience goes back and the next day starts a routine. But I would say if we work with 30 teachers one day in a seminar, maybe two of them do go back and begin that particular practice right away. Maybe 10 of them carry the experience of having a space to talk about themselves and find another place to weave this in. Maybe 20 of them just sit with the experience of feeling valued and it's not such a direct shift in practice, but as they come back to us over time, they are more open to thinking about different ways of interpreting kids because they've felt held and they've felt seen and known and respected and esteemed in a space that we made for them. I think I went down a long path and I can't really remember where I began. You asked about school culture, right?

Amy H-L: 00:39:23 Thank you. That was very relevant to framework, the idea of inviting as in your words and inviting both teachers and students to bring their whole lives, their life experiences into the classroom.

Jon M: 00:39:46 Margaret, you started your, you began your teaching career in English-Spanish dual language schools. As you reflect on, on those experiences, what are your thoughts about dual language education? How do dual language classrooms differ from other classrooms and what are the ingredients of a successful dual language program?

Margaret B: 00:40:09 So I'll start by just saying that even before I went into dual language, I worked in inclusion and I worked at IEPs [Individualized Education Plans], with identified special needs, into a setting that everyone was part of. Um, I brought that into my work as a dual language teacher and over time my, my understanding of the depth of the value of a dual language space has only increased. When I first began. I thought about things like what a, what a gift for children and what, what an asset for children to be bilingual, to be able to read, write and speak and communicate in more than one language. It's a gift for children who are bringing a language other than English. It's a gift for children who are learning a language other than English and it's a space in which children can share their backgrounds with each other, learn from each other, and end up with this wonderful asset of being bilingual and of having more opportunities because of that. I still believe that all of those things are true. Emotionally responsive practice has helped me think about the emotional space of a dual language classroom. The vulnerability of being a second language learner and the idea that on any given day, half of the class, you know, ideally half of the class is operating in their second language and is, or in their new language, we don't say second language anymore. We say new language because many children come with more than one home language and English is a new language, not a second language. So I think about the emotional safety of somebody in the room who does speak your language and your language being the operative language in the space, a feeling of home, home being valued in the space you're in. And I think about the equity component that not only children who are native English speakers feel that connection and feel that value but children who are other language speakers feel that connection and feel that value. And then recently, and this is post my graduate work at Bank Street, Ofelia Garcia's theory of translanguaging has become more and more widely recognized as an incredibly important way to view what children bring into the classroom. So when I was educated as a dual language instructor, we thought a lot about the English world and the Spanish world and the importance of getting children to operate in the language of the day and the separation of the languages. And it made a lot of sense at the time. It made a lot of sense in terms of not mixing up languages, of making sure that kids were completely fluent in both languages, that they weren't what people said at the time was code switching as if it were a negative thing to do. And so if a child came in and said "hola" to me on an English day, I would say, hello, can you say hello? And I'd encourage them to, to say hello to me in English. And over the past, I'd say five or six years, coming back into Bank Street as faculty and having my colleagues working closely with Ofelia Garcia, who is one of main scholars who brought the idea of translanguaging into the, into our, into our thinking, um, I've really transitioned my way of understanding the English space, the Spanish space, and the idea that while a dual language classroom does provide both languages with clarity, that what the children bring in needs to be valued in whatever language or mix of languages that it comes out in because children use all of their language resources to, uh, to let you know what they know and to learn. We've had some wonderful professional development at Bank Street. Recently at the language series we had a keynote who spoke very practically and gave us this wonderful example where we needed to decode something that was completely unfamiliar. And she said, and we had to work with a partner. And she said, how many of you spoke to your partner in a different language? How many of you spoke to your partner in English? We all spoke in English as we tried to decode something unfamiliar. and in a classroom where you said, you've got to operate in Spanish today, those children wouldn't be able to use their cognitive resources if they weren't fully fluent in Spanish yet. So there's many, many important examples of where translanguaging fits into a classroom, but I think it's, it's really important that anybody coming into a dual language setting learns about studies and tries to bring into their, their worldview this idea that, um, if a child goes back and forth between two languages as they speak, it's not the moment for the teacher to correct them. It's a moment for the teacher to embrace the knowledge that they bring and embrace the stories that they bring with, of course, the ultimate goal being children becoming fully fluent in both languages, becoming fully literate in both languages, that the pathway to that fluency is not by restricting their, their output or their input. Mmm. Along the way.

Jon M: 00:46:59 Could you, I think you've been describing it in practice, but could you translanguaging for people who aren't familiar with the term?

Margaret B: 00:47:07 I'm not, I'm afraid I'm not going to do it justice because I was, I didn't prepare myself to say this ahead of time, so I'll give you my operative definition, which is that children who are learning more than one language as they learn and grow in school, bring all of their language resources into play as they learn and make relationships and have experiences. This often entails going back and forth between two languages, substituting a known word from the other language within a full sentence in the other language in order to express yourself. Um, translanguaging means that language is one thing that we do. There isn't a Spanish section of my brain and an English section of my brain, although we thought there was. There's a language center in which both of those things, um, when I'm using English, all of that language center is operating when I'm using Spanish, all of that language center is operating. So translanguaging is the idea that on the route to fluency there is a need to go in between the languages that, you know,.

Jon M: 00:48:33 Thanks.

Amy H-L: 00:48:33 Margaret, you've been a kindergarten teacher and you've taught many kindergarten teachers. What's the most important advice that you would give a beginning kindergarten teacher?

New Speaker: 00:48:45 Ah, well there's so many different pieces of advice. I am going to share that when I was a kindergarten teacher, every single year I would read a chapter in this book, which this was long before I worked for Leslie Koplow's program. It's called "Creating Schools That Heal: Real Life Solutions." And chapter three is called Saving Kindergarten. And this is a chapter that talks about the development that happens during kindergarten. And I think one of my biggest pieces of advice is learn about child development and kindergarten. Consider the fact that some of the children coming into your kindergarten, if you're a public school teacher, will be four and a half while others are five and a half. And remember that four and a half and five and a half or developmentally very different places and then meet them where they are. Part of that, meeting them where they are is inviting their families in. And this is something that I practiced over my years, which was an intake interview in which I considered the parent, the expert in which I had nothing to tell the parent about their child yet, that it was all what they could tell me. And I think that this is an essential tool of a kindergarten teacher and really it's a wonderful practice I think at any grade level, but particularly as children enter into school, into formal school for the first time. And many kindergartens are so academically oriented that it really feels like school, that knowing what they, their parents, know about them and uh, offering partnership to parents is an essential piece of the success you're going to have with any given child. And I think the third piece of advice along the lines of development, and this is really something that Leslie articulates beautifully in the chapter I mentioned, is that on the road to what we call independence, there needs to be a dependent partner. There needs to be a grownup who is what Leslie Koplow calls your psychological home base. You as a grownup need to make yourself a safe grownup, someone who the children can turn to in need, someone who's going to honor them even when they're doing things that surprise you, like running around the room or throwing things on the floor or pushing other kids. That, knowing that being able to come back and depend on you is how they're going to get more and more independent over the years. And this is a place where I think it's a nice example of how emotionally responsive practice brings in early development. And we often remind people about toddlers and how toddlers will as they learn to walk and crawl, will go off from their grownup and explore something and then all of a sudden get a sort of feeling and look back and need to scurry back or run back to their grownup for a hug or for a connect or to show them something and they do this dance of go away and come back, go and come back. And that this is something that if kindergarten teachers can understand, they can offer to kids in the different ways that particular kids need it. Um, so when kindergarten teachers demand full independence in October, it's really not, it's not going to work for some kids. But when they have an idea that kids are going to gain independence over the year through feeling like they can depend on their teacher, then it really is going to work. And that those kids are going to feel prepared emotionally to step into the world of school as they become first graders. And then go back to the concept of inviting and containing and make sure your classroom has a routine that's dependable. Make sure you're always reading kids the schedule. If I have a magic wand, I would wish that every kindergarten teacher, never preschool teacher and really every teacher, because I did this with my grownups too, would read through the schedule every day and if there were going to be any changes, they would talk about it. And as one activity ended and another began, they'd look back at that schedule, that visual, that place that holds the expected, that holds the, what you can depend on in place. And that teachers would never say to me, "Oh, they know the schedule by now. So I don't read it anymore to save time." Um, I would say read the schedule every single day. You won't regret it.

Jon M: 00:54:09 Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't talked about?

Margaret B: 00:54:11 I think there's probably hundreds of things I'd like to add and I'm looking back at the notes I wrote before we spoke and I don't, I don't think there's anything, anything that was really burning in my mind that I needed to say that I didn't say. Uh, well I think there is one, there was a question that I don't think you asked, which was about the connection between special education and bilingual and dual language education.

Jon M: 00:54:46 So please, yes.

Margaret B: 00:54:48 Yeah. And that's something that I have thought about a lot and it plays into what I talked about during the section where I was talking about dual language and translanguaging. And because I came from a an inclusion setting, I had a lot of techniques that I used to make language comprehensible and to invite children to join in using the language that they had even though the inclusion setting that I worked in was all was an English classroom. And so because the children worked with speech therapists and occupational therapists and physical therapists, we would often incorporate some of the things that they did in their sessions with their therapists into our classroom practice. So for example, if therapists were using American sign language as a bridge to oral language, uh, we would use that in the classroom, too. So all the children recognized and used simple terms like stand up, sit down, more family, I won, thank you, bathroom, water. And when I came to dual language, I thought this is an important component of dual language too. If I say the word bathroom today and teach the children the sign and I say the word "banyon" tomorrow and show the children the same sign and then I continue that sign over the days, the children who are in their new language that day will have a much higher chance of comprehending what I'm talking about because they've got this visual, this gesture clue. So the use of the schedule, the use of the visuals, the use of real objects as you talk, the idea of making your language comprehensible. And it's funny to be talking about this on a podcast where nobody can see me and they can't see if I'm moving my hands or if I'm pointing to anything. And it's a very, it's a very language based form of learning and form of taking in. And you know, I, I wouldn't use a podcast to educate kindergarten children in dual language or in inclusion settings or even a non inclusion and non dual language settings because we understand a lot better when we have multiple sources of input for the content that's being shared and when we have multiple ways to express ourselves. So I'd really like to invite teachers to consider, um, whether you're in a dual language inclusion special education or, or a general ed monolingual classroom, consider adding even more visuals, gestures, sign language and actual objects into the way that you present information in language and consider allowing children to use those options as well as they let you know what they know even when their language is not yet caught up with their knowledge. And I think the other, I think the note I'd like to end on, we were talking about this in our emotionally responsive practice staff meeting just yesterday, in fact. And one thing we are really grappling with as more and more information comes our way about how to decentralize the white experience as the first or the only experience. We're talking about this a lot because at this point in time the six staff members that are at ERP are all white women. And while this has not always been the case, and I hope will not always be the case, due to a lot of different circumstances and a lot of components, it is the case right now. So we've been intentionally opening a space to reflect on this as we think about the different schools we work with, different teachers we work with and we've been thinking about how do we make sure that what we're bringing in as emotionally responsive practice, uh, feels connective, feels right, feels like it, it works within any school culture, within any teacher's personal culture, within any group of kids' culture. And there is not an easy answer to this. I think, um, maybe we could talk more about it with you in a year or two as we embark on really intentionally thinking, think about this question. But what did come up is what do we, what do we really believe universally? And one of those things that my colleague no well articulated was that human beings, there are some universals that we believe about the human experience that human beings make attachments and that those attachments nurture our development, that human beings need comfort. And that comfort might come in a lot of different forms and that human beings thrive when they are seen, when they're validated, when they're heard, when they're understood, when they're known, when they're valued. And I wanted to say that it's a journey for all of us to consider whether we are authentically doing this with every grownup we work with as we ask them to do this with all the children they work with. And I'm very excited to be able to collaborate and think together with [inaudible] really thoughtful, reflective people both in ERP and in the larger educational world. But it is a a long journey that we have to take together and it feels like a real honor to be able to come into spaces of teachers and spaces of families and spaces of children and offer them something and also adjust my offering to be what is right for them, what's relevant to them. And I look forward to continuing this journey with intention..

Amy H-L: 01:01:35 Thank you so much, Margaret.

Jon M: 01:01:38 And thank you listeners for joining us. We'd like to hear how you've incorporated ideas you've heard on our podcast or read on the blog. Please email us at posts at [email protected]. Check out prior episodes and articles on our site and we'll also host some of the things that MArgaret was talking about today. We also offer professional development for schools and youth programs in the New York city area. Contact us for details. Again, it's [email protected]. We're on Facebook and Twitter @ethicalschools, and Instagram. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.

Margaret Blachly of Bank Street’s Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice describes how to fit materials, curriculum, and relationships together to create an emotionally safe classroom.  Emphasizing the importance of a deep understanding of child development, she tells how important it is to know each child’s “story.” Margaret shares what she’s learned as a dual-language and special ed teacher and gives advice to new kindergarten teachers. Reflecting on Dewey’s Education and Experience, she talks about the ethical dimensions of teaching and the connections between the classroom and the larger society.

*Overview and transcript below.

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0:00-1:46 Introduction

1:46-5:02 Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice; importance of deep understanding  of child development

how each child’s life experience affects who they are, act, think, connect

5:03-11:59 Components of emotionally responsive classroom; “inviting and “containing”

11:59-16:06 Influence of John Dewey

16:06-22:00 “Aha” moments; growth and change in teachers

22:00-35:33 Immigrant experience; using reflective techniques; loss; inviting stories in that are hard

35:33-39:46 Changing school culture; teachers bringing their whole lives into the classroom; reflecting on their

experiences; feeling valued

39:46-48:33 Dual language, translanguaging; Ofelia Garcia

48:33-54:09 Advice for beginning kindergarten teachers

54:09-1:01:35 Connections between special education, bilingual education, and dual-language education; 

decentralizing white experience as the first or only experience

Amy H-L: 00:00:15 I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.

Jon M: 00:00:18 And I’m Jon Moscow.

Amy H-L: 00:00:18 Welcome to ethical schools where we discuss strategies for creating inclusive equitable schools and youth programs that help students to develop both commitment and capacity to building ethical institutions.

Jon M: 00:00:34 Our guest today is Margaret Blachly. Margaret is a psycho-educational specialist at the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College. She’s also an advisor and instructor in the early childhood special education and bilingual programs at the Bank Street Graduate School of Education and a learning specialist at the children’s learning center of Morningside Heights. She has been a teacher for two decades. Welcome Margaret.

Margaret B: 00:00:57 Thank you.

Amy H-L: 00:00:59 Margaret, how would you define the term psycho-educational?

Margaret B: 00:01:03 That is a wonderful question and it’s funny you ask because when I first saw my contract for taking on the job at emotionally responsive practice, I said, “Is that what I am?” And my, my director Leslie Koplow said, well, that is what you are. So I had to do a little thinking about it. Um, psycho-educational specialist to me means somebody who knows about and thinks about and can advise and teach about the impact of emotional health and wellbeing in the educational setting.

Amy H-L: 00:01:40 And what is Bank Street Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice? What does it do?

Margaret B: 00:01:46 So the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice is 20 years old and it’s a professional development branch of Bank Street College. It’s a staff at this moment of six people with our director and founder, Leslie Koplow, and we work with teachers, we work with administrators and we sometimes also work with children. We work with paraprofessionals and we sometimes also work with parents. We work with individual schools. We sometimes work with districts and we come to the schools or they come to us to learn about children’s emotional health and how it impacts their learning and their behavior in schools. We do seminars and we do coaching. We do support groups and we do parent support groups and parent workshops. We have an annual conference and each of these events or each of these different ways in which we work, operates on a similar premise that people who are in contact with children in an educational setting need to understand child development and they need to not only understand the development of the age of the children that they work with. They need to understand child development starting with birth and they need to especially understand child development over the first three years, four years and five years of life. We also operate on the premise that people that work with children and families need to honor and value that each child has a story and that that child’s story, aka their life experience, affects who they are and how they act and how they think and how they connect and that sometimes their story impacts how school feels for them. In fact, it always does. So whenever, whenever grownups come to us saying, we’re having so much trouble with child X, can you help us? The first thing we say is how old is child X? And tell us about who they are. And then the other is what do you know about this child’s story? Let’s make this child more of a whole human then, uh, this behavior that you’re seeing in your classrooms setting. And it’s usually through beginning of the conversation that way that we are able to offer a space for the grownups to consider that child in a fuller way and thus to find a way to respond to them in a fuller way and in a way that’s more that, that values them more, that honors why they’re doing what they’re doing and who these grownups are. Who is this teacher to this child? Who is this principal and who do they want to be? So we think a lot about development, a lot about experience and a lot about relationship.

Jon M: 00:05:03 So building on that, can you give some examples of what emotionally responsive practice looks like in the classroom?

Margaret B: 00:05:12 Okay. There’s some very basic components to an emotionally responsive classroom. However, it can look different from classroom to classroom. So I want to, I want to lay that premise out from the beginning that with the same idea in mind, two classrooms can look and sound pretty different but the effect can be the same, that children feel safe, secure, known, and able to engage. So one example is having a space like a cozy corner. Some classroom teachers call it a peace corner, some teachers call it a peace nook. But here’s the physical environment that says sometimes living in a group feels like too much. Sometimes a child, sometimes a person. Needs to retreat. Sometimes a person needs to regroup and have some space to be on the edge looking in and get ready to rejoin. So the presence of a peace corner or a cozy corner and then the way that it’s used is one really clear component of an emotionally responsive classroom. We talk about a framework of inviting and containing. And this has been very helpful to me to think about and it’s one of the things that we challenge ourselves to explain to teachers and to get them to be thinking about. So inviting and containing. is a balance that a classroom that it teacher wants to create an a classroom and I think that a school leader wants to create an a school that a coach wants to create in a coaching session that a graduate instructor wants to create in the graduate classroom. There needs to be invitation for who’s in the room to be welcomed and heard in the room. There need to be structures that contain the activity and the way things work within the classroom. So a classroom that’s overly inviting can feel really chaotic and I’m the first to say that my very first kindergarten classroom was overly inviting and it wasn’t containing enough and I needed a Bank Street advisor to tell me that actually many years ago. When she told me, you can’t open so many areas for your project time at once, I was very resistant and I said project time is the most important time in my classroom.This is when these children are going to get to engage with materials on their own terms. This is what I come from in Bank Street pedagogy. This is experience. So learning, if I don’t open blocks today, that’s one day less that the children in this room will have to play with blocks and their life because I knew that they wouldn’t have blocks first grade. and this was really it. I felt the stakes were really high, but my advisor said it’s too chaotic. You’re not able to. um, you know, the kids are throwing blocks, they’re throwing sand and over on the other corner they’re throwing baby dolls. And it took me a while to, to admit that she was right and scale back and look at the goal of having all of these open for children, but realizing that I needed to be more containing and more structured in the way that I open them one by one, set out clear expectations and shared knowledge of how the things were going to be used and got the room full of kids, used to working in a lot, a lot of different centers at once. So I think that that’s one of my personal stories of inviting and containing before I even knew these terms. I’ll share another from my own personal experience because this is one that I often share with teachers who I’m supporting, and it’s interesting because it just came up recently with a parent who I ran into who was telling me about a classroom where the teacher just wasn’t progressive and made the kids sit in assigned seats when they were having meetings together and I, I thought about it and decided to just tell her that personally I have come to really value assigned seats, particularly for new teachers. And this was another thing that happened for me early on in my career where I felt very tied to value of choice and I really wanted children to be able to choose seats that they knew were going to be good for them, where they want it to be. I wanted to honor them. I didn’t want to tell them where I thought they had to be, but I found that every time we came to the carpet together to have a conversation, there was so much anxiety about where kids sat. There was so much arguing, there was so much getting in each other’s spaces that when I made the hard decision to give them assigned seats, it actually really relieved that anxiety and allowed our conversations to go on. And so it’s an example that I don’t think, you know, I’m not saying every single teacher must assign seats because there are teachers who have really figured out how to make, not having assigned seats work, but for teachers who are having a tough time managing that, I say assign the seats, relieve the anxiety so that you can get to the content of the conversations you want to have, the community that you want to create. And it’s a way of saying to kids, there’s a space for you. You can depend on it. You don’t need to worry. You don’t need to wonder. You don’t need to think my friend’s not near me, does she like me anymore. You can kind of relax into that space. And the funny thing is I’ve found that when I teach grownups, once they’ve figured out their seat, they always come back to the same seat in the graduate classroom or in the ERP [emotionally responsive practice] seminars and it’s very comfortable to feel like you’ve got a spot, you belong there and you can join the group. So there are a couple of real life examples of inviting and containing.

Amy H-L: 00:11:59 Thank you. As you know, our podcasts and blog are strongly influenced by John Dewey’s approach to ethics in education. Do you see connections between Dewey’s ethical framework and the work that you do?

Margaret B: 00:12:13 So I think a lot about Dewey. When I did teach the courses at bank street in early childhood curriculum, Dewey’s experience in education, which is one of his later works in which he reconsiders and re States many of the things he said in his other books about pedagogy and the educational approach was one of the main texts that we needed to ask graduate students to read and think about and apply to their work. I’m not currently teaching these courses in the graduate school. But for me, going back to that Dewey text, which I had read long ago in the same course myself many years ago, was extremely helpful to think about the experiences that we offer children and to honor the fact that for every child coming into our spaces is part of their experience and is itself an experience. So we make choices as educators about the kinds of experiences children can have and as an extension, the kind of experiences their parents can have, their families can have. Um, I think about engaging with materials and Bank Street’s developmental interaction approach, uh, which asks educators to think about the materials, the curriculum, and then also the relationships that are in the room. All of these things fit together more and more. The more I repeat my reading of them and Dewey to me says that the educational experience can be and should be a parallel to the larger social experience and the very hopeful view that experiencing democracy in a classroom setting in a school setting prepares kids to grow up and engage in a democracy. In the very idealistic view of what a democracy can be, a social and political construct where people have voice, where people consider others, where people have choice and where they also have responsibility. Then in terms of thinking about the ethical framework, I understand this as the macro level of what our teaching means, and perhaps this is just another way of saying what I just said before, but our, our work as teachers and educators exist within a much bigger framework, a social, a political framework. And when we take the time to consistently reflect on ourselves at the macro level, thinking, what does my work with these children mean as a part of a larger institution of education in this country? And then on a micro level, what does my relationship and my, my educational offering to these particular children and these families this year, this day, this month, how to use my creation of a learning space that honors and welcomes and esteems children and their families and considers a developmental moment and how does it affect them personally? So I think there’s an ethical responsibility to see our role in kids’ experience and in their development of self within our spaces.

Jon M: 00:16:06 So Dewey of course talks a lot about change and how people make decisions and dramatic rehearsals is his phrase. And you were talking about how you changed in your practice, how you grew as you saw that some things seem to work better than others. And you of course were also coming out of, for example, a Bank Street background where you, you came to teaching from this. Um, what’s the change process that you see as you’re working with teachers who may not have come out of these backgrounds as they move towards sort of a more emotionally responsive practice? Do teachers, and I’m sure it’s different for every teacher, but do teachers describe aha moments? What are sort of getting at is we have so many traditional schools, you know, for all the people who study him in graduate schools, Dewey was never the dominant impact on American schools. It was always much more hierarchical and top down and so forth. And as you’re working with teachers in classrooms and also in schools that may not be progressive as such, um, how do you see this process of change and how do you see lasting change taking place? I don’t know if that’s, that may be a whole bunch of questions all bundled into one, but take whichever pieces of it you like.

Margaret B: 00:17:34 Okay. Yes, that’s a bunch of questions. Um, the first thing that came to my mind as you started to ask that question or those questions was it’s not always an aha moment and that has been something that I’ve needed to make peace with and that my colleagues at ERP whose training is in social work rather than pedagogy have really helped me to understand the process of growth and change over time in relationship with people. So I actually, I could tell you a couple of stories with aha moments in them and I’ve got one in mind and I can also tell you some stories of change over time. And I think both of them offer something for teachers to think about and maybe self-reflect, whether you’re thinking about your own practice or thinking about how to support other people who you would like to see grow. So there was an aha moment that happened several years ago when I was working at a school way out on the edge of Queens near the ocean. And our work at that time was responding to hurricane Sandy. And we had in that work more than we usually have. We had a curriculum planned out where we would come in and actually offer some lessons to the children and teachers and some invitations to share and express their stories. And one of the stories was about feeling scared in a storm. One of the books that we read was about a bear that feels scared in a storm and how this bear and their friends figure out feeling safe. And the thinking behind this lesson was that children needed to have an invitation to talk about the hurricane being a scary experience being a storm that was very scary. And then thinking about how they stayed safe or how they could stay safe in the future. Not on the practical level, not on making an emergency plan or anything, but really on the idea that after a scary moment there can be safety. And it’s important to know both of those feelings that hopefully the classroom can be that safe place. Now that was the idea. The story had these pictures of a dark woods in the night with rain and the minute I opened this book, now this was in a classroom with a lot of children who, who were themselves recent immigrants into the country or were the children of recent immigrants into the country. And interestingly, this work post hurricane Sandy was actually maybe a year and a half after the storm because of the amount of time that it took for funding to come to come through. So that our proposal for supporting these schools post-Sandy happened a year and a half later. However, it felt very impactful because a year and a half later people who had experienced the storm still were processing and still really responded to the opportunity to process together, to make sense of and to find comfort. However, some of these children were not even in this country when the storm happened, but here we were bringing this curriculum. And the minute I opened this story book, a six year old boy looked at it and spoke in Spanish, and I speak Spanish because of my year abroad during college and because it was something that I really wanted to learn to do and I became a dual language and bilingual educator. So I felt very fortunate to be understanding of what the child was saying because what he said to nobody in particular was that dark woods looks like when I was coming here with my mom and we had to hide in the dark scary woods and I was really scared.

Jon M: 00:21:59 Wow.

Margaret B: 00:22:00 And all of a sudden his teacher looked at me with this sort of aghast and shocked look on her face. Um, the teacher herself was an immigrant from a central American country and was a very experienced educator, but she had been worried about working with this boy who had been running out of the classroom. And when the school security guards approached him, he screamed and ran further. And so she had just been asking me what I thought about this boy and then he offered this, um, quite amazing statement in the middle of this story. And, uh, we got to write about this story in an article that I co-authored with two of my ERP colleagues, uh, because it was, um, it was sort of like an ERP moment that, so you can, you can read that story if you’re interested to hear more about our thinking about work with kids for whom an immigration story is part of their own experience. But the reason I’m bringing it up right now was really about what happened when the teacher looked at me and when I said to her, after I read this book, I’d like to work with him. And so I used emotionally responsive practice technique of being reflective and simply said to the boy in Spanish, that sounds like a scary story. Maybe after I read this book, you can tell me more about it if you want. And the reflective technique is offering a mirror to the child. I heard what you just said. It sounds scary and you can, you know, it’s, it’s invited here. So I read the story to the class and I set them off on their writing and drawing activity. And I said to this little boy, would you like to tell me more about your, about your story of coming here with your mom? And another little boy joined in and, and I actually felt a little overwhelmed by having both of them, but the teacher looked at me and said, well, he, he just arrived here, too. And we, I ended up having this conversation in which the two boys told their stories and the teacher listened. And then they both drew pictures about their stories and the teacher listened. And she said to me, as I was getting ready to leave the classroom, I had no idea that they had an experience like that. And she was visibly moved, shocked. Um, and really clearly thinking about this. Well, when I came back two weeks later, she said, after hearing that story, I decided to make a curriculum about our heritage countries. So all of the kids have made little presentations and little diorama’s and little posters about their heritage countries. And it was quite lovely and it was, you know, you might even say it was traditional, but the place it had come from was this teacher realizing the need for these children’s stories and experiences to be part of what was happening in her classroom. And the fact that she heard the child tell his story changed the way that she acted with him. She became more nurturing and more comforting and that helped him not feel the need to run out of the classroom. So there’s a story of an aha moment. Um, then there’s a story of a teacher who used her relationship with the ERP coach to help herself grow and to push herself to offer something to the kids in her class. This is a story that took place at a school out of state where we’ve been working for several years and this was a fourth grade teacher and it was only her second year as a teacher. Um, she was young and she was a white teacher and most of the kids in her class were not white children. They were African American, African immigrants, Latino, Latina, Latinx, um, how they define themselves. And she was really grappling, I think, with how she could offer these children a space to share their stories. She was not yet saying things like, I’m a white teacher teaching kids who aren’t white yet. She was clearly trying to think about it. She had read some books over the summer that she was considering reading to her class and one of them she felt like was maybe a little too old for them, a little too scary. And it was the book Ghost Boys by Jewel Rhodes, Jewel Parker Rhodes. And I was not familiar with this book. It is quite an amazing book in which that that addresses police shooting of unarmed black boys and brings Emmett Till in as a character from beyond the grave. And she couldn’t decide whether to read this book to her class or not. But she listened to them and the kids told her some stories that made her think this might be a good book to read. And she decided to take a risk and read this book. And the risk was really that the material was going to be too sophisticated or too complicated for her to explain to the kids or for them to process. There was a lot of loss in this particular group. And when she started reading the story, some of the kids’ experiences of loss came up. And it was loss across the spectrum of loss, – death, separation, immigration stories, moving and some, some tragedy. There was somebody who had experienced a shooting in their family. And so she decided to read this book and then she wrote to me saying, I started reading this book and everybody started crying and I don’t know what to do. Can you help me? And so I consulted with Leslie, my director, and we talked about how inviting hard stories into the room, it can be scary and can be overwhelming, but giving them a place to live can be therapeutic, can be comforting. And so I told the teacher that when I came back we would do an activity.

Jon M: 00:29:15 When you say giving them a place to live, could you elaborate what you mean by that sentence?

Margaret B: 00:29:20 Yeah, I think my story will give the example,

Jon M: 00:29:25 Go ahead.

Margaret B: 00:29:25 So, um, we thought, what if the kids make, what if we give them an invitation to make a page of a class book where they can tell the story of somebody that they’re missing and we’re going to keep it open ended because we don’t want to pressure anybody to tell a story they’re not ready to tell. But we want to open the space for kids who want to tell whatever story they want to tell. And so I did bring that invitation and I said, I heard from your teacher that you started reading this book, Ghost Boys, and that some of you started thinking about people that you miss and that it was sad and it can feel really sad to miss people. And so today I’m going to invite you, if you want to make a picture or write a letter or write a story about a person you’re missing, we’re going to put them all together in a class book. And so it turned out that this group of kids was very, very responsive to this invitation and created these pages for a book that ran the full spectrum of, you know, people who had died, people who had stayed home in another country or had moved away. And it felt very connective. But I didn’t, I didn’t want to say, this is so perfect, this is so connective. So I asked the kids, what was it like, what was it like to make this book? And these, this group was very sophisticated and very thoughtful and a whole bunch of the kids wanted to participate all the time. And said things like this felt really good. It felt like I wasn’t the only one who had a loss. This felt really special. It felt like it was okay to be sad. And they were saying things that reinforced my hunch and Leslie’s theory that inviting stories in that are hard can be helpful, can diminish isolation if you give them a place to live. And so this book was a place that the stories could live. We didn’t need to walk around talking about this loss all day long, but if we, if we wanted to check in with it, we could look at the book and kids didn’t have to be thinking and be distracted by this idea that they’d experienced loss because it had been acknowledged that loss is a part of human experience and that community sharing can can make you feel less alone with your loss. So this is a long-winded story and I think has a lot of other layers that I don’t know if there’s time in this podcast to go into. It’s one I’m still thinking about. I’m thinking about the questions that the children had about prejudice and about racism and about how this teacher and I encountered their questions and offered them answers, but we were both white women offering them these answers or these ways to think. And it’s made me think a lot about how much kids need a variety of voices, helping them understand the complexities of their own experience of the world, of this moment in the country too. From the emotionally responsive practice perspective, I felt that the teacher taking the risk to open a topic and to really invite reflection on this topic was an aha moment for her. And this group of children took the journey with her and they ended up making posters at the end of the book. And she did the entire book as a read aloud, leaving as much time for conversation as the kids wanted, which was a lot. And one of the things she was worried about was that she didn’t want the children to feel a complete sense of hopelessness about history and about racism. So we talked about the children being able to express both their understanding of racism and prejudice in this book and to be able to share if they had any experiences of racism and prejudice in their own lives. And then also to think about the word empowerment and to think about ways to find empowerment. This was also a theme that the book ended with. And so she had small groups of kids make this project where they depicted prejudice and racism in the book, prejudice and racism in our world, and ways that people find empowerment to work towards repair and change. And it was, it was very, very powerful. Then it’s hard to go away and not work with that teacher anymore and to think, where did she take this experience? What’s she going to do next? Where’s she going to grow? And that’s part of, I think, any ERP, we think about planting seeds for people and often not knowing when or where they’re going going to grow. And I think that what my coaching offered her at that time was partnership and thinking about something and thoughtfulness about how to care for children’s feelings while also having more of a macro picture of wanting to give them access to understanding about the forces of history, race and racism, and activism and collectivism, which all, which all stemmed from this book. Perfect.

Amy H-L: 00:35:33 Margaret, this seems to me to go to school culture and the idea that inviting children to bring their entire experiences, their life experiences into a classroom and feel safe about it does in a sense change the culture.

Margaret B: 00:35:57 It does. And in our different experiences with schools, depending on how many people in the school we work with and depending on whether we really work with the administrators, um, this kind of work can exist in the small bubble behind the closed doors of the classroom or can begin to have bigger effects on a school. I think some of the most important and most successful models we’ve had are when we’re able to have explicit time with administrators. And a lot of our work with grownups is giving them experiences. And I was thinking about this when I talked about Dewey and the importance of experience. We feel very deeply both in ERP and at Bank Street that in order to teach something, a grownup has to be able to have experienced something akin to it, to know what they want to try to provide, to try to create. And so we offer experiences for grownups to delve into their own memories and to try things like using a feelings chart to tell about how they’re feeling, using, uh, a journal to write about what’s happening for them that day. Before we get started on the content, I’m doing a go-around doing a check-in, a quick exercise about what color comes to your mind today, what’s .a landscape that you’re feeling like, and these beginnings are so important because the grownups connect to themselves first, then they connect to each other and then they’re able to listen to ideas that we might bring from a place of having experienced it themselves. We do have some aha moments for teachers in our seminars where we’ve heard things repeatedly. Like it felt so good to be able to just sit and write about what I was feeling. I’m going to make space for kids to do that in my classroom. And it’s pretty simple. It doesn’t mean that every teacher that comes in and has that experience goes back and the next day starts a routine. But I would say if we work with 30 teachers one day in a seminar, maybe two of them do go back and begin that particular practice right away. Maybe 10 of them carry the experience of having a space to talk about themselves and find another place to weave this in. Maybe 20 of them just sit with the experience of feeling valued and it’s not such a direct shift in practice, but as they come back to us over time, they are more open to thinking about different ways of interpreting kids because they’ve felt held and they’ve felt seen and known and respected and esteemed in a space that we made for them. I think I went down a long path and I can’t really remember where I began. You asked about school culture, right?

Amy H-L: 00:39:23 Thank you. That was very relevant to framework, the idea of inviting as in your words and inviting both teachers and students to bring their whole lives, their life experiences into the classroom.

Jon M: 00:39:46 Margaret, you started your, you began your teaching career in English-Spanish dual language schools. As you reflect on, on those experiences, what are your thoughts about dual language education? How do dual language classrooms differ from other classrooms and what are the ingredients of a successful dual language program?

Margaret B: 00:40:09 So I’ll start by just saying that even before I went into dual language, I worked in inclusion and I worked at IEPs [Individualized Education Plans], with identified special needs, into a setting that everyone was part of. Um, I brought that into my work as a dual language teacher and over time my, my understanding of the depth of the value of a dual language space has only increased. When I first began. I thought about things like what a, what a gift for children and what, what an asset for children to be bilingual, to be able to read, write and speak and communicate in more than one language. It’s a gift for children who are bringing a language other than English. It’s a gift for children who are learning a language other than English and it’s a space in which children can share their backgrounds with each other, learn from each other, and end up with this wonderful asset of being bilingual and of having more opportunities because of that. I still believe that all of those things are true. Emotionally responsive practice has helped me think about the emotional space of a dual language classroom. The vulnerability of being a second language learner and the idea that on any given day, half of the class, you know, ideally half of the class is operating in their second language and is, or in their new language, we don’t say second language anymore. We say new language because many children come with more than one home language and English is a new language, not a second language. So I think about the emotional safety of somebody in the room who does speak your language and your language being the operative language in the space, a feeling of home, home being valued in the space you’re in. And I think about the equity component that not only children who are native English speakers feel that connection and feel that value but children who are other language speakers feel that connection and feel that value. And then recently, and this is post my graduate work at Bank Street, Ofelia Garcia’s theory of translanguaging has become more and more widely recognized as an incredibly important way to view what children bring into the classroom. So when I was educated as a dual language instructor, we thought a lot about the English world and the Spanish world and the importance of getting children to operate in the language of the day and the separation of the languages. And it made a lot of sense at the time. It made a lot of sense in terms of not mixing up languages, of making sure that kids were completely fluent in both languages, that they weren’t what people said at the time was code switching as if it were a negative thing to do. And so if a child came in and said “hola” to me on an English day, I would say, hello, can you say hello? And I’d encourage them to, to say hello to me in English. And over the past, I’d say five or six years, coming back into Bank Street as faculty and having my colleagues working closely with Ofelia Garcia, who is one of main scholars who brought the idea of translanguaging into the, into our, into our thinking, um, I’ve really transitioned my way of understanding the English space, the Spanish space, and the idea that while a dual language classroom does provide both languages with clarity, that what the children bring in needs to be valued in whatever language or mix of languages that it comes out in because children use all of their language resources to, uh, to let you know what they know and to learn. We’ve had some wonderful professional development at Bank Street. Recently at the language series we had a keynote who spoke very practically and gave us this wonderful example where we needed to decode something that was completely unfamiliar. And she said, and we had to work with a partner. And she said, how many of you spoke to your partner in a different language? How many of you spoke to your partner in English? We all spoke in English as we tried to decode something unfamiliar. and in a classroom where you said, you’ve got to operate in Spanish today, those children wouldn’t be able to use their cognitive resources if they weren’t fully fluent in Spanish yet. So there’s many, many important examples of where translanguaging fits into a classroom, but I think it’s, it’s really important that anybody coming into a dual language setting learns about studies and tries to bring into their, their worldview this idea that, um, if a child goes back and forth between two languages as they speak, it’s not the moment for the teacher to correct them. It’s a moment for the teacher to embrace the knowledge that they bring and embrace the stories that they bring with, of course, the ultimate goal being children becoming fully fluent in both languages, becoming fully literate in both languages, that the pathway to that fluency is not by restricting their, their output or their input. Mmm. Along the way.

Jon M: 00:46:59 Could you, I think you’ve been describing it in practice, but could you translanguaging for people who aren’t familiar with the term?

Margaret B: 00:47:07 I’m not, I’m afraid I’m not going to do it justice because I was, I didn’t prepare myself to say this ahead of time, so I’ll give you my operative definition, which is that children who are learning more than one language as they learn and grow in school, bring all of their language resources into play as they learn and make relationships and have experiences. This often entails going back and forth between two languages, substituting a known word from the other language within a full sentence in the other language in order to express yourself. Um, translanguaging means that language is one thing that we do. There isn’t a Spanish section of my brain and an English section of my brain, although we thought there was. There’s a language center in which both of those things, um, when I’m using English, all of that language center is operating when I’m using Spanish, all of that language center is operating. So translanguaging is the idea that on the route to fluency there is a need to go in between the languages that, you know,.

Jon M: 00:48:33 Thanks.

Amy H-L: 00:48:33 Margaret, you’ve been a kindergarten teacher and you’ve taught many kindergarten teachers. What’s the most important advice that you would give a beginning kindergarten teacher?

New Speaker: 00:48:45 Ah, well there’s so many different pieces of advice. I am going to share that when I was a kindergarten teacher, every single year I would read a chapter in this book, which this was long before I worked for Leslie Koplow’s program. It’s called “Creating Schools That Heal: Real Life Solutions.” And chapter three is called Saving Kindergarten. And this is a chapter that talks about the development that happens during kindergarten. And I think one of my biggest pieces of advice is learn about child development and kindergarten. Consider the fact that some of the children coming into your kindergarten, if you’re a public school teacher, will be four and a half while others are five and a half. And remember that four and a half and five and a half or developmentally very different places and then meet them where they are. Part of that, meeting them where they are is inviting their families in. And this is something that I practiced over my years, which was an intake interview in which I considered the parent, the expert in which I had nothing to tell the parent about their child yet, that it was all what they could tell me. And I think that this is an essential tool of a kindergarten teacher and really it’s a wonderful practice I think at any grade level, but particularly as children enter into school, into formal school for the first time. And many kindergartens are so academically oriented that it really feels like school, that knowing what they, their parents, know about them and uh, offering partnership to parents is an essential piece of the success you’re going to have with any given child. And I think the third piece of advice along the lines of development, and this is really something that Leslie articulates beautifully in the chapter I mentioned, is that on the road to what we call independence, there needs to be a dependent partner. There needs to be a grownup who is what Leslie Koplow calls your psychological home base. You as a grownup need to make yourself a safe grownup, someone who the children can turn to in need, someone who’s going to honor them even when they’re doing things that surprise you, like running around the room or throwing things on the floor or pushing other kids. That, knowing that being able to come back and depend on you is how they’re going to get more and more independent over the years. And this is a place where I think it’s a nice example of how emotionally responsive practice brings in early development. And we often remind people about toddlers and how toddlers will as they learn to walk and crawl, will go off from their grownup and explore something and then all of a sudden get a sort of feeling and look back and need to scurry back or run back to their grownup for a hug or for a connect or to show them something and they do this dance of go away and come back, go and come back. And that this is something that if kindergarten teachers can understand, they can offer to kids in the different ways that particular kids need it. Um, so when kindergarten teachers demand full independence in October, it’s really not, it’s not going to work for some kids. But when they have an idea that kids are going to gain independence over the year through feeling like they can depend on their teacher, then it really is going to work. And that those kids are going to feel prepared emotionally to step into the world of school as they become first graders. And then go back to the concept of inviting and containing and make sure your classroom has a routine that’s dependable. Make sure you’re always reading kids the schedule. If I have a magic wand, I would wish that every kindergarten teacher, never preschool teacher and really every teacher, because I did this with my grownups too, would read through the schedule every day and if there were going to be any changes, they would talk about it. And as one activity ended and another began, they’d look back at that schedule, that visual, that place that holds the expected, that holds the, what you can depend on in place. And that teachers would never say to me, “Oh, they know the schedule by now. So I don’t read it anymore to save time.” Um, I would say read the schedule every single day. You won’t regret it.

Jon M: 00:54:09 Is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about?

Margaret B: 00:54:11 I think there’s probably hundreds of things I’d like to add and I’m looking back at the notes I wrote before we spoke and I don’t, I don’t think there’s anything, anything that was really burning in my mind that I needed to say that I didn’t say. Uh, well I think there is one, there was a question that I don’t think you asked, which was about the connection between special education and bilingual and dual language education.

Jon M: 00:54:46 So please, yes.

Margaret B: 00:54:48 Yeah. And that’s something that I have thought about a lot and it plays into what I talked about during the section where I was talking about dual language and translanguaging. And because I came from a an inclusion setting, I had a lot of techniques that I used to make language comprehensible and to invite children to join in using the language that they had even though the inclusion setting that I worked in was all was an English classroom. And so because the children worked with speech therapists and occupational therapists and physical therapists, we would often incorporate some of the things that they did in their sessions with their therapists into our classroom practice. So for example, if therapists were using American sign language as a bridge to oral language, uh, we would use that in the classroom, too. So all the children recognized and used simple terms like stand up, sit down, more family, I won, thank you, bathroom, water. And when I came to dual language, I thought this is an important component of dual language too. If I say the word bathroom today and teach the children the sign and I say the word “banyon” tomorrow and show the children the same sign and then I continue that sign over the days, the children who are in their new language that day will have a much higher chance of comprehending what I’m talking about because they’ve got this visual, this gesture clue. So the use of the schedule, the use of the visuals, the use of real objects as you talk, the idea of making your language comprehensible. And it’s funny to be talking about this on a podcast where nobody can see me and they can’t see if I’m moving my hands or if I’m pointing to anything. And it’s a very, it’s a very language based form of learning and form of taking in. And you know, I, I wouldn’t use a podcast to educate kindergarten children in dual language or in inclusion settings or even a non inclusion and non dual language settings because we understand a lot better when we have multiple sources of input for the content that’s being shared and when we have multiple ways to express ourselves. So I’d really like to invite teachers to consider, um, whether you’re in a dual language inclusion special education or, or a general ed monolingual classroom, consider adding even more visuals, gestures, sign language and actual objects into the way that you present information in language and consider allowing children to use those options as well as they let you know what they know even when their language is not yet caught up with their knowledge. And I think the other, I think the note I’d like to end on, we were talking about this in our emotionally responsive practice staff meeting just yesterday, in fact. And one thing we are really grappling with as more and more information comes our way about how to decentralize the white experience as the first or the only experience. We’re talking about this a lot because at this point in time the six staff members that are at ERP are all white women. And while this has not always been the case, and I hope will not always be the case, due to a lot of different circumstances and a lot of components, it is the case right now. So we’ve been intentionally opening a space to reflect on this as we think about the different schools we work with, different teachers we work with and we’ve been thinking about how do we make sure that what we’re bringing in as emotionally responsive practice, uh, feels connective, feels right, feels like it, it works within any school culture, within any teacher’s personal culture, within any group of kids’ culture. And there is not an easy answer to this. I think, um, maybe we could talk more about it with you in a year or two as we embark on really intentionally thinking, think about this question. But what did come up is what do we, what do we really believe universally? And one of those things that my colleague no well articulated was that human beings, there are some universals that we believe about the human experience that human beings make attachments and that those attachments nurture our development, that human beings need comfort. And that comfort might come in a lot of different forms and that human beings thrive when they are seen, when they’re validated, when they’re heard, when they’re understood, when they’re known, when they’re valued. And I wanted to say that it’s a journey for all of us to consider whether we are authentically doing this with every grownup we work with as we ask them to do this with all the children they work with. And I’m very excited to be able to collaborate and think together with [inaudible] really thoughtful, reflective people both in ERP and in the larger educational world. But it is a a long journey that we have to take together and it feels like a real honor to be able to come into spaces of teachers and spaces of families and spaces of children and offer them something and also adjust my offering to be what is right for them, what’s relevant to them. And I look forward to continuing this journey with intention..

Amy H-L: 01:01:35 Thank you so much, Margaret.

Jon M: 01:01:38 And thank you listeners for joining us. We’d like to hear how you’ve incorporated ideas you’ve heard on our podcast or read on the blog. Please email us at posts at [email protected]. Check out prior episodes and articles on our site and we’ll also host some of the things that MArgaret was talking about today. We also offer professional development for schools and youth programs in the New York city area. Contact us for details. Again, it’s [email protected]. We’re on Facebook and Twitter @ethicalschools, and Instagram. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Till next week.

This is an encore. Our conversation with Stephanie Carnes about Central American immigrant youth was one of our most popular. Enjoy it with our wishes for a safe and happy holiday. 

Stephanie Carnes is a trauma-focused bilingual school social worker in a large public high school in New York’s Hudson Valley. Stephanie worked as the lead clinician in a federally-funded shelter program for unaccompanied children from Central America and as a consultant she challenges the districts and agencies with whom she works to re-envision the meaning of an inclusive community. We talk about the necessity to normalize mental health care, how to create safe environments for immigrant children in American schools, and the power of their resilience. 

*For transcript and overview, go to the original episode here. 

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Jia Lee, NYC special education teacher and union activist, talks about the unfairness of the Fair Funding Formula, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the tendency of schools to re-traumatize vulnerable students. She also highlights the contrast between NYC Chancellor Carranza’s call for more culturally responsive classrooms and the City’s newly-mandated MAP tests, and the gap between what the United Federation of Teachers does and what it could do.

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