Moving into the New Trump Era: A Black Scholar’s Response
By Sydney Freeman, Jr., Ph.D., CFD, COI
Black people are told to work hard, play by the rules, and get the best education we can so we can compete on the job market. Yet by appointing people who have no experience or expertise in the areas in which they are asked to lead, Trump is setting a terrible precedent and revitalizing an anti-intellectual movement that totally undermines any notion of meritocracy. This movement towards anti-specialization and de-professionalization is especially damaging to Blacks and other people of color. Under the Trump administration, rich white men and women will continue to be put in positions of authority, even though they may be completely unqualified. And Trump is sending a clear signal to the business community, and the general public, that this is perfectly ok.
What will this mean for the academy–particularly for the Black Scholar? What signal does Trump send to the “liberal” enclaves called US colleges and universities? For one, it may mean fewer of our best and brightest doctoral graduates earn tenure-track positions. Black scholars and other faculty of color are already overrepresented in contingent positions. And those who are blessed to earn a coveted tenure-track faculty position may be subjected to ambiguous tenure and promotion standards at Predominantly White Institutions, positions that may become even more precarious. This could especially be the case for faculty doing work related to social justice, diversity, and multiculturalism.
Second, as some are still trailblazing Black scholars in their academic departments, schools, colleges, and universities, they may be forced to deal with intentionality, the ways in which they must perform their scholarly identity within their institution. In response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ (2016 online/2017) essay titled, “My President was Black” in the Atlantic magazine, Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote,
I think this is one of the most precarious challenges that the Black scholar will face in the New Trump era. Will we as Black Scholars chose to “wear the mask that grins and lies?” Will we reflect back to our White liberal colleagues their ideal selves that do not challenge them to change themselves to accept and learn, to genuinely embrace unapologetic Blackness? What should we do? What should be our response?
Several months ago, I sat in the audience at an academic conference that featured a panel discussion on the importance of public scholarship. One of the panelists was Professor Terrell Straythorn from Ohio State University. He gave an impassioned speech about the urgency and relevancy of his work to empower those who have traditionally been marginalized. He shared that he uses his public speaking as a platform to move his work beyond the boundaries of the academy, to influence constituencies who may not read academic articles and books or have access to those materials. I think this is one of the ways in which we as Black scholars can most effectively respond in this new Trump era.
We need to be writing and speaking with a sense of urgency and purpose. Our work and scholarship must be more direct, yet strategic. It is important that we be able to speak to multiple audiences. Particularly, we must unapologetically write to and on behalf of the Black community. For instance, in my own field and in my scholarship, I write extensively on the topic of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). To gain tenure and promotion, it is important that my work be published in “high status” peer-reviewed publications. However, it is my desire that my work address and directly impact HBCUs. Thus, finding lay periodicals, blogs, and speaking opportunities to engage with those seeking to innovate on behalf of HBCUs and the Black community is paramount to my overall intellectual mission.
We must not be afraid to see ourselves as more than Black academics, but be willing to step out as public intellectuals. This can and should also be integrated into our teaching, particularly when preparing future educators. For instance, I taught a doctoral course recently where in one of my class sections we discussed the relevance, challenges, and importance of developing one’s academic voice. This semester I was asked to teach a course titled, “Writing for Publication.” However, I am teaching it in a markedly different way from past instructors. I am utilizing the course to help broaden my students’ understanding regarding the nature of a scholar. I have them engaging in the development of critical blogpost essays, book reviews, policy reports, and literature reviews. Although they are learning about the importance of writing academic books and peer-reviewed articles, they are also learning how to share their scholarship in venues typically under-engaged in by scholars.
In conclusion, this is not the time to cower and be quiet. This is the time to be strategic and to use our positionality, intellect, and voices as true Black Scholars to resist the anti-intellectualism of this New Trump era.
Author Note
Sydney Freeman, Jr., Ph.D., CFD, COI, is an associate professor of Adult, Organizational Learning and Leadership at the University of Idaho. His research investigates the higher education leadership and faculty roles. He serves on multiple academic journal editorial and review boards, including serving as managing editor of the Journal of HBCU Research + Culture. He also is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education.
Leading During Difficult Times
By the Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) at Berkeley
This video provides a snapshot into the everyday challenges of the work of equity and social justice minded leaders which include addressing issues of violence, oppression, and poverty- issues that are further intensified by the Trump administration. We document a “teach in” occurred during a Saturday class in Tolman Hall with the preparation students in Cohort 17 the day after President Trump’s inauguration. As an act of solidarity, support, and commitment to their work, alumni from prior cohorts who are now working school administrators volunteered to serve as panelists and shared their leadership challenges as well as how they sustain themselves in the work. Afterward, panelists, instructors, field supervisors, and students divided into small groups to continue the discussions. Other activities of the teach in that are referenced in the video include learning to sing Lead with Love- a song written by Oakland based Vocal Activist Melanie DeMore and participating in a visual art campaign entitled Teach Love Not Hate.
We hope our contribution to this issue raises up the critical role of school leaders, student voice, and the need for more critical conversations between practitioners and researchers about issues of equity in schools.
[leading in difficult times video]
Author Note
The mission of the Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) at Berkeley is to prepare, induct, and support a diverse community of equity focused school leaders who will improve education for vulnerable and historically underserved students in California’s public schools in support of social justice. Since its founding in 2000, PLI has prepared 548 educational leaders through its Master’s program. Through its induction program, the Leadership Support Program (LSP), it has supported over 150 early career leaders. Through its outreach program, it has provided extensive professional development to educators in the Bay Area and internationally. For more information about the Principal Leadership Institute, go to principals.berkeley.edu
Shifting Sands in Florida: Rural Perspectives on Immigration, Education, and Undocumented Youth under the Incoming Trump Administration
Maria R. Coady, Ph.D.
Deon Heffington*
Nidza Marichal*
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
Introduction
People commonly associate the State of Florida with white sandy beaches, bowing palm trees, and balmy breezes—a true tourist destination site. Yet Florida is home to more than 600,000 undocumented (or “unauthorized”) immigrants who work in the hidden corners of the state in the agriculture, fishing, and farming industries (MPI, 2016). Largely hidden from the public’s view, undocumented immigrants support the State’s construction and building industries, competitive horse breeding, and restaurants. Without immigrant labor, Florida’s economy would face devastating consequences.
For undocumented children and families in Florida, the intersection of immigration and education policies has moved both in and out of the public spotlight over the past five years. Undocumented youth between the ages of 18 and 24, referred to nationally as “Dreamers,” remain in the crossroad of state and federal policies. In fact, the US government’s failure to establish a sound and workable immigration policy that provides legal status to undocumented immigrants and their children continues to threaten the very fabric of the US economy and family structure. The lack of clarity regarding immigration and education policies for undocumented youth, who were not born in the US and therefore lack US citizenship, has incited fear and confusion among educators, families, counselors, and community agencies across the State. Recent news media (Mitchell, 2016) suggests that the Trump administration, set to take office on January 20, 2017, may move swiftly to eliminate President Obama’s 2012 executive order that established the DACA program—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (USCIS, 2017), compromising the safety and well-being of thousands of youth and families.
Brief Historical Overview
Since its inception in 2012, the DACA program has provided a legal place-hold for Florida’s Dreamers to gain temporary authorization to live and to work in the US for a period of two years, subject to renewal. In order to receive a DACA card, immigrant youth must meet several important requirements, including: having arrived in the US before the age of 16; being currently enrolled in school, having graduated from a high school in the US or obtained a certificate of completion; having resided in the US or a specific number of years; and not been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor, or represent a threat to national security or public safety (USCIS, 2017). They also must pay a $465 fee for each application or renewal, a significant amount of money for youth and families from low income families. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are 85,000 Dreamers in the State of Florida (MPI, 2016). Four years after the implementation of DACA, approximately 38,000 of Florida’s immigrant youth had applied to the program in order to work legally or to attend college (Hipsman, Gómez-Aguiñaga, & Capps, 2016).
In the early stages of the DACA program in 2012, Florida’s Dreamers who wanted to attend college faced the added challenge of having to pay international tuition rates. This essentially made attending college prohibitive, as international tuition is at least three times the cost of in-state tuition in many of Florida’s public institutes of higher education. At the time of the DACA program’s roll out in Florida, however, it became clear that several—but not all—of the State’s universities and colleges had found ways to circumnavigate the international-tuition policy. For example, some colleges and universities in the urban centers such as Miami and Orlando provided a tuition “waiver” to students that covered the gap in cost between international tuition and in-state tuition. Their argument was that there was no way to ‘turn off the faucet’ of the large number of undocumented youth who wanted to attend college and who had graduated from a Florida high school.
In early 2013, the question of allowing in-state tuition for DACA card holders was brought before the Florida House and Senate for consideration. Students around the State, including those from our institution at the University of Florida who fought for tuition equity, #gatorfortuitionequity (Schweers, 2013), organized and traveled to the state capitol, Tallahassee, advocating for in-state tuition for DACA card holders and a state-wide policy that supported students who wanted to go to college. Proponents noted the economic benefit of such a policy, while opponents also noted the cost of extending the in-state tuition benefit to DACA recipients. Eventually, the organized students managed to influence legislators such that state higher education tuition policies allowed for in-state costs for DACA holders.
Current Issues and Challenges in Rural Florida
The local community in which we work is best characterized as rural and agricultural in nature, with immigrants entering and leaving the community based on seasonal crop labor demands. In the community, immigrant Latinos are employed at plant nurseries, on horse (training) farms, and on dairy farms. They also engage in seasonal labor by harvesting peanuts and watermelon, and baling hay. While a handful of Latino families have been in the community for more than a decade and participate in church, school, and social events (fall harvest fairs), many are newer arrivals principally from Mexico and Guatemala, making this particular setting what has been described as a “new Latino destination” (Suro & Singer, 2013). Census (2010) data indicate that 87% of the county population is White, and about 8% is Latino. Approximately 7% of the population speaks a language other than English in the home, and the average family income approximates $19,000/year.
Our work in the community over the past decade has illuminated several social issues that characterize and affect families’ emotional well-being and safety in rural Florida (Staccciarini, Wiens, Coady, Schwait, Pérez, Locke, LaFlam, Page, & Bernardi, 2011). First is the social isolation that families and children face. For undocumented immigrants, social isolation intersects with extremely limited public transportation that may otherwise support building social and emotional support networks. In particular, data from our earlier work revealed that members of the community felt largely “unheard” (Stacciarini et al., 2011, p. 490) or invisible in the rural community. The social isolation and rural nature of the community meant that, secondly, mental health concerns could not be addressed, as families preferred to stay outside of the spotlight and invisible from public sight. Further, community members in our earlier work noted that beyond issues of transportation, English as a Second Language (ESL) services, library support services, and culturally-sensitive health related interventions were absent. Undocumented immigrants continued to drive to local clinics when absolutely necessary, but preventative health, dental, and mental-health care were not possible, because undocumented immigrant families did not want to risk being pulled over when driving (see Coady & Sorel, 2013).
In the same community, Coady, Coady and Nelson (2015) conducted a study of teacher professional development interests and home-school partnerships in a rural Florida school district. They used semi-structured interview techniques with Spanish-speaking, immigrant mothers and also surveyed teachers of English learner children in the rural school district. Ninety-eight teachers responded to the survey, which asked teachers to identify the most pressing issues and areas in which they wished to receive professional development. The semi-structured interviews with mothers were conducted in Spanish at local churches, because prior work indicted that churches provide safe spaces for undocumented immigrant families (Marquardt, Steigenga, Williams, & Vasquez, 2013). That study found that the most pressing issue for mothers was addressing immigration, and the second most important issue was helping their children in school. In contrast, teachers noted that they wanted to learn how to modify their instruction for immigrant families, especially English Learners (ELs), followed by the desire to effectively communicate with families. Overall, data from our work in the community indicate that undocumented, immigrant families desire to communicate and connect with schools and teachers and want to reconcile their immigration status but are unable to do so due to shifting, unstable immigration policies.
Preparing for Change under the Trump Administration
Before the November 2016 election, immigrant families with whom we work were indicting informally that they were concerned about their status under a potential Trump presidency, who built his political platform on anti-immigration sentiment and construction of a physical wall that would separate people – the opposite to what families and teachers expressly stated would be most helpful. That concern was made real after the election.
Almost immediately, families began to express their fear to our informal network with Migrant Education staff, who provide support for agricultural workers’ children in public schools. Families noted that they were afraid that an immigration “sweep” at the local Dollar General store, where most immigrant families shop, would occur. In addition, the number of families and children attending the evening homework and tutoring program in the rural schools declined dramatically, despite the free transportation that is offered to families who wish to attend.
With our partners, Rural Women’s Health Project (RWHP, 2017), we are gearing up to identify immediate, albeit temporary solutions, to families in four key ways. First, RWHP and the Office of Migrant Education are informing parents to have legal powers of attorney ready and available. These powers of attorney would be essential, should undocumented parents be identified and placed into deportation centers.
The second temporary measure is to reinforce existing and build strong new networks between our university personnel and families. As we embark upon a new federal grant, Project STELLAR (Supporting Teachers of English Language Learners Across Rural Settings), which will provide professional development to teachers and educators of EL children, we will prioritize social and emotional supports and networks with undocumented EL families living in rural communities. Advocacy must start with relationships and trust. Our projectwill address these issues by preparing educators of ELs to use high-quality instructional practices for English language learners in rural settings in order to improve the achievement for ELs, and that includes understanding the background and context of our EL families who are undocumented and immigrant (Coady et al., 2016). Furthermore, home-school-community partnerships will be prioritized as they play a central role in learner success and student achievement (Epstein, 2001; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Jeynes, 2003).
Third, university graduate students and faculty will attend a “safety preparedness” training and workshop held in the rural community itself. The goal of the workshop is to train rural educators to remain calm, inform, guide, and motivate immigrant families with actions to increase their family’s safety. Learning concepts for the workshop will include:
– the current plan of the incoming presidential administration about immigrants;
– the actions families can take to increase their physical and emotional safety; and
– how a special Power of Attorney can help families plan for their children’s care.
Finally, we will continue to include issues of immigration in the preparation of high quality teachers to enable them to understand and navigate the broader sociopolitical context (Coady, Harper, & de Jong, 2016; de Jong, Harper, & Coady, 2013). We consider this to be of critical importance for the transitions expected in the new ‘era of Trump’. Teacher training education programs for both preservice and in-service teacher will need to address issues such as an overview of various immigration programs and policies, including DACA; the realities of undocumented families who cannot access basic necessities of drivers’ licenses, health care, and mental health support due to immigration policies; the economic contributions of documented and undocumented immigrants to the US and states; and the origins of immigration, namely why families risk leaving their home countries to live in the US. These conversations should become part of every teacher education program, as immigration and education will continue to intersect in the foreseeable future.
Conclusion
The future for Florida’s Dreamers and undocumented families is uncertain. Conservative positions and political rhetoric continue to characterize the State’s policy toward immigrants, and the possible repeal of the DACA program will mean that more than 38,000 Dreamers may lose the ability to work legally or to attend our State’s colleges and universities. Even worse would be the exposure that Dreamers face after having applied for DACA cards and being marked in federal databases. This is a real risk, as families are increasingly vulnerable in the current anti-immigrant climate. We hope to network with our colleagues and friends across the US to build our own support networks and to share ideas and strategies to support our rural, immigrant families.
*Doctoral Students at the University of Florida
References
Census (2010). Data on United States demographics. http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/
Coady, M., Coady, T. J., & Nelson, A. (2015). Assessing the needs of immigrant, Latino families and teachers in rural settings. NABE Journal of Research and Practice, 6. https://www2.nau.edu/nabej-p/ojs/index.php/njrp/article/view/42
Coady, M., Harper, C., & de Jong, E. (2016). Aiming for equity: Preparing mainstream teachers for inclusion or inclusive classrooms? TESOL Quarterly 50(2), 340-368. DOI: 10.1002/tesq.223
Coady, M. & Sorel, T. (2013). Waiting on DACA film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDTH1TJZHWo&feature=youtu.be
de Jong, E. J., Harper, C. A., and Coady, M. R. (2013). Preparing mainstream teachers for CLD students: Enhancing the knowledge and skills that teachers of CLDs must have. Theory into Practice Journal, 52(2),89-97. Special Topics Issue, invited paper.
Epstein, J. (2001). School, family and community partnerships.Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Henderson, A., & Mapp, K. (2002). A new wave of evidence: The impact of school, family and community connections on student achievement.Austin, TX: National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools.
Hipsman, F., Gómez-Aguiñaga, B., & Capps, F. (2016). DACA at four: Participation in the deferred action program and impacts on recipients. Issue Brief. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Jeynes, W. H. (2003). A meta-analysis: The effects of parental involvement on minority children’s academic achievement. Education and Urban Society, 35(2), 202-218.
Marquardt, M. F., Steigenga, T. J., Williams, P., & Vasquez, M. (2013). Living “illegal”: The human face of unauthorized immigration. The New Press. Reprint Edition.
Migration Policy Institute (2016). Data on Unauthorized Immigrants in the State of Florida. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-population/state/FL
Mitchell, C. (2016). Trump vows to ‘work something out’ for DREAMers, but offers no details on plan. The Language Learning blog, Education Week. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2016/12/trump_were_going_to_work_somet.html
Rural Women’s Health Project (RWHP). www.rwhp.org
Schweers, J. (2013). Tuition equity supporters get opportunity to address trustees. Gainesville Sun. http://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20131205/SPORTS/604158881/GS/
Staccciarini, J. M., Wiens, B., Coady, M., Schwait, A., Pérez, A., Locke, B., LaFlam, M., Page, V., and Bernardi, K. (2011). CBPR: Building partnerships with Latinos in rural areas for a wellness approach to mental health. Issues in Mental Health Nursing Journal, 32(8), 486-492.
Suro, R. and Singer, A. (2013). Latino growth in Metropolitan America: Changing patterns, new locations. Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy and the Pew Hispanic Center. Washington, DC.http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/10.pdf
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, 2017). Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/consideration-deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-daca
It’s (Not) Funny: On Feminism, Humor, and Fear
By Elizabeth Blake
A few years ago, Bill O’Reilly came to my campus. Or, technically, one of Bill O’Reilly’s surrogates did. When I arrived to teach my afternoon class, most of my students were huddled around a laptop, watching him interviewing students about the supposed lack of ideological diversity among faculty. Complaining about the percentage of political donations from professors that go to the Democratic Party, he scoffed, “that doesn’t seem very diverse to me,” and warned his viewers about “liberal indoctrination.” That day, before we worked through my lesson plan, we talked about how the rhetoric of diversity can be turned against itself in order to justify allowing intolerance into a conversation. We talked about how the imperative to represent both sides of an issue can obscure intellectual consensus, even when it comes to questions like the “debates” about evolution and climate change, where the scientific community has long agreed that no debate is necessary.
This was a useful lesson, because my class was a writing class; in order to write and argue well, you need to learn how to unpack rhetorical fallacies, and how to expose misleading logic. It was also a useful lesson because my class was a class on gender and sexuality, and my students—all of them female, many of them women of color—had a personal stake in unpacking that logic. Given that, I didn’t think twice about structuring twenty minutes of our class around a response to that video. As we transitioned from our discussion of the video to our discussion of feminist theory, I made a joke: “on to the indoctrination!”
My joke about indoctrination wasn’t especially funny—and it’s even less funny here, because jokes don’t get better when you explain them at length—but my students laughed. It’s of course possible that this was politeness on their part, as it so often is when students laugh at their professors’ jokes, but I’d prefer to think that it was because they got the joke. In order to know why you’re getting a joke, you need to understand what makes it absurd. In some cases, this understanding derives from knowledge shared only by an in-group, but in other cases all it takes is knowing what remains unsaid, or why a word doesn’t quite fit in context. Consider, for example, the unspoken punch line of every six year old’s favorite joke: “What’s brown and sticky?” The joke only lands because “a stick” is no one’s first thought. My students got my joke about indoctrination because it was so patently absurd as a description of what happened in our classroom.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that joke as I’ve watched academics discover that their names, institutional affiliations, research projects, and even photographs have been added to a “Professor Watchlist.” This list, whose mission is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” isn’t the first of its kind. Writing for The New York Times, George Yancy called it “a new species of McCarthyism.” He noted its parallels to “Cointelpro, the secret F.B.I. program that spied on, infiltrated and discredited American political organizations in the ’50s and ’60s,” pointing out that “a watchlist like this can have the impact of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.” This list is just one element of a threatening new political climate, a part that is specifically designed to scare educators. To keep us, among other things, from making that kind of joke.
We might also think of the watchlist as a new media expansion of David Horowitz’s 2006 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book that profiles 101 professors that Horowitz judged to be dangerous to academia itself. The book justifies its project by rhetoric much like O’Reilly’s. Horowitz says, quite rightly, that “teaching must not seek the arbitrary imposition of personal opinions and prejudices on students, enforced through the power of the grading process and the authority of the institutions they represent” (xxvii). This is hard to argue with. Even when pedagogy emerges from a specific ideology, such as Marie Shear’s oft-cited definition of feminism as “the radical notion that women are people,” it should not be an exercise in the arbitrary reproduction of personal beliefs.
Yet, even in seemingly objective subjects, good teaching is neither neutral nor without nuance. Jokes, like all ideas, emerge within cultural contexts, and good teachers provide their students with the critical thinking skills to understand those ideas, those contexts, and how the two inform each other. Shear’s definition is quotable for the same reason it’s funny: because women are people, and this isn’t a radical idea. It’s also quotable because it’s serious: because acting like women are people is often treated as if it were radical. This is part of why it is necessary to argue with Horowitz’s claim that departments like Women’s Studies and Black Studies—both of which he puts in scare quotes, as if it to emphasize their illegitimacy—are bastions of indoctrination, “shaped by narrow, one-sided political agendas” (xxxiv).
While debating Horowitz at Reed College (full disclosure, my alma mater), Peter Steinberger offered an explanation for “why so many professors are liberal.” In short, Steinberger argues, academics are people who draw conclusions based on evidence. The evidence shows that hierarchies of race, class, and gender exist. Thus, those of us who teach subjects like Women’s and Gender Studies or Black Studies—and here I’m inserting myself in his argument—and who have an obligation to teach our students accurately about these subjects, must teach them this. And if we believe, moreover, as Steinberger puts it, that these “undeserved inequalities are so vast, so egregious, so devastating, that we have a moral responsibility try to do something,” then that is when we become the kinds of professors who will end up on this watchlist.
Steinberger’s response is a nuanced, moral one. It is also a rigorous, academic one. He demonstrates the inconsistencies of Horowitz’s argument, appeals to his audience’s better nature, and—it’s pretty clear, at least to this reader—wins the debate. Similarly, Yancy’s New York Times column, entitled “I Am A Dangerous Professor,” makes a stirring case for embracing one’s inclusion on the list.
These are arguments, and rigorous, moral arguments are one way to respond to the charge of indoctrination. But I want to make room for thinking about the moral value of another reaction: that of the joke. Like a metaphor, a joke works by doubling: you have to be able to hold two things in your mind at the same time. For a joke that rests on a pun, that’s the two meanings of a homophone. For a joke that relies on irony or sarcasm, that’s the assertion of plausibility and the knowledge of its falsehood. Jokes also teach us to hear tone, to attend to the context in which a thing is said, and to stay wary, lest we become the punch line. This is part of why it’s important not just to make jokes, but also to think about how jokes work. Humor can consolidate power, defining the boundaries of a group by shared understanding, wherein those who laugh are “in,” and those who don’t are “out.” But humor can also challenge the workings of power, undercutting received structures and exposing the absurdity of ideological assumptions. To add oneself to the watchlist—as many professors did—is to resist its agenda and publicly embrace the values it repudiates. To add Indiana Jones or Professor Snape to the watchlist, as quite a few people—at least according to Twitter—did, is both to disrupt the list’s ostensible purpose and to draw attention to its exaggerated rhetoric. There’s not much these two fictional professors have in common, but there is one thing: they’re both dangerous. In the fictional worlds that they inhabit, both of these men kill people. Even though neither man actually made it onto the list’s website, the joke works: this, it says, is a dangerous professor.
We don’t often think of jokes as nuanced or moral, but good jokes are precisely that: they offer us two possibilities, and ask us to choose. Is this indoctrination? Or is it indoctrination’s opposite? A stick, a carrot, or something else entirely?
For those of us who believe in Steinberger’s moral imperative—as I do—jokes can teach us to be careful, lest we accidentally deepen those inequalities with cruel or thoughtless punch lines. Indeed, a joke is exactly the thing that allows us to move beyond “narrow, one-sided political agendas.” When the humor website McSweeney’s published Donald Trump’s Black History Month address, verbatim, under the title “My Very Good Black History Month Tribute To Some of the Most Tremendous Black People,” in its series of “Short Imagined Monologues,” it transformed a thoughtless speech into a thoughtful joke. To put this speech into this context is to point toward its implausibility, its absurdity, and its failure to meet the demands of its original context. This speech, the editors imply, belongs not at a breakfast honoring African-American leaders, but among the company of imagined speeches by luminaries such as “an Anthropomorphic Lady Jar of Mayonnaise,” an Epi-Pen, and Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By transforming a real speech into a satirical speech, this editorial decision does more than just make fun. It points to the importance of distinguishing the real from the joke, and the difficulty of that task in the present moment. This joke forces us to hold two realities in our minds: the fact that this was a real speech, and the feeling that it can’t possibly have been a real speech. By making it into a joke, McSweeney’s reminds us that it was very real, and forces us to consider what about this speech makes that seem so unlikely. This is a joke that can teach us about what we expect from elected officials, what we’re getting, and how it feels when the two fail to align. Humor points back at reality, illuminating it from surprising angles.
Most of us learn about jokes pretty early. We do this so early, in fact, that we don’t really think of getting jokes (unlike telling them) as a learned skill. It is, however, one of the first forms of literary interpretation most of us encounter. In one sense, then, I am making an argument for teaching the kinds of interpretive practices that enable scholars like Yancy and Steinberger to make the stirring arguments they do. In another sense, this is an argument for fostering something more subtle, reminding students that the interpretive work we do in the classroom is not so different from the interpretive work they must do in their daily lives.
We live in a historical moment in which cultural knowledge is increasingly shared through humor. We’ve all heard that statistic about how all the young people these days are getting their news from The Daily Show. Critique also passes through less traditional channels, including every Bernie Sanders meme you’ve ever seen, and my favorite: “Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.” It’s a moment, too, that requires us to think carefully about questions of positionality—who gets to tell which jokes, and in what contexts, and to what audiences. A joke that’s painful in one context can be reparative in another, and that’s an important lesson as well. Turning the phrase “nasty woman” into a joke is a way of refusing its ugliness, a way of using language and humor as tools of care.
Students, in my experience, are often more adept at this than professors. Indeed, I should confess that the best joke about Bill O’Reilly came from one of my students: “Next,” she said, “ he’ll be warning us about Women’s Studies!” All of her peers laughed, and so did I. That joke brought us together, implicitly constituting us as a community by acknowledging our shared investment in women’s studies, and materially doing so by making us all laugh. It’s important to laugh sometimes, and that’s part of my point here. The other part is that we, as professors and teachers, need to acknowledge and affirm the multiple modes of language and interpretation that our students bring to the table, and give them the tools to understand how those modes interact with, rely on, and inform their cultural intuitions. Unpacking a joke is never exactly a funny exercise, but it is one with high stakes—especially for those of us who are genuinely invested in ensuring that our students have the critical thinking skills to resist narrow, one-sided ideologies, in addition to the meme-making skills to render them hilarious.
References
Horowitz, David (2006). The professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc.
My very good Black History Month tribute to some of the most tremendous Black people. (2017, February 1). McSweeney’s. Retrieved from https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/my-very-good-black-history-month-tribute-to-some-of-the-most-tremendous-black-people
Steinberger, P., & Horowitz, D. (2006, November). A debate on academic freedom. [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/winter06/columns/NoC/images/steinberger_horowitz.mp3
Yancy, G. (2016, November 30). I am a dangerous professor. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html?_r=0
Author Note
Elizabeth Blake is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow in the Writing Program at Haverford College. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature with a concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University. In addition to teaching courses on food, feminism, modernism, and queer studies, Dr. Blake has been involved in graduate pedagogy training and research. She can be reached at eablake@haverford.edu
Post-election: What do we say to the children?
Louise Derman-Sparks, Debbie LeeKeenan, and John Nimmo
As teacher educators, we come from different life experiences but are brought together by our common commitment to social justice. Although we view this work as a long-term struggle and vision with times of change and pushback, like many activists, we viewed the period prior to and following the 2016 election as particularly challenging for educators of young children.
Together, we are the co-authors of Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change (Derman-Spark, LeeKeenan, & Nimmo, 2015). Louise has been an educator and activist for much of her life and grew up in a White, Jewish-American working-class family from Brooklyn, NY. Debbie is a third-generation Chinese-American, also originally from NYC, who has a multi-racial family; her personal experiences greatly influenced her professional life as a social justice educator. John is Australian by birth, and identifies as White and economically privileged. Being male, straight and cisgender in the early childhood field has been an important provocation in his thinking.
After the 2016 presidential election, both experienced and new teachers shared an outpouring of emotion and questions about how to respond to the children in our early childhood classrooms. Feeling a sense of urgency, we compiled the following response, a version of which first appeared the week after the election on our website: http://www.antibiasleadersece.com/
The presidential campaign contained some of the most hateful language and messages many of us have ever experienced. We know that bullying, teasing and name-calling based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and family make-up greatly increased in schools during the campaign and hurt many children (Costello, 2016). Now the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency threatens to oppose the values of anti-bias education and reverse many of the gains resulting from the Civil Rights and social justice movements of the past 50 years. His campaign and election have emboldened numerous organizations and individuals, mainly, but not exclusively, White, who share his negative beliefs about anyone whose race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation don’t fit with their view of a mythical norm. As Richard Cohen (2016), President of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) asserted,
White supremacists who backed his candidacy are jumping for joy. They think they now have their man in the White House. … We can’t afford to take [their] statements as the ravings of extremists on the fringes of society. They are now at the gates. (para. 16–20)
Even more disturbing, as soon as the election results were known, racist attitudes began turning into hate actions–––both verbally and physically. These hate actions have been directed against children as well as adults. The SPLC, which has tracked the racist actions of organizations for many years, wrote in the days after the election that in the reports they received, “many teachers took pains to point out that the incidents they were reporting represent a distinct uptick; these dynamics are new and can be traced directly to the results of the election” (Costello, 2016, para. 14). Pulling from news reports, social media, and direct submissions at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, the SPLC had counted 201 incidents of election-related harassment and intimidation across the country as of Friday, November 11, at 5 pm. These are being directed against African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people and women (reports can still be made at https://www.splcenter.org/reporthate ). Outrageously, the SPLC is finding that the most commonly reported location where incidents of harassment occurred were K–12 schools (Costello, 2016). For example, in Georgia a teacher reported, “I’ve had a lot of students repeat the phrase ‘Trump that bitch’ in my class, and make jokes about Hispanic students ‘going back to Mexico’” (para. 26). In Washington State, a teacher shared, “he day after the election I overheard a student in the hall chanting, ‘White power’” (para. 38). In Tennessee, an early childhood educator reported that “one Muslim girl clung to her kindergarten teacher on November 9 and asked, ‘Are they going to do anything to me? Am I safe?’” (para. 45). Second- and third-grade Mexican-American children in Fullerton, CA, reported to their young sibling’s childcare teacher that they were told by classmates to pack their bags because they had to get out of the country (personal communication to authors). Adults have also been targeted. For example, a parent from El Salvador was in a Greater Boston school and told to “Get out of here; you are in Trumpland” (personal communication to authors).
Such hate behavior harms children directly, when they are targets, and indirectly, when they see or hear about someone else being a target. No matter how the families of children in our classrooms voted, our schools must be hate-free zones. We have to intentionally and pro-actively do everything we can to ensure that the goals of anti-bias education are fully implemented and celebrated during a time when our children are hearing and experiencing hate messages and may be experiencing tension anger, or pain from family members. We also have to work intently to ensure that all of our children feel safe and are comforted when they are hurt. For example, we can broach the topic and encourage an inclusive community with openings, such as:
In our country, we vote for the person who is going to be our leader. Not everyone votes for the same person. In an election, people have different viewpoints and we are not always happy with who becomes president. However, the president is supposed to be the president for everyone. We hope that the adults in charge of our country can work together to benefit all Americans.
We know that some people are saying and doing hateful and hurtful things to other people. We also know that there are many people who do not like those hateful words and behaviors. In this classroom/in this school, I /we (all staff) will make sure that everyone belongs, and is safe, cared for and treated fairly. If you feel unsafe, if people say things that are not nice to you, you can come to the adults. Our job is to keep you safe and to be brave and stand up to any unfairness/injustice that comes to our community.
Here are some additional guidelines to support children during challenging times:
- Encourage children to ask questions.
- Be a good listener. Pay attention to words and feelings. Look for the underlying meaning.
- Answer children’s questions immediately and directly, with information that is appropriate to their developmental level and experience.
- Accept complexity. Recognize that there may not be simple answers, but still ones that can help children. We want to move beyond either-or thinking. Be aware that some children will be receiving messages that the election result is welcomed, with speech that does not include hate language.
- Avoid responding to current events and issues in highly emotional or dramatic ways. Even if you are angry or upset, try not to let your own feelings influence how you pay attention to and interpret what the children are saying and feeling. But do let the children know that it is okay to be e.g., scared, angry, sad, while also comforting them and helping them sort through their feelings and actions.
- Provide resources to help children manage fears or uncertainties. Include resources that talk about people who have worked together in the past to make life safe for everyone.
- Engage the children in creating ways that they can make themselves and each other feel safe and happy in the classroom and school.
As social justice educators, it is our obligation to not only support the children but their families. Families may also be targeted for their social identity, and may be fearful of deportation. We need to reach out and let families know school is a safe place for them, too. We also need to work with and support our colleagues and staff who share the responsibility of educating and caring for our children and families. We have the responsibility and the opportunity to be proactive in how we support our children and families during these challenging times. Take the long view. Be optimistic. Model resiliency. We need to hold the light.
References
Cohen, R. (2016, November 10). White supremacists think their man won the White House. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/news/2016/11/10/white-supremacists-think-their-man-won-white-house
Costello, M.B. (2016, November 28). The Trump effect: The impact of the 2016 presidential elections on our nation’s schools. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/20161128/trump-effect-impact-2016-presidential-election-our-nations-schools#executive summary
Derman-Spark, L., LeeKeenan, D., & Nimmo, J. (2015). Leading anti-bias early childhood programs: A guide for change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Author Bios
Louise Derman-Sparks has worked for over 50 years on issues of diversity and social justice as a preschool teacher at the Perry Preschool Project, child-care center director, Human Development faculty member at Pacific Oaks College, and activist. She is author and coauthor of several books, including Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, and What if All the Kids are White? Anti-Bias/Multicultural Education for Young Children and Families, as well as numerous articles. She speaks, conducts workshops, and consults on anti-bias education with children and adults throughout the United States and internationally. Louise is now retired as a professor emerita. rldsparks@aol.com
Debbie LeeKeenan is a visiting professor of Early Childhood Education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, she was director of the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School and an instructor in the Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Debbie consults locally, nationally and internationally. Her publications include co-authorship of Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change with Louise Derman-Sparks and John Nimmo, as well as numerous chapters and articles. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of New Mexico and is a former preschool and elementary school teacher. debbie.leekeenan@gmail.com
John Nimmo is assistant professor in Early Childhood Education at Portland State University, Oregon. Previously, he was Executive Director of the Child Study and Development Center and associate professor of Family Studies at the University of New Hampshire. His publications include Loris Malaguzzi and the Teachers (with Carolyn Edwards & Lella Gandini), Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs, Emergent Curriculum (with Elizabeth Jones), and numerous chapters and articles. John’s research includes a video documentary on children’s rights through the World Forum Foundation. He holds a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts and was an early childhood teacher in Australia. jnimmo@pdx.edu
Undocumented ESL students from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in the era of Trump: A personal narrative.
Luis Javier Pentón Herrera, M.Ed., M.S., M.Ed.
Concordia University Chicago, Doctoral Candidate
The day after the elections, I first reflected on what president-elect Trump’s presidency would mean for my life—how it would directly affect me. Now I know that I was selfish; I did not think about those who are more affected than me by this election’s results—my students.
When I arrived to school that morning I saw and heard something that struck me very hard. I saw my students taking pictures together and telling each other that they had to take those pictures as “going away” memories before they got sent back to their countries. My heart sunk in sadness and pain, as I stood there helpless and hopeless. I was not prepared to discuss this topic with my students but I knew I had to learn how; I needed to help them fast.
In this discussion, I reflect on my personal and professional experience as an English as a Second Language (ESL) educator teaching undocumented Hispanic immigrant ESL students. In particular, I focus on ESL students from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, as they represent the majority of undocumented Hispanic ESL students in American classrooms (Zong & Batalova, 2015).
Undocumented Hispanic ESL Students from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras
The majority of the current newcomer population in the United States is comprised of students from Spanish-speaking countries (NCES, 2016; Payán & Nettles, 2007), specifically from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (Zong & Batalova, 2015). Statistics show that there have been an increasing number of immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in recent years, and much of that population has settled in the states of California, Texas, Florida and Maryland (Zong & Batalova, 2015). Considering the increasing numbers of immigrants from these three specific Central American countries, surprisingly limited attention is paid to the reasons behind this mass migration.
El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala “have become virtually war zones where lives seem to be expendable and millions live in constant terror at what gang members or public security forces can do to them or their loved ones” (Amnesty International, 2016). The violence, war, and vandalism present in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have affected the lives of all the immigrants from those countries in one way or another. In particular, the immigrant children arrive to the United States with academic, personal and physical scars that cannot easily be forgotten.
Many of the undocumented Hispanic immigrant ESL students from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala arrive to American classrooms with academic challenges that go beyond learning the English language. Pentón Herrera & Duany (2016) explain that many students from this growing ESL population—identified as binate language learners in their article—are illiterate or have underdeveloped proficiency in Spanish. These academic realities reflect the students’ circumstances in their native countries, where many of them did not attend school or stopped going at an early age for fear of getting killed. In addition to this, many of these students arrive with personal stories that no living being should experience, let alone a child. Many of them have seen friends and family members killed with their own eyes, do not have immediate family members, and wear the physical scars of the never-ending violence in their countries.
These real stories and scenarios are happening all across El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala; and yet, these students are referred to as immigrants instead of refugees. These students are the protagonists of one of the world’s least visible refugee crises (Amnesty International, 2016). When they arrive to the United States, many continue overcoming barriers that keep them from attending school. Identifying and acknowledging this student population as “refugees” instead of “immigrants” is the first step towards understanding their life and offering the academic and social support they need. Addressing this particular population of students as “refugees” is the best opportunity we have, as a society, to finally humanize them.
Forces Impacting Students’ Lives
There are different forces that may keep this particular population of students from attending schools at any level (K-12 or Higher Education). Some of these forces are: (a) Immigration status, (b) politics, (c) problems in the household/Income, (d) uncertainty about their future, (d) lack of opportunities for further education, (e) society, and (f) individuals within their school system. These forces act as barriers that keep students from becoming successful in school and from focusing only on achieving excellence in education.
These forces have been present throughout President Obama’s presidency and can only intensify during President Trump’s time in office. These factors, combined with unrealistic academic expectations and unsupportive instruction, have contributed to the current education gap among Hispanic immigrant students and other race groups in the country (Haskins & Tienda, 2011). The figure below briefly explains the impact these forces have in these students’ academic experiences. I chose these forces and explanations based on my personal and professional experiences. I have worked with this population of students for many years and I have experienced these realities first-hand.
| Forces | Brief Explanation |
| Immigration Status | Immigration status is a big concern for this population of students. They worry about what will happen to them and their loved ones constantly. In school, students often talk about how unsafe they feel and worry about what their immigration status means for their present and future life after high school. |
| Politics | Politics in the United States affects this population of students the most. In 2016 there were many “redadas” (immigration raids) where many undocumented individuals were detained and sent back to their countries. These raids greatly affected this population of students as many of them stopped attending school for a while for fear of getting deported while others just disappeared from school for fear of being identified. After Trump won the elections, the same happened; some students stopped attending school for a while, and others just stopped attending altogether. In 2017, these students’ future remains undecided as politics promise to be more conservative and this population will be more targeted than before. |
| Problems in the household/Income | Many students are orphans and live with distant family members, friends or friends of relatives they have not seen in years. In addition to this, guardians and parents work many jobs and long hours to ensure economic stability for their family. These factors, together with parental/guardian misinformation about what is expected from them in schools, affects parental involvement. Lack of parental/guardian involvement and lack of communication between parents and schools often result in poor student support and poor student academic achievement. |
| Uncertainty about their future | Students do not know where they belong. Many feel unwanted and unappreciated because of the political rhetoric surrounding this election in the United States. At the same time, they do not feel safe going back to their country because they may get killed. This uncertainty of not knowing what to do in their lives, where they fit, or what they should aspire to be or study in the future creates a dilemma they have to struggle with every day. |
| Lack of opportunities for further education | Many students do not know or understand the options they have for further education after high school. In addition to this, there needs to be more opportunities for this student population to pursue and aspire to be part of important fields of studies such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) where they continue to be widely underrepresented (Santiago, Taylor, & Calderón Galdeano, 2015). |
| Society | Society plays a big part as many students feel discriminated against inside and outside of school on a daily basis. Many students experience racial and cultural discrimination on a daily basis and they just do not know how to respond or how to protect themselves. |
| Individuals within their school system | Many school professionals do not believe in this student population and do not go out of their way to help them in any way. Many school professionals blame this student population for low scores in standardized tests and many do not want to have ESL students in their classes because they “do not speak English”. This is sad to hear, but it is the truth that many students experience in their schools on a daily basis. |
Table 1. Forces Impacting Students’ Lives
Students cannot focus on learning when their basic human necessities are not met. Some needs, such as food and physical safety, are essential for the survival of individuals. Only when these essential needs are taken care of, students feel free to pursue more complex needs, such as education and self-improvement (Toledo-López & Pentón Herrera, 2016). The academic gap between Hispanic immigrant students has not been closed because their basic needs have not been met in the past. During President Trump’s presidency, one can expect that this particular population of students will only face more challenges inside and outside their schools that will continue to widen the academic gap and perpetuate illiteracy.
The problem with perpetuating illiteracy in our society is that eventually it will affect all of us. This population of students will become adults and will eventually have children who are American-born citizens. These children will grow up in a low-income household with illiterate parents who have no academic or economic means to support their children’s education. This cycle of poverty and illiteracy has becomes part of the American culture and, in years to come, it will continue to expand to a greater scale.
Teachers – Supporting Students
Teachers have, more than ever, an opportunity and a responsibility to teach tolerance, respect, and resilience to this vulnerable population of students. After the elections, I have heard many times that my students want to leave school because they feel unsafe and they think that agents from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will come to get them at any time. Fear takes over their faces every time someone knocks at our classroom door during instruction because they always expect the worst. My students, like many other students in the same situation and different grade levels around the country, feel unsafe, in despair, and do not see a reason of how education can be beneficial to them. In their minds, many think, “Why am I studying if I will get deported anytime soon?”
The reality is that students worry about getting deported because they do not have anything to go back to in their countries. Many students have sought refuge in the United States running away from murderers, rapists, dealers, and violence. Some have shared that going back to their native countries will mean a certain death to their family and to them. As I hear these stories and I see my students’ despair and fear, only one question comes to mind, “What can I do to help them?”
Since the elections, I have learned to modify my learning style to meet my students’ social and emotional needs. My students need a place where they feel safe, included, appreciated, and where they have a reason and an opportunity to voice their opinion. In my classroom, I offer them the opportunity to feel part of a community where everyone is equal and where we can all engage in civil, respectful, and enlightening discussions. In my classes, I have learned to include activities and conversations where my students feel empowered to be great and to flourish in these difficult times, and where they do not think of themselves as victims.
Educators of undocumented Hispanic immigrant ESL students are at the frontlines of the battle against illiteracy and school dropout. As such, it is not enough to become advocates for our students; we need to be informed advocates. I have found support and information through community and non-profit organizations that offer direct support to this population. Furthermore, I have shared and informed my students about their rights, and what they can do to seek help and become proactive. Also, I have worked with other school personnel to offer space for students to talk about their feelings and their vision for their future. These conversation circles, or support groups, have proven highly effective and have acted as a net of support for students and school personnel alike through these challenging times.
Final Thoughts
As an ESL teacher educating a vulnerable student population in the Trump era, I have found knowledge and education to be the best approaches to combat my students’ uncertain future. As a former English Language Learner (ELL) myself, I remember the importance of resilience in developing a sense of personal improvement and academic achievement. I often talk to my students about my life experiences in hopes of instilling in them the strength to stay in school during these difficult times. The most difficult times are yet to come for my ESL students and for all undocumented Hispanic immigrant ESL students in the United States. However, the solution cannot be silence. I believe that talking about Trump and what he represents for my students’ future is a healthy approach to coping with this reality that is not going away. As an ESL educator and a strong advocate for my students’ rights, I believe teaching my students literacy, content knowledge, and resilience is the best practice to keeping my students in school.
Author Biography
Luis Javier Pentón Herrerais currently a high school ESOL teacher and an adjunct professor at different colleges and universities where he teaches Spanish, TESOL, Research, and English classes. His current research focuses on Bilingual Education, Spanish, ESL/ESOL, Adult Education, Literacy Studies, and Hispanic Pedagogues.
Author Correspondence: Luis.penton@gmail.com
References
Amnesty International. (2016). Central America turns its back on hundreds of thousands fleeing
“war-like” violence. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/10/central-america-turns-its-back-on-hundreds-of-thousands-fleeing-war-like-violence/
Haskins, R., & Tienda, M. (2011). The future of immigrant children. Future of Children, pp. 1-7.
National Center for Education Statistics. (NCES). (2016). English Language Learners in public schools. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp
Payán, R. M. & Nettles, M. T. (2007). Current State of English-Language Learners in the U.S.:
K-12 student population. Retrieved from https://www.ets.org/Media/Conferences_and_Events/pdf/ELLsympsium/ELL_factsheet.pdf
Pentón Herrera, L. J. & Duany, M. (2016). Native Spanish speakers as binate language learners.
NECTFL Review, 78, pp. 15-30.
Toledo-López, A. A. & Pentón Herrera, L. J. (2016). The impact of bilingual education in the professional development of Hispanic women. Ámbito de Encuentros Journal,9(2), pp. 25-49.
Santiago, D. A., Taylor, M., & Calderón Galdeano, E. (2015). Finding your workforce: Latinos
in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). ¡Excelencia in Education! Retrieved from http://www.edexcelencia.org/research/workforce/stem
Zong, J. & Batalova, J. (2015). Central American Immigrants in the United States. Migration
Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-american-immigrants-united-states
Can the DREAM still exist?
By Cheryl Burleigh, EdD
The rite of passage and dream of high school seniors is to apply and be accepted to a college or university of their choice. For students who are immigrants and undocumented the ability to attend college is a challenge made easier through the United We Dream (UWD) and DREAM Education Empowerment Program (DEEP). Meeting with a group of students who depend on the support of such programs and the DREAM Act grants, the conversation on the topic of their education and future shifted from thoughts of the application process to the events of the presidential election and after the inauguration to what the future may hold. The following is a three-stanza progression poem based on this discussion.
I DREAM of a better tomorrow,
brighter future,
a fresh start,
a college education,
being challenged by like-minded individuals,
finding others like me,
independence,
expanding my horizons,
and a better life.
I DREAM of no boundaries,
no walls,
not living in fear,
my family staying together in the U.S.,
finding my parents home tonight,
being able to walk freely without anxiety,
not looking over my shoulder,
trusting the police,
and not being reported,
deported.
I DREAM of our voices being heard,
positive political action,
unity,
a movement of activism,
equality
embracing diversity,
earning my college degree,
supporting my family,
kindness,
compassion,
humanity,
freedom,
and hope.
Author Note:
Cheryl Burleigh is a research fellow, associate faculty, and faculty supervisor for the University of Phoenix. Dr. Burleigh is an advocate for educational change and awareness, empowering educators and administrators to support positive transformation within school systems. Her academic research interests include ethical decision making, education law, empowering females students in STEM, school leadership, education equity, and LGBTQ issues. Dr. Burleigh has been a presenter of science education curriculum and practices and educational leadership for school programs and administrators, state teacher associations, national and international conferences, and on behalf of NASA. She has won numerous grants and awards for curriculum and leadership development. Dr. Burleigh recently completed a series of observational studies of international education practices of underprivileged students. Please address all comments and questions to Cheryl Burleigh, EdD at cburleigh@email.phoenix.edu.
James Lane, Ed.D.
University of Phoenix
Center for Professional Responsibility in Education
The Classroom as Metaphor and Window to Democracy
Qualitative analysts apply metaphor to understand and explain. In the current cultural malaise, one metaphor seems best. The concept of the classroom as a window to the world emerges as resilient and renewed. I propose the classroom as a window to our culture. Through the classroom things flow in and out, showing and merging views, insights, and opportunities for growth and change. The classroom is a safe place, a haven for honor and respect. It is the place where different points of view come together. Only in the classroom can these different perspectives converge in a milieu of respect and honor and safety. In the classroom we come to know each other as people, as colleagues, even as friends. We share moments poignant, personal, emotional––of our own reflections, our own soul-baring. The classroom remains the ultimate egalitarian soil for growth of democracy. Black. White. Young. Middle aged.
Muslim. Christian. Conservative. Progressive. In the classroom, labels fall away. All are altogether and all together for reflection and renewal. I propose the classroom as a venue through which we and our students gather to teach, to learn, and to understand.
I reflect on students in several of my recent classes, enrolled in a generic freshman English course in a small, liberal arts college. The curriculum includes personal compositions, class presentations based on anthologized essays and stories, and related class discussions. They are a panoply of American society.
One is a young Muslim woman, a citizen of a Middle Eastern American ally. She tells us about her arranged marriage to an abusive spouse. She describes the trauma of marriage and the shame of divorce. She describes her wearing of the hijab as a commitment to her faith. She compares the Prophet Muhammad and Martin Luther King, Jr.––both of whom, she says, desired to serve their community and people who were marginalized.
A young man in his early twenties supports the discussion. He carries several citizenships––the United Kingdom, Germany, and another Middle Eastern country––links to his parentage and place of birth. The two describe life in their countries, where citizens build homes surrounded by high walls where they can relax, free from the eyes of their peers. They are polite, erudite, thoughtful, and offer views to a world beyond the experience of most here.
Two Caucasian men who served tours in Iraq describe locals who risked their lives to help Americans. These brave Iraqis worked on U.S. bases, entering and leaving in darkness. They and their families could have been punished, even killed, for working with Americans. These soldiers see as a clear and present danger sentiments to brand Muslims as enemies and ban them from entry into the United States.
Another is a guard in the county prison. He is black. Sometimes black inmates ask him of the white guards, “Can I trust this guy?” Other times the same prisoners taunt as he walks by: “Hey traitor, Uncle Tom, in bed with the white man.” Torn between worlds, he wants only to serve.
Another student is a middle-aged African American. He describes two experiences traveling in the U.S. only a decade ago. He was refused service as an African American, once in the South and, perhaps surprisingly, once in the Northeast. In both instances, he was in uniform. The talk is poignant. He cries––and so do we. The pain is palpable. It is emotional. It is real.
There is a set of veterans––one is white in his early twenties, another is Puerto Rican, middle-age. Both are stalwart supporters of the new U.S. President. They are thoughtful, serious, empathetic. Both scoff at fears of nationalism. Both reject claims that the conflagration of patriotism and nationalism represent racial prejudice and xenophobic pulses against the phantom “others” in American society.
The classroom is the window between insight and blindness, light and darkness, democracy and fascism. It is the great equalizer, the medium for Freirean dialogic leading to better understanding by all within. To this purpose founders, philosophers, and practitioners can illuminate.
In Romances with Schools, John Goodlad (2016) describes education as a moral institution and the foundation of a vibrant democracy. “The rhetoric linking education and democracy has had a long run since this nation’s founding––from Thomas Jefferson through many advocates to the present” (p. 255). He argues for a clear mission for schooling grounded in the principles of democracy itself. Education poses for us, he says, a moral challenge to create the ethical culture “that lies within the power of all the stakeholders to create” (p. 267).
In Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916) reminds us that education must embody both the means and the ends of democracy. He observes, “A progressive society counts individual variations as precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its educational measures” (p. 305). For Noah Webster, schooling is a tool for social planning and improvement. For Jefferson, schooling is the means to educate youth and so empower them to make informed decisions. For Horace Mann, education is the vehicle to uplift society. For Diane Ravitch (2008), “Democratic habits and values must be taught through … agencies that allow citizens to interact with each other and to have a sense of efficacy. The best protection for a democratic society remains well-educated citizens” (p. 56).
From this I reflect on post-election events at other education institutions I know. At a local high school firmly planted in middle-class suburbia, a teacher tells a black student he had better behave, or President Trump will send him back to Africa. At a storied university steeped in learning and tradition, a Muslim student sees written on her the notepad next to her door, “Leave now. You’re not welcome here.” At a large metropolitan university near the site of a mass killing, a young lesbian reads “you’re next” scrawled outside her dorm. Would these dystopian perpetrators have hurled the same barbs if they had been immersed in a dialogic classroom culture?
I recall my students. The young Muslim woman. The black G.I. The white men dependent on Iraqis who risked their lives. The two men, a generation apart, who view nationalism and patriotism in the same light. The question we must ask is not, “How did we get here?” The productive query, rather, is, “Where do we go from here?”
I return to the metaphor of the classroom as window. It allows views within and without.
It reflects. It provides flow and exchange. How can the classroom affect the view outside? This concept is more challenging. Many classrooms, many windows, together can affect insight and change. More than ever before, ours must be the classrooms of Jefferson and Webster, of Dewey and Mann, of Ravitch and Freire. Only through our classrooms can we shine light within and without. Only through the dialogues within our many classrooms, exponentially compounded collectives spread across and throughout America, can we reflect, illuminate, and change the view, within and without. This is the promise, the potential, the power, and the moral imperative of the American classroom. Within it and through it democracy and truth grow and will shine.
References
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education.
New York, NY: Macmillan.
Goodlad, J.L., & Goodlad, S.J. (2016). Romances with schools: A life of education. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lee, G. C. (1961). Learning and liberty: The Jeffersonian tradition in education. In L. A. Cremin
(Ed.), Crusade against ignorance: Thomas Jefferson on education, (pp. 1-26). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Mann, H. (1957). Twelfth annual report to the Massachusetts state board of education. In L. A.
Cremin (Ed.), The republic and the school: Horace Mann on the education of free men, New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Ravitch, D. (2008). Chapter 3: Education and democracy: The United States of America as a
historical case study. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107(1), 42-57. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-7984.2008.00129.x
Webster, N. (1787, December). Education. American Magazine, 23.
Biographical Information
Dr. Jim Lane has spent nearly 40 years as an educator. He began his career as a high school English teacher. He later served as the principal of two middle schools that served high minority, high poverty student populations. He holds a B.A. in English and Mass Communications Education, an M.A. in English, and an M.Ed. and Ed.D.in Educational Leadership. He now works as Associate Research Chair for the University of Phoenix Center for Professional Responsibility in Education, where he serves as a liaison for research and publication. His research interests include ethical frameworks, ethical dilemmas, educator codes of ethics, autoethnography, narrative analysis, constructivism, school leadership, and middle school curriculum.
Elizabeth Blake
Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing, Haverford College
It’s Not Funny: On Feminism, Humor, and Fear
A few years ago, Bill O’Reilly came to my campus. Or, technically, one of Bill O’Reilly’s surrogates did. When I arrived to teach my afternoon class, most of my students were huddled around a laptop, watching him interviewing students about the supposed lack of ideological diversity among faculty. Complaining about the percentage of political donations from professors that go to the Democratic Party, he scoffed, “that doesn’t seem very diverse to me,” and warned his viewers about “liberal indoctrination.” That day, before we worked through my lesson plan, we talked about how the rhetoric of diversity can be turned against itself in order to justify allowing intolerance into a conversation. We talked about how the imperative to represent both sides of an issue can obscure intellectual consensus, even when it comes to questions like the “debates” about evolution and climate change, where the scientific community has long agreed that no debate is necessary.
This was a useful lesson, because my class was a writing class; in order to write and argue well, you need to learn how to unpack rhetorical fallacies, and how to expose misleading logic. It was also a useful lesson because my class was a class on gender and sexuality, and my students—all of them female, many of them women of color—had a personal stake in unpacking that logic. Given that, I didn’t think twice about structuring twenty minutes of our class around a response to that video. As we transitioned from our discussion of the video to our discussion of feminist theory, I made a joke: “on to the indoctrination!”
My joke about indoctrination wasn’t especially funny—and it’s even less funny here, because jokes don’t get better when you explain them at length—but my students laughed. It’s of course possible that this was politeness on their part, as it so often is when students laugh at their professors’ jokes, but I’d prefer to think that it was because they got the joke. In order to know why you’re getting a joke, you need to understand what makes it absurd. In some cases, this understanding derives from knowledge shared only by an in-group, but in other cases all it takes is knowing what remains unsaid, or why a word doesn’t quite fit in context. Consider, for example, the unspoken punch line of every six year old’s favorite joke: “What’s brown and sticky?” The joke only lands because “a stick” is no one’s first thought. My students got my joke about indoctrination because it was so patently absurd as a description of what happened in our classroom.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that joke as I’ve watched academics discover that their names, institutional affiliations, research projects, and even photographs have been added to a “Professor Watchlist.” This list, whose mission is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” isn’t the first of its kind. Writing for The New York Times, George Yancy called it “a new species of McCarthyism.” He noted its parallels to “Cointelpro, the secret F.B.I. program that spied on, infiltrated and discredited American political organizations in the ’50s and ’60s,” pointing out that “a watchlist like this can have the impact of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.” This list is just one element of a threatening new political climate, a part that is specifically designed to scare educators. To keep us, among other things, from making that kind of joke.
We might also think of the watchlist as a new media expansion of David Horowitz’s 2006 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book that profiles 101 professors that Horowitz judged to be dangerous to academia itself. The book justifies its project by rhetoric much like O’Reilly’s. Horowitz says, quite rightly, that “teaching must not seek the arbitrary imposition of personal opinions and prejudices on students, enforced through the power of the grading process and the authority of the institutions they represent” (xxvii). This is hard to argue with. Even when pedagogy emerges from a specific ideology, such as Marie Shear’s oft-cited definition of feminism as “the radical notion that women are people,” it should not be an exercise in the arbitrary reproduction of personal beliefs.
Yet, even in seemingly objective subjects, good teaching is neither neutral nor without nuance. Jokes, like all ideas, emerge within cultural contexts, and good teachers provide their students with the critical thinking skills to understand those ideas, those contexts, and how the two inform each other. Shear’s definition is quotable for the same reason it’s funny: because women are people, and this isn’t a radical idea. It’s also quotable because it’s serious: because acting like women are people is often treated as if it were radical. This is part of why it is necessary to argue with Horowitz’s claim that departments like Women’s Studies and Black Studies—both of which he puts in scare quotes, as if it to emphasize their illegitimacy—are bastions of indoctrination, “shaped by narrow, one-sided political agendas” (xxxiv).
While debating Horowitz at Reed College (full disclosure, my alma mater), Peter Steinberger offered an explanation for “why so many professors are liberal.” In short, Steinberger argues, academics are people who draw conclusions based on evidence. The evidence shows that hierarchies of race, class, and gender exist. Thus, those of us who teach subjects like Women’s and Gender Studies or Black Studies—and here I’m inserting myself in his argument—and who have an obligation to teach our students accurately about these subjects, must teach them this. And if we believe, moreover, as Steinberger puts it, that these “undeserved inequalities are so vast, so egregious, so devastating, that we have a moral responsibility try to do something,” then that is when we become the kinds of professors who will end up on this watchlist.
Steinberger’s response is a nuanced, moral one. It is also a rigorous, academic one. He demonstrates the inconsistencies of Horowitz’s argument, appeals to his audience’s better nature, and—it’s pretty clear, at least to this reader—wins the debate. Similarly, Yancy’s New York Times column, entitled “I Am A Dangerous Professor,” makes a stirring case for embracing one’s inclusion on the list.
These are arguments, and rigorous, moral arguments are one way to respond to the charge of indoctrination. But I want to make room for thinking about the moral value of another reaction: that of the joke. Like a metaphor, a joke works by doubling: you have to be able to hold two things in your mind at the same time. For a joke that rests on a pun, that’s the two meanings of a homophone. For a joke that relies on irony or sarcasm, that’s the assertion of plausibility and the knowledge of its falsehood. Jokes also teach us to hear tone, to attend to the context in which a thing is said, and to stay wary, lest we become the punch line. This is part of why it’s important not just to make jokes, but also to think about how jokes work. Humor can consolidate power, defining the boundaries of a group by shared understanding, wherein those who laugh are “in,” and those who don’t are “out.” But humor can also challenge the workings of power, undercutting received structures and exposing the absurdity of ideological assumptions. To add oneself to the watchlist—as many professors did—is to resist its agenda and publicly embrace the values it repudiates. To add Indiana Jones or Professor Snape to the watchlist, as quite a few people—at least according to Twitter—did, is both to disrupt the list’s ostensible purpose and to draw attention to its exaggerated rhetoric. There’s not much these two fictional professors have in common, but there is one thing: they’re both dangerous. In the fictional worlds that they inhabit, both of these men kill people. Even though neither man actually made it on to the list’s website, the joke works: this, it says, is a dangerous professor.
We don’t often think of jokes as nuanced or moral, but good jokes are precisely that: they offer us two possibilities, and ask us to choose. Is this indoctrination? Or is it indoctrination’s opposite? A stick, a carrot, or something else entirely?
For those of us who believe in Steinberger’s moral imperative—as I do—jokes can teach us to be careful, lest we accidentally deepen those inequalities with cruel or thoughtless punch lines. Indeed, a joke is exactly the thing that allows us to move beyond “narrow, one-sided political agendas.” When the humor website McSweeney’s published Donald Trump’s Black History Month address, verbatim, under the title “My Very Good Black History Month Tribute To Some of the Most Tremendous Black People,” in its series of “Short Imagined Monologues,” it transformed a thoughtless speech into a thoughtful joke. To put this speech into this context is to point toward its implausibility, its absurdity, and its failure to meet the demands of its original context. This speech, the editors imply, belongs not at a breakfast honoring African-American leaders, but among the company of imagined speeches by luminaries such as “an Anthropomorphic Lady Jar of Mayonnaise,” an Epi-Pen, and Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By transforming a real speech into a satirical speech, this editorial decision does more than just make fun. It points to the importance of distinguishing the real from the joke, and the difficulty of that task in the present moment. This joke forces us to hold two realities in our minds: the fact that this was a real speech, and the feeling that it can’t possibly have been a real speech. By making it into a joke, McSweeney’s reminds us that it was very real, and forces us to consider what about this speech makes that seem so unlikely. This is a joke that can teach us about what we expect from elected officials, what we’re getting, and how it feels when the two fail to align. Humor points back at reality, illuminating it from surprising angles.
Most of us learn about jokes pretty early. We do this so early, in fact, that we don’t really think of getting jokes (unlike telling them) as a learned skill. It is, however, one of the first forms of literary interpretation most of us encounter. In one sense, then, I am making an argument for teaching the kinds of interpretive practices that enable scholars like Yancy and Steinberger to make the stirring arguments they do. In another sense, this is an argument for fostering something more subtle, reminding students that the interpretive work we do in the classroom is not so different from the interpretive work they must do in their daily lives.
We live in a historical moment in which cultural knowledge is increasingly shared through humor. We’ve all heard that statistic about how all the young people these days are getting their news from The Daily Show. Critique also passes through less traditional channels, including every Bernie Sanders meme you’ve ever seen, and my favorite: “Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.” It’s a moment, too, that requires us to think carefully about questions of positionality—who gets to tell which jokes, and in what contexts, and to what audiences. A joke that’s painful in one context can be reparative in another, and that’s an important lesson as well. Turning the phrase “nasty woman” into a joke is a way of refusing its ugliness, a way of using language and humor as tools of care.
Students, in my experience, are often more adept at this than professors. Indeed, I should confess that the best joke about Bill O’Reilly came from one of my students: “Next,” she said, “ he’ll be warning us about Women’s Studies!” All of her peers laughed, and so did I. That joke brought us together, implicitly constituting us as a community by acknowledging our shared investment in women’s studies, and materially doing so by making us all laugh. It’s important to laugh sometimes, and that’s part of my point here. The other part is that we, as professors and teachers, need to acknowledge and affirm the multiple modes of language and interpretation that our students bring to the table, and give them the tools to understand how those modes interact with, rely on, and inform their cultural intuitions. Unpacking a joke is never exactly a funny exercise, but it is one with high stakes—especially for those of us who are genuinely invested in ensuring that our students have the critical thinking skills to resist narrow, one-sided ideologies, in addition to the meme-making skills to render them hilarious.
Horowitz, David (2006). The professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc.
My very good Black History Month tribute to some of the most tremendous Black people .(2017, February 1). McSweeney’s. Retrieved from https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/my-very-good-black-history-month-tribute-to-some-of-the-most-tremendous-black-people
Steinberger, P., & Horowitz, D. (2006, November). A debate on academic freedom. [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/winter06/columns/NoC/images/steinberger_horowitz.mp3Yancy, G. (2016, November 30). I am a dangerous professor. TheNew York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html?_r=0
Curbing Ignorance and Apathy (Across the Political Spectrum)
Through Global Citizenship Education
By Michael Thier
What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?
I don’t know and I don’t care.
Whether we know that snarky response as a Jimmy Buffet lyric or the punchline to a quintessential Dad joke, “I don’t know and I don’t care” captures the disunity that defines the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We know or care very little about our ideological mirrors to the extent that the “United” States, our voting patterns, and our reactions to them have become a curiosity for the other 95% of the world’s population. Our new national pastime of navel-gazing about an election that many pundits call inexplicable follows a campaign filled with rambunctious rhetoric that revealed globalization as a springboard for the social unease that propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office.
Many voters chose their candidate based on perceptions of his business bona fides. Those voters either did not know or did not care that multiple bankruptcies do not align with such perceptions. Many voters used their ballots in protest, seeking an outsider whose expertise came from beyond the Washington, DC, Beltway. Those voters either did not know or did not care that public policy experience often predicts one’s ability to govern. Disheartened members of the political left continue to reproach the president and his supporters for what they see as a barrage of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia. But Trump opponents either do not know or do not care that packaging 46% of the electorate as all racists, misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes, and Islamophobes is inherently misguided. Instead, Pehme (2016) counsels crestfallen liberals to engage right-leaning family members around the dinner table, suggesting that despite “a depressing number of them that deserve these characterizations, to brush aside the more than 61 million Americans who cast their ballots for Trump as mere hateful idiots is to perpetuate the liberal elitism that helped fuel Trump’s success” (para. 11).
Regardless of what your 2016 ballot looked like, choosing to neither know nor care about the perspectives of nearly half your country’s citizens exhausts any chance to win the hearts and minds of your ideological mirrors. Ideas no longer matter once we squander opportunities for dialogue. As someone who has cast votes for both major U.S. political parties, but who also counts himself among those who believe that two people can disagree while both being right, I recommend that we stop wringing our hands and cease asking how our country could have elected a reality TV personality with a professor emerita-length CV of unpresidential behaviors. Instead, as the serenity prayer instructs, we must accept the things we cannot change, summon the courage to change the things we can, and find the wisdom to know the difference. Taking the latter tack, we should begin by accepting that no one wins minds by calling others ignorant. No one wins hearts by calling others cold. Instead, we must examine something that nearly none of our public schools taught us to know or care about: global citizenship education (GCE). Summoning the courage to change the things we can, I propose we emphasize GCE, a concept that too many education decision-makers overlook regardless of their political persuasion.
In a world beset by the opportunities and challenges of globalization, GCE can instill the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and dispositions to live, learn, and work. In one of many global citizenship conceptualizations, Oxley and Morris (2013) present four cosmopolitan dimensions (political, moral, economic, and cultural) and four advocacy dimensions (critical, social, environmental, and spiritual). With so many dimensions to navigate, one might readily recognize why GCE can prompt students’ critical thought about the world they inhabit (Henderson, Nunez-Rodriguez, & Casari, 2011; Maguire, Donovan, Mishook, de Gaillande, & Garcia, 2012). Given climate change, wealth inequality, permeable borders, and complex geopolitical conflicts, it seems logical that GCE would be offered as public-school standard. Unfortunately, though, the travesty of inequitable opportunities to learn relegates GCE to boutique status. By one measure, less than 1.5% of U.S. public schools serve GCE to their K-12 students (Thier, 2016). Even in the rare places that offer GCE, access favors students who are university-bound, White, and from affluent backgrounds (Perna et al., 2013). Several additional challenges thwart efforts to scale up GCE: its literature base is diffuse (Marshall, 2011), its definitions remain hotly contested (Davies, 2006; Myers, 2016), and GCE empirical studies are rare (Kerkhoff Vessa, 2016). Still, this burgeoning area of interdisciplinary research and practice links GCE to several desirable outcomes, such as increasing empathy within and across cultures, as well as fostering engagement with and understanding of complex international affairs (Goren & Yemini, 2017).
Since Election Day 2016, pundits have clutched at myriad factors in their attempts to explain results. Some have zeroed in on a core component of GCE: attitudes toward globalization (e.g., Lakshmanan, 2016). Many Americans’ exceptionally tepid attitudes toward the rest of the world are not surprising given the bubble our nationally focused schools have created. After World War II claimed the lives of as many as 85 million humans or about 4% of the world’s population at the time, many policymakers and educators pleaded for U.S. education to globalize students’ experiences (Scott, 2005). Instead, policies continue to compel elementary and secondary educators to address a narrow range of curricular goals, typically those that can be tested easily, such as basic skills in literacy and numeracy (Zhao, 2015). Focusing on local and national priorities, our secondary schools do not mandate that students learn about the world. Students simply do not receive the type of intentional GCE that would help them gain critical self-awareness, mutual respect, and a sense of reciprocity (Dolby, 2008), all traits that would be beneficial if distributed widely across our electorate and our society at large.
For example, the Education Commission of the States (2007) compiled graduation requirement data for our 50 states and the District of Columbia. Less than half of those 51 jurisdictions required students to take as much as a half-unit of globally focused social studies coursework (e.g., world geography, world history, or even European history). Only eight jurisdictions required students to spend one or more years learning a language other than English. Only three jurisdictions—Michigan, Washington, DC, and West Virginia—required students to take a global studies course and also learn a language other than English. By contrast, nearly all students were compelled to take three or more years of English, mathematics, and science each. With such little priority accorded to formal opportunities to learn global themes, one could imagine how infrequently schools might integrate GCE across subjects, an approach that Heilman (2008) casts as a remedy for a “single-nation curriculum” (p. 30).
Some readers might wonder what, if any, are the costs to our domestic focus. As one seemingly innocuous example, we join Burma and Liberia as the only three countries on the planet that do not use the metric system, denying us the ability to collaborate seamlessly in a common language of measurement with nearly 200 other countries. Of greater severity, perhaps the kinds of global perspectives that one could develop through intentional, well-integrated GCE would have helped the electorate think deeply about the ramifications of nationalist agendas, of the economic variety or otherwise. Sadly, the world is witnessing a rising tide of nationalism. The Economist (2016) likened the U.S. Republican Party’s gravitation toward nationalism to the rise of alternative populist parties in Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), France (Front National), Germany (Alternative für Deutschland), Hungary (Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség), India (Bharatiya Janata Party), the Netherlands (Partij voor de Vrijheid), Poland (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), Sweden (Sverigedemokraterna), and Turkey (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi). These parties all reject globalization, refugees, and immigrants, particularly those who are Muslim. Given the U.S. history of an inward-facing educational agenda (Gaudelli & Fernekes, 2004), we must abandon the practice of disregarding our globalizing world.
Inside the bubble of our “America-first” educational system, we learn to know and care very little about the rest of the world (Rapoport, 2009; Summit, 2013). Surrounded by 3,000 miles of ocean on either side, our historic bouts of isolationism align well with our recent potential to reignite that practice. But if we want education to be a mechanism that mitigates ignorance and apathy for future generations of American voters (both the half that goes to the polls in a presidential year and the half that do not [1]), we must embrace GCE in K-12 classrooms. GCE can pierce the bubbles that interfere with our knowing or caring about the diversity that our communities, country, and world display.
In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump (2017) called education the “civil rights issue of our time.” Among several unspecified aspects of that claim, I wonder what U.S. education will do to make our citizens civil toward one another? To what extent will education lead students to approach each other with humility and mutual responsibility regardless of how their counterparts look, how they choose to pray or not, the language(s) they speak, their national affiliation(s), or any other demographic separators that would be better pitched as catalysts of intellectual curiosity? The idea “that America must put its own citizens first” to rediscover some nebulous moment of greatness is intellectually suspect, if not dishonest. In fact, GCE would lead to a greater society, one in which citizens possess global views that make them less inclined to endorse border wars, trade wars, or wars of any kind.
As exit polling data in Table 1 show, perceptions about globalization were powerful drivers of 2016 U.S. Presidential election results. Voters who cared most about foreign policy or the economy—issues that are often framed to require examinations of forces outside the country—endorsed one candidate. Voters who cared most about terrorism and immigration—issues that are often framed to generate protectionist or isolationist sentiments—endorsed another. Voters who viewed international trade as a job producer or as job neutral endorsed one candidate. Voters who viewed international trade as a job robber endorsed another. Overwhelmingly, anti-immigrant sensibilities guided a considerable segment of the electorate. In the wake of the June 2016 U.K. Brexit vote, University of Oxford sociologist Alexander Betts made similar observations during the TEDSummit. Betts argued that political lines no longer divide as right and left, as tax and spend. Instead, an unexamined fault line divides “those that embrace globalization and those that fear globalization” (McManus, 2016, para 4.)
To unite this divide in our age of truthiness, all students need GCE: an education that defines success using metrics other than standardized tests of basic literacy and numeracy skills. Schools should not be judged by their ability to place students on conveyor belts that move them through a requisite number of Carnegie units. Instead, success should produce active citizens who know how to sift through a universe of information to dissect sense from nonsense, a core experience of GCE. Success should mean graduates who engage in transformative, purposive action in their local communities and the wider world so they can combat intolerance (Bajaj, 2011; Catalano, 2013; Woolley, 2008). At a minimum, successful graduates should be discerning voters who recognize that neither CNN nor Fox News nor the Daily Kos nor Breitbart is painting a comprehensive picture of their community, country, or world. As Thomas Friedman, who made globalization a household word in his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, notes in a 2010 op-ed, “When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues” (para. 10). Until we embrace education models that align with GCE, our electorate will remain ill-equipped to know or care. As long as we fail in that regard, we will get the leadership that we deserve.
[1] Presidential year voter turnout in the U.S. has fluctuated between 49-58% since 1964.
References
Bajaj, M. (2011). Human rights education: Ideology, location, and approaches. Human Rights Quarterly, 33, 481-508.
Catalano, T. A. (2013). Occupy: A case illustration of social movements in global citizenship education. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 8(3), 276-288.
Davies, L. (2006). Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? Educational Review, 58, 5-25.
Dolby, N. (2008). Global citizenship and study abroad: A comparative study of American and Australian undergraduates. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 17, 51-67.
Education Commission of the States. (2007). Standard high school graduation requirements (50- state). Retrieved from http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/mbprofall?Rep=HS01
Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the 21st century. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Friedman, T. L. (2010, 16 Nov.). “Too good to check.” The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html
Gaudelli, W., & Fernekes, W. R. (2004). Teaching about global human rights for global citizenship. The Social Studies, 95, 16-26.
Goren, H., & Yemini, M. (2017). Citizenship education redefined–A systematic review of empirical studies on global citizenship education. International Journal of Educational Research, 82, 170-183.
Heilman, E. E. (2008). Including voices from the world through global citizenship education. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 20(4), 30-33.
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Lakshmanan, I. A. R. (2016, 11 Nov.). “Trump won. Globalization lost. Now what?” Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2016/11/10/trump-won-globalization- lost-now-what/b1qHh9uprJUd6AbVMwIHWN/story.html
Maguire, C., Donovan, C., Mishook, J., Gaillande, G. D., & Garcia, I. (2012). Choosing a life one has reason to value: The role of the arts in fostering capability development in four small urban high schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 42, 367-390.
Marshall, H. (2011). Instrumentalism, ideals and imaginaries: Theorising the contested space of global citizenship education in schools. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9, 411- 426.
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Oxley, L., & Morris, P. (2013). Global citizenship: A typology for distinguishing its multiple conceptions. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61, 301-325.
Pehme, M. (2016, 22 Nov.). “C’mon, liberals, give your Trump-voting relatives some love on Thanksgiving: Just because they voted for Trump doesn’t mean they’re awful people. Really. So talk to them.” The Daily Beast. Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/23/c-mon-liberals-give-your- trump-voting-relatives-some-love-on-thanksgiving.html
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Rapoport, A. (2009). Lonely business or mutual concern: The role of comparative education in the cosmopolitan citizenship debates. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 12, 23- 32.
Scott, R. A. (2005). Many calls, little action: Global illiteracy in the United States. Language Problems & Language Planning, 29, 67-82.
Summit, J. (2013). Global citizenship demands new approaches to teaching and learning: AASCU’s Global Challenges initiative. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 45(6), 51-57.
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Thier, M. (2016). Left behind: Associating school-level variables with opportunities for global education. Presented at the 2015 annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education; posted in 2016. http://www.aare.edu.au/publications- database.php/9769/left-behind-associating-school-level-variables-with-opportunities-for- global-education
Trump, D. J. (2017, 28 Feb.). Speech to joint session of Congress. Retrieved from http://www.voanews.com/a/excerts-of-president-trumps-speech-to- congress/3744629.html
Woolley, R. (2008). Spirituality and education for global citizenship: Developing student teachers’ perceptions and practice. International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 13(2), 145-156.
Zhao, Y. (2015). Counting what counts: Reframing educational evaluation. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
| Table 1 | ||
| 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Exit Polling Data by Percentage | ||
| Item | Clinton | Trump |
| Most important issue: foreign policy | 60 | 34 |
| Most important issue: economy | 52 | 42 |
| Most important issue: terrorism | 39 | 57 |
| Most important issue: immigration | 32 | 64 |
| Trade with other countries: creates jobs | 59 | 35 |
| Trade with other countries: does not affect jobs | 54 | 39 |
| Trade with other countries: costs jobs | 31 | 65 |
| Handling illegal immigrants working in U.S.: deportation | 14 | 84 |
| Support building wall along U.S.-Mexico border | 10 | 86 |
Note. Data from Huang, Jacoby, Strickland, and Lai (2016).
Biographical statement Michael Their, a Research and Policy Fellow jointly appointed to the Educational Policy Improvement Center and the Center for Equity Promotion at the University of Oregon (UO), is a candidate for a concurrent Ph.D. (Educational Leadership, specialization in quantitative research methods) and M.P.A. He collaborates with researchers in 10 countries on mixed-methods studies that focus on (a) global citizenship education and (b) opportunities and challenges for students in rural and remote schools. His previous degrees come from New York University (B.A. Journalism) and Stony Brook University (M.A.T., English). Most importantly, he is the proud father of two daughters. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michael Thier, University of Oregon, Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership; 5267 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. Email: mthier@uoregon.edu