Author’s note: This post is a letter I sent to the new principal hiring committee at my son’s elementary school.
Dear Friend,
The hiring committee is still at work. We don’t yet know who you are. I trust the committee will make a great choice, and I look forward to getting to know you.
Actually, I don’t.
That is, I don’t look forward to getting to know you that well personally. I look forward to getting to know you through my son. As an educator myself, I know that my son’s school life can be substantially shaped by you, by collaborations between you and the teaching faculty, especially by decisions about what to teach and how to teach it.
You are joining the school at an important time. The current principal has left in the middle of the year. There are questions about school climate, equity, and fairness. You will find opportunities for healing, as well as opportunities to sustain good traditions and chart new paths.
Most important will be how you and teachers work together to maintain the curriculum and instruction that has made the school strong – and how you will innovate in these areas to make us stronger.
In any school, what happens in the classroom is the most important thing. The culture of the classroom and the learning that happens there have the power to shape the culture of the hallways, the play on the playground, the online and face-to-face relationships, the conversations in our homes.
This is a school where my son is learning a lot and is happy. This is also a school, like every school, where there is bullying and harassment among our children. It is a school, like more and more Vermont schools, where there is increasing racial diversity – in addition to the more familiar differences of family background, religion, and socio-economic status. In this school, as in every school, the community must ask what the curriculum and instruction can do to cultivate positive relationships, empathic citizenship, and a critical understanding of race, class, identity, and power. The health of our democratic society requires this. The habits of citizenship and dispositions toward tolerance are shaped at an early age.
Earlier this winter, as I tucked him into bed, my son told me that he and some other students were working on a letter to our new president. They were writing about the president’s idea of building a wall, informing him that there are some students of Mexican heritage in our school. I was eager to learn more about the writing assignment, but my son is young, in one of the early grades, and he didn’t share much detail.
I later learned from his teacher that the writing prompt had been about how to make the world a better place. A few students had thought of writing a letter to the president. My son was discussing it with them, but then he changed table groups and focused on a different topic. The teacher supported the students who continued writing the letter to President Trump. The letters were sent. I felt proud of the school when I heard this.
As a parent, tax payer, and citizen, I would be doubly proud if we were intentionally asking all students to engage in tasks like writing letters to elected officials about topics of importance – even topics as sensitive as race and immigration – even in the early grades.
It’s certainly not easy to put academics in personal and political contexts. And when we make such tasks whole-class endeavors, we – the adults – must be intentional about our own personal and professional readiness, as well as be thoughtful in guiding students in the work. There are good models of how to do this. I know there are strong models at our school, where there are so many skilled teachers so beloved by so many families and students.
Myself, I find inspiration from Rethinking Schools, the Zinn Education Project, Teaching Tolerance, Facing History and Ourselves, SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities), and from individual teachers across the country who courageously shoulder this work – like Matt Sheelen, a teacher in San Diego who I follow on Twitter. Matt recently tweeted a graphic he’d adapted for first grade. It was an “identity iceberg,” with the top of the iceberg revealing what you might notice when you first see someone: body type, language, age, skin color, clothing. Below the water line, the hulking bulk of the identity iceberg is about getting to know someone more deeply: racial/cultural identity, interests/hobbies, morals/beliefs, family and life experiences.
Courageous and skilled in their craft must be educators who engage children in deeply exploring the identity of self and other. But it’s important, for if we don’t carefully integrate such explorations into the curriculum, the kids will still explore it on their own – and often in ways that reproduce the rough clichés and cruelties of a divided nation.
As I’m sure you’ll agree, when educators sit secure in ivory tower abstractions, with context-less fractions and sanitized histories, we may be able to fool ourselves that silence about race and class in the classroom is a responsible neutrality. But neutrality is a fiction. And the silence, if not broken, is going to break someone.
So here’s to courageous curriculum that can help bridge the differences that divide us and build strong citizens.
I hope that the school board and superintendent will allow your to-do list to be chock full of priorities related to student wellbeing, school culture, curriculum and instruction. I hope that they, and the parent community, will be clear with you about what our broad goals are in these domains. I hope you will be given space to pursue those goals creatively, in collaboration with the teaching faculty and with families.
The curriculum and teaching that my son experiences in the classroom should be what most powerfully shapes him. I look forward to getting to know you through his work.
Sincerely,
T. Elijah Hawkes, Dad, Neighbor