[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] Justin Baeder:
I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to be joined today by Scott Sider and Darren Graves, authors of Schooling for Critical Consciousness, Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice.
[00:28] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:31] Justin Baeder:
Scott and Darren, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:33] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Thank you for having us.
[00:34] Justin Baeder:
Thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm excited to get into this topic and to learn more about the work that you've been doing over the past several years. So you both are currently faculty in higher education. Darren, you're at Simmons University and Scott, you're at Boston College, correct?
[00:50] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Correct.
[00:50] Justin Baeder:
Tell us a little bit about your work on critical consciousness and how you came to work together and ultimately to produce this book.
[00:58] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
So I was a high school English teacher. And when I started working as a faculty member, my research interest really sort of focused on youth civic development. I got really interested in the role that schools could play in fostering adolescents' beliefs about citizenship and sense of social responsibility and commitment to engaging in activism and just really thinking about their responsibilities as citizens themselves. within a community and a broader world. And sort of as, you know, after doing a number of projects sort of within that area for a number of reasons related to the world we're living in around 2012, 2013, I got really interested in the role that schools could play in fostering young people's ability to analyze, navigate, and challenge racism and racial injustice. And I realized that I wanted, you know, my research to kind of move into that area, but I didn't have a lot of expertise in that space of explicitly studying race or racism or racial identity.
[01:47]
And so I reached out to Darren, who who'd been doing that work for quite a while, and asked him if we could team up to try to put something together.
[01:54] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Yeah, and for me, it was a wonderful opportunity because the project that Scott was proposing was essentially the type of research that I had kind of dreamed up when I was a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where Scott and I both were trained. And so there was so much research that showed that students who had strong racial identities were doing well in school and beyond. And I became really interested in what teachers and schools could do to leverage that relationship. And so I was really interested in thinking about what teaching and schooling would look like when you're really intentionally trying to help students develop a strong sense of racial identity, help students understand and navigate and challenge racism. And so for me, it was just, it was a perfect marriage of research interests and actually perspectives, I think, on schooling and these issues as well.
[02:42] Justin Baeder:
Darren, building on your work and on your research, I wonder if we could start by having you just describe for us a little bit, what is critical consciousness? Because I would say in both your cases, you're the serious kind of researcher that does serious academic research. And sometimes as practitioners, we lose track a little bit of some of the terminology. So If you could bring us up to speed a little bit, what is critical consciousness and how does that play into identity development?
[03:09] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Broadly speaking, we're defining critical consciousness as one's ability to recognize and resist oppressive forces in their lives and in their communities. And so we how that relates to issues of racial identity is that the context in which identity, especially racial identity, is being formed is in the context of racism and racial inequality. And so we think it's really important for there's a connection between how people understand how racism and racial inequality happens in our society and And a connection between that and how people, especially folks of color, develop a sense of identity around race is contextualized by that racism and racial inequality. So we see that connection between how people understand the context of race and racism and how they see themselves because it's bound within that context.
[04:07] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Thinking about this from the perspective of educators, and I was a high school English teacher prior to joining the faculty at BC. And for me, really, like where this project came from is, you know, in 2012, 2013, after Trayvon Martin was killed and the Black Lives Matter movement started to rise, you started to see a lot of articles in newspapers and magazines and on the radio about the role that parents of color were playing in in preparing their children to navigate and challenge a world that's filled with racial inequity. And I think I was paying a lot of attention to those articles and pieces in part because I was becoming a parent for the first time. But also as a school person, I started to ask myself, well, what's the role of schools in doing this work? If we know that sort of a young person's ability to thrive is dependent upon maybe A, their academic sort of skills, but also the non-academic skills that allow them to sort of move through the world successfully, then what is it that schools should be doing to
[04:57]
to help young people of color be ready to navigate and challenge a world where racism and racial inequity are persistent and pernicious.
[05:05] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
I think from a developmental psychology perspective, we are interested in the mixed messages that I think young folks are probably receiving around issues of racial identity. On the one hand, messages that say, you know, it doesn't matter what race you are, it just matters how hard you work, the meritocracy issue. And we get those messages. And on the other hand, you turn on the television or you walk out your front door and you see evidence to the contrary. And so we can understand that would be very confusing for young folks trying to understand who they are in this context. And so that was another layer to one of our purposes behind this research, to help adults work in schools, to help students navigate that process of figuring out who they are in this world, in this country, in this context.
[05:49] Justin Baeder:
So I'm hearing a little bit of a theme of teaching students to figure out how to stand up for themselves and how to stand up against injustice and how to, as you said, I think navigate is a great word there. And you've been working with a number of schools over the past few years with their students to explore that topic of the book, as the title says, Schooling for Critical Consciousness. So take us a little bit into the work that you've been doing in high school. So this is primarily with high schools that you've been working.
[06:21] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
So, you know, Darren sort of gave you a definition of critical consciousness, right, which is the ability, you know, kind of the ability to kind of recognize oppressive social forces like racism and to feel committed to navigate and challenge those forces, to feel sort of able to, you know, to do that. And sort of the original scholar who was kind of writing about who coined that term critical consciousness is this Brazilian philosopher. philosopher Paulo Freire who you know sort of who sort of argued that that actually should be the primary purpose of education for youth from marginalized groups and and interestingly Freire sort of argued that there was a Singular sort of pedagogical approach to doing it like he said like if you're teaching for critical consciousness you use this sort of Particular sort of pedagogical approach that he called a problem posing and he sort of wrote, you know Many books about sort of this is how you do it One of the things that was interesting to me as a sort of a scholar, you know, and Freire was writing primarily in the 1970s. And his book has been, you know, his books have been very influential and so on and so forth.
[07:12]
But, you know, in sort of the contemporary in the world we live in today, there are lots and lots of educators who I think are interested in the work of helping prepare young people to navigate and challenge racial inequity. But they're coming at it from a variety of different sort of educational perspectives, right? Like they're not necessarily following directly in Freire's footsteps. So we were interested to reach out to schools that sort of came out of different pedagogical orientations. That were interested in this work, but they were doing it in different ways. And to look at how those different approaches impacted the young people they were working with.
[07:41]
And so when I say like different pedagogical approaches, one of the schools in our study was a member of the Expeditionary Learning School and Community, which comes out of sort of the outward bound model. Another school that we studied was a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, which takes kind of a habits of mind approach to teaching and learning that comes out of sort of Ted Sizer's work at Brown in the 1980s. you know, in the 1980s. Another school that we were studying took what's known as a no excuses approach, which is sort of a highly structured sort of strict disciplinary environment, you know, and so on and so forth. Another school took sort of an action civics approach, which is sort of this experiential civics work. And another school took, you know, was very deliberately patterning itself after Paulo Freire's work and using his problem posing approach.
[08:21]
And so our goal was really to kind of study how these different approaches were impacting young people and not with the idea of, saying, okay, this is the school that's doing the best, but rather to sort of see if there were practices, like, you know, if there were practices that we could find sort of that individual, that one particular approach was using that might be useful to, you know, to educators across the, you know, across sort of the pedagogical spectrum.
[08:47] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
We found a few different things. And I think we, to back up, to build on Scott's last answer, I don't think We thought there was going to be a way that this was going to look. We pretty much assumed there would be different ways and that each of them would be effective in their own ways. So we wanted to make that clear. But I think in terms of things that we found, I think I think largely if we go back to that definition of critical consciousness, I mean, you think about it as the ability to both recognize and then resist against oppressive forces. I would say that without getting too oversimplistic, and I might be doing that right now, that I think some schools for a variety of reasons tended to put more of their focus on the recognition piece, the analysis piece, helping students understand like what, is racism, what does it look like, how do you know it when you see it, what are its components, right, that kind of thing, versus other schools that might have focused more on the resistance part of it, which I think had more to do with actions, behaviors, dispositions that were aimed at, at the very least, helping students, going back to the word, navigate the obstacles or the challenges that might be present once you recognize that racism is there.
[10:05]
or more towards the other end of the spectrum, which we thought it was sort of in line with this notion of resisting, which was, you know, actions and behaviors, dispositions that will help transform the conditions that racism and other forces of oppression were kind of reproducing. And so I guess that's along with the way of saying some focus more on the analytical skills, some others focus more on behavioral, dispositional, organizational skills. None of the schools did any of them exclusively, but we found that schools tended to lean towards one side of that spectrum or the other. And I think there's nuance within that spectrum that can be lost by only seeing it as analyzing and resisting and recognizing, but I think that's the best way to explain it for right now.
[10:53] Justin Baeder:
So I think there's a little bit of hesitation on the part of educators to bring up big issues that affect student lives, but that we don't personally necessarily have a great deal of ability to control. There's a fear that if we talk about racism, then we may end up just making ourselves depressed and making students feel demoralized because we don't really know what to do about that. So talk to us a little bit about the agency side and getting students to actually be empowered to make changes and to advocate for themselves and to advocate for changes in the systems that they're working within.
[11:28] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
A question that also comes up in this regard is whether students of color learning about racism will then become apathetic or why would I try if racism is so pervasive? Why should I even do school or whatever? And what we found is that when you couple students' awareness of these issues with skills, be it analytical or otherwise, to be able to have some agency to do something about it, then not only do they not become apathetic, on the contrary, they become quite engaged. So even if you're just worried about the level of, will students be engaged? We think that will happen. I think the other tension that we surface is that...
[12:07]
sometimes the dispositions and behaviors that one would need to practice in order to resist systemic oppression doesn't necessarily fall in line with the dispositions, behaviors, code of conduct, norms that we have for how students should be interacting with the institution, right? So in other words, like, We're saying, what if their awareness of racism helps them realize that there might be racism happening in schools? And then they turn their energies towards the school. What I think this means for educators and administrators is reorienting their sense of authority with their students in ways that are reasonable. So what I'm saying is, you don't have to cede authority to students just because they're the students and they know what's going on and therefore let's just let them do whatever they want.
[12:58]
But on the other hand, I do think that, especially to the extent that either the teachers themselves are uncomfortable or don't know enough about some of these issues, what's going on in their students' lives, right? And or making sure that all these, the stuff that they're learning doesn't backfire and then the students then see the teachers themselves as enacting the very behaviors that they were supposed to be tearing down. It requires, in ways that make sense with the particular school cultures, a more reciprocal approach relationship with between students and administrators. Again, what that looks like is going to look really different than in like, for example, a no excuses charter school, then, you know, maybe like a frarian, you know, kind of school. But no matter what, it does require you to be really intentional about as adults and thinking about what kind of relationship as educators, right, are we going to have with our students?
[13:54]
Are we going to be merely, you know, depositors of information, sort of banking model of education? Are we just here to like deposit information in our students' heads? Or do they come with information? Do they come with expertise that we need to honor and figure out how to marry those together in ways that will push this entire educational project forward?
[14:15] Justin Baeder:
I wonder what your thoughts are on what our desired outcomes should be. What should we hope students are able to do and what should we hope students learn as a result of this process? I can picture well-intentioned educators trying to have these conversations and get students to do this kind of work, but ending up feeling a little bit frustrated. Like maybe we got, you know, we got everybody kind of fired up, but now we made a poster and what do we do with that? Like that's not quite the outcome we wanted students to take with them into their lives. So what have you seen schools striving for in terms of outcomes?
[14:48]
Like what kinds of students do we want to produce as a result of this work?
[14:53] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Is it okay if I jump in here, Scott? Great. I think that was a nice distinction, I think, that we saw between some of the schools as well that kind of I don't think mapped out necessarily easily on different typologies, but I would say that, especially in terms of thinking about critical consciousness and this notion of, you know, what does success look like? I think some schools had what I would call, what I would describe as sort of a beat the odds disposition or orientation, which is that success will come when you meet a bar, get a certain grade, get a certain score, get into college, sort of become the outlier or the exception to the kind of statistical rule that might be influenced by race, right?
[15:43]
So in other words, getting into college is the success. You got that high SAT score, which is higher than the average, right? You got into the college, which nobody expected you to do. Once you get there, that's the success. I think other schools...
[15:58]
were also interested in getting their students into college or post-secondary life and then had mechanisms and processes to follow them through college, right, through when they were gone. So I do think there were some folks who had an orientation of, yes, getting them to successfully complete school. But then I think the orientation that was probably most meaningful and I think different from the very first one I mentioned was an orientation that success comes when you get the – sort of the tools, the privileges, the power that comes with, you know, going to college or getting that post, you know, whatever comes after high school and then bringing that back to your community to effectively transform your community, whatever that means, you know, your city, your neighborhood, your school, whatever. Right. But that, that notion of success happens when you have used those privilege, use the privileges and power that you've gained to then like help the next, um,
[16:51]
help the next, uh, uh, generation or your, or the rest of your community. I think none of those, none of those are, all of those are great goals and I can see how all those are reasonable, um, measures of success for schools, but you can see how they're different, right? Some, some, some have, uh, more of a future, even a further future orientation, um, in terms of thinking about success than some other schools that might've framed it more along the lines of, of, taking this knowledge that you're that we're that we're helping you develop around race and racism and then get and then using that to get into college and being successful there.
[17:30] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Maybe I just have to be like just a couple like if I just sort of answer as concretely as I could, like what might a successful outcome look like in terms of schooling for critical consciousness? Like so if you think about our sort of framework of analyze, like you're a bit like students ability to analyze, navigate and challenge racial inequity. So a student who is good at analyzing racial inequity, I think a positive outcome there is that as they're sort of moving through the world, whether in high school or beyond, as they encounter obstacles that racism, racial inequity put in their pathways, a critically conscious student is not saying, oh, that's my fault, or that's my family's fault, or that's my identity group's fault. They're actually recognizing, oh, this is racism, or this is a system of oppression that That has put this obstacle in front of me like and recognizing that is the first is a key step in being able to navigate or challenge that obstacle. Right. Because if you if you sort of just perceive yourself to blame or your identity group to blame to be, you know, to be at fault, then you wouldn't be motivated to take the next step to strategize about how to get around that or knock that obstacle right over.
[18:30]
And so I think that's sort of an outcome we'd like to see from like an analysis standpoint. In terms of navigating, you know, if I use sort of a college example, for instance, you know, I think one of the things that motivated a bunch of the schools that we were studying to sort of become sort of more committed to fostering students' critical consciousness is that students in their school would graduate and they would move on to college and then they would come back to visit and they would tell their former teachers and their former administrators, you know, I felt really academically prepared for college, but no one told me what to do when you have a racist roommate. Or no one told me what to do when I'm sitting in a seminar in college and someone makes a comment that sort of makes assumptions about sort of the intelligence of people of my race or like lumps together race and class into sort of one amorphous statement and so on and so forth. And so I think that the educators in the schools we were studying kind of realized that, oh, like if our commitment is sort of our students going on to thrive in college and beyond,
[19:24]
Like there's academic skills, but there's non-academic skills as well. And then last but not least, to your point about sort of like how do you, you know, to your initial question about sort of, well, like what does it look like to sort of learn to challenge racial inequity? You know, one of the schools in our study, I mean, and this seems like in some ways is a very small thing, but I think there were a lot of lessons there. Like in one of the schools in our study in a ninth grade class, like they were studying Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States. And the final assessment for the unit was to write a letter to your elected representative sort of, articulating your beliefs about what a just relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico would be. And students had to draw on evidence from their unit to support their claims and so on and so forth.
[20:03]
But they wrote those letters and they sort of worked on those letters and mailed them off. And of course, when you write a letter to an elected representative, you get a response. I mean, you get a genuine response from that representative's office. And I think that that process You know, I think that process was really illuminating for those ninth graders that like they can reach out to the A that they can reach out to an elected representative and that that office will respond to them. And, you know, and of course, like that doesn't mean that you automatically get changed. But of course, like that's how activism works, period, that like it's a it's a process.
[20:31]
I think that even that very small assignment in a ninth grade class in a school that, you know, that, you know, that we were studying, you know, I think that was part of the process of helping young people sort of develop the tools to engage in challenging racial.
[20:43] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
If I can just add one more thing, because I really appreciate Scott's answer. I think what makes something critical consciousness versus just consciousness, we could have conversations about race and racism that would necessarily fall into the realm of critical consciousness. I think the defining features of the critical piece are sort of an analysis of systematic power and oppression. So to Scott's earlier point, if you're only seeing things through the lens of like, Oh, so-and-so just doesn't like me because they have their own idiosyncratic little ideas and prejudices about things. Like, we wouldn't necessarily constitute that as a critical consciousness. We understood that individuals' actions within the context are embedded within a larger system that produces, yes, interpersonal interactions.
[21:30]
Right. Structural interactions. Right. That is what constitutes critical consciousness to us. So it has to be that analysis of power and privilege on a systemic level to really, from our perspective, to bring it to the level of critical consciousness.
[21:47] Justin Baeder:
So I'm thinking about our audience of school administrators who may be, you know, overseeing this work that teachers are doing with students and maybe hearing about it, perhaps secondhand, and maybe have some concerns about, you know, having students challenge systems that perhaps are oppressive and at the same time... if there is a system in place in a school, as leaders, we're responsible for that. And we maybe are even complicit in any problems that that system is creating for our students. So as administrators, how can we see this work and not be threatened by this work and find the value and the necessity of this work for our students?
[22:23] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
There are a few tensions that you've kind of have unearthed in doing this work from like an educator and administrator perspective, right? One is that, you know, it is scary to talk about racism, think about how it might be happening, especially if we're thinking about how it's happening in the lives of our students, especially if that might be, you know, happening within, I don't know, the schools that, you know, in the institutions that we might be working in, right? And so that is, I think that that's scary to take on. I think from our perspective, I don't know if we cover this, you know, so head on in the book, but we, the way we see this is that racism is a system, right? It's a system that goes in spite of people's good intentions, right? And so I think a lot of people's fears of taking on this issue is fear of being, as you just said, implicated in racism, Right.
[23:13]
And sort of getting branded with like you are the grand mover. Right. You are the reason that this is happening. And so I think my response to a lot of and I do a lot of work with educators around this. My response to folks like that is that that's a reasonable fear. Right.
[23:28]
And a reasonable reason to not, you know, to be scared to do this work. And that racism as a system is so powerful and has been going on. for so long that it's really bigger than any one of us. You know what I mean? And I understand the way that you might be like, well, I don't want to be implicated in this. We're all implicated in it.
[23:46]
You know, I heard the notion of this being disruptive to the way that we do schools. And that makes sense to me too. And I would also argue that the way that we're doing schools is not disrupting, you know, so-called achievement gaps or equity gaps or the systematic, you know, racial inequalities that we're seeing in schools. And so I would say, Don't worry as much about being implicated in it. We're all implicated in it with different levels of power and privilege. But it's more about what are we going to do to disrupt it?
[24:15]
And the only way it's going to be disrupted is through intentional work around this. And to your point, if it's not happening at the administrator level, it's got to happen at the administrator level. It has to happen at the level of the leaders. Because if the leadership isn't behind it and the leaders aren't holding people accountable for it, It will be that uncomfortable experience that we all have had in schools where somebody comes in and says, we're going to have to talk about race and racism and how bad it is and how we shouldn't be doing it. And then we all go, yeah, that's wrong. And then nothing else happens after that because you've attended the professional development, you've attended the assembly, the leadership.
[24:49]
There's no follow up steps. It's just, you know, do your best. And that's that. So the administrators need to take the leadership role on this. It's not going to be effective if they don't. And by the way, the last thing I'll say is because it's such a systematic issue, when the administrators are on board, when the teachers are on board, when everybody's on board, it's still effective.
[25:10]
super, super hard to make it actually work. We had a constitution, which then we had a bill of rights, which then we had a set of voting rights, you know, acts, right, to actually do, to try and achieve the ideals, right, of equality. And that same principle holds when we're doing this in any other institutions. It's going to take intentionality and consistent effort to actually make it work. And I know that's hard, but like, to the extent that you're, you know, that we're comfortable with our outcomes, especially on the basis of race and the disparities we're seeing, then we can continue to do work as usual. If you're not comfortable with that, yes, it's going to be, we're going to have to be uncomfortable retooling what it is we're doing to not produce those outcomes.
[25:54] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
And I think I would just add, like, I think the principals and administrators who are sort of going to be interested in sort of schooling for critical consciousness are the ones who sort of say, like, I am committed to the young people I serve thriving. And what are the qualities that are necessary in order to thrive? So it's no coincidence that in our study, for instance, we found that the young people who grew the most in critical consciousness over their four years of high school also finished high school with the highest GPAs. And other researchers have found that young people with higher critical consciousness are more resilient. They have higher self-esteem. They're more academically engaged.
[26:29]
They have higher professional aspirations.
[26:31] Justin Baeder:
So I'm thinking of, say, a suburban high school, you know, large, comprehensive high school that has a lot of AP classes. And, you know, let's say this is a probably majority white high school. And students notice that the representation of different groups in AP classes is not proportional, right? The AP classes do not look like the student population. So thinking from an administrator's perspective, you know, we don't have any sort of formal policies that intentionally skew the makeup of those classes. But the reality is if I go and look in one of those AP classes, it's going to not match the rest of the school.
[27:08]
So through some of the lenses that you present in the book and using some of the tools that the schools that you've worked with have used with their students, what might we expect or hope to happen in this hypothetical suburban high school with AP classes?
[27:24] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
I mean, I think there's lots of answers to this question, but let's start with the students because I think that like, let's sort of imagine the scenario that it's the students who express concern about this, like, which I think would be a terrific thing. Like, I think that from my perspective, like that, that represents sort of an exciting opportunity for, you know, whether it's an English course, or a civics course, or a social science course to say, like, let's, let's explore this, like, let's do some reading about, you know, about sort of, you know, like, you know, implicit biases about just, you know, disproportion, disproportionality, like in, in schools, like, and let's do some research, like about, about what's going on, let's actually, like, let's take a look at the numbers here. And let's look at like the, historical numbers to the point that we can, and let's explore some possibilities for a more equitable system of sort of opportunity to the AP coursework. And I would try to equip the students like to begin the work of sort of like of adjusting whatever it is that's causing this inequitable system, right?
[28:23]
And that could be that maybe the system relies too highly on teacher recommendation for the AP courses, or maybe the system relies too highly on on prerequisites that some students are being given access to and some students aren't, or maybe it's sort of like advertising the courses in a way that gets the word out to a wider portion of the student body. In one of the schools we studied, the civics class was sort of charged each year with identifying an unjust policy in the school handbook and working to change that policy. And they did that by research and presenting to the faculty and sort of proposing a new policy and working to affect change within their school community. And I think that was an incredibly empowering experience for the young people in that school. For instance, one year they worked to change the school's technology policy because they felt like it was outdated and sort of unfair to student learning.
[29:14]
And I think that giving students an opportunity to affect change in their school community greatly impacts their sense of agency to impact change in a broader community. So that's one way of thinking about it, I think.
[29:27] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Yeah, I think we also saw Sort of culminating projects. We saw schools that were like seniors would do culminating basically action research projects, whether it was things that were happening inside the school or in their communities. They would scaffold basically a year long process of doing the research. getting the word out, organizing, creating actual events, creating some sort of public service announcement type of way of getting the, you know, disseminating the information is like another way this can look. Other schools created sort of extracurricular or co-curricular student groups that were basically initiated by students to help them create more spaces for them to explore specific topics and or organize or do action around it. But I think the real defining features, I think, of whether it's co-curricular, curricular, extracurricular, whatever it is, I think the defining features are acknowledging the realities that the students already know, right?
[30:27]
So this is a big deal, especially for students of color who experience racism, experience racial inequality quite normally and regularly. And when schools don't acknowledge that, schools can become a really alien place. I think The mere acknowledgement of these realities can be quite powerful in and of itself, quite affirming and create a space for students to feel like, OK, this is a place where I can bring my whole self. Right. And then the other part of that is, as Scott was saying, we were saying equipping, then giving students tools to analyze and do something about it. Right.
[31:02]
So how that might look. might really depend on what your specific school culture, but it's a notion of, you know, affirming, you know, the realities that they're experiencing and then saying, okay, now what are we going to do about it? And making it as much as possible, a student driven, student centered, student led, um, process.
[31:22] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
It actually, it actually occurs to me that a version of what you asked about actually did occur at one of the schools, which is that sort of the, sort of the reverse in some ways, which is that, so you asked a question about sort of imagine a scenario where, um, where students of color are sort of disproportionately not in the AP classes. At one of the high schools that we were studying, the high school that actually had that civics project in 11th grade, in 12th grade, as sort of Darren mentioned, students were sort of charged with kind of doing a year-long action project of some sort. And a couple of the students, sort of their project focused on the disproportionate suspension of students of color within sort of the school, like sort of arguing that their perception was that the school's disciplinary policies were treating students inequitably. And so they sort of did research on that topic, kind of looked at the data within the school, looked at the sort of the research literature on disproportionality within sort of school disciplinary policies, and then actually sort of made this proposal for sort of implementing a sort of more restorative, a more sort of restorative justice-oriented approach to discipline within the school.
[32:26]
And one of the most impressive things I've sort of seen a student do was, so, you know, these students sort of like did all this work and sort of planned out this sort of what this more restorative justice oriented disciplinary proceed, you know, sort of approach would look like. And then they didn't push for it to be implemented right away. And the young people who were doing this work sort of explained to me that we know that if we push for it too fast, it won't work. Like people, you know, people won't, the teachers won't be ready for it and it won't work. And so what they did is they enlisted 11th graders who the next year would have sort of their own project to do and said, hey, we would love it if like for your project, you'd be willing to kind of like take what we've done and continue moving the ball forward so that sort of educators in the school sort of have kind of the space to adapt to this new way of thinking about disciplinary policies within school.
[33:20]
And I thought that was just an incredibly smart insight on the part of these young people that Like, we want this to succeed. Like, you know, even though we won't be here anymore at this high school because we'll have graduated, you know, we want this to be sort of a legacy that moves forward. And in order to do that, it has to be sort of implemented systematically. And I thought that was fascinating.
[33:39] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
And what impressed me about that example, too, is what I was talking about earlier, the disposition that the school administrators have to have in order to encourage students to find things that they don't like about how the school runs. That is not what we do in schools often. We often frame students as the last people we want to ask about things. how to change schools because we sort of assume they'd be selfish or they don't know enough or they just wouldn't, they'd come up with weird ideas that wouldn't be helpful, which is just completely backwards to me as students are the experts on how schools work. And so I'm struck by the ways that the schools that would scaffold processes for students to unearth things that they didn't find that they thought that they thought they could be improved about schools. And that requires a way of seeing oneself right at, you know, with a sense of, you know, with a sense of like, hey, we're not perfect.
[34:31]
Like things can change. Students can see things that we may not see. And I could understand why a lot of adults might not take on that type of orientation. But I think it's to their peril.
[34:43] Justin Baeder:
So the book is Schooling for Critical Consciousness, Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice. Scott Sider and Darren Graves, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[34:55] Scott Seider & Daren Graves:
Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Take care.
[34:59] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
