Partner with BIPOC Youth to Make School Better for Everyone
Originally published on Medium, January 2022
Ashley Kannan cannot recall one positive interaction with a teacher during his time as a student in grades K-8. He describes his experience of elementary and middle school as living in the shadows and falling through the cracks.
During his first few weeks of high school, Kannan, who is Southeast Asian, encountered a popular school counselor in the hallway. As he describes it,
“It was 7am, I was sitting in my locker alone. She walked past me and said good morning and asked how I was doing. She did not know me, but something about how I answered her — not rudely, but evasively — signaled to her that I was in need of connection. She invited me into her office even though I was not her student. She took the time to have a conversation with me in a way that was not shaming. She didn’t want anything from me, she wanted to know who I was. Through that exchange, she provided a sense of warmth — a safe haven — in a setting [school] where I had never experienced any of that. She saw me and over the years always went out of her way to acknowledge me by name. If every adult took that stance, I don’t know how we would fail kids.”
Now in his 24th year of teaching, Kannan’s commitment and inspiration as a leader for equity is born out of his own experience as a student in Oak Park, IL, the same district where he now teaches. While he has always been a fierce advocate for students, making his classroom a safe haven where young people are invited to sign their names on his desk and create graffiti art on the classroom door, he has pushed himself to dig deeper into learning about his role in creating not just caring, but equitable learning experiences and outcomes.
The catalyst for this shift was and continues to be his students. Five years ago, a class of students pushed him to think critically with them about the social justice issues impacting their lives — racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, classism — in and outside of school. At their request, he sponsored a student-led LGBTQ club, the first of its kind in his district, focused on creating a safe space for students in an otherwise unsafe environment. This work spread into his classroom where he welcomed what he calls “students’ acts of resistance” to an institution that did not validate their experience.
“The LGBTQ club made me realize, I can hone in on my teaching craft as much as possible, but it will not be enough if I don’t recognize and respond to the ways that the institution of school grinds students. They wanted and needed a place to make sense of the world they were living in and their own role in leading change.”
An important dimension of Kannan’s evolution as a teacher and leader has been a willingness to embrace his own vulnerability, something he did not see in his own teachers when he was a student. During his first year of teaching he recalls telling his students,
“I am not good at this yet. I need you to help me help you.”
That willingness to be vulnerable, to take action — even when and especially when we don’t have all of the answers, is a critical practice when leading for equity in complex systems such as school districts, in which solutions to equity challenges can rarely be known in advance and where ongoing innovation, reflection, and adjustments are required to make progress.
As part of Kannan’s school district’s participation in the National Equity Project’s Building Equitable Learning Environments (NEP-BELE) District Network, Kannan was asked to administer Elevate, a student experience survey developed by Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS). Teachers use Elevate to gather qualitative data from their students about six research based learning conditions shown to be leading indicators of student engagement and learning (PERTS, n.d.):
Teacher Caring
Classroom Community
Meaningful Work
Feedback for Growth
Affirming Identities
Student Voice
The results from Kannan’s first Elevate survey were sobering. While 94% of students indicated they felt Mr. Kannan cared about them, only 9% felt that what they were learning was meaningful. This is hard data for any educator to take in, and it represents a critical choice point. This was his opportunity to lean into the discomfort of hearing the truth from students, to acknowledge their needs were not being met by him, and exercise creative courage in his response. Kannan conferenced with each of his students, shared the data, and asked,
“What would make learning more meaningful for you? What will make it more interesting?”
The students generated ideas about content that mattered to them including an exploration of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on their communities and lives and just as importantly, expressed a desire to collaborate in the design of how they engaged in learning.
Too often, adults receive feedback and think it is up to us to solve or fix the problem: we review data, identify challenges, and work with other adults to set about making change. This misses a key opportunity to partner with students to co-design approaches that meet their academic and social emotional needs. Educators in the NEP-BELE District Network begin by listening to the experiences of students currently experiencing the greatest harm in the system as it is — young people who experience marginalization based on their racial or cultural group or other social factors. In Oak Park, there is a long-standing pattern of Black students being least well served in schools and for this reason, Kannan leaned in to learn from Black students in particular about what they were experiencing and what they needed.
When we listen to young people who are not experiencing belonging and success in the current system of school, and co-design both micro- and macro-innovations in partnership with them, trust is built, healing occurs, and the changes implemented benefit all young people. Kannan sees this approach as creating systemic change from the ground up, which is what he has done in his classroom by partnering with his students in an on-going reflection and co-design process.
Educators in the NEP-BELE District Network work collaboratively across roles of student, teacher, administrator, parent and community member to address complex challenges by embracing a set of Liberatory Design Mindsets (Anaissie et al., 2021) to guide the change process:
Practice Self-Awareness
Take Action to Learn
Exercise Creative Courage
Work to Transform Power
Attend to Healing
Work with Fear and Discomfort
Seek Liberatory Collaboration
Focus on Human Values
Embrace Complexity
Recognize Oppression
Build Relational Trust
Share, Don’t Sell
Liberatory Design Mindsets (Anaissie et al., 2021)
These mindsets are helpful provocations and reminders about how we need to “be” together to lead beneficial change toward equity in our schools, districts, and communities. They are focused on the adaptive, social-emotional, and political dimensions to change that are often overlooked or undervalued in traditional top down efforts. Practicing these mindsets together helps us access and catalyze the collective intelligence that exists in all living systems, but is often constrained by hierarchical approaches to systemic change. These ways of working and being are not typically incentivized (and are often explicitly and implicitly discouraged) in our institutions, but they are what is needed to co-design the next system — one that creates safety, agency, and connection for every student and leads to a more just and humanized system for everyone.
In May 2020, Kannan heard two recent high school graduates, Ana De Almeida Amaral and Izadora McGawley, share their story of starting and teaching the first ever Ethnic Studies class at their high school in Chula Vista, California (Amaral and McGawley, n.d.) and the profound impact the class had on them and their peers. Something clicked for Kannan. He felt called to create an African American studies course. As he reflects now,
“I just decided. I am going to teach this. Because I can’t NOT do it.”
By 10 P.M. that night he had written the first five weeks of the course. By the end of the summer, the curriculum for the new course was complete and full of everything his students had been asking for — literature, music, film, participatory action research — all focused on themes of contribution, resistance, solidarity, and joy in African American history. The course launched as a pilot in fall 2020 and even in the context of hybrid learning, was an overwhelming success. Students engaged in empathy interviews with their peers, participated in community service that mattered to them and were actively engaged in leading discussions, contributing content, and steering the direction of their own learning. As one student shared, “We actually looked forward to that class every day — because we were really learning and we could be ourselves.”
When the district’s Chief Academic Officer, Dr. Eboney Lofton, visited the class in October, she knew immediately that it was, in her words, “the real deal.” The room was buzzing with energy, dialogue, and debate. This raised the question of how the district could ensure that all students had access to the kind of learning that was taking place in the African American studies class. As a result, the Chief Academic Officer partnered with Kannan and the department chair at another middle school to launch a curriculum restructuring effort in July of 2021 in which all social studies teachers in 6th to 8th grades are now collaborating to redesign both the curriculum and the approach to teaching social studies district wide.
Kannan is quick to emphasize that swapping out a few books by White authors for authors of color is not the point; it is the relationship and collaboration with students to identify what they want to learn and how they want to learn it that is most important and most impactful. As he says,
“If you change the content, but don’t change how you are in relationship with students, you aren’t really changing anything.”
By listening to, partnering with, and supporting the leadership of students — particularly students who are most marginalized in the current system — we can identify and eliminate practices that cause harm and create learning environments that are responsive to what young people from across the country are rightfully demanding:
More teachers and administrators who share their racial and cultural identities;
Curriculum that includes more complete and rich histories of who they and their families are;
More autonomy and agency in choosing what they learn and how they learn it;
Participation and power in decisions that impact them; and
A focus on collective well-being including physical, mental, emotional, community health.
Youth Demands from NEP Youth Liberation Symposium, August 2021 | Image by Ink Factory
Deep equity work is messy and uncertain, but if we are willing to embrace the complexity together, with creative courage, the possibilities for our collective future are extraordinary.
References
Amaral, Ana De Almeida and Izadora McGawley. (n.d.) Ethnic Studies: A Movement. https://advocatingforequity.weebly.com/our-class.html. Retrieved August 31, 2021.
Anaissie, T., Cary, V., Clifford, D., Malarkey, T. & Wise, S. (2021). Liberatory Design. https://www.liberatorydesign.com.
Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS). (n.d.). Elevate. https://www.perts.net/elevate. Retrieved August 31, 2021.
About the Authors
Kathleen Osta, LCSW has worked to support the healthy growth and development of young people and advance racial and social justice for over 25 years as a teacher, social worker, coach, and nonprofit leader. She currently serves as a Managing Director at the National Equity Project. Listen to her discuss this story on the 180 Podcast: What Is an Equitable Learning Environment and How Can Your School Build One?
Ashley Kannan has been a teacher for the last 24 years, 22 years in Oak Park School District 97, teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth grades at Percy Julian Middle School. He also serves as the 7th/8th grade Girls’ Basketball Coach and is a faculty sponsor for Rainbow Tribe, Julian’s LGTBQ+ safe space.
This article is dedicated to Marge Zuba, a rebel leader who provided safe haven to both of us and so many more.