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In this episode, I’m thinking about the question: How can I better use a shift in language to connect with the districts, schools, instructional coaches, and teachers already doing this work? To meet the moment of new state civics requirements (which are happening in many states in the northeast—MA, NY, NJ—and I’m sure others), I want to help schools meet new state mandates and do justice-centered work! Civics is About Engagement as “Citizens” Concepts I love from the existing research… Justice-Oriented Citizens (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) Justice-Oriented citizens “know how to examine social, political, and economic structures and explore strategies for change that address root causes of the problem”. There’s a critique of systems of oppression and action to fix them vs. “participatory citizenship” which is more volunteerism (Martell and Stevens, authors of Teaching History for Justice, say It’s the difference between holding a food drive and asking “Why are people hungry?”) Transformative Democratic Citizenship (Banks, 2017) As defined by Banks, this is “the ability to implement and promote policies, actions, and changes that are consistent with values such as human rights, social justice and equality.” Student Leadership (Lyons, Brasof, & Baron, 2020) “Students working collaboratively to affect positive change in their educational environments with support from adults and mechanisms in the school.” What is Justice (to me)? Justice allows all of us to be our full selves. It’s intersectional. There is a presence of a culture of positive peace that enables us all to thrive. Common Pitfalls We limit our work to an “add diversity and stir” approach. We get nervous about making a mistake and wait until something is perfect to act. We also view (and teach) change leadership as an individual endeavor instead of collective civic engagement. How do we support teachers to create really good Civics projects, units, and courses? Support teachers in all content areas (and in all grades) to design summative assessments that give students opportunities to apply whatever content they learned in a way that advances justice. Design PD experiences or staff meetings that enable all staff members to design civics projects that connect to their course content. How do we enable all students to practice civic engagement within our schools and districts? Meaningful opportunities for student leadership. Take a look at your school’s decision-making structures and make sure you have equitable student representation on all committees, including the leadership team. From the research: Mitra and Gross’s Student Voice Pyramid (2009) reflects three levels of student voice: listening to students, youth-adult partnership, and building capacity for student leadership. The earlier levels actually cause more turbulence than higher levels because students are invited to share concerns, but not encouraged to co-create solutions. Partnering with students and families is critical. Half measures (listening without partnering to take action) is not enough. Tips for Implementation Designing Civics Projects: Use department team meetings to align your state’s civics project standards to the department or summative assessment rubric. Help teachers and teams pick a publishing opportunity where student projects are shared. (This could be the school website or the school’s social media accounts.) Coach teachers to think about how to connect civic engagement projects to course content and also leave room for student voice. Student Leadership in Governance: Collect data on the student experience. You can do this through the SLCB Survey linked below or any of the various methods named in the book, Street Data. Invite students onto school committees. Audit these committees for representation (i.e., it’s not just one token student or all of the sports captains, students with straight A grades, or members of Student Council). Support and train students in the tools and skills they can use to be an effective representative for students. To help create space for student leadership in your school or district, I’m sharing my statistically validated Student Leadership Capacity Building survey with you for free. (Use this to measure student perceptions of leadership and civic engagement opportunities in the school!) As another resource, check out my 5-minute tutorial on How to Measure Equity and Student Voice to see how you can personalize the survey for your context. To learn more about the MA Civics Project requirements, I made this short video summary for you. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 112 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerdy out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 1 12 of the time for leadership podcast. Today, I want to talk about a mindset shift for me. So I talk a lot about justice centered education. But what does that actually mean? Right. What does that mean to me and how can I tap into the language already being used? The initiatives already top of mind for leaders and educators in my field. So for me today, we're talking about my shift and my connection to civics education and all the civics mandates that are happening in many states across the northeast. 00:01:12 And how that connects to everything. I always talk about teaching and leading for justice. Let's get into it. So, talking about justice seems divorced from what educators are doing right now. What is top of mind in this moment in many states in the northeastern part of the United States have new civics requirements. They might be civics projects, they might be a course that has new civic standards or revised civic standards. Many states that are grappling with this currently as they record this or have been grappling with this for the last couple of years include Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey. I'm sure there are a tonn of others. And so I'm thinking, how do I shift my language to help and get in front of educators who are grappling with? How do I do this civics thing? Leaders who are trying to support their teachers to create a new civics curriculum and project based curriculum that is rooted in a civics project or what I often call an activist project for students. How do I do this within the political context of everything that's going on? Maybe specifically thinking about the communities that people are in the states that people are in the legal ramifications of certain states and certain communities. 00:02:20 All of this staff is top of mind for people, people are doing this work of reworking their civics and social studies curriculum more broadly. And here I am talking about justice which is absolutely critical, but it's not necessarily connecting the dots for folks who are looking to immediately serve the need of their educators and their curriculum, given the new mandate from the state. So here is what I want to do in this episode, I wanna talk through those connections. I wanna think about next steps. I want to think about bringing in all of the research and, and making these connections really clear. So that when we're doing this work around civics education, we're not just doing the work to meet the mandate, we're doing the work in a way that feels truly aligned to what listeners of this podcast and myself believe that justice centered education is the direction we want to go. It is values aligned. It is why we are in this work. It is what is best for students. So let's think all of that through. So here is where we're gonna start. Civic is fundamentally about engagement, right? 00:03:26 Civic engagement is actually a direction that I was going to go in my dissertation work. It was my initial kind of place that I, that I wanted to study. And then I, I kind of moved more broadly to the student voice field, which is like adjacent to civic engagement. So I have a bunch of research that's just kind of been sitting there and I wanna kind of bring that back in to the work that I do and I think it would be relevant for us in the civics conversation. So civics is about engagement, civic engagement, there are so many definitions of citizens and citizen when I'm gonna speak about citizen in this podcast episode. And more broadly, when I use phrases like citizens, I'm talking about an incredibly broad definition of citizen being a person who resides and participates in a community, not affiliated with legal status or any form of documentation. So citizens as community members and participants in a community. So how do we define, define citizens? There are so many definitions I have always loved and have used in my research in the past Westheimer and Kane's definition, they have four typologies or, or types of citizen. 00:04:32 Theirs that talks about justice oriented citizen is my favorite. So when they talk about justice oriented citizens, they're talking about being able to identify and critique oppressive systems. Westheimer writes that people who do this justice oriented citizens know how to examine social, political and economic structures and explore strategies for change that address root causes of the problem. You know, I love this definition because I love root cause causes and I love thinking about examining those structural pieces. We have to be able to teach students to do that. Yes, it looks different at every level. For many of these civics projects, we are talking about middle and high school levels. Certainly this is something that they are capable of. I think in different ways. This is certainly also possible. And could be happening again in different ways, the language might be slightly different. The level of critique might be slightly different in elementary schools. But it is absolutely possible when we think about this critique of systems of oppression and taking the action to fix them. 00:05:36 This is contrasted with another type of citizenship. According to Westheimer and Ken, they contrasted with participatory citizenship, which I think of as more like volunteerism, Doctor Chris Martel and Doctor Kayleen Stevens, authors of Teaching History for Justice. They were members of our guests on the podcast. Earlier in the show, they say it's the difference between holding the food drive, right? Collecting the cans for people who are hungry. That's participatory citizenship or volunteerism. First is asking why are people hungry? That's thinking about the system that's thinking about the root cause of the problem and ultimately leading for to a different approach to change, right? So when we, we think about change in that sense, we're thinking about how do we solve this underlying why when we figure out why people are hungry, oh, it's because of, you know, not being able to be hired when someone emerges from uh the prison system, for example, because people are, these structures are not in place to support them because they are required to identify that they have been incarcerated. 00:06:48 Like all of these things. Now they can't get a job and now they're hungry and now they can't pay for food all these pieces. Well, what can we do four steps before they get hungry, right. How do we support people who are transitioning from being incarcerated to participating in the community that they now live in? How do they provide for themselves? How do we as a community support them? Right. That's a very different action from collecting food and handing it out. Not at all to say that collecting food and handing it out is bad or problematic, but it certainly isn't sustainable. It isn't getting at the root cause it isn't changing structures and critiquing systems. So justice oriented citizens, that's the type of unit curriculum object that I want teachers to think about. How do we critique the systems, how do we support students to take action that's actually going to make a difference that's going to have a sustainable impact that's going to push back against these notions of doing a volunteer project and calling it a day and going home back to your community that might not have these problems or back to your house. 00:07:55 That doesn't grapple with these questions that doesn't have a sustained connection to the people that you helped in that one moment, right? It it it becomes like this separate activity, it becomes charity, not liberation. When I think about another definition of citizenship that I love is, is from Banks and Martel and Stephen talk about this in their book, Teaching History For Justice. This is Banks 2017. Talks about transformative democratic citizenship. So it is Transformative Democratic Citizenship Banks says it's the ability to implement and promote policies, actions and changes that are consistent with values such as human rights, social justice and equality. So again, thinking about that action, we are actively promoting policies and changes that are consistent with values of human rights, social justice and equality. So there is the presence of that value system that I mentioned earlier that is critical to this type of citizenship when I think about how I define justice, which was going to be the initial kind of thread of this podcast was actually gonna be my definition of justice so that I could share that. 00:09:10 And I'm, I'm happy to do that and I will do that in just a moment. But I think the connections now are the new lens with which I'm looking at this episode and, and talking through this stuff, how does my definition of justice now, I've been holding on to that and you know, ever changing it because I learn new things and it's constantly evolving. How does that connect with all this civics? Talk, all of the new civics project development, the unit development, the curriculum development around civics mandates. So I see justice as first of all central to curriculum design and the student experience and the sense of belonging and all the things that we want justice to me is intersectional. So it is all of our identities it is allowing us to be our full selves, all of us, teachers, students, leaders, all the people and it is allowing us not just a negative piece but a positive piece. So often we talk about peace as like the absence of violence, right? So in positive peace, not only is there an absence of direct and structural violence, there's also a presence of a culture and of systems working together to enable all of us to thrive. 00:10:23 So it's not just the absence of violence, it's the presence of the people of the culture of the systems that enable us to thrive that presence of thriving in all the things that go into enabling that to be true. And of course, again, it's intersectional. Let's not forget that piece. So we're not just looking at one part of identity and saying we're going to have justice and positive peace for people who hold this identity. We're thinking about all the layers are multitude of identities that we all hold. This is intersectional justice. There is positive peace. I've talked through in previous podcast episodes, many common pitfalls of doing this work of justice center curriculum design, for example. And we often strive to just add diversity and stir, but we often get nervous about making a mistake. And so we wait until something is perfect before we launch it. But learning is absolutely central to this. So I would say that justice also requires the capacity to learn the capacity to be open, to change, to be curious, to be reflective, to learn from missteps, to learn from people to learn in community and collectively make change. 00:11:46 I think in a curriculum lens we often teach change thinking about. For example, the Black freedom Movement and the civil rights movement, we teach change as individuals led this change. We have individual heroes in the book, Teaching History for Justice Martel and Stevens talk about this as as not the direction we want to go, right? We we need more of a collective activism, collective movements, movement building. That is what sustainable change comes from. So how do we do that? How do we replicate that in our communities and our educational spaces in our classrooms, in our curriculum and the way that we enable students to govern and engage in share leadership practices in our schools and districts? That is what I grapple with, right? And I think that is very connected to civic engagement and civics curriculum and civics projects. Another piece that I want to pull in from research is my definition of student leadership that I put forth initially in my dissertation and then later and publish articles which is student leadership is students working collaboratively. So again, we have that collective movement building students working collaboratively to affect positive change in their educational environments. 00:12:57 So we're specifically defining in this definition because it's student leadership, not just youth leadership, we're defining the community as the educational environment. So they're working to affect positive change in their educational environments with support from adults and mechanisms in the school. And I added this piece because in all of the research that I was doing, I was realizing that support piece is critical, the structures piece is essential to my dissertation and my research because without it, we don't have those sustainable changes. We don't have effective meaningful student leadership. We have kind of this invitation for student voice where we kind of check the box and say we asked students, but it's not like a meaningful shift in practice. It's not an authentic partnership with students. And that's the huge difference, right? When we're enabling students to have meaningful civics projects up a unit or a course that enables students to find and tap into their inner leader, right? 00:13:59 We all are capable of being leaders. We all have that innate ability when we equip students with the skills and the opportunities, not just one but multiple opportunities over the course of their academic career. Over the course of a unit, we enable them to have those opportunities repeatedly and we bolster those skills and provide the different tools they might need and the access points, they might need to be able to enact change that is meaningful and important to them. That's student leadership, that's a good civics project. So those are the questions that should be running through our mind as we think about supporting teachers to create really good civics projects and really good civics units and civics courses. The other piece of this that I want to add before I get to, to more research here is this can be and, and many of these states who have put forth these mandates have said this can be and should be expanded beyond the typical social studies domain or content area. Civics projects can live in math classes, they can live in social studies, they can live in pe classes that's not usually talked about because, you know, maybe some students don't have access to pe or don't have a lot of time in pe compared to maybe a core course, but it can, right? 00:15:20 So think about how each content area can be supported to do this. Think about staff P D that is about civics projects that is content agnostic and great agnostic where everyone can tap in to the strategies and the approaches and the mindset shifts that enable us to do civics well throughout the school in every course. Wouldn't that be cool if every single project in every single grade in every single content area was a civics project was an opportunity to make change. Now, if I take five courses and I have four units or four summit of assessments per year, I have 20 opportunities to make meaningful change in my community every single year as one student. And now we say, you know, maybe there's a 1000 students in that school or in that district or however big your district is, that's 20,000 opportunities for meaningful change every single year, right? We are going to move the needle. That is what I think is possible and that is what I want to shift. When I think about my impact in doing justice centered work and connecting to that civics movement and connecting the people right now, the leaders who are thinking about how do I make sure we comply with the civics mandate and also do it well, do it connected to our values, we tap into those resources around justice centered curriculum design and teaching and leading for justice. 00:16:42 That's it. That's the vision. And I also want to think about, you know, the mechanisms here, I think there's two mechanisms. I've been talking a lot about curriculum design. So I do think that student voice and student leadership that is the mechanism for attaining justice and sustainable justice in school communities. You can do this through activists or civics projects as summit of assessments in course units. You can also do this as another mechanism through decision making structures and equitable student representation on leadership committees. And I have had a whole series of the podcast episodes before about how to do this. And I have a whole course on this, like I've talked enough about it that I don't need to talk more about it now. But there are multiple avenues here as a leader, you can think about governance structures, you can also think about supporting the curriculum. So think about where you fit and where you want to support where you have questions, what questions those might be, feel free to send those. To me. Another research based idea that taps into both of these is that da and came up with this una voice pyramid. And I've talked about it a little bit before on the podcast and in my blogging, she partnered with another researcher. 00:17:53 So Mitra and Gross together came up with the student voice pyramid that reflects not just the three levels of student voice she initially came up with but mapped onto a turbulence theory. So me talks about at the bottom of the pyramid listening to students middle of the pyramid, youth at all partnership and at the top of the period pyramid building capacity for student leadership, the earlier levels, the lower levels of just listening to students can actually cause more turbulence than higher level level ideas because building capacity for student leadership actually will decrease turbulence because there is active, I don't like the word empowerment. There is an active connection to inherent student agency partnering with students in that middle piece is critical because we are co creating solutions. When students are able to actually take action to make the change, they're able to collaborate with one another, with their peers, with adults, with the systems and structures that are present in an education community. 00:19:07 That's how they decrease the turbulence, they calm down because they're like, ok, action is being taken. OK? We couldn't do that thing that I wanted to do. But I now understand why because someone actually sat down with an hour with me for an hour, invited me to a meeting and I now know why I understand the legal parameters we're working within or if that's the case, I fired up the whole team to get excited about pushing back against that law, right? Or whatever it is, they're part of the conversation, not just someone you're listening to, they're not just filling out a survey and never hearing from you again. And now they're just frustrated, right? That increases turbulence. So let's talk about a couple of things you can do before you go because this solo show is getting a little long. Here we go. Tips for your civics project design. Use department t meaning to align your state's civics project standards to the department or summit assessment rubric. So if everyone has their own course rubric, make sure they align each of those assessment rubrics to the civics project standards. I think it's way easier to just design a department wide rubric. 00:20:14 It's part of my process for curriculum design anyways, it fosters alignment. It's easier to do this task when you're just aligning to one versus like 10, but a line in whatever way you do that next tip pick a publishing opportunity. You could offer the school website or the school's social media accounts as mechanisms for sharing student projects. So once they've created something, they created a short documentary, they created a podcast, they are calling for a legislator to pass this bill and they need signatures. Whatever it is, use the school opportunities to share with the wider community, the school platforms to enable the students to reach a wider audience. Beyond the the class finally connect to content and leave room for student voice. So connect those civics projects, the current events, the things that are happening in students' lives to the the course content to the student experience of, of of life. 00:21:18 To like I said, current events news, bring all that together, make sure that the the civics stuff that they're learning, whether it's the skills, the content, make sure all that stuff they can apply it, they can use it to do what they want to do because they're choosing the action or the subtopic. For example, if you have a pe activism unit, right? They're doing some sort of civics project for pe let's say that they are really interested in um having access to a basketball court because that is what a lot of the students want to do. That is a fun form of exercise for people and there is no gym space in their school, right? That is gonna be really interesting to the students who like to play basketball, for students who do not like to play basketball, they might go in a completely different direction. They might talk about, um, equipping students with, I don't know, this is data technology but like a Fitbit or some sort of way to track and maybe even compete socially with other students in terms of ways that we could like, actually have like a healthy competition in tracking steps or something. 00:22:31 Um, because they, they enjoy walking around, they maybe aren't sports people, but they like moving their bodies and they, they want kind of a social way to do this and, and motivate them, right? So maybe they are petitioning the school board for some money for this social software. All right, those are my tips for civic project design. I'm always happy to collaborate on some brainstorming civic projects. We're gonna have a whole series coming up in, I think June and July definitely some summer time where we are in a live brainstorm unit, like activist based units or like project based like make a difference units in like quote unquote real time. But during the recording of the podcast, so we're gonna have some guests on, it's gonna be good stuff. Now, tips for student leadership and governance structure, collect data. So again, think about me pyramid, we don't just want to collect data, we want to do something with it, partner with students, enable them to be leaders, but we do have to collect data in some way so that we know how to partner with students effectively. I have a survey that I will link s today's freebie. So again, freebies for every episode are located at the blog post for the episode. 00:23:36 This will be Lindsay beth lions dot com slash blog slash 112. So it's episode 1 12, Lindsay beth lions dot com slash blog slash 1 12. So there you'll be able to find this is a research validated survey. You're also going to want to check out street data pod or the book Street Data. Absolutely love the methods and they're really good for collecting quote unquote street level data from students. Also invite students onto school committees, not just the leadership committee, all the committees, curriculum committee, discipline committee, all the committees think about how well each student identity is represented. Don't just have one token student, but think about do we have equal numbers of students and adults? Like that's the kind of shift we want support and train students in the tools and skills that they can use to be a meaningful representative for other students, for the students in their community or identity groups or peer groups. This is really challenging work and this episode has gone long already. But this is just kind of a mindset shift a starter for thinking about civics and how we live it out in our curriculum and in our government processes in the school. 00:24:47 What I love about the governance structure of peace is that this is the way that civics comes to life. This is the way that we live out civics in how we do things and what we teach and how we invite students to apply what they learn. It's all civics, it's all civic engagement in service of that justice oriented citizen from West Timer and Kaine or that transformative democratic citizenship from banks. Make sure you check out the freebie. That's the S L C B survey, the student Leadership Capacity Building survey. There's also a youtube video tutorial. That's less than five minutes that I will link to the blog post as well that tells you how to use it and what it looks like. I will also link to what are the requirements for the Massachusetts Civics project with a short five minutes or less youtube video that will be released in March. So it will be out by the time of the airing of this episode, check out all the things and please tell me how you are using this. How are you thinking about civics in your school? What have you done so far to implement the projects and all the state mandates? What questions do you still have? If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my life, coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. 00:25:53 I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students we, we current events into course content and amplify student voices which skyrockets engagement and academics. It, it energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me. Grab a spot on my calendar at w W W dot Lindsay beth lions dot com slash contact. Until next time leaders continue to think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode. Quotes:
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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