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In this episode, I’m sharing ideas for how you might approach conversations about the violence in Gaza within your schools and classrooms. Many adults have told me they do not feel equipped enough to facilitate or engage in this conversation, however world events are happening and impacting adults and youth. At a minimum we should make space for students to share their emotional responses and experiences related to this trauma.
And as Michelle MiJung Kim wrote, “Even if you don’t understand the full history, you can draw on your knowledge of power dynamics, characteristics of white supremacy and colonialism, and the use of dehumanizing narratives to justify ethnic cleansing. Even when emotions are running high, you have the skills to create big enough containers to hold and validate people’s grief and fear, while guiding people to challenge the conditions that create violence. You know how to connect the dots to explain how all of us are implicated in this humanitarian and moral crisis.” Note: This episode was recorded on October 31, 2023. What’s happening? First, some historical context: Between 1947-1949, known as the Nakba, an estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, including in dozens of massacres, and an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in a capturing of historic Palestine to create the state of Israel ("What’s the Israel-Palestine conflict about? A simple guide"). In the last 16 years, Israel’s occupation of Palestine has created the largest “open air prison” in the world, with Palestinians being banned from travel, including to the West Bank, despite it being widely acknowledged they are both part of a “single territorial unit.” This is clearly not the only context. For more details, you can reference the first link in this paragraph. Most recently (as of this episode), on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian armed group Hamas killed 1,400 people in Israel, many of whom were civilians. Since then, more than 8,000 people have died in Gaza—many of whom were women and children—as a result of Israeli attacks. (Note: This is data as of October 29, 2023.) Additionally, Israel has blockaded Gaza, cutting off critical supplies. In the last several days, Israel has cut off cell phone and internet access for residents of Gaza. Access to health care and clean water are concerns for many, including the estimated 50,000 pregnant women and girls in Gaza. Israel has denied visas to UN officials following a comment that Hamas attacks “didn’t happen in a vacuum.” How do we talk about these events with students (and adults)? Step 1: Establish discussion agreements that center the dignity and humanity of ALL people. A specific clarification of agreements for this conversation might be: antisemitism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated. And critiquing actions of a nation, group, or leader are not antisemitic or Islamophobic. We should be able to critically analyze a government's decisions. This is not the same as expressing racism towards a group of people for who they are. Step 2: Invite folx to share their emotions, and if helpful, personal stories and experiences. (Just speaking from the “I” here.) Step 3: Invite inquiry: What do we want to know or learn more about? What specific questions do we have? Step 4: Level-set on researched facts, and analyze sources and context for power dynamics. Step 5: Practice criticality (Muhammad, 2020) with support. I like to use questions adapted from Dr. Muhammad’s HILL Model: What do you think about the power and equity at play here? How are individuals or groups disrupting oppression? How might you/we? If you are a social studies teacher, you may want to pull in a resource you’ve used. For example, the Genocide Education Project’s Stages of Genocide resource is one that could help students think through the relevance of the term genocide in relation to Israel’s attacks on Gaza. It would be particularly helpful to examine the Holocaust genocide case study in relation to the previous idea but also to provide the additional context of the Holocaust to deepen analysis. If you are practiced in using a gendered or feminist lens, for example, you may investigate the interplay of militaristic violence and intimate partner violence. The example in this academic paper by Dr. Simona Sharoni is one that illuminates these parallels. Final Tip We cannot have conversations about challenging, high-emotion topics without the grounding in our collective acknowledgement of each person’s humanity. We don’t need to push particularly traumatized individuals to talk about this in classroom spaces when this could be further traumatizing. We also don’t want to avoid conversations about hard things because we don’t feel equipped. We can build our capacity to talk about hard things. We can seek to learn information we don’t yet have. We can enter conversations humbly, and ready to acknowledge our mistakes, while centering justice and human dignity. As an example of how to set a foundation to build up to harder conversations about current events, I’m sharing my Staff Meeting Agenda series with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 144 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 here. TRANSCRIPT I'm 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 nering out about co-creator curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go for this episode. I want to address how we talk about the violence in Gaza in our schools, in our communities. So I'll be sharing ideas for how you might approach conversations about the violence in Gaza within classrooms within your school communities, even as adults. So we're taking both a student and adult lens here. Now, the context is that many adults have told me they do not feel equipped enough to facilitate or engage in this conversation. However, world events are happening and impacting adults and youth and at a minimum, we should make space for students and adults to share their emotional responses and experiences related to this trauma. 00:01:11 I'll give you some more in the episode for reference. This episode was recorded on October 31st 2023. So the specifics of the context, the events happening will be slightly outdated as of the airing, which will be in January 2024. So how do we talk about the violence in Gaza in our schools? I think what's a really important thing to note and the context for I think having this conversation specifically within the realm of the so called DE I World is a, a comment on linkedin which I reposted from Michelle Mizon Kim and she wrote an extended post, but I will just share a clip of it briefly quote. Even if you don't understand the full history, you can draw on your knowledge of power dynamics, characteristics of white supremacy and colonialism and the use of dehumanizing narratives to justify ethnic cleansing. Even when emotions are running high, you have the skills to create big enough containers to hold and validate people's grief and fear while guiding people to challenge the conditions that create violence, you know how to connect the dots to explain how all of us are implicated in this humanitarian and moral crisis. 00:02:17 Again, the quote is far longer. I've linked to it in the blog post which you can access at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 44. I'll be sharing that link again because throughout this episode, there are many references that I have linked within the blog post. It's one of the most heavily linked for a lot of reasons. There are a lot of resources I want to direct you to. There are also a lot of facts that I want to make sure I'm citing. So all of the the links to those are are in here. So let's start with the grounding of what's happening because I think one of the major things that many adults have told me is like, I don't feel comfortable navigating this conversation, even with another adult because I don't feel fully informed. And of course, that means that I don't feel comfortable navigating this conversation with Children and educating and facilitating the conversation with Children where I am responsible for the factual understanding of those kids, right? And so I think part of this work is skill based in, in building the capacity for having the discussions about anything, right? And I talk about that a lot on the podcast. The other piece is for each specific instance, you know, we as educators, as adults, as people, we don't have to have all the answers to everything. 00:03:26 We don't have to be experts in every single content area as current events come up by definition, they're current, right? They're they're ever changing. We don't always have all of the information at hand. And so I think part of that is being able to say I don't have all the answers as an adult, as your teacher, right? So when we're in a context of students, but even as we're adult adult conversing, right, in a staff conversation or something we can say, uh you know, based on what I know, here's the thought. So I just wanna level set again. This is based on a recording of, uh this is the recording date here is October 31st 2023 due to reduction processes and all the things. This will not actually air until the beginning of January of 2024. So I I get that there is, you know, a two month lag here in terms of up to date data. So I'm just gonna share what feels relevant in this moment and what is hopefully still relevant to you in the future? First, the historical context. There's so, so much of it and I've linked to more of it here, but I, I am not an expert on all of the facts. So I will just share what I feel like is relevant to contextualize for our conversation today. 00:04:29 So between 1947 and 1948 during which Israel identified itself as a nation and was created as a nation. Um This period of time to the Palestinian people is known as the nwa of the catastrophe in Arabic. An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, including dozens of massacres and an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the capturing of historic Palestine to create the state of Israel. There is a link to a much longer and more in depth guide if you would like more context. Now, in the last 16 years, specifically Israel's occupation of Palestine has created the largest open air prison in the world. With Palestinians being banned from travel, including to the West Bank. Despite it being widely acknowledged, they are part of a single territorial unit by international nations and organizations. Now again, clearly, this is not the only context for more details. Please dive into these links. Um I I do not purport to be a a scholar of um Palestine or Israel most recently as of the airing of this episode or as of the sorry recording of this episode on October 7th 2023 the Palestinian armed group Hamas killed 1400 people in Israel, many of whom were civilians. 00:05:44 Since then, more than 8000 people have died in Gaza, many of whom were women and Children. As a result of Israeli attacks, specifically, I want to name these are attacks by the Israeli military Israel government. So additionally, Israel has blockaded Gaza cutting off critical supplies in the last several days. As of this recording, Israel has cut off cell phone and internet access for residents of Gaza access to health care and clean water are concerns for many many people but including as they often take a feminist lens in these things, an estimated 50,000 women and girls who are currently pregnant and living in Gaza Israel recently in, in the last week or so has denied visas to un officials following a comment that Hamas attacks didn't happen in a vacuum. And that's, that's quotes around, didn't happen in a vacuum. So recognizing the context there. So these are all of the facts that are circulating in my head. These are the things that I am thinking about and of course, this is steeped with emotion, additional context. I don't, I don't have the space or the knowledge to get into. 00:06:50 But what I do know is that students and adults are going to need to process this in some way. So for some of them, they can process this with their families. For some of them, they're processing individually internally um with friend groups, with peers, some are trying to, you know, look to the internet and, and finding people that they follow on social media and what they say and they're repeating that creating, you know, perhaps a container that may not be the most fruitful for generative discussion about emotional events. And so with that understanding, here's what I would suggest and it, it is parallel to many other times I've recorded episodes like this and recorded episodes that are both generic and specific. I know a few years ago I was recording, how do we talk uh with white students about the attacks on the Capitol, right? That that happened in early January as well. So this is kind of reminiscent of of a lot of the structure that I would use in talking about a lot of current events. The first step is to establish discussion agreements that center the dignity and humanity of all people. So this is critical if you don't have this, you can't engage in this discussion, right? 00:07:55 And which is why I think social media is a really challenging place to have discussions like this. We don't have that shared connection. We don't have that co created community. We don't have clear agreements that we all have consented to um enact or, or abide by, right? This is the unique difference that we have in communities of care, communities of educational environments, of friend groups, of, of families, places where we can center the dignity and humanity of all people. And we can specifically agree to that through consensus and we can specifically core how that looks for us. What does it look like in practice? What do we do to call each other to account when that is not happening, we have a unique space in classrooms and school communities to do this work. And so I think if it's not happening in their friend groups and family groups or it's happening, but it's not happening in a way that centers the dignity and humanity of all people, here's even more reason that we do it here, we do it in our spaces in schools and educational communities whose whole point is to learn and to think critically and to have um disc course with folks, right? 00:09:00 And then hopefully, ideally, students and adults take that and bring it into their own spaces of discourse with families and friends and loved ones. Now, I would want to specifically clarify an agreement or create an agreement for this particular conversation about Palestine because we want to say very clearly that anti-semitism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated, right? We are never tolerating racism that violates the inherent centering of dignity and humanity of all people. It just goes against the core principle that we're developing agreements around, right? So obviously, that's not tolerated. And at the same time, we can critique actions of a nation group or leader because that in and of itself is not anti Semitic or Islamophobic. So we should be able to critically analyze a government's decisions, for example. And it is not the same as expressing racism toward a group of people for who they are, right, for their identity and the identity group they belong to, right? So these are not the same step two invite folks to share their emotions and if it's helpful, personal stories and experiences, again, I think really important that it's personal here, that it is speaking from the eye that it is not. 00:10:13 Here's my opinion on this or here is um you know, this like fourth hand account that I saw on social media and I'm completely divorced um from in terms of like my own personal connections, like I just don't think that's the time or place for this. I think there might be a time or place for that at some point. But initially, we want to start again to see the humanity in each of us to see the humanity of the folks in the room in the conversation, what emotions are they experiencing? And again, it can, it can stop at just the emotion at this point, right? You don't have to share stories that's up to you and your facilitation. It's also up to the community in terms of what they're willing to hear, able to hear the next step. I think after we've done this, after we've acknowledged, you know, the agreements, the emotions in the space, potentially personal um stories or, or experiences that resonate with them in that moment. Step three is to invite inquiry. So notice we haven't even like gotten to like a complete factual like, you know, like here is exactly what's going on in all the things. Yeah, I do think there is a degree of factual grounding just to enter the conversation. 00:11:18 But that could literally be like a headline or um a, a still image of like a, a website, a news website or something, right? Like just to say like here's what's going on in the world in like snapshots and like headshots, like maybe a visual like that is not traumatizing. But like, I think we don't need to get to all the granularity of the facts just yet. Because again, all of these first initial layers and steps are to make sure that beyond anything else, we are practicing again and again, that centering of humanity and human dignity across the board across our group. So in step three, inviting inquiry, what we want to do is ask questions like what do we want to know about? What more might we want to learn about as a class or you as an individual? Right? Even again, thinking about doing this as a staff PD two for adults to grapple with this to then maybe go talk to students about it, maybe not, but I think adults need practice with this as well. What specific questions do we have? So we're listing all of those out and then we as a class collective or maybe a group, each, each student group or each adult group chooses a question and kind of like goes on, you know, an academic research journey, right? 00:12:28 We pursue inquiry just like we would pursue inquiry in anything in a historical way, right? And about a historical event, we want step four then to be that we're kind of level setting on the research facts we're sharing out, we're also analyzing sources, we have a critical lens we're specifically thinking about the context, right? Nothing, nothing does exist without context. So every kind of thing we're, we're kind of putting together, right? Some of the questions they overlap and help us contextualize like, oh, this group found that, well, I found this in, in my group. So, you know, let's contextualize it all. Let's look at the specific power dynamics, right? If we're censoring justice, we are looking at power dynamics, we are putting on a critical lens. And I think that's step five, right? We're gonna elevate and and further practice criticality, which is a phrase that Doctor Goldie Muhammad uses in her book Cultivating Genius and her Hill model of curriculum development and pedagogy, right? And I think there are supports that go with this and I've talked about these before, but I'll, I'll just talk a little bit about what I would do in this scenario. I I like to use questions that are adapted from Doctor Mohammed's Hill model. 00:13:31 So she has one on criticality that is mostly for people who are creating curriculum. So as you develop this lesson, how do you center criticality, that kind of thing, specific questions that I would pose to a group of students or adults for conversation around a current event would be adaptations from now. So for example, what do you think about the power and equity at play here? Right? Who holds the power where lies in equity? Those kinds of questions? Also, we don't want to just analyze inequity. We don't want to just sit in the injustice, right? I think I've, I've heard this from like anecdotally from people in my classes. I've heard it from colleagues who know the work that I do. I've, you know, seen it um in, in, in terms of research studies, it is also critically important that we do the second part of Doctor Mohammed's criticality question as well where we're talking about disrupting oppression. So also naming, you know, how are individuals or groups disrupting oppression right now? And how might you as an individual, how might we as a collective group disrupt oppression right now? 00:14:35 So we're not all just steeped in the injustice. Yes, we are. But we also can name agency in what folks are doing, acknowledge that work and then what we can do. So we don't have to um we, we can, right, create the space for the emotion and then we can also create a path forward if you were a social studies teacher. So these next couple of recommendations for step four where we're really like practicing that criticality. Like you might bring in some different resources depending on what your class is familiar with what you've used before. I always like to leverage things that you've used before and be able to use that as a lens. So for example, if you're a social studies teacher, you may want to pull in a resource you've used like the Genocide Education project. I know has a lot of grants. So you might use their stages of genocide resource packet that's helping students think through the relevance of the term genocide in relation to Israel's attack on Gaza. So you might actually go through the stages and be like, do we see these? Right, how do we see these? Um if you're practicing in uh like an el a class or social studies class or some other class using a gendered or feminist lens. 00:15:37 For example, you may investigate the interplay of militaristic violence and intimate partner violence. There's an a powerful example from Doctor Simona Cirone, who was one of my uh feminist teachers in college. She wrote an academic paper that kind of illuminates these parallels really well and I'll link that again in the blog post. Um One more time that blog post for listeners is Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 44. Now, as I'm kind of wrapping up, we've, we've said a lot, there's been a lot. This is an emotionally heavy episode. I do want to name the final kind of takeaways I think for this particular conversation about the violence in Gaza. But also any current event, anytime we're talking about an event or series of events that are unfolding in the world that are impacting us that are carrying with them high emotions and long historical contexts that we as individual educators may or may not fully um be aware of all of those things are, are important to name and consider and, and build around, right? 00:16:40 But II, I wanna say these final things to, to kind of leave us, we cannot have conversations about challenging high emotion topics without the grounding in our collective acknowledgment of each person's humanity. We don't need to push particularly traumatized individuals to talk about this in classroom spaces when this could be further traumatizing. This also includes things like using visuals or videos um or even sounds right that are emotionally traumatizing. We have folks at different, in different emotional spaces. And I think that's another value of inviting folks to share their emotions. Of course, every everything, every share opportunity is an opportunity. And so it's not mandatory, but I think inviting that emotion share out helps us as facilitators of these conversations to know where exactly everyone is. Um And how, how like emotionally raw um some folks are and, and, and I think that makes, helps us make decisions accordingly. Um We also don't want to avoid conversations about hard things because we don't feel equipped, we can build our capacity to talk about hard things. 00:17:45 We can seek to learn information. We don't yet have, we can enter conversations humbly and ready to acknowledge our mistakes while censoring justice and human dignity. And if we can do those things, that is my freedom dream for all classrooms, for all educational spaces, for all staff meetings and team meetings amongst adults, this is my hope for all families. This is my hope for all friend groups, right? This is it, this is the generative dialogue that is at the heart of making sense of our world is at the heart of expressing our humanity and seeing the humanity in others. This is the heart of restorative justice, peace building. This is at the heart of why I went into education, right? Because I wanted to build a better world. And I think youth are the the place and educators who are lifelong learners and committed to the journey of being better, always and creating co creating better futures with our youth. This is where that dream is most possible and most likely to flourish. 00:18:54 If you have these conversations, please reach out to me and let me know how they go. If you have additional recommendations or things that you've tried that have worked well in terms of having this conversation, please reach out if you like this episode. I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan. Talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders 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.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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Time for Teachership is now a proud member of the...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
August 2024
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