Lessons for Students: How One Community Chose to Respond to Hate

On the morning of August 5, 2012, six worshippers were murdered at a Sikh temple in the small Midwestern town of Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Many of the persons present at the time of the shooting were women and children. The lone gunman identified himself as a white supremacist. The senseless violence was halted by the bravery of Lieutenant Brian Murphy, shot 15 times during the attack. Too often we hear similar stories of hate and racism and less frequently do we hear about how families of victims, schools and communities come together to grieve and to remember, to rebuild and work together to ensure that such violence doesn’t happen again.  

The documentary film, Waking in Oak Creek, reveals those difficult and necessary parts of the healing process in the year following the tragedy. It is a powerful film to show with students as they watch young temple members find their voice and emerge as leaders to end hate crimes and how a diverse community grows, supports, and grieves with them. As the film descriptor reads, “together, a community rocked by hate is awakened and transformed by the Sikh spirit of relentless optimism.”

At a time when it is unfortunately necessary to weed out hate and misinformation from the immigration debate, this film is apt and impactful. It is great way to continue a discussion on the benefits of inclusion and diversity. It is also a means to talk about resilience, the power of community, and youth voice from multicultural perspectives. 

To stream the film in its entirety (34:00) and download supplemental resources on the film page, please click here.

To request a free DVD for your classroom screening, faculty training, or community event, please click here.

Waking in Oak Creek is presented as part of Not In Our Town's Working Together for Safe, Inclusive Communities collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Not In Our Town offers free supplemental resources including an educator lesson plan, a video showing students sending a symbol of peace to Oak Creek, and a short film collection: Talking About Immigrants.

If you would like to share your ideas about how you are discussing immigration issues in your classroom or how you plan on discussing these issues, we would love to hear from you. Please email teacher@immcouncil.org if you have any questions or if you’d like to learn more about opportunities for professional development, community grants, and other programs that can enhance your teaching and learning. View our immigration-themed lesson plans, book/film reviews and follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration #teachimmigration.

Cultivating Diversity as a Resource

-- Dr. Becki Cohn-Vargas, Not In Our School Director

As a follow-up to our post last week on “Teaching Practices for Identity Safe Classrooms,” we are sharing a piece on cultivating diversity as a resource an outcome of a partnership project of Not In Our Town and the Center for the Collaborative Classroom (CCC). Watch the companion webinar to this collaborative series and read the whole series here. 

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Many teachers believe that the best way to live Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream is to be colorblind, to ignore the differences among children. And yet, Dr. King did not really intend to make differences disappear.

When teachers ignore differences in an attempt to be colorblind, classrooms are not identity safe. Students from negatively stereotyped groups can feel stereotype threat—a sense of not belonging, or not being seen as capable. These students may worry that they will be judged or treated according to a negative stereotype, or that they might do something to inadvertently confirm it.

In contrast, in identity safe classrooms, teachers aim to include and honor each student’s background in the curriculum, activities, and classroom environment. By cultivating diversity as a resource, everyone is encouraged to fully participate in a challenging curriculum, while sharing responsibility for the classroom. High expectations for all are expressed in the context of regular and authentic use of diverse materials, ideas, and teaching activities. Students who are struggling to meet the high expectations are provided with additional support and encouragement by the teacher so they can persist in their efforts.

Here are the components of cultivating diversity as a resource for teaching:

• Using diversity as a resource for teaching means that teachers should involve the curiosity and knowledge of all students in the classroom. Teachers do not need a specialized curriculum to meet the needs of all students. Instead, they continually ask students to share from their lives and backgrounds. In this way, they also break down stereotypes of each other’s cultures. For example, one teacher invited students to bring music to play during writing. At first, they only brought popular American tunes. So she brought in music from India, where she was born. Then a Mexican student brought ranchero music, and a Nicaraguan student brought marimba music. Then the teacher shared some salsa to show the students other types of music from Latin America. Sharing this music from different countries gave students the chance to enjoy and appreciate the similarities and differences in the music with their classmates in a positive, curious context.

• Using diversity as a resource also means learning the hard lessons of history and having difficult conversations about the effects of bigotry, always at the students’ developmentally appropriate level. For current events, one fourth-grade Latina brought in an article about a rogue video game where players hunted for “illegal aliens.” The teacher, while mortified, did not shy away from this painful topic. She held a discussion, acknowledging the reality of racism and breaking down the negative stereotypes. The teacher emphasized compassion by attending to feelings that resulted from the distressing article. She reminded students that some of their teasing and games, although less cruel, also hurt their peers.

• Teachers should support each student in high-level learning with high expectations and academic rigor. Too often, teachers believe that hanging up pictures of people from diverse backgrounds and providing a few books reflecting diverse cultures is all that it takes to cultivate diversity as a resource. But when some students are provided with curricula focused only on remediation of skills, it tells all students that some of them are capable and others are not. Even students who are not strong readers or writers have important ideas that need to be shared and cultivated, so they can develop their conceptual understanding of the world and find their place in it.

• A challenging curriculum motivates each student by providing meaningful, purposeful learning. As part of the era of “No Child Left Behind,” many schools focused on preparing students for standardized tests. The arts, science, and creativity were often sacrificed. For students who were below grade level, rote learning and a checklist of standards left them bored and more likely to misbehave. In contrast, a challenging curriculum is vibrant. Teachers motivate students to become engaged through inquiry learning, project-based curricula, and open-ended activities that link to their lives. The class becomes a safe place for thinking, where zany ideas are encouraged and all voices are heard. Instruction can be differentiated to accommodate a range of academic levels while everyone is exposed to activities to do together. Students must analyze and synthesize what they are learning, compare and contrast, and explain their thinking to others in an atmosphere of intellectual excitement. It is not possible to have an identity safe classroom when some students are assigned only remedial, skill-focused work, while others are involved in meaningful, challenging work that relates to their own lives.

In identity safe classrooms, cultivating diversity as a resource is a way of life that creates equal status for all children. This approach allows them to get to know each other, show respect and caring for others, and build from their own experiences and backgrounds. By intentionally not being colorblind, teachers create conditions where students see themselves reflected in every aspect of their classroom. They feel capable of handling rigor and challenges because they belong and are supported in their efforts.

This blog was co-authored by Dorothy M. Steele, EdD. Dorothy is co-author of the new book, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn, and former executive director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She is an early childhood educator who is interested in public schools, including teaching practices that are effective for diverse classrooms, alternative assessment processes that inform teaching and learning, and strategies that build inclusive communities of learners in schools. Her work with the Stanford Integrated Schools Project was an attempt to look at these various aspects of schooling in a large urban school district.

Becki Cohn-Vargas, EdD is currently the director of Not In Our School (NOIS), designing curriculum, coaching schools, and producing films and digital media on models for creating safe and inclusive schools that are free of bullying and intolerance at national nonprofit the Working Group. She also teaches online courses on bullying prevention for the University of San Diego. Becki worked in educational settings for over 35 years as a teacher and administrator. She co-authored the book Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn with Dr. Dorothy Steele. The book was published by Corwin Press.

Additional Resources:

Crossing Borders with Digital Storytelling – As a way to cultivate diversity as a resource, we recommend our lesson plan for K-12 teachers for launching a digital storytelling project on immigration in their own classrooms. With applications for sharing stories with family and community members, digital stories are a powerful way for teachers to create opportunities for “empathetic moments” among students and shape classroom environments. 

We encourage you to take a pledge to stand up to hate, bigotry, and bullying. The American Immigration Council offers free lesson plans, resources, book/film reviews, and grants to #teachimmigration. We also welcome student reviews and contributions to our blog. Email us at teacher@immcouncil.org and follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration.

Teaching Practices for Identity Safe Classrooms

-- Dr. Becki Cohn-Vargas, Not In Our School Director

As many of you are gearing up for the new school year, we are highlighting an introduction to creating identity safe classrooms, important teaching practices for valuing diversity and creating inclusive classrooms for immigrant students and all students. This is Part 1 of the 5-part Identity Safety Blog Series, a partnership project of Not In Our Town and the Center for the Collaborative Classroom (CCC). Watch the companion webinar to this collaborative series and read the whole series here.  Later this week we will feature what it means to cultivate diversity as a resource.

The goal of most American teachers is to successfully educate all students, but too many black and Latino students underperform academically and fail to meet their potential. Educating all students well is not only important for the students themselves, but for our nation as a whole. We cannot have a just and democratic society without fully educated citizens.

Among the many remedies for student underperformance, we find didactic teaching aimed at skill remediation and zero-tolerance policies. These remedies have not worked. Disproportionate numbers of low-income students and students of color are pushed out of school and fail to graduate. Our work on identity safe teaching shifts our focus from the deficits of students to an examination of what we do in classrooms that helps them succeed socially and academically.

Identity safe classrooms are those in which teachers strive to ensure that students feel that their social identity is an asset rather than a barrier to success in the classroom, and that they are welcomed, supported, and valued whatever their background.

A Research-Based Approach to Identity Safety

Our work evolved from the body of research on “stereotype threat” done by Claude Steele and colleagues. They wanted to understand why black college students had lower grade point averages than white students with the same ACT scores—at every level. Stereotype threat theory states that people from negatively stereotyped groups may fear, in situations that are relevant to them, that they might “be judged or treated in terms of the stereotype or that [they] might do something that would inadvertently confirm it” (Steele, Spencer & Aronson 2002, p. 389).

Literally hundreds of studies have demonstrated the power of stereotypes to depress human performance. For example, black students performed less well than white students on an intelligence test when it was described as a test of ability. But when the same test was called a game, they did as well as the white students. Studies of women taking math tests had similar results.

In another set of studies, white athletes did better than their black teammates when the task was described as one based on “sports intelligence.” By contrast, the black students performed better than the white athletes when it was described as a “test of natural athletic ability.” (See reducingstereotypethreat.org.)

Our research, the “Stanford Integrated Schools Project” on identity safe teaching practices, explores how to lift the threat to improve success in elementary classrooms. How can teachers reduce the sense of stereotype threat for students whose social identities (race, gender, ethnicity) link them to low school outcomes? Our question: Are there ways to incorporate social and academic practices so students from all backgrounds feel a sense of belonging and purpose in the classroom, so they can fully engage in learning?

What Identity Safe Teaching Looks Like

Our researchers observed in 84 classrooms to document the arrangement of students and materials, the nature of their relationships, the types of questions directed toward students, the presence or absence of cooperative learning activities, the level of student autonomy, and the teachers’ approaches to dealing with misbehavior. We looked for evidence of the use of diverse materials and activities as a resource for teaching, rather than a more color-blind approach that ignores student differences. We discovered a link between identity safe teaching and enhanced student performance. We found:

• Students in higher identity safe classrooms had higher scores on standardized tests than students in lower identity safe classrooms.

• The Student Questionnaire revealed that students from higher identity safe classrooms had an increased liking for school and motivation to learn, liked challenging work, and felt a sense of belonging compared to students from less identity safe classrooms.

This approach is based on the assumption that teaching and learning are social processes that depend on building trusting, positive relationships between teachers and students and among the students—no matter what their social identities.

Social identities are attributes in each of us—whether we are white or black, young or old, rich or poor, gay or straight, Methodist or Muslim, etc. Everyone has multiple social identities. Sometimes, because of our racialized American history, some social identities are linked to school success and others are not. In identity safe classrooms, student diversity becomes a resource for learning.

Identity safe teaching is in stark contrast to schools whose curriculum is high on remediation and low on inspiration, and whose discipline is punitive and based on heavy-handed control that does not promote compassion, responsibility, and problem-solving.

By contrast, identity safe teaching focuses on how what we do affects students’ experience in the classroom. From our research, we learned there is a constellation of things teachers can do that change life in the classroom so that students achieve at higher levels and improve their liking for school, their willingness to work hard, and their feeling of belonging in school. The components of identity safety fall into four major categories: child-centered teaching, cultivating diversity as a resource, classroom relationships, and caring environments. Read how to put the components in practice here and next week we will feature “cultivating diversity as a resource” on our blog.

The components of identity safety are:

1. Child-centered teaching: promotes autonomy, cooperation, and student voice.
2. Cultivating diversity as a resource: teachers provide challenging curriculum and high expectations for all students in the context of the regular and authentic use of diverse materials, ideas, and teaching activities.
3. Classroom relationships: relationships are based on trusting, positive interactions with the teacher and among the students.
4. Caring classroom environments: social skills are taught and practiced to help students care for one another in an emotionally and physically safe classroom.

This blog was co-authored by Dorothy M. Steele, ED.D. Dorothy is co-author of the new book, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn, and former Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She is an early childhood educator who is interested in public schools including teaching practices that are effective for diverse classrooms, alternative assessment processes that inform teaching and learning, and strategies that build inclusive communities of learners in schools. Her work with the Stanford Integrated Schools Project was an attempt to look at these various aspects of schooling in a large urban school district.

Becki Cohn-Vargas, EdD is currently the director of Not In Our School (NIOS), designing curriculum, coaching schools, and producing films and digital media on models for creating safe and inclusive schools that are free of bullying and intolerance at national nonprofit the Working Group. She also teaches online courses on bullying prevention for the University of San Diego. Becki worked in educational settings for over 35 years as a teacher and administrator. She co-authored the book Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn with Dr. Dorothy Steele. The book was published by Corwin Press.

Recommended Lesson Plan:  Educate, Celebrate and Empower:  This one-week immigration community outreach project and lesson plan meets three objectives: 1) to educate students on the experiences of the immigrant population; 2) to celebrate and welcome immigrant students; and 3) to empower all students to implement a social justice project.

We encourage you to take a pledge to stand up to hate, bigotry, and bullying. The American Immigration Council offers free lesson plans, resources, book/film reviews, and grants to #teachimmigration. We also welcome student reviews and contributions to our blog. Email us at teacher@immcouncil.org and follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration.