Training for Justice: A K-12 Leadership Curriculum
At schools around the country, faculty, administrators, and parents have gradually realized how critical affinity and interest groups are. Not only are they key to cultivating an inclusive school culture but they are essential to maintaining a healthy racial climate. Affinity groups, such as Black, Latinx, and Asian-American groups, offer students a safe space to come together around a common social identity, in this case race, in order to find a “safe space” to create community as well as share strategies about how to maneuver dominant white culture. Meanwhile, interest groups offer the wider school community the opportunity to learn about a topic of shared interest. We might consider these the proverbial “brave spaces” where marginalized students take on the work of educating peers, staff, and faculty about issues specific to their community.
The benefits of affinity and interest groups are impossible to deny. But those incentives took on a new urgency as the events of 2020 unfolded. While the COVID-19 pandemic has of course taken a toll on us all, it impacts low-income students, gender-nonconforming students, and students of color most acutely. Moreover, the series of highly visible and brutal murders of Black Americans that started last year, the ongoing nationwide uproar, and the resulting social unrest has left many of our students feeling, in the words of one student leader, “sad, angry, [and] isolated.” As she recounted, “I felt like these events directly affected me and something in me was changed by them [but] I didn’t have a lot of people to turn to, to ask what does this mean.” In other words, for students of color who assume visible leadership positions, there was a palpable desire to channel their emotions into something meaningful.
Over the last decade, the field of K-12 education has steadily developed curricula and programming structures for implementing a social justice co-curriculum, especially for student affinity and interest groups. Yet, we have paid considerably less attention to the training of student leaders who facilitate these groups. Drawing on my experience as a historian, educator, and diversity practitioner, I offer this piece as a roadmap to reimagine our social justice co-curriculum for student leaders. In contrast to most pieces about students, I wrote this article with students, centering the voices of student leaders of color to help us understand their unique challenges during this ongoing pandemic. It is a social justice lesson plan outfitted to our ongoing pandemic reality and hybrid learning environments. Throughout, I argue that educating students about their role in the course of history and thus empowering them to make real change in their school and home communities is critical.
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Over the previous few years, eleven affinity and interest groups had sprung up in the small independent high school where I served as Director of Equity and Inclusion. It was largely a grassroots phenomenon led by students and happily accommodated by school leaders. No one, however, referred to them as affinity and interest groups. This vocabulary had yet to enter the public consciousness of senior leaders, faculty, or students. Rather, the entire school community viewed them like any other student club, no different than, say, the Chess Club or the Newspaper Club. As the incoming DEI director, my first job was to educate the larger school community about the goals of affinity and interest groups, emphasizing how and why they were qualitatively different spaces than other student groups.
In those first few months, I gathered student affinity and interest group (SAIG) leaders in order to co-create a unified mission, purpose, and programming structure. We met informally throughout the first two trimesters to develop mission statements, share best practices for organizing meetings, and brainstorm strategies to combat prejudice among their peers and others. Slowly, over time, peer leaders of these programs gained a toolkit of skills. Concurrently, I also gathered Faculty Advisors on a monthly basis to engage in professional development about adolescent identity formation as well as to co-design the budding program. After two trimesters, we had developed a workable program structure. We were ready for a 2.0 version of SAIG programming that provided in-depth leadership training for SAIG leaders.
Then came the global pandemic. Everything, it seemed, came to a screeching halt. We placed most of program development on hold during the third trimester in order to attend to the most pressing community needs. But mid-spring 2020, a slow and steady stream of distressing news documenting the state-sanctioned murder of Black Americans turned into a flood. Students of color, especially Black students, were in deep pain about national events. As we all witnessed the growth of a nationwide protest movement, one student leader remembered feeling “disheartened and frustrated” by the racial ignorance of her white peers. “We’ve known about these killings…all these years,” she stated, “we’ve heard these names and we have seen these videos.” As another student put it, educating their non-Black peers about the depth of anti-Blackness while trying to process the events with her family and community was like “adding ten layers of grief.” Clearly, affinity and interest groups would be the most pertinent site of support and community-building for our students of color who were feeling the effects of the moment most keenly.
While peer leaders were among the most vocal student activists, as minors living under the restrictions imposed by a global pandemic, they struggled to find ways to participate in the events unfolding across the nation. More worrisome, however, I realized through my conversations with students that they saw these events as disconnected from any previous tradition. Certainly, they had learned a bit about the Civil Rights Movements in their history classes, though Black students agreed that most of what they knew had been passed down through family stories. As one student shared, “Before the training, I didn’t think of my work as anything close to the Civil Rights Movement.” It was only through the training that she began to link the events of summer 2020 and SAIG work to the Civil Rights movement. It dawned on her that the moment offered youth of color “our own form of protest.”
As we designed the training programs, our overarching goal was to show students that they were part of this tradition of fighting for justice in the US, a fight historically led by students of color like themselves. To understand this is to feel a sense of rootedness in this world, a sense of true purpose that ties you to our ancestors in the shared struggle for liberation. I wanted them to have this grounding as a community. Additionally, we wanted to provide them with the opportunity to develop content knowledge, language, and skills regarding social identity development in order to become more effective social justice change agents. Also, we hoped to equip them with essential leadership skills such as facilitation skills, public speaking skills, and interpersonal skills in order to strengthen their ability to serve as role models and mentors to the wider community.
Of course, we had to contend with the fact that the entire training would have to be conducted online. And, as we had learned over the spring, attention spans were understandably short. Moreover, fun, joy, and community-building were central to our endeavor – all famously hard to come by in the Zoomiverse. In order to lighten the load for SAIG student leaders, my DEI Coordinator and I decided to begin with an initial two-hour training, follow up with three 20-minute online modules to be completed over the course of a week, and conclude with a final two-hour training. All modules were interactive and incorporated a range of collaborative, team-building activities as well as reflective exercises. With this pacing, rhythm, and approach, we hoped to keep things fresh, brisk, and engaging.
In preparation for the training, we purchased copies of March: Book 3 for each SAIG leader over the summer. Written by the late Civil Rights activist and statesman John Lewis, March is an award-winning graphic novel that documents the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The third and final installment covers, in particular, the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The parallels to summer 2020 were hard to ignore. I will admit that, although I found it to be an engaging graphic novel, I worried that students would find it too long or ponderous. To the contrary, I was thrilled to learn that it had a major impact on them. As one student commented, “just hearing [about] someone who wasn’t MLK – that’s how [the Civil Rights Movement] has always been taught, that he was the center of it – it opened my mind up to what…being a Black leader means.” While there are a number of ways to provide students with this history in a fun and relevant way, we found this graphic novel to be an effective tool for helping students make connections about the current unrest and thus provide them with a sense of self-efficacy in a world that felt so dangerously out of control.
To further build and cement relationships in a fraught racial climate, we opted to involve our senior leaders, both white men. The Head and Assistant Head facilitated warm and engaging conversations around a set of pre-determined discussion questions that aimed to help students draw connections between the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s and 70s and the social unrest unfolding in real time. We wanted them to participate in this activity in order to continue to strengthen relationship-building among our students of color and student activists on the one hand and senior leadership on the other.
To foster a rich dialogue, we asked students the following questions in small groups facilitated by the Head, Assistant Head, and myself:
What did you know about the Civil Rights Movement prior to reading the graphic novel? What about the history was new or foreign to you?
What is something you found interesting, surprising, or important in the graphic novel?
In your opinion, what impact did John Lewis and his contemporaries have on our nation (i.e.: the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, etc.)?
What lessons do you think the first Civil Rights generation has to teach us about ideals, strategies, and practices to effect social change?
Next, we wanted students to elaborate on their connections to this larger tradition. In particular, we encouraged students, especially our anti-racist white student allies, to consider the wide variety of roles we each have to play. We asked them to identify “types” in the graphic novel, holding time for silent reflection as they responded to the following prompt: “Imagine you were around during the first Civil Rights Movement. Reflect on the wide array of roles available at the time, i.e.: organizer, protester, prophet, ideologue, philosopher, supporter, ally, politician, etc. What role would you have felt most comfortable playing and why?”
As students think back on it now, one recalled questioning for the first time the dichotomy between leader and follower through this activity. As she explained, “we forget that there are different roles we can take…how they build on each other.” She then gave the example of folks at the George Floyd protests who provided water and first aid to protesters. Their contribution was both important and necessary, though less visible in the mainstream media. She took this lesson to heart, and began to think, “I don’t always have to be the one to speak out, I can take smaller roles” and still offer a meaningful contribution.
After some brief discussion, we then began what was arguably the most critical activity of the entire training: mapping what activist Deepa Iyer has termed “the social change ecosystem.” Drawing on Iyer’s impressive work, we sought to uncover our individual potential as change agents, emphasizing a few important points. First, we stressed that working towards social justice is countercultural, requiring us to move against the grain. Second, the movement for social justice requires leaders from all walks of life with different temperaments and philosophies of change. Third, to effect change in our world, we must work together with folks who bring varying strengths and talents to the table. In essence, we wanted students to understand that it takes all kinds to push a movement forward. We cannot -- and should not -- do this work alone.
Next, we introduced them to Iyer’s expansive typology of change agents, which includes weavers, storytellers, guides, healers, disrupters, caregivers, builders, visionaries, frontline responders and experimenters. In a world where the loudest voices tend to attract the most attention, the typology would instead help students envision the wide array of roles available to those who fight for social change. Critically, the typology acknowledges the contributions of both dreamers and doers, the quiet and the outspoken, and everyone in between. As one student summed it up, “There wasn’t just one way to be an activist.” In other words, we guided them towards the conclusion that each of them brought specific and important strengths through their individual contributions.
To conclude the first day of training, we gave students time to process and digest this information in small groups. Specifically, we asked them to review Iyer’s Social Change Mapping Framework and reflect on the following questions:
Which of the roles do you most identify with and why? What skills and/or behaviors do those roles require? (these are your strengths)
Which of the roles do you least identify with and why? What skills and/or behaviors do those roles require? (these are your stretches)
Do you believe that certain roles are valued more than others? Less than others? Why?
As part of the online training that followed, the first module asked students to build their own social change agent “molecules.” Essentially, we wanted them to render visible to themselves their strengths and growth areas as leaders as well as to visualize the nature of their unique contribution to social justice. As facilitators, the DEI Coordinator and I explained and then modeled the activity in a brief 10-minute film clip, demonstrating what we each saw as our respective contributions. As it turned out, our approaches were quite complementary – why, in fact, we made such a good team. Prior to the second training, we then asked students to submit their social change molecule – a visual representation of their relationship to different change agent roles.
When we gathered once again, we asked each student to present their image. We then asked them to briefly discuss the following questions in small groups:
1. How can we support one another with our different social change roles?
2. Think about the upcoming year: what kind of leadership actions are you best suited for in terms of your skills?
When they returned, we asked everyone to share a change agent role or skill that they were committed to focusing on in the coming academic year. As one student recalls, she felt a sense of “relief” and “comfort” through this exercise. During the training, “it felt like a weight was lifted,” she said. “Going into the training, I thought I had to play every role,” she remarked, adding, “…it was nice to see that there were different roles to play.” Another student agreed, explaining that the social change ecosystem served as both an invitation to “step out of your comfort zone” and a reminder that “I could step up and step down whenever I needed to.” This led to deep reflections on the nature of boundaries and self-care for social change agents, student leaders, and students of color.
We dedicated the rest of the training to concrete skill-building, strengthening students’ planning and organizational skills as well as their group dialogue, active listening, and facilitation skills. During our year-long leadership programming, our curriculum would guide them through ongoing education and reflection on adolescent social identity development so that they could better support their younger peers along the same journey. While I believe these skill-building sessions are critically important to a social justice co-curriculum, it would have fallen on deaf ears if students were not also inspired by their historic mission, confident in their ability to contribute to this movement, and empowered to create real change in their school and home communities.
Through this modest hybrid training, students found themselves connected to a tradition that was larger and more beautiful than they had previously known. As one student put it, the training “pushed me to look within myself and think about what being Black means…what being a part of this community truly means…I started to dive into my history, and wanted to know more about it.” A social justice co-curriculum that centers student voice and experience can offer a sense of empowerment after learning and critically thinking about their relationship to the Civil Rights Movement. I hope that K-12 educators might adapt this curriculum to suit the needs of their own student leaders, especially student leaders of color who face unique pressures and require additional support and uplift in this no less historic moment.