Our host Justin Reich kicks off our new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide. To get a sense of the current landscape of divisive content laws, we talk to Brock Boone, senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then, we’re joined by Sarah Kaka, Associate Professor and Writer/Researcher at Ohio Wesleyan University, who helps us understand how divisive laws are impacting teachers every day. And, Dakota Morrison shares his student teaching experience as a high school social studies teacher designing a civil rights unit in Ohio. Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
Our host Justin Reich kicks off our new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide. To get a sense of the current landscape of divisive content laws, we talk to Brock Boone, senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then, we’re joined by Sarah Kaka, Associate Professor and Writer/Researcher at Ohio Wesleyan University, who helps us understand how divisive laws are impacting teachers every day. And, Dakota Morrison shares his student teaching experience as a high school social studies teacher designing a civil rights unit in Ohio.
Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
Resources and Links
Take our course on supporting youth activism at www.youthinfront.org
Pre-Order Justin Reich’s new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools at www.iteratebook.com
Watch our documentary film We Have to Do Something Different
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/e1-teacher-speech/transcript
Credits
Host Justin Reich
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Follow our host Justin Reich on Twitter
Dakota Morrison: The state of Ohio also has what's called the model curriculum. What the model curriculum is it has your standard, and then it says, "Okay, here's the standard and here's some bullet points of what you should teach to meet this standard." So looking at that, I was actually surprised because it included a lot of stuff that I was never taught. The model curriculum for that standard that I just read reads, "Mexican-Americans organized through the United Farm Workers of America to improve the conditions of migrant workers. Women made progress towards equal opportunities through demonstrations, legislation, and the establishment of the National Organization for Women. The American Indian movement worked to improve conditions on reservations, protect land rights, and improve opportunities in education and employment. And finally, the gay liberation movement began with the Stonewall riots, which led to an organized effort for full inclusion in public life and institutions.
Justin Reich: From the MIT Studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, I'm Justin Reich, and this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. We're excited to bring you this new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide, a look into divisive content laws, book bans, the history and legal framework of teacher speech and new challenges for teachers and teaching. For a number of years, we've partnered with an organization called Learning for Justice to create an online course called Youth in Front about youth student activism and trying to give teachers a sense of their rights, their responsibilities, their role in supporting youth activism. Not necessarily supporting what the youth activists are advocating for, but their role in helping young people be effective citizens, be effective advocates.
And in the last few years, the context of that work has really changed dramatically with divisive content laws, with don't say gay laws, with a variety of legal efforts, particularly in Republican-led states, to renegotiate the roles and responsibilities of teachers in classrooms. We've got a lot of questions from educators about this new landscape. And so we said, let's look into the history. Let's look into the legal framework of teacher speech. Let's look at what kinds of laws and cultural changes are happening right now, and let's try to help educators navigate this new terrain.
So it is always a political question when we try to determine what we should teach, but I think there are really two things that are different right now about divisive concept laws. So typically, to resolve questions of what teachers should teach, states, regulatory agencies, try to be precise in delineating what teachers should teach. So we've got standards and curriculum and other guidance that explains what should be taught and at what grade levels.
Instead of creating clarity, some of the divisive concept laws that have been passed and have been proposed, they chill speech by creating uncertainty. By defining overly vague concepts that should not be taught, and refusing to provide guidance on how to address topics where those concepts are relevant. So instead of telling teachers, "This is what we want you to teach," or, "This is what we not want you to do," we create these spaces which teachers feel like they have to stay away from because lawmakers are intentionally uncertain about what should not be taught.
And second, in the United States, in many, many communities, we've long recognized that the consensus process for selecting what we teach, content, that's going to inevitably leave some parents dissatisfied. There are lots of our neighbors that have extreme views. And developing a common curriculum for a public school is all about consensus. Now, historically, we found ways to let parents with views that are really different from their community withdraw their students from some part of the public school experience. It happens all the time in health class and sex ed class. It happens some somewhat less, but still happens in social studies and English language arts.
Now, these debates in many respects are really healthy. We should have parents, citizens engaged in the conversation about what we teach in schools. Schools are inevitably inherently political places. There's no more political question than how should we raise young people. But I think teachers are recognizing that part of what's happening is that we're changing the way that we negotiate these debates. We're changing the ground rules for how communities decide what to teach. And that I think is more worrying and deserves more attention.
So what we are going to do in this series is we're going to look at the history of teacher speech rights. We're going to look at the competing claims, the competing principles that courts have established to be able to help society guide what teachers can and cannot say. We're going to look at how divisive concept laws are trying to change the balance that has been historically struck around these issues. And we're going to look at the consequences for typical teachers out there in classrooms trying to make this work.
To help us understand the current climate, we talked to Brock Boone, a senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. So let's get into it. Today we have Brock Boone with us. Brock Boone is a senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. And he's also been a staff attorney for the ACLU, a graduate of Georgetown Law. We're here today to talk about teachers and speech. Brock, thanks so much for joining us.
Brock Boone: Thank you for having me.
Justin Reich: Brock, can you tell us a bit how you got into this work with the Southern Poverty Law Center?
Brock Boone: Sure, absolutely. Going back early on, I think, so I grew up in Alabama. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. I grew up loving to read world literature. I used to read the Bible front to back, which I don't think always pleased my Sunday school teachers because I was the kid who asked the very difficult questions, and I did the same thing at school. Luckily at school, I think, is why I grew to love the teachers, just because the teachers typically always encouraged my questions. When you read world literature, I think as a young kid, you can't help but put yourself in other people's shoes, in narratives from around the world, which expanded my little corner of Alabama outside of Alabama.
So that is the basis of where I transformed into wanting to become a civil rights attorney. And it's all those conversations I recall back from high school where teachers who would show us photos, and sometimes very difficult photos about Alabama's history or America's history, that sparked conversations in the class that have made me feel, not only that I should be doing important civil rights work, but that teachers should be protected when it comes to them being able to teach, and teaching in the way that teachers believe that teaching should be done. So that is where I'm coming from when it comes to a lot of this work.
Justin Reich: And certainly in Alabama, in lots of other places, I think there are many more teachers who are thinking twice as they're going through their materials and saying, am I going to talk about this part of hard history? Am I going to show these pictures? How is my community going to react? How is the legal landscape changing? From your perspective on the front lines, can you give us an overview of the landscape right now as it relates to free speech for teachers?
Brock Boone: Sure, absolutely. So what is happening right now, and what we're hearing from teachers from, in particular are all around the South, but also this is happening throughout the country, is that teachers are afraid. They are extremely afraid of what they're teaching. And that has been intentional when it has comes to how these laws have been written and how vague these laws are written.
So because of that, we're seeing the effects of that, and teachers are obviously asking the question, what about my constitutional rights? What rights do I have in the classroom? Right now, teachers are in an almost impossible position where states have passed these divisive concepts laws, these educational gag orders, these curriculum censorship laws, because a lot of the material that they are required to teach as part of, just say, the Georgia's teachers professional standards, or the Maine professional standards, those standards require a lot of discussions, obviously, especially if you're history, around slavery, around civil rights movement.
So how do you do those things when these laws are written so vaguely. Is it possible? And the answer to this question is yes. It is possible that just simply doing your job is potentially violating these laws, which it seems that we cannot live in a world where that is the case, right?
Justin Reich: Well, what prevents these laws from simply overruling state standards? So a teacher maybe could get disciplined for not covering state standards. But actually, most history teachers have pretty wide discretion about what standards to cover or what to not. States pass these more recent laws, educational gag orders, that don't say explicitly, but seem to make it very difficult to teach certain standards. How should we understand the obligations of the standards over the educational gag orders?
Brock Boone: I think part of what makes this very difficult, and what makes this difficult for teachers, is something I kind of mentioned earlier, which is that teachers are put into this impossible position. So the government is telling them one thing, which is you need to teach these standards. This is basic American history. Or these are the types of literature that you should be assigning to your student. Here's a list. And then on the other hand, teachers are being told, well, if it has anything to potentially touch on systemic racism, that you could potentially get in trouble for that because it might touch on these divisive concepts.
So to give another example, if you're an AP US history teacher, you were required to cover the colonization of America and Native Americans. It requires students to analyze the events that led to the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War. And it requires teachers to cover the various civil rights moments that occurred particularly in the 20th century. So all the while teachers, they must make their students analyze claims, analyze evidence, and analyze reasoning and sources to follow the AP standards. And so this is all required of AP US history teachers. But now in states with classroom censorship and educational gag laws, every teacher teaching AP US history in one of these states is at risk of retaliation and potential violation of the vague laws.
So I feel like there's three camps of teachers that we're encountering when it comes to how they're reacting to some of these laws. One camp is saying, "I'm deathly afraid. I don't want to lose my job. I've basically censored all my books that even talk about race. So I am just cherry picking the few things that I feel safe with." Which is I don't really know how they're filling the time of the semester and they don't either. And what we've heard too is that students are dropping out of their class because the class isn't very strong because the class isn't interesting.
And then I'm hearing from another camp of teachers, which are saying like, "Bump this. I'm going to teach like I always teach. I'm basically doing civil disobedience. I'm going to keep teaching this. I'm teaching truthful honest history, and they can't stop me. And so I'm just going to do it until I get in trouble."
And then there's another camp of teachers who are just not aware of the censorship bills. And so they're, I would say, just floating along doing what they've probably always done until they probably hear about some type of action where someone's told like, "Oh, you can't put up this poster this year," or something like that. And then they're kind of making those decisions on what they need to do.
I want teachers to be able to at least have notice and due process as to what is allowed and what is not allowed. Because otherwise you'll hear the stories that I keep hearing, which is like, this was right before Black History Month. So the last week in January, this is a rural school in Georgia. She was told by administrators, "Hey, you know how you usually put up that Black History Month poster and you put up photos on the poster? You can't do that this year because of the censorship laws." And I talked to her and she's upset obviously. But that is what happens when you don't know what violates or not. Some administrators are taking a heavy hand and just like, well, if it's says Black, then maybe you should take it out.
There's another teacher I spoke to recently who she just basically removed every Black author from her syllabus. So she took her last year's syllabus when she was writing out this year's syllabus, and she just said, well, I'm just going to have to get rid of all the Black authors because I think there's a chance that this might be violating the censorship law, which has to do with race. And so I'm just going to be extra safe or whatever and take it off. So that's the self-censorship happening before any type of enforcement action, and those are the stories we're hearing every week.
Justin Reich: Okay. TeachLab listeners, a quick word here from our partners. I'm so excited to tell you about our latest course, Youth in Front, which you can find at youthinfront.org. Young people have always been at the forefront of movements for justice in the United States, and we want teachers to be able to support them. Maybe not in their specific advocacy, but in being powerful advocates for whatever they believe in.
So here at the Teaching Systems Lab, we teamed up with Learning for Justice and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to produce a course that helps teachers support student activism as part of civic education. You'll learn the history of student led activism in our first self-paced course and how to support student activists. You'll get 15 professional development hours and a certificate. The online course has three powerful interactive units that each take about a week or two to complete. Lots of tools, actionable strategies, and it's all available to you free of charge. You can get started today by visiting youthinfront.org. Let's get back to the show.
Since 2021, at least 28 states have adopted additional measures restricting how teachers can teach history in the United States. More states have proposals on the table. After hearing from Brock Boone, we wanted to get a better idea of how these measures are impacting teachers in the classroom. So we talked to Sara Kaka, an associate professor of education at Ohio Wesleyan University. Sara is the department chair of the university's teacher preparation program. Sara, welcome to TeachLab. Tell us a bit about how you got here.
Sara Kaka: I'm Sara Kaka. I am a brand new associate professor of education at Ohio Wesleyan University. So I taught high school social studies for 10 years prior to making the shift to higher education. So I have lots of good classroom experience, and now I've been in higher ed for 10 years as well. So I feel like I have kind of come full circle when you think about the cycle of teaching and seeing the loop of everything. So I became a teacher at the beginning of No Child Left Behind, and now here we are today.
Justin Reich: So from your vantage, where do things stand today? How did we get to this point?
Sara Kaka: So divisive issues legislation really kind of started to take the country by storm, gosh, I guess it's been almost two years now. There's such a short history of them at this point, but really kind of in the wake of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. At the same time that that schools were going back to school after the pandemic and parents were finding their voice. So parents in the fall of 2020 who were showing up to school board meetings. They were angry because their students either had to wear masks or because they didn't want to go back to school, or they did want to go back to school, or they wanted to go back full time. So parents at that point started to get really, really involved in their kids' education.
And so we see the timing of that in the fall of 2020, catapulting us then into the spring of 2021 where state legislatures started to push these bills forward. And I think it depends on who you talk to, what they say the goal of the legislation is. But the reality is that all of the laws, the divisive issues concepts, seek to limit what teachers can say or do in their classes. And so there's a variety of different kind of formulas that we've seen across the country, but all of them limit teachers' ability to talk about controversial issues and talk about issues surrounding race and gender and equity and sexual identity.
Justin Reich: Sara and her colleagues have been researching teachers' perspectives on teaching divisive issues. They recently published a paper titled These Laws Allege That We Can't Be Trusted, the Culture Wars and the Teaching Profession. In this research, Sara and her team set out to understand the effects of divisive issues legislation as it's passed or under consideration in many US states.
In describing the situation they write, "The intended consequences are clear. Stop students from learning about contentious issues in the classroom. In particular ones like American enslavement and the subsequent systematic oppression of Black people, indigenous people, people of color. The unintended, or at least less obvious consequences of such legislation, are less clear. How might this emergent situation influence the work of teaching?" To find out, Sara and her team interviewed teachers in eight states where these laws are in effect. Sara, what stood out to you most from your interviews with teachers about divisive issues laws?
Sara Kaka: In the research that we've done, that I've done with the research group I've been working with for the past few years, we've talked to teachers in states where the legislation has actually been enacted. So it's in place. We thought that was really important, not just to talk to teachers where legislation might be in place or it's in process, but actually who are living with these laws over them.
And so I think one of the big things that we found at this point is that teachers are afraid. Teachers are afraid of doing what they know they should be doing. They feel like they're limited in what they can teach. They're limited in how they can teach. And so teachers are afraid of the consequences. And I would say that's not true of all teachers, but some of the ones that we've talked to, that was one of the big things that they discussed is this fear, this kind of emotional impact of the laws on them.
And so then if you're afraid to go to work and do your job well, then the love of teaching and the reason, that passion that you had at one point, it's going to fall away. And so we're seeing one of the direct consequences of this is that it's exacerbating the teacher shortage. And so it's hard enough to get teachers to want to come into the profession these days, but then when you add restrictions and culture wars on top of it, we have less people coming in as well.
I mean, given the era that we're in, I think this is just one more strand of the culture wars. So schools have now become a battleground for things that really have nothing to do with school realistically. And so I think that by creating these problems, by saying that teachers are teaching the 1619 Project, that they're teaching critical race theory, that they're indoctrinating students, that's not happening. We've talked to teachers. Teachers have gone on record saying that they're not doing it.
And I think that every teacher I've talked to has said, "My classroom is an open door. You want to come and see the lesson plans here, that's fine. You can see what I'm doing." I don't know any teacher who's going to say no if a parent were to reach out to them and say, "Tell me what you're doing today." But no teachers that I have talked to, or that my colleagues have talked to, and I have a relatively large network of teacher educators who have lots of colleagues around different states, there's not a single teacher that any of us have talked to that have said, "Oh yeah, I'm indoctrinating my students. I'm telling them that it's bad to be white, or that it's bad to be male." No one is doing that. We're taking primary sources and from a variety of different perspectives in social studies, and we're providing opportunities for students to create their own opinions because that's what good teaching is. And that's what we're teaching in teacher preparation programs today.
Justin Reich: How is this climate impacting the people who are training to become teachers in your university program?
Sara Kaka: I think, by and large, the vast majority of teachers want to ensure that their kids have what they need. To go out and be successful and have those critical thinking skills, media literacy, being able to provide evidence to support their arguments. I think all that's really important, and the laws are limiting it. And so some teachers are willing to take chances to actually to stand up and keep doing what they're doing, even in the face of the laws.
And I've talked to colleagues around the state of Ohio as well who see this similarly in their university though. The students that are coming into our program, they're not going to just sit back and take this. They're not willing to sit back. I had a student teacher who he got in trouble just less than a year ago, I guess, maybe over a year, for teaching a lesson on Stonewall. But he did not shy away from that. He's like, "It's in the standards. I'm going to teach it. I'm going to do it the right way. I'm going to use different sources." But they're pushing boundaries because they know that that's what their students need.
Justin Reich: Sara is talking about Dakota Morrison, a student completing his teacher licensure. Dakota had grown up in ohio, fallen in love with social studies in ohio public schools, and was preparing to become a high school teacher himself. He discovered that Ohio’s Department of Education published guidance called the Model Curriculum, and that model curriculum encouraged educators to teach about Gay Liberation Movement and the Stonewall Riots. We’ll hear about all the work that went into preparing that unit, and how students and parents responded, after the break.
Justin Reich: I've got a new book coming on September 20th, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. So for 20 years I've worked in schools on all kinds of projects. Transforming curriculum, integrating technology, reengaging students, making school meaningful and relevant to young people and families. And whatever you're working on, every successful school improvement effort that I've been a part of has one thing in common. They all improve one step at a time.
My new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools, is a playbook for making big changes in schools out of a series of small, manageable steps. In Iterate, I'll share everything I've learned about design, collaboration, and improvement from educators all around the world and from my colleagues here at MIT. You can learn more at iteratebook.com, and you can pre-order a copy at bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, target.com, and wherever books are sold.
In the spring of 2022, Ohio was making national headlines for its introduction of a bill that mirrored a controversial Florida law restricting how teachers in schools talk about sexual orientation and gender identity. Supporters call these parental rights in education laws, while opponents have named them the don't say gay bills. Ohio's House Bill 616 proposed to ban in instruction and materials about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through the third grade in all public and most private schools. And students in grade four and higher could discuss these issues, but any curriculum or instructional materials on sexual orientation or gender identity would need to be "age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." If the bill passed, teachers who violated these rules would risk losing their licenses and schools would risk losing their state funding. Now also in the spring of 2022, Dakota Morrison was beginning his student teacher placement at Findlay High School in Findlay, Ohio. Let's hear Dakota's story.
Dakota Morrison: My name is Dakota Morrison. I am a Bowling Green State University graduate. I am licensed in 7-12 AYA social studies education here in Ohio. And I just finished my first year teaching at Bucyrus Secondary School. So I wanted to be a teacher in first grade. I had every state and capital memorized in kindergarten. I knew every president in order with political party in first grade. So I just loved history. And I mean, when you're in first grade, what do you do? What's a future in history? Obviously the only thing I could think of was a history teacher.
So my whole life, I want to be a history teacher. Eventually my 10th grade year, my social studies teacher did something absolutely astounding, which is why I call him my idol now. Right after the Paris attacks, he stopped our unit on the Bolivian Revolution, and he walked in and said, "Look, I don't want you to fall victim to the Islamophobia that you see on the news following this event. So we're going to jump forward in standards into our unit on Islam, so that way you see what real Muslims believe." And that is to me that is best practice. That is culturally responsive. That is everything that a social studies lesson should be. So that's where I realized that social studies education isn't just memorizing things, and learning where you come from. It's my way of changing the world by helping humans understand other humans.
Growing up, both of my parents worked in Findlay. Findlay, Ohio has more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else in the United States. They have the headquarters for Marathon Petroleum, the gas stations, they have Whirlpool, they have Cooper Tire Factory, they have Ball Metal, which is where every soda can in the Midwest is made. So it's very, very rich town. And to me, Findlay is the big city. I never grew up going to Toledo. I never went to Cincinnati. I never went to Columbus. I went to Findlay. That's where I hang out.
So when I got my student teaching placement at Findlay High School, I'm like, great. I'm home. Findlay, it's about 1600 kids. Despite the fact that it's a really, really rich town, a lot of the rich kids went to one of the suburban schools outside of town. So it was a 29% economic disadvantage, 10.4% Hispanic, and every other community that you can think of is under 5%. The school is very modern. They use a lot of technology. The classroom I was in was 100% paperless and inquiry-based. Very, very accepting.
I mean, on my first day in, my CMT, which is my classroom mentor teacher, I know every college has a different acronym, but he handed me a list of all my students' pronouns. I noticed walking through the school that there were a lot of posters for the school's GSA, Gender and Sexualities Alliance. So it seemed like a very accepting place just walking [inaudible 00:27:37].
So at this placement, I taught 10th grade American history. And they called it CP, college plus or college prep. So it was basically honors. That's what they called honors there. I taught the 1920s. I taught World War II, and I finished civil rights in February. And I look at my state standards. Ohio State standards have one standard that says you have to teach civil rights at all. That's number 27. It says, following World War II, the United States experienced a struggle for racial and gender equality and the extension of civil rights.
So I can fit a lot of things under that umbrella. The state of Ohio also has what's called the model curriculum. What the model curriculum is it has your standard, and then it says, "Okay, here's the standard and here's some bullet points of what you should teach to meet this standard." So looking at that, I was actually surprised because it included a lot of stuff that I was never taught. The model curriculum for that standard that I just read reads, "Mexican-Americans organized through the United Farm Workers of America to improve the conditions of migrant workers. Women made progress towards equal opportunities through demonstrations, legislation, and the establishment of the National Organization for Women. The American Indian movement worked to improve conditions on reservations, protect land rights, and improve opportunities in education and employment. And finally, the gay liberation movement began with the Stonewall riots, which led to an organized effort for full inclusion in public life and institutions."
So I decided if I want to be culturally responsive, I want to make sure every student has the opportunity to see themselves in my class, to see themselves in history, I should incorporate all of this content. So I decided to do what I called my civil rights plus unit. Four one week units, each week being a different community's civil rights unit. I think my approach to teaching the standard was to ensure that nothing could be seen as controversial. I didn't want parents to think I was shaking their kids saying, "Love and respect trans people." Like please do, but the point of it was to say, this is a movement that happened.
It's important for every teacher to be unbiased in everything that we already know. But it's very, very hard to be unbiased when it comes to things like civil rights, because obviously everybody should support civil rights. I don't think that's a controversial opinion personally. But we're in a time period where just including Black history is a controversial thing in some places. So I wanted to ensure that me teaching a gay history unit wasn't just seen as, oh, he's a gay teacher, so he wants to talk about himself.
The way I did that was by framing it around, hey, here are some movements that were inspired by what we've already learned. And I told the kids point blank, everybody deserves to see themselves in history. We have Mexican-American students in our class. I counted. 30% of my students were out LGBT, whether they were gay or bi or trans or non-binary or pansexual or bisexual, or whatever. And I made that known to the class. I'm like, "Look, we're doing this many civil rights units. And the reason we're doing this is because everybody should see themselves. And we have a lot of communities present here, and this will branch understanding and make you guys understand each other a little bit more."
Justin Reich: Okay. So far in this story, we can tell that Dakota is well aware of the pressures that divisive content laws are putting on his curricular decisions. And he's done everything he can to make sure his lesson is aligned. He's working from Ohio State standards, he's referencing Ohio's model curriculum. But to be sure, Dakota seeks out feedback from his mentor teacher.
Dakota Morrison: I was very closely advised by my mentor. Because I mean, this is 2021 social studies. And of course Don't Say Gay had just been introduced in Florida. It's a whole thing. So when he looked at the curriculum that I created, he typically left comments just through Google Slides. I remember specific comments where he said, "Keep making curriculum like this. Keep making this look so good. Keep making this professional." There were times where I would word things where he might say, "You might want to tone that down a bit." He always was on the side of caution. But at the same time, he was always on the side of truth.
Everything I made was heavily researched. I consulted former professors of mine that had taught queer history classes. At one point in this story that I'm going to bring up later, my CMT took all of my materials to the building principal who used to be a social studies teacher, and he approved everything. He said, "Yeah, I see no issue with what you guys are teaching and what you're giving to the kids."
Justin Reich: After doing all that due diligence on top of the content learning and the lesson planning that teachers are already doing to put new units in the classroom, Dakota set out to teach his unit on the gay rights movement.
Dakota Morrison: I started out on a Friday with one day lesson on the aesthetic movement in the pansy craze to establish the first LGBT symbols in the United States. The next day I did a day on the lavender scare. It was a hyper doc assignment where students had to listen to a short little podcast, read comics, and understand the lavender scare of the 1950s, where Eisenhower signed an executive order that banned all suspected homosexuals from working in government positions. I did one day on gay liberation. So starting with the homophile movement, the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, things like that in the '50s. Compton's Cafeteria riot, Stonewall, Harvey Milk, the creation of the rainbow flag.
I ended that day with the creation of the rainbow flag, 1978. Put up a picture of the first one that Gilbert Baker made with pink and turquoise included in it, titled it The First Rainbow. And then the next slide, I put how it's changed. So removing pink and turquoise, adding black and brown, and then eventually adding the trans colors with the progress slide that we use today.
Finally, I started what was to be a two day lesson on the AIDS epidemic using VOXPOP, because that simulation takes two days. And then that would be followed with a one day pop culture day looking at how queer culture infiltrated mainstream life in the '90s, with Will and Grace and Ellen and the lesbian wedding in Friends, as well as music like RuPaul and other things like that.
At one point during the unit, I wrote feminism up on the board, and I said, "Okay, let's come up with a definition for this word. So that way when we're in groups, when we're discussing," because a lot of my content is student led, "we can use this word effectively. We know what this means. We have a shared definition." That worked so well when I started my LGBT unit, I wrote up on the chalkboard, LGBTQ, and wrote out what each letter means, and I wrote how to appropriately use the word queer. I wrote what I teach in my lectures that it's okay when it's used as an adjective, and it's a slur when it's used as a noun. So for example, if I say that Elton John is a queer. That's inappropriate. But if I say, Elton John is a queer musician, or I could just say Elton John is queer. That's when it's seen as acceptable. That's when it's appropriate, and that's how it's used by the community.
And I did this not only as a learning opportunity, and so students could use it appropriately in our conversations, but also to kind of save my own butt because I use queer as shorthand for LGBTQ. It's like I might say the queer community. This is a queer lecture, this our queer history unit. And I didn't want students who didn't know better to think that I was name calling.
The unit was fantastic. The kids were very, very mature. A lot of kids walked out of my class that never paid attention to anything getting A's. A lot of kids that never talked to me talked to me because they saw themselves for the first time. I mean, I was four days in from the pansy craze, lavender scare, Stonewall, and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The kids were so mature. I remember after my first day of the AIDS epidemic day simulation, almost crying because the kids were so mature. I was so afraid of AIDS jokes happening in my classroom and having to deal with that, and I didn't have that problem. I never had to deal with homophobia in that classroom.
But March 16th, I went to lecture at BGSU. Afterwards, I got a phone call while I was on campus from my CMT to tell me that parents had complained and our unit was getting shut down. We couldn't finish the simulation. We couldn't do the summative assessment. And we had to shut down the rest of our civil rights units. And I've said this entire time, I am dumbfounded but not surprised. That is how I will describe the situation till the day I die.
Justin Reich: So from talking to teachers, my hunch is that Dakota's experience will resonate with many of our listeners out there. To find out what happened next, be sure to listen to the next episode in our series on Teacher Speech and the New Divide. And if you've come up against divisive content issues in your school or classroom, we want to hear from you. You can email us at teachlabpodcast@mit.edu. That's teachlabpodcast, all one word, @mit.edu.
I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab and a special thanks to all of our guests who shared with us today. In our next episode on Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we'll pick up with Dakota Morrison's story and find out what happened next in Ohio. We'll also dig deeper into the history of Teachers' First Amendment rights. To get a better understanding of where we are today.
We've got some great resources out and forthcoming for educators everywhere. I've got a new book coming out in September, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. You can learn more at iteratebook.com and you can pre-order wherever books are sold. If you'd like to sign up for Youth in Front, our course on supporting student activism, you can visit youthinfront.org. And you can check out our documentary film, We have to Do Something Different, Teachers on the Journey Towards More Equitable Schools at somethingdifferentfilm.com. Take a look at our show notes to see Dakota's lesson plans, Sara's research, and find links to all that great stuff that we're ready to share. If you like what you hear on TeachLab, please be sure to leave us a rating or review. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley, and the sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe, until next time.