Katherine Crawford-Garrett and Rebecca Sánchez are professors in the school of education at the University of New Mexico. They wrote the following commentary:
Like so many universities across the country, the University of New Mexico, a minority-serving institution, has experienced a sharp increase in hate-related incidents since the presidential election last week. These events, which have included swastikas being spray painted around campus and the attempt to remove a Muslim woman’s hijab in the library, have triggered responses from departments, colleges, and senior level university officials such as the President and Provost.
The chair of the American studies department, for example, immediately sent a note to students inviting them to an informal gathering to process emotions and share thoughts and insights; a colleague who teaches Spanish reported that faculty and administrators in her department were collectively planning a teach-in. A professor in Chicano studies initiated a petition to have the campus designated as a sanctuary for undocumented students. The Provost shared insights about the role of the university in comforting those who “are hurt, scared, and disenfranchised.” As professors in the College of Education, we wondered how our college might respond, aware that our students were not only navigating a treacherous environment on campus but simultaneously working as pre-service teachers in public schools where they were struggling to debrief the election, address issues of bullying and aggression, and ease the anxieties and fears expressed by their students from immigrant backgrounds.
As the days passed, we became increasingly confounded by the silence from our college and department and tried sending emails inquiring whether a message would be sent to education students and faculty within our community. Specifically we asserted that, “As the College of Education at a Minority-Serving Institution, we have a moral obligation to acknowledge the events of the past several days, re-affirm our commitments to diversity, and offer our students an opportunity to discuss and process what has happened.” We understand that addressing these issues is difficult and that members of our college community hold diverse political views and experienced the aftermath of the election from a variety of different positions and perspectives. Yet we argue that we have an ethical responsibility to foster dialogue, generate discussion and encourage solidarity. As a result of these convictions, we also attempted to start a conversation among our colleagues directly by sending an email to our faculty listserv. In our message, we posed critical questions about the purposes of teacher education, including the following:
- What does it mean to be critical participants in a democracy?
- In what ways do we rigorously and consistently engage diversity in our courses, programs and department?
- What does it mean to prepare teachers to teach in “these times?”
- How do we center human relationships in our work? Both with each other and with our students?
- How do we stay connected to our vision and values as we negotiate pressures from state and federal sources?
While many of our colleagues expressed interest in discussing these questions, we later discovered that certain responses to our email were not distributed by department leaders, including one particularly powerful response authored by a Black, female professor. Lastly, we sought to reach out to the elementary education students enrolled in our program by compiling a comprehensive list of resources to support them as they attempted to confront the numerous issues surfacing in their classrooms in the wake of the election. These resources included links to news accounts of school and university-based violence occurring across the country, guidelines for discussing the election from organizations like Teaching Tolerance and Facing History and Ourselves, a list of our College’s core values which include tenets like social justice, diversity and advocacy, excerpts from U.S. court cases that affirm children’s rights to an equal education, and suggestions on how to move forward collectively in an era marked by deeply divisive rhetoric. Unfortunately, we were denied access to the elementary education listserv (though we are both faculty members in the program) and told the resources we sought to provide did not constitute official business.
While we both found creative ways around these obstacles by contacting our individual students directly (a fraction of those we could have reached through the listserv) and working to organize a community forum, which will be held on Inauguration Day, we remain alarmed by the silence and resistance we encountered in our college. What is most damning about this silence is that it subverts the very core of our work as teacher educators. What could be more essential to our profession than helping pre-service teachers conduct meaningful, urgent discussions with students about what it means to live and participate in a democracy?
When we finally saw our students in class nearly a week after the election, they had stories to share regarding personal experiences on campus and the conditions they encountered in their elementary and high school classrooms. One high school teacher was told by her principal that discussing the election with students was unprofessional and would be marked as such on a forthcoming evaluation. An elementary school teacher shared a note written by student who said he wouldn’t be participating in class that day because he was so worried about his family’s impending deportation. Another teacher shared that a group of 5th graders were bullying younger students at the school with the justification that “If the president can talk like this, so can we.” A Middle-Eastern graduate student conveyed fears that if he chose to leave the U.S. to visit his family over the summer, he may not be allowed back in to complete his degree. These concerns serve as tangible and concrete reminders of the necessity of creating the space to have difficult conversations in our classrooms.
We still don’t fully understand the silence we encountered within our college and cannot definitively identify its roots, but we believe it may be related to fear — the same fear pre-service teachers often express about raising controversial topics in the classroom, confronting homophobia directly, or discussing race with their students — fears that we connect, at least tangentially, to school reform initiatives that extol compliance over criticality and creativity. Our teacher education program, like those across the country, faces pressure to comply with a host of increasingly meaningless standards and mandates while the potential for real, transformative work is essentially lost. As a teacher education department, we seem to dedicate a tremendous amount of time to discussing assessment, analyzing standards and designing performance indicators but precious little time to the hard work of interrupting hate in K-12 classrooms, on college campuses, and in the world at large. Even when many of us attempt to do this work individually in our own courses and through our research endeavors, how much more powerful and potentially transformative would this work be if it were given the institutional attention that standards and evaluation so often receive?
Our nation is clearly at a crossroads and education will undoubtedly play an essential role in how we collectively move forward. If our goal as educators is to develop critically-conscious citizens capable of engaging productively within our democracy, we must live these values as well. We must talk fearlessly with one another, engage in dialogue even when it feels uncertain and uncomfortable, and be willing to affirm one another’s humanity. As Holocaust survivor and scholar Elie Wiesel noted, “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
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