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So, um, it's important for me to say that I am here as a parent, guardian from the Denver Public Schools. And I just want to thank the organizers for inviting a parent voice into this venue. I really appreciate the opportunity. Um, I also just accepted a job with the Adams 14 School District, so I got to do a little shout out for Adams 14.
Um, you know, most TED Talks talk about a new idea or a big idea. I'm talking about a really old idea; it's been around for decades. I'm talking about multiculturalism. We were talking about it in 1978, and we're still talking about it today because it's been around for such a long time, it can mean different things to different people. So I want to talk about some multicultural practices that I'm not talking about today. I am not talking about food and festivals or heroes and holidays. Okay? These sorts of things can be really fun; they're very easy to do, and if they're authentic to the cultures that are represented in our school, they can be really fun community builders. But they also come with some risks.
One of the things that I see a lot out here is I see—I see things on the school menu. We'll have tacos in celebration of Cinco de Mayo; we'll have uh, fried chicken for Martin Luther King Day; we'll have soul food on the menu during Black History Month. Um, and again, these sorts of things can be fun, but they also run the risk of sort of reinforcing stereotypes, and they also run the risk of trivializing things that are really, really uh, quite important. So, um, how many people here think most of your students have heard of Cinco de Mayo? Right? And so if y'all—I use y'all as a gender-neutral pronoun—if y'all had tacos um on your menu, as your students are biting into that taco, are they thinking about Mexican resistance to French occupation? Is that what they're thinking about? No. So it runs the risk of sort of trivializing something that is actually quite important. Oops. Can you go back one?
I'm also not talking about something we do a lot in early childhood classrooms, which is when we bring in stories from all over the world, right? Kind of that folklore and sort of fables approach. Again, this is something that's really easy to do; it's also a way to kind of ensure that our children, our diverse children in a classroom, see somebody who looks like them in what they're reading in the classroom. It's a really easy thing to do, but I want to remind everybody that the value of multicultural content is not just about where a story comes from; it's also about the messages um that the story relays to the reader. Last year, in her second-grade literacy class, my daughter was reading a multicultural anthology. One of the stories that was included in that anthology was a story called "The Sky Girl," which is a traditional Celtic tale. And if I were to summarize this story, it's basically about a man who gets obsessed with a magical seal woman. So I'm going to read one paragraph from this story: "He went to look in wonder and delight. He saw three beautiful girls sitting on the rocks, naked, combing their hair. One of the girls had fair hair, one red, and one black. The fair-haired girl was singing; she was the most beautiful of the three, and he could not take his eyes from her. He gazed and gazed at her gleaming white body." Okay? This was my daughter's response to that story; um, I would say it was my response as well. So when you are using sort of the stories from around the world approach, remember that the messages matter; the message of the story matters as much as where the stories come from. Um, to be fair to my child, uh, this is what Zoe looks like: happy. Okay.
So if I'm not talking about food and festivals or heroes or holidays or folklore and fables, um, what am I talking about? I am talking about the kind of social—the kind of multiculturalism that's characterized by three basic things: it is rigorous in terms of content and instruction; it's very rigorous. It supports all that skill building we're so concerned about. Um, it also is designed, particularly with instruction, to advance students' pro-social capacities. And that's a big phrase that just means our students can look at issues from multiple points of view, and they can um work collaboratively in diverse groups. That's what pro-social proficiencies are. Um, and the third thing that the kind of multiculturalism that I'm talking about does is that it advances social justice. But let's talk about that term for a second. Um, last fall in the Denver Public Schools, we had a little kerfuffle. Um, DPS rolled out the new—a draft of the new teacher evaluation protocol, and it included some elements that related to this term, "social justice," and so it brought out some pretty significant responses in our community. To some people in our community, if we focus on social justice, that means we're going to turn all of our children into socialists who hate white people. Okay? This, of course—this kind of response then brought out people from the other end of the spectrum who said, "If we don't have an emphasis on social justice in our schools, that just means our schools will serve to reinforce the white supremacist, heterosexist oligarchy." And, by the way, so right. [Applause] So if you get hung up on the social justice term, if it's not a term that works well for you, um, I'm going to take a cue from our school superintendent, Tom Boasberg, when we were having this kerfuffle in DPS, who just came back and said, "We want our kids to be critical thinkers." Multiculturalists are interested in our children being able to look at—at—at issues from multiple points of view, work collaboratively with each other, and really kind of solve problems. So the kind of multiculturalism that I'm talking about is the kind that is rigorous academically—content and instruction; it advances pro-social proficiency, particularly through instruction; and it advances social justice, or critical thinking, whatever term you're most comfortable with.
So one of the schools that I have the privilege of being involved in in uh, Denver—in Denver Public Schools—is Highline Academy Charter School. I'm the board president there; that's a volunteer position where I work full-time. Um, yeah, and um, Highline Academy is a K-8 public charter school authorized by—authorized by the Denver Public Schools. We are a purposefully integrated school, and we mean that like in the old-school way: we are 50% of color and 50% white; that's on purpose. And the demographics of Southeast Denver allow us to do that. We're also what we call a core—what we call—literally, we made this up: we are a core knowledge plus school. Um, those of you who know core knowledge—if you don't know core knowledge, what it basically is, it's a—it's a sequence and a scaffolded set of content that spirals up through the grade levels, and it's a really useful tool because it allows us to make sure that, you know, our kids aren't reading the "I Have a Dream" speech every year when they—when they do Martin Luther King Day, right? It just allows us to create shared knowledge in second grade that is then built upon in the fifth grade. So when Zoe, my daughter, was in second grade last year, um, this was when they had their first introduction to Westward Expansion. Um, and it was now—Highline—Highline has—we're a core knowledge plus school because we supplement our content a lot to make sure it meets the needs of our diverse learners. And when Zoe got into this Westward Expansion unit, it was a whole bunch of—of pioneer wagon trains, riverboats, trains, um, and that—and—and very—very based sort of in this Manifest Destiny mentality. And that is a perfectly valid way to teach Westward Expansion; it really is, because Westward Expansion was really, really good for a lot of people, and we probably would not be here today had it not unfolded the way that it did. But Westward Expansion was not good for everybody. Um, and I was really worried that Zoe was only getting sort of half of the story. And so I sat down and I thought to myself, "Okay, what is it I really want her to know by the end of this unit? What—what do I want her to be able to answer?" And I wanted her to be able to think about how can progress be both positive and negative. That's really what I wanted her to be able to reflect on with this unit. And so we supplemented a lot; we supplemented a lot. We brought in the core knowledge sequence, for example, includes a short story that's—that's told from the perspective of a pioneer girl who's going out on the road, right? And so we—Venn diagram—early grades teacher's best friend—we did a Venn diagram activity using a story about a Bitterroot Salish girl who was being forcibly removed from her home. That was one way we brought in—we brought in fiction, non-fiction, we brought in poetry from the Cheka; we brought in—um, an important thing that we brought in were resistance narratives. Because when you teach history, particularly this episode of history, it's almost like it's a foregone conclusion, but there was massive resistance to policies of Indian Removal. We certainly taught some of the resistance narratives from Native America, but we also made a point to do resistance—resistance narratives from white folks: the ladies of Steubenville, Ohio, a group of Quaker women um who wrote to Congress asking them to be more equitable; a U.S. senator who gave a six-hour-long speech on the floor of Congress um asking folks to reject the Indian Removal Act. Um, we brought in lots and lots of different things. And by the end of the unit, um, my child and many others could answer, or at least reflect on, what—about um that essential question: In what ways can progress be both positive and negative? They used all of their skills: their reading skills, their writing skills; we had mapping activities for geography; we had graphing activities for math. It was all sort of skill-based; it was very rigorous. Um, for my child, she was really transformed, I would say, by this unit. It really sparked a passion for her. I took at least three trips to The Bookies, which is our little independent teacher bookstore in Southeast Denver, to get her non-fiction books about Native America, that kind of thing. And then she did the most incredible thing: she asked us to do something over spring break. She didn't want to go to camp; she didn't want to lay around and play video games. This is what she wanted to do: she wanted to go see the site of the Sand Creek Massacre because she had read about it in some of her books. So she was really, really motivated by this content. You know you're getting it right when the kids are doing it on their own time. You know you're getting it right.
So between second and third grade, um, Zoe changed schools. She is now at the Denver Green School, which is—when it's fully enrolled, it'll be a K-8—be K-8, and it's an innovation school, which means it's—it's a traditional DPS school, but it's got its own kind of thing going on. It does have an environmental—if I could get some water, that would be helpful—it does have an environmental focus, um, but it's really built around these—around principles of sustainability, and it's a little different than environmentalism. So, for example, they are really interested in teaching children about the healthy commons: How do we protect the healthy commons? Thank you. Oh, much better. So the idea of the healthy commons is there are things that we share in common, right? We share the Earth; we share the land; we share the water. How do we work collectively to protect those things? So Zoe goes to the Denver Green School, and wouldn't you know it, they're teaching Westward Expansion in the third grade, right? And I'm like, "Really? Because we just—we just did this, and we just did it really well, and it was—it was awesome, and now she's going to sit in class and do it all over again." Well, Cartelle—Cartelle Jaquette, her teacher, um, definitely did lay down some background knowledge about what happened for Native America and the pioneers and that sort of thing. And then Mr. Jaquette did something that rocked my daughter's world, and it rocked my world, and it's very Denver Green School: he taught the unit from the perspective of the buffalo. Right? And if you think about multiculturalism being about inviting multiple perspectives, think about the power of children looking at Westward Expansion from these three frameworks. It was really quite a beautiful—it was a really beautiful and exciting thing uh, for my daughter and for me, and hopefully for all the kids. So I just want to ask all of the educators in the room that when you think about doing multiculturalism, please don't stop with heroes and holidays, food and festivals, folklore and fables. Please don't stop there, and maybe don't even start there, um, because there is a wonderful way um to do a kind of teaching and learning that is going to build those academic skills you care about, that's going to allow children to really look at issues from multiple perspectives, um, and that is going to enable them to sort of think uh, very critically. Um, and doing multicultural education really, at the end of the day, is about empowering our children uh, to be really prepared to participate in our diverse democracy. Thank you very much. [Music]