In this episode, we sit down with the executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council, Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup. The Vermont Humanities Council runs Vermont Reads (not to be confused with Vermont *ed* Reads), in which they choose a book for our whole state to read, ponder and talk about. This year, that book is Angie Thomas’ powerful The Hate U Give.

And that is the book Christopher and I mull over on this episode of the show. What can this popular YA novel about police violence against Black bodies teach a largely white state?

I’m Jeanie Phillips, and this is #vted Reads: books by, for, and with Vermont educators. Let’s chat.

Jeanie: Thanks for joining me Christopher.

Christopher: Thank you so much for having me Jeanie. It’s really great to be here.

Jeanie:  Do you want to tell us before you read a little excerpt, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Christopher:  Sure. I’m the Executive Director of Vermont Humanities. We’re the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and we’ve been around since 1974. And our mission is to really make sure that all Vermonters have the opportunity to read and learn throughout life.  We do a lot of different programs, but one of the programs that many Vermonters are very, very fond of is Vermont Reads, where we pick one novel each year and work with that novel in communities throughout the state for the entire year.

Jeanie:  Excellent! I love Vermont Reads and I’ve been reading your selections for many years and I’m so excited to have you on the show. You indicated that you’d love to start with a little bit of a reading from The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. So I’m just going to turn it over to you.

Christopher:  Yeah. So this is an interesting book for these times because it addresses police brutality against African-Americans.  And so I’m going to start with a short excerpt from the book. It starts with the main character, Starr, who’s a 17-year-old girl, talking to members of her family the day after she has witnessed the shooting of one of her childhood friends by a policeman. 

“I borrowed your hoody, Seven,” I mumble. It’s random, but it’s better than nothing. “The blue one. Momma had to throw it away. Khalil’s blood…” I swallow. “His blood got on it.”

“Oh…”

That’s all anybody says for a minute.

Mama turns around to the skillet. “Don’t make any sense. That baby–” she says thickly.  “He was just a baby.”

Daddy shakes his head.  “That boy never heard anybody. He didn’t deserve that shit.”

“Why did they shoot him?” Seven asks. “Was he a threat or something?”

“No,” I say quietly

I stare at the table, I can feel all of them watching me again.

“He didn’t do anything,” I say. “We didn’t do anything.  Khalil didn’t even have a gun.”

Daddy releases a slow breath. “Folks around here gon’ lose their minds when they find that out.”

“People from the neighborhood are already talking about it on Twitter,” Seven says. “I saw it last night.”

“Did they mention your sister?” Momma asks.

“No. Just RIP Khalil messages, fuck the police, stuff like that.  I don’t think they know details.”

“What’s going to happen to me when the details do come out?” I ask.

“What do you mean, baby?” my mom asks.

“Besides the cop, I’m the only person who was there. And you’ve seen stuff like this. It ends up on national news. People get death threats, cops target them, all kinds of stuff.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Daddy says. “None of us will.”  He looks at Momma and Seven. “We’re not telling anybody that Starr was there.”

Jeanie:  That’s really powerful. Oof, there’s a lot going on there and I wonder if we might use it as a segue to ask: why did the Vermont Humanities Council choose The Hate U Give for Vermont Reads?

Christopher: It’s a tough book and it’s very relevant at this moment, of course. We really chose it because last year our Vermont Reads Book was March by John Lewis. That book is also a really powerful book with a fair amount of violence in it. You know, it’s the story of John Lewis growing up and joining the nonviolent civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it goes through a number of different events in the congressman’s life.

It goes through crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the beatings that happened there. It goes through the lunch counter sit-ins and the violence that happened there. And it goes through a lot of the jail time that John Lewis and his fellow organizers went through.  But one of the things that we thought about as we worked with that book was that for many people it feels like far away history, even though it was only about 60 years ago. For many people — especially young people — that feels like it was very, very long ago.

And we felt like it was important to recognize that the civil rights movement that John Lewis started is not over.

You know, as we watched the congressman in his final weeks visiting Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C., that was very much the message that he wanted to give to young people today. This movement is not in the past, this movement is now. And that’s really why we felt like it was important to continue the conversation with a book that really dives deep into some of the work that the Black Lives Matter movement is doing today.

Jeanie:  I love March and John Lewis is a hero of mine. I watched Barack Obama’s eulogy (video) and was really touched by him saying, “Be more like John Lewis.”

John Lewis, I know, centered love in his work, and thought of his activism as an act of love, and the civil rights movement as something that embodied love. That justice is a form of love. 

And so I carry that, and Barack Obama’s words about John Lewis, in my heart. And I think a lot about how could I be more like John. 

So I’m so grateful that you bring him into this conversation, and bring this book into continuity with last year’s Vermont Reads book. And with his life really.

I’m also wondering: you say that John Lewis says that the civil rights movement isn’t just ancient history, it isn’t just in the past, but it’s also something that I think a lot of folks associate with the South. And here we are in Vermont. I think that bringing this book here is also a way of asking us to deal with our own racism here, when we think of ourselves as not a very racist state.

Christopher:  Yeah. You know, I think that’s very clear. We see that especially in the last six months or so. That there have been so many really intense examples of the work that we need to do in this state. That we continue to see threats made against Black organizers. We continue to see Black organizers actually leave their communities because they and their family don’t feel safe. In a way that’s actually part of the story in The Hate U Give.

There’s a big, there’s a big debate that runs throughout the book between Starr’s parents, about whether they should stay in the community that they live in. Whether or not it’s safe for their children. And I think that’s very much true for folks of color, for organizers all over the place. It’s not something that disappears when you cross the border into Vermont. We like to think that we have a very safe state but that is that is not many people’s experiences. 

Jeanie:  Right. And the statistics also don’t bear out that we’re a non-racist state. Right? Because people of color are way more likely to be stopped by police officers, right? As just one statistic. Or people of color who live in Vermont are way more likely to be incarcerated, right? And so our statistics show racism in action.

Christopher:  You know too, just one statistic that came up yesterday again is that Vermont incarcerates Black men at the highest rate in the nation. We are number one and there’s some very systemic problems there.

Jeanie: This is our issue too, right?  When you talked a little bit about the debate within Starr’s family, about whether to leave, I had marked a piece of the text on page 52. Starr’s father, Maverick, is really loyal to his neighborhood; the neighborhood is really important to him. He runs a business in the neighborhood. Starr’s mother, on the other hand, his wife, is really interested in moving out to the suburbs, to a place where she feels like her kids will be safer and where her brother Carlos lives. And Uncle Carlos is also a police officer.

So I’m just going to read a section of this because I think it’s really relevant to what we’re talking about here in Vermont as well:

So there’s something about this for me that’s like how timeless this book is even though it was it came out of a very specific time because of how little movement or progress we’ve made in this area and then also a way in which it brings it home for us, even if we think we don’t live in a place that has this kind of incidents happen.

Christopher: You know, I think it’s true we keep seeing this story over and over and over again.  In this fictional treatment, we see these dynamics happening that you just see in community after community all across the country. And you see them here in Vermont as well.

But I also want to turn it a little bit and say there’s some really crazy stuff that happens in this book. There is some really deep systemic racism; there’s some really deep pain. They’re telling a deep story, they’re in pain — but there’s also a lot of joy in this book. And each time I read it, that comes out to me more and more. That there is a community in Garden Heights that is really looking out for each other.

Garden Heights is the name of the neighborhood that the fictional neighborhood that Starr in her family live in. And they know everyone: they know all the neighbors, all of the parents’ generation are taking care of everybody’s kids, the grandparent’s generation knows everything that’s happening in the community. They talk a lot about being outside in the streets, talking with one another.

The scenes where they are gathering, or in a celebratory space, are really wonderful examples of community culture. That I think is just beautiful. And it’s also really relatable in many ways. When we think about our own neighborhoods here in Vermont, there’s some really crappy racist stuff that happens here; we have deeply embedded systemic racism. But we also care about each other and these communities as well.

We also have some of the same issues that exist in Garden Heights, so that’s another thing that that came up for me. Particularly thinking about how much they struggle with systemic racism and economics. How much they struggle with systemic racism and the drug culture and the gang culture. Like, that is not stuff that only exists in an inner city neighborhood, right? The opioid epidemic. And as prevalent in Barre or Montpelier or Winooski or Brattleboro or Rutland as it is in the fictitious Garden Heights — or anywhere else in the United States. There’s an important message there too, right? That this is not a community that’s at a distance.  We can relate to this. These are things that happen in our communities as well.

Jeanie:  I think what I’m hearing from you is that Angie Thomas takes this real strengths-based approach, this real asset-based approach, as she’s writing this family, this community, and  this story.

So even though this terrible, awful thing has happened to Khalil, and Starr’s a witness to it and it really rips apart the community, there’s also this sense of Angie seeing all of their gifts and their love for each other. The place that that struck me most acutely is the really beautiful relationship between Maverick and Lisa. Between Starr’s parents. The way that they’re able to hold the tension of this challenging moment and still love each other, and love their three children.

And I think that’s really important. I think that a lot of books about race have been about conflict, or about pain. So Angie Thomas’ book is about that, but it’s also about strength and about wholeness.

Christopher:  Yeah. There’s so much beauty in that, and also a lot of humor, you know? I think one of the things about Maverick and Lisa’s relationship is that they do have a lot of conflict about this tension between the suburbs and the neighborhood, but they do hold each other very much in a loving space. They have that argument and they embarrass the crap out of their kids all the time with the way that they love each other, and how public they are about the love that they have for each other. 

That is, I expect, so relatable to anybody who is a teenager watching their parents interact with each other. Or anybody who’s a parent trying to push the buttons on their kids to make them react. There’s a lot of humor in that and it’s so strength-based. It’s all about assets. And there are so many assets in the community that Angie Thomas has written. 

Jeanie:  It’s redemptive, right? Because Maverick hasn’t lived an ideal or perfect life. He spent time in jail and he’s come out the other side of it as a business owner, as a family man, as a pillar of the community, really.  And there’s something about that redemption that feels really hopeful to me.

Christopher:  Yeah, and his relationship with Uncle Carlos, Lisa’s brother, who raised Mav’s kids during the time he was in jail is a really interesting and complex relationship. Because Uncle Carlos is a cop. He’s serving in the same precinct as the cop who murdered Khalil. So there’s a really interesting tension between the two characters and their approach to community-building. Mav has this kind of incredible sense of organizing in the community, and Carlos comes at it from a more traditional policing perspective, but they’re often coming at each other in ways where they have to look beyond the stereotypes of cops or gangbangers. I find that an interesting piece of this book as well.

Jeanie: The part of the story where we get this contrast between Uncle Carlos and Maverick reminded me of the Jason Reynolds book called All-American Boys. Have you read that one? It’s a white perspective and a Black perspective; two perspectives on an act of police violence. I think what Angie Thomas is really getting at is the plurality of ways that we can think about these issues.

You know, the book starts with this big arc, if you will: an act of racism where a police officer acts with excessive force and ends up killing a young Black man. But there are also the smaller acts of racism that happen at the private school that Starr attends. I’m particularly thinking about her interactions with Haley and Maya. I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about that sort of quieter kind of racism that that gets spotlighted in this book.

Christopher:  Yeah you know could I read another short passage from the book actually that gets right at that.

It starts on page 71. In the on-going battle between Lisa and Mav, one of the compromises that was made is that the three kids are sent to a private school in the suburbs, close to where Uncle Carlos lives. It’s called Williamson High School. Connie and Seven and Starr are all students there, and it’s an almost entirely white school. Starr has two girlfriends: Haley and Maya. Haley is very, very white. Maya is from a Chinese-American immigrant family, but this little passage is as Starr is getting out of the car to go to walk into the school in the morning. She says:

Jeanie:  Yeah. That passage really highlights for me what it must feel like and be like to code-switch as a regular part of your school day.

Christopher: A lot of people might not know what code-switching is. Code-switching is what Starr is talking about in that passage where you really have to become another personality in certain situations.

I first learned about code-switching not in the context of racism, but in the context of Queerness. And feeling like you behave in one way in a certain group of people, and you behave in a different way among another group of people.  And although I know that code-switching as a concept originated in communities of color, it does apply to other kinds of difference. Where you really have to hide in many ways.

And what Starr is doing is, is pretty classic.

She doesn’t tell people what her life is like in her neighborhood. Not because she’s not proud of her community; I think she is proud of her community. But to have to compete with some of the other private school kids.

One of the things she talks about is they’re all saying where they’re going on their Christmas vacation. They’re going to the Bahamas, to the family home in the Bahamas, or they’re going to Taipei to visit their grandparents. Starr doesn’t have any of that and she can’t compete with those kids. It’s hard for her, as a teenager, to figure out that she can hold on to other things.  It’s a complex piece of her story. 

Jeanie:  I think about Starr and other folks who have to code-switch in order to fit in to dominant culture dominant narratives, right? How much work that is. And how little credit it’s given, right? To read a situation and know which version of yourself to have ready. And then all the work! All the sophistication. The sort of literacy that it is to be able to do that.

To know how to speak to your community is both a strength and a tremendous burden, right? It’s a lot to ask a 16-year-old kid to do. 

Christopher:  And they’re doing it all the time, right? They’re learning it from a very young age. 

I can say that from my own perspective, as a young person you learn very quickly what’s safe and what’s not safe in any given situation.

We recently did a training for librarians who were going to be working with this book and that’s one of the things the trainer talked about. Right away, to a room full of largely white librarians, she told a story about how as a Latino woman she spends much of the time scanning the horizon for “shit that’s about to go down”, I think is the term that she used.

And I think that’s true for anybody from a marginalized population. Constantly aware of your surroundings and what might be dangerous.

That’s very much what Starr is experiencing at Williamson.

 Jeanie: I read this book in 2016, as a librarian. I was at a library conference and I got an advanced reader’s copy. And I saw the poster then (which is different than the poster now) and knew I needed a copy of this book. I read it right away. 

What I remember in 2016, is that I had a 16-year-old son at home. 

Same age as Starr, right.

And in this book, in chapter two, when they first get pulled over, Khalil and Starr, Starr immediately starts remembering the talk she had with her parents. One talk was about the birds and the bees. And then the other one she says, the other talk was about what to do if a cop stopped me. 

Starr continues throughout this or deal with the police officer to keep remembering her father’s words. 

And I remember reading this you know it’s on page 21, it’s the beginning of the book and realizing I had never once had a conversation with my son about what to do if you’re stopped by a police officer, never.  And feeling both the privilege of that and the shock of that and the pain of what it must be like to have to have that conversation early and often.  And so thinking about thinking about what you just said about how people of color have to navigate spaces and the difference when you are when you occupy an identity that is in that represents the dominant culture.

I guess I’m just still sitting with that. Remembering how much that hit me at that time. 

Christopher:  Another resource for folks would be Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And  Me. It’s letter that Coates writes his son, which is that talk that Black parents have with their children. Those three lines:

• Keep your hands visible
• No sudden moves
• Only speak when spoken to.

They repeat this over and over and over again through the book.

I think that’s a piece of this that white folks do have a really hard time understanding. That the relationship we might have with the police in our community is very different from the relationship that other people might have to the police in their community.

I live in Montpelier, and in our schools there’s a big debate happening right now about the school resource officer, who is a cop, who is assigned to the school district and spends time in the schools. The officer wears a gun in the building. And there are a lot of parents who have expressed concern about having an armed police officer in the building. A lot of them are concerned because of the association of school resource officers with systemic racism and the potential for police violence, particularly against young men of color.

And we’re a very white community. There are lots of other parents who just cannot get that. Who just are not able to get that understanding of: keep your hands visible, no sudden moves, only speak when spoken to. That the relationship that we have to the police is not the same as other people’s relationship to the police. And that it’s traumatizing for some children because there’s generational trauma associated with that relationship. 

With all due respect, many Vermont cops are wonderful, wonderful people. They’re not engaging in violence against young men of color or young people of color, but that does not change the fact that the generational trauma that is associated with police is still there. And it’s borne out by our statistics, that we put young men of color in jail at a higher rate than any other state.

Jeanie:  I think that’s one of the reasons why this book and books by people of color are so important for students in mostly white schools to read.

I’m thinking about Rudine Sims Bishop, who in the 1990s, wrote a piece about windows, mirrors, and sliding doors (.pdf). And there’s a great graphic I’ve mentioned before, where if you are a white young person growing up in this culture because of the way you are represented in books and the media, it’s like you’re surrounded by mirrors.

Everything’s mirroring back your own experience, which makes it seem like your experience is the only one.

If you’re a person of color, your mirrors get smaller and smaller to the point where if you’re Native American, the way you see yourself in media and culture is like the size of a compact, right? Teeny tiny.

And that’s harmful for people of color who don’t see themselves represented, but it’s also harmful because of the way that white folks are overrepresented in their own experience of media and books. Right? That they think that there’s only one way to experience the world.

For me, we can’t — in schools — read enough books by and about people of color, written by own voices. Stories of people of color and other marginalized voices.

Because we are so inundated, and we’ve been so inundated with our own stories, that we need to welcome in other version, so we have a more pluralistic and understanding view of the world.

Christopher:  You know, that essay has come up over and over again for me in the last couple of weeks, so I’m glad you put it in the resources for folks. Listeners, you all should read it. It’s quite illuminating.

I mean, it’s arguably harmful, right, that we’re two white people talking about this book together. Right?  We have biases and perspectives and misunderstandings that are pretty much ensuring that there are pieces of this work we don’t get. That we don’t understand. And we at Vermont Humanities have heard that critique, you know?

Why are you, as a historically white organization doing work with this book?

And it’s a painful critique to hear. That you can’t just read a book and get it, right? Because we’re smart people; a lot of us are English majors, we read a lot. You know about new criticisms, I went to Kenyon College. The reality is that there are places where I’m going to mess up often and I have to be very, very careful about that.

And so one of the things that we’ve decided to do which we haven’t typically done in the past in Vermont Reads is offer facilitated assistance to every community that wants to work with this book. To help them address some of the pitfalls some of the places where we could fall down, where we could make mistakes. Among the biggest of them of course, is that as white folks, we could assume that all young people are having the same experiences. 

For many young people of color in Vermont, their lives here are  radically different from the experience that Starr has in this book.

This is a novel, it’s fiction, it’s not based on somebody’s actual experience, although it draws a lot of elements of truth out of history and out of the current, current day.  We have to be careful as teachers, as librarians, as organizers around this, to make sure that we’re recognizing the complete humanity of the people that are in the room with us when we’re having these conversations — and not make assumptions about what people’s experiences may or may not be. 

And I hope that we’ll do a good job but I’m also sure that we’re screwing it up every day.

Jeanie:  And the only thing worse than screwing it up would be not trying it all, right?

I can’t let the errors I’m going to make in my own whiteness stand in the way of me reading and talking about books by people of color, right? And I can’t expect people of color to do that work. So I totally hear you and couldn’t agree more.

Five years from now we’ll listen back to some of the conversations I have about reading, about books and be mortified, right? At how little I knew. Because I’m always driving to learn more and I won’t learn more if I don’t try, right? If I don’t lean in. 

I really appreciate that you just said that and holding the tension of both of those truths. For me, fiction in particular gets that deep truth. Like, I learned so much about what I don’t know, the lived experience of others through fiction. Not because it’s factual but because it hits on what it must be like to have daily experiences of micro aggression in a way that I can’t walking around in my white skin. 

Christopher:  You know, I go back to another one of my favorite books, The Color Purple by Alice Walker. As a young person, this really meant a tremendous amount to me, right? Because there was a mirror there of a clear experience in a serious relationship with Shug, but it was also a book that got really, really challenged particularly when it was made into the movie by a white guy, by Steven Spielberg.

It was a book that was showing too much that white people wouldn’t understand. That there was too much violence in it. Particularly violence against women by Black men. And it was a book that was dangerous for white people to read. Yet, you know, looking back, I’ve probably read it 10 or 15 times now over the last 30 years, since it came out in the early 1980s. I guess almost 40 years ago now. 

And I think about this book, The Hate U Give, and I think there’s some parallel qualities.

What does it mean to have that internal view of the community’s dynamics? 

There is tremendous strength in the character of Seeley, in The Color Purple, for example, in her relationship with Shug. The women in that book particularly the women but some also some of the men, show tremendous strength. That is also exists in this book The Hate U Give: tremendous strength in community. I think we want to really hold onto that. What are the assets that this community has? What are the things that they are doing to support each other, to love each other, to hold each other up, even in the face of this tremendous violence? That’s really important. 

Can I read another little piece?

So this is where we started at the beginning of the conversation: Mav and Lisa had said to Starr  nobody’s going to know, you’re not going to tell anybody, nobody needs to know. And they felt like that was that was their way of helping Starr to cope with this tremendous violence that has been visited upon her. That was their way to protect her and to protect the family from the consequences of being the witness. 

But by the middle of the book they’ve all kind of changed their minds.

Starr has decided to testify in front of the grand jury about what happened in hopes of getting justice for her friend. I’m not going to read that piece, but I’m going to read the first time she goes to the police station to talk with the detectives about what happened.

It’s the beginning of chapter 6 page 93:

I’ll stop there.

Jeanie:  That feels like a really important passage, do you want to say more about why you selected it?

Christopher:  Again it goes back to this notion that I don’t get it. I don’t have the same relationship to the police that many of my friends and colleagues do. That I can walk into the police station and think that it’s a place where I can go to get help. 

What Starr does when she walks into the police station is she sees all the guns that might kill her or her mother or her father.  It’s a base experience that is entirely different for some people versus other people. And that’s so important as readers and as change-makers that we’re able to understand that experience.

Jeanie:  That brings me back to when you were talking about the school resource officer and different perspectives on that, right? And thinking there are probably kids walking into schools even in Vermont for whom a gun on a school resource officer triggers trauma, right? Or brings up something that makes them feel uncomfortable, or makes them feel unsafe in some way. Maybe not because of an experience with a cop, but maybe because of an experience with a gun, right? 

Maybe because of something that’s happened at home or in their communities. And this assumption that because it’s a cop everything’s okay, doesn’t apply. It doesn’t make it okay for all people who walk in. It doesn’t change the biology of what happens for them when they see that gun.

So I’m loving this conversation! I could talk about Starr and her family for the rest of the day, but I want to hear more about what’s happening around this book with Vermont Reads. You talked a little bit about offering facilitation, but how are you supporting communities as they talk about this book? What are some of the events that are happening?

Christopher:  Well, some of the traditional ways that Vermont Reads works is that we pick a book, and we create a resource page around the book. We think about several different things when we’re picking the book:

• We think is this a book that can be widely read from middle school on up;
• Whether or not the book will lend itself to collaborative projects;
• Is it at a literacy level that a lot of people will be able to read it?

The Vermont Reads project is not meant to be a book group where you read the book and you talk about it. It’s meant to be project-based, where you read the book and you talk about it and then you do something. 

We don’t want to choose a book that is already being widely read or widely taught. So for example, I was recently reading The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, thinking well that would be a really great book. It just so happened that that book came out just as I was graduating from college. So as I checked it out with several of my colleagues, I said, “Well that’s great, but now every eighth-grader in America reads that book.”

And I didn’t know that because it came out after I had already had my educational experience.  So we wouldn’t choose a book like that that’s already being widely taught.

We picked this book because it really does lend itself as the follow on to March, but also because there’s so many opportunities in it for communities to do something later. We know, for example, that many communities that are doing work with this book are also engaging with the social justice action committee at their church, or the youth anti-racism organization at their school, or a Black Lives Matter chapter in their community.

That there are opportunities for people to read the book, learn from the book, and then take some sort of action.

We also are super aware that we’re in the middle of a pandemic right now.

And the pandemic really shut down Vermont Reads for quite a number of months, because we are pretty old fashioned and we rely on paper books. So we bought 4000 copies of The Hate U Give and for four and a half months, we couldn’t ship them anywhere because it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t considered safe to ship the boxes out.

So we’re just now starting to see projects happening. And there’s been tremendous demand (which is awesome) and actually a bit of a shift from when we started with the book at the beginning of the year. It was a bit of a slow start and some librarians actually said I’m not sure if this book is really going to work out for us, but then of course history cut up with white people and we had several more horrifically violent situations happen and suddenly The Hate U Give is pretty popular among white folks because they really want to learn.

So it’s our responsibility now, as it picks up, to make sure that we are being responsible with this book.

I mentioned earlier we’re providing trained facilitators who can help you with complicated conversations in your community.  And we’re making a lot more suggestions about what kinds of things you might consider doing to follow up with this.  I’m excited to see what people come up with and what kinds of things happen ,I’m also you know excited to think about what other books people might read, might they read between the world and me.  Might they read White Fragility and some other books that then inspire people to take the next step in their journey?

I hope so but we’ve got a lot a long ways to go, right certainly for us and for my humanities this is not something that is one and done will be at this for a long time certainly for the rest of time that I am around, but I hope long after that and specifically on The Hate U Give we decided to extend it another six months because we did lose that chunk of time because of the pandemic and so we’ll be working encouraging communities new projects with this book all the way through June 30th of next year before we start the next book.

Jeanie:  What do you hope schools will do with this book? What are your hopes for how it’ll don’t know spark change or conversation in public schools?

Christopher:  Yeah you know I think there’s a few things that I would say, I hope that they’ll use it and indeed if they’re going to use our books they’re required to use it beyond the curriculum, right it’s not just a book where they could say, hey send me 25 copies and the ninth grade honors English class is going to read it.  They’ve actually got to involve another community organization and I hope that it will spark a partnership with that community organization whether it’s a social justice group by the local church or a youth organized activism group in their school that will carry on and they’ll continue to build that partnership you’re over a year.  I hope it will also encourage them to really get more get more involved in understanding what communities in Vermont are struggling with around these issues, I mentioned you know early on that the problems that Starr is experiencing in her neighborhood are not limited to communities like Starr’s, right.

That a big part of Khalil’s story is that his mom was an addict and that is a story that is relevant to thousands of Vermont children and if we can learn some empathy around that and some do some change making around that here at home, I think that would be a great outcome and of course you know one of our challenges here is to make sure that people understand that Khalil’s moms experience as an addict is not because she was black, it’s because of the racism that impacted her whole life and those kinds of forces that economic injustice that systemic economic injustice exists in a lot of places.

Jeanie:  Absolutely, especially with as you mentioned the pandemic has changed your program and cause you to extend it, but the pandemic is also wreaking havoc on the economic lives of Vermonters, right.  That we know that there’s a lot more food insecurity and income insecurity right now because of COVID-19 and that to me feels like another thread work some of our students conceive themselves in this book the struggles in this book.

Christopher:  Lights or food, lights or food that’s a theme that comes up a lot and that’s the thing that very much at play in Vermont right now.

Jeanie:  Yeah, well I have great hopes for how this is going to play out with the schools I work with and I’m really excited that more and more kids are going to get read the book and you were kind enough to drop off a beautiful copy to me I’m going to put a picture on the site in case you haven’t seen it, the Vermont Reads edition of The Hate U Give which is a lovely copy, thank you for that. 

Christopher:  You’re welcome.

Jeanie:  I wanted to make sure that you had a chance to talk a little bit about Jason Broughten and the conversation he’s going to be having around this book.

Christopher:  Yeah, so you know as you know Jason Broughten is our state librarian and I love that he always introduces himself that way.  I’m Jason Broughten your state librarian and he is going to be having a conversation with our dear friend and colleague Dr. Laura Jiminez, she is a professor from middle grade novels young adult novels, studies the use of a young adult literature and anti-racism work specifically done research around The Hate U Give as well as a lot of other books.  She has a great blog that will get you the link for the resource page.  And they’re going to be having a conversation with school and public librarians on October 1st and we will be linking to the recording of that conversation after the fact and we’ll make sure that you get it for your resource page, it’s been exciting to partner with Jason over the last year and a half because for my humanities and that live really share strong interest in anti-racist organizing and using books and literature in anti-racist organizing.  So it’s nice to have that partnership with him.

Jeanie:  That’s really exciting I look forward to that and Jason has actually agreed to be on the podcast and to choose the book for us to have a conversation about, so I’m really excited about that as well.

Christopher:  You know what book he’s going to read.

Jeanie:  No he is holding me in suspense as of now, so I’m going to reach back out say have you, he said he had several in mind, so we’ll see when it comes up with.  And I’ll be curious to know if it’s a young adult book because we do a lot of work around young adult or middle grades books.  But we also talk about adult books that maybe help with professional development of teachers or give us a different lens on teaching.

Christopher:  Can I actually maybe put in a plug for nominations for Vermont Reads.

Jeanie:  Please.

Christopher:  So we are always looking for suggestions of excellent Vermont Reach choices and there is a nomination form on the Vermont Reach section of our website where you can put in your suggestion why you think it would be a great Vermont Reads book.  I can tell you now that we will be starting the next book in July of 2021.  We’re very interested particularly in books that might address issues of climate change and from my perspective I think it would be very interesting to have books that talk about climate change through a perspective of racial justice and what is climate change going to.  How is climate change going to impact different communities around the globe over time?  So if anybody has great ideas around that theme we would love to hear them, but other ideas are also always welcome around any theme.  I’m looking at a book right now in my office that I have been loving, it’s called We Contain Multitudes by Sarah Hoekstra and it’s about two boys in love with Walt Whitman and with each other.  And that is an amazing book, so maybe that will make of Vermont Reach appearance at some point, but please go on the website and nominate your favorities so that we can consider them.

Jeanie:  Oh Christopher be careful what you wish for.  Do I have to put my name on all my nominations?

Christopher:  You can do whatever you want, you can put whatever name you want.

Jeanie:  Because I already have one that hits your boxes, are you ready.

Christopher:  Awesome.  Yeah.

Jeanie:  Are you ready.  One of my favorite books of all time is a young adult book written by a First Nations author from Canada, Cherie Dimaline and it’s called The Marrow Thieves.  And it’s a dystopic piece of fiction that is utterly gorgeous and it’s about some folks, young folks and older folks surviving in a post climate change world.

Christopher:  This is crazy but we were sitting around eating lunch outside on our front lawn of Vermont humanities the other day with a couple of our new staff members and we went around the circle and I said what are you reading, and one of our folks said I’m reading this amazing book called The Marrow Thieves.  I never heard it before.

Jeanie:  It’s the best, it’s amazing, I feel like I need to loan you my copy because you know because you brought me The Hate U Give, usually at the beginning of the show, I ask people what’s what they’re reading, what’s on their bedside table and I feel like you’ve just given me we contain multitudes to add to my list.  Is there any other book you’re reading a book you’ve recently read that you want to share with us?

Christopher:  Well we contain multitudes definitely also a Canadian writer, although the book takes place in Minneapolis, which is a lot of fun because it also brings in Prince, which is quite…

Jeanie:  I love Prince.

Christopher:  Quite wonderful, so I would suggest that I am also wrapping up now MT Anderson’s amazing epic The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, which I have not read before.  A lesser known work of his that I think everybody should read is Symphony for the City of the Dead.

Jeanie:  I loved that book. He actually came to my library to talk to students about that book that’s a phenomenal book.

Christopher:  Awesome, well I’m hoping I’m fingers crossed that I can talk from my youth orchestra into doing a partnership with us around that book at some point.  Although the rest of my team tells me it’s too complicated and too depressing to talk about the Russian Revolution, but I think it’s a great book and too depressing that’s totally relative.  There’s a lot of joy and Shostakovich as well is the hard stuff. And that you know on the more grown up side I’m reading a book about Adam and Eve by the fellow who wrote Swerve Stephen Green Block historian which has been really interesting especially as it feeds into the Adam and Eve narrative in the astonishing life of Octavia Nothing, that’s been cool.  One final suggestion, Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. A very popular TV show on HBO right now and the TV show is terrific, but the book is even better.

Jeanie:  Nice.  So I think your dog is telling us it’s time to wrap up, but…

Christopher:  Probably.

Jeanie:  I just want to thank you I’ve lived in Vermont now for 20 years, I’ve been aware of Vermont Reads for a number of years and one of the things I’m most grateful for about Vermont Reads is that you get folks reading YA.  That you bring books that are meant for young adults or middle grades and get a large cross section of people to read them.  And I think we live in a world where it’s easy to think that young adult or middle grades books or just for young people but they’re not.  And I’m just so grateful when adults read books from young people’s perspective and when they realize how great YA is.  So thank you.  From on the bottom of my librarian heart for getting more people to read books like The Hate U Give and March.

Christopher:  Yeah, we love YA and we love it for everybody.  It’s really, it’s really a great opportunity for folks to learn about things they, they never thought they would learn about.  And The Hate U Give is a great example.

Jeanie:  Well I cannot wait, I’m going to be looking for projects that emerge from the way communities are using this book to spark conversations and make change.  So I’m looking forward to those examples and I’ll make sure that pack the transcript with links to a lot of the things you mentioned and to your website.  I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk about The Hate U Give and about Vermont Reads.

Christopher:  Thank you so much for having us, we’ll come back any time.

Listeners, I’m angry.

I’m angry about the failure of our political leadership, the unmitigated disaster of climate change, and the risks we’re asking our educators and students to take right now. I’m angry, and I’m hurt, and frustrated, and I’m not the only one. I know you’re angry, and I know our students are angry.

Our schools have long been held to the idea of being zones that are or should be, entirely free of politics.

But how does that work in the real world?

Are our students free of politics when they walk through the classroom door? Do they take their anger off when they put on a backpack, or turn on their cameras?

On this episode of vted Reads, we’re re-joined by Vermont principal Elijah Hawkes. Hawkes has written a book called, School for the Age of Upheaval: Classrooms That Get Personal, Get Political, and Get to Work.

It’s a powerful, powerful read, by which I mean that you can read it as a talisman against the notion that as educators we should stand by and pretend our students don’t see, hear and feel about politics as it unfolds around them. You can read it in order to figure out how to address your students’ anger — and maybe your own.

I’m Jeanie Phillips, and this is Vermont Ed Reads. Let’s chat.

Jeanie: Thank you for joining me, Elijah.  You were very recently on the podcast at the end of last season, but I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself again, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Elijah:  Hi, Jeanie. My name is Elijah. I’m currently principal at Randolph Union.  I’ve been here nine or ten years now and delighted to come back for another year with this fabulous faculty, staff and community.  I grew up in Vermont myself, in Moretown, and then left for college and found my way to New York City where I was a teacher and then a school principal in New York City. I also lived abroad and worked in schools and school settings in West Africa for a couple of years.  well, all of that experience just affirms for me the importance of small, community-minded democratic schools and so it’s a pleasure to be here at Randolph Union and to be talking with like-minded educators. Like you.

Jeanie:  I’m super excited to talk about your book.  But before we get to that, I like to know what people are reading! What are you reading now?  Last time, I think it was The Water Dancer.

Elijah:  Oh, yes, it was The Water Dancer. I’m reading a book of essays, long form essays I’d never read before by James Baldwin called No Name in the Street, and it’s written much later than a lot of his other essays, so I’m enjoying reading it.  It just feels like a different kind of Baldwin’s voice to a certain degree, a little bit more meandering, and free flowing but it always comes back to where it wants to go.  So, No Name in the Street, by James Baldwin is what I’m reading.

Jeanie:  Thank you for that.  I haven’t read that so I’m going to have to add that to my list. But I’m also reading essays right now. I’m reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.  They’re little small essays and they’re so delicious.  I highly recommend it. 

Okay! Let’s talk about your book.  There’s a lot to talk about in this book.  But I’m going to start just with the introduction, because you start by talking about anger.  And I think this might be a time when kids could really feel angry. 

I think if my own son is any indication, this is a time where you can feel really angry with society, given COVID, given the conditions of right now, given the political situation.  And so, you say “We need their anger, and we need it to find its voice.”

I’m going to read that again, Audrey, you say we need their anger and we need it to find its voice.  And I don’t think of anger as being particularly welcome in schools.

So I wanted to know more about what you meant by this, and maybe even a description of what it looks like.

Elijah: I think I start to talk a bit more about what it looks like in the get personal and to get political chapters where I think you’re right that young people today is experiencing what they are likely to be experiencing, watching the behavior of adults behaving in ridiculous and unjust ways, seeing the way their society is going.  They have a right to be angry at the state of the world.  They’ve been born into a world of runaway climate change that is likely to make civilization difficult for them to live in.  By the time they’re in their older years (and even sooner) they have a right to be angry at the state of the world they’ve been given, so a kind of righteous anger, a kind of anger at the state of injustice.  And so, I think that that anger is something we need and we see it in the streets and its, it can force really positive change in our world.

So, in the get political chapter, I talk about the need for ideological dissonance and debate that is, like, ideas and ideals that are being debated and upon which kids can grasp and channel their sense of what is unfair and what is not right about the world in political and political directions.  So that’s oriented towards policy change and social change as opposed to directed towards themselves or towards other people in some kind of demeaning way towards others or shameful way towards oneself.  And so, the get personal chapter touches upon that as well.

I think that better again that if a child is – if a young person is feeling wounded or in pain in some way, children are too likely to internalize that as being somehow their own fault and so it can lead to feelings of shame.  Something that then gets closeted.  So if the world has mistreated them rather than them feel shame about that in some way or feel like lesser than I’d rather they be upset with the world that has been mistreating them, and that they find a way to express who they are, the stories that they’ve lived, and that they also have a sense of, like, how to shape their world for the better.  But that’s something about what I mean by we need their anger.

Jeanie:  I feel like part of what you’re saying is that we need to harness their anger. And part of doing that is giving it boundaries or using a phrase. Our mutual friend Mike Martin uses “limits as liberators.” Like, sort of giving it some structure and also giving a sense of something to rebel against. Something to sort some values and morals and cultural, traditions and beliefs, and ground them a little bit.

Elijah:  Yes. Absolutely. To be both grounded and to have something to resist. I think but I think that that’s part of why it’s important for the adults in a young person’s world to have strongly held beliefs.

Whoever those adults might be, I think it’s important not to avoid complexities. Not to be a simplistic black-and-white thinker, but to have strongly held ideals and to express those in no uncertain terms.

As a lot of the writers that I quote throughout the book do when they’re talking to young people. So that they have something to either say: “Yes, that resonates with me and there’s a model that I can follow” or “No, that doesn’t resonate with me that’s a path that I’m not going to take.”

If adults are too wishy-washy or too ambivalent or too juvenile ourselves in our own pursuits and pleasure-seeking, young people won’t get that kind of mature confrontation with ideals and tradition that they need. 

Again, like you said, either to have something to adhere to or something to reject.

Jeanie:  I think what you’re asking us in that chapter about getting political in particular, is to show up as our moral selves, right? To show up and not shy away from politics and from conflict. And I guess what I would ask is:

What do you say to folks who feel that politics doesn’t belong in schools? Or that my morals as an educator don’t belong in schools?

Elijah:  I think that I think everything is political, really. I think that our lives are shaped by common circumstances and those common circumstances whether it’d be the 90-degree temperature in September that causes us to issue heat warnings such that we can’t hold soccer games? Or whether it’d be the economic divide between the haves and the have-nots. Whether it’d be the quality of the water in our streams, whether it’d be who has money for lunch or not.  I mean, I don’t know. Like, what is not political? What is not in some way shaped, either in in distant or very immediate ways by policy contexts by people in positional power?

So, I would reject the notion that, like, politics doesn’t have its place in the classroom. 

I think that whatever we might be talking about has connections to policy contexts. And so when I say get political, I mean, put things in a policy context. Think about who has power to shape the world, and claim some of that power for yourself, and know how the world works in that regard.  That’s what I mean by get political.

Now, there’s a book that I cite in that chapter called The Political Classroom, which is more of an academic text by some professors who are really interested in knowing how politics in the classroom engages young people.  And of course, they find that classrooms where people are debating controversy in political issues are very engaging for kids. 

But what these researchers also found is that the classroom can be very engaging for kids across the political spectrum, if the teacher withholds their own personal political beliefs. 

Those classrooms can also be deeply engaging for kids across the political spectrum, if the teacher is more transparent about their personal political stance. 

So, a lot of it is about the tact of the teacher in terms of how you share who you are as a person outside the walls of the school.

I chose to be pretty public through my writing, and in other ways about where I stand on the political spectrum, I suppose.  And I think that over time that actually serves me well in working with a diverse community of people.

…How to say this? 

I think it would be worse if people thought that I had a hidden agenda by which I was trying to manipulate their child.  Whereas, if I don’t know if I’m having a conversation with parents and I think yes, I think healthcare is a human right.  I think that there should be universal healthcare for all, I can be transparent with you about that.

At the same time, I can support students having debates in the classroom about it in really thoughtful ways that are pedagogically sound.  But you as a kid and you as a family, you don’t have to be, like, wondering what my agenda is.  You can be empowered to disagree with me in really articulate ways.

Jeanie:  Right.  I really appreciate that stance and that way of holding yourself in the world and being transparent about what you believe, and being open to other people’s ideas and feedback. I’m not the first person to say this by any means, but this idea that when we think we’re being neutral, we’re actually political on the side of the status quo. And so when we’re refusing to discuss these tricky issues — whether it’s climate change, or immigration, or any of these things that are sort of larger discussions in our culture — we’re sending the message that it doesn’t matter. That we don’t have much say in it. And that the status quo is just fine.

Elijah:  Yeah, I think that’s true.  And status quo is an unmitigated disaster for, like, much of the world’s population right now. 

I was with a group of teachers and other educators in a certification program and they were they had read the book over the summer as part of their program and many of them chose to focus in on the very question that we’re talking about right now.  And I think we’re really wrestling with, “What do I do with my own beliefs as a teacher in the classroom?”

And we got into a conversation about, are you always going to perpetuate the idea that there are two or three or four equal sides to every political topic?  Like, where would you *not* do that?

You know, like, if, when it comes to Nazism, are there two equal sides to that to that political stance?  Well, no. 

Okay, so you’re going to draw a line there and you’re going to take a stand.  That’s good. 

What about climate change? Are you going to say there are two equal sides to climate change? Like, right now? Teachers, school principals: are you going to say that there are two equal sides to that and you want both sides to be heard and want young people to make up their minds? No, you’re going to take a stand on that.  Okay, good. 

Like, I don’t know. Where you draw the line in where something is really, really important to the world and you’re going to sort of like, hide what you feel is right?

Jeanie:  I feel the same way about hate speech, right? O homophobia. There’s a clear line for me.

Elijah:  Yeah.  Again, that said, I don’t think that teachers being transparent about what they feel is right for their world and for the children and it, precludes them from enabling children to really become evidence-based critical thinkers who are accepting this and discarding that as they make up their own worldview.  In fact, how elsewise, can they do it? They need adults in their lives, who are presenting them with strongly held evidence-based beliefs that are also grounded in personal experience, they need to see that.  And then they need to again, like, be able to decide if that’s something that they are going to accept in their world as true or a path forward or not and young people will, they will make up their own minds.

Jeanie:  Much of your book get seems to me is about process. It had me thinking back on my own life. About how I came to believe what I believe. Where my ethics and morality sort of formed. How do we create conditions for kids to develop their own sense of self in that way?  Develop their own beliefs and identity — you talk a good bit about identity in your book — and give them space to do that, instead of just assuming that they can make sense of the world.

Elijah:  Yes, right.  I don’t know if this is quite the appropriate analogy or not, but like, I often think about, like, when I’ve needed to acquire knowledge and skills and haven’t had it. And intentionally seek it.

I think often about how when I moved back to Vermont.  When I grew up, I never used a chainsaw very much.  My dad did and other people did, but I never did. And so, when I came back to Vermont and became a homeowner, there were some work to be done around the place with a chainsaw.  I had friends who knew how to use chainsaws very capably.  So, I went to my buddy Chris. I was like, “Chris, like, can you show me how to cut down a tree in a safe way?” Like, I very intentionally went to someone who felt like they knew what they were doing, to mentor me into that skillset.

Jeanie:  One of the examples you use early on in the book is about a student who, like, your chainsaw, has an interest, but her interest is depression. Because she’s experiencing it. Because she’s in pain because of her own depression. And she does a project: she makes in video about depression. And so, in a way, the educator she’s working with is giving her the skills she needs. Is mentoring her in the skills she needs to talk about, to voice, this thing that’s important to her. 

And, and I love that example because I think that’s really powerful way to capitalize on interest.  It’s a really great example of a Flexible Pathway. 

But I’m going to just poke at it a little bit, because I can imagine that some of the educators that I know or work with might say, “Yes, but how does that help meet curricular goals?” Or question the validity of that kind of personal work. So I’m going to put that question to you.

Elijah:  Well, I guess yes. I can appreciate that question, although I think that any documentary filmmaker might very well push back and suggest that the skill sets that [they] have in order to make this film certainly fall into the realm of the language arts. Certainly fall into the realm of digital literacy, and depending on the subject area may very well dovetail with science standards or social studies standards or psychology. So it’s not hard, I don’t think, to connect a project, like, that to our graduation standards. 

It may be hard to view it as test prep for an SBAC test in mathematics. But then again, a child who feels more self-assured and confident in herself may very well do better on a standardized test than the girl who walks into school with her, you know, bangs down over her face and a lack of a sense of pride and a lack of a sense of her own voice and place in the world.  Because through that project, this girl was telling a story that she’d never before told. And I kind of believe almost every story wants and needs to be told. On its own terms when the time is right.

And so that’s part of what that’s part of the subtlety of all of this is that, how do we help young people find that time? And that time may never arrive in the years that they’re with us.

You know, I was just in a professional development session with the Vermont Principals Academy over the summer and I offered a poem that I thought we could read. Because we were talking about Vermont and we were talking about race and racism and we were talking about people being in our classes and our colleagues and the poem is called, “Every Traveler Has One Vermont Poem” by Audre Lorde. 

In that poem, a speaker of the poem — who one can presume is Audre Lorde or an African-American person like her — is in Vermont and she’s called the n-word by a young boy on a tractor.

And one of the participants in the session over the summer said that there is a story that she carries with her, that she feels sometimes the need to tell the people she’s working with in schools —  but she hasn’t told it yet. But seeing something of her story in that poem? Was important. And was humanizing. It brought her a step closer perhaps to sharing some of the story that she feels the need to tell. 

So, in that summer professional development session she didn’t share her story. But she acknowledged that there was a story inside her and she saw something of that story in the literature.  And so, she and that story are working it out.  At some point, when the time is right that story will be told, and the world will see her and she’ll see herself in the world in a new way and perhaps even more complete way.

Jeanie:  I can’t love the idea of sharing story and the power of story enough. I think that really led me to one of my favorite quotes from your book is on Page 12 and it says — it’s about a specific student but it could be about any student —

Better we help her find the words, and that they be spoken in safe and supportive spaces, with adults who care to listen. Better they be written in ink than in blood. 

And I guess the question I have is: how?

You give many examples in this book of how to help young people find the words, over and over again. In your examples of Jeremiah and other students, right? And this young woman. But I guess the “how” I’m really interested in is: How do we, in the limited time we have in schools, teach or encourage adults to care to listen?

I think schools often feel really times starved and it can be really easy.  I can think of myself countless times not having time to really hear a student that needed heard… and that haunts me a little bit.  So, I guess that’s the question I’m putting to you is: how? How do we make that a reality?

Elijah:  Well, gosh, it feels to me like there’s ample time.  So, maybe it’s more the question of: how do we work with adults such that they care to listen and create the space?

Because I got a typical high school class and I’ve got students with me? More than 200 minutes a week? For 10 months of a year? That’s some time. So, maybe it’s more about how do we as adults ready ourselves to create the spaces where those stories can be told and heard. And I think that may be the real key to this, to unlocking these spaces in schools. A lot of adults aren’t comfortable with the pain that young people carry. And that they even themselves may carry.  A lot of teachers, a lot of English teachers, may be very comfortable talking about Faulkner but not talking about themselves.

A lot of math teachers may be comfortable teaching algebra but not reflecting on their own racism, right?  We need to create spaces for the adults in the building to have those conversations and do that kind of work. And then that helps us all learn how to personalize our interactions and see the world we live in policy and political context. We have to practice it as adults.

That’s some of the work that we’ve been trying to do at Randolph Union, which is just like, to very regularly in our precious faculty meeting time, to sit in small circles of five to eight people and do some of this work together. Where the listening is practiced, where people start to get a sense of how meaningful it is to feel heard…

And to have opportunities — invitation, not coercion — but to have opportunities to share a story or to see that story reflected in what something. What someone else has shared.  So, I think creating adults who are ready to listen means practicing and doing that work as the adults in the school.

Jeanie: I couldn’t agree more with the idea that listening is a skill we have to develop that it’s not something we’re really, that comes really easily to us especially in this current moment, in this current culture. 

That to me feels really connected with another quote that I love that reminded me of Carla Shalaby’s Troublemakers. And it’s specifically about Jeremiah, one of the students you write about and that says:

“Love. Any other response seems inadequate.What else can be said other than love him?”

Listening feels like a really act of love. And so part of what you’re saying to me about relationships and circles and the ample time is about prioritizing love. Prioritizing knowing students well and that’s another place where I can hear folks, maybe folks that might say focus on the 3 Rs, you know, the Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic say that’s not the job of education.  So, what do you say to that? 

For me I say learning is social and that relationships are key. But that that L-word, the love word, I think can be challenging for folks.

Elijah:  Well, what I, I guess what I would say is… I guess I would say to someone who is skeptical about the focus on relationship building, I would say give it a second. Give us a little bit here.

Like our advisory program at Randolph Union? We based it on some of the work of U-32 in past years where they have about, you know, six year at least in the past they did a six-year relationship between an adviser and students and families.  So, when we first launched this kind of advisory program at Randolph Union a bunch of years ago, there was a great deal of skepticism.

But now? It’s one of the most important questions that new parents for our school want to know. “Who is going to be my kid’s advisor?” Because they’re going to be with them for so long. And they know from their neighbors and from their siblings how important that relationship is over years and years and years and years and years.

Or in a classroom: if you give me a semester to do really powerful work with young people and then let that work be shared, watch that girl’s film on teenage depression, the work and the students will speak for themselves.  It will be of such undeniable power and relevance because the young people speaking about who they are that it just want, it just can’t be questioned.

We got to share that student work. Don’t just keep it in the classroom.

So if we’re doing really meaningful work with young people, again whether it’s with their names attached or even anonymously, share the powerful stories that we’re hearing and that students are writing because the power of the stories will speak for themselves. And every parent that’s out there and every neighbor and community member and grandpa and grandpa? What they want most of all is to see and hear the young people in their lives and to know them as whole people. So, the work will speak for itself. 

Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the time and the means to share it.

Jeanie:  So, I have two thoughts about that, and one is I think that exhibition of student work is really crucial as an antidote to, like, judging schools by test scores alone. Because test scores give you such a narrow, small, little, biased I’ll say, notion of what’s happening in a school. 

But student work, it tells more of a story. Coming back to story again and student’s stories. 

And one of the things that I really saw in your book was a kind of listening to students and not just what they say and not just what they write, but listening to how they hold their bodies and the work they’re producing and the work they’re *not* producing and, like, this kind of deep full listening to kids.

And that reminded me a lot of Acts 77 and PLPs or personalization, right? And that we have to know kids really well in order to create flexible pathways that matter for them, right? 

And that this kind of works that you’re talking about is part and parcel of that work. I’m really playing devil’s advocate. And I’m going to quote the fakequity blog that I really love, where they say: “the devil has enough advocates.”

But I’m going to do it anyway, which is:

If I’ve got 15 or 20 students in my classroom.

If I’m a middle school teacher.

Or if I teach 50 or 60 students a day, how do I operationalize that kind of deep listening?  How do I not leave some kids out? How do I not just listen to the loud kids?

Elijah: And how do you help the students who don’t want to speak, or feel comfortable speaking? Because all that takes time too.  So I mean there’s some discussion of that kind of pedagogy in the book. Of course, it’s really important for the classroom teacher to establish a climate of trust where the norms — whether they’re crafted with the young people or not — that the norms are norms the adults are going to uphold. That they’re going to make sure that it feels like a safe space where there is kind of, like, boundedness and contained-ness that the adult is helping to create, so a person can feel safe sharing their story.

I think there should be opportunities for work to be shared anonymously, as well as with your name attached. 

I think there’s nothing more fun than reading a child’s work to them. Because there may be students who can write the most wonderful thing — but they’re afraid to read it themselves to their peers.  So, the teacher could read that work to their peers. Or you bring in some older students to read the work or you bring in some of your drama students who want nothing more than to read in a performative way, and bring the child’s text to life. 

There are ways to create a very celebratory culture that values the questions kids ask and the stories that they tell, and finds ways to share what young people contribute whether it’s anonymously or not.

I don’t know, I think there are ways to create those spaces.

And then if you’ve got a lot of students, there are lots of different ways to display and share student work.

Sometimes I’ll walk down the seventh grade hallway here and they’ll just be 60 or 80 very short poems on the wall; no names attached, but every student’s voice is out there. 

And then I think also, you know, over time there could be discussion forums and other, like, Socratic seminar.

I’m thinking of the discussion forums that have been really carefully scaffolded over time, so that students again feel supported by the teacher and by the work they’ve done in sharing their voice and sharing their opinions. It’s certainly possible and we’re blessed to be here in Vermont where there are so many different models of that and so many teachers who are willing to share their work.

If a teacher wants to do this kind of work, the resources are out there to help them do it.

That said, it’s also important that the administrators of the school are willing to support it. That’s key as well. 

And it’s important that teachers hear from their administrators that we’ve got your back if you’re going to be doing work that has personal and political intersections as long as we’re doing that carefully. Like, work carefully. I’ve got your back; I’ll support you and we can do this well together.

Jeanie:  You’re right. The Get Personal chapter gets really specific and I really love the ideas.  They’re about building trust in the classroom and how to go about that. Modeling that vulnerability, being yourself in the classroom, being willing to share your story to be person of yourself. 

I really love this idea of it being an invitation rather than something that’s coercive or compliance-oriented, right? That the engagement is an invitation. And that kids get to join in or to put a toe in when they’re ready, and ease in. 

But the last thing in that chapter is about validation and praise, and it didn’t strike me the same way. 

I questioned it a little bit.

As somebody who has really done a lot of work giving praise and validation to students in the past? About a year or so ago, I listened to a Hidden Brain episode about clicker training and, you know, just giving feedback that’s nonjudgmental. And it really struck me that as a student myself, I was so wrapped up in the validation and praise from others, that I didn’t actually ever know when I was doing good work myself. 

And so, I guess I’m just going to question that a little bit, about the role of validation and praise.

Elijah:  You said as a young person, it sounds like you were more focused on the external validation and didn’t have your own sense of, like, when you were doing something worthy of the praise or not? Can you say more about that a bit?

Jeanie:  Well, I think we’re all attention-seeking, right?  And some kids when they don’t get attention go about it in a negative way, right?  We see that in classrooms all the time. 

But for a kid like me who was very compliant, and a good little girl, I often went about getting attention by trying to do my best work. Not because it was my best work, but because I wanted the teacher to give me that star. That gold star, those kind words, right?  And I won’t even just say as a young person. I think even as an adult, it’s taken a lot of work for me to value my own growth and my own work internally as opposed to looking externally for folks to approve of it. 

I’m just curious about that, right?  

Elijah:  What I’m thinking is that it’s certainly not healthy to create a culture in the classroom where everyone’s motivation is dependent upon some external rather than intrinsic motivation.  That’s certainly, that’s really not healthy.

That said I feel, like, positive feedback, goes a long way towards motivation, as well as sort of modeling. 

I guess, if a student presents something that has, you know, like several strengths about it and several weaknesses, sometimes, especially early on in a class, we just accentuate the positive because that shows the rest of the class what kind of work is worth doing. You don’t even have to say, like, I wouldn’t do that. There can be a strong emphasis on the positive, especially at first, and you can help create the criteria you’re seeking to attain by emphasizing the positive aspects of what people are doing.

I don’t know; I just feel like a lot of positivity and enthusiasm goes a long way as a teacher and is part of loving the kids. 

And again, just an abundance of care and validation — but kids know when something is empty. You can’t be insincere; that will be a problem. You can’t just throw fluff out there.  Like, you can’t praise someone for asking a question when they didn’t actually ask a question.  You have to be a careful listener and you have to be sincere and you also have to be balanced and share the love with everybody.

Jeanie:  Well, that makes me think when I got to page of 132 which is in the Get Meta section.

You talk about a strategy that Alex Shevrin Venet uses in her trauma-informed teacher toolkit, and that’s: disconnect before you correct. And that positivity really rings true there for me. Like, “I can see you have your head on the desk” — a question can follow. “Are you feeling tired or hungry?” Instead of just saying “Get your head off the desk!”

I think it was just the words validation and praise that brought back my own experience a little bit.  So, I can really appreciate that.  Thank you for going deeper on that.

Elijah:  Yes, sure.  I appreciate your question.

Jeanie: I am a huge fan, so I’m going to move along to the Get To Work chapter. I’m a really big fan of the Get To Work chapter.  I’ve actually written a little bit about this for a school librarian audience about doing, I think I called it work that is real.  When I think young adolescents, young adults but also little people, can really do really work that’s relevant and meaningful and engaging to them.

It’s a little bit like going back to your chainsaw example of like: it’s going to do real things, right?  

We see that in action right now. right like the Winooski students for anti-racist education. They’ve just made huge changes in the Winooski School District based on their activism. And that’s work that’s real, right? 

And so, any time we can get kids out and doing the real work of testing water quality and streams or developing prototypes to solve a real problem feels really powerful to me. 

I wondered if you had any examples from the book that you’d like to share with our listeners from Randolph Union.

Elijah:  Yeah, in terms of the in terms of the get to work modality, yeah I think that well, let’s see. One example that I talk about in the book, which is from Randolph Union from a couple of years ago, was a local community organization, Economic Development Corporation needed a place for their board meeting or their shareholder meeting or some large annual meeting and they asked if they could use the school.  And I said, well, yeah you can use the school, but how can the young people help you organize and pull off the event? Because there’s a lot of work that we could do in having you here that we could learn from. 

So, the students at the tech center helped make the food for the evening. And the students from some of the project-based learning classes helped provide some of the content for the evening.  It’s just a matter of looking for any opportunity to put young people to work doing the doing the tasks that the community needs doing.

There’s no reason to not do work that the community needs doing. You know, I think it’s a problem and we should look to reform teacher preparation in this regard. 

It’s a problem that I could be a student at Harwood Union High School who really liked and did well in his English classes and then go off to college and university and really like and do well in my English classes and then go on become an English teacher and replicate what I did in my English classes and have no contact with any professional other than teachers.

And that could be the same for science. And that could be the same for math and that could be the same for almost anything. 

Jeanie:  Yeah I really love that and I love pulling in community partners and asking them what work needs doing, and how can our students do it. I’m also thinking about how much our core classes and teachers could learn from tech centers and wood shop teachers. And I just think about how much energy goes into the school play or the school musical. How excited kids get and how that’s this high stakes performance. And what could the rest of us learn from the drama teacher who puts that on.

Too often those things are sort of shunted to the side and treated like they’re not the core, or they’re not even those core subjects because so often that denotes like, the other things they’re less important.

And yet I think we could learn so much about how to make our classes more relevant and meaningful and engaging from those disciplines because they do real work.

I still have the lamp I made in wood shop in middle school all these years later.

Elijah: I think that sometimes maybe it could be helpful to think about it’s not always about reaching out into the community. It can also be about just doing the work that the school needs doing. 

So, for instance, one of the things that’s worked well here it at Randolph is to take what used to be an after school endeavor and a kind of club activity, that is, the world language students going abroad. Going to Spain or Morocco or France or wherever, that used to be an after school activity.

We pulled it down into the school day and made it a teacher’s prep or responsibility and enrolled students who wanted to be there in the class. Of course, there was also an after school component for the students who couldn’t be in the class but by making it a class it could become so much more than students raising money.

It could be students in partnership with Planting Hope from Montpellier, an organization that does work in schools in Nicaragua. The students could be co-planning their own travel to Nicaragua, developing their own materials that they’re going to then use when they’re in the schools in that in that country. 

It could be writing the grants themselves to the foundations to raise the money to support their trip so that any kid can go regardless of their financial backing. Writing emails to airlines and picking up the phone with travel agents and learning these real world skills.

Sometimes it’s about opening up the space in our classes to just do the stuff that the school needs doing.

Jeanie:  It reminds me of Peter Stratman, one of my fellow Rowland Fellows from my cohort does this thing called Cabot Leads. Every middle school kid gets a job in or out of the school. So some kids are working as assistants in the PE class or as mentor readers with kindergartners, but others are in the cafeteria, right? Helping with food prep. Some kids are going out into farms and helping with the milking.

Elijah:  They’re doing work that they’re interested in and it’s worthwhile.

Sometimes when we just ask young people what they’re interested in, of course that can lead in powerful directions but it but I think having as a point of departure what needs do we have collectively or do you have or that can start to fill that the work that’s done to meet a need can be very, very important words.  If I’m just interested in something it might be slightly more superficial.  I’m not saying necessarily is, but I think as the first point of departure is thinking about our individual and collective needs is a really, really powerful way to start the work of getting to, of getting to work.

Jeanie:  Well, and I think that the research, the newer research points out that people are happier not when they’re pursuing a passion but when their life feels purposeful.

Like having a sense of purpose. Feeling like you’re making a difference in some way. That you’re meeting a purpose. That, to me, is about community need. That’s way more rewarding for folks than just pursuing an interest or a passion, right?

Elijah:  I think also if you’re talking about needs as a point of departure, it can neutralize some of the knee-jerk reactions to anything that is political. If you’re focused on like, there are hungry people in our community — that’s obviously a political concern. 

But if your point of departure is focusing on that need? Then if the teacher is courageous enough, you’re going to get yourself to the policy context of that hunger.  Focusing on needs is a way to get to the personal and political in ways that are: how can you object to that? Of course, we’re talking about something political!  We have people who are homeless in our community! That’s a political concern!  It’s all interwoven.

Jeanie:  It makes me think too that if you’re doing that well then you’re not just sort of raising money. When you get to what you call the political context, you’re moving past just the savior mentality or quick fix mentality. You’re actually having to understand the real issue.

Elijah:  Yes, absolutely I couldn’t agree more and that’s part of why I advocate for a shift in terminology: from “service” to “citizenship.” Think less about serving others and think more about my rights and obligations as a citizen in the society to which we all belong. 

Of course one could be a global citizen, but where do you really practice and build a muscle of helping others in a way that like, you’re held accountable as well? It can only happen in close proximity at first. You really need to see the impact of your actions, the mistakes that you make, and how those mistakes reverberate among the people that you’re working with.

 And so if we build our citizenship muscles and sensibilities in our own communities first and build outward global citizenship can come but I agree with you.  We need to also be sensitive to the needs right here at home where we can really start to feel our privilege if we have it, our power and of course we have it if we organize and work together collectively.

Jeanie:  Yeah, I love that. I love that. I guess something I’ve been thinking a lot about is the word “reciprocity.” The give and take. 

And one of the things that I’ve talked about in other episodes is like: who gets to serve?Sometimes we only let, you know, we only let the gifted kids serve, right?  So how do we make sure everybody who wants to, gets to have impact? Right?  Everybody wants to be engaged in that way. That’s a human need, to be connected and to be helpful to others. 

And your book is a lot about that. How do we create conditions so that kids get to have that need met, and not just be alienated from themselves in their communities and their cultures and their schools?

 I really appreciate that.

The last chapter before you write a lovely letter to teachers is about getting reflective and metacognitive and it makes a great case for me about PLP’s or portfolios. Places that we can capture those reflections.

I don’t really have a question about that, just deep appreciation for the resources and the perspectives you share. The strategies you share in that section. It’s a chapter I’m definitely going to be using with the teachers with whom I work. 

Any thoughts or anything you’d like to add or any snapshots of that chapter you’d like to add for our listeners?

Elijah:  Yeah, I talk a little bit about the student, the student portfolio presentations or effectively it’s like a personal learning plan or personal learning portfolio at the end of eighth grade, at the end of 10th grade, 12th grade, it could have been you know at any grade level but it is, we do them at the end of the year here at Randolph Union.  It’s like a huge scheduling nightmare.  It’s worse than scheduling exams.  It’s really hard to do it well because we want to kids to be presenting to their advisor as well is there a past teacher and a future teacher.

And so, it’s hard to put those panels together but it is so healing, it is so important for educators to just sit and listen to young people talk about who they are as people in as learner’s.  So, it’s one of those ways that we create like really meaningful academic and personal rites of passage in the school and it means a lot to the students because of course they’re building their vocabulary and their sense of and their sense of self and where they have struggles and they start to learn how to ask for help and where they have strength so they can learn how to apply those strengths.

It’s really good for young people.  It’s also really good, really good for educators especially if it’s like I’m going to get to teach that kid next year or I worked with that child last year and look how far they’ve come, it could be such a healing ritual and the stakes feel really high but in a like a traditional bureaucratic accountability sense the stakes are very low, it’s not an exam.  Yeah, you have to do it but really does your promotion to the next grade level depend on it?  No, not really.  But it feels really high stakes to everybody because people are sharing of themselves and it’s public speaking in your own community where you feel accountable and where you have those relationships.

I think it’s well worth the effort to have those personal learning journeys shared in person. 

Jeanie:  Yeah, I have the Compass School is down where I used to live and I spent some time at Compass School with students being on their panels for their senior portfolios and I hardly knew these students and I had tears in my eyes and it was such a beautiful process to watch them go through that and it reminds me again of two things that we talked about earlier. 

One is exhibition night. Community members being able to come in. Because they always have community members on their panels, and see the impact of school on this kid. 

And then two was the power of those stories. Coming back to the young person’s story and their developing story. Their developing narrative of themselves. And so I really appreciate how we’ve come full circle in this conversation, really thinking about that quote from the very beginning which I’m going to read again.

Better we help her find the words, and that they be spoken in safe and supportive spaces, with adults who care to listen.

I love that.  Elijah, thank you so much for this book.  I’m really grateful that it exists in the world and that I’m going to get to use it with teachers that I work with and thank you for talking to me about it, I really appreciate it.

Elijah:  I’m very grateful for the conversation, Thank you Jeanie.