As the election results rolled in late into the night of November 8 and early November 9, I wondered what my 10th- and 11th-grade students at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, would think the next day. Summit County, where the school is located, had gone “blue” in a state that voted “red.” Many of these students were experiencing a presidential election for the first time as young adults. My international students were deeply perplexed (and some amused) by all the election frenzy.
During the weeks leading up to the election, the Young Democrats and Young Republicans took playful jabs at each other during all-school morning meetings. Some enterprising students made T-shirts in the school’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Creativity supporting the candidacy of Harambe, the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo earlier this year. Students organized polls for the community, arranged watch parties for debates, and held a mock election on November 8 (Hillary Clinton took 159 votes to Donald Trump’s 75). Students and faculty dotted their outfits with voting stickers as well.
So where do we go now? What do we do?
I’m sure that many of my fellow colleagues at other independent schools look at the election, the divisive rhetoric of campaign, and the massive amount of fear-infused voting on both sides as critical moments to encourage civil discourse among our students about what makes a community a community. As bell hooks wrote in her introduction to Teaching Community, “Progressive education, education as the practice of freedom, enables us to confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connection.” That sense of connection is something I seek to encourage intellectually and socially in my school community.
As famed American writer and physician William Carlos Williams wrote in “Pรจre Sebastian Rasles,” an essay in In the American Grain:
“It is this to be moral: to be positive, to be peculiar, to be sure, generous, brave — to marry, to touch — to give because one has, not because one has nothing. And to give to him who has, who will join, who will make, who will fertilize, who will be like you yourself: to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize, — not to sterilize, to draw back, to fear, to dry up, to rot. It is the sun.”
I put this quote at the beginning of every syllabus to set the tone for the environment in which I believe learning happens, where students give in order to understand.
I am thinking of the words of Williams and bell hooks today, as our nation realizes its deep division. We, as teachers, must both acknowledge that and work to change it.
Here are six considerations after the election relevant to teaching in intentional communities of learning:
1. Dialogues across difference are crucial to bridging the empathy gap that exists.
Last week, on the heels of a speaker who talked about his experiences at Western Reserve Academy, I asked my students if they had had any particular interaction at our school with another student that made them see things differently. Most students were able to quickly recall a story about how an interaction with someone whose background or lived experience differed from theirs changed the way they thought about a certain group of people. Stories connect us with each other, and sharing stories across differences of identity and experience allows for critical openness.
2. In Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), we must be intentional about talking about white privilege and how to be allies of people of color.
With all the recent talks about the demographic divisions in America, it is important to acknowledge privilege systems — especially those that exist in independent schools that are PWIs. The rhetoric of the election was particularly harsh toward people of color and immigrants (among others). Today, we have the opportunity to talk about white privilege to get our students thinking about what actions they can take to practice anti-bias and dismantle systemic racism.
3. We have to realize some of the limits of "big data."
We saw on election night an outcome that “big data”— the models, the polls, the historical and demographic data — did not predict as likely. Perhaps one of the biggest shocks in the wake of the election is not the particular outcome, but the failure of our long-trusted models for attempting to understand uncertainty. As independent schools increasingly push for data-driven decision making, we have to acknowledge the limits of full reliance.
4. We have to curate spaces for expressing fear.
Throughout the night, as election results rolled in, a tour of social media expressed a range of emotions, but one that seemed ever-present from all sides was fear: fear of change, of uncertainty, of difference.
As independent schools, we know that the world we are educating students for is vastly different than the one that exists today. In addition to building skills for navigating ambiguity, it is worthwhile to consider creating spaces for students to express what they fear and help them understand the root of that fear.
5. We have to realize that the learning process is not only high-impact, it is high-stakes.
There was no shortage of commentary during the election cycle that showed the divide in how college-educated individuals voted versus those who did not have a college education. Now we are seeing increasing resonance for what education means: the formation of political values. It’s vital that we continue to work to instill universal values in our students and an awareness of how personal beliefs and actions affect the broader community.
6. We need to ask ourselves and our students, "What and whom do we value and why?”
An election calls us to reflect on our beliefs as people who inhabit multiple identity and social spaces. I can think of no better moment than now — after the election — to think about this again and to think together about what we can do to live our values.
In those same syllabi that I begin with the William Carlos Williams quote, I include this piece of wisdom from Maxine Greene’s “Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings”:
“If the human being is demeaned, if her or his family is delegitimized, crucial rights are being trampled on. This is partly because persons marked as unworthy are unlikely to feel good enough to pose the questions in which learning begins, unlikely to experience whatever curriculum is being presented as relevant to their being in the world.”
I hope we can confidently say that, even though we may be divided, we acknowledge each other as worthy and deeply relevant.
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