Transcript
Kevin: A Rutgers researcher recently found that having a strong sense of belonging at school could mitigate suicidal tendencies among Black students. In fact, the research showed that as Black adolescents' sense of belonging decrease, their risk for suicidal ideation and attempts increase by as much as 35%. What does it mean for a child to feel accepted and valued at school? What role do parents and teachers play? And how can we create a sense of belonging for all students? This is "What I Want to Know." And today I'm joined by Ramon Stephens to find out.
Ramon: And to me, I'm still perplexed by why folks are so fearful of diversity initiatives. I think a lot of it has to do with misinformation around what diversity is, right?
Kevin: A Rutgers researcher recently found that having a strong sense of belonging at school could mitigate suicidal tendencies among Black students. In fact, the research showed that as Black adolescents' sense of belonging decrease, their risk for suicidal ideation and attempts increase by as much as 35%. What does it mean for a child to feel accepted and valued at school? What role do parents and teachers play? And how can we create a sense of belonging for all students? This is "What I Want to Know." And today I'm joined by Ramon Stephens to find out.
Ramon Stephens is the founder and Executive Director of The Conscious Kid, an education nonprofit dedicated to supporting families, educators, and organizations in learning about and taking action against systemic inequality and racism. He joins us today to share how we can create a sense of belonging for all of our students. Ramon Stephens, thank you so much again for joining us. You are doing some really, really interesting work. But you are almost an anomaly these days. You're an African-American man in education. And I say that because less than 7% of teachers in America are African-American men.
And so that's one heck of a starting point. And I have to ask, since you're this unicorn, what got you interested in becoming so deeply immersed in the education of our young?
Ramon: Oh, wow. You know, thank you, Kevin, for that context and providing, you know, that important statistical information. And I continually ask myself this question on a daily basis, you know, "Why did I choose education?" But I think it's two parts. One, which a lot of folks in education kind of got into it maybe by accident, maybe it was something that they were really passionate about. Maybe they became more passionate about it later in life. But I think just coming up in the education system and seeing my own experiences and thinking about ways that I probably could have been supported more or ways that maybe things could have been different inspired my initial role.
But I think also, like, having my own kids and having to see them navigate the same challenges that I had to navigate kind of forced me to have to do the research and look at different ways to make change for them. You know, I have two young Black boys coming through the education system. And so that was something that I had to learn about.
But I also think too, when I graduated undergraduate, I was an admissions advisor for University of Washington Bothell. And that gave me a space. My undergraduate really kind of gave me like a theoretical backing for a lot of kind of inequalities that happened in the school system, which really kind of primed me for it. When I became a diversity officer, I was really able to see what it looked like as far as which students were gaining access to the university, which communities were not, how we were going to change up our recruiting practices to be more equitable and support more marginalized communities. That really kind of gave me that real-life experience. But I think I saw other Black leaders, and I had never seen that before. And so my boss was an African-American man, and I had never had that. And I was able for the first time to not only see myself but to see how folks were, how Black people were navigating the pipeline.
So, to this day, like three of my mentors are Black women. And they are some of the most important people in my life that have shaped almost everything about my scholarly identity and experience. But being able to see those models that look like me played a key role, I think, in really doing this. At first, I was like maybe I'll just go to undergraduate and get a degree, and that's going to be good enough. But once I was able to see Black leaders that were going to law school, getting their graduate degrees and seeing how they were able to make it sustainable, not just for themselves, but do positive things with their community, I was like, "I'm in. I think I can do this. I'm in."
Kevin: Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Let me ask you this. Where did you grow up? You talked about your challenges in the school system. What area of the country, where did you grow up and attend school?
Ramon: Ah. So I grew up in Washington State, and I attended school in Seattle, right near Seattle, Washington. I say that because that's kind of the big city that everybody knows about. And then I also attended school in a town called Puyallup, Washington, which is like about an hour south.
Kevin: Oh yeah, I know that.
Ramon: Okay. Okay, great, yeah. And then in Tacoma too. So I attended schools in like the Tacoma, Puyallup, kind of really was renting as this specific school in my elementary. And so my schooling in my undergraduate, or sorry, my elementary school was fairly diverse. I had a pretty solid experience in my elementary school. I think when I got to high school and I was more out there in the Puyallup area, where things weren't as diverse and weren't as kind of open to some of the . . .
Kevin: Or welcoming.
Ramon: Yes, welcoming. There we go. Yeah. And at the time, you know, you don't really understand. You know things are differently. You know that you're not being treated the same. You know there's these weird microaggressions and people saying like all kind of weird slurs towards you thinking it's okay and making jokes. And that was something that I had never experienced until I started going to schools where there weren't a lot of, like, black and brown folks.
Kevin: Well, let me let me ask you this because, you know, you created The Conscious Kid. I'm going to talk about what it means to have a sense of belonging for our students and why that's important. But I also want to talk about this whole area of diversity and this whole area of, you know, inclusion. It is now a wildfire political area. So, you know, it used to be, you know, as recently as 10, 15 years ago, understood that the notion of diversity was important in business and education and life. Why is it, do you think, that the notion of diversity in some quarters is now a dirty word?
Ramon: That is a very good question. And to me, I'm still perplexed by why folks are so fearful of diversity initiatives. I think a lot of it has to do with misinformation around what diversity is, right, and then that misinformation then gets amplified. It's good old classic propaganda, where folks might misrepresent or misunderstand or haven't been taught certain things. So I think it's multi-pronged.
First, we've got to look at how does our school system provide mechanisms to educate people around race and culture. We know that this is something that's been largely absent from our school system in general. So we don't have a space where folks are even educated about it. So then where are folks getting their information about these things? Maybe they're from friends or family. Maybe they're from places on the internet, YouTube, social media, things that might not be vetted, things that might have some truths, but also have some half-truths.
So I think this basic just kind of understanding of what we even mean by diversity, what is the definition of race and racism, all of these things folks don't have a steady definition. There are definitions, but folks don't understand it because we haven't been educated, right?
When we talk about things like what do we mean by supporting kids of color, we're not saying that we're being oppositional to other students. What we're talking about is creating practices that support all students. So you'll have the misinformation that says, you know, we want to support, say, African-American students. Well, then that gets put in a binary. Oh, that means you don't want to support other student groups. Like no, no, that's not what we said. That's not what that means.
When we say we want to support marginalized communities, what we're saying is it's not an exclusion to supporting all communities, right? And that's the whole point is to make sure we create school systems that support all communities.
When we talk about what is culturally responsive pedagogy, people think, oh, you want to have a bunch of literature that's anti-white. Well, not really. When we talk about culturally responsive literature, culturally responsive schooling, we're talking about creating schooling practices that support all students, creating literature that supports all communities, right?
And the reason why we talk about the intentionality in supporting marginalized communities because there's a lot of problematic stereotypes and negative representation within media historically for those communities. And even just getting access to books for many communities still remains an issue of invisibility. So we're looking at how are we making sure we support all communities? We need to make sure that we center those that aren't being discussed, but it doesn't mean that we're not equally supporting everyone else in the room.
Kevin: When you talk about access to literature that is inclusive and sort of reflects the cultural experience of particularly folks of color, even before Conscious Kid, that kind of got you going because you started lending books to the library. Isn't that right?
Ramon: Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is a thing that's been going on. I can think about from my own perspective, as like a Black man, Black person growing up in a Black household, we always had friends and ourselves that had personal book collections. So, you know, maybe your mom, my dad, my cousin, my uncle brings over a book. You know, I found this really good book that I think would be good because the reality is that when you go to bookstores, or at least when I was a kid and still now, and even your school library, there's just not equal representation. So we had to figure out different ways to get positive empowering messages about ourselves and to educate ourselves about our cultural identity.
And so I can think about my parents made sure they had books and empowering representations that was able to educate me about being Black. But these were books that I couldn't get in my public library. I'd go up the street and I'd find my friend Eddie May, and this is another Black friend. And his grandparents got a separate book collection of some other things that we can exchange books. So, as we got older, you know, so I guess let me first go take a step back because I want to give a nod to the movements that have always taken place within various marginalized communities to educate themselves on their community and their identity.
The diverse book movement has been around since Black people have been here. But as far as our role in popularizing it and us really helping feeling inspired by that, that's kind of where it starts off is these small collections in our homes, in our communities. And then as we get older, you know, we have children and we're like, you know, we need to get some books for our kids. I need to find some books that center representations of black and brown boys and kids and provide also windows that they can learn about diverse communities as well.
So we go to our local library and we ask, you know, "Do you have any books with Black kids?" And this was when I was in SoCal when I was in San Diego. And I remember the librarian, like, you know, scratched their head, thought about it, came back like two hours later — there was like 10,000 books in this library — brought 2 books back. One of them was about a Black girl praying to God that her hair wasn't going to be nappy. And the other one was equally disempowering. And so we're like, this is still a thing where we can't . . . this is still a thing. I'm like fully grown now. There's no shifts.
So then, you know, we started doing the research. I'm naturally a doctoral student at this time. And, you know, my partner finished her master's. And so we're like, "Let's do some research on this and see if this is a thing." And then the statistics were equally disparate in the sense of Black people getting access to publishing. The few stories that were available about Black folks weren't even written by Black folks and had all kinds of stereotypes and problematic messaging. And the research even showed that there was more books about animals than there were about like all communities of color, if I remember correctly. I believe that's Lee & Low statistics that actually provides the statistical data on representation in children's books.
And so we're like so this is still like a major structural gap. And so, you know, we had been collecting our books, just like our parents had, and talking to our friends of color who had kids. And, you know, we're exchanging books. And then it got to the point where we had so many books and we had so many folks asking, we're like let's just make this a project. And so, you know, we started off, like I said, lending books to families here and there, and we've grown to be able to donate over 350,000 books across 50 states. And those are books that are by and about marginalized communities, and not just the representation. You have to have the content that provides counter-stereotypical content and affirming identity affirming.
Because we can say, pick a couple of books with Black kids in it, but if it's full of stereotypes, it's going to do just as much damage. So we need to make sure that we have the representation and the content, because not all representation is good representation.
Kevin: How would you respond to, you know, as I said, this challenging space we're in related to diversity? How would you respond to what many, I mean, you see political leaders, you see parents' groups talk about that if you have an over-indexing with respect to these kind of books, that it can end up being more negative and it can also be injurious to the majority population? I mean, you hear that more and more. How would you respond to that?
Ramon: Diverse books that have empowering content about marginalized communities is good for all communities. And so, like, this is the narrative when we talk about misinformation about like, for example, diverse literature. It's like when we do culturally responsive pedagogy, when we do diverse literature, they assume that this is something of charity that we're giving to these black and brown folks for them to see themselves. They don't see how much it benefits themselves to learn empowering narratives about communities that are different from themselves. And that's the whole point.
When we talk about windows and mirrors, yes, it's important for communities of color who haven't been represented to see themselves. But it's also important for communities to see other communities outside of themselves and learn empowering things about their contributions and what they've done for, say, America and society, because that shapes the way that we interact and treat one another.
For example, when we talk about like racial bias, right? Bias, it can be explicit and it can be unconscious, right, inexplicit bias. One of the biggest factors that pushes back against unconscious bias is counter-stereotypical messaging. So when we talk about receiving information about stereotypes from the dominant landscape, when you don't have empowering representation that are creating these stories, right, the thing that can push back against that is these counter stories, basically.
And so when we talk about why is this beneficial, there is a researcher, her name is Christine Slater, and she does research on white kids who study, say, ethnic studies, because the idea is like, "Why do I need to study ethnic studies?" And they actually had the highest academic outcomes than the kids of color, because they had never been exposed in areas around race, diversity, and culture. Many kids of color brought that into the classroom with them.
And so, as far as being able to see communities differently and treat communities differently, research shows that when folks have access to counter-stereotypical empowering information, that changes the way that we literally see a community and see somebody, which therefore impacts the way that we treat one another. And so when we have messaging around solidarity, right, what does that look like, you know, all communities are represented in diverse literature.
That's the other thing is when we talk about white folks in particular, right, there's stories, examples of white folks throughout history that have resisted racism and slavery. We can talk about the abolitionists, right? We can talk about, I'm sorry, like the, I'm sorry, the Quakers and the Shakers who were aligned with the abolitionist movement earlier in the century is another example of it, right? But these are stories that aren't told throughout history, right? And folks from all backgrounds that made changes.
And so the reality is that when folks see themselves and they're provided models for how a more cohesive society looks, it benefits all communities. But the misinformation is . . . but, unfortunately, that's often not how it's explained.
Kevin: So talk about The Conscious Kid. How does The Conscious Kid operate in terms of addressing some of these challenges?
Ramon: Yeah. So a big part is our lens is we focus on, you know, creating media to support healthy and racial identity development. And a big part of that is creating content and finding content that is written by marginalized or underrepresented authors that also provides counter-stereotypical, counter-biased information, and identity-affirming information. And so, aside from, you know, we wanted to build a platform that could uplift these stories because stories is one of the oldest tools in education. It's shown to have one of the biggest impacts on learning, and it cuts across all cultural communities. All communities use stories to educate and inform folks of the world, right, and how to operate within that world and things that have worked, things that do not work.
And so, by providing stories that provide empowering counter-stereotypical messages from folks within those communities, that is a way of, like, kind of pushing back against that unconscious bias, but also showing all the diverse authorship, right, and the different stories across communities of what that can look like. And so our platform is really aimed to uplift and amplify those stories due to, as we mentioned, those structural gaps in the publishing industry that may not center those stories or for the variety of reasons of why they may not get access to mainstream media.
Kevin: This idea of The Conscious Kid, the work you're doing, this whole area centers around the sense of belonging. And by any independent yardstick, it is clear that one of the challenges that exists in our schools is far too many children enter school not having that sense of belonging, not having that sense of self-worth. It may stem from challenges at home, but we have seen that oftentimes even challenges at home can be exacerbated and frankly made worse if you don't get the requisite support in recognizing your own value and worth.
So talk about the importance of belonging, not just as it relates to the literature that you're involved in disseminating, but as you said earlier, the impact it has on all children, irrespective of race, color, or class.
Ramon: Absolutely. So when we talk about belonging, it's shown to be a need equivalent to food and water and air, right, as far as thriving. And I think a big part about belonging is just first kind of understanding how it can differ across communities. I think that's one of the first kind of limitations of belonging, is this idea of that it's seen as this universal piece.
There are aspects of belonging that cut across all communities, things like strong student-teacher relationships, right, things like high expectations paired with high-level support, right, trusting school climates, academic enrichment, highly-trained teachers, right? All of these things support belonging for all communities. But then there are nuances for how it can differ across communities as well that folks may not realize, right?
So when we talk about, you know, particularly for, say, African-American students, when we think about school policies that may target Black hair, right, or punish students for expressing cultural practices that aren't necessarily oppositional to other students or folks, the CROWN Act is a policy, for folks who may not know, that was created to try to push back in school policy that would basically punish Black students for wearing their hair in say cornrows or say braids or say dreadlocks. And so really this idea of how can we start to make belonging, making sure that we're all folks are community or all folks, sorry, are supported. We've got to do two main things, one of which is we need to look at what are the actual practices in place to support all students, and then what mechanisms do we have to even assess the belonging of our students.
The problem is the mechanisms that we have, like I said, some are good. We know that there are some things that work for all students. But we're still, as you mentioned, folks are still leaving the education system feeling as if they weren't supported, not feeling valued, not feeling respected, and not feeling included.
So what are some of those differences? Well, there's culturally specific differences. But then we've got to unpack that more as far as what do we mean by culture, because when folks define culture, it's often seen as like race or ethnicity. And we talk about terms and not having an understanding of what it means. Culture, yes, can mean race and ethnicity, but it can also mean like sports culture or gaming culture. And the definition that we're using is a set of shared practices situated in some kind of social-historical context, right?
So what are the shared practices in our classroom to make sure we're supporting all students, right? That ties back to the discipline, right? What are our discipline policies? Or what are our grading policies? So, for example, are we going to just punish students for getting a bad grade in the test? Or are we going to give them the correction to the test, allow them to retake it to make sure that they actually learn the information? What are our shared practices in recruiting students? What are our shared practices in making sure all communities feel supported within that school? What are our shared practices in making sure our teachers have training around that, right? What are our shared practices around funding?
So really this idea of making sure this idea of school culture includes the culture of the communities that are in the classroom to where students don't feel like they have to choose between going to school or their home culture. I think an example of that I can think of is this idea of, like, linguistics, right? It's like one example outside that actually does apply, like, ethnicity, right? School is kind of very English-dominant. If you speak or are bilingual, there are some schools that are bilingual, but that can be a barrier, right, if you don't have a shared practice to address the linguistic differences across your students.
So when we come to understanding belonging, yes, there is some things that definitely cut across that all students for sure need, right? That level of support, that level of trust, those strong connections, student-teacher relationships, but then we also want to make sure we're looking at the differences in our students as well and making sure we're tuning to those. Yeah.
Kevin: What is your sense in terms of how schools generally and school districts are responding to this challenge of ensuring that all kids have this sense of belonging?
Ramon: It depends on the school. So some schools are really for it. And it can even depend on the people in the school. So there may be some individuals that are like, you know what, I maybe have personal experiences that hold connections to these things, and I see the importance of it. Or maybe I've read some literature and gotten educated and I see it. But the problem is these things now have, like, connection to this political base now, where it's seen as maybe their particular candidate hasn't endorsed it, right? And so folks may be afraid to kind of align with that. So it just depends on what school you're in, what state you're in, the people in that space and their understanding and even pre-training, I don't want to say epistemological practice because that's not an accessible term, but the dispositions and training they've had around these issues, education they've had around these issues. And it just depends. I mean, we . . .
Kevin: Yeah, a lot of us, as you said, the acculturation. I mean, you know, what their environment has been growing up. This has been very important, this conversation. And I have one more question. This is what I really want to know. What advice would you give to teachers and parents about how to ensure all students feel valued and have this sense of belonging at their school?
Ramon: Yes, if I were to give, I'm thinking of . . . there's a few different, like, mechanisms that folks can use, or things that people can do. The first is to kind of think about your space and position in the school, if you're a parent, teacher, student, school leader.
If you're a parent, say, and you want to advocate for your students, or if you're, say, a teacher, as you mentioned, I would say two things. One, you have to make sure that creating belonging has to be intentional. It cannot be this reactive model. It has to be proactive, and it has to be thought out, thoroughly thought out. And on top of it being thought out, it has to be routinely checked and assessed to make sure folks are getting the outcomes and experiences that we're aiming for. So one of which is like creating a shared plan. This is like a low-level thing that I feel like can be done in almost any institution with parent support is creating this idea of a shared plan. There's this idea of like IDPs or individual development plans, where folks have a plan for what they want their student to be. But there isn't like a long-term plan for what that looks like, especially over like 5, 10 years, right?
Let's say you're in high school and you have a high schooler and you want them to have a positive high school experience and you want them to go to college. Is there a plan that the parent, that the teacher, that the principal, that the school coach, that everyone that's in this person's life has in supporting this person to reach those clear outcomes, right? What is the shared plan, and what does that look like long term? When everybody is on the same page, that's when you start to see organizational change, right? But you have to have a shared plan and what that looks like versus if you have maybe one person who's doing this thing and they're advocating, but then they've got the school they've got to go up against and maybe some things work out and maybe not, and then you're frustrated and you leave and you try to find a new space.
Find a space and find individuals that you can be and make a proactive shared plan for how you want to navigate not only the school system, but what you want your goals to be. I want to go to college after four years. Okay, so what do you need to do that? You need to be in community service for four years. Like this should start in like eighth, honestly in middle school, if you want to do something like this, going to college.
Okay, well, what's your community service look like? What does your grades need to be like? What courses do you specifically need to take, not just to graduate high school, but to be a competitive applicant, right? That's the thing. It's like, oh, you might need two years of foreign language to graduate, but that's not going to make you competitive at the four-year level if you want to, say, go to an Ivy League school, right? But once you get everybody on that shared plan, then you're actually able to make sure that student thrives.
And then, most importantly, having open lines of communication where a person feels like they can genuinely communicate if they don't feel that belonging, and then making changes accordingly. But I would say having a proactive, well thought out, shared plan amongst everybody in that student or child's life.
Kevin: Ramon Stephens, this has been a great interview. Thanks so much for joining us on "What I Want to Know."
Ramon: Thank you, Kevin. The privilege is all mine. And yeah, hope for the best of you and thanks for having me.
Kevin: Thanks for listening to "What I Want to Know." Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education. And write a review of the show. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media. That's #WIWTK.
For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com. I'm your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining "What I Want to Know."
Meet Ramon
Ramon Stephens is The Conscious Kid’s founder and executive director, an education nonprofit dedicated to supporting families, educators, and organizations in learning about and taking action against systemic inequality and racism.
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What I Want to Know
In this podcast, you will hear from leaders in education as we talk through learning solutions for homeschool, online school, education pathways, and topics tailored specifically to online students and parents.
