Transcript
Kevin: Heated political debates and culture wars over U.S. history have led to the adoption of new policies and revised curriculum in schools across the country. These new guidelines are raising concerns among families and educators. Many worry about the erasing and rewriting of history. Why is history still important and needed today? What are the consequences of politicizing history? And how can we encourage discernment in today's highly charged political world? This is "What I Want to Know." And today I'm joined by Jessica Lander to find out.
Jessica: They shaped my belief about the importance of facing hard history and studying all of history, so studying the innovative, the positive, and the challenging and the hard, even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable.
Kevin: Heated political debates and culture wars over U.S. history have led to the adoption of new policies and revised curriculum in schools across the country. These new guidelines are raising concerns among families and educators. Many worry about the erasing and rewriting of history. Why is history still important and needed today? What are the consequences of politicizing history? And how can we encourage discernment in today's highly charged political world? This is "What I Want to Know." And today I'm joined by Jessica Lander to find out.
Jessica Lander is an author and teacher at Lowell High School in Massachusetts. Jessica teaches U.S. history and civics to recent immigrant students and has won several teaching awards, including being named the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year. She joins us today to discuss the importance of teaching history to students.
Jessica, welcome to the show. Jessica Lander, thank you so much for joining us on "What I Want to Know" and welcome to the show.
Jessica: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you today.
Kevin: I've been waiting for this show. I've been waiting to interview you. I think that the work you're doing is so, so very important. But I always have to go back to the beginning. I ask all great teachers, all great educators that one question, did you always want to be a teacher?
Jessica: So no, but I had phenomenal teachers growing up. So from my parents, I mean, our parents and our families are always our first and most important teachers. And my parents were extraordinary teachers for me. And then in elementary school, I had really fantastic teachers who taught me both to love learning, that taught me that what I was excited about was worthy of study. And also, which I think was really important for me, and I didn't appreciate till later on, so I'm dyslexic and struggled with speaking and reading and writing and spelling, and never in elementary school did I feel that being dyslexic was a barrier for me achieving in the classroom and outside the classroom. I recognize the privilege of having been in a school community where my teachers celebrated all types of learners, and so had amazing teachers growing up and then in high school and college, but didn't actually think about being a teacher until freshman year of college. And I'd originally gone with the belief that I was going to be a science major.
Kevin: Oh, wow.
Jessica: And was doing a language study program in Tanzania studying Kiswahili. I knew being dyslexic that immersion was the best way for me to learn. And so was in Tanzania in Arusha between the fall and spring semester and met a friend there who then showed me a school that was nearby. And I took a tour of the school, and it was a really fascinating school that was created for low-income students in the area and was doing really, really well. And students were thriving on national exams and in the community. And I came away, I viscerally remember that first day having taken that tour of the school, coming back that evening to where I was staying and going, "Wow, I want to understand what this school is doing. And how can we replicate these ideas?"
And I can't do that as a science major, as much as I love science. And so I came back to university and I switched majors to anthropology with a certificate in African studies and wrote my thesis on the school and decided, "Okay, I'm going to go into ed policy," not teaching, but ed policy. But to be in ed policy, it was really essential that I have experience in the classroom, that no one should take me seriously, I wouldn't take myself seriously if I didn't have experience in the classroom. And so I applied for and got a fellowship to teach at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. I graduated on a Tuesday, packed my bags, drove back to Massachusetts, unpacked my bags, repacked them, got on a plane Friday, landed in Thailand on Sunday, and started teaching at university on Monday morning.
Kevin: Wow.
Jessica: And that was my first year teaching. And the plan was one year. And I remember the very last day, it was the last class, class had finished, and I drove my motorbike to a nearby temple in the neighborhood. And I just sat in the courtyard and cried because the community that my students and I had created together was gone. That community that was so special and quirky and funny and rigorous and all of those things that we had together created, it was never going to exist again. And I knew then that I had to go back to the classroom and stay in the classroom for longer. And so that was when I knew, really knew I needed to be a teacher.
Kevin: What's fascinating about your journey, a couple things is, you know, all of us have those, I will call it, seminal moments that change you. And we remember them vividly. And especially when the moments guide your path and tell you, "This is what you should do." And as has been the case with me, and it sounds like it's been that way with you, when those moments happen, not only do you not look back, there are never any regrets. And I'm sure you would say that.
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. It just feels like this is what I'm supposed to be doing. There's such joy in teaching. There's such joy in watching my students become teachers to each other and then teachers and leaders in our community. And I definitely wouldn't have imagined it back in grade school or even, like, going into college, but couldn't imagine anything else now.
Kevin: Let me ask you this. What were you teaching when you began? What subjects were you teaching?
Jessica: So in Thailand, at Chiang Mai University, I taught English and critical thinking classes, and then a Shakespeare class, which I created on the side, and we put on a production of "Macbeth." And then I came back to the U.S. and taught sixth grade and taught both English and math in an extended day program. And then actually flew back to Southeast Asia and lived in Cambodia and taught leadership skills and genocide studies to young women, college women in Phnom Penh in Cambodia.
Kevin: I want to ask you about when you began to teach history and why. But, you know, with your travels, and, again, I find this with people who've traveled around the world, not only does it broaden one's horizons, but particularly for teachers it helps your perspective in terms of compassion, empathy, you know, global understanding of the commonalities as well as the differences. And that has guided your journey even as you have now excelled as a history teacher. But when did you start to teach history and why?
Jessica: So I think there were always elements of history that I was teaching in sort of my earlier years of my teaching career, but I was not officially, like, a history teacher until I got to Lowell High School where I teach now. So I had definitely woven history into my classes. I love history. As a seventh and eighth grader, my teacher, Jen K. Goodman, had us use Facing History & Ourselves, this really fantastic national organization. They have a curriculum based first in genocide studies and the Holocaust, and then sort of broadening out to more social justice. And so I had always really found the teaching and the learning of history really important and read a lot of history.
But the first time that I taught history as a history teacher was when I got to Lowell. And that was, you were talking about how our experiences, and particularly for those of us who have lived abroad and had that opportunity, how that impacts us, it definitely impacted my ending up in Lowell, which I'm so, so grateful for, that I had gone to get a master's in education policy and management and was figuring out where I was going to teach next and what I was going to teach. Was it going to be English? Maybe it was going to be art. I'm also a practicing artist.
And I happened to have a conversation with one of the women who was at a recruiting fair from Lowell Public Schools, which has the second-largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia. And having recently lived in Cambodia, this was really exciting for me to be able to learn from and learn with a community that not just was a vibrant Cambodian community, but also a vibrant community of peoples from all over the world. And I think, too, being drawn from having lived in a number of countries.
And the position that was open was a position to teach recent immigrant and refugee students and teaching history. And I sort of talking about those seminal moments, those moments that are so crystal clear in our memory and are transformative, another of those for me was who would become my two heads of department, Stephen Gervais and Robert DeLossa. And they are the head of the EL Department and the Social Studies Department. And I knew very little about Lowell at the time. I'd been a couple times. But they agreed to meet me halfway between where I was and the city of Lowell on a Saturday morning at a coffee shop. And it just speaks volumes to who they both are and how much they care about the community and their students that they would have a conversation with someone who may or may not be a teacher at their school on a Saturday, that they'd drive halfway to meet me and tell me about their school. And that hour, hour and a half conversation we had changed my life, because I came up to Lowell and found the work that I hope to do for the rest of my life.
Kevin: It's powerful in so many ways. And because of your experiences and because you were teaching history to immigrants, you've taken that ball and run with it extraordinarily, if I may. And you became an author. You've written several things. Your one book, most recent book, "Making Americans," where you unpack the journey, the immigrant journey and you tell stories about some of specific individuals sharing their humanity, their experiences, court decisions that gave rise to the ability or requirement and the legal right to make sure that our immigrant children were educated properly in this country. What motivated you to go through that sort of extraordinary task of writing a book? And I can say that because I'm an author myself. It takes a certain level of commitment as well as a desire to share information that you feel must be shared.
Jessica: And that's absolutely it. It has for a long time felt like the book that I needed to write, not just a book that I wanted to write or I was looking to write a book, that it needed to be written, that these stories were so important. So that comes from my students.
So I started in Lowell at Lowell High School in 2015. I have students from 30 different countries, from Colombia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Cambodia. And they are remarkable young people. They bring such strengths to our classroom and to our community. They are cultural and linguistic navigators for their families and for themselves and for their friends. They bring a wealth of knowledge having lived in multiple countries and cultures and traditions. They bring grit and perseverance and determination honed in living in a new land. And they bring all these strengths that enrich our classroom and our learning together. And I am just blown away by them every day.
And seeing the ways in which they do remarkable things in their own educational journeys, but also the ways in which they support each other's educational journeys and the ways in which they are really invested in creating new homes and new lives here and giving back to their new homes in Lowell and in Massachusetts and the U.S. And so the ways in which they want to help create positive change in the community and to engage and collaborate with members of the community. And so seeing all of this, seeing the work they did in our classroom, the ways in which they brought that learning and teaching out into the community is so inspiring to me and was one of the drivers of the book.
And then the other was seeing all the amazing things they do and also recognizing that our schools generally, many of them are not yet supporting our amazing immigrant-origin students in all the ways that they can and should be. Today in the United States, one in four students are immigrants or the children of immigrants. One in four. And every community has immigrant-origin students, immigrants or children of immigrants. And they bring all of these strengths. And it is important for schools to be playing a really essential role in making sure that young people feel a strong sense of belonging in our schools, that they feel valued, that they feel their strengths are recognized and appreciated and invested in, that they feel safe and they feel that they can really put down roots. And this is best for them and it's best for the whole community and the whole country.
And so it was sort of those two beliefs that drove me to want to write this book and then also in addition to those of just my own curiosity as a teacher of wanting to learn from other educators across the country of how I could be a better teacher for my students. And so it was those three things. And then I was fortunate to receive an Emerson Collective fellowship and so was able to actually take off a year, with the support of my school district, to begin researching the book. And then I finished writing it while full-time teaching. But that's what drove me to write the book.
Kevin: It's very, very inspiring. And speaking of curiosity, and the stories aside because you knew many of the students, obviously, talk about your biggest takeaway based on the research in the book because having some understanding of the process you may have gone through, it's always interesting to me that you enter into a project like that and you have certain expectations. You also have a certain knowledge level or a base of knowledge you want to share. But once you begin the research for something like that, there's always things that like, "Oh, wow, I didn't know." Talk about a couple, one or more of those things.
Jessica: Absolutely. And I think to frame that, it might be useful for readers. So, basically, the book tells three sets of stories. To reimagine immigrant education, my belief it's important to have these three sets of stories. Stories of the past, as you mentioned, those key laws, Supreme Court cases and movements that have transformed immigrant education. So those stories of the past. Stories of the present, innovative and creative approaches to immigrant education today in schools across the country, from a single classroom in North Dakota to an entire school district in North Carolina of 126 schools. And then, of course, stories of the personal, which you mentioned, which are those stories of our young people that if we're serious about reimagining immigrant education, we have to be learning from our young people about their experience of our schools so that we can better support them or better support their near peers.
And so you're right, the stories of my young people, I had a sense of my young people. I mean, I learned so much more from them and about their experiences and their strengths in talking with them. I sat with each of them for about 20 hours of conversations over a long period of time. But the history part, that research, I mean, as a history teacher, I really nerded out. And I'm, like, already a history teacher. So it was really powerful to dive into this history and I call it historical sleuthing that I didn't know, to your point of like, what do we know and what do we not know going into a project like this?
So I knew that there were important moments in history that I wanted to cover. But I think one of the things that has really struck me is that a lot of the history that I learned for the book, I did not know before researching and writing the book. And I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know it. It's essential history for us to know. It's essential to be taught in schools. And I try now to take a lot of that history that I learned and bring it into my curriculum. And it's essential for adults to know. And so I think one of those big takeaways for me was just all of this essential history about immigrant education, about immigration, that has transformed our schools, transformed our communities, in some cases transformed my own family.
And I share a little bit about my own family's journey. My great-grandfather, Daniel, came as a refugee from what is now Ukraine when he was 7 years old, back at the turn of the 1900s. And his experience in schools I have a much better understanding with now having learned this history that I didn't know before. And so that's a huge takeaway for me. I think there's a takeaway of just seeing how whether it's xenophobic rhetoric that we're seeing now that we think maybe is new is not. It's happened before. And so seeing that cyclical nature and also seeing the ways in which courageous individuals have built on each other's work over time.
And so I think one of the things, this is getting into the nerdy history writing me, but the last chapter, the last piece of history that I write was really exciting for me both to write but also to learn because all of these people who I had been sitting with and learning with who are, like, 100 years old people, but had been learning their stories were all showing up in this last history to be able to tell that last history, which tells a story that spans about 50 years and brings us to the present. So many characters that I had met along this journey came back, that it was all building on each other. And I couldn't have written that last chapter without understanding all of those stories that came before.
And I think the last thing that really struck me was just how really magical and powerful it was to learn from folks who were at the heart of these cases. So as much as possible, I sought out and was able to talk to folks who were part of these stories, parents and students and teachers and lawyers and activists. And that was really just such an honor and such a privilege to be able to talk with these folks who they and their families shaped history.
Kevin: And they made history.
Jessica: They made history. And it was just, like, for me as a history teacher, for me as a writer to be able to have that honor of being able to speak with them and learn from them was extraordinary.
Kevin: You know, I find myself, and I really want to get to where we are today with respect to history, but I find myself using this phrase far more than I ever thought I would. And that phrase is, "If we don't understand and know history, we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of history." And with all this going on, the, you know, challenges to curriculum, in some cases the dumbing down of history, the editing, deleting, depending on your community or the tribe you're in, some things you like, some things you don't like. And, you know, educators, many teachers fall into that category. I've had teachers say, "Well, because I have a certain feeling about this religion, I don't want to talk about, I don't even want to mention the word." Some people don't want to talk about Holocaust or slavery. There's so much of the politics and the angst around history. Talk to me about why the teaching of history, the facts of history, what really happened in as, you know, complete and honest way as possible, talk about why that's still important today.
Jessica: Yeah. I mean, it's always been important and will always be important. And I'm 100% with you. I mean, so this organization, Facing History & Ourselves, if listeners haven't heard of it, I urge you to go look it up. They're a really fantastic organization. And I learned from them very early on, and so I think they were really, they shaped my belief about the importance of facing hard history and studying all of history, so studying the innovative, the positive, and the challenging and the hard, even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable, to your point exactly of then we're doomed to repeat ourselves, that we have so much to learn from our history.
And not speaking about it, not reading about it, denying it exists, doesn't make it go away. And it makes it more likely that we are to repeat ourselves. And so, in my class, I mean, I see it every day when my kids face hard history and grapple with challenging questions that they grow from that. And we do it in a community and a space where they're able to ask those questions and to grapple with each other. But if we are really helping to support students in becoming active civic participants in our democracy, in our country, in our communities, then they need to know the past to be able to shape our future. They need to know all of it.
Kevin: So let me ask you this, Jessica. How do you distinguish between the telling of history and the editorializing of history? Because people, there are some blurred lines happening here with folks who say, you know, "We want to delete this or we don't want so and so to teach this," because the assumption is that if you even raise some of these issues that have taken place in history, that the teller, the teacher will editorialize. But there is a distinction there.
Jessica: Yeah. I think, like, for teachers there are amazing primary sources that we can explore. There are great websites that gather lots of primary sources. And so bringing those into the classroom as well as, of course, secondary sources, it's so essential to be grappling with the big challenges in history. And that's also what's really important about the study of history and I think also what grips my students.
I remember a student sort of thinking about the same way that many of these stories in my book I had not known and was not taught before I studied it. One of my students last year hadn't heard of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. And he has some family that is Japanese and of Japanese descent. And he was shocked. He was like, "No, this couldn't have happened." And this was a young man who had been, you know, like not so invested in class yet, but he was suddenly really engaged and was asking more questions and staying back after class. And I have a social justice library in my class with lots of books where I hope my kids will see themselves in the titles and the stories in the book. And I pulled out one book about a memoir. And he wanted to check it out and brought it home with him, and his excitement and engagement and just really recognizing that this was important, yes, it was his history.
But I have seen the same for my kiddos who the history that we are grappling with is not necessarily their history in terms of, like, their ancestors or their family's history, but they too they recognize how important it is to study this. And so it's how do we create more opportunities for students to do this in classrooms? And how to use this as opportunities for empathy building and connections between our past and our present and then also provide students not just sort of the talking about in the present but the tools with the, "Okay. So how do we shape our future? If you want it to look different, how do we shape that?" And that takes intentional skill building.
And so I teach . . . there's a great organization, Generation Citizen, that does action civics work across the country. And my students every year in second semester choose together one community issue they care about and to collaboratively together they work on identifying a root cause and a goal and then working with local officials to advocate for real systemic change. And so it's really helping . . . My kids want to create positive change. They want to help their communities. They don't necessarily have the tools yet. And so it's how do we help give them the tools to then be able to shape that future? It's all through this.
Kevin: I think that's absolutely essential. I think that the one thing if you're around students enough, you find that oftentimes we insult their intelligence by not empowering them to be able to think and collaborate and problem-solve. And, fortunately, I think education in America is headed in that direction.
Jessica, one last question. This is what I really want to know. From your vantage point, and there are a lot of school administrators, school leaders, teachers that will be listening to this, what can we do to ensure and keep the accurate telling of history in America's classrooms?
Jessica: So many things. I think one is to seek out and know our history. And so to be avid and voracious readers ourselves as educators, as school leaders, and then also to encourage the same for our students, that I'm always trying to learn more in the same way as striking when I was writing "Making Americans" of all of these essential stories that I didn't know.
And I'll just give you one as an example. As a kid, I was really taught about Ellis Island. And some of my family came through Ellis Island. But I wasn't really ever taught about Angel Island in San Francisco. Where Ellis Island was really mostly a place of welcome, Angel Island was really a detention center, and mostly for immigrants coming from China. And they're starkly different in how they treated immigrants. So if you were in Ellis Island, you stayed on average two hours to two days, and on Angel Island, you could stay anywhere on average between two weeks to two years detained on Angel. And I give that as an example of just one piece of history that I didn't know was not taught, but is I learned at a conference I went to and is now an essential part of my curriculum when we study immigration in the early 1900s. We will study that in about two, three weeks in my classes.
And so seeking out those stories, seeking out books, challenging ourselves to grapple with hard history so that we can then bring it into the classroom. And then I think too is listening to our young people. Just as you said, like our young people are deeply intelligent and so, so curious. And so as much as possible, helping to create spaces in our classrooms for school leaders or in our classrooms as teachers, creating those spaces in our curriculum for our students to help lead in the creation of our lessons and our materials.
So there's a class I teach. I mostly teach a U.S. history class to recent immigrant and refugee students, and then one class which dives into all sorts of history, a lot of hard history in the U.S. And every Friday, a group of my students will take over and teach the class. And within whatever unit we're looking at, they have to choose a topic related to that, but they'll work with me over the course of a week to develop a whole lesson plan and activities. But they are choosing what they think is important for their peers to learn. And we're doing that in collaboration and discussion. And it's like deeply, deeply rigorous. And I just explained this project today to my students, and there were a lot of, like, very big eyes.
But it reminds me of many, many ways back to my elementary school and where I was mentioning at the beginning of our conversation of my teachers creating opportunities to let us explore what we were passionate about. And so similarly, and this is just one example of what I try to do in my class of creating space for my students to explore the history that they are curious about. And that's one part of it. It's also us as teachers bringing in lots of perspectives and ideas and grappling with that hard history. But I also think it's important to be really creating space for student voice and student ownership of their learning.
Kevin: Yeah. Jessica Lander, well said. Thank you so much for joining us on "What I Want to Know."
Jessica: Thank you so much for having me. It was just a pleasure, a real pleasure and joy to be in conversation with you.
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 Jessica
Jessica Lander is an author and teacher at Lowell High School in Massachusetts.
Jessica teaches U.S. history and civics to recent immigrant students and has won several teaching awards, including the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year.
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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.
