Elementary School Classroom Activism
Elementary School Classroom Activism Case Studies
In her study, “Teacher Activism: Enacting a Vision for Social Justice,” Bree Picower highlights the experiences of nine self-identified teacher activists and demonstrates how their activism influences how they lead in their classrooms. In addition, she demonstrates how teachers’ activism can serve as a springboard for students’ involvement in activism. Her examination of the role of teacher activists in social justice education reveals three overarching commitments of teacher activists. The second commitment, Moving Toward Liberation, is key to understanding how teacher activism helps inform social justice education.
Moving toward Liberation— Through the practices of developing caring relationships and democratic spaces, teacher activists work toward their vision of liberation by delivering culturally relevant, community responsive pedagogy that helps students develop their own understandings of inequality and the skills to take action (Picower, 2012, p. 565).
The experience shared by Ray, a third-grade dual-language teacher, demonstrates how the introduction of activism to students as early as elementary school can inspire them to work toward generating change in their communities.
Third Grade Class
In his third grade class, Ray utilized community responsive pedagogy to center his curriculum around the community in which he teaches. Rather than existing as an isolated space apart from the outside world, his classroom existed as a space in which students can learn about their community in context. Recognizing that many of his students were children of domestic workers, Ray invited a guest speaker to his class whose activism was related to promoting the rights of domestic workers. While visiting the class, the guest speaker invited students to a rally. This invitation and Ray’s ability to bridge education and activism had a direct impact on students’ drive for generating social change. This was best demonstrated by one student who attended the rally alongside Ray and several of her classmates. The student, moved by her family’s history as domestic workers, asked to take a more active role at the rally by speaking on stage. Ray explained,
“She had written this little speech, and she got up there in front of 200 people and the cameras and the microphones, and she spoke, and she was amazing! She nailed it! And she talked about how her mother was broke and how it’s not fair and you have to give people more money. And this is an eight-year-old! Afterwards, she was crying and her mother was crying. What was particularly cool was that a radio station was there recording it, and it was on the radio, and we played it for the class who got to hear their classmate speaking at this rally. It was powerful” (Picower, 2012, p. 568).
Ray’s students gained knowledge about activism through their introduction to the guest speaker and subsequent invitation to the rally. In essence, this experience allowed students to network, observe adult activists, and make use of their voices to become youth activists themselves.
In an episode of WHYY’s Real Black History podcast titled “Educators say teaching Black history truthfully is their goal, not indoctrination,” sixth-grade teacher Karen Falcon shares a story of her school’s first social justice action. Annette John-Hall (2021), the host of Real Black History, notes that “Through her unique teaching methods, [Falcon’s] students have learned how to affect change.” Describing her own teaching methods, Falcon explains, “I don’t know that I teach activism as much as I teach history and we talk about the truth, about the past and the present. And, you know, I want them to be problem solvers. Sometimes the activism piece comes out of me asking a question that I don't even know the answer to.” For Falcon, the first instance of posing a problem question for students to solve happened in 2006.
Sixth Grade Class
As founder and co-director of the Jubilee School in West Philadelphia, Falcon has developed strong relationships with students and their families since the school’s opening in the 1970s. When one of her former students became one of 406 people lost to gun violence in the city in 2006, Falcon returned to her class following his funeral and asked her students how our society should go about ending gun violence. Falcon explained in the podcast, “When it got into a discussion, some of them said, ‘Well, we really can’t do anything.' One of the students said, ‘Well, we can have a march,’ and she brought up Gandhi. And then she started talking about how maybe a march wasn’t enough. We should have a campaign” (John-Hall, 2021). Following that student’s suggestion, the class organized a campaign that resulted in an invitation to speak at a UN small arms conference. Students coordinated marches with students from other schools at which they spoke out against gun violence. This experience demonstrates that, for Falcon, activism is bringing current events and pressing community issues into the classroom and giving students the space and support to think critically and generate solutions. This group of students left Falcon’s classroom with the ability to brainstorm solutions to a social issue, coordinate their efforts to effectively implement the solution, and communicate their ideas to people in positions of power.