Civics and History

New program brings distinguished community education leaders to ��

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 17:31:05 +0000

New program brings distinguished community education leaders to ��

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 09/12/2025 - 10:31

Bob Hoover (second from right) chats with STEP faculty and other �� community members.

The �� Accelerator for Learning's Equity in Learning Initiative taps local expertise to help students, scholars gain new perspectives on education.

September 12, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

What does it mean to live a life in service to education?

In the example of Robert “Bob” Hoover — the inaugural Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the �� Accelerator for Learning — it’s about tapping into community partnerships, helping to build institutions of learning, and empowering students through knowledge.

“All of our kids are capable and deserve a quality education, so our job as educators is to provide that,” says Hoover, director of the SWAG Program at Live In Peace, a nonprofit that supports young people in East Palo Alto through coaching, counseling, tutoring and mentorship.

The Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, a role within the Equity in Learning Initiative at the Accelerator, was launched in the 2024-2025 academic year to introduce �� students and scholars to exemplars in the field of education outside of the university, recognizing the expertise that comes from the broader community. A cornerstone of the Accelerator is collaborating across sectors to get the best possible learning outcomes. During his time in the role, Hoover met with students across campus sharing his experience and perspectives.

This year, the Accelerator welcomes two new practitioners in residence: Aditi Goel, who has more than 20 years of experience in educational policy and nonprofit work; and Olatunde Sobomehin, CEO and co-founder of StreetCode Academy, a nonprofit that provides free tech classes to communities of color.

“I learned how important it is to have intergenerational conversations about issues in education,” said Maisha Winn, the Excellence in Learning Professor at �� Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Equity in Learning Initiative.

Education as a collaborative effort

From Air Force veteran and public school board member, to academic program director and college president, Hoover has worn many hats in his 93 years. “I wanted that historical context for ��’s collaboration with the community,” Winn said.

After moving to California 66 years ago with a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Pennsylvania State University, Hoover received his physical therapy certificate from ��, his California teaching credential from San Jose State University, and his master’s degree in education administration from Antioch University.

Bob Hoover (center) meets with STEP students and GSE faculty.

However, Hoover says that his greatest lessons came from the community around him.

“An amazing factor in my development was that the school I went to had an expectation that everyone was prepared to go to college,” said Hoover, who grew up in North Carolina during the Jim Crow era. “The teachers in our school were so highly motivated to make sure the students got a good education that they reached out to my mother in Pennsylvania whenever I wasn’t doing well, to ensure I made it to my classes.”

These experiences drove him to support the advancement of Black and Brown students in the Bay Area as a community organizer, the program director of college readiness at the College of San Mateo, and the first president of Nairobi College, a junior college created to meet the educational needs of people of color. He was also part of a group of 30 people who worked for 20 years to incorporate the City of East Palo Alto in 1983.

“Having gone through that environment as a kid had a huge impact on what I did as an adult,” he said.

As the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence during the past academic year, Hoover met with students, faculty and staff to share about his experiences in education, and encourage younger generations to chart their own course.

One such event was a speaking engagement hosted by �� undergraduate students at Ujamaa House, an African American themed dorm, on organizing for education. Taylor Hall, ‘25, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies and a minor in education, spearheaded the event and said she first learned of Hoover through her own education research.

“Once I embraced the idea that I wanted to pursue education as my pathway, I started taking a lot of classes on the cultural aspects of learning and cultural development in education,” said Hall, who was originally an international studies major. “It was through these classes that I first learned about Mr. Hoover and the Nairobi Day Schools.”

Hall said the purpose of the event was to encourage intergenerational conversations around organizing, give younger organizers hope within the current political climate, and honor Hoover as a veteran, Hall said.

“It was so beautiful to have so many types of people there to come and hear Mr. Hoover speak,” she said.

One of the event’s attendees was Hoover’s granddaughter and �� student Lena Hoover, ‘27.

“I think I’ve always viewed education as a privilege because of the amount of work my grandfather has done with advocacy and education,” said Lena Hoover, who started a program with Hoover during her first year at �� that sends students in Ujamaa to tutor at Live in Peace twice a week.

Bob Hoover (left) speaks to students and �� community members at an event at Ujamaa Hall attended and co-organized by his granddaughter Lena Hoover (center).

“He’s always talked a lot about how as we graduate and move forward, it’s important to remember to give back, whether that’s through money or time, and stay grounded in service and uplifting the community we came from,” she said.

“The biggest thing he’s taught me is the importance of having a village, because working with other people is integral to building a movement.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Maisha Winn

U.S. textbooks portray Asians in a limited and negative light, new study shows

Carrie Spector — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:48:28 +0000

U.S. textbooks portray Asians in a limited and negative light, new study shows

Carrie Spector Thu, 03/27/2025 - 11:48

A new study uses artificial intelligence to analyze the portrayal of Asians and Asian Americans in widely used U.S. history textbooks. (Photo: iStock)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Race and Equity

In an analysis of widely used U.S. history textbooks, �� education scholars find that the rare mentions of Asians and Asian Americans largely use language related to war.

March 31, 2025

By Carrie Spector

Despite the instrumental role Asians have played in developing American infrastructure and institutions, they are rarely mentioned in popular U.S. history textbooks, according to a new study co-authored by �� researchers. Even the infrequent references tend to portray Asians and Asian Americans in a negative light, the study finds, largely in the context of war as enemies and outsiders.

Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze each word and sentence of 30 of the most widely used U.S. history textbooks in California and Texas high schools, two states that have the highest student populations in the United States and make up the largest markets for textbook publishers.

They found that only 1 percent of sentences in the textbooks contained any mention of Asians or Asian Americans. Most of the references were related to war and foreign affairs, rather than their contributions to U.S. society.

“There’s very little discussion about Asian Americans in these textbooks, which is especially surprising for states like California and Texas, which have a huge Asian American population,” said Minju Choi, PhD ’25, who co-led the study as a doctoral student at the GSE and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany.

Minju Choi, PhD '25

The study also found that the sentiment of verbs used to describe Asians was markedly negative, more so than the language used to describe actions of other ethnic groups. Specifically, the researchers identified the prevalence of words like attack, invade, and threaten in connection with Asians, in contrast to verbs like begin, want, and believe used in connection with groups like Germans and the British.

“The disparity is shocking,” said Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the �� Doerr School of Sustainability. “For Asian groups, not only did we see the dominance of the war narrative, but the language is much more aggressive, more negative. The negative sentiment is higher for Asian groups relative to other social groups, in sentences related to war and in non-war contexts.”

The study, published March 27 in the journal Educational Researcher, was co-led by Lucy Li, who earned her bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science from �� and is now a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. David Bamman, an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, is also a coauthor.

A disproportionate focus on war

While war is commonly a centerpiece in U.S. history textbooks, the researchers said, they found that the emphasis on war was far greater for Asians than for other ethnic groups. More than 45 percent of sentences mentioning Asians or Asian Americans were focused on war or conflict, compared with about 14 percent of sentences in the textbooks overall.

“That focus obscures the social history of Asians and Asian Americans, the complicated history of migration and other transnational experiences as they’re linked to militarism,” said Choi. “It also perpetuates the stereotype of Asian Americans in history as the foreign enemies.” The emphasis on “fighting” verbs in connection with Asians oversimplifies their roles into either aggressors or victims, she said.

GSE Associate Professor Patricia Bromley

The researchers also gave examples of Asians who had an important role in the history of the United States but were rarely or not mentioned in the textbooks. For one, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1898 brought about by Chinese American Wong Kim Ark helped to establish birthright citizenship for anyone born within U.S. territory, but only one textbook in the study sample included a reference to his case. None of the textbooks mentioned Japanese American Yuri Kochiyama, an activist who played a significant part in the U.S. civil rights movement.

When historical figures were named in sentences mentioning Asians or Asian Americans, nearly two-thirds of the individuals who were named were white, the researchers found. This sentence, for example – “In fact, because most Japanese people had never seen steamships before, they thought the ships in Perry’s fleet were ‘giant dragons puffing smoke,’ ” – refers only to Matthew Perry, a white American naval commander, by name.

“Asians and Asian Americans are reduced to groups and treated quite monolithically, versus the white figures, who get to be heroic actors with power and agency as individuals,” said Bromley.

The study also found that most mentions of Asian Americans were limited to Chinese and Japanese Americans, excluding groups such as South or Southeast Asians. Filipino Americans are the third-largest Asian American group, Choi noted, but rarely appeared in the textbooks except in the context of the U.S. annexation of the Philippines.

Using AI to analyze words and sentences

The study builds on past textbook analyses led by Bromley and her collaborators, investigating how U.S. textbooks characterize different population groups such as men, women, and people of color, as well as how political movements and climate change are represented.

For this study, like some of the previous work, the researchers analyzed each word and sentence in the textbooks using natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to recognize and understand text. One popular NLP method, known as topic modeling, identified the prevalence of certain topics in sentences that mention Asians and Asian Americans. Another, known as dependency parsing, identified verbs associated with Asians and Asian Americans, to analyze actions ascribed to them in the textbooks.

The researchers did not find meaningful differences between the California and Texas textbooks in terms of the prevalence and nature of references to Asians and Asian Americans, but noted that the use of computational methods to identify general patterns might not reveal more nuanced differences in ideology between the two states’ books.

For educators, the researchers suggested that supplementing textbooks with more inclusive materials could provide a broader perspective on the historical portrayal of Asians in the United States. They recommended lesson plans and teaching resources from the �� Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education for more representative accounts.

The limitations of existing textbooks can also provide a springboard for discussing the implications of their depiction of Asians, Bromley said. “It can be a chance to point out the omissions and the language used, to reflect with students on the meaning and creation of narratives of American national identity.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Patricia Bromley

Learning from before and building toward more: �� GSE pilot course teaches the history of California education

Olivia Peterkin — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 21:41:44 +0000

Learning from before and building toward more: �� GSE pilot course teaches the history of California education

Olivia Peterkin Tue, 02/11/2025 - 13:41

�� GSE assistant Professor Mike Hines (center) with STEP students Emilio Luna (left) and De’Jshon Maxwell-Garcia (right), who took his pilot course on the history of education in California. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Civics and History | Faculty and Programs | Teaching

A new course for teacher candidates, led by �� professor Michael Hines, takes a journey through the state's legacy of learning.

February 12, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

If you were to teach a course on the history of education in California, where would you start?

Would you kick things off in 1921 when the state board of education was established? Or back in 1874, when attendance became compulsory for children ages 8 to 14 in California?

More importantly, how would you convey the significance of knowing the state’s educational history in the first place?

For Michael Hines, an assistant professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), the place to start is long before California reached statehood – going back to Indigenous traditions in education then moving through European colonization and their impact on how children were taught. It’s important for California teachers to understand the history of education in the state, he said, because it affects their work in ways they may not even realize.

“Teaching is a deeply historical act, and whenever teachers come into a classroom they carry historical narratives with them,” said Hines, who piloted a course on the history of education in California last summer through the �� Teacher Education Program (STEP), a master’s program at the GSE that also leads to a preliminary California teaching credential.

“Whether these narratives are stories about the purpose of American education or stories about the histories of the communities where they’re working, the act of becoming a teacher or going into the classroom is freighted with this historical context that often goes unacknowledged.”

Doing the homework

The pilot course was funded by a STEP mini-grant, designed to encourage GSE faculty and doctoral students to pursue innovative projects that advance the field of teacher education. The mini-grant program supports STEP’s mission to serve as a “learning laboratory,” where faculty can explore and test new initiatives, and doctoral students can deepen their knowledge and skills.

Upon being approved for the STEP mini-grant in the fall of 2023, Hines and two GSE doctoral students, Ayan Ali and Abigail Kahn, set to work on figuring out what would be covered in the course and how they would deliver it to STEP students in the allotted week of instruction.

“This just felt like a really unique opportunity to create an exciting syllabus, and to think deeply about the needs of people who were going to be entering California classrooms in the very near future,” said Ali, who studies the history of education under the GSE’s Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies (SHIPS) program.

“We spent a lot of time doing background readings on histories of education in California, trying to get a lay of the land,” she said. “I spent a couple of months familiarizing myself with the literature.”

Hines, Ali, and Kahn worked together to gather a variety of historical materials, including primary and secondary sources, and to lead class discussions.

Kahn, whose dissertation proposal focuses on schools in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, led a discussion for the course about this history in California, as well as ��’s involvement in creating curricula for the camps. “I gave each of the students copies of letters from December 1942 from ninth graders at the Minidoka concentration camp, introducing themselves to their teachers.”

The purpose of the exercise was to think about what the STEP students may be teaching at schools.

“School has a big hand in history, and in teaching students about race,” Kahn said.

Sharing with the class

Abigail Kahn (left) and Ayan Ali (right) are GSE PhD students who helped construct the course. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Since the course isn’t a requirement for their degree, the STEP students all signed up on a volunteer basis to take the class for the week between their summer and fall teaching placements.

“The students who signed up were incredible throughout the entire process,” Hines said. “They came in with so much enthusiasm for the material, as well as questions, such a command of some of the issues we wanted to discuss, and with so much grace and empathy for each other and for us as an instructional team.”

“They really did help us co-construct the classroom space,” he said, “and that was one of the things that made it such a unique and positive experience for me.”

Emilio Luna, a STEP student raised in San Diego, said he enjoyed the course’s look into how different social and ethnic groups influenced education in the state.

“I learned more about the Chicano movement, including how it was often led by young people, and it helped me understand more about myself and where I stand in the history of California education,” Luna said. “I also learned more about what my role is as an educator, especially someone with my identity and how I position myself in the classroom to serve kids who have an identity similar to mine.”

For De’Jshon Maxwell-Garcia, a highlight of the class was learning about some of the local efforts people took to ensure equity in education for Black students, such as the work of Mothers for Equal Education, in East Palo Alto, who created Nairobi Day Schools to support learning opportunities for Black children.

“It surprised me how deeply rooted my efforts today are to things people have done in the past to ensure educational equity and freedom,” said Maxwell, a STEP student originally from Fresno, Calif.

“Thinking about the hurt, struggle, and pain that people have directly experienced in education makes things more real, and allows you to start thinking about things from the past and disrupt however it shows up today,” he said.

The instructional team also conducted interviews with the STEP students to gauge what they learned and felt they could apply to their teaching.

Hines and the STEP leadership team are now considering next steps for the course. An updated version, based on student feedback, is likely to happen this summer, said GSE Professor Ira Lit, faculty director of STEP.

“This course rests on an important idea that practicing teachers need to know and understand important aspects of the history of education to best serve and lead in the present,” he said. “I’m excited to see what we learn from this project and how it will help us move our work forward.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Michael Hines , Ira Lit

Lessons for the future: How past practices help reimagine education

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 01:59:19 +0000

Lessons for the future: How past practices help reimagine education Olivia Peterkin Tue, 02/04/2025 - 17:59

Civics and History | Diversity and Identity | Race and Equity

In this episode of School’s In, GSE Professor Maisha Winn discusses how positive insights from the history of education can be used to shape its future.

February 6, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

Often when people think of why we study history in any form, it’s to remember and reflect on past mistakes to avoid repeating them in the future.

However, Maisha Winn, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education, believes that there are lessons in the history of education that are not only positive, but important to apply to create a better future.

“I think about history as an opportunity to learn about the actions and activities of people that we may want to tap into, especially in the case of education,” said Winn, who is also the faculty director of the Equity in Learning Initiative at �� Accelerator for Learning.

“I think that a lot of times we think about innovation as something that is ahead of us, something that has yet to be discovered, something that is inherently futuristic,” she said. “However, there have been people, especially in non-dominant communities, Indigenous communities, who have been engaged in ways of teaching and learning for a very long time that we can learn from and learn with.”

In her role in the Accelerator, Winn spearheads projects that address disparities in educational outcomes, and in her research as a professor, she studies how under-resourced communities create practices, processes, and institutions of their own. Most recently, she has been looking into the work of Black institution builders, who were central to the Black Arts Movement between 1965 and 1975, and their perspectives on how to support student success.

“Many of these institution builders’ minds were about three pillars: identity, purpose, and direction,” Winn said. “And that if young people had those three pillars as anchors in their lives, that would help launch them as civic actors in our country.”

Winn joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss historical insights into education, the importance of establishing identity to student success, and how parents can help children connect to themselves and their communities.

“I think that it’s important to think about supporting our young people in developing really solid narratives about their lineage, about who they are, about what their goals are now and where they see themselves going,” she said. I cannot express enough how important I think it is for young people to have this strong sense of identity that allows them to connect with other people in really powerful ways.”

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Maisha Winn (00:00):

History matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter.

Denise Pope (00:12):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education and Co-Founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:35):

And I'm Dan Schwartz, I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the Faculty Director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:45):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Well, hello Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:56):

Well, hello Denise. So I have a question for you. Surprise.

Denise Pope (01:02):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (01:03):

So I'm going to see if I can channel my 11-year-old voice.

Denise Pope (01:08):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (01:08):

You ready?

Denise Pope (01:09):

This is an eleven-year-old question?

Dan Schwartz (01:11):

Yeah, maybe 12.

Denise Pope (01:11):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (01:12):

So why do we study history?

Denise Pope (01:15):

Why do we study history? Okay. What a lovely question, Daniel. Why do we study history? I believe that it is really important to study the past, a lot of people say so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. I think it's really important to look back at the history of countries, the world, et cetera, and figure out why we are in the state we're in, for better or for worse, right? It's a sense of kind of looking back so that you don't screw up the next generation. That's what I would say to little Danny. What do you think?

Dan Schwartz (01:59):

Little Danny stopped listening about halfway through because... No.

Denise Pope (02:04):

Cause it was boring?

Dan Schwartz (02:05):

I thought that was interesting. It's a very instrumental response. Rather than following that, I thought we'd just introduce our guest who actually does it.

Denise Pope (02:13):

Okay, good.

Dan Schwartz (02:14):

It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Maisha Winn at the Graduate School of Education. She's also a Director of Initiative on Equity and Learning at the �� Accelerator. So Maisha studies the Black student experience in and out of schools, and like many of our guests, she was a teacher before becoming a professor. So welcome, Maisha.

Maisha Winn (02:34):

Thank you for having me, Denise and Dan.

Dan Schwartz (02:37):

So here's the question, you are maybe a historian of the future or maybe you study history and the future, why do we study history?

Maisha Winn (02:47):

I love that you started with that question, Dan. And Denise, I love that you offered a response that I think many of us are familiar with. You hear this over and over again, that we look at history because we don't want to repeat mistakes. However, I might bring a different perspective in thinking about why we look at history. I think about history as an opportunity to learn about actions and activities of people that we may want to tap into, especially in the case of education. I think that a lot of times we think about innovation as something that is ahead of us, something that has yet to be discovered, something that is inherently futuristic. However, there have been people, especially in non-dominant communities, Indigenous communities, who have been engaged in ways of teaching and learning for a very long time that we can learn from and learn with. And so I might offer to that traditional story about why we teach history and think about history this other avenue of exploration about how we might find innovation in the past.

Denise Pope (03:53):

I love that. And so what does that mean exactly?

Maisha Winn (03:58):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (03:58):

What have you found?

Dan Schwartz (04:02):

You particularly specifically looked at people who changed education, isn't that right?

Maisha Winn (04:07):

Yeah. So my most recent work has been looking into the work of Black institution builders who were a part of the Black arts movement, which is typically situated between 1965 and 1975. These institution builders were poets, writers, they were parents, they were everyday people who were concerned about the conditions of their schools, particularly public schools. The group that I write about is a group that was located in Chicago, they started the Institute of Positive Education in 1969. Two years before that, one of the co-founders founded a Black publishing house. And they were very concerned about math scores and reading scores. And even though we didn't use the language of achievement gap or educational debt, as Gloria Ladson-Billings often says, we weren't using that language, but that was in existence. And so this was a time period where many Black Americans were deeply disappointed that after civil rights legislature, that things still had not improved in their communities and in their schools, so they took it upon themselves to start their own preschools and elementary schools and even high schools. And this was happening throughout the country.

Dan Schwartz (05:22):

It's amazing how important local action has been for minoritized communities. But so I got to bring it back, Maisha, so what have you learned that's going to help me borrow that into the future?

Maisha Winn (05:35):

Yeah, well, one of the things that I have learned and really think is important to share is this idea that education and many of these institution builders' minds was about three pillars, identity, purpose, and direction. And that if young people had those three pillars as anchors in their lives, that would help launch them as civic actors in our country.

(06:03):

And I want to really hone in on that because I think that sometimes people miss some of the sort of underlying foundation of the Black power and Black arts movement, people think it was just about the liberation of Black people. But if you ask institution builders about this time, they would argue that it was not just about the liberation of Black people, but the liberation of all communities that had experienced some sort of oppression or had been overlooked in some ways. So those movements really launched Brown Pride, the Chicano movement, LGBTQ movements in places like San Francisco and Northern California, Asian solidarity work.

(06:43):

And so this notion of identity, purpose, and direction, I map that onto thinking about our past, our present, and our future. Because when you think about identity, that takes us back to what are our different individual histories? How do we show up? What are the stories that our families tell about us, about our community, about our lineage? And then when you think about purpose, that's the now, that's why are we doing any of the things we're doing now? And then direction is where are we headed into the future? And so I think a key piece of this work is around civic engagement, civic literacy, civic discourses, and how to show up as a full participant in the country.

Denise Pope (07:25):

So I love that. And I think identity, purpose and direction speaks volumes to what, if you just think of every kid, think about who am I, how do I show up, how am I in relation to others, what is my purpose, why am I here and where are we going?

Maisha Winn (07:44):

Yeah. So when I was on faculty at Emory early in my career, there's a psychologist there whose work was very influential to me, her name is Robyn Fivush, she runs the Family Narratives Lab. And she found that young people who are able to articulate a narrative of their family lineage and sort of who their people are, if you will, had better success academically and socially in school settings. And I thought that was always so powerful and it always sort of stayed with me, I would even say dare haunted me a little bit, I thought about it a lot throughout my work, what does it mean to support young people in developing a really strong narrative about who they are?

(08:29):

And one of the things that she found was that the narrative was not supposed to just be some ascending narrative like, "Our family is great. Everything we've done is wonderful, we're fabulous people." And it certainly didn't help when the narrative was, “Wow, we've just always had bad luck and we're just a downtrodden group and community of people." She found that what she called the oscillating family narrative was one that helped anchor kids. So the oscillating family narrative would be, "We've had these really amazing times in our family and we've had some times that have been challenging, and this is how we dealt with those challenging times," so that young people would then know that when they are struggling, there are ways in which they can change things, they can use their own agency to turn things around for themselves, but everything is not just upward and onward, which can feel very isolating, I think, for young people.

Denise Pope (09:26):

And is there something about having it be from your family even more powerful? Because I know Jeffrey Cohen, one of our colleagues, looks at when people come and tell stories and, "Hey, you know what? It was hard for me and it's okay if it's hard for you," we see that that's been very influential. But there's something more here that you're saying, which is it's intergenerational. What piece is that?

Maisha Winn (09:50):

Yeah, I think it's the intergenerational piece. And I think what's exciting is we have breakthrough work, even our colleague Tom Dee and colleagues do some really beautiful work around the power of ethnic studies and young people learning about the contributions that their people made and how that made them want to engage even more in school to, one, show up, to be there. It improved things like truancy and it improved things like being present, and improved their academic participation. So those kinds of findings are really powerful and compelling.

Dan Schwartz (10:22):

So do you think this sort of discovering my history and where I sit in it is particularly important for minoritized communities?

Maisha Winn (10:30):

Absolutely, absolutely.

Dan Schwartz (10:32):

As opposed to the dominant where everything around me tells me where I am?

Maisha Winn (10:37):

Yeah. And I think that's why part of these schools, they had an African-centered or Pan-African education, but in addition to that, they taught hardcore math, science, all of the foundational disciplines. And so what they did that I think might be different, because I interviewed one of the math specialists at the Institute of Positive Education, and I asked her, I said, "Is there a difference between African-centered mathematics and regular math?" And I asked her this because I learned that she was actually headed to �� to do one of Jo Boaler's trainings and I thought, "Wow." And she said she loved Jo Boaler's work, and she was still active tutoring young people, primarily African-American young people.

(11:20):

And so one of the things that we sort of drilled down to was it wasn't that the math was different, it was the orientation toward math. It was lifting up the fact that Black people, people of African descent have had a long relationship to mathematics and making sure that children are anchored in that so it doesn't feel like it's somebody else's discipline, but it really is something that is a core part of who you are, is part of your identity.

Dan Schwartz (11:54):

So Denise, I have kind of an academic question for you that in the last maybe decade, the amount of research on identity in the psychological space has really increased. And so I'm trying to decide, is it because we've discovered how important this is and people have figured out how to study it, or is it that issues of identity have become more important for people and therefore people are moving towards studying it? So has like the role of identity in people's lives changed, is that what's driving the increase in identity research? Or is it that we just figured it out that this is really important?

Denise Pope (12:33):

I think we are slow to roll in this world, and I think identity has always been important.. particularly if you feel like you're othered in some way, you feel it, you live it, you don't have to be told it. It's like the fish in the water thing, right? Anyone who is not benefiting from the majority culture has been feeling this all along. I think we are finally understanding the connection between that and having a positive learning experience, right? I think it's often been split, "That's a home thing, that's an identity thing, that's a person thing, that's a culture thing," and then you learn math, right? And it took a while for us to figure out, oh wait, it's a system. And cognitively, our processes are all intertwined neurologically that if you feel like you don't belong, you're not going to learn. If you feel like you're being bullied, you're different, you don't see yourself reflected in the curriculum, you're not going to learn. So I think it's the former.

Dan Schwartz (13:35):

The former meaning it's always been there and we're just finally discovering how important it is?

Denise Pope (13:40):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (13:46):

So I want to go back, people may not know how strong the assimilationist view was of education.

Denise Pope (13:54):

Do you want to explain what that word means?

Dan Schwartz (13:56):

It was that everybody needs to be assimilated to kind of whatever the vision of the American way was. And so the idea is you replace some values with American values. This was extremely strong, right? This was how to make America. So I think the group that you study, for them to find a way to stand up to that and kind of say, "No, you don't want to do that. You want to hang on to the culture, here the argument is educational, it's good for the kids," I'm sure there are other arguments as well. So how did they manage to pull it off, right? I mean, there was so much push towards assimilation.

Maisha Winn (14:39):

Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Thank you, Dan, for that. And I would say that potentially many of these institution builders would say that what they were doing was fundamentally American. It was developing and cultivating a new generation of young people who would be active participants, who would stand up for themselves and for other people, who would notice when things were not right, not just for themselves, but for others, and would feel compelled to hold people accountable to do right by other people. That was part of the value system. And so I would say that this community of people would say that that's fundamentally what it means to be American.

Denise Pope (15:26):

And live in a democracy where you have to be educated and community-oriented in order for it to work.

Dan Schwartz (15:36):

Absolutely.

Denise Pope (15:38):

That kind of gives me hope.

Dan Schwartz (15:40):

So Maisha, there's a lot of wisdom. And so how are you turning this into action? I know you have Institute for the Future, I think it's called, tell us about this.

Maisha Winn (15:52):

Yeah, so my research team, the Futuring for Equity Lab, has been partnering with the Institute for the Future, which is actually based here in Palo Alto. I started working with the Institute for the Future in 2019 before the pandemic, and I'm really glad we launched that relationship prior to the pandemic. I attended their Foresight Essentials training, which is basically a training that is used for corporations and people who are trying to forecast what they need to do for their businesses, they're trying to-

Dan Schwartz (16:25):

Oh my God, how many Post-it notes did it involve?

Denise Pope (16:29):

Are you poo-pooing this, Dan? Are you being cynical here?

Maisha Winn (16:33):

They don't use just any old Post-it notes at Institute for the Futures, they actually use something, I don't have any around here, but they use something called Idea catchers, and they're really big Post-it notes, basically.

Denise Pope (16:43):

Big, big idea catchers.

Maisha Winn (16:45):

Big idea catchers, they're fabulous, lots of those. And one of my grad students at the time at UC Davis pointed me in their direction and I was really working on conceptualizing what I call five pedagogical stances for engaging in justice and equity work in schools. And those stances are history matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter. And when I was working on the futures matter stance, I was finding some of the ed literature a little bit limiting, but I also didn't find what I was looking for in sort of the speculative futures literature because I wanted to drill down on things that we could actually do. And so that led me to the Foresight training at Institute for the Future.

(17:32):

And what I learned were some really powerful activities and steps that people can take to think about, to plan for what we call preferred futures. Part of that are collecting signals, signals are like innovations, data, current trends maybe even about what's happening in education. So foundational work was collecting these signals. And I have to tell you that when we found ourselves in the pandemic, I had this historical work covering my dining table, analyzing all of these primary source materials, and I remember moving them over to collect signals for the future of education because I just thought, "I don't know what else to do right now, and I feel like this historical work, I'm not sure if this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now so let me collect these signals."

(18:24):

And as I was collecting these signals, some of them were about how parents were putting together these co-ops, they were figuring out who on the street in the building and the neighborhood were like the humanities/social science parents, and who were the math/science families and how they could cover the kids' school day so that somebody could get some work done. And I just started to look at all of these different ways in which parents were putting their children's education together.

(18:53):

And then after the murder of George Floyd, I started seeing signals around how many Black and Latina families were saying, "Well, we're not really afraid of COVID, we're afraid of racism and racial terror and violence, and we might just want to keep our kids home longer until we can see how other things play out in this arena." So then I started collecting those signals. And all of this ended up leading me back to this historical work around why these parents had started these schools in the first place. A lot of their concerns were very similar to some of the concerns of parents who were deciding not to send their kids back once things were sort of cleared for children to go back to school in the pandemic.

(19:39):

So the Institute for the Future has talked a lot about democratizing the future, and I thought, you know, these skills that these business people are getting are amazing and they're really expensive and they're pretty much inaccessible to everyday folks, and what if we thought about how to adapt some of these tools and make them user-friendly for parents? And then what we decided to do was not just have parents involved in learning the activities and learning the steps and learning the processes, but have them do work with their children.

(20:16):

So we had a pilot, and we have more workshops coming up, where we bring parents in with their children to actually go through different processes where they're planning and thinking about their education futures 10, 15, 20 years out. And it's not just an exercise of, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" But more like what kind of person do you want to be? How do you think you can get there? What are the kinds of things that you do now to prepare for that? And some of those things are in the arena of your academic intellectual work, some of those are in the financial arena, some of them are in the health arena, the mental health arena especially. So we really think about what this looks like across domains.

Dan Schwartz (20:56):

It sounds incredibly useful. Denise, I asked the wrong question. It should have been “How do I think about my future?”

Denise Pope (21:03):

Yeah, for sure.

Dan Schwartz (21:04):

“While honoring my past.”

Denise Pope (21:06):

While honoring my past. I mean, I think that's absolutely right. Here's a question, and I hope I'm not watering it down too much, is there something that you could teach some of our listeners who are parents, just maybe a little baby tool, a little baby way to get started with this, with their own kids are in their own communities?

Maisha Winn (21:22):

Absolutely. My husband laughs at me all the time because when I came back from my Foresight Essentials training, I came back and did all this stuff with our kids at the dining table and he said, "What is going on here?" So I will shout out Lyn Jeffrey at Institute for the Future for helping me think about some of these activities. But she takes you through this activity called Finding Future Me, where basically you're imagining we are 10 years out from now. So it is now the year 2035. First of all, how old will you be?

Dan Schwartz (21:51):

Old.

Denise Pope (21:54):

Old. Dan says old, but yes, okay.

Maisha Winn (21:57):

Where do you think you will be physically? For my kids at that age, I think they were going to be later on in high school thinking about college. What ways will your body be different? How might it change? One of my kids said they were going to have more muscles, one of my kids say they were going to be taller. I wanted to say I was going to be taller too but that probably is not going to happen.

Denise Pope (22:20):

Probably not a good futurist speculation there.

Maisha Winn (22:22):

And Dan, it's funny that you said old because-

Dan Schwartz (22:25):

I said older. No, I said older.

Maisha Winn (22:27):

Older.

Denise Pope (22:27):

I think you said old, my friend.

Maisha Winn (22:29):

I thought you said old, but okay, we'll give it to you.

Denise Pope (22:31):

Okay, all right, okay, all right. You're nicer than me, Maisha.

Maisha Winn (22:35):

But I will say that it's important at this stage in the exercise to also offer up the fact that maybe we can think about how we're going to get better, so not just older but better at something. I want to be one of those women who's swimming laps in the pool. I'm not that person yet, but I hope 10 years from now I'm one of those people who's doing that in the morning when it's freezing cold. I'm not there yet. So what ways will your life improve? What kinds of skills will you have in 10 years that you don't have now? And so finding your future me is a way to just start putting yourself in the head space of thinking about 10 years from now where you would be.

(23:14):

And then we do some exercises, some thinking around if we're feeling optimistic, hopeful, somewhere in between, because I think it's really important for people to talk about how they're feeling about this current moment and what they think is possible 5, 10 years from now, and then what role will they play in creating that kind of future that they want? And children can talk about that. I think my youngest was in first grade when we were doing this, my oldest was in third grade, and they had a vision for themselves. And I think the sooner you start talking and processing about that vision can be very powerful. And it's more than, "What do you want to be when you grow up? What college do you want to go to?”

Denise Pope (24:01):

Or, "What's your passion?" Which gets thrown around a lot too to kids.

Maisha Winn (24:04):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (24:05):

No, I think people will be surprised at how good kids are at this. So I was doing a study once and I was asking this kid, "Let's say you took a math test and you thought you did well, and then the score comes back and you did badly, you got a D," I said, "What would you do?" And he said, "Well, it's over. I'll do better on the next test."

(24:26):

So then I said to him, "What sport do you play?" He said, "Basketball." And I said, "Well, imagine you're in a game in basketball and you only make three out of 10 free throws. What are you going to do about it?" And suddenly he laid out these plans where “I would work this many hours a day, and if I stick with it, I'll be able to get on a basketball team when I go to college. And then from there I'll get support to get stronger.” He had it all laid out, but I don't think he'd ever thought about it until I asked him, but he could generate it right there. And so if you go into a space that they think about, you'll be surprised at how good they are at this.

Maisha Winn (25:03):

Yeah. And I love this idea that in something that this young person, this example that you're sharing, something that they cared deeply about, they could imagine the steps. And so I think one of the tangible things that we can do right now in schools is we actually need to support our young people with the steps that it takes to get to wherever they want academically.

(25:26):

And we talk about that in terms of executive functions. I remember when I was in this magnet program in my high school, and I didn't realize that most of the students in my school were not getting the same kind of learning experience that I was getting, we were just a small select group, but we actually had human study skills classes that helped us plan and map out how we were going to write a paper, how we were going to attack this math exam. So we had that kind of thing, and a lot of students in the school did not have that. So we were sort of ushered along that kind of pipeline.

(26:03):

And I think about in hindsight how powerful that would've been for so many of my peers who were not in that kind of program. And you see the same thing now. In a lot of our independent schools, we have classes, we have support systems around human skills, around study skills, around just trying to get your ducks in order and have a plan, and we don't necessarily have that for all of our public schools.

Denise Pope (26:30):

It's something I know we're working on at Challenge Success where just even building time in the schedule to have that is one big piece and then you have to find teachers who feel comfortable teaching it and all of that, but it makes such a difference.

Maisha Winn (26:43):

It really does.

Denise Pope (26:44):

First of all, thank you, Maisha, because we've learned so much and we can go on forever. But I do want to just put to you kind of to have a sense of if you were going to sum up, which is hard, some key points that you want our listeners to walk away with, what would those be?

Maisha Winn (27:00):

Well, let's start asking young people about their futures, how they're imagining their futures. And let's not always have that be embedded in what college you're going to or what you want to do when you grow up, but what kinds of things you care about, what kinds of things that you're interested in, in and beyond school and academics, I think that that's very important.

(27:26):

I think that it's important to think about this notion of identity, purpose, and direction and supporting our young people in developing really solid narratives about their lineage, about who they are, about what their goals are now and kind of where they see themselves going. I cannot express enough how important I think it is for young people to have this strong sense of identity that allows them then to connect with other people in really powerful ways. Because when you have a sense of who you are, it's really easy to connect and build with other people. And I think some of the social pressures and complications in schools with young people, and quite frankly even with our adults, are around people sort of searching and trying to measure themselves against someone else's measuring stick. And I think that we have to invite our young people to be agentive in telling their own stories.

Denise Pope (28:28):

I love it. Maisha, thank you so much. It's such important work that you're doing, it's really caused me and the listeners, I'm sure, to think so much so this was great. So thank you and thank all of you for joining this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (28:50):

Oh, I'm the same guy as always, I'm Dan.

Maisha Winn (29:00):

That was so fun.

Denise Pope (29:03):

I'm glad. You see what I go through here? Yeah.

Maisha Winn (29:06):

I'm just afraid that I was laughing at Dan half the time.

Denise Pope (29:10):

No, you were perfect.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz , Denise Pope , Maisha Winn

Finding education on the ballot

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 22:40:36 +0000

Finding education on the ballot

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 10/25/2024 - 15:40

Two students hold up "Vote for Education" stickers at an Oct. 8 teach-in hosted by Undergraduate Programs at the GSE (UP@GSE). (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Campus Life | Civics and History | Education Policy

�� GSE senior lecturer Jennifer Wolf discusses ways to help empower students to use their vote to advocate for their beliefs.

October 28, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

For many college undergraduates, this presidential election marks the first time they’re eligible to vote. But there are many barriers to entry, said Jennifer Wolf, a senior lecturer at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and director of undergraduate programs at the GSE (UP@GSE).

“Oftentimes students are away from home and from all the different resources that they might typically draw on,” she said. “On top of that, they’re encapsulated inside of a fast-moving, high-demand university setting where they have to think about studying for finals,” let alone dealing with a thick ballot and deciding how to vote.

On Oct. 8 Wolf hosted a teach-in at �� to help prepare students for the upcoming election, with nonpartisan information on voting and a particular focus on finding ways to advocate for education through the ballot.

“Voting is not easy,” said Wolf, who hosts a teach-in for education every presidential election year. “I tell my students that voting is like studying for finals, only more important. You don’t just go in there and decide willy nilly — you have to study,” Wolf said.

Here, Wolf discusses the importance of civic education, offers tips for teachers, and suggests how voters can look for education on the ballot.

Jennifer Wolf is a senior lecturer at the GSE and director of undergraduate programs at the GSE. (Photo: Sofiia Kukhar)

What is a teach-in, and why do you host one on voting for education?

A teach-in is a brief, designed, exchange of information on a critically important current issue in the education democracy. UP@GSE hosts a variety of teach-ins — we’ve also conducted them on book banning, curricular freedom, and rampage school shootings, to name a few.

We exchange information freely on these topics, not related to a grade or credit, because we veer into political territory where people are welcome to bring different opinions.

My hope is that people come to the teach-in already solid in their own beliefs about education and what’s important to them. How they feel about school choice, teacher salaries and unionization, freedom of speech across the school sphere — those are their beliefs to form themselves.

Our job with the teach-in is to identify how to vote for those beliefs on a ballot, because it’s not super clear. And especially with education, you raise your voting power as you go lower down on the ballot.

What are some misconceptions people might have when it comes to “voting for education?”

There’s a long distance between who we vote for president and how that’s going to affect our local school district. If I want to have power over the local school district, I need to vote for my school board members and my state legislators.

Sometimes an issue of education makes it onto the votable state ballot, but more often a bill is put forward in the state legislature that you as the citizenry writ large aren’t going to vote on. The state assemblyperson and senator that you vote for are going to vote on that.

On a ballot you will see bonds for schools, but that’s almost always a funding thing. Bonds, because they’re collected through tax dollars, have to be brought forward by voters.

Almost everything else with regard to education goes through the state legislature, because in the United States, each state, protectorate, and tribal nation is responsible for its own education governance. For example, Massachusetts set up public education in 1852, but it wasn’t until 1917 that Mississippi did the same. We need to pay attention to our state legislatures with regard to education because each state has its own take.

How can we help students make informed voting decisions?

One of the things we do at the teach-in is to give people questions to ask their local legislators when it comes to their stances on issues. We also connect them with nonpartisan voting resources like Ballotpedia, where voters can enter the zip code where they’re registered to vote and see their ballot, as well as a summary of every candidate, initiative, and bond in three sentences.

There’s also �� Votes, Secretaries of State Voter Guides, State Policy Network, and the National Center for Education Statistics, among many others. We’re not doing this work alone. I also encourage students to look into recommendations from news outlets and organizations they trust to see why they support a particular candidate.

At the teach-in I share a matrix I use that lists all of the candidates and initiatives I’m interested in, what the recommendations are, and the stances of candidates on both sides.

We also cover education bills in play, by state, public K-12 spending per student, and some people, places, and races they may want to watch.

Some might find that level of research daunting. How can we make it less overwhelming?

I tell people to do it communally, to find other people you care about and do it together. Every year I sit with my mom and my daughter and we do it together. We have some issues where we have different beliefs, but we say this is the night when we’re going to do this, and we get out the drinks and the hors d’oeuvres.

Voting is a tool for your citizenship at the federal, state, and local realms, and each of these contributes to democracy.

What tips do you have for teachers who want to teach students about voting in a nonpartisan way?

For me, the primary thing I’ve done is lead teach-ins and take the civics education outside of the classroom. I never want a student to feel they need to meet, mimic, reflect, or agree with my political ideas in order to earn a grade.

Students need to feel free to come into a classroom and learn with their own belief system in place. I mean, we’re going to challenge it, and we’re going to talk about it, but I don’t ever want students to think they need to agree with me.

By putting this in a teach-in setting, we remove that. It’s completely voluntary and it’s not transactional in any way. You come to the teach-in and you get knowledge, a sticker, cookies, and an apple. There’s nothing else to be gained.

For me that’s one thing that’s really important in teaching civics education. We just want to empower students to vote, not in a specific way or for a specific person.

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Changing the history course

Carrie Spector — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 23:00:18 +0000

Changing the history course

Carrie Spector Sun, 02/25/2024 - 15:00

Students in Salinas, Calif., participate in lessons using the Reading Like a Historian curriculum developed by the �� History Education Group, which recently launched as the Digital Inquiry Group, an independent nonprofit. (Photo: Manol Manolov)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Impact

The �� History Education Group revolutionized the way students learn about the past. Now it’s moving into a new era.

February 27, 2024

By Carrie Spector

When Sam Wineburg joined the faculty of �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) in 2002, he knew he wanted to pursue a different approach to the way K-12 schools teach history. Instead of having students memorize names and facts from a textbook, why not equip them to investigate the evidence for themselves, just as historians do?

His own research had shown that with the appropriate guidance, even fifth and sixth graders could work with documents like diaries, speeches, and works of art to explore questions about the past. And as the world’s mode of delivering information was becoming increasingly digital, he knew that teaching students how to scrutinize sources would be critical beyond the history classroom — they were skills for becoming informed citizens in a democratic society.

His groundbreaking approach became the premise of the �� History Education Group (SHEG), an organization that has become renowned for its innovative, research-based approach to teaching history and, more recently, digital literacy. Over the past two decades, the group has created a rich repository of lessons for different grade levels, all freely available on its website, and partnered with school districts around the world to help educators use the materials in their classroom.

To date, SHEG’s resources have been downloaded more than 16 million times by educators from all 50 states and from countries around the world. Forty-one state departments of education in the United States include its materials on recommended lists. UNESCO bestowed the organization with an award for its work communicating best practices in media literacy in 2020, and a California law that went into effect last month requiring media literacy instruction in schools cited SHEG’s research in its rationale for the legislation.

Now SHEG is moving into a new era as the Digital Inquiry Group (DIG), an independent nonprofit that launched this month.

“Our main objective has always been to create materials for the classroom that are easy to use and go beyond the single voice of the textbook,” said Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at ��, who founded both SHEG and its new incarnation, DIG. “We’ve made a few bets, trying to figure out where we’d have the most influence with limited resources. But with all of our research and all of the resources we’ve developed, it’s always been about empowering students to make sense of the past and the present.”

Incubating a new approach at ��

The book Reading Like a Historian, published shortly after the authors developed the curriculum, shows how to apply the approach to middle and high school classrooms.

Back in 2002, before there was a SHEG, Wineburg launched his approach in a course for prospective high school teachers in the �� Teacher Education Program (STEP).

“STEP was really a laboratory for developing these new teaching methods,” said Wineburg, who piloted curriculum materials he developed with his first two teaching assistants, Chauncey Monte-Sano, PhD ’06, and Daisy Martin, PhD ’06. (Monte-Sano is now a professor of education at the University of Michigan, and Martin directs the History & Civics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz.)

The document-based curriculum his team created, called Reading Like a Historian, introduced students to historical thinking, a set of skills historians use to analyze and understand historical events in context. Using primary sources designed to be accessible at different grade levels, students investigate questions about history: Did enslaved people build the Great Pyramid at Giza? Why did U.S. senators oppose joining the League of Nations in 1919? Was Social Security revolutionary, or a program designed to appease Americans who wanted more profound change?

The first major test of the curriculum came in 2008, when Abby Reisman, PhD ’11 (now an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania), led a large-scale study with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).

Students in the test classes showed not only an increased ability to retain historical knowledge and a greater appreciation for history, but also improvements in reading comprehension and critical thinking.

This twofold finding reflects the curriculum’s ability to bridge skills that K-12 history teachers sometimes view in conflict, said Rob McEntarffer, supervisor of assessment and evaluation for Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska, a district that has participated in SHEG research over the years and integrated its resources into the curriculum.

“There’s long been a pendulum swinging back and forth between an emphasis on content knowledge versus critical thinking skills,” McEntarffer said. “Some teachers identify as content experts and emphasize historical content in their classroom, and others think that students are going to forget all the content, so they want to emphasize 21st-century thinking skills. But SHEG’s research [showed] that it’s a false dichotomy.”

After the SFUSD trial, at the district’s request, Wineburg and his team built a website to house the investigational curriculum. “We called ourselves the �� History Education Group and posted our materials online,” said Wineburg. “And to our tremendous surprise, we realized that people were downloading them from all over the country.”

Joel Breakstone (center) leads a group of social studies teachers in discussion during a professional development workshop on materials developed by the �� History Education Group, now the Digital Inquiry Group. (Photo: DosEckes Productions)

“With all of our research and all of the resources we’ve developed, it’s always been about empowering students to make sense of the past and the present.”

<p>Sam Wineburg, Professor Emeritus, �� Graduate School of Education</p>

A ‘clear picture of need’

The curriculum provided just the kind of lessons that Joel Breakstone, then a high school history teacher in rural Vermont, had long sought.

As a history major at Brown University, he’d been taught to work with first-hand accounts of historical events, and he wanted his students to do the same. “But as a high school teacher I found that really challenging,” he said. “Primary documents aren’t written at a grade level that’s appropriate for 15-year-olds, and giving William Lloyd Garrison speeches to students at 7:37 in the morning doesn’t go very well.”

He found SHEG’s materials online and, inspired to explore the methods further, he enrolled in a doctoral program at the GSE, earning his PhD in 2013 and then taking on the role of SHEG’s director.

He was soon joined on staff by fellow alum Mark Smith, PhD ’14, who as director of assessment helped expand the team’s resources with Beyond the Bubble, tools using documents from the Library of Congress’ digital archive to help teachers track students’ progress with the curriculum.

In 2016, after conducting a high-profile study of how students from middle school through college struggled to evaluate the reliability of information on the internet, the organization expanded its work into Civic Online Reasoning, a curriculum focused on ways to detect misinformation based on research observing professional fact-checkers at the nation’s most prestigious news outlets. Wineburg conducted this research with GSE graduate student Sarah McGrew, PhD ’19, now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland.

“Our research painted a very clear picture of need, and we realized we had to develop a better approach to supporting students in becoming discerning consumers of information,” said Breakstone, who served as executive director of SHEG for the past ten years and continues in that role with the Digital Inquiry Group. “Even though our name was the �� History Education Group, we were working more generally to help students understand where information comes from and how to consider the source.”

Far-reaching impact

The team consults with school districts of all sizes to help educators use its materials, including a decade-long partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest district in the country. SHEG has led numerous trainings every year for LAUSD since the district adopted the Reading Like a Historian curriculum in 2014.

“These trainings are one of the most requested, and they fill up immediately,” said Kieley Jackson, history and social science administrator at LAUSD, who estimates that about 1,500 teachers and 250 administrators in the district have now been through the training. “I’ve had veteran teachers quite frankly confess to me that they were in stages of burnout, and SHEG’s professional development sessions reignited the spark.”

Even with a curriculum focused largely on American history, SHEG found fans around the globe. In Australia, Jonathon Dallimore, executive officer of the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales, praised the organization for showing a generation of teachers that it’s possible to use primary sources with young learners — for providing a model, and showing that it works.

“The great power of the material is that it’s an introduction into some really complicated ways of thinking about the world,” he said. “These are incredibly mature concepts about time and perspective and the way people operate, which hopefully can help students develop confidence and humility at the same time.”

Beginning its new chapter as an independent nonprofit, the group plans to expand its offerings, from additional professional development opportunities (including “on demand” workshops) to new tools to help schools integrate digital literacy into core subjects across the curriculum.

Through a licensing agreement with ��, all of SHEG’s materials will remain freely available on the DIG website.

“As a small group, we’ve always sought to make as much noise as possible,” said Breakstone. “It’s been remarkable to see the reach we’ve had, with a staff of no more than four people at a time — seeing folks in California and Arkansas, Italy and Sweden, Columbia and Taiwan, all taking up these ways of doing history and digital literacy. As DIG, we hope to have an even greater impact.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Sam Wineburg

Untangling the web

Carrie Spector — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:14:51 +0000

Untangling the web

Carrie Spector Mon, 11/27/2023 - 16:14

A new law requires California K-12 schools to add media literacy lessons throughout the curriculum, the latest of several state laws to help young people learn to judge the credibility of information online. (Photo: iStock)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Teaching

As a growing number of states move to require media literacy in schools, �� Professor Sam Wineburg shares strategies from a new book.

December 1, 2023

By Carrie Spector

Starting Jan. 1, 2024, California K-12 schools will be required by law to add media literacy lessons throughout the curriculum – the latest of several state laws recently adopted, in part, to help young people learn to better judge the credibility of information online.

“For years, our research has shown that students struggle to make sense of what they encounter on the internet and social media,” said Sam Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus at �� Graduate School of Education and founder of the �� History Education Group, whose research was cited in California’s legislation. “But you can’t blame young people for not knowing how to do something they’ve never been taught.”

In a new book, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online, Wineburg and co-author Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, detail an array of strategies for assessing the credibility of articles, websites, and videos shared on the internet and social media.

Here, Wineburg talks about some of these strategies, the power of emotions for detecting misinformation, and why critical thinking isn’t always the best approach for evaluating online content.

GSE Professor Emeritus Sam Wineburg

You say that online, “critical ignoring” is just as important as critical thinking. What do you mean by that?

I’m all in favor of critical thinking and deep reading, but assessing online content requires different skills. You’re not necessarily going to get to the bottom of an unfamiliar website and learn who might really be behind it by spending a lot of time on it, examining it in detail. You need to leave that site and search the broader web for context.

Close reading and critical thinking also require sustained, focused attention, which is a limited resource in our attention economy. Attention is the brain’s high-octane fuel, and we need to be discerning about how and when we use it. If you’re a cyclist in a big race, it’s great to pedal fast, but you also want to pace yourself, reduce resistance from the wind, maximize your strokes. You want to conserve your energy for when you really need it.

The same principle holds true when it comes to the information that comes across our screens. Expending attention on dubious sources is a colossal waste of time and energy. It can also be dangerous, exhausting your mind for important tasks and warping your perspective. Critical ignoring can keep you from squandering your attention on digital scams.

So in cases where something is worth your attention, how do you go about maximizing your effort?

First, don’t spend more than a minute on an unfamiliar website. Don’t try to evaluate it by relying on what it says about itself on its “About” page. Get off the page, and do a search on the name of whatever you’re investigating – a person, an organization, a company – to see what the rest of the web has to say. Then, resist the temptation to click the first thing that catches your eye. Take in the full set of results to get a sense of the sources.

In other words, use the web to check the web. The internet is a galaxy of electronically linked resources. If I showed you only one strand of a spider’s web, you’d have no idea what it looks like or how it works. The way you understand a single node in a network is to understand its relationship to other nodes.

“Propaganda is designed to evoke a visceral response, and that emotional reaction can bypass our rational thinking. But emotions are also important for processing information.” — Sam Wineburg

What about when the information is coming from a video shared on social media, where you might not have a source or any context to evaluate?

The first question to ask yourself is always: Do I understand what I’m looking at? The idea that “seeing is believing” doesn’t apply to videos online, especially short clips. How do you know if it’s actually depicting what it says it is? How do you know whether it’s from a different time, or even a different location? And even if the video is from what it purports to be, do you know what happened before and after the events in the short clip you’ve seen? Who posted it and supplied the description? Can you track down the original, full-length video?

There’s a lot of concern about “deepfake” videos created through AI, but anyone can easily crop existing footage, put a headline on it, change the date, and get millions of views. These are cheap fakes, and we have to worry about them. We don’t realize how easily we can be deceived, especially when our emotions are triggered.

You write in the book that emotions can also operate in our favor when it comes to assessing credibility. How is that?

It’s true, emotions can work both ways. Propaganda is designed to evoke a visceral response, and that emotional reaction can bypass our rational thinking. But emotions are also important for processing information.

Feelings tell us to pay attention. If we find something compelling or surprising, that shows us what’s important to check out and where to dig deeper. It’s a signal to stop and go back to what you first saw or read. We make better decisions when we draw on the strengths of both feelings and intellect.

How does the rise of AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, affect the landscape of misinformation?

These chatbots are built on large language models, which draw on information from the internet to generate words and phrases people tend to say. Their goal is not to be accurate. Their goal is to be convincing.

The text that you get from these models is homogenized – we have no idea where the information comes from. So we need to approach it with the same skills we’d use to evaluate a website or other online content. And because these chatbots can now easily fake the tone and style of a reputable source, it’s more important than ever to investigate broadly.

How much of an impact do you believe media literacy requirements in schools will have?

These laws are a start in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go. If digital literacy is just another thing we dump on teachers’ heads, it won’t work. It needs to be woven seamlessly into the regular curriculum, rather than a patch slapped onto an already crowded school day. And if teachers don’t feel confident teaching these skills, then no matter how good the curriculum is, it will die on some dusty shelf. The place to start is by investing in high-quality professional development for teachers so they feel capable of helping students navigate an increasingly treacherous digital terrain.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Sam Wineburg

What do history textbooks teach teens about climate change?

Carrie Spector — Sat, 27 May 2023 19:55:27 +0000

What do history textbooks teach teens about climate change?

Carrie Spector Sat, 05/27/2023 - 12:55

New research suggests that widely used history textbooks in California and Texas, which strongly influence textbook content nationwide, tend to emphasize controversy in discussions of climate science and prompt students to think about our planet’s rapid warming as a matter of opinion. (Photo: Getty Images)

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | Teaching

A new study finds that popular U.S. history textbooks in California and Texas commonly misrepresent the scientific consensus around climate change.

May 25, 2023

By Josie Garthwaite

California and Texas textbooks have their differences when it comes to teaching teenagers about American history and the way that subjects like race, gender, and immigration weave through it. But a new �� University study has found the two states’ U.S. history textbooks are surprisingly similar when dealing with climate change and environmental topics.

Published May 23 in Environmental Education Research, the study analyzed each word and sentence in 30 of the most popular U.S. history textbooks in California and Texas. The results suggest widely used history textbooks in the two states, which strongly influence textbook content nationwide, tend to emphasize controversy in discussions of climate science and prompt students to think about our planet’s rapid warming as a matter of opinion or a two-sided issue.

Teaching complexity

“When teaching history, it’s an important skill for students to be able to consider alternative viewpoints,” said senior study author Patricia Bromley, an associate professor at the �� Doerr School of Sustainability and �� Graduate School of Education. “But the way that this skill is being applied to climate change falsely suggests that the science is undecided.”

Scientific evidence unequivocally shows human activities, mainly through emissions of greenhouse gases, have caused global warming. The planet’s surface temperatures are now 1.1 Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) hotter on average compared to when burning fossil fuels for energy took off in the 1800s.

Bromley and lead study author Hannah D’Apice, a PhD student in international comparative education, say a better approach – found in a few of the popular textbooks they analyzed – is to invite students to consider the complex social dimensions of climate impacts and political processes for creating policies, without misrepresenting the scientific consensus around climate change.

“It matters how students are taught to see climate change as a civic issue and integrate scientific information into their understanding of what it means to be an engaged community member and citizen,” said D’Apice. “Scientific literacy is really important for social issues, public health, and long-term public well-being.”

Collective action

Both states’ textbooks shared a tendency to mention corporations’ contributions to climate change and environmental damage only in passing, gloss over potential environmental risks of major dams and other public works, and present what the authors describe as an overly limited view of who holds the power to create change.

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, the textbooks primarily discuss government and prominent individual figures as the primary agents that can take action in relation to climate change,” said Bromley, who also leads the Global Civil Society & Sustainable Development Lab in ��’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. As future voters, the authors write, students have collective power to elect leaders that seek to address climate change and pressure big polluters to change.

“History and civics curricula are some of the most important tools we have for teaching students to be thoughtful and engaged citizens,” D’Apice said. “If we want collective action around climate change, students need to understand not only the scientific consensus, but also the political and social mechanisms they themselves can use to create change.”

AI trained on a new climate dictionary

To analyze the content, D’Apice and Bromley used a type of artificial intelligence known as natural language processing, which enables computers to perform tasks like measuring sentiment and the relative prevalence of different parts of text.

To select relevant text, the researchers first generated a broad list of terms and sentences related to climate change, drawing on glossaries and documents such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Then they reviewed any words that appeared more than 150 times in the textbook data for additional possible terms. To clean the text, they culled terms such as “nature” and “Industrial Revolution” that can be related to climate or environment, but which also appeared very frequently in sentences unrelated to those topics.

They ultimately came up with a list of 141 terms, ranging from “greenhouse gas” and “pollution” to “asthma,” “footprint,” and “levee failure.” After an initial scan to remove irrelevant sentences (when “exhaust” referred to tiring out, for example, rather than the stuff from a tailpipe), the authors had a final sample of nearly 6,400 sentences. “In the big picture, when we can computationally look at the whole corpus, there are very few differences between the two states in how climate change is depicted,” Bromley said.

The broad “climate dictionary” and the method for refining and analyzing it is now a resource that can be adapted and scaled to measure environmental education worldwide, said Bromley, who is collaborating with groups including the United Nations-backed Mission 4.7 to develop global indicators around education for sustainable development. “We need more people to start thinking about climate change as something that should be integrated throughout all other aspects of society,” she said. “It’s not just an issue for science.”

This work was supported by �� Institute for Human-Centered AI, ��’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), and the Center on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Patricia Bromley

Tallying the invisible costs of living undocumented in the United States

Carrie Spector — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 21:32:20 +0000

Tallying the invisible costs of living undocumented in the United States

Carrie Spector Wed, 01/11/2023 - 13:32

A ��-based research project aims to show the costs, financial and otherwise, of living undocumented in the United States. (Photo: Molly Adams / Wikimedia Commons)

Civics and History | Diversity and Identity

A research collaboration led by Associate Professor Antero Garcia provides a platform for immigrants’ stories about the costs of undocumented life.

January 12, 2023

By Carrie Spector

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, each with their own experience of adversity and loss. Financial, psychological, medical, familial — individuals labeled undocumented amass a multitude of damages, many of which are overlooked in the public conversation about immigration.

A new ��-based research collaboration is working to bring those costs to light. The project — led by Antero Garcia, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education, and Alix Dick, a storyteller and filmmaker from Mexico who now lives in Los Angeles — provides a platform for first-person accounts of undocumented life, and an opportunity to tally the costs incurred.

“Immigrants are often treated and talked about as a cost, a burden on the United States,” said Garcia. “But for people who’ve immigrated to this country, voluntarily or involuntarily — what are the costs to them and their lives? What’s been taken? And how and why do they continue to pay these costs for living in America?”

Together, Garcia and Dick are working to reframe the predominant narrative about undocumented life in the United States, using a participatory research approach that puts immigrants' stories and experiences front and center.

Research that centers the subjects’ voices

�� education professor Antero Garcia, whose research topics range from civic identity and literacy practices to technology and gaming, has long centered his subjects’ voices in his work. (Photo: Jim Gensheimer)

Garcia, an education scholar who began his career as a high school English teacher in South Central Los Angeles, has authored or edited more than a dozen books about transforming schooling in the United States. As a researcher exploring topics from civic identity and literacy practices to technology and gaming, Garcia has long centered his subjects’ voices in his work, often employing a research approach known as autoethnography.

“Autoethnography is about individuals naming their own experiences and relating them to the world around us,” Garcia said. “So instead of embedding myself in an immigrant community, for example, and then telling that story, the idea is for people who’ve been part of that community for a long time to share that expertise themselves.” He likens it to pláticas research, a Chicanx/Latinx feminist methodology in which subjects share their lived experience through one-on-one conversations.

Garcia also holds a longtime commitment to making his research accessible, frequently seeking out publicly available channels for his work over academic journals with a prohibitive paywall.

To that end, Garcia and Dick recently launched a weekly online newsletter, La Cuenta, to provide a venue for the stories of undocumented Americans. The newsletter, whose name is derived from a Spanish word referring to a bill or receipt, explores the many costs of living undocumented in the United States, financial and otherwise.

One anonymous contribution in a recent issue offered a list of dos and don’ts in learning to be undocumented, including: “Don’t get your hopes up about going to college, [because] you won’t get financial aid and we can’t afford it”; “Do drive very cautiously,” to avoid getting pulled over — and even, simply, “Don’t try to stand out.”

Another issue featured a conversation between Dick and newly elected Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez about the cost of undocumented labor. Dick also conducted a two-part interview with Jorge Xolalpa, an award-winning movie director from Mexico who recently learned that his latest film will screen at the Cannes Film Festival next spring but shared that, even with DACA protection, he can’t safely leave the country to attend his own premiere.

A blank postcard prompts senders to itemize the costs they've incurred living as an undocumented immigrant in the United States.

Tallying the costs of undocumented life

In addition to launching La Cuenta online, Garcia and Dick are using a more tangible, old-school device — postcards — to solicit stories about the costs of undocumented American life.

For this they reached out to Hope Amico, an artist and educator based in Portland, Ore., who has been running a postcard-based art project called “Keep Writing” since 2008.

Every month, Amico designs a letter-pressed postcard with an introspective prompt on a theme and sends the cards to her list of subscribers, who mail in their responses (which Amico sometimes includes in her art shows).

For Garcia and Dick’s research, Amico designed a postcard elegantly modeled after an old-fashioned invoice, with empty fields for respondents to itemize the costs they’ve incurred as an undocumented immigrant, give a rationale for payment, and add up the total amount due. (Along with sending it to her own subscribers, she had a supply printed for Garcia and Dick to distribute, available by request at no charge.)

Dick shares an experience of her own on the postcard template as an example, accounting for her loss of hearing in one ear. She writes:

I was an immigrant working at a restaurant in Atlanta when my tooth became infected. Unable to afford $1,500 of medical care, I ignored it. For eight months, the pain increased, sometimes leaving me unable to sleep. One night, I woke with blood pooling on my neck. The infection had spread to my ear, affecting my hearing, which I never regained. I often apologize for this: I’m sorry, what did you say? I’m apologizing for the cost of American living for someone like me.

The anonymity of the postcard not only protects respondents’ identity but establishes limits that are hard to come by in contemporary communication, the collaborators noted.

“We don’t know anything other than what’s on the postcard we receive,” Garcia said. “We don’t have a way of communicating with that person, asking them for more details. You don’t get anything more than what they offer.”

Soliciting stories by postcard might be an unconventional research tactic, but “people are writing back and sharing their stories,” said Dick. “It was an unusual idea, but it’s working.”

The research team is seeking out stories from people of all ages, and while they didn’t specifically target educators to partner in the effort, they’ve already gotten interest from teachers in developing a curriculum around it. “A couple of teachers who happened to receive the postcard reached out and said, ‘I’ve got large communities that I teach every day who are undocumented, or their families are, and I’d love to think about how I could bring this work into the classroom,’ ” Garcia said.

Ultimately Garcia and Dick plan to develop their material from this project into a book, built around the voices and experiences shared through La Cuenta and the postcards they receive.

“Our biggest desire is for people to know that they have expertise through their experience, and that they get to tell their stories,” said Dick. “Nobody else gets to tell their stories for them.”

La Cuenta publishes weekly on Thursdays. Visit the site to subscribe or request a postcard.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Antero Garcia

It doesn’t take long to learn how to spot misinformation online, �� study finds

Carrie Spector — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 17:11:58 +0000

It doesn’t take long to learn how to spot misinformation online, �� study finds

Carrie Spector Tue, 04/19/2022 - 10:11

Photo: Pressmaster / Shutterstock

Civics and History | Curriculum and Instruction | K-12

Research from the �� History Education Group finds that less than six hours of instruction helps students learn to spot dubious sources online.

April 19, 2022

By Edmund L. Andrews

There may be new hope for helping young people – and anyone else – learn to navigate the torrents of misinformation and propaganda online.

A new study by researchers at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) found that high school students who received only six 50-minute lessons in digital literacy were twice as likely to spot questionable websites as they were before the instruction took place. The lessons were based on a free curriculum developed by the �� History Education Group (SHEG) in 2019.

“Most young people are much more gullible than they think they are when it comes to websites with hidden or even malicious agendas,’’ said Sam Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at ��, founder of SHEG and the study’s lead author. “This research shows that a modest investment of time can help students avoid many of the traps.”

The study, published online by the Journal of Educational Psychology on April 19, is the first randomized experiment in an urban school district to investigate the effect of the new curriculum.

Lateral reading and ‘critically ignoring’

The curriculum, called Civic Online Reasoning (COR), draws on previous studies of how students and even highly educated adults can be fooled by polished websites with hidden agendas.

Earlier research by SHEG, for example, has found that both professional historians and college undergraduates were far more easily duped by suspect websites than professional fact checkers. The big difference: Fact checkers read “laterally,” leaving a document and opening new tabs to run quick background checks on a source’s reputation, organizational ties and claims.

The �� researchers tested the novel curriculum with about 500 high school students in an urban midwestern school district. All of the students were enrolled in a semester-long, district-required class on government at each of the district’s six high schools in spring of 2019.

Half the students were taught the usual curriculum, which included topics in political science and analyses of current events. The other half were taught the COR curriculum, and their teachers received professional development to prepare them to deliver the curriculum. (The teachers of the control group also attended a daylong workshop on COR after the study, to engage them in the curriculum and provide equitable access to the resources.)

The COR curriculum focused on teaching students how to read laterally, more like fact checkers.

Along the way, students learned how to scan and quickly assess the credibility of search results, and to “critically ignore” low-quality sites, said Wineburg.

“What the bad actors want is your attention,” he said. “They believe that the longer they can get you to stay on the page, the easier it is to suck you into their vortex.”

Instead of clicking on the first few websites that pop up, students were taught to scan through the search results and look for clues to a site’s credibility. They learned about search engine optimization and how it can distort results: A site that looks reputable and appears at the top of the list of results, for example, can still peddle junk science.

Another misleading clue, the researchers said, is a dot-org address. Many digital literacy guides, including ones that appear on college library websites, suggest this address is an indicator of credibility because they appear to be nonprofit organizations. However, the dot-org domain, like dot-com, is an “open” domain: Anyone who pays a fee can register a dot-org site.

The researchers note, for instance, that the International Life Sciences Institute describes itself on its dot-org website as a “nonprofit global organization whose mission is to provide science that improves health.” But a few seconds of additional search shows that the group is backed by giant food corporations and has long been a platform for fighting regulation.

Unlearning what schools teach about reading

By the end of the semester, the students who took the curriculum did twice as well as they had before on a test to spot dubious websites. Even then, however, the students earned only half the total number of possible points.

“There’s undoubtedly more work to be done, but our study provides clear evidence that students can improve their ability to sort fact from fiction online,” said Joel Breakstone, director of SHEG and a co-author of the study. “Policy makers have focused on how tech platforms should address this problem. Yes, but: This is an educational issue as well. We can’t assume that students can discern the information that streams across their screens just because they grew up with iPhones. They need to be taught.”

A broader challenge, the researchers noted, is that the Internet demands that students learn a new way of reading. Schools teach students to carefully read and absorb material from beginning to end – but textbooks and other school materials are heavily vetted, and the underlying assumption is that the content is valid and worth learning.

That’s exactly the wrong assumption and the wrong strategy for dealing with the internet, the researchers said.

“School is an analog institution, but the Internet is digital,” says Wineburg, “The lesson here is that the way to judge credibility is not by reading every word, which eats up our time and our energy. Instead, we need to use the power of an electronically linked internet to make fast and frugal decisions about what to believe.”

The lesson isn’t just one for high school students, the researchers added, and it goes beyond blatant falsehoods generated by Russia or conspiracy groups like QAnon.

“Every single public policy issue has a spate of websites that claim to offer objective, unbiased information, and they are often sponsored by corporate interests,” said Breakstone. “Unfortunately, this is how influence is transacted in modern society. And it’s not just students who get misled. We are all at risk.”

In addition to Wineburg and Breakstone, the study’s co-authors include Mark Smith, director of research at SHEG; Teresa Ortega, associate director of SHEG; and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland.

The study was funded by Google.org, the charitable arm of Google.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Sam Wineburg

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It doesn’t take long to learn how to spot misinformation online, ������������ study finds

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