Empowering Student Advocacy
When middle school teacher Liz Zadoo first talked to Inspire Citizens founder Aaron Moniz about how to embed advocacy into one of her grade 8 social studies units, she got so excited that she went home and spent her evening revising and upgrading her unit plan.
“I thought redesigning the unit would be a lot of work and there would be a lot of planning. When Aaron explained what advocacy could look like in the unit, I was so excited; I was able to use my existing unit plan but tweak it in meaningful ways,” says Liz.
After teaching high school IB history and psychology for many years, Liz took on a middle school social studies role when she moved to AES-Delhi. The school used to have an integrated humanities program, where language arts and social studies were combined, but when Liz arrived the classes were being divided into separate English and social studies blocks. Sixth and seventh grade separated their subjects first, with eighth grade following the next year. This meant Liz had an opportunity to redesign her curriculum, and she was building it as the year unfolded.
The work in social studies was part of a bigger partnership between AES-Delhi and Inspire Citizens where mission and vision statements were refined, and a long-term implementation approach was created to embed service learning into curriculum across the school, K-12. Liz was one of the first teachers to pilot an embedded service learning experience. “The unit I redesigned with Aaron was centered around conflict, and I felt we needed to explore prejudice and persecution first,” says Liz. “We had explored identity and causes of racism, sexism and other social issues, and I wanted the students to investigate what we can do to advocate against these behaviors. When I met with Aaron, he asked me to evaluate my essential questions for the unit and identify how the questions relate to aspects of the Empathy to Impact cycle (care, aware, able, impact).”
This overarching way of approaching the unit led to Liz’s redesign of the unit plan. She then brought students into the process, having them think through the same questions and create action plans based on how their learning connected to the Empathy to Impact Cycle. “Based on Aaron’s suggestion, I created a master set of slides and students were able to plug their notes, reflections and sources right into the slide deck. Everything I needed to assess was there,” Liz explains. “For the advocacy and action component, students were creative and made such an impact in our community, and I could see such solid student engagement throughout the whole learning process.”
The slides also acted as a process journal for each student where Liz or Aaron could engage in formative assessment and then adapt teaching and learning accordingly to maximize the impact of the advocacy work being done by each student. Some examples of what students did included making posters, designing web pages linked to the school website, and preparing Ted Talks to share with the community. At the same time, fifth graders participated in gender workshops and learned how to run a public awareness campaign about becoming an ally and overcoming cis-normativity bias.
“One group conducted a survey with peers and saw that students didn’t think they were impacted by classism, but then my students realized our private international school community is quite homogeneous, and that was creating a narrow perspective. So that group gave a Ted Talks presentation for the whole middle school community about classism. They wanted to advocate for awareness about what classism is, and also how important it is to check our own perspective and privilege,” Liz recounts.
Another group wanted to have fifth graders take a survey about unconscious bias, and worked with the fifth grade teachers and school counselor. The counselor wanted the students to create a context for the survey first, so it would make sense to the fifth graders; this prompted the eighth graders to make a presentation about unconscious bias before having the fifth graders take the survey. The results indicated that unconscious bias had impacted some students, particularly in regards to issues of race. One eighth grader was so impacted by this learning that he has created a report about the survey findings and is meeting with the principal to present the information and talk about solutions. “The students were the point of contact with all other adults in this experience, and I helped them preview their emails and prepare their communication,” says Liz. “They learned so many skills from the communication aspect of this learning experience alone!”
In the middle of the learning experience, Liz had her students present to a panel of teachers and administrators (and Aaron) about their progress: the process they had used, their plan for action, the challenges they had encountered and how they had responded to those challenges. “This was powerful,” recalls Liz. “By having the students present to adults outside the class, they really thought about what they were doing, the whole process and what they still wanted to do.”
The Inspire Citizens team is working with AES-Delhi to develop a whole-school approach to embedding service learning into curricular experiences, and this eighth grade example is one of several success stories. “Social studies, humanities and English are natural entry points for this kind of exploration. A Changemakers unit is coming up, and the English teacher has had students reading biographies of changemakers. In social studies, I’ll start with a debate about which inventor has had the biggest impact on the world and then we’ll look at innovative thinking around the SDGs in India. I’m going to have students design their own assessment for this unit; there’s just so much possibility,” Liz says animatedly.
“I want to leave the kids with hope for the future. We need to be innovative about how we solve our problems and look at what people are already doing,” she continues. This is the essence of what curricular redesign looks like with the Inspire Citizens team: student engagement, deep learning, excited teachers and purposeful changemaking.