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[Audience clapping]
Jen Holladay: So um it's important for me to say
that I am here as a parent guardian from the
Denver Public Schools and I just wanna
thank the organizers for inviting
uh parent voice into this venue I really
appreciate the opportunity um I also just
accepted a job with the Adams 14 School
District so I got to do a little shout out for Adams 14 um you know most TED
Talks talk about a new idea or a big idea I'm
talking about uh really old idea it's
been around for decades I'm talking
about multiculturalism we were talking
about it in 1978 and we're still talking
about it today because it's been around
for such a long time it can mean
different things to different people so
I wanna talk about some multicultural
practices that I'm not talking about today
I am not talking about food and
festivals or heroes and holidays
kay these sorts of things can be really
fun they're very easy to do and if
they're authentic to the cultures that
are represented in our school they can be really fun community builders but
they also come with some risks one of
the things that I've see a lot out here
is I see I see things on the school menu
we'll have tacos and celebration of
sin Cinco de Mayo we'll have uh fried chicken for Martin
Luther King Day we'll have soul food on
the menu during Black History Month um and again
these sorts of things can be fun but they also run the risk of sort of
reinforcing stereotypes and they also run the risk of trivializing things that
are really really uh quite important so um how
many people here think most of your
students have heard of Cinco de Mayo?
Right and so if ya all had taught I use
ya all as a gender-neutral pronoun if
ya all had tacos um on your menu as your
students are biting into that taco are
they thinking about Mexican resistance
to French occupation is that what they're
thinking about? No. so it runs the risk of sort of
trivializing something that is actually
quite important
oops can you go back one I'm also not
talking about something we do a lot in early childhood classrooms which is when
we bring in stories from all over the
world right kind of that folklore and
sort of fables approach again this is
something that's really easy to do it's
also a way to kind of ensure that our
children our diverse children in a
classroom see somebody who looks like them
and and what they're reading in the classroom it's a really easy thing to do
but I wanna remind everybody that the
value of multicultural content is not
just about where a story comes from it's
also about the messages um that the story
relays to the reader
last year in her second grade literacy
class my daughter was reading a
multicultural anthology one of the
stories that was included in that
anthology was a story called the Selkie
Girl which is a traditional Celtic tale
and if I were to summarize this story
it's basically about a man who gets
obsessed with a magical seal woman so
I'm gonna read one paragraph from
this story he went to look in wonder and
delight he saw three beautiful girls
sitting on the rocks
naked combing their hair one of the
girls had fair hair one red and one
black the fair haired girl was singing
she was the most beautiful of the three
and he could not take his eyes from her
he gazed and gazed at her gleaming white
body okay this was my daughter's
response to that story um I would say it
was my response as well so when you are
using sort of the stories from around the world approach remember that the
messages matter the messages of the
story matter as much as where the stories come from um to be fair to my
child uh this is what Zoey looks like happy
okay
so if I'm not talking about food and
festivals or heroes or holidays or
folklore and fables um what am I talking
about? I am talking about the kind of
social the the kind of multiculturalism
that's characterized by three basic
things it is rigorous in terms of
content and instruction very rigorous it
supports all that skill building we're so concerned about um it also is designed
particularly with instruction to
advance students pro-social capacities
and that's a big phrase that just means
our students can look at issues from
multiple points of view and they can
um work collaboratively in diverse groups
that's what pro-social proficiencies are
um and the third thing that the kind of
multiculturalism that I'm talking about
does is that it advances social justice
let's talk about that term for a second um last
fall in the Denver Public Schools we had a little kerfuffle um DPS rolled out the
new a draft of the new teacher
evaluation protocol and it included some
elements that related to this term
social justice and so it brought out some pretty significant responses in our
community to some people in our
community if we focus on social justice
that means we're going to turn all of our children into socialists who hate
white people okay this of course this
kind of response then brought out people
from the other end of the spectrum who
said if we don't have an emphasis on
social justice in our schools that just
means our schools will serve to
reinforce the white supremacist
heterosexist oligarchy and by the way
so [chuckles] right
so if you get hung up on the
social justice term if it's not a term that works well for you um I'm gonna
take a cue from our school superintendent Tom Bose Berg when we
were having this kerfuffle in DPS
who just came back and said we want our
kids to be critical thinkers
multiculturalists are interested in our children being able to look at at at issues
from multiple points of view work
collaboratively with each other
and really kind of solve problems so the
kind of multiculturalism that I'm
talking about is the kind that is
rigorous academically content and
instruction it advances pro-social
proficiency particularly through instruction and it advances social
justice or critical thinking whatever
term you're most comfortable with
so one of the schools that I have the
privilege of being involved in in uh Denver
and Denver Public Schools is Highline Academy Charter School
I'm the board president there that's a volunteer position where I work
full-time um and yeah and um Highline Academy
is a K-8 public charter school
authorized by Alyssa authorized by the
Denver Public Schools we are a
purposefully integrated school and we
mean that like in the old school way we
are 50 percent of color and 50 percent white that's on
purpose and the demographics of South
East Denver allow us to do that we're
also what we call a court what we call
literally we made this up we are a core
knowledge plus school um those of you who
know core knowledge if you don't know core knowledge what it basically is it's
uh it's uh sequence and a scaffolded set
of content that spirals up through the
grade levels and it's a really useful
tool because it allows us to make sure
that you know our kids aren't reading
that I have a dream speech every year
when they when they do Martin Luther King Day right it just allows us to
create shared knowledge and second grade
that is then built upon in the fifth
grade so when Zoey my daughter was in 2nd
grade last year um this was when they had
their first introduction to westward expansion
um
and it was now High Line High
Line has were a core knowledge plus
school because we supplement our content a lot to make
sure it meets the needs of our diverse learners and when Zoey got into this
westward expansion unit it was uh whole
bunch of old pioneer wagon trains river
boats trains um and that and and varied that
based sort of in this manifest destiny
mentality and that is a perfectly valid
way to teach westward expansion it
really is because westward expansion was
really really good for a lot of people
and we probably would not be here today
had it not unfolded the way that it did
but westward expansion was not good for everybody
um
and I was really worried that Zoey was only getting sort of half of the story
and so I sat down and I thought to
myself okay what is it I really want her
to know by the end of this unit what do
I want to be able to answer and I wanted her to be able to think about how
can progress be both positive and
negative that's really what I wanted her
to be able to reflect on with this unit
and so we supplemented a lot
we supplemented a lot we brought in the
core knowledge sequence for example
includes a short story that's uh that's
told from the perspective of a pioneer girl who's going out on the road right
and so we Venn diagram early grades
teachers best friend we did a Venn
diagram activity using a story about a
bitterroots Salish girl who was being
forcibly removed from her home that was
one way we brought in um we brought in
fiction nonfiction we brought in poetry
from the Choctaw we brought in um an important thing that we brought in were
resistance narratives because when you
teach history particularly this episode of history it's almost like it's a
foregone conclusion but there was
massive resistance to policies of Indian
Removal we certainly taught some of the
resistance narratives from Native
America but we also made a point to do
resistance re-resistance narratives from
white folks the the ladies of Steubenville Ohio
a group of Quaker women
um who wrote to Congress asking them to be
more equitable um a U.S. senator who gave a
six-hour long speech
on the floor of Congress um asking folks to
reject the Indian Removal Act uh we brought
in lots and lots of different things and
by the end of the unit um my child and many
others could answer or at least reflect
on write about um that essential question
in what ways can progress be both
positive and negative they used all of
their skills their reading skills their writing skills we had mapping activities
for geography we had graphing activities
for math it was a whole sort of skill
based it was very rigorous um for my child
she was really transformed I would say
by this unit it really sparked a passion
for her I took at least three trips to
the bookies which is our little independent teacher bookstore in
southeast Denver to get her nonfiction
books about Native America that kind of
thing and then she did the most
incredible thing she asked us to do
something over spring break she didn't
want to go to camp she didn't want to lay around and play video games this is
what she wanted to do
she wanted to go see the site of the Sand Creek Massacre
because she had read about it in some of her books
so she was really really motivated by
this content you know that you're getting it right when the kids are doing
it on their own time you know you're getting it right so between second and
third grade umm Zoey changed schools she is
now at the Denver Green School which is
uh when it's fully enrolled it'll be a
K-8 um be K 8 and it's an innovation school
which means it's uh it's a traditional DPS
school but it's got its own kind of
thing going on it does have an environmental if I could get some water
that would be helpful
um it does have an environmental focus
um but it's really built around these
prin around principles of sustainability and it's a
little different than environmentalism so for example they are really
interested in teaching children about the healthy commons how do we protect
the healthy commons thank you
hmm much better so the idea of the
healthy commons is there are things that we share in common right we share the
earth we share the land we share the water how do we work collectively to
protect those things so Zoey goes to
the Denver Green School and wouldn't you know at there teaching westward
expansion in the third grade right I'm
like uh really because we just we just did this and we just did it really well and
it was it was awesome and now she's
going to sit in class and do it all over again
well Cartel uh Cartel Jacquet her teacher
um definitely did lay down some background knowledge about what happened for Native
America and the pioneers of that sort of thing and then Mr. Jacquet did
something that rocked my daughter's world and it rocked my world and it's
very Denver Green School he taught the
unit from the perspective of Buffalo
right and if you think about
multiculturalism being about inviting
multiple perspectives think about the
power of children looking at westward expansion from these three frameworks it
was really quite uh beautiful um it was a
really beautiful and exciting thing uh for
my daughter and for me and hopefully for
all the kids so I just wanna ask all
of the educators in the room that when
you think about doing multiculturalism
please don't stop with heroes and
holidays food and festivals folklore and
fables please don't stop there and maybe don't even start there um because there is
a wonderful way um to do a kind of teaching
and learning that is going to build
those academic skills you care about
that's gonna allow children to really
look at issues from multiple perspectives um and that is
gonna enable them to sort of think uh very critically
um and and doing multicultural education
really at the end of the day is about
empowering our children uh to be really
prepared to participate in our diverse
democracy thank you very much
[Audience clapping]
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