Creating a classroom community that honors student identities, encourages students to learn about the world around them, and leads them to practice empathy while advocating for themselves and others is a goal for many educators—but how to get there? East Hartford third-grade teacher Tracey Lafayette has focused on teaching social justice and empowering her students and shared her approach with other educators at a recent CEA conference.
As a new teacher, Lafayette remembers reading the book she received that covered how to be an effective teacher for those starting out in the career.
“I skimmed it—it was a lot,” she said. While she found the book useful for providing tips on how to arrange and assign seating and have an effective discipline plan, it was also overwhelming and missing many aspects of teaching Lafayette wanted to prioritize.
Lafayette wanted to make sure she was teaching through a socially just lens, she wanted to empower learners to advocate for themselves and others, and create an environment that felt safe for students to engage in conversations about difficult topics. Through trial and error during her eight years as a teacher, Lafayette has discovered approaches to teaching social justice that she now wants to share with other educators.
Using picture books and words of the day
In her second year teaching, Lafayette read The Youngest Marcher by Cynthia Levinson to her fourth graders. The book is about a nine-year-old who participated in the Children’s March, a 1963 march by over 1,000 school students in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest segregation. The children’s actions helped convince President John F. Kennedy to support federal civil rights legislation and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Lafayette’s students came away from reading the book thinking that if someone their age could make change like that, “we can too.” Just months earlier, Hurricane Harvey had wreaked havoc on families in Louisiana and Texas. Students had seen the devastation on the news, decided to launch a fundraiser, and were able to raise over $900 to purchase school supplies for a Louisiana classroom.
During her first years as a teacher, Lafayette found her students asked great questions and it made her wonder how she could better set the stage for even more impactful conversations with her students.
One approach that has resonated with students was having a word of the day everyday at the beginning of the school year. Some of the words Lafayette chose included empowerment, mindfulness, community, diversity, and identity.
With each of the words, Lafayette found books to help illustrate the concept. When students focused on the word “empowerment,” Lafayette incorporated the books A Teacher’s Top Secret by LaNesha Tabb, Always Anjali by Sheetal Sheth, and Your Name Is a Big Deal by Naomi O’Brien and LaNesha Tabb.
During the lesson on mindfulness, Lafayette discussed zones of regulation with students. Students can come away from such lessons with the idea they should always be in the green zone, feeling happy and upbeat, Lafayette says.
She told students, “If Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were in this very green, it’s all good zone, nothing would have changed. The red zone and yellow zone — feeling worried or angry — that’s where activism lives. Activism comes from feeling something so powerful that you need to go out and do something about it.”
When it comes to discussing diversity, Lafayette talks with students about many types of diversity including neurodiversity. “I tell them I have ADHD, and I can talk about my strengths and also my struggles.”
The conversations Lafayette has with her students about those five words set the stage for many other conversations including some about environmentalism, race and racism, immigrants and refugees, homelessness, poverty, and food insecurity, gender assumptions and discrimination, and disabilities and intersectionality.
“Social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social rights and opportunities,” Lafayette says. “Taking this approach helps you create a classroom community that honors student identities, encourages them to learn about the world around them, and leads them to practice empathy while advocating for themselves and others.”
