By Tyler French | Innovation and Partnerships Director
We recognize students come into our classrooms primed by conversations taking place in the world around them. Often, with a little prompting, they are excited to dive into those conversations. Through our residencies in all subjects, we welcome these opportunities to engage with students and integrate both local and national current issues into our lesson plans. I wanted to share with you an outcome from a recent event that highlights the necessity of supporting integrated educational models that tie learning back to the world around us. Your support of our Virtual Classroom allows us to provide educators all over the world with resources to support both academic and social emotional development of youth they engage, helping those youth add their voices to these conversations!
On October 5, 2019, a group of family, friends, new acquaintances, and strangers gathered at the Strathmore Mansion for our Amplify US! event. We were there to share in poetry, storytelling, and conversations about race, difference, and connection. In addition to professional poets, community members, and an excited audience, two youth performers who we have previously engaged in our programming lit up the stage with their poetry and storytelling.
It’s difficult to capture in words the feeling of the room. The conversations were not necessarily easy or without discomfort, but all were warm and caring. They felt urgent and necessary. Every person who showed up was meant to be there. People lingered longer than usual, already late for a Saturday evening. The performances and conversation created a kind of gravitational force and held us there. Primed by the performances, audience members leaped into conversation with each other, discussing aspects of their lives rarely shared with strangers. The conversations engaged intergenerational connections across race and nationality and the event spilled over its end time as audience members were reluctant to end their conversations.
Why this urgent need for dialogue?
In 2017 Montgomery County Police reported a 26% increase in bias incidents compared to the prior year (report linked below). Of the incidents reported, roughly half were motivated by bias toward religion and half were motivated by bias toward a race or ethnicity. Over that year, there was a 48% increase in the number of incidents in which a school or college was a target of a bias incident. Among known subjects of all bias incidents in 2017, the dominant offender group is males (44 of the 53 known subjects were males). Additionally, 33 of the 53 subjects were under the age of 18, a 267% increase over 2016.
We know the picture these statistics paint is not limited to our work in Montgomery County. The resources we currently provide through our Virtual Classroom and the future resources your support is helping us grow support educators everywhere to best support their students. I would like to invite you to follow our programming and the conversations the educators and students we engage are adding their voices to by joining us on Facebook, or following along in our blog.
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