Facing History at Alternative Schools
Facing History program staff in the Bay Area are increasingly engaging with teachers and students from such alternative schools as juvenile justice facilities, continuation schools and community day schools to leverage the power of Facing History’s content and methodology in environments very different from most schools. Recently, the first opportunities for sustained programming in alternative settings involved a series of “experimental sessions” by Bay area staff and conducted recently at the request of Santa Clara County’s Office of Education.
When middle and high school students who have been expelled from their comprehensive high schools enter alternative schools, the usual programs involve individualized learning, fewer traditional classroom activities, less direct instruction, and a higher value on “variable credit” for work accomplished by the students. Often, strict classroom rules constrain interactions: seating arrangements ensure that less physical contact is likely; lack of access to writing implements or other equipment that could be misused aims at the goal of safety for teachers and students; movement within the classroom or to lavatories occurs only with permission; and many aspects of human interaction are monitored more closely than in traditional schools.
In the spring semester of 2009, San Francisco Bay Area program staff conducted four on-site student workshops during the spring semester of 2009 for students at Terra Bella Community Day School in Mountain View. All students at Terra Bella have been expelled from their prior schools, and many referred to themselves in their first “identity charts” as captives rather than participants in school. The sessions’ goals, from the school’s perspective, included exposing 12-16 students to new ideas about identity and the power of labels as a way to address tensions, fighting behaviors, and academic engagement issues among students—and of low academic expectations among teachers. From Facing History’s perspective, the series of two-hour sessions were a test-run that is already leading to participation in Facing History’s general offerings by task-force members and other educators from Santa Clara County’s Alternative and Juvenile Justice School systems.
Terra Bella Principal Carey Johnson and County Director of Alternative Schools, Paula Mitchell, sat in on two sessions and then sponsored a meeting of lead teachers from ten other county schools to learn about Facing History as a possible support-provider in their own arena. Carey commented in a follow-up meeting, “We saw important progress among students who went through the workshops, a glimmer of hope that their voices could matter.” Director Paula Mitchell immediately contracted to send one teacher from a juvenile justice facility to the summer seminar and invited a fall in-service for a newly constituted group.
