By Jocelyn Stanton

Jocelyn Stanton teaches Humanities at Boston International High School in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Here she reflects about a transformative moment with one of the students in her Humanities 4 class of juniors and seniors.

The bell rang and the class ended. "Alright guys, see you tomorrow," I called out. "Write your reflections and we'll come back and vote on what we want to create tomorrow."

My class and I had just spent twenty minutes together designing the final assessment for our latest piece of literature, Red Scarf Girl. The students wanted to show their learning by doing Reader's Theater [1] with the entire book, and together, we were trying to create an authentic assignment that would both demonstrate their reading comprehension and assess their understanding of the Facing History concepts we used to analyze the memoir of China's Cultural Revolution.

The students stood up and began to head out of my classroom, but Tamara* came over to me as I packed up my markers and books. She lingered by the table.

"You know, Miss," she began, "you run a real democracy classroom."

I felt my heart jump. Of all my students, Tamara has been the most resistant to my Facing History-style of teaching. As we studied and explored our own personal attitudes, philosophies, and choices, Tamara routinely pushed back. Throughout the year, she had burst out in class with direct criticisms of my teaching and my method.

In December, she interrupted a lesson to say, "All we do in here in discuss our opinions. How is that learning anything? We always talk about what we think, and what we would have done in a situation. We're not learning anything."

Contrary to how it sounds, Tamara's comments were always made with the utmost respect, more like a tough soccer coach than a belligerent teenager. We had talked after school about her concerns, and she continually expressed to me that class wasn't hard enough, that to learn history, we need to learn more dates, and that writing an essay with a self-constructed thesis, as opposed to a research paper, just didn't feel rigorous to her.

In response, I had talked to Tamara and the class about my teaching approach, about why I teach the histories and use the techniques I do, and why I am most concerned with helping them become students who think critically about the world around them. While most students accepted this method from day one, Tamara remained resistant. Her previous education in India and her basic understanding of what constituted classroom did not involve discussions or debates. Tamara wanted a more traditional classroom, and in her eyes, all this community-building, critical-thinking stuff was just getting in the way of "real" learning.

For example, when we created working definitions about concepts such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, she complained, "But what IS the real definition?"

When we held Socratic Seminars discussing why we think people conformed or obeyed in Rwanda during the genocide, she'd shake her head at me, saying, "Why does it matter why WE think they obeyed? They obeyed. That's what happened."

When I asked students to do a barometer [2] about whether or not Jesus Colon [3] (a black man) helped a white woman one late night on a New York subway, she'd wait patiently for the exercise to finish, exclaiming, "How are we supposed to know what he did or did not do?"

As you can imagine, when she stayed after class to tell me I ran a democracy classroom, I waited expectantly for the other shoe to drop.

"Thanks, Tamara." I slowly replied. "I take that as a compliment."

"It's a good thing, Miss. It really is." She smiled at me.

"Well," I continued cautiously, "I think you guys have great ideas, and I think you're old enough to design your own assessment. I love the ideas you guys came up with today."

"Yes." She agreed. "It's going to be a great assessment."

She continued to linger by me, so I seized the opportunity to go a little deeper.

"Tamara," I began, "do you remember when you didn't like my democracy classroom?"

"Oh yeah," she said smiling. "I remember."

"Do you remember all the talks we had about it, and how it sometimes made you angry?"

"Miss," she laughed. "Of course I remember."

"So," I pressed. "What changed?"

"Well, Miss. I think you sort of brainwashed me. I really believe in a democracy classroom now."

"Huh." I said, trying to hide my smile. "Well, I hope I didn't brainwash you."

"No," she said, "It's more like you flipped my mind. I just saw why it's good and why I like it. It's good for us to think together. We learn a lot from each other. And we learn about who we are and we think more about our choices. I get it now."

I'm not sure how to convey to you just how big of a change this is for my dear Tamara. Suffice it to say that this conversation might just be the biggest success of my year. It's another example to me of what Facing History can do in a classroom, of the hidden, subtle, almost silent things that can happen in a Facing History classroom.

I can't fully articulate how Facing History flips kids' and teachers' minds, but I know that it does. There's something to this Facing History thing; I can just feel it. And once in awhile, in moments like the one with Tamara, I even get to see it.

* Name has been changed.