Facing History is so proud of our award-winning teachers. We know that educators face enormous obstacles, including an increase in teacher turnover, political pressure, and the learning gaps that persist in our education system. Yet, despite the many challenges, Facing History works with a growing number of teachers whose out-of-the-box thinking and resolve to make a difference in the world brings new light and energy into classrooms.
Jessica Lander is one of the educators.
Her dedication to her students was recently recognized when she was named the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Out of 52 individual state and US territory winners, Jessica was one of only 10 individuals to be nominated for the National History Teacher of the Year Award.
In addition to her accolades for her work at Lowell High School in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jessica is also a published author of three books and numerous articles related to the triumphs and challenges of teaching.
Jessica recently took time out of her busy schedule and opened up to Facing History about her journey to becoming a teacher and growing into her career. From her students to her fellow teachers, from mentors to Facing History curriculum, Jessica finds inspiration from all corners—she takes this inspiration and turns it into ideas and action that directly benefit her classroom of young learners.
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What inspired you to become a teacher?
In college, my plan was to major in biology. But I had chosen Swahili for the college language requirement, and because I’m dyslexic, I knew that immersion was the best way for me to learn. So, between semesters my freshman year, I went to Tanzania to work on my Swahili. A friend I met there introduced me to an unusual school.
This school was doing powerful work supporting low-income students. I came away from that first visit wanting to know more about the school and its community. I switched majors to anthropology, and I went back and forth to Tanzania to visit the school and learn from its teachers and students. My plan for after college was to go into education policy, but I knew I needed classroom experience first. So I got a fellowship to teach at a university in northern Thailand. I graduated college on a Tuesday, packed my bags and flew to Thailand that Friday. I arrived on Sunday and started teaching at Chiang Mai University on Monday.
It was an exhilarating, wonderful year. I learned so much with my students and from my students. After the very last class, I drove my motorbike to a nearby temple and sat and cried—I wouldn't be able to see my students every day, the class we had created together was gone. I had intended to teach for only one year before moving into ed policy, but in that moment I realized I needed and wanted to continue teaching.
What was your first experience with Facing History?
I first experienced Facing History in my 7th and 8th grade social studies class with my teacher Jenn Kay Goodman. Jenn taught me the importance of grappling with hard and important history. In her class we studied the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, and the migrations of people to the United States. To underscore the importance of being upstanders—not bystanders—we researched, wrote, and acted monologues that put us in the shoes of resistors and rescuers during the Holocaust. Jenn asked us to think conceptually and creatively. In Jenn’s class, as a way to synthesize our learning about the Holocaust, we each created a model of a memorial we proposed to build complete with an artist’s statement explaining the symbolism of each choice we had made.
How has Facing History influenced you and your teaching?
I took two important lessons and ideas from being a student of Facing History, which I now work to weave into my teaching. First, Facing History challenges us to understand the many perspectives of history, including our own biases. Second, Facing History is not just a call to study—it is a call to action.
Facing History challenges students to examine the messiness, and sometimes ugliness, of history. To build understanding and empathy we must put ourselves in the shoes of others, we must face our past, and we must face ourselves. In studying history it's important to study all of history: the inspiring parts, and the hard parts. If we don’t learn our history, if we don’t face our history with open eyes, how can we plan and shape our future? As I have crafted my curriculum and lessons I have drawn on the work of Facing History again and again, working to ensure we are grappling with hard and important history, diving deep into the laws, cases, movements, and changemakers that have shaped our present, asking essential and challenging questions, reflecting on our frames, biases, and perspectives, and learning from each other.
Facing History teaches us and calls us to be upstanders. As much as possible in my class I work to incorporate opportunities for my students to become teachers and leaders in our community, to learn the skills to advocate for issues they care about, and work with community leaders on local challenges. In the fall my students learn how to craft op-eds on issues they care about (a project I created modeled after one that my professor Pasi Sahlberg at the Harvard Graduate School of Education taught us); a selection of the op-eds are published in the local Lowell Sun newspaper. In the spring my students work collaboratively to tackle an action civics project in collaboration with the national nonprofit Generation Citizen.
My 7th and 8th grade teacher Jenn didn’t just have an impact on me when I was in her class. In high school I stayed in touch, in college I stayed in touch. When I became a teacher I reached out to Jenn who shared her wisdom and her ideas. And even some of her lessons! I see a lot of Jenn’s teaching in my own teaching. Indeed, I now teach my own students variations of a number of the projects I first learned as a student in her class.
How do you utilize Facing History?
I have the immense joy and honor of teaching extraordinary recent immigrant and refugee young people who come from more than 30 countries at Lowell High School in Lowell Massachusetts. Together we study history and civics.
One particularly collaborated with Facing History I find really powerful is in connecting to the We Are America Project my students and I founded.
It was a class project in 2018 that led my former students and me to launch a national nonprofit, We Are America Project, which mentors teachers and works with students to share students’ personal stories of American history and identity. Each year we collaborate with and mentor teachers from across the country, who in turn work with their students to support them as they explore and then share stories of identity and personal history. We then help these teachers and students to publish these stories in anthologies and on our website library. We hope to help spark community conversations about identity and to create space for each young person to claim publicly their American identity and their place in our country’s history and our future.
When we first set out to create the We Are America Project, my students and I reached out to three wonderful education organizations that we admired and whose lessons we incorporated into our curriculum to ask them to be our partners: Reimagining Migration, the Tenement Museum, and Facing History & Ourselves! We were really excited when all three said yes. For the last five years we have collaborated with all three organizations. Across the school year we hold monthly webinars for our Teacher Fellows, supporting them as they explore and teach our curriculum. We are really grateful to all our partners who zoom in to lead fall workshop, sharing their knowledge and resources. For the last five years wonderful educators at Facing History have helped kick off our year-long fellows program, leading a workshop on the Facing History & Ourselves unit My Part of the Story.
What’s one favorite resource from Facing History that you would recommend to other teachers?
As I mentioned above, I really love teaching the My Part of the Story unit so much so that it is woven into opening lessons of the We Are America curriculum my former students and I created. I think the range of lessons and activities in the unit really help students approach and grapple with identity, and specifically American identity, from a range of abilities, and allows them to hear from many voices and perspectives.
When I studied the Holocaust as a 7th grader in Jenn’s class, the memorial project that Facing History created was one that really struck me as a student and still sticks with me years later. As I mentioned earlier, it is a project I have incorporated and adapted into my teaching. For my students, who come from across the globe, I have worked to adapt the project. We begin our study of memorials by looking at three types of memorials. In addition to reflecting on Holocaust memorials, I also ask my students to reflect on memorials in our community in Lowell and also memorials in their home country. After reflecting on memorials created by others, my students set about creating powerful memorials of their own.
What impact do you think Facing History lessons or approaches have had on your students?
Students have told me, through their writing and also in conversation, about the powerful impact that Facing History lessons have had on how they see the world and their role as upstanders. These lessons have been particularly meaningful, I believe, for my students who have experienced trauma and violence. Many of my students are refugees or have immigrated here because of violence in their home country. I also work in a city that is home to the second largest Cambodian community outside of Cambodia, with many families who arrived as refugees from the Khmer Rouge. As I have heard from some of my students who have experienced violence, the Facing History curriculum has helped provide them with language to begin to articulate and grapple with what they or their families have experienced.
What’s your favorite thing about teaching?
Learning from and with my students! They are an inspiration.
My students bring such a powerful array of strengths to our classroom and community. They are cultural and linguistic navigators for their families. They bring a wealth of knowledge and experience from having lived in multiple countries and cultures, and they show tremendous grit and determination as they navigate a new school system, a new community, and a new country. In journeying to this country, they’ve often become masters at negotiation, problem solving, and teamwork. Here, they're creating new friendships and they're learning new languages. They are deeply generous toward each other. They bring their determination, curiosity, creativity, compassion, and courage to our classroom and our community. I see my students support and teach each other in the classroom every single day, in the small moments and in the bigger ones. And I see how much they care for their new community, and I see the ways in which they are creating powerful, positive, and systemic change. It is so inspiring to watch them become teachers and leaders in our community!
What role do the lessons of the past play for immigrant students of today? And what do you see as the importance of connecting lessons of the past to our present day?
When students are able to grapple with hard history and learn from diverse voices they can better make sense of the world and help shape our future.
As I have mentioned, I have the honor and joy of teaching recent immigrant and refugee students from more than thirty countries. Four years ago I set out to learn how we could together reimagine immigrant education. I traveled across the country to visit innovative educators and schools working with immigrant-origin students. I dove into the essential, but often overlooked, history of landmark laws, Supreme Court cases, and movements that have transformed immigrant education, and I sat down to learn from my own newcomer students. After learning so much from so many people who became my teachers, I published Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education last fall.
To reimagine how our country can better educate newcomer children, I believe we will need to understand our past, explore present innovations, and listen to the personal stories of young people themselves. I believe these stories of the past, the present, and the personal have so much to teach us about how we can imagine what is possible.
What advice do you have for educators feeling burned out or disheartened by the challenges related to what or how to teach certain topics?
Unfortunately, teaching often feels isolating. I have often felt that way. And rarely do we teachers get the time to sit in each other’s classrooms, or to collaborate and brainstorm with peers. In writing Making Americans, I got to do this every day. It was so energizing. I came with so many ideas that I brought back to my classroom that transformed our space, transformed my curriculum and lessons, and deeply impacted the work I do. As I traveled across the country for my book, I saw, too, how much teachers across the country were eager to learn from colleagues in other communities and across states. There was such a hunger to learn from each other, to collaborate, to share best practices, and grapple together with challenges.
That kind of collaborative space rarely exists enough in our profession. But, seeing what works in action is powerful. Collaborating with each other can also help us create system-wide solutions. I appreciate the ways in which organizations like Facing History bring educators together to learn from each other and collaborate with each other. It is communities such as those created by Facing History that nurture us and help us grow.
Anything else you’d like to share about your Facing History experience or approach as a teacher?
While I have forgotten many lessons from my schooling, 20 years later I still remember the Facing History curriculum that I learned. I vividly recall so many of the projects, readings, and lessons in the Facing History curriculum. Facing History has shaped my understanding of myself and my responsibilities to communities and to the world. And Facing History has shaped how I teach.
