 Hi, good morning, welcome to the annual May Day Peace Conference. My name is Yuri Hong, and I'm a member of the Greek Latin and Classical Studies Department as well as the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program, and I'm the chair of the May Day Planning Committee this year. The purpose of the May Day Peace Conference is to focus our attention on what we can do to build a more just and peaceful world. For those of you who have attended the May Day Conference in the past, you might notice some key differences. As we looked around at our community and the challenges facing us today as a society, we decided to spotlight the expertise and perspectives of our own Gustavus faculty to share their knowledge on the topic, but also to model how to engage in dialogue across personal and disciplinary perspectives as an informed member of society and then also how to listen and ask questions with curiosity and humility, especially on topics that lie outside our areas of expertise. We wanted to showcase how a liberal arts education is central to engaging with issues of peace, because it enables us to explore from multiple angles the basic questions that we all have to grapple with as individuals, as communities, as societies. Who are we? How did we get here? What do we do now? Our hope is that this teach-in will illuminate the ways in which each discipline, from the arts and the humanities to the social sciences and the sciences, help us to explore these questions in crucially different ways, to encompass a fuller scope of a more honest picture of human experience and expression, more completely than is possible through just one discipline alone. We hope that putting these perspectives in conversation with one another around an important topic of our day, today's is the future of U.S. education who gets to decide and why, that this will provide an experience of the liberal arts as a practice of seeing each other, learning from one another, and getting inspired to take action together so that we can move forward in creating a more just and peaceful world. To get us started, I welcome President Bergman to provide a greeting. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for filling the room with curiosity and interest. This is going to be a great morning. As we begin this conference, we also acknowledge that Gustavus Adolphus College is located on the homelands of the Dakota people, whose spiritual traditions include the belief that this land, along with the creatures and people living on it, are their relatives. The annual May Day Peace Conference was established at Gustavus Adolphus College in 1981. The May Day is the international distress call. Those who hear it are called to respond. Likewise, the May Day Peace Conference was established to inspire all of our attendees to take action, to take action for justice and peace throughout the world. And here we are, over 40 years later, and the purpose of this conference is still as relevant, and perhaps we would say even more relevant than it was in the past. The Gustavus Vision Statement says that we will equip our students to lead purposeful lives and to act on the great challenges of our time. Peace and justice are certainly among the great challenges of our time. We know that there are many challenges in the world that are linked to issues of justice and peace. This conference was started and underwritten with funding by the late Florence and Raymond Spahnberg. We are very grateful for their vision for this conference. Three of the children of the Spahnberg family are here with us today. Michael, Miriam, and Anne, could I ask you three to please stand so we can acknowledge your role in continuing this conference. Thank you so much. And finally, I want to add a special thank you to the 2023 conference organizers led by Yuri Hong and the committee for their decision to pilot this new teach-in model for the conference. I'm sure we're going to find it to be a new and amazing way for us to be inspired in the interest of peace and justice in the world. So I am pleased that you're all here with us today. We look forward to how we're going to turn this all into action. Thanks so much. Thank you, President Bergman. So this year's conference, teach-in and panel discussion, is on the future of the U.S. education system. Who decides what gets taught and what does that mean for us as a society? And because this conference is not only about learning but about doing, I want to draw your attention to a few action item cards in your program that you might be inspired to get started on as you experience this event. I want to now welcome Professor Lisa Dombowski from the Gustavus Education Department to provide a brief overview of this topic. Hi, and thank you, everybody. I put my bio up on the screen because I wanted you to know that I have been either working or studying within this field that today's May Day topic is about for decades. And I therefore think I have a fair understanding about some of the issues that underlie the question of who gets to decide what's taught in U.S. schools. I'm not going to lie. If it were up to me, I'd set the whole thing on fire and start over. But because I don't have that kind of power, I'm going to use the next tool in my kit. And that is to educate. I want the rest of you to know and understand what's going on. What is at the basis or the foundation of this question who decides what gets taught in schools, and I'm not going to lie to you either. It is tricky and convoluted. But at least if you have the information in the liberal arts fashion, you can make up your own minds. But I want you to know where everything begins. I'm going to start off with some headlines I pulled from recent news. And I'll tell you, I'm not somebody who actually follows the news very carefully. And yet, I'm personally, without being a news watcher, regularly bombarded with headlines like these. And I imagine those of you who do follow more closely see them even more often, more regularly. And I will say that issues around education and questions, contentions, arguments have been going on pretty much since the start. So this isn't anything new. It has, however, those seem to be bigger. Or it seems to be like there's more of it. And perhaps that's just with today modern technology and so forth. That just could be why. But there might be other reasons that underlie it as well, okay? Also now, and don't growl, but in the spirit of the fact that this is about education and what we're talking about today, I've designed a little quiz. It's true, false, low stakes. You're not going to fail Mayday if you get an answer wrong. But I do want you to participate. And the way I'm going to ask you to participate is actually, I stole from a student of mine who stole it from one of her professors. So thank you, Allie and Darsa. But what I'm going to ask you to do is show me your answers using a letter from American Sign Language. So when I ask you a question, if you think the answer is true, make a T, okay? For true. And if you want to, you know, show it loud and proud, or if you want to keep it more close to the chest, that's fine. And F, if you think the answer is false. Okay, everybody ready? First question. I'm excited about this. Are you excited? Come on, be excited. Here we go. This one might sound like a duh, but work with me, okay? Everyone understands schooling and the way education works because duh, everyone's been a student. Okay? True or false? That answer, my friends, is false. It's a scary, insidious kind of false because it gives people a false sense of security. They do think they know what education is about, what teachers do, what teaching is because they were on one side of the desk in a classroom. But that's really not anything to do with what teaching and education and schooling actually is. So keep that one in mind because that's an important point. Okay, y'all did really well on that one. Ready for the next one? True or false? Most decisions about pre-K through 12th grade schooling are in the hands of its professionals, also known as the teachers. You are killing this quiz, everybody. That's correct. Yes, it's true that teachers have say so in like the day to day what happens in their classrooms, but really what is taught and even in many cases how it is taught actually isn't in their hands at all. That's decided by other people. And we'll get to who those other people are in another minute. Okay, next question. True or false? U.S. education actually has decision making at local, state, and national levels with oversight, funding, and a whole bunch of other things coming from all of those arenas. True or false? What a smart and educated campus community we have. You're right. And like I said earlier, the system is so convoluted and the web is so complex that I'm not going to be able to untangle it for you in the 10 minutes I've got. But what I do want to do is again give you the spaces, this foundation of how this decision making happens so that when the panel gets up here, you have at least that framework and foundation. Okay, so let's start with the local level. Local of course means your community. Where do you live? Whether it's a big city, whether it's a small town, rural area, somewhere near you or your hometown is a school. And that school is a part of some school district that looks like whatever it looks like depending on where you're from. Now who's in charge of that school? And who's in charge of that school district? Well, it's pretty much it's the school board. And those of you at Gustavus who are familiar with the board of trustees who oversees what President Bergman does, the school boards in every school in America do pretty much the same thing. They're the people who oversee the superintendent, who then oversees all of their personnel and it trickles all the way down to eventually the teachers in the classrooms. Okay, so now where did the school board come from? They're elected. You put them in office, you vote for them every two or four years or whenever, depending again on your voting cycle and where you're from and et cetera. I will say that in some cities or towns, the race for the school board is contentious, it's competitive. People are gunning for it and for one reason or another, many of them with their own agendas about what they want to see make happen in schools. In other cases, they're begging for warm bodies to fill the seats. So it could be that big of a pendulum swing and that big of a difference. But the point is that they're just local, average citizens who decide they're going to serve their community and I would say the majority of those people who make those major decisions about schools aren't educators. They're just community members. So what you have on screen right now is I took a couple of different screenshots from the St. Peter public schools because we're in St. Peter right now. Just to give you an idea of what it is they do, what kind of oversight they provide. And if you look and go down to like number, okay, that's 600. So you go down where it says education programs. That's where the curriculum stuff comes in. Also you also, Mankato public schools, very similar. And most school boards around the country are going to do or show something similar. I encourage you all for more, whatever you call home, go and look at your school board's websites. That somewhere in the school district pages you're going to have to dig a little bit, but you can get to the bottom of what it is they're actually providing oversight on. And you can see how deep it goes and how deep the roots go with regard to the school board. So again, once more they're elected. The superintendent and other school personnel are typically hired usually through some kind of search process. Okay. One other thing I want you to know about school boards though is that they're often pointing fingers and saying, hey, don't look at us. We're making these decisions because the state and or the national or the federal government tells us what we're supposed to do. And that's actually not wrong at both state and federal levels. So whatever state you live in, and here I've got the Minnesota Department of Education website home page up. They are making decisions that impact local school boards and local school districts. So is the federal system of education? So now where do those people come from? And who are they? At the state level, it's the governor who appoints the secretary of education. So the person who was in charge of Minnesota Department of Education was appointed by the governor. So when you think about the governor, somebody that we elect, and then that person picks who they want to be in charge of schooling for that for their four years in office. That's another thing to pay attention to also changes all the time. Voting happens all the time, people are coming and going, you can't even keep it all straight. Then nobody's there for very long, right? Okay. The Department of Education and those kinds of folks are doing things like creating the standards. Y'all remember the standards? Those of you who are older, maybe you weren't taught with the standards in mind, but those of you who are younger sure were fun? No. Teaching with them also not fun. But they were decided upon and imposed upon us by others at the state and the national levels. One other thing to not forget about both state and federal, attention toward and influence over what happens in schools is Congress. Again, our elected representatives both in the Senate and the House of Representatives are people in their writing bills proposing legislation and passing laws that impact what happens in schools. So we've got the local school board, we've got the state, we've got the federal. All of these fingers are in the educational pie. Ready for the next true and false question? Okay, fine. That all said, Lisa, big deal. Teaching is still easy and straightforward. They're just given the curriculum and then they teach it. That's it. True or false? Come on, I just explained to you how it works. I just told you that teachers are told what to do and you're still voting false and you're right. Because even after all that, everybody, they still will get a parent or a parent group or some other organizational group that's saying, hey, I don't like the fact that you're teaching this book because there's magic in it. Or I don't want my kid to know about evolution or whatever it is. So even after approved curricula have been passed by all these different people who decide on them for us, teachers are still sending kids off into other rooms with alternate curriculum and materials that they have to provide because somebody doesn't like Harry Potter. Okay, last question. You ready? When you unpack US schooling a bit further and you understand the answer to the question about who decides what gets taught, essentially the answer is the person who decides is you. True or false? All right, that was sort of a little bit of a trick question. But yes, it's true because it kind of depends. Do the people that you vote for represent you? Do they listen to you? And that's another important thing too. But really remember that those people that you put there, they only experienced school from one side of the desk. Thank you. Thanks so much, Lisa, for that really helpful introduction to this incredibly complex issue. I now welcome Professor Greg Castor from the History Department to moderate this discussion with our faculty panelists. I'm really excited to hear this conversation because I think a lot of the questions you might have will kind of be addressed and come out in the course of this discussion. The other thing that I would like to point out that I touched on briefly before, so Lisa was explicitly asked to come and give her expertise and her perspective on this topic as someone who is very much informed on this issue in many, many ways. The other faculty panelists have been invited because they can speak from their personal and then also disciplinary perspective with regard to how they connect to this topic. But they haven't been asked because this is their area of expertise. We wanted to model what it looks like to be an informed person, an educated person, and then what it looks like to have a conversation about something that you're not an expert in because that's what all of us in this room are, right? And so I invite you up to the stage. So again, hi everybody, welcome. Just a quick pickup on what President Bergman said about justice and peace and action. So everyone knows, some of you may know, some of you may not know, May Day is also an international workers holiday. It was actually invented in this country in the late 19th century as part of the eight-hour day movement, eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. People died for eight hours. That seems hard to imagine now and still are dying, right? But just as an FYI. So I am so honored to be here with these amazing professors and colleagues and my job is more or less to let them talk. And so maybe we can begin with Jill and just go down and your thoughts about both the topic of this day, who decides what gets taught, and of course that relates to Lisa's remarks as well. And you each have two minutes, I think. Yes, I won't be able, oh, introduce myself first, right? I'm Jill Locke and I'm in the Political Science Department and also affiliated with the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies program. And I have been at Gustavus since 2000. My area of expertise is democratic theory and I am generally interested in and teaching and doing research on issues related to how do we improve and or make a more robust democracy. And when it comes to schooling, it is complicated because you do need a mix of expertise and ordinary engagement. And so you have this complicated sort of federal and then local system that we've tried to thread a needle basically between a kind of national commitment to certain standards of education so that our students are not in the immortal words of the horrible legislation left behind. So we have that national commitment, then we have experts, right, who are involved in curricular development. And then generally from a democratic perspective, it's good to have communities engaged. And it makes sense that there might be issues in Minnesota that are different than issues in Florida. Just thinking about issues around climate, for example, are what we face here is different than what you face in Florida. Now I've lost that. Generally, we like to think about all of these different little laboratories of engagement. Of course, the problem is that as with other political issues, we're not always on the same page and we don't all have the same voice. And so you can have a real imbalanced sort of tyrannical engagement on the part of it could be at the local level, it could be at the federal level, it could be at the state level. So within political science, we generally try to study these different institutions and how individuals engage with and interact with those institutions. And that fits in, I think, perfectly well with the theme of the conference for today. One little note, there is a movement that Common Cause is beginning to launch around lowering the voting age to 16 for students, high school students to be able to vote in school board elections. So it wouldn't be for all elections, but for school board elections. So that might be something we could pick up in the discussion. Hello, yeah, mine works. Hi, I'm Sunhee Lee. I teach in the English department here. And my area of specialization is U.S. ethnic literature and contemporary American lit. First, I'll talk a little bit about just, you know, as a literary scholar, you know, what am I thinking of, you know, with this topic? And my first reaction is a not serious one, right? Because books have been banned and, you know, challenged for a very, very long time, right? So any kind of classic literature that you loved, I don't know, To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, probably was banned at some point, right? So in some ways, I think kind of joke is, well, you know, you're not a serious writer until your book's been banned at some point, right? So there's that. And, you know, and just to be a little bit more serious, right? You know, in different periods, right? The reason for banning changes, right? So, but I have to say a kind of consistent sort of group that challenges, you know, texts and books is sort of the religions front, right? So, you know, any kind of like anti-Christian language or like, so something as simple as like dam, for instance, like in the olden days, like, oh, this book has too many dam in it, you know, and that would be banned, right? So really simple things. The other thing is sort of sex, right? Any mention of sex or, you know, and that's, you know, this is obscene, right? And those are, I think, pretty consistent. But what's happening now, though, is a bit different. So a little bit of kind of historicization and also just my personal, you know, work in U.S. ethnic literature is sort of making the current moment much more threatening and much more serious. So, you know, one thing is, in my field, right, a lot of the texts that we study now by writers of color, by queer writers, by women writers were, we have them because there was work to recover those texts, right, which is sort of 1970s and 1980s with the rise of multiculturalism. You know, scholars did recovery work. So you'll be shocked to hear but texts like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, classic, was out of print until the 1970s. And we wouldn't have that book that is now widely taught, so on, right? It wouldn't exist if that work didn't happen. So, 70s, 80s, publishing opened up more. Publishing more works by diverse writers. Then that gets, like, translated to, you know, writers writing more, right? Because if they read, you know, if queer writers read other writers, then they think, oh, maybe I have stories to tell, maybe I will write. So it's a kind of ripple effect, right? And then those books become available for young people who need to see their lives reflected in the stories. Those texts are being taught in school. So I think, you know, it's been gradually great to see, right? That we are getting more diverse texts. They're becoming more available. So what's happening right now, you know, is very, very concerning because it's not just sort of banning books or banned or books are being challenged because there's sex or there's the word damn in it. But it's very, very targeted. So one thing that I will suggest is just that you take, so one organization that's done a lot of great research on this is the American Library Association. And if you just go into their website, there's a lot of information. It's something really simple like, which are the most challenged books in 2022? And you just click on that and it's shocking. Like 80% of the books have queer themes written by queer writers. A good number of them are sort of intersectional. Maybe half, maybe 30, 40% of the books are books written by writers of color. So it's very, very targeted. And we have to kind of read what's happening now. Oh, and not to mention one of the other shocking things is, you know, the sudden sort of rise in the number of cases, like ban cases or challenge cases. So in 2020, the number was like somewhere around 200s. In 2022, that number is now in the 2000s. So there's a kind of sudden sort of urge and rise in kind of this culture war that we're seeing in, you know, challenging and banning books. So from my perspective, right, I just read the moment as a very targeted effort to regress. So the kind of advances that have been, we've been making towards a more democratic education, towards making diverse stories available, towards, you know, thinking about the students who need those stories and so on. All the work that we've been doing is really just being kind of, you know, I think there's a targeted resistance to that and a desire to regress. So in that way, I do think that the current moment is quite dire and that it's something that we have to really think very actively about. Hi, I'm Katie Lehigh in biology. I teach molecular biology and genetics. I am very interested in scientific literacy for our general populace. Scientific literate people make better decisions. They tend to respond to some of the great challenges of our time, climate change, issues with legislation on sex and gender, and racism. People who have a scientific literate background understand the biology of these challenges and they can make better informed decisions. So our current biology curriculum often increases students' belief in race essentialism from a biological perspective. The false idea that race is actually biologically relevant when it is only a cultural construct is what most of our high school students come out with. We know for 50 years now that this isn't true. We've got lots of genetic data from all over the world demonstrating that people are more similar genetically than probably most of you would ever guess. So you can take two people from across the world and they could be more different to the person who lives in the house next to them than they are to each other genetically. So what we view as race is not an actual biological truth. It is a falsehood that's been propagated by bad science. And unless we teach people the correct science and they have the scientific literacy to understand it, people are going to continue to have these biases that they bring into every area of their life. Our current education system doesn't provide teachers with the materials that they need to teach these things. So 69% of elementary education professionals don't understand how to teach about climate change and the human effects that are causing climate change. These are the people that are teaching our children. So if our children are not getting a good science education in K-12 then they come into college without the adequate knowledge to start their education journey. So instead of beginning to learn the things that they need to we now have to have about 40% of college students taking remedial courses in their majors which cost them money, delay their progress, delay their overall development of knowledge and critical thinking skills. So it's really important that as you think about what you can do to make a difference in your community is advocate that your district really push for implementation of the next generation science standards which include things like teaching students that climate change is real, include critical thinking skills and a basis of scientific literacy that is really important for an informed populace that can vote, that can make good decisions and that can help us to continue our creativity and innovation in STEM. Hi everybody, I'm Colleen Stockman. I'm here from Art History and Arts Entrepreneurship. So I teach in the humanities. My specialty area is in Atlantic slavery, American art and material culture. But I'm also here for the Fine Arts Division so I want to represent more of the arts side as well. I think we need to think about arts education as critical infrastructure. We cannot build a better world. We cannot fix our communities until we can imagine what it looks like to do that. So we have to imagine it first and then we have to know how to make it, literally. So we have a lot of like, there's a lot of denigration of the arts in these serious questions about equity and so forth, but it really is a critical piece of it. So we're going to need fine motor skills and critical thinking and creative problem-solving to do pretty much anything that we've all started to address up here. And we're always living in art, right? If you drove here in a car today, an artist made that. An artist stitched the hem on your shirt. They put my shoes together, right? They built this building. It's all, we're living it. It's not ancillary too, but it's part of the social processes that have both created these inequities that we're talking about, and they're also part of how we design better ones. So when we think about, I think we want to jump into conversation too, but Segregation by Design, for example, was an excellent book and now an excellent Instagram for the social media users in the room that really helps us see the way that structures of racism, we talk about structural racism, right? But that is a structure. A structure is a design. Someone designed it. People designed it. And how can you design a better system instead, right? So if we can break down and really rethink what are these visual decisions that have been made, both in service of all sorts of isms, but we can make better choices, right? So redlining is a thing that happens on a map, on purpose in particular places. So it's both deeply social and specifically visual. And we can see that today. So we have to understand these histories, I think, to be able to make better choices and fix the system. So if we can dig into all of these social processes that created the inequities that are built into our education system, because it is working like it's supposed to, unfortunately, then we can start to design better systems. One quick thing you already know me. I'm Lisa Dimbelski from the Education Department. I want us to be really careful too about not teacher bashing because I don't know of any other profession in the history of all the professions where actually the work of its professionals are not decided by them. I want to actually pick up on that and ask you, Lisa. I mean, our teachers, though, aren't simply acted on, right? We have the national, the state, and the local. Can you say a bit about, and then we'll come back to the others? Thank you for your great comments, opening comments. But about what agency teachers have in this mess? I would love for teachers to be able to speak for themselves, too. And what I also talk to my teacher candidates, the ones that we're training here at Gustavus, is you can make your own changes in the system from within. And that's where I feel like the hope is, and that's where I feel like it happens at a very micro level in a classroom with a teacher, because really that's the only control that they do have. Even though they don't have control of every single thing in that classroom, they can still create an environment of inclusion, of anti-racism, of whatever else they want to do. And they can still, except for that kid who has to step out because they can't read Harry Potter or whatever, they can still teach the truth that Katie was talking about. Thank you. And thanks to my colleagues for paying attention to change over time, persistence over time, dear to historians, historical context. So, yeah, a lot of this isn't new. People have been battling in this country over education from the beginning, as Lisa said, but the context is, son, he said, is also different, right? History doesn't repeat itself contrary to what we might think because the context is never the same. I wonder, we kicked around this question at dinner the other night, but I wonder if people would comment on, you know, what is the point of a school, public education, right? That's really what we're talking about here is public education. What is the point of that? Is it to, as Horace Mann thought, the great U.S. educational reformer who helped to create the common school system in this country? Is it about social cohesion? Is that what it's about? So, whoever wants to start, Jill, maybe Polly Syperson? I think, yeah, what is the point of the school and the history of the school? We haven't always had public schools and many people have tried to destroy them whenever they have, as many of you probably know, in the South after Brown v. Board and schools were required to integrate. There was, there were schools that closed. There's actually five schools right now that are being closed in Louisiana that serve disproportionately, serve Black and Latino students. Schools were closed after Brown v. Board and private academies, tax-funded private academies were opened. There's a big Supreme Court case, Minnesota case actually, about whether or not you can have majority-minority schools or majority-white schools that's on its way to the Supreme Court. So, we are not even in agreement, I don't think nationally, that public school is a public good. And I guess, I've always attended a private liberal arts college, that I always attended public schools. So, my mom was a public school teacher. I'm a public school, my kids attend public schools, I'm a big public school booster because I do think they are, there is a democratic foundation there. It's how we learn how to be citizens, it's how we learn how to resolve conflict, it's how we learn to face uncomfortable information. It's a social world, it's kind of the political world of childhood, right? Where kids get to talk across lines that maybe the more insular ways in which they live at home, whether they are very liberal or they are very conservative, there's an insularity to families and religious communities. And so, I can't imagine any case for democracy that did not include robust public schools and whether it's vouchers, charters, all of these other neoliberal innovations, there's reason from a democratic perspective there's reason to be very suspicious of them. And what, when people, these content bands are trying to turn these schools into essentially those old white academies, that same kind of logic, that we only, we and people like us get to decide what our children learn. And it comes from a place of fear, fear that our children will abandon the truths with which we raise them, and that is, that's part of raising your kid in the world. So, invest in the institutions would be my, would be my political move. Thank you. Anyone else want to, Colleen, go ahead. Yeah, just want to draw together this question about labor and also gender studies, too, related to the devaluation of the profession over decades and centuries, in a sense. Right, that there's this moment when, at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, the field of teaching opens up a bit more to women, which is very convenient because you could pay them less. So, the, in a sense, we can look at that moment as one of the places where the wage situation and sort of how we value the labor of teachers changed quite a bit, right? There's both this awesome new venture of opportunity for women and new immigrants at that point, too, as part of this movement in growing the field of teaching, but at the same time, it's always already embedded in this devaluation of women's work. So, just, yeah, didn't know if there were other comments about sort of the labor history component of that, the fact that we do also have schools so that we can have workers, and then what we do with who is facilitating the work of the classroom, et cetera. And I think when we look to at historical moments, the phrase achievement gap comes right after Brown. So, that's a phrase that comes from segregationists who want to immediately re-segregate schools. So, it was never meant to, like, close the gap. I mean, at its core, that's never what that phrase meant. So, it's come to me in a lot of things now, when we look at the moment it first arrives in the press and what it was used for, it's an important distinction between the intent, the sort of perceived intent of what that phrase could mean, but what it actually does and always meant. And, like, achievement gap, you're gonna hear those buzzwords all the time, like, post-pandemic, now the big one is learning loss. If I hear learning loss, one more damn time. I'm gonna answer the question in a slightly different way. So, I want to talk about schooling as a privilege that many, many children communities over history didn't get to go to school. So, right? So, schooling for the communities that didn't have that privilege meant social mobility, the other side also meant assimilation, right? So, the kind of ambivalence, I think, is really important for us to think about, right? And also, right, like, you know, what... So, if we think about schooling from a more kind of underprivileged sort of students perspective, let's say, right, versus, right, I mean, I think we would all agree the parents who are at the board meetings are middle class, upper class, right? We know the working class, moms and dads are not there, right? They're not really they, you know, for because they have to work or they have other, right? So, the ones who are making decisions are definitely middle, upper, wealthy, or class. But, right, if we think about schooling as a privilege, that is more important for children from underprivileged, right, situations. So, you know, that... And we have to think about that difference, right? Like, you know, from teacher, I'm in a classroom, and I have these students, like, who am I gonna look at, or who am I gonna think about at night, right? Right, and so, you know, if we kind of think about that, right, that the school as a gateway to social mobility, as a gateway to, you know, just, like, stable living, right? And this is what parents of, you know, like working class parents think, right? My kids need to know math, then they need to graduate high school, maybe they go to college, maybe they could get a good job, right? Like that, and that's important, right? So, the skill aspect, but in order for those students to have that kind of success story, they also need to be validated in school. So, this is a nurturing part, right, that if a student, if you have a black student, who's, you know, let's say, going through a mainly white curriculum, they are not validated, right? They need to see themselves. And so, what's being taught is also a kind of, you know, we have to think about nurturing, but also, you know, sort of an ethical, you know, kind of standpoint too, like as a society, how much do we need to support, right? The communities and the sort of the students who come from those marginalized communities, and choices have to be made, right? What am I going to teach? What am I going to talk about? So, thinking about school students and their very, very diverse kind of comp, you know, in multiple, right, diversities we can think about, right? But also remembering that schooling is a privilege. Schooling does give more power to people, right? And that part, I think, is also something we have to remember. So, that made me think about exposure to someone like you, so in STEM we see this huge increase of minority students when they're exposed to positive images of someone who looks like them, who has cultural background like them. They're more likely to go into STEM. But the people who are choosing these textbooks and curricular materials are generally not people who look like them. So, the people that are making these choices are not thinking necessarily about the fact that not everyone is represented in these textbooks. And while, yes, teachers can be a rogue and bring things into the classroom, that's a huge time commitment for them. Science teachers spend on average seven hours a week developing extra things for their classrooms because their curricular materials aren't sufficient. They don't get the professional development that they need to keep abreast of scientific advances, ways that we use language to better communicate with students and without those materials because they're, whether it's at a district level here in Minnesota or state level in somewhere like Texas, people aren't thinking about those things. They're not taking those things into account. They're bringing their political biases into there. And it really affects that education students are getting. And so if they're not seeing those things, if they're not seeing themselves validated, they're not going to pursue a career and we are going to miss out on their creativity and innovation. And we're slowing ourselves down in a very economical, very base way to talk about it. But we're losing people who could make huge advances that could bring more creativity, more innovation by not validating these students. And students say that I think only 3% of LGBTQI students see a positive representation in all of their education of someone like them. And that's not validating. Thank you all. I think we've sort of touched on it, but I'm just going to name it. We're talking about in the present moment where quote unquote white people, I can't, the construction, white, black. I always tell my students, if I look like the color of that paper, call 911, or I've already passed away, I don't know. It's just ridiculous, white, black. But where white people in this country are not in some places already not the majority and that generates fear, that generates backlash, not among all white people. So we're talking about that for sure. I think we're also talking about authoritarianism, some would say even fascism, where knowledge is under attack, the public good education, public sector is under attack. So that's I think really important to keep in mind. Back to your point, Lisa, about the local the different levels. I do not have children, except honorary like Professor Locke's kids and others, but I imagine as a parent, and I went to a public school, which is now sadly closed, but I would imagine as a parent, I know as a parent I would want some say in what my kids learn and how they learn. And I just wonder about another piece of this seems to me kind of a general backlash against expertise. So we have experts in the room, literally teachers who as you say, don't have, they aren't in charge of what they teach. I wonder what you all think about, is there a way to involve parents and the teachers at the same time without it just degenerating into a shouting match at the local school board? That's a great question. Can I also say not only what is taught, but oftentimes how it's taught is dictated to teachers. I don't know how many of you saw the teachers who literally had to read word for word out of the teachers manual, because that was the only approved and accepted way to teach that lesson that day happens all the time. I just want you to know that. So it's not only what, but they're also being told how in a lot of cases. Okay, so what was your question? I wonder about, for you and everybody, I wonder about, and I have not been to such a board meeting, I've only seen them on television, they're the worst ones, but how do we, as someone who believes in democracy, I want parents involved, right? I think they should be involved. I remember on parents going to a PTA meeting and hearing good things and bad things about my brother and me, but I don't remember my parents thinking or assuming that they should be telling the teacher what to teach and how to teach. So I wonder, is there an answer to what we currently seem to have at so many of these board meetings? So, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, so I am a parent. I have two middle schoolers, and so it is something that I also think about. I think the first thing I will, and this is my personal opinion and how I would approach it is, one is I have tremendous gratitude for the teachers and they are experts, and some of them are very young, right? But they went through their training and they know they have bonds with my own children, which I think the first time I realized that my children can form a meaningful bond with another grown-up was quite special, right? It's sort of like, yeah, I actually, these precious people, I can entrust them, right? I'm not saying all teachers are great, but I think 99% of them are amazing, and so my first inclination is I am going to trust the teachers. So, and the board is separate though, right? The board, they have to make decisions and budget cuts, and as a parent, I try to be there. I mean, that's, you know, you have to be there. You have to say your piece, you know, and you can't assume, I'm not, you know, somebody who enjoys always like being out in the front and kind of telling people what I think. I do not enjoy that, but it happens, and I know that if I don't say X, it never gets said. You know, you can't assume that that's going to be said by somebody else, especially if you're a person who is very sensitive to issues of representation. If you care about our student body and all the diverse students, regardless of what their home backgrounds are like, that they're getting what they need, if you care about that, that's a perspective that's so important and it's lacking. Trust me, you know, parents, they think about their kids, right? All my kids in sport, like they, you know, I'm going to advocate for that, where my kids are in like Spelling Bee, whatever, right? It's very kind of, but if you have a wider perspective and then you're thinking it could make a difference. It sounds crazy, but it really does because the board is required to log a feedback, you know? And you can say, you can keep them accountable and it does, like, other people listen, right? So you show up, you do your best. But, so that's that, right? The system, I think, you know, and generally, like, I'm not like, let's change the system. I just, my thinking is more, you know, kind of like what Lisa said, the system is the system. You work kind of within it and make little changes. But then also as a parent, like, I will tell my kids to read all the bad books, right? Like, yeah, I mean what, right? Like, honestly, I looked at the list and my kid is, or their kid is 14, and yeah, I'm going to immediately buy some of those books, right? So in a way, you have to, you just, right? You have to just do that. They're amazing. And I think what I find so, this is my last thing, sorry, last thing is that I look at pop culture and I see a lot of progress. Like, my older kid and I watched the Netflix show Arcane. I don't know if some of you really like it, right? I enjoyed myself, and it's so progressive in terms of like, there's a queer couple, there's, like, you know, the culture is moving. And in some ways I thought, wow, it's great that my kid, you know, this is just storytelling. There's more positive, you know, so the kids are already there. It's really the adults that are, you know, so just give your kids those books. They're going to enjoy it, and you're going to have some good things to talk about. Maybe give them to the school board members too. I think just quickly, I mean, one way to measure that progress is by the intensity of the backlash, right? I think that's important to remember. Anyone else want to? And I, again, we're speaking here as educators. Even if you have kids, you're still an educator. You mentioned, I think, Lisa, typical board members, not an educator. I imagine the typical parent at the board meeting is not an educator. Who else wants to? You want to say? I was just going to say that, you know, I think your question about, should you as a parent be involved in picking up on this theme of privilege? And yes, privilege is an overused term or whatever, but if you have privilege, you know that. And if you can call, if you can walk into the board, school board meeting and raise your hand and speak in a way and present yourself in a way that they have to take you seriously, I do think it is democratically and possibly morally incumbent upon you not to only advocate for your own children's interests. And I think that's the bad parent at the meeting is the parent who is so concerned about their own, the cutting of the one's water polo team or whatever, which is what their kid is. We don't have water polo here, so I feel like I can hold that up as a symbol of privilege. But if you're more concerned about the cutting of the water polo program or you're more concerned about the cutting of, you know, second AP class in calculus than you are concerned about the fact that many children do not have access to the books, the fact that students are not graduating, the fact that students are not having good post-secondary options that people in your community are living in poverty while others are living in wealth, like then you should stay home. And you should go, I think you have to go to school board as a democratic citizen. And I think the narcissism of the privileged parent is nowhere clearer than in these debates about critical race theory, which are a backlash precisely. And this is something we've talked about a little bit in both of my classes, this morning classes. But this whole language about critical race theory and black history in the 1619 project is about white guilt. Presumes that there are only white kids. First of all, let's accept that white guilt is the response that white students have. I actually don't find that to be the case. But let's say that every white kid reads about the 1619 project and feels guilty. They are not the only kids at the school. So the fact that our public debate about critical race theory and black history is about white guilt just indicates the degree to which white parents have centered their own often projected concerns about their children who may want to learn that, right? But what about black students who are in the schools who are tired to the point that, you know, the son he made, who are tired. And Katie's point about the few representations of LGBTQ, you know, folks in the curriculum. So in a democracy, right, we have to tell a more complete story. And the idea that only when there's this one little curricular innovation that white students might not feel validated is now the time for us to be, you know, shutting, firing teachers and passing divisive legislative content bans. Again, it's just another reflection of that white narcissism. So don't go to the school board. Don't vote for your own narcissistic interest, right? Vote for shared power. That's what democracy requires. So that's my soapbox. Katie, would you like to know? So I have three small children, but I did attend some school board meetings in the last couple of years in the new city that I live in. And parents had a lot of opinions that they wanted to share. And I have opinions about what my own child should learn. But when I think about what all the children should learn, I feel like that is in the realm of the experts, not my realm. I'm not an expert in how reading should be taught. I shouldn't have an opinion for how everyone else gets taught reading. If I want to teach my kid a certain thing at home about reading, that's what I'm going to do. But if I'm going to go to the school board, I'm going to look and see what do the experts think? Can we bring an expert to talk about what the research is? I'm obviously a scientist, totally a data nerd. But I'm going to want to know where is the effective teaching of reading happening and how can we implement that? I don't want to go in there and argue my opinion about how I feel about reading because that maybe my kid has something that makes their neurotypical, maybe they need to read in a different way. That's fine. But I shouldn't impose my opinions and feelings on others' education. I think the experts should be making the decision whether that expert is someone who literally studies that, the expert is the person who is in the classroom every day. Those are the people who I want making those decisions. Colleen, go ahead. Yeah, I'll jump right on the reading comment, too, that I think the worst part has my sound. The science of reading is something that's come up a bunch in headlines recently. I think it was teachers in Minnesota, wasn't it? There was a couple of, I mean, everywhere, but part of what teachers were realizing is it wasn't just that they were ineffective at reading. There's plenty of data showing that whatever we've been doing to teach reading has failed miserably. Teachers have thought it's partly their fault, which it's not, and now we know it's partly because they were not given the directions and the directives to teach with the current science about how we learn to read the science of reading. So all that evidence is out there. All of the research has been done. We know how to teach reading. It's just that that's not what we asked our public school teachers to do. So that brings to another point about the importance of being curious and that we've lost time, I think, in public schools to be curious, to ask ourselves not just about, you know, who we're seeing represented there, but also who we are and how we want to represent ourselves, that self-expression and self-identity and understanding ourselves is this huge piece that gets lost with standard tests and boring, empty content that has to be taught through these particular methods, too. So being curious and asking ourselves the questions about how we know what we know and why, right? I get all the time, as somebody who teaches American history and race and visual culture in the U.S. all the time, I hear students are like, how did I not know that? And it's like, that's a great question. Keep asking yourself that question. And the more students ask that question and the more parents ask that question, then we start to have that sort of glitch that's there to basically build a better world because we're constantly asking ourselves, how do I know what I know and what's the evidence? Where can I point to? Can I trace that data point all the way back to its source? There's tons of great media and podcasts who are doing some of that, of looking at, well, where are we getting that statistic that keeps getting thrown around about graduation rates or so forth? And it turns out they made it up when someone did actually do the research and this was specifically about Louisiana schools. Yeah, so I think the being curious question and the looking at other models of what is working, like Brandon Johnson's election in Chicago is a really big deal and a harbinger of a lot of positive change, I think, to come in what people want. And if people don't know about... This is just a brief overview that Brandon Johnson was a public school teacher, became a county controller and involved in government for a long time, is also an activist and an organizer. Paul Ballas running against him is basically a monster who completely decimated public schools in Louisiana, which is why there are literally no public schools left in New Orleans, among other systems, because New Orleans and Louisiana has come up today. So that those two individuals who are both on the Democratic ticket were running against each other in a huge contentious race. It's a super important moment to look at. Oh, we decided that a teacher should be in charge of something. Yeah, so it's a very exciting moment. So, yeah. Thank you. I know this part is coming to a close. I just wanted a couple of quick comments and then a question. One, of course, students. We talked about parents at school board. Students can go to school boards as well. And speak. Two, my cousin. I come from teachers on my mother's side, although she abandoned teaching to sell sporting goods and then become a hairdresser pretty quickly after teaching. I had a couple of years in a one-room schoolhouse. But she, my cousin, my first cousin I'm very close to who is a teacher now retired in the Chicagoland area. She taught Mayor Johnson, so she's so proud and she's just ecstatic as a teacher. But where I'd like to start, kind of picking up on the theme of curiosity, which President Bergman, wherever you are, President Bergman said in your introduction over here. There you are, thank you. And you mentioned Colleen. I love Ezra Klein's podcast. I forget what it's called, whatever, the Ezra Klein. Anyway, he asks his guest to suggest a book or two, or in this case we could be a book, a podcast. Maybe, Lisa, you want to start? What might people read if they're curious, which we hope you all are? Anything that was written by an actual educator. Colleen, you mentioned a podcast already. Sure, yeah, I'm going to keep it specific to this, which is the citations needed. Episode 1, their very first episode, and Episode 166 have excellent research and actual educators and PhDs in education policy interviewed and very succinct effective histories to help us understand why we're at where we're at right now. Citations needed. I'm going to recommend a book called Superior, The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini. It is a great exploration of the history of race science and people's attempts to bring it back again. So if you at all were interested in what I said about race essentialism and the falsehoods that most people unfortunately walk around with, check that book out. I already talked about it. Just go to the American Library Association, check out most challenged books of 2022. And the other thing that I didn't want to point out is that when these books are challenged, they're not in libraries, they're not being recommended. That's also money. Many of those young, I mean, they're young writers and they're creating beautiful work. They need to be read. So that's sort of supporting them that way and it's a huge loss, right? Financial loss that maybe they can't continue to write. So I would just check out that list and read some. I want to read some because they're really new text too. I would recommend this book by Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us and Them. I've taught this class in my intro to political and legal thinking. Actually, Professor Stanley was nice enough to zoom in with our class during COVID. And it's really like a checklist. If this is happening, these are characteristics of fascism and it's all connected. Like the anxiety around like trans issues, those are all part of the fascist playbook. Gender is a big part of the white supremacy we should understand. But gender also, you know, I mean, if you look at Berlin, right, before Hitler's rise to power, it was a wonderful queer landscape, a very experimental city. So all of this, the anti-cosmopolitanism, the anti-trans, anti-gay anxiety about abortion. And fascism is an ideology, meaning it fits facts and science into its worldview. And I think that's the concern that I have is about ideology, you know. We know sex ed, if you want teens not to get pregnant, comprehensive sex ed, right? If you want teens to get pregnant, abstinence. And yet, we don't go with the science. So that's the other piece. And the ideology can really only be broken down at the granular level in all of our conversations and the work that we do ourselves. Great book by Stanley, which I've read with our next door neighbor. He and I read it together and talked. Retired federal prosecutor. And I would recommend two books by historian Johann Neem and N-E-E-M. One is a terrific book called Democracy Schools. It's short. It's accessible. It's about public education in this country from basically the revolution, certainly up until the truth, I think the Civil War. And the other one, his other more recent book, is What's the Point of College? And to me, the point of school, the point of college, the point of education is this, right? To be able to do this and to disagree, but also to work collectively at the same time towards some public good, knowledge is under attack in this country in ways I've never seen in my lifetime of 69 years. Democracy, I would say, as well. Schools, what's left of them, right? It's a very scary moment for a lot of us, but it's also a moment when we can do something, right? As we're trying to suggest. And I guess that's a nice transition to what Professor Gannon will say next, Yuri. Thank you, awesome colleague. Well, so much for this great discussion. I loved that in the course of our conversation, we were able to take a topic like, you know, how do we value expertise and balance that with parental involvement, community involvement, and kind of a nuance, something that seems, you know, maybe initially pretty straightforward and then bring in all of these other nuances and complications around that. And I love the fact that what this conversation brings out to me is that everything is a work in progress, right? A curriculum is a work in progress. A school board is a work in progress. Parenting and raising children is a work in progress. We're all individually works in progress and I think it's important to have kind of two things in mind at the same time when I think about public schools, gratitude, right? Acknowledgement of all of the hard work, the successes of like the public education system in the U.S., like be grateful for all of the things that it has provided and is continuing to provide while all of this, at the same time embracing opportunities for growth and acknowledging that there's much more work to be done and kind of, you know, that growth kind of... we need to embrace it as individuals, as societies, as systems and so holding those two things in mind I think are really important. I want to thank the panel for this great discussion and then we can move on to thinking about how to take all this intellectual growth that I hope you've experienced in turning it into action. So one more round of applause please. We've thought about a lot of things. We've heard some discussion. We've heard questions. We've heard responses. So what are we going to do, right? Because this day is also about taking action. I want to acknowledge that taking action can look like a lot of different things. And so in order to help attendees kind of envision what are some possibilities. This is certainly not exhaustive. We have some items in the printed program. There's suggestions and you'll see, you know, that they're kind of broken up into kind of the easier things that you can do fairly quickly and then it goes all the way down to things like run for school board. So there's a kind of increasing level of action that you can take. I also want to acknowledge that just being here today and listening and engaging with your brain is taking an action, right? You moved your body to a place for a specific purpose. And then also that last bit, just vote, right? Get informed, vote in every level of election that you can. It all matters. So in addition to that though, we wanted to actually carve out some time and space in our, you know, our time together to create some space for action because it is important. You'll notice that you came on your seats. There were a couple of cards with some options for taking action like right now. So one of the things that you can do is, you know, in terms of those sets of action options is like sharing information with friends and family and things like that. But we're also going to have a moment for you all to kind of talk to one another and think about what action items you're going to, you know, contemplate taking today or do right now. Because peace-building happens on a personal and relational level. And even things that maybe, you know, you can't take certain types of actions right now, three, five, ten years down the road, all of this stuff is there waiting for you to kind of be at a place where you can take some of those more involved actions. So we have these two action options, these two cards that you can consider doing right now. You can write a thank you note, right, to someone on campus or someone off campus who's either working on issues of education or has supported your own education. People oftentimes work really, really hard on this and very, very rarely get thanked and gratitude, thanking people. That actually is a really important thing. Sometimes the work really grinds you down and thanking people, like getting thanks from people is actually the thing that keeps you going. So that's one of the things that you can do. And the other thing that you can do, and so that's your second card, is to provide your input to a legislator or actually there's, so on one side it says give your input. So these are a couple of bills that are actually kind of in the works right now on the level of Congress. And so you can follow the directions and you have this handout that helps you communicate with your legislators. And I just want to note that, you know, that sometimes people say like, oh well what's the point in contacting my legislator that either aren't going to listen to me or they already are on my side and they're going to vote the way I want them to vote. There are literally people whose job it is to track how many people contact, like write, email, call on a particular issue and they just like tally it up, right? And so by contacting your legislator, if you have called and they say, oh like 20 people called about this issue or sent an email about this issue or texted about this issue, then it kind of like, you know, rises on the radar of the legislator to be like oh well my constituents said this. I guess I better follow that or maybe I better rethink my position because then they won't reelect me, right? So it is actually an important thing to do and sometimes that, you know, we kind of take that for granted and we're not practiced in that. So we made it really easy for you to contact your legislators on that one side of the purple side of that handout and then on the back side you can go use your phone to access the QR codes to find out more information and things like that, okay? And you can contact them about like anything that you care about and so that practice is important. So I wanna take like just a couple of minutes, right? So I'm gonna set a timer for like five minutes and then give you some time to turn to a partner, talk about what you've heard, introduce yourself if you don't already know each other, share like, you know, what's your main takeaway from this and then like what's the action you're gonna do and so, you know, you can do something really fast and then just do it, just do it and then you can forget about it and be like I did something, okay? Go, five minutes. Stay, don't go away. There's prizes if you turn in your cards. Don't leave 30 seconds and we'll come back together. So let's come back together for just a minute. Thanks so much for engaging. That was in response to students, student feedback who said, you know, we learn about all these amazing things. We wanna actually like do something. What do we do with all of this? So I hope that was impactful for you. As you leave today, student hosts are gonna be at tables at the bottom of the stairs. If you sent a text message to a friend about this morning, stop at the tables on your way out to get your name and the drawing for some prizes. If you have a thank you note that you wrote out, then drop that off. We'll email it, we'll mail it for you and then you can get entered in the drawing. If you wrote to your legislator and need help doing that, then you can stop by the tables and a student will either help you. You can show them that you did it and then you can get entered into the drawing as well. The prizes are bookmark gift cards, a plant from Traverse to Sioux Garden Center because we want to grow your ideas and action and democracy. A final survival basket, right? Because you gotta take care of your immediate needs as well as, you know, think about how you're gonna be in the world. And of course a few banned books. So please be sure to stop off and drop off your action items. And before we go, I wanna say a really special thank you to the Sponberg family for your generous and ongoing support of the Mayday Peace Conference. This is a thing that we do that not everyone does and it exists because people thought about it, funded it, dedicated their time and energy to it. So I wanna say a quick thank you to them again. There's a new Caroline Bell that's been composed for today in honor of the Mayday Conference and the Sponberg family. And so that's gonna premiere at 11.45 in front of Christ Chapel. You're all invited to show up after this event and be there for the kind of dedication and the unveiling of that. If you have somewhere else to be, then just perk up your ears at 11.45 and take a listen to that. I wanna thank the Planning Committee for Mayday Conference, which includes Michael Sponberg, Bob Larson Taylor from the Marketing Office. She's my personal kind of like everything therapist for all things events related and more. And students especially, Emma Anderson, Harriet Anderson, and Ellie Hartman. It's been really, really wonderful working with you all. So many thanks to everyone who prepared the food and refreshments and got everything organized here with regard to technology and the setup of Alumni Hall. And a special thanks to our panelists, our faculty panelists, and Lisa Dombowski for your keynote remarks. Greg Castor for moderating. Jill Locke, Katie Lehigh, Sanhe Lee and Colleen Stockman for agreeing to join us on this experiment. This is not an event that we've done in this particular kind of way for Mayday before. This morning has been recorded and will be archived on the Mayday Conference website. Please share the link with anyone who missed this opportunity today. And finally thank you all for taking the time in your day to be together as we continue to reaffirm the value of a liberal arts education and the role it plays in creating a more just and peaceful world. I know they can seem really big and daunting, right? Creating a more just and peaceful world. But that begins with relationships and communities. So I want you to take just like a minute, just a second to look around. And really look at who's here and also who stayed till the very end, right? This is our community, right? So already by being here, you've participated in the strengthening of our community and inspiring it to work for that more just and peaceful world. We do it bit by bit, individual by individual, community by community. We hope this has been a meaningful experience for you all, as meaningful as it has been for all of us. We'll be doing a teaching next year for Mayday. And so if you have any ideas, send them in now. We have ideas that people sent in from before. Look for a campus communication when we explore what that next topic is going to be. And don't forget to stop by the tables and do your action piece and get your name in the drawing. Thank you so much for coming.