 So good morning, everybody. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the director of P20 Initiatives, and we're very excited to have you with us. We've got a great panel today, really diverse, pun fully intended because it's an accurate statement to really help us address our topic today, which is equity and practice, connecting learners with their schools and colleges and universities. And so again, as we always try and do, we're taking a look at this across both the early childhood through 12th grade and the post-secondary settings and wanting to consider a range of issues. And so we've got a great panel today, two high school students and one post-secondary leader to talk about these issues and really help us focus our attention on what all of us as educators and leaders need to be doing to take action in these areas. And we're excited to have you joining us live. We will be posting this video. So it's shareable with everybody in their busy schedules, but those of you that are here right now have the advantage of being able to interact and ask questions and so forth. So I'm going to have our panelists introduce themselves. Jocelyn, I'm gonna start with you if you can tell us who you are and what you do and where, and then we'll move on to our high school students. All right. Good morning, everyone, or hello, everyone. So my name is Jocelyn Santana. I am the director for social justice education at Northern Illinois University and Jason and I are colleagues. So thanks for having me here. So we're really glad to have Jocelyn. I have had the opportunity to learn from Jocelyn and her teammates as a student and as a learner and be a part of communities of practice that they set up and some really cutting edge work going on with that team. And so we're excited to have Jocelyn here to share that team's collective knowledge. And now we've got two high school students who have each introduced themselves. Cherry, will you go ahead and start? Hi, there. I'm Cherry Goodamunla. I'm a senior at Palatine High School and I'm glad to be here today. Thank you. Sam? Hi, my name is Sam from Palatine High School, a senior in Palatine High School. I'm really happy you guys have me here. Cherry and Sam, I'm gonna kick off with you guys. Can you tell us, just get us started by telling us one thing. It's obviously been such an unusual high school experience that you've had with the shutdown occurring in spring a couple of years ago and then last year in and out of school and now this year back in school with our masks on but things going pretty normally with activities. What's one thing you really like about school? It could be a class, an activity, a teacher, whatever you want. Cherry, do you wanna go first? Sure. One thing I think I definitely missed during the pandemic and quarantine school and online school was the sense of community. I think the second that we got back into the year and in person, even with the masks and the different regulations, it was just the people that I missed hanging out with and having a sense of community and having a teacher to go to and having friends and students and peers to help me and et cetera, yeah. Awesome. Yeah, Sam? Adding on to what Cherry said, one thing I really missed so much was socializing with my football teammates, my wrestling team, my teachers, especially I really missed the teachers. I missed like, because I'm a visual learner and I need to be there. I can't just stay on Zoom and just watch people teach. I need to be there in person and it's just really great to really be back and learn and be a part of this great community like Cherry said. All right, we're gonna stick with our high school students for just a second. What do you think students in general want, teachers and professors to know about what makes you feel most included or comfortable in a school or in a classroom environment? I feel like one thing where, when compared to like Zoom school is this, even when we're during our passing period, so forgive me if you hear any noises. But yeah, so feeling included and comfortable in the classroom isn't always just like calling on a student and participation. It's also having the opportunities that we didn't get to have during the pandemic, which I've looked like, like going in for help and having a sense of tutoring and like asking questions without feeling awkward and et cetera. So I think how to feel the most included is just to make sure that your students are one getting the most out of their opportunities and it's not just staying in the classroom, but that those opportunities expand outside of the classroom as well. Yeah, I didn't know, in my opinion, I think every student needs different amount of attention. Some people need more attention than others. And if you're a student really needing that attention and you just feel like excluded from the class, no one that's asking you any questions, you're too socially awkward to raise your hand and ask a question and you don't feel like you're learning, I feel like it might be very difficult for them. I think teachers should go up to the students and ask, talk to them, get to know them. It's really important to get to know your student because once you can talk one on one, you get to know how they learn, maybe they're visual learners, maybe they can learn on their own. Some people could easily, for example, in my math class, some people easily could learn everything about calculus, all the rules and everything. And me, I'm just here, I need special attention. I need to learn and learn again. And I need more explanation than others. And it's just great if the teachers could engage with us and get to know us better as individuals. So let's stick with that. What are some of the ways that you feel like teachers best get to know you better as individuals? Think of an example of a teacher who does that and tells us what that looks like and feels like or what that shouldn't look like and shouldn't feel like. I think first establishing that personal relationship with your students is really important. And what that could look like is, well, just recently, my math teacher, Ms. Considine here, she's known for being very personable and the people, her students around her, we love her very much. And because she's in an empath where like, when it comes to assignments or a tough schedule or something, she works with us and she makes sure that we don't miss out on any opportunities, even though we might not be able to get them in the classroom during a specific time. Or when we're just having a bad day, just making sure to like, check up on us. She's one of those teachers that if you do not always have a smile on your face, she notices the second that something's off, which I think is so, so cool and awesome. And we just kind of, because of that, our whole class last week wrote her letters and surprised her with it. And just to show like a token of appreciation and she really loved it, we really loved it. So yeah, just creating those personal relationships and not being afraid to make a mistake with your students because your students are human just like you, teachers are human just like students. And so we understand, like if anything, we're teenagers, so we understand when we make mistakes, it's not gonna be perfect 100% of the time. But if you're willing to work with us, we're willing to work with you. Definitely. And in my case, from my perspective, I would say activities and just presenting yourself, some people don't like presenting or saying anything about themselves, but at least asking, how was your weekend? What are you doing this weekend? So just to know their schedule, just to know their time, are they working? Do they have work, family issues and all of these things? And you get to know them better. And I feel like those activities and those questions, little questions, little things you might not even notice, some people might not notice, we students notice it. We know like, oh, this teacher cares about me, she cares about what I'm doing this weekend. And you know, my plan, my schedule, and she actually really wants to get to know me. So that's really exciting. There was a lot of great information there for us to unpack as educators. Those were really, really detailed answers. Thank you guys. Jocelyn, I know you're just listening to those answers with the rest of us, but as you think about those and think about what your team does both formally through workshops and programs and informally in consulting and conversation, what resonated there? What are the things that you really wanna pull out of that that align with what the team does at NIU? Yep, thank you. I would probably say, well, fantastic. I appreciate those very thoughtful answers that you all provided. I think that that's great. And I think that that's important for us as educators to hear. And so there's a lot of authenticity in those responses. I think a lot of what we have focused on in our education, for example, we went into the Kalp School District and worked for eight weeks with a group of selected individuals that I think they were self-selected if I remember that correctly. Individuals, educators, psychologists, administrators, principals, right? The scope of educators for our school district. And we worked on social justice education and competency. A lot of what we talked about was thinking about how we work towards creating inclusive environments for our student populations or for their student populations, which included looking at not just race, but also looking at all the other isms that may be in fact, or other identities, gender, sexual orientation, ability, access along those lines, I think are very relevant and important topics when we're talking about inclusion because inclusion really is also creating and working towards that sense of belonging for our student populations. And even for ourselves as professionals, right? Because we got to model that as well. So that's a lot of what our education and our training has been actually with educators in the K through 12 settings, but also within higher education is to look at, okay, what does this look like and how can we be equitable in our distributions for our resources? I think that that's an important understanding. So one of the things you've just shared, a couple of things I wanna call it, and they probably go in different directions, Jocelyn, but number one, you talked about the authenticity of the answers. We just heard from Jerry and from Sam and I wanna, I'm interested in hearing more about the importance of authenticity and how your team approaches helping faculty, staff, educators when you're working at K-12 setting, be appropriate and authentic and use that as a way of getting at issues of inclusion or becoming more inclusive. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so there's the Institute of Belonging and actually there is a public link when Dr. John Powell came and spoke in DeKalb. And so this Institute of Belonging shares a framework or a model that talks about the human circle and how it's important for us to come into spaces and recognize our humanities. And it's funny because we actually had a, we had a professional development session with maybe 20, 30 folks yesterday and we were talking about specifically authenticity and belonging and how that feeds into inclusion, right? But a lot of this also has to be unpacked and unlearned as professionals as well for us to model these vulnerabilities appropriately, vulnerabilities with our students. But we have to also be comfortable ourselves in taking that step and modeling that with each other as professionals to professionals. And so once we start recognizing our own humanity and bringing that to our spaces with us, I think that that's an important first step, not just for our students that are observing us but also for ourselves in that healing and inclusion practice. And so again, if you get an opportunity, take a look at that framework or that model of the human circle. They have really great resources around it but that's really starts to foster this authenticity that we're talking about. I think also other approaches to authenticity happen when there's an approach on shared power, responsibility, shared leadership. When that power is shared with students, when there are common standards that are set within classrooms that guide conversations in the spaces so that students can come and show themselves the most authentically as possible, all of that starts feeding into this building of an inclusive community. That's awesome. We'll come back to that concept of shared power in just a minute and for all three of our panelists, we're gonna go way off script when we do that but hitting on some really, really important instructional issues that I know are relevant to lots of people in our live audience and are relevant to a lot of the instructional work that the Illinois P20 Network does. Jocelyn, one more question for you right now. I wanna go back to, you talked about the work we need to do ourselves as professionals, whether I'm a first grade teacher, a seventh grade teacher, community college professor, higher ed faculty or staff member, a four year university faculty or staff member, what advice would you give leaders in any of those organizations about how to take the right steps and not misstep but to create safe spaces for those conversations to happen productively and also to lead the action. And so tell us about, I know that's a big area, the work of your team is helping people move through that. So walk us through maybe some offering us some guide rails to help us get there as leaders in a way that's as positive as possible for everybody. Yeah, absolutely. So here's, it's important that there is self-reflection and I think honesty with ourselves as people, right? Because oftentimes in the work that I do when it deals with cultural competence or developing competencies, social justice education, sense of belonging, inclusion, all of these concepts, there's always this, there's this line that exists of well, I'm not those individuals, I'm not that individual that has those extreme perspectives or extreme views that are exclusionary. And so sometimes it can be very challenging to see yourself as a contributor to sustaining systems of inequity or participating in it some way, shape or form. And I think that that's really difficult sometimes to grasp because it may go against our own values, beliefs, norms, attitudes that we hold for ourselves that we think we have, right? And I oftentimes when I talk about this, I think it's really important to approach this from a place of understanding and grace for ourselves and that's this humanity piece, right? I often have to do this work for myself and think about what beliefs I hold, what values I hold and where that stops and others have that right to also have their beliefs values and for those beliefs and values to be respected. And so where I often share with folks is for individuals to start with that self-awareness to understand yourself, understand how you have been socialized not only as an individual but also socialized as a professional. We have both socializations that exist, right? You were exposed in your bachelor's, master's, whatever level of degree education you have to philosophies, beliefs. And in time, those philosophies and beliefs have evolved and changed to be more conscious and aware. But I think starting with your self-awareness so what beliefs do you hold and how those beliefs can show up in the classroom, show up in your engagement with students is really important. I often like to share a story and I'm not trying to go too long here, Jason but I like to share a story and I think that this is really interesting. So when I talk about identities, I identify as Latina, I identify as a mom, a social justice advocate. I have my Christian belief. Jocelyn has frozen up. We'll see if she can come back so we can hear the rest of that story. Well, we wouldn't all be together if it weren't for the technology. So thank goodness for the technology but as we can see, it's not perfect yet. So when Jocelyn comes back, we'll let her dive into that. One of the things that Jocelyn talked about was extending grace and allowing people going through the process to be human and one of the things I've seen in my own experiences personally and with people around me is allowing yourself to drop your level of almost self-defensiveness and to be able to say, yeah, I make these mistakes even though I believe in diversity and inclusion and equity and the rights of all individuals and the power of all people, all of my students to be successful, there are still things I'm doing for a variety of reasons that are inhibiting those beliefs from coming to fruition. And so we heard Cherry talk about that a little bit before, earlier when she was talking about teachers when they make a mistake saying, hey, I made a mistake here and that can be really powerful. I wanna go back to Cherry and Sam right now and I don't want you to name names here, that's for sure but can you think of a time and if you can't, I suppose that's a great indicator of how things are in your school but can you think of a time where either an individual teacher or a school-wide program has taken place where you knew the goal was equity and inclusion but it didn't really connect with you. It felt a little artificial or it may have even actually made you uncomfortable and had the opposite effect of what you knew it was trying to do. Have you experienced that? And if so, can you tell us about what that was like? What happened? What it was? Cause I think that also helps us know how to avoid those things. And I see Jocelyn's coming back in so we'll come back to Jocelyn in just a minute for that important story. But Sam, Cherry, go ahead and if you can tell us about if you've experienced one of those well-intentioned mistakes on the part of a teacher or a system. Say, do you want to start? I'm still gathering my thoughts. Sorry, that was a fail. That's okay. I just wanted to point out I can't think of something like a situation right now but I just wanted to point out, as humans we're constantly learning and the teachers can't be perfect all the time when we need them to be perfect. And I think a lot of students need to understand that. We're just asking them to do their best, do the little things, learn about us and all that. But over time it's like we need you to be better and learn actually. But we're all human beings and eventually we make mistakes but I don't personally, I don't put my teachers to such expectations that oh, you need to be perfect. Like you can't make any mistakes all the time because I can reason with them like, oh, if you can make mistakes, that's okay. But personally there hasn't been a lot of situation in Powhatan High School that I think I wasn't involved like anything was wrong or it didn't feel natural or it didn't feel, I just felt excluded. I don't think I've ever experienced any of that in Powhatan High School. Great, Terry? Yeah, to kind of go off what Sam said, like thankfully in my last four years I haven't had many like experiences like that with teachers. But last year of 2020, I worked with our district's equity team and that was a mix of students, faculty members, parents and other district board members. And they all had their own experiences. And what I think we could really pull from that is like it's not always, the effect isn't always gonna stay in the school. It always somehow leads outside of the classroom and it impacts our students and it impacts just their personal lives, their relationships, their families. And even though it could be something minuscule, even for like a minute or something, a comment, a look or a tease or a joke that is very surface level at the time could build up and eventually lead to like more of a personal experience that students don't expect and eventually parents don't expect to, families. And it goes into their professional lives too. It carries how people put work in like into their passions and their goals. And I think that's super important. I do have more like positive experiences and more helpful experiences, but yeah, that's my answer to that question. Just to add them to that, teachers are expected to be professionals to make the least mistake they can. I think I experienced this more amongst students and this unfairness more amongst my fellow students and my teachers, because my teachers, they always try to learn but this fellow students, I don't, a lot of people really don't care or they just don't wanna learn or yeah, I don't really experience this among my teachers. So shout out to them. So let's come back to your peers, but before I do that, I wanna point out two things that have been a theme now and what Sam said, and we've heard them in Cherry's comments as well. And I think Jocelyn's talked about them as well. One is we're not going to be perfect and Sam's telling us on at least from his perspective that students will show teachers at all levels grace for that process. So that's really great to hear, but then on the flip side of that, there should be this trend of getting better over time as well. And the second thing that we heard is about getting to know us as individuals, getting to know one another as individuals. That's really interesting because I once worked in a place where they, and this was a long time ago, and the big buzzword at that time was multiculturalism, was what we talked about in ways that today we talk, we use the phrase diversity, equity and inclusion. And one of the things that multiculturalism tended to slide into was a focus on food and holidays and those are all very important things. There's no question from the day-to-day of what we're eating to the ritual of important holidays over a year or events in a lifetime. But one of the things that was brought up in those conversations that really stuck with me and that I thus far in my career have always found to be true is this quote, families, culture exists at the family level. And this is why you can have good friends of the same broad culture and linguistic background as you, but you go to their house for, I use the very secular example of Thanksgiving and you'll go to the house, someone's house for Thanksgiving who has a similar background to you and you'd be like, why do you guys do this? Why are you eating this? And because those differences can be rooted not just in macro cultures, but really the micro culture that exists at the family level. And so without getting to know people as individuals that becomes impossible to really understand. Now on the flip side, whether you're talking to a high school teacher with 165 students a day or you're talking to a college faculty member who might be teaching a class of 165 or more in a lecture setting, yeah, that there may be some challenges there, but to the degree we can, excuse me, get to know people as individuals, I think those are important points that I've brought out. Jocelyn, I would like to bop back to you if you can to tell us that story and then we'll come back to Cherry and Sam to talk about your peers because that's come up and I think that's helpful for all of us to hear. So Jocelyn, can you give us another shot? We were hearing about how the different ways you identified and the last one we heard was Christian and then unfortunately the technology did its thing. Yeah, so hopefully I will stick around this time, but we'll see. So exploring your identities and the self-awareness piece is really important. And one of the things I often talk about is in the self-awareness moment. So a couple of years ago when the Women's March happened, when it originally happened, I had grabbed my kids and I said, okay, we're gonna go to this Women's March. We made posters, they were there. I had a conversation with them on why we're participating. And I used the power of social media to show and go Facebook Live and all of a sudden people are looking out all of my interactions that's happening and all these posts are coming up. And particularly the posts weren't affirming posts. They were more like, I can't believe you're there. I can't believe you're supporting this cost. You clearly do not value human life. And so it was really interesting to be in that intersection and decide how I wanted to respond or not respond. And I decided I was gonna go ahead and respond rather than taking a very hard perspective on it. I chose to infuse a little bit of humor and get a point across at the same time. And so I said, oh, you're right. Clearly I do not value human life here. This is what we're talking about here. So why don't you go ahead and come and grab my kids? What was I thinking? And that was enough of that moment for individuals in my feed and my network to pause and consider what it is that they were thinking, what it is that they were saying. And so I thought that that was interesting. And those are interesting moments of self-awareness, right? It doesn't always have to be this large conversation. It could be exposure and then reflecting on what it is that you are having your own reactions to as you are engaging in something. Yeah, I had a moment like that. I've been lucky enough to visit the homes of students for decades and after doing that for, I don't know, almost about 20 years at the time this happened, I went with colleague to a student's home and it was late on a Friday night. It was about eight o'clock at night and we were sitting in the family's kitchen. And I was offered a bottle of water and I said, oh, very politely and this whole conversation was taking place in Spanish. I said, no, thank you, I'm fine. And when we walked out, my colleague reminded me, everything went well, the conversation went well, the purpose of the visit was successful. I would go on to continue to have relationship with the family, but my colleague reminded me before we were in the car that that was potentially offensive to have not taken that bottle of water I was offered in their kitchen, I was in their home and they wanted to give me that. And for someone who, it was a good moment of self-reflection and it seems so minor, right? But I think to Jocelyn's point, these little moments, I mean, here I am, this is four or five years later and I can feel the moment and smell the moment and picture the moment. And it's these little moments that can continue to build up and we have to be open to those moments. And then to Sam's point, we have to be open to acting differently in those moments but we also have to know individuals to not take a lesson and over-stereotyping. So I guess Jocelyn, how do you help people as they are learning? And particularly people who spent most of their lives with people more like themselves in many ways who are now maybe starting to interact with more and more different people and who are engaging in these kinds of conversations. How do you help them along in that process? What are some of the initial steps so that those initial steps can be positive for them as a learner, as an adult learner, as an educator, so that they wanna keep moving down the road. And so like Sam and Cherry have said, so they don't feel like they're always doing something wrong. Even if their students aren't expecting them to always do it right, they may be expecting themself to always do it right. And what are the steps you take to help learners in this space? Because I think that's important for the people on this call for how we present these topics when we are engaging with colleagues and staff. Yeah, so can you hear me? Okay, so a couple of points here. First is understanding that we need to dismantle the human hierarchy, okay? And I think that this is a really important conversation because I often start with the question, when is it okay to oppress somebody? And again, I'm not talking about intentionality here, although sometimes that can happen, but I'm also talking about those unconscious moments where we are oppressing somebody or using our position or using our power to be oppressive. And I think that that's an important moment of reflection. And so it's doing a lot of self-reflection on again, what values you hold and what beliefs you hold. I've done training where folks are like, oh yeah, I'm here to dismantle racism. I'm here to dismantle sexism. I'm good with that. Oh, LGBTQ? Oh no, I don't go there. I can't support that. That's against my belief system. And so evaluating this human hierarchy and dismantling it is really an important part. And so that's the first step is being able to look at yourself and understanding what values you hold. And if there are values that can be oppressive in nature, how is it that you evaluate that? And sometimes those things are very difficult to identify because we start going into our unconscious bias areas. And it's those ideas or thoughts that may come up in the back of your head that you may not necessarily vocalize, but they're there. And so spending time in those thoughts when they do pop up or writing them is really important. That's the authenticity of working on yourself. The other aspect too is understanding or as you're working towards cultural competency for yourself is understanding that there is a broad, there is a fantastic model called the cultural competence continuum. It's an older model back in the 80s. I think it was created, but I still use it. I find it to be very, very relevant to today. And in this cultural competence continuum model, it speaks on culturally destructiveness in capacity, evasiveness, pre competence, competence and proficiency. And the beauty of this model is that at any point in time you can work or be in the transformational side of this model, which is the pre competence of proficiency in one particular area. But as you are moving through the system or well, two things, moving through yourself in this continuum and identifying things, you can identify that, oh, maybe over here, I may be operating at the destructive level and I need to maybe address that. So it's a student that comes up to you and maybe is having a conversation about a matter and your responses, yeah, we're not going to address that, that's not, what is the policy here? Rather than taking a perspective of looking at the student identifying with empathy and then being able to identify, okay, is this a student issue or is this a policy practice, institutional school issue? And so the continuum works in two ways. One, it works for you as an individual, but it also works for you to evaluate the system. So your education, your school, your district and being able to look at, okay, are there policies or practices that are existing that are creating inequitable avenues or experiences for our students? And so again, I think that those are some of the ways that we look at things to start maybe impacting change. Obviously microaggressions is one of those kind of areas or spaces for conversations, but when it comes to microaggressions, oftentimes there's this understanding of, well, it's subtle slights and insults, but it's not really in your face. There are different types or forms of microaggressions and within those different types or forms, I think it's important to understand them to be able to do appropriate interventions. So are we dealing with a microassault which is the most in your face? And I think in time, in these last couple of years we're seeing more microassaults happen. And so that will inform the strategy and the intervention versus microinsults, which are the smaller slights of, oh, you are very pretty for, or you speak very well for those types of insults, right? That requires a different strategy and intervention. And then you have microinvalidations and microinvalidations are one of those examples if you're interacting with someone and they say, you know, I feel like I'm being treated unfairly in this class. I feel like I'm being graded more harshly or whatever it is. And the invalidation comes in. Are you sure? Is that really what's going on or are you just interpreting it that way? Again, those are moments where it's not necessarily intentional by an individual, but that reinforces harm, that reinforces pain. Folks that have been historically marginalized or have identities that are marginalized, they recognize patterns, you know? And so taking that step and opportunity to empathize and to be able to maybe work through that rather than just automatically shifting, well, the policy is this or well, the practice is this or well, no, I know that person. I don't think that that person would be treating you that way. I think that those are important avenues. So as you can see, there's a lot of different ways that you can engage with this, but I think it's a matter of making the decision as to being conscious of those unconscious moments. So we're gonna shift gears a little bit here and I've got a question for all of you. I'm gonna start with our high school students on this one because a lot of this work to solve this problem that I'm about to bring up is taking place in high schools. We talked on our last panel about the teacher shortage, which is truly a P20 issue. We have teacher shortages at all levels and the only way we'll solve the teacher shortage is with the involvement of K-12 or early childhood through 12th grade and post-secondary together. So one of the things we wanna do is not only solve the teacher shortage and ensure we have the very best teachers possible, but we also want to ensure that our teacher candidates reflect who their students are in as many different ways as possible. So what ideas do the three of you have and starting with Cherry and Sam, what ideas do you have to best increase the diversity of the teacher candidate pool when we think about traditional current high school college students to help us match the tremendous diversity of the people of Illinois? And then Jocelyn will have you jump in and obviously if there's ideas from the audience on this topic which affects everybody in this group today, that would be great. So Cherry, Sam, how can we increase the diversity of our teacher candidates? Well, first I think like in all honesty, it's a give it like a personal level. This year, we have a lot of new teachers in our school or at least not teachers, but TAs and like faculty and assistant principals. And we have like, I wanna share one of my black friends, he was so excited cause we finally have our first like black assistant principal. And he's just like, wait, Mr. Smith is black? I didn't know that, that's so cool. And it's like little things like that that I just wanted to bring out because it's such a important thing to have. And to reiterate the question is, I think like when looking at pools like this, us students, we don't really get to have a say and who gets to be hired, right? But I think now when it comes to backgrounds and culture, the newer generations like the millennials and like a little older than that little younger people who are just now graduating college or getting their degree come from a lot more backgrounds than normal because for example, like an Asian culture, you don't see a lot of Asian teachers because they either are forced to go into fields that are stereotypical or fields that don't really work with people as often. Whereas it's like, whether it's educators, whether it's psychiatrists, therapists, et cetera. So maybe diving into like more younger generations and looking for people from different backgrounds and comparing the diversity of your school to your faculty, like do those two things match? Do they, is the ratio equal? Like if a person is more inclined to have a counselor or a teacher with a similar background to them, do they have that opportunity? Do they have that ability to ask specifically, like can I have this teacher for this class? Because I know they teach this and I think they could really help me not just within the classroom and curriculum-wise, but we could really match on a personal level, which also helps with the prior topics that we talked about. So that's my thinking there. On my side, I have two points. I'll say number one, teachers should be better teachers. They're nicer, and like I said, little things towards, especially students of color. I think they need more attention because a lot of people have been through different traumas at home and they don't really get the opportunities that everyone gets. And if you become better teachers, if you wanna emulate what they see, the good things they see and people would like to envy, if I see a good teacher that I really like what she does, I would wanna be more like her. And a lot of the teachers we have here, the younger teachers, they love their teachers in the past. And they're like, you know what? I wanna be more like them. And a lot of young people are teachers right now. Like one of my coaches, he just started teaching. He went to this school, he's a math teacher. He said he loved his math teacher. So he wanted to be more like him. And he became a math teacher to help others. Like he was helped. He was helped, his teacher had really helped them. So he really wanted to help others and give back. And number two is just create more opportunities for the students, you know what I mean? And just create more opportunities, you know, college, you know, college is expensive and people need more scholarship, especially people of color. Cause if you're like, what if I go to college? I don't get a job. I don't get a good enough job cause I'm black or this or that. And I can't pay my college loan back. Cause college is a huge risk to people of color. You know, I risk, I reward, you know, you get, let them take the risk and give them higher reward for that, you know? So that's my opinion. I also wanted to add like, if possible bring in people of different backgrounds of experience. So people who have worked in colleges and universities that are of color or are like of similar experience to high school students where they can come in and they have a place at the high school where they have the ability to give those said students similar opportunities that could help them in the future as far as their career, as far as what goals they want to accomplish and diversity training, not just within the faculty and teachers but put the students along with it just like how I was part of the equity team here. I feel like a lot of help and goals can be accomplished if that were to be adopted, not just in the district but in like minuscule amount where it's like in the high schools, in the classrooms and have more meetings like this with teachers and potential teachers. Aslan, what are your thoughts about everything you just heard and how we solve this teacher shortage that we're in across the state? My gosh, my head is like just, I mean, just in this subject matter, we can spend an hour or two. I want to come back and recognize the students that just shared right now because I think what you are sharing is so important and so important to be validated and heard. And thank you so much for sharing that. You're touching on a very, very important subject which is representation and the value and the impact of representation and what historically has happened. And I think it's really interesting when we start talking about education and our students' experiences, particularly students of color. It's so important for us not to ahistoricize what has happened within our educational system with the move of segregation into inclusion and what that happened with the population of teachers that existed historically with teachers of color in particular that weren't that lost opportunities to move into the educational pipeline. And here we are today, right? So we have to give space for that historical element because that's how we start understanding where this representation may or may not be lacking here. And so it's really important, I think that as students are demonstrating interest or demonstrating potential skills that show that they may be interested in the field of education. It's important for that to one be recognized and two to be cultivated. We talk about this in the higher ed setting when our individuals, when students are in our classrooms and we are seeing the potential of a career path, how is it that we are engaging with those students in the classroom? How is it that we are encouraging them in that path and exposing them? I remember having a conversation in one of my previous roles, so I used to work in career services and a sophomore came into the space and was talking to me and saying, you know, I really don't know what to do. I don't know how to engage. I don't really know my career path. And we just had this really great conversation and I said at that moment, do you wanna be an intern in my office? And they were like, what? And I said, yeah, would you like to interview? I'm interviewing. I said, would you like to interview and see if you would be a candidate for being an intern in my office? And this individual was talking about maybe pursuing higher education. No, not at the time they weren't. They didn't even consider higher education as a profession. And then I exposed them and I started talking to them. I said, you understand that this is a field, right? This is an area of study. You can get your master's degree in two years and go into higher education. Oh, what? And so it's that awareness, that exposure, that conversation, that investment, that cultivating that brings our students back into these spaces. And I think that that's an important conversation to have. I think impact in how that is done is also really important. We see in the national media what's happening with conversations with critical race theory and how that is being pushed back on or the rewriting of our history or decolonizing our educational experiences and curriculum so that there is more representation other than how maybe folks of color have been represented within our history. And so those are some points of conversation that I think have long-term impact. If you're an administrator, it's how we are approaching where we are posting our job descriptions. How are we reaching out? Are there avenues? In higher education, there are job search engine sites that are specifically for folks of color. So there needs to be a lot of intentionality behind the cultivating of individuals into our education roles. And then there's intentionality behind how we are recruiting and attracting diverse candidates into our areas of work. And then how you support them once they get there. So I'm gonna do just a quick tieback to something that was said earlier by Jocelyn and something that the students have alluded to and an advertisement for the last panel of our fall meeting next Friday morning, which is focused on career pathways. And obviously the career pathways work is tied to this, but at the core of all of the instructional work that we do out of the Center for P20 Engagement, so both through the Illinois P20 Network as well as through NIU STEAM is the notion of authentic learning. And Jocelyn brought up earlier the phrase shared power and shared power should look like a whole bunch of different things in the classroom, including what instruction looks like. I mean, one of my favorite educational professors of days gone by is the late Seymour Saracen. And Seymour Saracen really spoke to this, but also spoke to how principles and teachers interact and how students and teachers interact. There's parallels there. And we know the best schools are schools where teachers are empowered to be part of the decision-making processes. And at higher ed, it tends to be formalized through all kinds of shared governance processes, but really within the classroom, it's important too. And we'll see that in next week's career pathways work. And a lot of the really advanced career pathways work that's taking place across the state. And there's been a fair amount of money that's been devoted to it too, has been focusing on human and public services and the education pathway. So with that, to wrap us up, one last question for each of you. And this is a hard one because you may repeat something you've already said. You may wanna say 50 things because of course there is no shortage of things for us to do. But if there was just one thing you could change about schools, colleges, and universities generally. So like Cherry and Sam, I think the teachers and administrators at Palatine High School that have been working consistently on this work over many years are gonna be pleased to hear your answers to know that while there's probably still work to do, they've made great progress as a result of the time and energy they put in. So we're not talking specifically about your school, but about schools generally, what would be the one thing that each of the three of you would suggest a school, college, or university or an organization that's represented on watching this could do to become more inclusive. Jocelyn, you wanna kick us off? So what can institutions or education systems to do more? What's the one thing that yeah, an organization or institution can do to become more inclusive? I think look at the policies and practices to see where there could be inequitable practices that won't recognize differences of the students. I think that exists. And so those differences aren't just race, right? Those differences are intersectional. And so thinking about how we practice our education is an important process in that inclusion efforts. Cary? One thing I would definitely say is figure out a way to decrease the amount of apathy from students and from the university is because you can't, if everyone thinks that there's nothing to be changed, then there's nothing to be done because it's not just the ignorance, it's also the sense of well, nothing's happened to me specifically, nothing's happened to them. So I don't see a problem. Just because there isn't, you can't specifically see a problem doesn't mean there is one. And so I think try to increase the amount of empathy from your faculty, from your college is a great start to beginning a solution, to beginning how to increase inclusivity because if people don't care, then you're not gonna get anything done, right? So that's one thing. And I had another thing that I forgot. So okay, that's a great one thing. Sam, finish us up. What one thing could organizations do to be more inclusive? I think listening, I know this is very cliche, listen to your students this, but I think it's underrated how much that actually helps the teachers and how almost that could help because I feel like the solution to a lot of problems is in the voice of the students. They need to speak, they need to communicate with you and you need to listen to them. One thing is to speak and communicate and see all the problems they have and how you can help them to fix it. And the other thing is taking action and planning. And that's the hard part, action and planning and bringing stuff together. And individuals might have differences, but you can't always cater to what everybody wants. You really can't satisfy everyone, but try your best to reach that and accepting differences, accepting different cultures, different this, just listening to them, like this is what I want, this is what I need. And really giving it to them and taking action, especially take action, most important. And Jason, I'm gonna jump in here to reinforce that point and reinforce what we talked about earlier. So there's a matrix called the oppression model or oppression matrix. And within that oppression matrix, one of those things that get evaluated is that the individual, societal, institutional levels, attitudes, beliefs, norms, values, right? And so when there's a point that's being made about listening to students and bringing them and including them into the process, that's an effective inclusion strategy. The side that impacts it is the dismissive or the oppressive part comes in when it's saying, oh, you just wait, you think that that's a problem now. That's really not a problem. And dismissing those thoughts that's where you can see hierarchical of human value or oppression come in when youth are dismissed because of that age and experience. But that's really not, may not even be on the table or should not even be on the table. And so I would encourage us to have that self-awareness. So, and as an action oriented point, I will throw out something specific that I think ties this together for organizations at all levels. And Cherry brought it up, but that's to include students and faculty if you're not including them in places already but in hiring processes. That is something that is actually easily done. If people have questions about that offline, I'm happy to discuss what I've done with that in my own career. And as I've got some hiring to do, we have some conversations to probably rehab about maybe reconsidering exactly what our processes look for those positions so that we can make sure we're putting our feet to the fire on it, if you will. So there's just one specific example of a way to try and put something into practice. And obviously listing would be a critical part of having students as part of those processes. So with that, there is so much ground that we could have covered that we did. We never got back to even talking about peers, which would have been so interesting for all of us to hear about. I wanna first thank our panelists. Jocelyn, Cherry, Sam, thank you so much. Hopefully you guys are seeing the thank yous in the comments, your voices were heard and will continue to be heard loudly by lots of people as we share this out. Thank you to those of you who attended today. If you have feedback from me, you are welcome to reach out to me directly at either my email address or ptwinenetwork at niu.edu. And I would welcome your feedback on either next steps or things that we can do better moving forward. And I would just remind everybody that we have one more panel next week with two school districts implementing the career pathways work, one that's probably the most experienced district with it in the state at this point and the other that's in the process of implementing right now and we'll have some students earning endorsements this spring, hopefully. And so join us next Friday morning at nine for that. Cherry, Sam, Jocelyn, thank you all again. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you for having me.