Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) is piloting a series of civil discourse lessons in four schools, including the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) starting last month. The six class-length lessons, developed by education nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves and adapted by BCPS, are an expansion to the school district’s advisory curriculum.
The lessons aim to train students in spotting bias and discrimination, and how to have conversations about sensitive topics.
The pilot comes months after the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) filed a federal civil rights complaint last July accusing City Schools of failing to address “egregious and persistent discrimination and harassment” against Jewish students.
Four of the schools cited in the ADL’s complaint – BSA, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Bard High School, and The Mount Washington School – are the only schools piloting the Facing History program.
However, the lessons were not necessarily a direct response to the ADL, according to BCPS Equity Office director Tracey Durant. City Schools had considered implementing civil discourse training into high school advisory before the complaint was filed.
“We were looking to revise the advisory programming, and certainly the schools that decided to do this pilot and schools in the ADL complaint, there was an alignment between those schools. We chose schools very intentionally to do the pilot,” said Durant.
Social studies faculty at BSA were notified of the lessons this past fall, and attended a training with staff from the other participating schools in early January. BSA families were notified of the classes in a letter from Principal Roz Cauthen on January 21.
The letter described the lessons as “an opportunity for students to explore critical skills in navigating identity, stereotypes, discrimination, and hate speech in thoughtful, meaningful ways,” and attributed their presence at BSA to “the more intensive support our faculty and staff are receiving following incidents that stakeholders have reported at our school.”
On the incidents mentioned in the letter, Cauthen said, “There was a swastika found in the boys’ bathroom in the basement, and then also there was this Anti-Defamation League lawsuit. BSA was one of the schools that was named in that lawsuit. So those events were some of the factors.”
Cauthen also said she didn’t push back on the program because she “didn’t look at it as if we were being punished” by BCPS as a result of the ADL complaint. “I really looked at it as if this allows us another opportunity to engage teachers and students around how to talk about difficult things,” she said.
For the teachers, integrating six lessons into their curriculums mid-school year proved difficult, especially given the academic scheduling issues at BSA.
“It’s been really hard, especially here at BSA, because we’re about to hit [BSA’s annual fundraising gala] Expressions where that’s going to be a drain on instruction time and homework time. I have to take out some research and project work from the second semester,” said history teacher Megan Bremer.
BSA’s teachers were given flexibility as to when they would run the lessons, and both Bremer and another history teacher, Meg Grouzard, opted to run them at the top of semester two.
“In my class, we’d just discussed authoritarianism and how authoritarians gain and maintain power in the early 20th century, including things like the Holocaust, so the lessons fit within my curriculum relatively well,” said Grouzard.
But the lessons were quickly derailed, first by the weeklong break during Winter Storm Fern, and subsequently by a burst pipe in BSA’s basement that led to virtual schooling for two weeks.
Grouzard had already run four of the lessons before the burst pipe, and she felt the final lessons – about hate crimes and inclusive language – were “a really important conversation to have when I can see people and not black squares [on virtual meetings].”
By the time the sixth lesson was completed, a month had passed since the first was introduced to Bremer and Grouzards’ classes – but this wasn’t far off from City Schools’ plan.
“As a part of the advisory curriculum, the lessons were supposed to be given across six weeks. We weren’t that restrictive other than saying it needed to happen. But it was intended to be somewhat close together,” said Durant.
As a pilot program, the lessons are still in development, and City Schools is surveying students after each lesson to continue to make changes.
“At schools like BSA, we plan to have empathy interviews to get more meaningful feedback, and that will also impact the delivery of programming next year,” said Durant. “The interviews are a more qualitative way of getting feedback, about real specificity around feelings rather than just, ‘Did you like it?’”
Some BSA students found the lessons too elementary for a high school class. “The way it was worded in the packet, it just feels like this is something that little kids would be doing, definitely not people who are about to graduate,” said senior bassist Lexie Bennett.
“I would’ve liked more of an interactive thing with other students. The beginning was interactive, but towards the end we lost that,” said freshman visual artist Sylvia Brown.
But BSA’s history staff appreciated the lesson content. Though inserting them into the schedule mid-year was difficult, all the history teachers already used some other materials created by Facing History in their classes.
Bremer noted the importance of having civil discourse lessons: “We have a need to have difficult conversations about antisemitism here. This is one of the ways in which the district is trying to make sure that we have the tools to manage those conversations well. This is not just an academic exercise: we all want to build up the skills for engaging on the issues that are meaningful to the community, and I agree with the district’s forward thinking that if we are going to sustain our democracy, we need to know how to have civil discourse with one another.”
To contact this writer, email Muse Newspaper at musebsa@bsfa.org.
Featured photos by Kenya Price for The Muse.
