Calling All Science Educators

In the new, surreal and scary era we stumbled into on Tuesday being a science educator has taken on new meaning. Our new president, Voldemort, I mean Trump, plans to appoint a climate change denier to head the EPA, drill just about everywhere and cut all funding currently dedicated to addressing climate change.

I propose a broad coalition of science teachers, museums, non-profits, public gardens, schools, colleges and universities to come together and spend the next four years teaching about climate change and advocating for clean energy, conservation and climate solutions.  We are at a critical moment in hundreds of ways, but if we don’t take on climate change now we will lose our opportunity to do so at all. Trump is planning to do battle against the environment and we need to fight back.  If every museum, every school, every garden, every research institution pledges to take on and teach about climate change for the next four years maybe, just maybe we can stem the rising tides in our future.

We are the leaders that remain in the moral vacuum of a Trump white house. More than ever, public institutions that serve and educate the public need to band together and toil to promote diversity, tolerance, equity and sustainability for all. We need a broad alliance dedicated to protecting those most vulnerable to the hate Trump inspires. We need to come together to protect our democratic institutions and our civil, natural and reproductive rights. There is so much to do, and so much to fight for, and amidst all that we can’t forget our planet.

Please share widely.

 

 

The Stories We Tell

As an educator, as a white person, as a New Yorker, I need to say again, black lives matter. We all do. Because the voices of educators shape the stories we tell ourselves about race, about our history and about how our fractured, violent society came to be.

There is  much to say and do within ourselves and in our communities. What educators need to say is this: until we address segregation in schools and adopt curricula that teaches truth about our history, there will always be people convinced that they are not privileged by their whiteness and that we can in fact “make america great again.” (Let’s translate that: Make white people great again- America was never great for anyone else)

In schools all across the country, we continue to teach American history through the lens of great white men, too often in monocultural classrooms. The narrative has widened slightly to acknowledge the existence of slavery, but it remains an aside- an regrettable afterthought that is often not really addressed until college level history courses or not even then. In my own elementary school, we adhere to the New York state scope and sequence and teach about New Amsterdam, the Colonial period, the Revolutionary war, and industrialization with only cursory attention to the enslaved and then oppressed peoples who enriched the white men who founded and ran this country.  I have written about this before but in this moment- with so many shootings, with Trumps’s blatant empowerment of white supremacy, with tragedy and protests flooding the news I want to say it one more time.

This is what we should be teaching our children.

New York was founded on slavery. America was founded on slavery. America is a nation that owes its wealth and power directly to the brutal oppression of African peoples. Slavery drove colonization, it built Wall Street and paved the way for American independence and wealth.   For 400  years,  America exploited, murdered, abused and silenced black people to make itself great.  And now it is clear how deeply we are still broken- how many systems and institutions continue  to segregate and oppress- from police to prisons to our increasingly segregated schools. We cannot pretend to anything else- to any greatness, to any innocence.  American history can never be undone.

And if as an educator, I tell the same old story to my students, if I don’t fight for equity and integration, if I don’t add my voice and say black lives matter, we will remain mired in the consequences of our history without insight or compassion. Black lives matter. Black children matter. Black history matters. Its time to bring truth to our curriculum in every state and to desegregate our schools. It’s time to stand up as educators, fight for our students and change the stories we tell. Especially now.