12:02:15 Sara Schwebel:		My name is Sara Schwebel and I'm the Director of The Center for Children's Books and a professor at the School of Information Sciences here at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. So this roundtable is part of The Center for Children's Books' series of events this year on Illinois' implementation of the TEAACH Act--or Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History. The TEAACH Act revised the Illinois school code to require that every public school student in the United States--sorry, in the state of Illinois--we're working towards the United States! But that every public school student in the state learn about the contributions of Asian Americans to all aspects of U.S. History.

12:06:22 Sara Schwebel:		And as those in this audience undoubtedly know, Asian American history has been greatly underrepresented in U.S. History textbooks, and there's no surprise here. U.S. History textbooks have long been dominated by heritage-based approaches, leaning towards heritage often. And their efforts to cultivate a shared identity and sense of patriotism have contributed to sort of scant attention to minoritized communities and even less to systemic
racism. Moreover, textbooks' orientation towards progress, towards an ever more perfect union, can make it difficult to present the continuation of historical struggles. And yet, despite all of this, we know that children are not learning the same history in school that they did half a century ago. So both textbooks and trade books for children on historical topics have changed.

12:07:20 Sara Schwebel:		So two quick examples: Linda Sue Parks' recent novel Prairie Lotus, which is a 2020 rewriting of sorts, or speaking back to Little House on the Prairie. And another, I'm thinking of the research by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano, who administered questionnaires to 2,000 public high school students nationwide, asking them to name 10 famous Americans. And the top 3 on their list of student-generated answers were all African-American: a result that's really unthinkable in the 1950s.

12:08:03 Sara Schwebel:		But of course, there are limits to these changes: new myths and heroes have replaced the old and of course there's still glaring omissions and distortions. So in the results of that particular survey, for example, no Asian Americans broke the top 10, and as the authors note, in 4,000 questionnaires (so 2,000 high school students and 2,000 adults for comparison), there wasn't a single mention of Samuel Gompers or Eugene V. Debs. No mention of labor organizers whatsoever.

12:08:36 Sara Schwebel:		So how can we understand the history of curricular changes? Both the various ways that they've come about as well as their successes and their shortcomings? And then, more specifically, how can we think about implementation of the TEAACH Act within this history, the context of this history? And also as a way of sort of capturing our collective hopes for our schools and our children. So we have gathered here in our zoom room four historians of education who can help us think through some of these topics and I'm really delighted that they're here and am happy to introduce you to them. So in alphabetical order, let me first introduce Dr. Jon Hale. He's an Associate Professor of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership, and of Curriculum and Instruction here at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. His research examines the history of student and teacher activism, which includes the history of efforts to diversify the U.S. History school curriculum, as well as patriarchal and supremacist efforts to control it. He has provided professional development for the Children's Defense Fund Freedom School Program and for school districts and State Boards of Education who attempt to make the curriculum more inclusive.

12:09:57 Sara Schwebel:		Next we have Dr. Lindsay Marshall, who is an Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Oklahoma, which occupies land belonging to the Caddo and Wichita peoples and originally shared by many Indigenous Nations. Her research focuses on the creation and perpetuation of settler, colonial public memory through K-12 history education. She also researches the environmental history of human-equine relationships with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and decolonial methodologies.

12:10:28 Sara Schwebel:		Next joining us is Dr. Mario Rios Perez. He's an Associate Professor in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse. His research and teaching interests include the historical construction of race in educational settings, Latinx history, and the history of migration. His forthcoming book is titled Subjects of Resistance: Education, Race, and Transnational Life in Mexican Chicago From 1910-1940.

12:10:55 Sara Schwebel:		And finally, we have Dr. Yoon Pak, who's a Professor of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and her research centers on the history of American education in the 20th century, particularly as it relates to racial minorities and immigrant groups. So I'm really delighted to have this fabulous panel assembled here today. And happy that you're all here to join us in this conversation.

12:11:20 Sara Schwebel:		So you may have noticed a demographic poll pop up on your screen. So if you wouldn't mind answering that, I'll just pause for a second as people enter their data. Great, so I'd like to start out with a question that will help all of us here get to know our panelists a little bit better, and so I'd like to ask if you can just briefly share the way that you connect your research with your activism. So in other words, how you see your role as a historian and historian of education intersecting with efforts to enact real change in K-12 schools, to broaden what is known and taught among youth. Would someone like to start with that question?

12:12:14 Dr. Lindsay Marshall:	Yeah, I'll take first crack at that. Thanks and thanks everyone for being here. This is such an important conversation. When I started doing this research--that was before the 1619 project and the blowback to that--usually the question I got was like, "Why do you care about textbooks?" And it's so exciting that people don't ask that anymore because they're so important. The intersection that I see with my work: my work really springs organically from my experience in the classroom. I was a K-12 teacher for 11 years in San Jose, California, and the whole reason I left my stable teaching job and ran away to graduate school was because, as I was teaching and and trying to help my students make sense of the timeline of U.S. History, particularly (I was teaching an AP version of the class), it became really apparent to me that our timeline was broken. That we were trying to put a diverse, complicated history into a narrative framework that only allowed for the political history of landed white men, primarily. And so there were these moments in the timeline where students would be confused about the chronology, and those were moments where, for instance, indigenous history asserted itself. That you couldn't really ignore the fact that indigenous peoples continued to exist and that the power balance wasn't quite what the curriculum would have the students believe that it was between the United States and native nations.

12:13:56 Dr. Lindsay Marshall:	And so, because I couldn't figure out how to reconcile that, I went to graduate school because I was looking for a book that would help me figure out how to think about that better and I couldn't find it. The wonderful edited volume, Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians wasn't out yet. That would have saved me a whole lot of moving probably if it had been! But I really see in the research that I've done, to try to understand where these narratives came from that we're handed (particularly about the U.S. West and Native American history); how they get sustained--nobody is going to the mat defending the accuracy of these textbook narratives about conquest of the West--and yet they're resilient to change, over you know, centuries of education history. And as I really dug into why that is, I became increasingly convinced that the thing that disrupts that narrative framework in that way of thinking about the U.S. as a settler, colonial nation really is the power of the teacher in the classroom. The relationship of the teacher and the student and the ability of the teacher to guide students into thinking historically and thinking about that narrative construction as opposed to just worrying about, "Did I add enough members of this racial minority, this gender identity to this timeline?" that is already functionally broken.

12:14:52 Dr. Lindsay Marshall:	So, that's where I see my research and my activism intersecting. I try as often as possible to consult. Like I worked with ISBE When I was at UIUC for instance, and do a lot of teacher training workshops. But that's kind of how I see. I don't really see much separation between the research I'm doing and what I hope happens in the classroom because of that.

12:15:17 Dr. Yoon Pak:		Alright. I can go quickly next. What drives me to do the work that I do is really about, how do we portray the reality of what's always been? We've always been a multiracial country and it's also a reflection of ensuring that we do our best in our work through our research, teaching, service, in every respect that it is consistent across the board for everyone. So at the end of the day I always talk about what I do is really in service to how do we imagine and reimagine democracy, democratic citizenship? Who gets to decide who counts and who doesn't count in a democracy? So those have always been the guiding force ever since I was in graduate school to pursue the work that I do. But also connecting it to today's but also historically, what have we done in our past to really persist in continuing these anti-human legislation and anti-human types of curriculum? So it's really to fulfill the full humanity of groups that have been historically oppressed and disenfranchised.

12:16:34 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	Yeah, I can go next. And you just both reminded me of the ways that I was thinking, well how does my work connect to this? And here at Syracuse, I teach a course for all future teachers. They're required to take this course. So at the beginning I was like, "Okay, how am I going to approach this course? What am I going to teach?" And and then one of the things that I've done I think over the years, I've really changed what I've been teaching in that course, because all of these students are going to go out in the field or are out there already, and not only in schools, but in different educational settings. And one of the things that I'm always trying to remind them is that our educational system as a system is relatively new and it's still in flux. And one of the things I feel that in schools of education or colleges of education that we do, is we're so practical and we want students to live for the present, to be able to apply it. And I want them, you know, one of the things that I've been doing more recently is to have them imagine this future that doesn't exist yet. You know, whether it means that it's a curriculum that's not present, that is not developed, that seems that it's a project that seems to, you know, be impossible to fund. But I want them to think about them as shaping the future and being part of this change that is occurring.

12:17:57 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	And so I do a lot of history in my classes. I teach a lot of the history, but I also teach this history of debate and try to challenge the narratives and the contradictions, the paradoxes in education, because I think that sometimes our students in the schools of education assume that things are the same. That schools and teaching has remained the same, that they haven't changed, and that's far from the truth. So I try to tell them you're gonna be actively participating in this new curriculum, in this institution-building. And so you really have to make these choices and these decisions. And so that's one of the ways that I try to remind them. And I hope it works. That's one of the things that I'm always trying to remind them. And you know, as colleagues are mentioning, you know, this multiracial perspective, this perspective that encourages different angles, and like this unfinished project, that we're still a part of. So that's kind of one way that I try to hammer in. Or not to hammer in, but just to remind them that it's an exciting area, you know. It's an exciting profession and a very rewarding career to enter.

12:19:13 Dr. Jon Hale: 		I'm just trying to chime in here and add a perspective about some of my work I do with the Freedom Schools. And I came across Freedom Schools very early in my research in graduate school and part of what was exciting about the Freedom School program was the curriculum that activists, well, they'd been writing since reconstruction, but in the 1960s they sat down with Ella Baker, Miles Horton, Septima Clark, and others, and really designed a new curriculum that not only provided a counter-narrative, but it also centered student agency and activism. And they wrote this curriculum, and they put it in Staughton Lynd's (and may he rest in power) the trunk of his car and he drove, you know, 700 miles down the Mississippi, and delivered this curriculum that was designed to inspire students to engage with power structures that really were implemented to oppress and segregate, and to sort of keep people out of positions of power. So this curriculum really was working against that. So my work is trying... I try to work in spaces where I can effectively and work with people developing curriculum in that mindset. Some might call an abolitionist mindset, or a transformative mindset, but really looking at the spaces where people are rewriting a curriculum, not just for content and for knowledge sake, but really, to I think inspire work on the ground to eradicate a lot of the issues that we're presented with in the United States today. And as much as there's an anti-CRT push, there's a lot of work whether it's, for instance, the TEAACH Act. There's a lot of good work done across the country. So I think, you know, building off on something that Dr. Perez just mentioned about reminding students about what the historic record shows us in terms of using curriculum for agency. There's a history of that. We don't see that a lot, but I think my work is to raise awareness about this history. But then also work in spaces like the TEAACH Act, or also Illinois passed other legislation around inclusive history. Trying to work in these spaces to help rewrite this curriculum that imagines, you know as Dr. Pak mentioned too, and others, imagines a better future. So really, just trying to see where we fit in and what we can do there.

12:21:36 Sara Schwebel:		Thank you. So many of you mentioned work with teachers, students who are moving into K-12 classrooms or to other forms where they'll be interacting with youth and sharing knowledge of the nation's past. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the levers of change in terms of actual materialization of change in conceptions of U.S. history by young people. Obviously many factors go into play and legislation at the state level is important. So too is the kind of training perspective teachers receive, including what happens in the classroom, but also the collection of courses that they're able to take, given state requirements for training. So in thinking collectively about bringing about change at the level of student knowledge, how do you weigh those different variables? Where do you--obviously, it's a collection of them that brings about change--but when you think about it what is the most important ingredient or factor in changing the curriculum that's learned in schools?

12:23:25 Dr. Yoon Pak:		Well I'll go first, just at least so that we don't have too much pause time here. Aside from, I'm really a big fan of structural changes, so whatever that we can do collectively to ensure that there's structural changes from the top and from the bottom. So if we're talking about teacher education programs, we need to understand our history. How, and in what ways, has it become still a 70% white female middle class workforce? It's not to say there's anything wrong with that, but when we see that, what can we do about that? But to also understand it also came about from the post-1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, where that system of segregation displaced so many highly-qualified, and in some respect, overqualified African American teachers and school leaders. So where do we learn from that tradition? It's also understanding that it's not just a black/white issue, but how do these indigenous forms of knowledge that have been in place, how do we infuse that within a knowledge system of teaching and teachers? Also of Latinx, LGBTQ+, Asian Americans of course...this can be done. It's not insurmountable. One of the short examples that I'll give is when I had the great opportunity to hear Ronald Takaki, a great historian of American education, speak. He gave an example of when all the critics told him at that time in the late 80s and 90s, that he couldn't teach multicultural education in a one-semester or a one-quarter class at UC Berkeley, he did it in 10 minutes. So it really goes to show it's a way that we can infuse all of these things together.

12:25:15 Dr. Lindsay Marshall:	Yeah, when I think about my time in the classroom, I'm really impressed--the structural change like you say, Dr. Pak, is everything. I clung to the state standards because I was straight out of an undergrad and I was teaching World History 1 and 2, which was everything that ever happened anywhere and was in no way prepared to do that. So what the state of California told me I should teach became what I taught, because I literally didn't have the time or the resources to think about it in any other way. So just like you were saying, Dr. Perez, we don't train teachers to think transformatively, really, because part of that is because it's hard, and we get stuck in our ways as a profession and part of it is because there's a fire drill in the middle of third period, and you know, did you wear the right shoes today, or your feet killing you by the end of the day? And do you know how to change the overhead projector bulb? And all that sort of thing, which kind of crowds out that, you know, transformative future thinking. So the more flexibility I think our state standards and resources for teachers and teacher-preparation programs can be, the more they can make space for teachers to continue to become experts in content. To have the space to attend conferences or read journal articles, to learn about how the field they're teaching is changing. I know I didn't have that time and I argued a lot with my administrators that my professional development should also include content learning. It didn't just have to involve pedagogy, and I lost that fight over and over. So I think these big structural changes do have the power to carve out that space in a lot of ways for the classroom.

12:26:52 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	Yeah, I don't think I'll say anything new here. So I absolutely agree with everyone saying this is structural changes. So I think the TEAACH Act is one really good example of it. Part of the second half is the resources that will be made available to teachers, and this time and space for them to experiment and to flush these things out, because it takes time for teachers to figure out. You know, as you're designing a course or as you're following, adhering to a standard, it takes time for you to feel comfortable in it or to, you know, to get an idea of what works. And so I think schools and school districts, you know, administrators also have to be part of this process. It just can't be teachers. And so to find ways to support, say, the TEAACH Act, to fund, perhaps field trips or things outside of the school too. So that way it doesn't only stay within a set department or a set classroom, or it's only the responsibility of one teacher. But it's something that is infused and it's hard to then get rid of, you know, because these things can lose traction if someone gets fired, or if you know, you lose funding for one thing. And if it's just part of everything...there's ways, that school districts or schools can get creative. I mean, there's always a dearth of resources, of course, and time, and there's things that happen. But I think, looking at the particular place--the classroom, the school, the population--there might be local museums. Maybe there's a history there, thinking about the places is also important. There might be things that don't don't need to be replicated, that are already happening elsewhere: regionally, locally. So I think the resources part has to be part of that. And, you know, embedded in that process. Otherwise these policies will be very, very difficult to implement and to follow, and it will be a struggle and then they're gonna penalize the teachers who might actually be very interested in promoting these ideas and integrating these curriculums in the schools. So I think it has to be really broad, but also very, very pointed.

12:28:51 Dr. Jon Hale: 		And may I just add a point about, you know, structural change? And then, you know, the point that Dr. Perez brings up about resources? So I mean, there's a lot. An unfunded mandate, like the TEAACH Act in Illinois or the other inclusive mandates around LGBTQ history in Illinois, and ability and disability history in Illinois, Native American history, etcetera. There's a spate of legislation that's really making our curriculum in Illinois more inclusive. So people are shocked to learn, you know, South Carolina passed a similar mandate in 1984, under the Governor Dick Riley, who was considered a moderate Democratic education reformer, and he actually made it part of the state curriculum to teach Civil Rights  history in South Carolina public schools. Dick Winters in Mississippi did the same thing a couple years later, where, if you look in Mississippi curriculum, their state education, they actually have on the books something about teaching African American history. Sometimes your resources...if you don't have the resources to implement this, these are just hollow sort of mandates that you expect, you know, Doctors Dahlen, Pak and Lee to try to find money to host professional development around this. And that's what educators have to do to sort of make these mandates in these new curricular trends stick in the schools. So the state passes something that looks good, but then nothing happens. I mean, why do we have these? We forget we have these on the books in Mississippi and South Carolina, for instance, right? And Luke Eric King writes about this: we have these mandates, but what do we do with them without the state resources to actually make this happen?

12:30:25 Dr. Jon Hale: 		And second, I think one of the problems with structural change is that we taught some people in some circles--17 states have passed affirming legislation like Illinois, like the TEAACH Act. What about the other states, where it's anti-CRT, right? We allow in our schools, I think this notion of neutrality or objectivity to say, "Okay, well, if we're gonna teach LGBTQIA+ history, well, then, we should teach, you know, sort of a Christian side of it to balance this out." But when are we gonna have the courage to say it? Not all, not all opinions, I mean, not all values can be equal. We can't have hate legislated and supported in our classrooms. So there's this type of, I think, movement, not only do we have to fund these inclusive mandates, but we also have to, exactly to Vicky's point, right? I mean, we have to also say some things, perhaps, should not be allowed in our classroom, because we see where this is going. So I mean, we also have these conversations about, are we really holding onto objectivity to say anything matters in in our classroom? Or really, narrow down and say something should not be taught that borders on hate speech and violence. So we really struggle with this as a country. So I put that out there to say, how do we balance these conversations with ideas around mandates and making the structural change as well?

12:31:51 Sara Schwebel:		Thank you. I wonder if you might help all of us understand the current moment, a bit in historical context. So you spoke of, Dr. Hale, spoke a little bit about other mandates, and the problem of the lack of funding, of course, to transform that into a possibility for real change. Teachers have the ability to be immersed in material that enables them to create transformation in their classrooms to the full extent we would like, with the full spirit of those mandates. But also about the pushback that we are seeing now for change. An alarming rise in book challenges, courses--AP courses. So how might we understand this in light of earlier efforts to change narratives in textbooks, to change conversations in classrooms, to change the narrative learned?

12:33:13 Dr. Yoon Pak:		Well, perhaps part of that. Oh sorry, Dr. Perez, would you like to?

12:33:16 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	No, Dr. Pak, you go first. I'll follow.

12:33:18 Dr. Yoon Pak:		Oh, no no no. But you know what, I just forgot what I was gonna say, so you might as well go.

12:33:27 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	All right, well let's see how this comes out. But I think to speak to what you're saying, it's, I think, part of the curriculum. One of the things to speak to this history of, you know, books being banned and being challenged. I think it also...I know that what we do, is we try to complicate it, and say, "There's other ways of thinking about this." But the curriculum, as you know, Dr. Marshall and Dr. Hale, Dr. Pak mentioned: is that this curriculum is always being changed, and so there's books, there's these decisions to ban books or not include them all the time. They're just not officially. You know, we think of like the du jour/de facto kind of. We can use that example of segregation, and the way it happens, The same thing is about, you know that related to the curriculum. We're making constant decisions of what we're not going to include. And so, although we see these things happening in Florida or Oklahoma, or other places, you know, Arkansas uses certain words or so on, and so forth. You know, these are decisions that are happening on the ground, and these are constantly happening, constantly happening at the school, at the school district. And I think one thing we've learned is (it's definitely, you know, part of the historical record), is that a lot of these debates play out also at the school district level. So school boards. One of the things that, you know these anti-CRT folks have been really successful, that is going to the school boards, you know, recording themselves (there's a history of that, you know) performing out this dissent. And so I think there's ways that we can, that people also have done that, you know, to challenge the curriculum. And so there's books that might not be, you know, banned across the state. But there's ways to promote local change where we might not be able to generate national attention. We might not be able to generate state support. There's ways that local change can can elicit some type of, you know, support in curricular change in the school districts. And I know that we're talking national and maybe statewide level. But I think it's also important to say that that can happen at the very regional level as well. That it takes time for these things to generate support, you know. You develop collaborations, groups, people hear about what you're doing. And you then hopefully, ultimately, you know, submit a legislative policy that will get support and change something.

12:35:52 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	So I think it's also keeping an eye on that, because you know, there's books that are especially for Latino/Latina history that are just not being included, and those are not books that are banned. They're just not being included. So although they're not banned, I kind of see it as a ban, because they're not being included. They're just not part of this narrative that Dr. Marshall is talking about, and so I think, that is like one polarity, right? The banning of the books. But there's this constant erasure that's happening in the school textbooks.

12:36:24 Sara Schwebel:		So in some respects that it's a distraction, right? That the banning, the challenges, the banning are getting a lot of attention. But in some ways the books and topics that are not even in the curriculum to begin with, to be challenged, that the absent content, the omission is as much of a significant problem.

12:36:50 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	Yeah, I don't know if it's a--what did you call it? Like a distraction? But it's not. I think it's definitely, you know, something that we need to pay attention to. But absolutely there is this broader, I think, movement. You know that teachers are incentivized also, in ways, not to include it because it takes work. Like Dr. Marshall was saying: it takes work for a teacher to integrate and to challenge the curriculum. It takes a lot of work. So this incentive is not to do that, not to change the curriculum, not to, you know, spend your weekend looking for book lists. And I mean it takes a lot of work, and you know, like you were saying, Dr. Marshall, if there are tornado drills, or whatever that may be, I mean, these are real life things. So the structure itself already is incentivizing THE curriculum that's already there without the book bans even being in place.

12:37:46 Dr. Lindsay Marshall:	It's been really interesting through these policies here. In Oklahoma we have one of these laws, HB 1775, which is kind of the cookie cutter heritage foundation author, you know, anti-CRT without saying CRT, kind of law, but it's in direct conflict with the Oklahoma history standards which are legally required to be taught. And there's a provision in the law that says, well, this doesn't mean that we don't teach those standards. Those standards are still in effect, but in practice schools aren't... If you're the teacher and you have watched a teacher in your school, as we had here in Norman public schools, be fired on day two of the school year for violating the law, you know, you see your district doesn't have your back. What are you gonna do? This is your job, right? And so that's put, I think, particularly K-12 teachers in an incredibly difficult position. And like you said, it's, you know, all politics is local, right? It really, really is. I was thinking about your question, Sara, about what is kind of the historical context? I've run into a lot of these kinds of attacks on American history curriculum as un-American in my research. In Chicago in 1927 there was a Mayoral campaign where Big Bill Thompson ran on an America-first platform, and he ran, you know, huge rallies and flyers declaring that American history textbooks were un-American and were teaching American school children to be ashamed of their country. And I mean I had to laugh because I was reading the 1776 Commission's report at the same time, and I felt like plagiarism had gone on there, right? So this kind of attack is not new. New Jersey and New York in the 1920s were requiring loyalty oaths of teachers, and hauling teachers up in front of the state legislature, and banning textbooks. But I think what's new in this particular moment is that this movement to censor history and to restrict the freedom of children to learn about the complexity of our past, has married that local power with this national narrative in a way that I don't know has happened before. Maybe it has? The Red Scare maybe comes kind of close to that in terms of its impact on the classroom. But it's really bizarre to see, you know, kind of the strategies that worked in the past to kind of wait out these panics are not...just focusing on the local isn't getting us traction. We're not doing a good enough job of that. But we also can't ignore this national narrative, because it has been allowed to redefine all the terms that we're using to talk about what's being taught: CRT, wokeness, all that kind of thing. And so we really need a really robust approach at both levels, both with people coming to the school board meetings and countering this narrative in public.


12:40:42 Dr. Jon Hale:		Makes me think, too, what Dr. Perez and Dr. Marshall are talking about in terms of coalition-building. I mean, we see the right, the far right, the extreme right, building coalitions at the local level, because our system is designed where a lot of these decisions in schools are made at the local level, right? So, for instance, if you look at the Loudoun County--two summers ago, Loudoun County, Virginia where you had some of the first arrests at school board meetings. Well, if you go through (and this was during Covid so it was recorded), you can go to Youtube and watch the entire (if you have 3 hours to do it). It's an interesting event. But people are there yelling about pronouns, about critical race theory, and other types of history. And just a general anti-patriotic discourse going on in the school. People are coalescing with just anger at these school board meetings. But they're building coalitions around various factions about what they hate the most, right? So you see that happening on the right and together they're building a national narrative, to Dr. Marshall's Point, a national campaign and talking points as they're running. So it's really in some ways terrifying to see the coalition that they're building.

12:41:51 Dr. Jon Hale:		But then the point about coalition-building from the other perspective: if you look at--so just assigning Jarvis Given's Fugitive Pedagogy paired with Carter G. Woodson's work in a History of Ed seminar I'm teaching right now, you can see the coalition that it took to write and publish a counter-narrative. It took the Association for the Study of African American Life in History, the NAACP, teachers willing to sort of bring in these banned or fugitive texts in the classroom, right? It requires the same type of coalition for that. So I think I do see a lot of hope on the ground about we have a history of this coalition-building, and then seeing especially the work in Illinois, you do see that on the ground here too, to build around, to build these larger coalitions to help challenge. And as, you know, Dr. Marshall was saying, challenge this in the public arena, to challenge that larger public narrative, as well.

12:42:49 Dr. Yoon Pak: 		Yeah, I think it really does speak to being very explicit in our teacher training or in all of our classes. Education is a very (and schooling) is a very political endeavor, I mean from day one. Even the concept, the conceptualization, the designing of segregation--it's all been intentional and it's all been through political effort. And even with that, understanding that these very democratic aims have received anti-democratic critiques on the grounds that, quote unquote, "This is not what we want in our public schools." So just even giving examples of the 1930s in California, for example, when a very popular textbook series Building America, which was gonna be adopted by California, was then quickly taken away because of a very small but a coalition of folks who would write into the editorials of the newspapers, denouncing this as being Socialist and Communist-leaning. And, "This is not something that we want our kids to understand." When what it was doing was just showcasing the reality of various cultures and groups in the U.S.

12:44:05 Dr. Yoon Pak: 		And also how it began to target particular teachers in particular areas. So a more famous case would be the case of Francis Eisenberg and the Los Angeles schools, where she was fired for being Communist or teaching things that they said were "very subversive in nature." And when I took a look at some of those curriculum materials, it was just plain democratic citizenship, education, and education guides. And despite the highly favorable letters that were written in her support by teachers, by parents, by students, it was still that small vocal minority who held that power of "how do we get that public opinion in our favor to continue firings of teachers?" So it's also understanding from the playbook, from the extreme right, how do we then work it in a way to really counter those things that we can do through facts and evidence?

12:45:07 Sara Schwebel:		I know that there's been a lot of activity in the chat, so I wanted to turn now to those gathered and ask if anyone has questions for the panelists? And if you do, you can write them right into the chat. Or you could, I think you can also turn on your voice. Okay? Here we go!

12:45:36 Sara Schwebel:		So the first question is: "What role do school libraries play in curricular shifts? How do school library spaces have the potential to guide students thinking alongside classroom instruction?" So really speaking to that resource question in part.

12:45:53 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	I can speak to that. So that excites me. The library part of it. So this connects to some of my research, and one of the things that I did not expect to find at all was the role of libraries in Chicago. And specifically when I was looking at Mexican communities, 1920s to about 1940s. And so Mexicans don't really make any major curricular changes in the school districts, like major in-roads. But one of the things that they're very successful at is critiquing the curriculum, and it gets to, I think, another question or a point in the chat. Yingying, I think, made a question about immigrant communities. They were actively critiquing the curriculum. And so you look at their sources. They're debating what's happening. They're critiquing books. They're like, "This professor from Teacher's College Columbia doesn't know what they're talking about." But they're not making it into the official record. And one of the things that came out, I think you know one of the claims that I make is that (the one that becomes obvious to me) is that these school districts never really bridged that...never develop a relationship with these immigrant communities. So what these immigrant communities do is they then develop their own libraries, their own resources. And they're actively bringing in books from Mexico and developing their own books. Now they're not successful to do that...they don't do that within the schools, but they do develop libraries outside of the institution. So libraries become this major place where they have full control. And it's also a matter of resources, because they don't have, you know, endless money. And at that point, of course, transportation. There's logistical issues with shipping books and things like that. But certainly libraries become a place that are resources, and also a space, you know. It's not simply the books, but it's gathering place, a space that they can claim as as their own educational place.

12:47:43 Dr. Mario Rios Perez: 	And so I think that libraries are critical, both as a place (and for the Mexicans that I'm speaking about), a place that is really controlled and led by women. And so it also then changes the gender dynamics there, you know. I don't know, depending on the schools and school districts. So it does multiple things. So I think libraries are just critical in this part where, you know, you can begin to test the grounds, or to challenge or supplement or complement the curriculum in ways that you can't do it immediately within the classroom.

12:48:26 Sara Schwebel:		Thank you, and just scanning, but I think I missed a question in the chat. If someone had one, would you mind just cutting and pasting it back in as I scroll through? Feel free if anyone else wanted to weigh in on the library question, please go ahead. I mean, it is interesting to think about these alternative schools outside the public schools as a mechanism for driving change and also building coalitions.

12:49:10 Sara Schwebel:		So I have an additional question that I've been thinking about a lot as we...about change. I guess, the substance of change. So what all of you have been addressing in the past hour, you know, about really transforming the narrative that is told. Not just piecework, you know: sidebar history, in textbooks, adding additional characters, adding additional topics, but on a very surface level. And I wondered if that's something you could speak to a bit, because when change is underfunded, and when teachers don't have the time to...time and also resources and exposure to rich content, then you have this risk, right? That you can bring in new characters, even new topics, but without really transforming the narrative. And I'm wondering if you could talk briefly about strategies to sort of bridge the gap between, you know, inspirational legislation and all the time and energy that it takes to bring about change? So you know what are ways, I guess, that one can start small and use that as a stepping stone to build?

12:50:57 Dr. Lindsay Marshall:	Well, one thing that I found in my practice, both in K-12 and in higher ed, particularly working with teacher candidates, is when we're talking about particularly U.S. history education, what our system really asks are two sometimes mutually exclusive things to happen in the classroom. That we teach students how to think historically and we teach them about the past, which we all know is complex and contradictory, and all those things. But that we also produce citizens. And if we don't think critically about both of those tasks, they can be in contradiction with each other, because citizenship training can look a lot like patriotism indoctrination, for instance, instead of actually trying to produce critical thinkers who are community-engaged and seeking to think complexly about the world around them and their place in it, and in relation, and all that. And one thing that I found really helps because we have it, you know, really trained into us before we go into the classroom, that the main thing students need to come out of a U.S. history class with is the timeline: a chronology of U.S history. And that's where all that also random you know, kind of marginalia happens. Where, okay well, we can't teach the the Plains Wars the way we used to, but if we put a little sidebar about Sitting Bull in there, then we fixed the problem. But we didn't fix the problem. And what I try to encourage my students to do as they're going into classrooms is not worry about teaching a set of content, a set timeline, a chronology, but to worry about helping students think through why we view the past the way that we do. Instead of thinking of "the U.S. history timeline," there are many timelines of U.S. history, and every time we look through a different lens we find more interesting questions and more perspectives that shed more light on what happened before we all got here.

12:52:48 Sara Schwebel:		Right. The classic east to west or west to east question, right? Where do you start the story? Do others wanna weigh in?

12:52:58 Dr. Yoon Pak:		I was just gonna say, if it means the small incremental changes that we can take right now is to already start with the default that young people are very sophisticated learners and thinkers from the get-go. And I think it's really the adults who have a hard time understanding, and how to teach to the ways that young people are already wired in ways that they can wrestle with so many dissonant (what we may consider to be dissonant) ideas. So I would start from that, but just even quickly, you know, I never thought 23 years ago that having started a class on Asian American education would have led to something like doing the TEAACH [Act]. I never would have thought when Doctor Sharon Lee was one of my first TAs in the class, that we would have been developing this. And one of the things that drives (well, I will speak on her behalf as well because we have said it) one of the things that drives us to do this kind of work is things that we would do anyways. Whether or not, I mean we're incredibly fortunate to get funding, but we also worked without pay voluntarily for a whole year to make sure that we could get this kind of histories out and available to teachers and to other educators all over. And so with Dr. Dahlen being a part of the faculty too, it just became a wonderful way to create this community. So it takes a long time, and we have to understand that. But be patient, but at the same time, keep pushing those boundaries in every way possible.

12:54:45 Sara Schwebel:		That is such a powerful way to end. So maybe what I'll do here is  make some announcements, and also thank the panelists for such a wonderful, enriching conversation. So glad that you could share your knowledge and expertise with us this afternoon. A reminder for anyone who is interested in earning professional development hour credits to look for the chat for information related to that. And I also want to remind all in attendance that we have been hosting a series of conversations and speaking events related to implementation of the TEAACH Act, and those recordings are available on the Center for Children's Books website.

12:55:37 Sara Schwebel:		And we are looking ahead just after Illinois' Spring Break to our annual Gryphon Lecture, which we'll be hosting on Monday, March 20th. At the same time, same time and place. At noon, and also in person at the iSchool. And we'll be hosting Dr. Sohyun An of Kennesaw State, who is giving a lecture enttiled "Implementing the TEAACH Act: Using Asian American Children’s Literature as a Tool to Resist America’s Long History of Anti-Asian Violence."

12:56:06 Sara Schwebel:		Thank you again for all being here today for this conversation, and you will be able to access it on the CCB website as well. Thank you very much.