Ohio educators discuss race, justice after Chauvin trial verdict

On Apr 23, 2021

Following the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent the death of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in a Columbus Police-involved shooting, protesters march through the streets of Downtown Columbus on Tuesday. Many Ohio educators are using current events like these to talk about racism, violence and civil unrest in their classrooms.

On the first day of class at Cincinnati’s Aiken High School last August, Rachel McMillian and her students agreed on one thing: They wouldn’t be centering any of their lessons around George Floyd’s murder or Derek Chauvin’s trial.

“As a Black teacher of Black students, we collectively decided that it was not something that we would watch in-depth,” McMillian said. “It’s been pretty traumatic for all of us.”

That doesn’t mean it hasn’t come up though.

Her students, a group of 16- and 17-year-old Black and brown students who want to be educators one day, constantly draw the connections from what they hear on the news and watch on TikTok to what they’re learning in class.

When they’re reading “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, they see the similarities between George Floyd and other deaths of Black people at the hands of police officers.

When they discussed Black joy and love at the beginning of the semester, they questioned why other teachers don’t share more positive stories about Black people.

They have plenty of informal conversations about race and policing and ethics, ones where McMillian closes the classroom door and they can all be real about what they’re feeling.

And as they consider what it will be like to teach in their own classrooms one day, McMillian knows her students will use their lived experiences to better inform their future pupils.

“They were babies when Trayvon Martin died. So the same way I’m teaching them now about him and Michael Brown, they’re going to be teaching their students about George Floyd,” McMillian said. “They’re always discussing, ‘What are we going to do as teachers?'”

Educators across Ohio and the U.S. are bringing complex current events into their classrooms, both to teach students about justice and to facilitate sensitive, age-appropriate discussions about racism, violence and civil unrest.

This week, especially, illustrates that need, some educators say.

More:Derek Chauvin’s trial is a teachable moment. Here’s how classrooms are discussing it.

Tuesday afternoon, a jury found Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer guilty or all charges in the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed, 46-year-old Black man. Chauvin, a white man, pinned Floyd’s neck under his knee for nearly 10 minutes. At about the same time as a judge read the verdict, a white Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, also Black, while she wielded a knife during an altercation with another girl on the Southeast Side.

The last year has been a wake-up call for many educators — both in the K-12 and higher education worlds — to reconsider how to discuss these issues in the classroom and create more inclusive curriculums.

‘Whenever we engage, it needs to be in context’

Paul Dean, an associate professor of sociology and interim director of faculty development at Ohio Wesleyan University, said students entering high school and college classrooms today look different than they did five or 10 years ago.

These students, especially those in college, have a heightened expectation that their professors will be discussing current events in their classrooms. This doesn’t just apply to sociology and ethics classes, but in English, math and sciences halls, too.

“They want to see how issues of race, gender and class affect all fields,” Dean said. “They expect us to know the terms, give more context and be prepared to engage.”

Dean noted that this current wave of activism is the most organized and sustained movement since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but that current students and educators are dealing with different issues of racism today. Students, for instance, are more likely to walk into classrooms today being “color-blind” or believing race isn’t an issue than they were 50 years ago.

Educators have the task of providing context around current events and connecting how these issues relate to a bigger picture, Dean said.

OWU sent an email to faculty members Monday, before the verdict was read in Chauvin’s trial, with a list of resources about how to address the trial in class. It included conversation starters, teaching and news articles to contextualize and connect with other issues of systematic racism, and how to follow up.

“Regardless of when the verdict is delivered, these issues will continue through the end of the semester and beyond. Students will appreciate checking in at various times to show ongoing support, strengthen trust, and build a sense of belonging,” the email read.

“Whenever we engage, it needs to be in context,” Dean said. “All of these issues have been around for decades, so we need to put this in context that racism has been here forever but also understanding that this is a different movement.”

A push to include race and ethnic studies

At the state level, a group of Ohio social studies teachers hope to ask legislators to eventually make it mandatory for all students to take a class on race, ethnicity and gender studies to graduate high school.

The Ohio Council for the Social Studies, a statewide nonprofit nonpartisan group of social studies professionals, is developing a curriculum schools could use for a semester-long course now, and hopes to have it finished by the end of the year, to “expose all our students to the diversity of our state,” President Jim O’Connor told The Dispatch.

It would help students explore the histories of people of color — people whose experiences are often omitted from traditional history texts.

The work started earlier this year, following nationwide conversations about police violence against Black people and the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate impact on minority groups. Once the curriculum is finished, the group will make it available for schools to use as an elective course as early as 2022.

“Ohio has huge areas of isolation, where you’re not interacting with anyone of a different race or ethnicity,” said O’Connor, who has taught social studies for 27 years at Princeton High School, a school of predominantly Black and Hispanic students north of Cincinnati. “If you never have that proximity — playing sports together, sharing classes and after-school activities, sitting at the lunch table — you lack that understanding and empathy of people who are different from you.”

Many classrooms aren’t waiting for mandates to start teaching on these issues.

Teachers have a responsibility to teach about the world — which includes the good and the bad — said Scott DiMauro, a high school social studies teacher from Worthington and president of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

“You can’t prepare students for the world, to go out into the world and have success, if you are not teaching them truths,” he said.

A handful of other states are also exploring ethnic studies courses. Ohio’s neighbor Indiana, for example, has required that high schools at least offer an ethnic studies course since the 2018-19 academic year. California adopted a “model curriculum” last month and a pending bill would make it mandatory.

In Ohio, schools aren’t required to use specific curriculum for their classes, but students are required to earn credits in certain subjects, Ohio Department of Education spokeswoman Mandy Minick said.

The Ohio Council for the Social Studies hopes to include flexibility in its curriculum for teachers to talk to students about the history of local minority groups, O’Connor said. Columbus has a large Somali population, for example, and his school’s community has many families originally from Guatemala and Mexico, he said.

This is especially important when considering that more than half of American children under age 15 are non-white, according to U.S. Census estimates, he said.

Creating a safe space to discuss difficult topics

When discussing race and policing in the classroom, DiMauro said it’s important to create a safe environment for students to express their experiences and ask questions. Teachers also shouldn’t interject personal beliefs or opinions into the conversation, he said.

“One of the realities, when we are dealing with racial injustice, is that a lot of our students of color come to our classrooms with a long history of not feeling safe,” he said.

“You want to make sure you create norms and standards, especially as you are discussing controversial issues in the classroom … that everyone feels like they have an equal opportunity to be heard, to ask questions, to listen and to express themselves.”