ConverSketch: Graphic Recording and Facilitation

Posted on August 25, 2015 by NCDD Community

ConverSketch provides high quality multi-media explainer videos for businesses and organizations to succinctly share their story or a product. These popular videos use hand-drawn illustrations and narrative to connect you with the right audience and encourage them to learn more about your story. Using graphic recording helps the group synthesize information, facilitates collaboration, creative thinking, sustained motivation for action, and brings energy to the group. Complex systems are visualized and the conversation is organized so that the group can free their minds from keeping track of details and focus on solution-making and innovative thinking.

These graphics are an engaging way to:

• Help people track and engage with complex information
• See organizational systems and seemingly disparate ideas are connected
• Encourage action and maintain motivation after an event
• Distill and share the key ideas from an important event such as an executive retreat or strategic planning meetings
• Teach a new concept in a way that facilitates better memory of information
• See a different way to approach a challenge
• Find common ground between different stakeholder groups
• Get a group on the same page quickly
• Energize and have fun with your group!

More about Karina Mullen Branson
Karina_headshot Karina Mullen Branson is a graphic recorder and facilitator based in Fort Collins, Colorado and founder of ConverSketch. Graphic recording is a method of visual note-taking; simply put, Karina listens to your group talk and distills key ideas from the conversation/meeting/presentation/etc. She uses hand-drawn images and text to make a large-scale map of your ideas in real-time so participants can see the conversation as it emerges and develops. Karina was a member of the graphic recording team at NCDD’s 2012 conference in Seattle. She has also worked locally and internationally with clients including the United Nations University, BASF, the City of Fort Collins, the National Park Service, Colorado State University, and the Center for Public Deliberation.

Follow on Twitter: @ConverSketch

Resource Link: www.ConverSketch.com

Welcome Back! Resources for Civics Teachers

Posted on August 24, 2015 by stevemasy

As we go into the new school year, I just want to take a few minutes and welcome folks back, and to welcome those that might be new to teaching civics here in Florida. This post will share with you some of the resources that are available for teaching civics in this state. Some of these might help those of you teaching civics and social studies in other states as well. An overview of some excellent primary sources for social studies and civics education is also available! Certainly, this is only a very small list; throughout the year, we will continue sharing new resources, spotlighting excellent resources, and discussing ways in which they may be used in your classroom.

The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship
For obvious reasons, we start with the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship. As an organization, the FJCC offers free resources and professional development to teachers, schools, and districts, centered around civic education. Most recently, we worked in collaboration with Miami-Dade county teachers to create elementary civics lessons (‘Civics in a Snap’), which will be shared with you as soon as our NEW site goes live later this week! Our most accessed resource, the 7th grade Applied Civics Resources, provides lesson plans, content background videos, benchmark specifications, and assessment items that teachers can use to teach the benchmarks. Please note that in order to access most resources on the site, a free registration is required.

iCivics

iCivics is perhaps one of the most well known and loved civics resources in the nation. The site provides games, writing tools such as Drafting Board, lesson plans, and other resources for teachers to better teach that next generation of citizens. The FJCC has worked closely with iCivics in developing resources aligned with the Florida Benchmarks, which we have integrated into our lesson plans, though their curriculum and resources are intended for a national audience. Free registration is required, but it is well with your time, and I have never known a teacher to say a negative word about iCivics. Just be sure that you make sure whatever resource you are using fits your state’s standards! Here in Florida, folks from the Florida Law Related Education Association lead the iCivics effort across the state, and are themselves worth a look.

The Center for Civic Education
The Center for Civic Education is perhaps one of the most well known and important national civic education organizations. Their ‘We the People’ and ‘Project Citizen‘ materials are incredibly popular, and they do an excellent job in helping students understand the foundations of citizenship and to start them on the path toward civic engagement.

The United States Youth Senate Program
The United States Youth Senate Program is a unique educational experience for outstanding high school students interested in pursuing careers in public service. The 54th annual program will be held in Washington, D.C., from March 5 – 12, 2016. Two student leaders from each state, the District of Columbia and the Department of Defense Education Activity will spend a week in Washington experiencing their national government in action. Student delegates will hear major policy addresses by Senators, cabinet members, officials from the Departments of State and Defense and directors of other federal agencies, as well as participate in a meeting with a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. All transportation, hotel and meal expenses will be provided by The Hearst Foundations. In addition, each delegate will also be awarded a $5,000 College Scholarship for undergraduate studies, with encouragement to pursue coursework in history and political science.To apply, please contact your state selection contact. Here in Florida, the contact is Annette Boyd-Pitts of FLREA.

The Ashbrook Center
The Ashbrook Center is an excellent resource for both primary sources and teacher professional development. Perhaps more well known for the materials it provides through TeachingAmericanHistory.Org, Ashbrook has some nice resources for civic education as well, and their seminars on aspects of American government, civics, and history are excellent. I had the opportunity to attend one myself, and it was very well done, though reading-intensive. They are expanding more into Florida. Please keep an eye on this blog for information on upcoming seminar opportunities with Ashbrook.

The Bill of Rights Institute
Putting aside, for now at least, the somewhat controversial background of the Bill of Rights Institute , the resources provided by the BORI are worth taking a look at, especially the primary sources that are provided.

The National Archives and the Library of Congress
The National Archives and the Library of Congress have a wonderful collection of resources that any and every social studies and civics teacher should want to use. We have written about the new mobile app before, and the FJCC has worked closely with the National Archives in providing professional development to teachers at all levels of education.

Mock Elections

The FJCC/Lou Frey Institute Student Voting Election Simulation, while aligned with Florida’s Civic Benchmarks SS.7.C.2.9 and SS.7.C.2.7, can be used by anyone in any state as a way to have students engage in the process of voting. It is easy to use and pretty flexible in how you choose to use it. Registration IS required, but is as always free.

Civics Tutorials

This Civics Tutorial site is aligned with the Florida Civics Benchmarks, and provides some excellent guided tutorial pieces for students to use within a flipped classroom model, as a remediation tool, or in preparation for 7th grade Civics EOC. An overview of the site can be found here.

Escambia Civics Review Site

The Escambia Civics Review site is just what the name implies: a review site intended to prepare students for success on Florida’s Civics EOCA. However, it contains additional resources that can be used throughout the year. These resources include vocabulary games, connections to Discovery Ed (if you have an account with that specific resource), assessment items, a practice test, and, most significantly, student friendly readings. These readings are about a page long and are intended to be used by teachers to supplement instruction in the benchmarks. They have been rewritten recently to ensure consistency in the vocabulary and that all of the readings are appropriate for middle school students!

The C3 Framework
The C3 Framework is a relatively new resource provided by the National Council for the Social Studies (and you should be a member; talk about resources!). It’s Four Dimensions lend themselves well to civics, especially the focus on asking questions and taking action. An overview of the C3 can be found here, and I encourage you to check it out, even if your state is not using it.

Florida Civic Health
The Lou Frey Institute’s Florida Civic Health site allows you to compare Florida to every other state in a number of measures of civic health. While it is obviously using Florida as a starting point, you CAN use it to compare your own state to Florida, or to compare metropolitan areas within the state of Florida. Simply select your state on the map, as you see in the screenshot below.

Countable

Countable is a FANTASTIC new resource for teachers in social studies, and especially civics. It would be an injustice to summarize it in just a few words, so please take a look at the post we did on it here, or simply visit it yourself to explore it! The current topic for discussion? Birthright citizenship. Check it out!

The Civil Debate Wall
From the site: The Bob Graham Center’s Civil Debate Wall is a unique, innovative social media tool created by Local Projects for The Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida and funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The Wall creates constructive dialogue by providing a physical social media tool that connects large touch screens, a texting system, and a website. These three synchronized components create a single, seamless interactive experience for the broader University of Florida community to actively engage in local, national and international issues. The website component of the Wall closely mirrors the physical Wall. The website attracts users who are not physically on campus. Providing the same features, the website gathers users from a broader population and allows users to keep track of debates.

These are just a few of the resources that are available for civic education in Florida and across the nation. If you have additional ones, please feel free to share them with me at stephen.masyada@ucf.edu, or leave a comment on this post. Please do the same if you would like professional development or any other help or support! Don’t forget to take a look at the overview of primary resource tools here, and be sure to check out the Florida Civics Teacher’s Facebook Page and the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship Facebook Page! Good luck in the new year, and thank you for the work that you do!

on the proper use of moral clichés

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Peter

In Joseph Roth’s finely wrought novel The Redetsky March (1932), a simple and good-hearted peasant orderly tries to make a huge financial sacrifice to help his boss, Lieutenant Trotta. The feckless Trotta is badly in debt, and the orderly, Onufrij, has buried some savings under a willow tree. Onufrij has already appeared in the novel many times by this point, but always as a cipher. Now suddenly we see things from his perspective as he walks home (fearfully and yet excitedly), tried to remember which one is his left hand so that he can identify the location where he buried his money, digs it up, and uses it as collateral to obtain a loan from the local Jewish lender.

Apparently, cheap novels that were popular among Austro-Hungarian officers in Trotta’s day “teamed with poignant orderlies, peasant boys with hearts of gold.” Because his actual servant is acting like a literary cliché, Trotta disbelieves and callously rejects the help. He tells Onufrij that it is forbidden to accept a loan from a subordinate and dismisses him curtly. Trotta “had no literary taste, and whenever he heard the word literature he could think of nothing but Theodor Körner’s drama Zriny and that was all, but he had always felt a dull resentment toward the melancholy gentleness of those booklets and their golden characters.” Thus he understands the offer from Onufrij as a fake episode from an unbelievable book. Trotta “wasn’t experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.”

Trotta can be compared to two other characters who have problematic relationships with clichés. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Francesca da Rimini utters a speech that consists almost entirely of slightly garbled quotations from popular medieval romantic literature. She justifies her actions with these clichés and avoids any mention of her own sin. It becomes evident that she never really loved her lover, Paolo, but was only in love with the cliché of being a doomed adulteress. Like The Redetsky March, the Inferno is a beautiful and original construction in which clichés have a deliberate place.

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (living more than five centuries after Francesca) also quotes incessantly from popular romantic literature and thereby avoids having to see things from the perspective of her victims, notably her husband and children. Flaubert italicizes her clichés to draw attention to them. He uses his own brilliant and acidly original prose to describe a person who can only think in clichés.

Even though Francesca and Emma Bovary quote statements that are literally true, they rely on stock phrases instead of seriously thinking for themselves. They love what they would call “literature,” but they reduce it to a string of clichés.

Trotta is in some ways their opposite and in some ways similar. He despises “literature” but knows some clichés that popular books contain and uses them to avoid reality. His method of avoidance is to doubt anything that is a literary cliché, whereas Emma Bovary and Francesca da Rimini believe them all.

Although Dante and Flaubert were making different points from Roth about clichés, I think both perspectives have some value. Certain cultural movements—notably, the Romanticism of ca. 1800 and the High Modernism of ca. 1900—have prized originality and have scorned cliché as one of the worst aesthetic failings. Indeed, they have defined “literature” as writing free of cliché at the level of style, plot and character, or theme. These movements have enriched our store of ideals, but they have been overly dismissive of the wisdom embodied in tradition. If you respect the accumulated experience of people who have come before you, you may reasonably assume that many truths are clichés and that many clichés are true. To scorn cliché can mean treating one’s own aesthetic originality as more important than the pursuit of moral truth.

Thus I would not try to delete statements from my list of moral beliefs because they have been made many times before or have been expressed in a simple and unoriginal fashion. I would even be inclined to consider our culture’s store of moral clichés as a set of likely truths. Roth was right: “a lot of truths about the living world are … just badly written.” Situations repeat, and what needs to be said has often been said many times before.

But the risk is that a stock phrase can prevent a person from grasping the concrete reality of the situation at hand. I’d propose two remedies for that problem. First, it is worth recognizing which of our moral commitments, even if they are fully persuasive and valid, are also clichés in the sense that they are standardized and prefabricated phrases. Those commitments deserve special scrutiny.

Second, it is worth attending to the ways that all of our various moral commitments fit together. Each cliché may be true, but when it is juxtaposed with other general statements, it always turns out to be only partly true. Life is full of tradeoffs and tensions. Even if the components of my overall worldview are mostly clichés, the whole structure of moral ideas that emerges from my best thinking about my own circumstances is original–just because I am my own person.

Sources: Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, Part II, chapter 17; my article “Why Dante Damned Francesca da Rimini,” Philosophy & Literature, vol. 23 (October, 1999), pp. 334-350. See also on the moral peril of cliché and what to do about it; and on the moral dangers of cliché.

The post on the proper use of moral clichés appeared first on Peter Levine.

NIFI Partners with Faith Leaders on Gender Violence, “Deliberative Discipleship” Conference

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Last week, the National Issues Forums Institute – one of our NCDD organizational members – announced two exciting collaborations they’re undertaking with NCDD member Gregg Kaufman aimed at engaging more communities of faith in deliberation. The projects are full of potential, and we encourage you to learn more in NIFI’s announcement below or to find the original here.

Faith Communities & Civic Life

American faith communities associated with Judaism, Islam, Christianity and different religious traditions care deeply about many of the same issues about which the National Issues Forum Institute (NIFI) publishes deliberative dialogue materials. Religious organizations prepare educational materials about issues such as environmental challenges, criminal justice, race and cultural understanding, the economy, and education. Once more, these communities represent tens of thousands of citizens who convene regularly for worship, learning, and service.

How might NIFI introduce deliberative dialogue as a valuable method for discourse in faith community settings? Here are two current projects.

Gregg Kaufman, an NIFI network member and Lutheran pastor, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) staff, are collaborating on a project dedicated to raising awareness about and making choices regarding the tragedy of gender-based violence in America. The ELCA is preparing a formal “social message,” a teaching document to be approved by the denomination’s governing body in November 2015. Kaufman prepared a corresponding deliberative dialogue guide, Gender-based Violence: What Steps Should the Church Take? The guide will be made available to congregations this autumn and a post-forum online survey will collect feedback about the issue and the deliberative process.

The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Washington, D.C. advocacy offices will host a bishops’ conference in September that will coincide with Pope Francis’ visit to Washington. Deliberative Discipleship – Deliberative Democracy is the conference theme. Bishops will have the opportunity to become familiar with deliberative democracy and NIFI issue guides that reflect some of the concerns that the Pope and leaders of many religious bodies are mutually concerned about; economic inequality, immigration, strong families, and protecting the environment.

Faith communities have the capacity to bring people with deep concerns for public issues together. How can deliberative democracy practitioners develop productive alliances?

For more information about these projects contact:

Gregg Kaufman

gkaufman8@mac.com

www.thedeliberativevoice.com

You can find the original version of this NIFI post at www.nifi.org/en/groups/current-and-future-deliberative-projects-faith-communities-gregg-kaufman-0.

Working Together to Remove Racial and Ethnic Barriers to Student Achievement (Facilitators Discussion Guide)

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Keiva Hummel

The 44-page guide, Working Together to Remove Racial and Ethnic Barriers for Student Achievement (Facilitator Discussion Guide) by Everyday Democracy, was published January 2009. The facilitators guide discusses the Montgomery Country Public Schools (MCPS) Study Circles Program and provides minute-by-minute details for how to facilitate this six session Dialogue-to-Change program. This Study Circles Program was created to remove the racial and ethnic barriers to student achievement and parent involvement within the Montgomery Country Public School system. The objectives of this program were to build a unified group of diverse parents, teachers, and students that understand the challenges and benefits of a diverse school; encourage an environment in which racial and ethnic issues are talked about openly and productively; and create personal and group action steps that address racial and ethnic barriers to student achievement.

More about the guide

This facilitator guide is organized to help participants:
-Build lasting relationships among diverse stakeholders
-Become more aware of the issues, their own beliefs, and the perspectives of people who are from different backgrounds
-Develop action plans that will address racial and ethnic barriers to student achievement and parent involvement.

Each session, and each activity, are designed specifically to meet these goals. As a facilitator, you need to pay attention to all three of these goals throughout the study circle. Study Circle groups however, are always different. They won’t respond the same way to all activities. You may need to adapt the sessions or activities to meet the specific needs of your group. To do this successfully, you must understand the goals of the activities, how they fit in with one another, and how they fit into the overall design of the study circle.

-Sessions One and Two are designed to develop trusting relationships.
-Sessions Three and Four are designed to have honest and challenging conversations about race and the impact of race on the student achievement and parent involvement.
-Sessions Five and Six are meant to develop actions steps that will address the racial and ethnic barriers.

To learn more and access the full workbook guide, download the PDF below.

About Everyday Democracy
Everyday Democracy (formerly called the Study Circles Resource Center) is a project of The Paul J. Aicher Foundation, a private operating foundation dedicated to strengthening deliberative democracy and improving the quality of public life in the United States. Since our founding in 1989, we’ve worked with hundreds of communities across the United States on issues such as: racial equity, poverty reduction and economic development, education reform, early childhood development and building strong neighborhoods. We work with national, regional and state organizations in order to leverage our resources and to expand the reach and impact of civic engagement processes and tools.

We have learned that some of the key components to ensuring racially-equitable systemic change include building relationships, establishing a diverse coalition, having trained peer facilitators during dialogues, building on assets, and linking actions to individual, community, and policy change. We provide online tools and in-person trainings on organizing, racial equity, facilitation, communications, and action planning. We act as a catalyst and coach for communities, knowing that the people of each community are best suited to carry out and sustain the work that will make a difference. The communities we serve are the focal point of our work. Our ultimate aim is to help create communities that value everyone’s voice and work for everyone, and to help create a strong national democracy that upholds these principles.

Follow on Twitter: @EvDem

Resource Link: Remove-Racial-Ethnic-Barriers-to-Student-Achievement.pdf

Links, Aggregated (Monday Edition)

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Joshua Miller

Intuition can encourage opinions that are contrary to the facts.
Press the space bar to load a new puppy.
Antonia Malchik: Over the past 80 years, walking simply as a way to get somewhere, let alone for pleasure, has become such an alien concept to Americans that small movements towards making neighbourhoods and communities more walkable are met with fierce, indignant resistance.
Who won the Hugos? (“All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.”)
Most Vox Thing Ever? Deez Nuts, Explained

liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Peter

Reverence for our written Constitution is a highly unusual feature of the political culture of the USA, sometimes verging on a civic religion. Teaching students to hold the Constitution in high regard is also an unusually prominent purpose of civic education in this country. And of course, our Constitution is the oldest in the world and (to the best of my knowledge) the one least subject to change, which means that it has run as a cord through our whole history since 1788.

According to a 2011 Time/Abt SRBI poll, which is the most recent survey I have found, 64% of Americans believe that the Constitution has “held up well” and doesn’t need change.

That is a majority, but not an overwhelming one, and opinions differ by ideology. According to the same poll, 62% of Republicans are “strict constructionists,” believing that the constitution should be interpreted according to the framers’ original intent. In contrast, 67% of Democrats favor “flexibility.” And Democrats are more open to the idea of a new constitutional convention to change the document.

I would challenge the presumption that conservatives do (or should) like the Constitution more than liberals do. One could argue that everyone reads the document selectively, with some favorite parts and other sections that we would rather delete if we could. Conservatives are enamored of the list of enumerated powers, the Second Amendment, and the Tenth Amendment (among other passages). Liberals are more excited about the Necessary and Proper Clause, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Many liberals have acknowledged that they would get rid of the Second Amendment if they could. But some strong conservatives would like to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment (allowing the income tax) or even the Seventeenth (direct election of US Senators). Candidates Trump, Paul, Santorum, Graham, Christie, Carson, and Jindal, and (less consistently) Kasich and Walker have said that they would end the birthright to citizenship that is central to the Fourteenth Amendment. That hardly reflects reverence for the document as it is today.

At the same time, I would criticize the bipartisan tendency to constitutional piety and the way that it restricts our constitutional imaginations. There are many reasons to think the document is flawed. Just to name one, the separate election of presidents and congresses is a recipe for gridlock or even for constitutional crises, averted so far mostly because our parties didn’t polarize ideologically until the end of the 20th century.

James Madison made sure to study the experience of as many republics as he could before he traveled to Philadelphia to begin writing the Constitution. No one who undertook a similar study nearly 250 years later would design a constitution with a powerful, separately elected president; and actual new democracies never copy our design nowadays.

Another flaw is a set of massive omissions. The real political system of the 21st century is characterized by corporations, political parties, permanent military and security agencies, and a very large administrative/regulatory state. The Constitution is silent on all of those institutions. The Citizens United decision did not–contrary to received opinion on the liberal side–define corporations as people, but it did treat them as regular associations under the First Amendment. Parties and unions also get lumped together as associations because they are not otherwise recognized in the text of the Constitution. And since the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and the regulatory state are missing, courts struggle to understand these entities as creatures of the legislature that are lodged within the executive instead of branches of government with their own powers, perils, and limitations.

If you are a libertarian constitutional originalist, you have a clear and simple solution to these omissions. Get rid of the regulatory state, which isn’t an enumerated power of Congress and which unconstitutionally delegates legislative power to unelected executive branch staff. Once the federal government is unable to regulate, corporate political power will become unimportant because there will be little to lobby on. That is a consistent view, and it reinforces enthusiasm for the text of the Constitution, which becomes the basis for a radical reform movement. But no one has ever seen a globalized corporate economy without a regulatory state. I am not sure it is possible; I certainly doubt that it would be desirable or popular.

Assuming, then, that we will continue to have people like party leaders, lobbyists, spies, and regulators, their powers and limitations should be addressed in the Constitution.

More generally, to imagine improvements to a society’s constitutional order seems an important form of citizenship. Even for children, it is interesting and valuable to debate changes in the Constitution or whole alternative documents. Adolescent and adult activists should be free actually to pursue such changes. Our constitutional piety has advantages (reinforcing the stability of our system, restraining certain kinds of populist excess, and providing a superior alternative to ethnic nationalism), but it badly restrains acts of constitutional imagination that should be part of active and creative citizenship.

The post liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution appeared first on Peter Levine.

Bridge Alliance Launches Declaration of Engagement & New Website

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

We want to encourage our NCDD members to check out the newly-launched website of our partners with the Bridge Alliance – a new organization that “exists to upgrade our democratic republic by serving organizations and citizens who are uniting Americans across the political divides to improve civility and collaboration.” You can find their new web home at www.bridgealliance.us.

NCDD is proud to be one of the Founding Members of the Bridge Alliance, which we’ve been supporting and involved in since its early stages. The Alliance is an exciting effort to bring together and support many groups in and beyond the D&D field that are working to overcome the limitations that the bitter, partisan divides in our political system place on our ability to solve problems for our communities, our nation, and our world.

One of the first steps that the Alliance is taking together is to encourage everyday citizens to sign their Declaration of Engagement, which acknowledges that we all have a part to play in the solution. The pledge is simple, and it reads:

I am part of the solution to political dysfunction. Through my actions I commit to:

Engage in respectful dialogue with others, even if we disagree

Seek creative problem solving with others

Support elected officials and leaders who work together to address and solve our nation’s challenges.

Through the actions of all of us, together, we can achieve a more perfect union.

We encourage our members to sign the Declaration and familiarize yourself with the work that the Bridge Alliance is doing. You can start to get a sense of what the Alliance is about from their website and by checking out the recorded talks from their Transpartisan Conference in Boston.

Either way, keep an eye out for the great work that the Alliance has coming in the future!

Interview on Practical Philosophy in Berlin

Posted on August 20, 2015 by ETW

Professor Chris Skowronski, Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at Opole University, Poland, interviewed me at the Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum conference on August 13, 2015.

If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here.

I’m grateful to Chris and to Maja Niestroj for the interview, the video, and the hospitality while I was in Berlin. It was a great conference on a wonderful public philosophy, Dr. John Lachs, who has been my mentor in philosophy since around 1998 or 1999.

Are we teaching citizenship that matters?

Posted on August 20, 2015 by stevemasy

Our own Dr. Terri Fine has shared her first column for the UCF Forum. In it, she raises an interesting question: have we in Florida actually learned citizenship, and what it means to live together, and to pursue justice, as citizens? Using the horrific Groveland Four case as a starting point, the column makes an unfortunate, but important, point about Florida:

Despite its reputation for racial moderation, Florida’s white society brutally enforced segregation and discrimination into the 1960s as lawmakers enacted policies that curtailed minority rights. Florida’s reputation for racial moderation during those years has focused on Gov. LeRoy Collins’ measured response to the Brown case as compared to the massive resistance advocated by other southern politicians.

Governor Collins certainly deserves some level of praise for his refusal to follow the pattern established in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, but is that really enough to say that Florida handled integration well? Perhaps not. As Dr. Fine writes,

During that time, the Legislature passed a number of bills designed to fight integration. In addition, after Collins, Floridians elected governors who campaigned against integration, civil rights and busing, and made little effort to promote racial equality in the three elections that followed.

Of course, the violence in Florida concerning racial justice and civil rights tended toward the brutal as well. Besides Groveland, we need only think back to the crime that was Rosewood.

And yet, here in Florida, where we indeed have come far as compared to some of our Southern neighbors, have we learned the lessons of the past? Have we learned what it means to be a citizen? I never taught about the Groveland Four, though I spent a decade teaching in Levy County (the home of the Rosewood Massacre). If we don’t teach it, if kids don’t learn it, are we truly teaching what it means to be a citizen in Florida, a citizen in the United States, and the obligations that go with that citizenship? If we don’t teach kids about the struggles that our neighbors, that perhaps their parents and grandparents, had to endure to live as free citizens, are we really teaching them anything? ARE we teaching them citizenship that matters?

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Monthly Archives: August 2015