Dear Florida Educators,

You are invited to the 20th Annual Literacy Symposium that will take place on April 6, 2018 at the University of Central Florida, College of Education & Human Performance!

This year’s them is: Celebrate the Power of Literacy to Transform Lives—our students’ and teachers’ lives as well as our schools, families, and communities.

Learn about: effective literacy instruction for all students, how to engage the disengaged readers, the role of socio-emotional learning in literacy, strengthening vocabulary and comprehension across content areas, motivating students with quality texts, how to create a culture of literacy at schools, supporting school-wide literacy initiatives, differentiated instruction, meeting the needs of diverse learners, and digital literacies, to name a few.

To register, visit:

http://education.ucf.edu/litsymposium/proposals.cfm?id=3&pg=prop 

For more information about the event, please contact Melissa Mitchell, Event Assistant (Melissa.Mitchell@ucf.edu) or Dr. Vicky Zygouris-Coe, Event Committee Chair (vzygouri@ucf.edu).

Friends, we are sure that you are familiar with the wonderful website ‘Teachers Pay Teachers’. We here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute are big fans of teachers offering to share their skills and creativity to a broader audience, and making some well-deserved money along the way. That being said, we have encountered a situation that we would like to bring to your attention.

Recently, we received word from a teacher that some of the resources being sold for a profit on Teachers Pay Teachers looked awfully familiar.  Upon further investigation, it has come to our attention that there are a number of teachers selling free FJCC/LFI curricular materials (lesson plans, worksheets, and assessment items, among others) on Teachers Pay Teachers. We are currently evaluating the magnitude of the issue, but we know enough to be certain that it is not isolated. In this context, it is important for us to underscore the fact that although our instructional materials bear a Lou Frey Institute copyright, it is actually the University of Central Florida that ultimately owns the intellectual property. This means that we have an ethical and legal responsibility to notify the University General Counsel’s office that our materials are being offered on “Teachers pay Teachers”. Once that is done, it will create a potential liability ranging from minor to not so minor for the teachers whose names are associated with the sale of copyrighted materials. We would note as well that a not-insignificant number of teachers are selling iCivics curricular materials as their own on Teachers Pay Teachers. The folks at iCivics, who work so hard to create quality resources as well, are likely to share our own concerns about this issue.

We would ask those teachers who have posted these resources for sale on Teachers Pay Teachers or other similiar sites withdraw these from the market immediately, before we find it necessary to involve UCF General Counsel and file an infringement notice with Teachers Pay Teachers. We would suggest the same for those folks posting iCivics resources. After April 15, we will be moving to involve UCF General Counsel on this, a step we are reluctant to take. However, we feel as though we have little choice. 

The Institute goes to great – and sometimes painful –  lengths to produce the funding that permits and sustains the distribution of free instructional materials for Florida teachers. Although the path is different, we know that iCivics does as well. If we find that we cannot control the resale market, we fear that we will have no option but to reluctantly reconsider how we approach the ways in which we provide instructional support materials. We hope to avoid this, as it would impact teachers and students across the state.

We hate that we have had to write this post and make this request, but we feel it is necessary. Our resources are intended to be freely available, and we would like to continue on that path. Thank you so much for your help on this.

Friends, it is with great pleasure that we invite you to join educators, politicians, students, and community leaders from across Florida and beyond at the upcoming 2018 Urban Education Leadership Summit here at UCF on April 12th, 2018. The featured keynote, Dr. Pedro Noguera, was recently featured on MSNBC, discussing the teacher walkouts in West Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as the recent events around Florida schools. Check out his TED talk from 2012 to get a sense of our wonderful keynote.

Panels and discussions will focus on ways in which we as educators can drive school and student improvement in urban schools. I have no doubt that it will be an engaging, exciting, and lively series of conversations!

You can register for this event here, and if you have questions, please feel free to contact Dr. Amanda Wilkerson!

While the student anti-gun student movement attracts national attention, two new publications have arrived in my inbox that address youth engagement in nonviolent social movements. Both depict youth as peacemakers rather than victims or perpetrators of violence, but both require significant caveats.

Taylor et al. provide a useful literature review with mixed findings. In some studies, exposure to political violence and abuse during childhood predicts more empathy and more civic engagement–even in some of the worst situations in the world. That suggests that youth can be peacemakers rather than victims of violence. In other studies, the relationships are negative.

Using a longitudinal dataset from Northern Ireland, the authors find (if I understand their complex statistics correctly) that kids who have seen more sectarian violence and discrimination by age 10 are more empathetic and more engaged in their communities, but that prolonged exposure to such violence reduces engagement. Empathy and engagement are positively correlated, but engagement falls for everyone during the teen years.

Dahlum finds that “Campaigns with a high degree of involvement by students and educated protesters are more likely to be nonviolent” and “Campaigns with a high degree of involvement by students and educated protesters are more likely to succeed”–but the latter is only true because students and educated protesters are more likely to opt for nonviolent strategies, which are more successful than violence. (See Why Civil Resistance Works.)

A casual look at Dahlum’s article, which is entitled “Students in the Streets,” might suggest that this is a study of youth. She is actually focused on people of all ages who have a lot of education. That is basically a proxy for social advantage. For example, she mentions a movement in Bangladesh that was led by “students, doctors, lawyers, [and] intellectuals,” among others. That is not a description of an age group but of a social class.

Dahlum combines students with graduates (of any age). If we view them separately, students have these characteristics:

1. They tilt toward the young. Even in very poor countries, many (and often most) 7-year-olds are students. But nowhere are most 75-year-olds in school. Not only are students experiencing childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood as developmental stages, but they represent the newest generation in any society. (See this post on age versus generational effects.)
2. They tilt toward the upper socio-economic tiers, because education is an expense and a path to income and power. This tilt varies by country and by age. Seven-year-olds in Sweden are students regardless of their social class. But at age 20, only the elite in many countries are still in school.
3. Being a student is an occupation, a way of life. It may facilitate social activism because schools and colleges concentrate large groups of peers in places where they can be mobilized (or mobilize themselves); because they often are better protected against retaliation than many workers are; and because institutions devoted to learning are good places to spread news and ideas. (See also: why do students sometimes lead social change?)

Therefore, students often play disproportionately important roles in social movements. But that is only partly a matter of age and generation. Social class and occupation are also relevant.