INTERVIEW: Francine Curtis

In this interview Francine Curtis, a social studies teacher at John Marshall Middle School in Long Beach, California, explains how a student-run program has reduced racial tensions in a highly diverse middle school. Also see the story about Curtis and an interview with four students who are members of the Diversity Ambassadors.

Changing Schools: Tell us how the Diversity Ambassadors program began.

Curtis: It really began last year (1995-96). I was teaching world history. And in world history there are so many areas where cultural understanding and diversity fit with the content of what a classroom teacher is teaching. And I realized that I needed to establish respect in my classroom in order to teach different cultures with my kids. And also in terms of grouping, having kids working in groups. I always felt when I first starting putting kids in groups there was this respect issue, the issue of working together, or getting along. I would always say "I'm not your referee; you need to solve your problems for yourself." But I started realizing that I needed to give kids tools to solve the problems for themselves.

I have had training through the California International Studies Project on diversity issues, and I've gone to a lot of workshops and intensive trainings. I started bringing some of those activities back to my own classroom and to the staff in our school. I do workshops for our staff and sometimes for the district.

I started seeing that the students needed an outlet to be able to have a dialogue and take leadership on these issues. So I was thinking about it -- we were having conversations in our 7th grade class and we did activities, but it was mostly just in my class. Then something happened last year. We had an assignment -- we were following the presidential primaries. The students had several assignments, but one of them was to write about what you would do if you were president. One of my students wrote that what he would do is get rid of all the illegal immigrants. His essay fell on the floor when he left the class one day, and two of my Mexican American students came in and read this and became enraged. The next thing I knew, they were going to jump him, and all of a sudden we had this all-out racial issue happening in the school.

It was then I realized that we needed to take some of the stuff we've been doing and take it schoolwide. So the first Diversity Ambassadors meeting was between these students who had the conflict -- sitting down listening to each other and talking about their points of view. And they solved it. The conflict was settled between them. But the problem was it had spread throughout the whole 8th grade -- "This kid said this; we're going to jump him," that kind of thing.

I decided that we had to take it into the 8th grade classes. So I brought together a group of some of my better leaders from my classroom -- and the other teacher, Howard Fineman and I split the whole eighth grade and went into all the classrooms. And we did just an impromptu workshop. The students started talking about their experiences with racism, what it meant to them, and also how people can misunderstand each other and jump to conclusions. That totally told me that kids wanted to talk about these issues and wanted to listen to each other. The problem among the students disappeared; the conflict was over, the child was safe. It ended there.

That core group of kids then became the leadership group for the first set of Diversity Ambassadors. From there, we started doing peer mediation and conflict management. It was very informal last year. For example, one teacher came up to me and said, "My classroom is completely out of control. There's conflicts between African American and Latino students in my class, and I can't teach anymore." I just grabbed the DA's, as we call them, and we went in to her class and did an impromptu workshop within her classroom, and that made a huge difference in her classroom environment. But there was still conflict between two people in her class, so we had those two students work individually with the DAs.

Changing Schools: How do the Diversity Ambassadors do their work?

Curtis: One thing we always try and do is have a DA from each racial background that's represented in a conflict present when we're having these discussions. We use the same conflict management and peer mediation techniques that other programs use. The difference with us is that we take the component of tolerance, of understanding and respect, and we dialogue on it. We do activities about it. We took the kids to the Museum of Tolerance last year as an experience for them, and we've done a diversity assembly for the school the last two years.

The assembly is a celebration, and we get all the different groups in the school -- like the Latin American Club, the Cambodian Club and so on -- to do traditional dance or something that represents that culture. We try to have it be very well-rounded. We try to touch on as much as we can. There's also a strong theme of understanding, tolerance and unity. There's a book called "All the Colors of the Race," and there are a lot of great poems that go with that. Like one student who is half-black and half-white stood up and did a poem on what it felt like to be half and half and to not be accepted in a lot of places because of that. So we try to go beyond just the discussion of "we had a conflict, you hit me, I hit you," and try to look at what's inside of us.

I usually give a little speech about unity. One of the things I'm most proud of is that we have had the deaf and hard-of-hearing students perform for two years in a row. This is a group of students in our school that has been the most isolated -- completely out of the mainstream -- even to the point that many of these students didn't want to sign (use sign language) because they felt like they would be laughed at. But they have been up in front of the whole school for two years in a row, performing to a completely quiet and respectful audience.

Changing Schools: Tell us about the activity you call the "label junkyard."

Curtis: Another thing we did-- one of the most potent activities that I do with them is called the "label junkyard." You have a sheet with labels like "African American," "European American," "Catholic," "Jewish," and you check the things that apply to you. And then there's a "label junkyard" where you write down all the hurtful things that have been said to you. At the middle school level, one of our biggest problems with conflicts is name-calling. I've been focusing on race here, but there's also the issue of the large kid, the small kid, the kid who wears glasses, the girl with blonde hair. All those things that some people will dismiss as "just middle school stuff," but which is really important. We know there are a lot of adults walking around who were wounded by these kinds of experiences in childhood.

So this label junkyard gets to that. We did this in almost all of the classes on campus last year. You have to be very careful with this. The facilitator asks for the students to say the words they are writing down -- words like "beaner" and "nigger." Horrible, filthy words. And it takes a long time for the kids to get them down because they are uncomfortable even writing them. I chart them on butcher paper, and I talk with them about how it makes them feel and why they think people say these things. And then, at the end of the activity, the paper is covered with all of these horrible things, and you ask the class "what are we going to do with this?" And often they say, "let's burn it" and other middle school answers. But I sort of guide them to "why don't we tear it up?" I really let them get into it. Everybody tears off a piece and they stomp it and rub it into the floor. Then we throw it in the trash. At the end, we say, "OK, we've created a safe place within this room where labels aren't going to used."

It's a step at a time. Having done that in my own classes, I don't have to hear "fag" or "you stupid jerk" anymore, because they know that labels can't be used in the class. And by doing it throughout most of the school last year, it made a huge difference. Kids want to hear this message, too. They're very open to it.

Changing Schools: How do your students serve as "Diversity Ambassadors"?

Curtis: By being mediators when it's needed. And it's been very informal, really. It amazes me how many kids will just come up and say, "I've got a conflict with so-and-so, can a DA help me?" And so we do that. In the last year, the conflicts in our school have gone way down. Most people here will tell you that our school climate is so much better. And I think that's in large part because of these kids.

They are also learning how to interrupt prejudice in constructive, non-prejudiced ways, through talking to each other. One of the kids just told me about being called a "Nip." He's a DA, but it really hurt him and he didn't know what to say. And we just had a whole conversation about what he would do if that happened again. I'm always very careful that they are not putting themselves in any dangerous situation -- that they know how walk away from it. But what they're actually doing is asking people to think, asking them to understand how they feel.

This year we're going to do some other things in addition to the diversity assembly. They're going to sponsor a unity dance, we're going to go to the Museum of Tolerance again. We'll do either a lunchtime or full-blown assembly on (teen violence). We also had the hard-core gang unit from Long Beach come and talk to the kids about gangs. Some of the DAs are good students academically, high-status, middle-class homes. Others are low-status, come from gangs. It's a whole diverse group, obviously.

Changing Schools: Tell us about the visit by the police gang unit.

Curtis: The interesting thing was that when the gang unit came last week, he came with three or four former gang members, and as they walked up, the DAs were going into my classroom for the meeting. There were all these other kids out there, and they see these guys that look very cool and interesting. Several of the kids wanted to know what we were doing, and I said, "Why don't you come in and watch?"

One of the kids that came in ended up sharing with the class -- he wasn't a DA -- about his brother who is in a gang. All sorts of really painful details. And the look on his face was the look of pain. It totally upped the ante. He cried in front of everyone, this very tough kid who comes from a very tough, gang-filled neighborhood. He shared how it made him feel. He doesn't know if he can choose not to be in a gang, because he doesn't have anywhere to go. You could have dropped a pin in the room, the kids were so rapt.

So these are the kinds of experiences I'm trying to give to them -- experiences to dialogue, to listen to each other. Activities that teach them how to deal with things, but also real-life experiences where they hear from each other, from gang members, from other people who have experienced prejudice.

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