By Carl Zebrowski
Editor

The Pennsylvania State University is expanding a program already in the Lehigh Valley that helps school students from diverse backgrounds understand one another and get along better. 

The university-wide Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative has been working with the Bethlehem School District to guide teachers in providing effective instruction on difficult topics, including those that may tie into antisemitism and other hostility. Soon it will get started in the Allentown School District, with planning for the 2025-26 school year set to happen this spring and the launch expected as classes start this fall.

Though the goal is to make positive changes in kids, the program focuses on educators. “We actually have a partnership with teachers of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds up through 12th grade to empower the students to be critical thinkers, to foster empathy, and to engage in civic discourse,” said Danielle Butville, assistant director of the initiative. “We believe the best way to get at that is through their teachers.”

The initiative brings together teachers in groups and offers them guidance, including strategies and tools, to achieve the goals they’re hoping for with their students. Then it helps them put what they learned into action and make adjustments along the way.

“We don’t have a canned curriculum or canned presentations,” Butville said. “There’s enough information in our world. What we do is help teachers navigate it.”

The participating teachers are those who requested that the initiative help them find ways to deal with challenges that have arisen in classes or with students. “A lot of the time,” she said, “educators are afraid or hesitant, sometimes because of this cancel culture world, to even navigate these things. Or they’re just unsure of how to do it responsibly. That’s why we partner with them to figure out how to do it in a way that is not going to get the educator into any issues, really centering them as a facilitator of conversation, not as a provider of content.”

Butville ticked down the problems the initiative sees most often that can lead to challenges in the classroom. She named student apathy first. “It’s like that post-Covid,” she said, “just student apathy toward learning. They’re just not invested. There’s trauma there. There’s heightened anxiety there. It’s really like our schools aren’t serving them the way they should be. We’re not meeting their needs.”

Other problems are “hot-button curricular topics—slavery, Civil War”; “current events, with the election, inauguration”; and “technology, a lot of it.” 

She named social media last—but not least. “They’re feeding the algorithm,” and it’s shooting back to them exactly what they’ve already heard,” she said of the students. “They don’t necessarily even understand what their own perspective is, or why they have it, or how it was informed. 

“They also don’t understand that other perspectives might exist. And I’m not just saying one versus the other. We’ll present that there’s multiple sides to difficult issues.”

The reported experience with the initiative in the Bethlehem School District has been positive. “We go in person approximately monthly, but we talk to them all the time,” Butville said. “There are one-on-ones with them. If they invite us into their classroom, we’re coming into their classroom.”

How different might the problems and possible solutions in Allentown be from those in Bethlehem? Based on experience, Butville said, not much. “If it’s a school in inner-city Reading, or it’s a school in Aspen, Colorado, or it’s a school of pre-service teachers in Sanford, Alabama, it’s really all the same the issue at the root,” she said. “It’s understanding that others have different perspectives, and those might broaden your own perspective, or they might strengthen your perspective. But ultimately we’re working with students so they understand how to think, not what to think.”

The ultimate goal is to encourage students to be agents of their own learning. “By that I mean students who realize, regardless of their age and their context, that they have a voice as a citizen,” Butville said. “And when we engage in civic discourse, and when we approach others with empathy, and when we develop these critical thinking skills, they have the power to take informed action.”