Educating Educators in the Age of Trump by

This essay will outline what we did in the 15-week course, Education in the Age of Trump, and will document the ways in which it made us all vulnerable. It will analyze the possibilities and perils of creating an overtly political classroom in an era of political polarization and widespread fear.

n January 11, 2018, the day that our president uttered his reprehensible comments about Haiti and Africa, I received an email from an investigative reporter affiliated with Campus Reform.Campus Reform is a conservative website under the direction of the Leadership Institute, a non-profit founded in 1979 to teach "conservatives of all ages how to succeed in politics, government, and the media." 1 Campus Reform has daily reports on what its authors claim to be incidents of liberal bias, political indoctrination, and restrictions on free speech in American college classrooms. 2 I was their new target.The reporter asked me to answer several questions about my upcoming course, "Education in the Age of Trump."In his email, the reporter asked me if my course might "alienate students who may have supported the current U.S. President."The reporter than asked me to expand on my personal views "on bias in academia" and whether I thought that "educators have a responsibility to exclude personal political opinions from the classroom" or whether "academia has a responsibility to oppose Trump and the social trends that led to his victory in 2016?" 3 As an individual who has shifted between my rural, conservative Pennsylvania hometown and my adopted, urban New York City residence, initially I wanted to respond.I thought that the questions that the reporter had posed were important ones to discuss and deliberate the various challenges teaching under our nation's current political climate.However, about an hour after he sent me his initial email, the reporter had already posted his article without my input. 4 I read the article I was filled with several emotions.I felt angry that I honestly thought that this investigative reporter actually wanted to know what I thought about my course and pedagogy.Even though I have privileges that most bourgeois white women enjoy, I felt anxious that this article might jeopardize my job or cause harm to my family, particularly my young children.And I was furious that I lived in a country that felt more like the fascist Italy that my grandparents and mother had left than the democratic nation that I, as a first generation American, felt so fortunate to be part of.At the same time, I felt cheated that I had not had the opportunity to answer the questions that the reporter raised.
Through a careful examination of the reflections that my students wrote and the discussions that we had in class, this article addresses the questions that the reporter has posed and how my course, "Education in the Age of Trump," aimed to educate educators in the Age of Trump so that they, too, could use our nation's history as a way to name and address injustice.
The course focused on the history of racism and white supremacy to push students, most of whom were white and middle class, to think critically about the ways that white conservatives and liberals have promoted policies and practices to uphold racial inequity and injustice throughout American history.The second aim of my course required us to think about how we might incorporate this history, which many of us (including myself) never learned in our public schools, into our own public-school classrooms as an act of racial and social justice.In other words, learning this history was step one; step two was the implementation of what we had learned in this course into our own classrooms.I wanted to teach this course to give students an opportunity to explore the history of racism and white supremacy that was visibly on display during and after the 2016 presidential campaign so that they, a group comprised primarily of white educators, could explore this history with their own students.This history is rarely, if ever covered in schools, because most white educators do not know it.I wanted to change that.

I wanted to teach this course to
give students an opportunity to explore the history of racism and white supremacy that was visibly on display during and after the 2016 presidential campaign so that they, a group comprised primarily of white educators, could explore this history with their own students.
The Origins of the Course: Trump 101 and Trump 2.0 "Education in the Age of Trump" was based on and inspired by the Trump 2.0 crowd-sourced syllabus that historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain put together and published on the Public Books website. 5These scholars called their syllabus the Trump 2.0 syllabus because it was assembled in reaction to the Trump 101 syllabus that the Chronicle of Education had published a few weeks earlier. 6any scholars, including Connolly and Blain, felt that the Trump 101 syllabus failed in its attempt to explain the roots of Trumpism, the fractures in America, and the future of politics.The Trump 101 syllabus's failures stemmed from the fact that none of the recommended readings on the Trump 101 syllabus analyzed the contemporary racial and gender inequalities that the Trump campaign exploited.The Trump 101 syllabus did not include any works by scholars of color, LGBTQ intellectuals, or scholars from other marginalized groups.The scholars who opposed the Trump 101 syllabus wrote a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education which asserted that "by erasing the history of non-white scholarship, non-white political commentary on Trump, and its own history as a form meant for teaching, the 'Trump 101' syllabus failed to contextualize Donald Trump's rising political influence and becomes instead an extension of the racism that has come to define much about Trump's presidential campaign." 7 a historian of race, inequality, and education, I followed the debate on the Trump 101 syllabus and the subsequent publication of the Trump 2.0 syllabus with great interest.After the election, I decided to use the Trump 2.0 syllabus to educate myself on the roots of Trumpism, which the syllabus defined as, "personal and political gain marred by intolerance, derived from wealth, and rooted in the history of segregation, sexism, and exploitation." 8The syllabus contained many books that I had already read, but it also contained many other books that I hoped might push my thinking about the structural and historical roots of Trumpism in this country and around the globe.I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to support the practitioners and researchers that I taught and worked with at Teachers College.
The 2016 election ushered in a wave of anxiety and stress among teachers and students. 9I listened and watched as conversations emerged among my personal networks of educators who were deeply concerned about the welfare of their students.I heard stories about students who were worried about their safety in this democracy.Black and brown students worried that they or their families might be deported. 10Jewish and Black students were terrified when swastikas and racist epithets appeared on their school buildings and churches. 11dministrators, teachers, and families felt paralyzed in their attempts to safeguard their children from xenophobic, misogynist, racist, and homophobic words and deeds in their communities and schools.My students at Teachers College, who were student teaching in New York City public schools after the 2016 election, struggled with many of these same questions and challenges.I wanted to find a way to support them.
In April of 2017, I asked my colleagues if it would be possible to create a course which I called "Education in the Age of Trump," based on Connolly and Blain's Trump 2.0 syllabus.They agreed.I submitted a draft of the syllabus to the curriculum committee, which reviews and approves new courses at Teachers College.In the summer of 2017, I learned that the committee had approved my class to run in the fall of 2017.I culled through the Trump 2.0 syllabus over the summer, again, and pulled the readings that I thought were most appropriate for the students I teach at Teachers College-students who want to become teachers, policymakers, and researchers.As I planned the course, I tried to be mindful that much of this history was new for my students, who were mostly upper and middle class white students.I had to balance my desires to support them as we explored this material together and push them to articulate the possibilities and fears of engaging with this material in their own classrooms.
While this tension existed in many of the courses that I taught previously, this tension seemed stronger given the heightened level of surveillance of teachers who engaged in pedagogy for radical social justice in this current political climate.

Course Overview and Structure
The course largely followed the themes and included many of the readings in the Trump 2.0 syllabus, but it also deviated it from it in some ways.The Trump 2.0 syllabus was designed for historians and social scientists, and thus, I had to sift through the works on the syllabus to think about which works were and were not appropriate for educational practitioners.Historians are not secondary school teachers.I had to replace many of the historical works with works that were better suited to the kinds of questions that my students, who were training to become secondary school teachers, might have and the kinds of situations that they might face.My students at Teachers College were not working in archives; they were working in public middle and high schools.The readings had to reflect this difference.
Like most of the courses that I teach at Teachers College, "Education in the Age of Trump" was a seminarstyle class organized around a weekly set of thematicallybased readings.The class was capped at 15 students to allow for robust and deep discussion of the readings and the application of these readings to their own teaching and research practice.I had 15 students in my course-12 female and 3 male students; 12 white and 3 students of color.Fourteen of the 15 students in my course were training to become middle and high school social studies teachers.Most of these students were student teaching in high-needs, low-income public schools in New York City and taking coursework to earn a Master's degree in social studies education.Most of the students attended selective four-year colleges before attending Teachers College, a school of education, affiliated with Columbia University.Each week, I sent an email to my students that provided a detailed overview of the readings, why I selected the pieces, and what I hoped to get out of them.These emails included a list of questions to generate discussions.While these questions were not prescriptive, I thought it was important for students to understand why I picked the readings that I did and what I planned to discuss in class so that they can come prepared and ready to discuss these ideas in class.
At the same time, I wanted to give them voice and agency in my classroom, to discuss the ideas in the readings that resonated with them as scholars and teachers.In most of my courses, I usually asked students to write 1 -2-page reflections every other week on the readings so that I had a better sense of what they were learning and thinking about.In this course, I required my students to participate in in-person or virtual reading group meetings on a weekly basis.The reading groups included 3 -4 individuals assigned randomly at the beginning of the semester.I verified that these random assignments had an even distribution of racial and gender categories.Even though I only had three students of color and three men in the class, the students of color and men were distributed evenly across these groups.The reading groups met for at least one hour a week outside of class.The students recorded these reading group meetings and submitted the recordings to me along with a 1 -2-page reflection on what they had discussed in their meetings.Each student took turns writing these reflection papers.The recordings and reflections were due 24 hours before the class began so that I had time to read each one before class.The syllabus explicitly stated these procedures.
I structured the course this way for several reasons.First, I knew that the course reading load was heavier than most courses at the college.I wanted to give my students an incentive to do the readings in a timely manner.Second, I knew that the content made us all vulnerable; talking about racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia is difficult.Most of the students in my fall course were upper and upper-middle class white students, who despite their progressive political views, had grown up primarily in wealthy white suburban communities with limited racial, ethnic, and social economic diversity.The course materials forced them to take seriously the individuals who supported Trump and to confront their own biases about these issues.The reading groups gave students the space, time, and intimacy to work through these biases in a more honest and deeper way compared to a full class discussion.The reading reflections included insights about these conversations so that I understood where they were with the material and where I could push them in class.

Discussing "Trumpism" in the Ivory Tower
The first two weeks of the course focused on the antecedents of Trumpism in the recent past-the ways in which the 2008 and 2012 election set the stage for the 2016 campaign.The films and readings in these two weeks forced many of us to examine our own political blinders, to contend with what we did not see or know about the conservative side of American politics, and how we might be able to learn more about these perspectives. 12The conversations in the classroom centered around the rise of the Tea Party in the United States and how in many ways this movement set the stage for the 2016 campaign. 13In our discussions, we paid careful attention to the role that women, from Sarah Palin to stay-at-home suburban mothers, played in the Tea Party movement, and how in many ways, these same white women played a decisive role in the 2016 election. 14We used the sources in these two weeks to interrogate how our own positions and biases due to our racial, social, and geographical positions often promoted a narrow view of the political and social contours of this country and why we needed to do more to push ourselves out of our comfort zones and learn from those with different political and social worldviews.This was not always easy or comfortable.For example, one week we discussed comments from youth in one of my research sites about the resurgence of Confederate flags in their schools and communities following the 2016 election.One of my white middle class students asked me where the school was located.I told him Pennsylvania.He, along with several other people in the classroom, seemed somewhat shocked to learn that Confederate flags existed north of the Mason-Dixon Line.Like many white students in the classroom, he assumed that these objects proliferated in the South but not the North.As someone who has repeatedly seen Confederate flags and symbols throughout the North, I was somewhat taken back with his ideas and encouraged him and the others like him to get out in the world a bit more.In my course evaluations, my students remembered this moment as a contentious point in the semester.It was.I was frustrated that they thought these objects only appeared in the South-that racism was a Southern problem that they, as Northerneducated bourgeois white students, did not engage in.They were frustrated that I called them out on what they did not see.
Weeks 3 and 4 examined the widespread denial of racism and white supremacy in America and the ways that American capitalism sustains and promotes both of these ideals.The readings from week 3 provided us with the language to describe and examine how white power has been and still is amplified by and built on the denial of racism in this country.These readings also illuminated a shift from an overt to a more nuanced, covert form of racism.As the scholars that we read during these weeks suggest, this new form of racism relies on coded language to advance racism while it simultaneously downplays institutional and structural racism in American society. 15e students in my class, most of whom were white upper-and middle-class students from metropolitan areas, asserted that explicit discussions of race and racism were largely absent from their own educations and were often overlooked in the classrooms where they were student teaching.
The students in my class, most of whom were white upper-and middle-class students from metropolitan areas, asserted that explicit discussions of race and racism were largely absent from their own educations and were often overlooked in the classrooms where they were student teaching.The three students of color, one of whom was an international student, echoed this assertion.For these students, it was at home, not at school where incidents of racism were discussed.In one of the reading responses, students noted that they had been raised in a "colorblind society" where the promise of the first black president seemed to overshadow conversations about structural racism in the nation.While they did not support this colorblind orientation, this group asserted that people often downplay the effects of structural and institutional racism because they firmly believe in the idea that everyone in America can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps."As one student suggested, white people rarely talk about racism because denying its existence upholds white privilege, power, and supremacy.Another group noted that in the rare cases where students are exposed to conversations about race, these conversations are often presented in discrete and sanitized formats, such as the decision by Rosa Parks to stay seated in the white section of the bus or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech.Students asserted that they never learned the long arc of the civil rights movement or the more radical ideas that civil rights leaders held.
The students in my class articulated their commitment to discuss race and racism in their own classrooms, but they also recognized that schools silence and promote conversations about racial injustice and inequity in America. 16Even though they did not necessarily support silence, they understood that they might be teaching in communities where anti-racist, anti-bias education might be an affront to those who believe that they have the most to lose from these conversations: privileged white youth and their families.In our classroom, we tried to tease out how they might be able to integrate conversations about race and racism into their classrooms and handle the backlash that they might receive from white youth, families, and perhaps, even other educators.One of the students of color suggested that teachers leverage the language of intersectionality to bring more nuance to the conversations about race in our classrooms.Another student, who grew up in a predominately white workingclass town 60 miles north of New York City, urged us to consider the idea of stressing the commonalities between poor whites and poor people of color.
Both of these students relied on their own experiences to push us to think more deeply about what we could do in our own classrooms to teach about racism, inequality, and poverty despite the opposition we might face.Week 4, then, connected the language of white power and colorblind racism to capitalism and racialized political discourse. 17These readings forced us to acknowledge and reckon with the ways that slavery and Black labor were tied to the accumulation of white capital in the Early Republic.In our discussions, we noted how this connection between blackness and white capital has been promoted and sustained today through mass incarceration and the school to prison pipeline.We also examined how the 2016 campaign rhetoric exemplified Lopez's notion of dogwhistle politics.According to Lopez, dogwhistle politics refers to individuals who use racially coded language that simultaneously promotes and denies racist views. 18Even though we recognized the long history of dogwhistle politics in American history, in our discussions, we also highlighted the ways that social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, make the proliferation of dogwhistle politics more powerful, prevalent, and public than in the past.For example, when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the president tweeted that Puerto Ricans "want everything done for them." 19ven though Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and are entitled federal support, this message promotes the racist idea that Latinx individuals, whether in the U.S. or abroad, are dependent on U.S. support because they lack the capacity to help themselves.Students argued that they could use their classrooms to combat these messages in society by both pointing out the ways that the founding of this country solidified the connection between blackness and capitalism and that the expansion of our empire to places like Puerto Rico perpetuated these ideals.
The next few weeks built on these ideas through the history of xenophobia and security in the United States.In these weeks, we examined the historical roots of Islamophobia around the globe and its effects on children in the United States. 20We also analyzed the historical roots of border control and xenophobia against Latinx individuals. 21Even though no one resisted these ideas, the fact that many of these challenges can be traced to the 19 th and early 20 th centuries shocked many of my students.Most of my students had never heard about the Bracero Program or Operation Wetback, and now that they had exposure to these events, they actively sought ways to incorporate these topics into their own classrooms.These readings also reinforced and advanced the concerns that many of them already had about police surveillance and ICE raids in black and brown communities.The texts pushed us to consider how the United States has been engaged in a process of "othering" as a way to promote Islamophobia and xenophobia, and in turn, white power and supremacy.These readings and our class discussions pushed us to identify times in American history when this process of othering occurred, such as Japanese internment during World War II, the Red and Lavender Scare in the 1950s, and the federal surveillance of black activists during the 1960s.Rather than argue that these acts only occurred under the current administration, these readings illustrate the historical and structural roots of anti-immigrant sentiment, and in doing so, allowed us to consider the long history of anti-immigrant policies and practices in our nation's history.Moreover, these readings helped us understand that the Democratic and Republican parties and leadership have been implicated in upholding and sustaining Islamophobia and xenophobia for decades, if not, centuries.
In the next few weeks, we examined the intersections of gender, sexuality, and power as well as the ways that the mass incarceration state and U.S. housing policies affect our schools and youth.Dorothy Roberts' Killing the Black Body allowed us to analyze how policies to alleviate poverty are generally written in way that targets the person in poverty rather than poverty itself.In our classroom discussions, we related this idea to the widely held belief in meritocracy in America, a belief that does not account for differences based on race, gender, or class.Many people believe that everyone in America is given an equal opportunity, which as my students noted in turn, promotes the idea that the poor are poor because they are lazy or incompetent.The students in my course, once again, viewed these widely held beliefs as ones both Democrats and Republicans uphold and searched for ways to address this idealized myth in their classrooms.The book helped them understand the gendered and racialized language around black motherhood.Roberts's insights helped us consider, as educational researchers and young teachers, how we might become more aware of own our racialized and gendered biases in our interactions and conversations with lowincome Black mothers and their children in parent teacher conferences and in the front offices of our schools.These insights surfaced again when we discussed mass incarceration and housing evictions later in the course. 22 addition to examining the ways that inequality affects women and children, we also considered how toxic masculinity has shaped our nation's history and our public schools and how individuals have sustained and challenged this ideal in their communities today. 23Students-both men and women-recalled their own experiences with toxic masculinity in their own schools.Most of my students asserted that toxic masculinity was tolerated, sometimes even promoted, in the schools that they attended.Having the language to describe what they had experienced and witnessed in their own learning gave them the opportunity to voice their concerns about toxic masculinity in the schools that they attended as well as the schools where they were student teaching.Educators, they asserted, had a responsibility to name and address toxic masculinity in their classrooms and schools as way of promoting equity, kindness, and humanity in their classrooms and schools.
While some of my students noted that they are still struggling with how to name and address toxic masculinity in their classrooms, one of the reading groups created a curriculum called, Chuck the Patriarchy, which centered on ways to deal with toxic masculinity in their classrooms.First, the students noted that it is important to recognize how masculinity in its various forms affects both content and classroom culture.My students noted that most of their curriculum and textbooks prioritize the history of wars, presidents, and generally aggressive white men.These stories and histories, as they said, are "rooted in the notion of assumed importance, an arrogant attitude that we see as akin to masculine notions of assumed dominance."They wanted to destabilize this.In this piece, they argued, that in order to deconstruct toxic masculinity, they, as teachers, must assess the content that they choose to highlight (uplifting previously ignored voices), how they frame traditional content, and draw important connections to that content and student's current environment.This, they noted, inevitably means facing complex social studies issues that can be difficult to unpack for secondary students in a social studies classroom, such as intersectional representation, coded language, and unpacking sentiment and facts.
They noted that addressing and ending toxic masculinity requires that teachers name, and in many cases change, the various power hierarchies that exist in and out of the class.Even though they had diverse student teaching experiences and opportunities, they noted that teachers routinely perpetuate toxic masculinity by prioritizing facts over sentiment or "hard evidence" over "soft sentiment."This not only promotes a masculine way of thinking, but as they noted, it also limits how a student interprets information.They argued that "soft sentiment" and expressing emotionality are commonly deemed more feminine practices but being able to incorporate feelings and values into discussions of current events and other social studies topics is important for holistic understanding.They felt that the course, Education in the Age of Trump, forced them to reexamine "our own values and understanding of history."They continued: The facts we have learned about nondominant histories have contributed to how we feel about our history and current state.Being able to reflect on this learning has been an inherent part of our learning in this class, and something we find important in dismantling dominating hierarchies that currently thrive in schools, content and culture.In order to begin dismantling the norms of toxic masculinity that have run especially rampant in the post-Trump era, my students believed that they had an obligation to start this process of naming and ending toxic masculinity in their classrooms through their curriculum and pedagogy.
As someone who grew up in a rural part of America, it was very important to me to include a discussion of rural issues on the syllabus.We used Amy Goldstein's Janesville to frame our discussion of rural America around the ideas of gender, labor, and toxic masculinity that we had just examined in urban spaces.For many of my students, this was the first time that they had ever considered the plight of rural or at least non-urban America in their coursework.As they said, understanding the challenges in a place like Janesville, Wisconsin or Buckhannon, West Virginia, helped them develop empathy and compassion for individuals who might have different political and cultural outlooks in this nation. 24They did not understand the economic hardship and deep poverty in these places because they had never studied them.
In her final reflection paper, a Latino woman who grew up in a small city in Pennsylvania noted that this course was the first time she had ever discussed rural America in the classroom.Before this course, she said that she had always associated the challenges of poverty, racism, and inequality with urban America.Reading Janesville and discussing the rise in poverty, people of color, and inequality in the rural America forced her to reckon with the ways that these challenges affect urban and rural Americans.The book and our discussion of it, she argued, gave her the chance "to expand not only my knowledge but also my way of thinking." This book and our conversations of progressive politics in rural West Virginia challenged her "to think about the differences in place, perspective and background that educators and others working in schools bring to the table, and how important it is to ensure we always make space for everyone's truths, not just our own."In other words, the course gave her content knowledge that she did not have, but perhaps more importantly, it pushed her to be open to differences that, as she suggested, she had not encountered or experienced in her own life.
In the remaining weeks in the course, we discussed LGBTQ rights and religion in schools. 25I paired these themes together because often times the religious right uses sexuality to advance their agenda to push religious ideas and theories into our public schools.In these weeks, we examined the ways in which homophobic incidents have been on the rise under the Trump administration and how these hateful acts have spilled into our schools.My students shared emotional stories of their own experiences as queer youth and the effects that the election has had on queer youth today.
We then moved to evangelical Christianity, which once again, many of my students said that they had never studied in school before.
Taking seriously the viewpoints of evangelical Christians helped us articulate our own ideas in a deeper way.As one of my students said, I have to think about what others think so that I can understand and express my ideas in relationship to what I might disagree with.This course gave students the opportunity to deliberate and dialogue about their own beliefs so that they could more effectively advocate for social justice and change in their schools and lives.

Reflecting and Renaming the Course
In our last class, I asked my students to reflect on the course title, to consider if the course title actually described what we accomplished over the semester.I told them that I had my own concerns that the course title centered the challenges in our schools on one person and that this title promoted the idea that if this person was not our president, then these challenges might disappear.As a historian of race and inequality, I knew that was not true.Many of my students argued that they had signed up for the course because of the title, but that in fact, what we had discussed over the course of the semester centered around the ideas of racialized discourse, toxic masculinity, and American capitalism.In our discussion, they reasoned that the course was less about Trump and more about the role that white supremacy and power has played and continues to play in American history and society.The course, they argued, pushed them to be more aware of their own biases and to be more cognizant of their ability to use American history to address injustice in their classrooms and schools.It also helped us understand and acknowledge our own political blinders and to think about ideas and perspectives from multiple vantage points.
One student noted that she thought that the course title might be off-putting to students who supported the president and his political ideas-that often times the course focused on what many of them already believed to be true.She urged me to change the course name to attract conservative students to the course so that she and others could learn from their perspectives and ideas.In response to her ideas, I said that I am fine with individuals having different perspectives politically, that I had actually been raised in a household with two parents who had different political views from me.The problem is that I am not fine with individuals who use politics to justify Trumpism.In this class and my other classes, I do not tolerate any form of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia in my classrooms.I explicitly state these standards on all of my syllabi.
I struggled with this feedback, but ultimately decided to change the course title from Education in the Age of Trump to Education in a Polarized and Unequal Society.On the one hand, I truly believed that the 2016 election had unleashed something in our schools that I had never witnessed, at least on this scale, in my lifetime.I told my students that we needed to acknowledge that education in the age of Trump was markedly different than education in the age of Obama, Bush, or Clinton, the presidents that had governed this nation during their lifetime.At the same time, it was not that different.If the reporter who emailed me about my course had read my syllabus or come to my class, he might have realized that we discussed the ways that Trumpism has existed since the founding of this country.I chose to teach this course, not to alienate or indoctrinate my students as the reporter suggested, but rather to equip them with the knowledge to teach about Trumpism's myriad forms in our nation's history so that they when they have their own classrooms in a few months, they, too, can teach their students about the long history of Trumpism in this nation.For I firmly believe that one of the most effective ways to end these injustices is to educate our future teachers about the history of racism and white supremacy, so that they in turn, can explore this history with the youth in their classrooms and equip them with the knowledge to fight for social justice and racial equity in their own lives.