Elevating the Voices of Black & Brown Youth: A Fireside Chat With Vocal Justice Founder Shawon Jackson
TeachFX is on a mission to promote more meaningful and equitable student voice in the classroom by empowering teachers with personalized feedback on their teaching and customized professional learning experiences.
It was in this spirit that we facilitated a conversation between Vocal Justice founder Shawon Jackson, the TeachFX team, and educators who joined us from around the country.
Shawon has helped hundreds of young people tap into the power of their voice, and to share their stories and ideas with others.
He recently founded Vocal Justice, a public speaking program, with the mission to empower undervalued Black and Brown youth in our schools to become socially conscious leaders by teaching them how to communicate authentically and persuasively about social justice issues.
Here, you can read through the transcript (edited for clarity and brevity) or watch the full replay on-demand.
Why promote more meaningful and equitable student voice in the classroom?
More meaningful and equitable student voice in the classroom impacts education – both for students and teachers – in three important ways.
Students need to speak in order to learn.
When students speak more in class, they develop their own self confidence, they have a better sense of belonging, and even get better grades.
When we change who does the talking, we change who does the learning.
The students who benefit the most from speaking in class include pluralingual learners, students with disabilities, and students of color. But these students get far fewer opportunities to do so than their peers.
This is a major piece of the opportunity gap, and one that we can address through discourse and student talk.
Teachers can create opportunities for all of our students to engage more meaningfully in learning in their classrooms.
Programs like Vocal Justice and partners like TeachFX are key tools helping educators around the country to do exactly that.
In this conversation, you’ll learn how Vocal Justice is working with teacher fellows around the country, why this work is so important right now, and what strategies you can put in place today.
How Vocal Justice is Elevating the Voices of Black & Brown Youth in Our Schools
Zach Crago: Shawon, I'd love to start by hearing your story. What inspired you to do this work, especially with undervalued black and brown youth in particular?
Shawon Jackson: So, my story begins when I was six years old (I had essentially the same baby face that you see on the screen now).
I was walking down the hallway and my principal, who was a Black woman, called me into her office. And I thought I was in trouble. But instead, she looked at me and she said, “Shawon, I want you to give a speech for Black History Month.”
And, I didn't realize it at the time, but that moment of delivering the spoken word piece in front of hundreds of people at our local community college helped me to feel confident in my own voice as a young Black boy in ways that I didn't realize until I became older.
And I contrast that experience with when I first started teaching public speaking.
While I was in college, I was working at a youth correctional facility when some friends began a public speaking course there for young men who were involved with the criminal legal system.
One of my students, a young Black man, looked at me and said, “I do not think I have a story to tell.”
And it was so disheartening.
Here was someone who had incredible insights on the world. And because of the hardships they had experienced, had received these signals throughout their entire life, and in that moment, they’re saying that their story and their voice didn't matter.
And, as I continue teaching public speaking in the Dominican Republic and in DC, I noticed this recurring theme – working with young people of color in particular – that they hadn't received signals that their voices matter and opportunities to actually speak up and share their stories.
This was a huge missed opportunity.
Because we know that storytelling is a powerful tool for social change. And if those who are the most proximate to the pain of injustice don't grow confidence in their voice and prepare to speak up, we're missing out on all of these powerful insights about how to really move the needle – on so many social justice issues.
So that was a big part of my motivation for launching Vocal Justice today, focusing on young people who have been closest to the problems that we're trying to grapple with here in the U.S.
Zach: So tell me more about what Vocal Justice does and, in particular, why it matters today in the United States.
Shawon: Our high-level mission at Vocal Justice is to inspire and prepare Black and Brown youth to advocate for social justice, using their authentic voices.
We reach young people through a teacher fellowship model. We train and compensate middle and high school educators across the U.S. to facilitate our justice-oriented public speaking program within their school as part of an existing class or as an after school club.
We have 30 incredible educators across 15 states this year, collectively working with 450 young people through our program.
Our curriculum has three core elements that our young people engage in about one hour per week, over the course of the school year.
The first component is self awareness, where young people reflect on and share their personal stories.
We emphasize the asset-based nature of the narratives, recognizing that they get so many signals in the world saying that they are their voices and their experiences do not matter.
We flip that and say let's talk about the beauty of your community and your identities and the expertise that you have based on your lived experiences.
Our second unit is social awareness, where young people have a chance to learn about social justice issues from a structural perspective.
We make sure that we’re not just thinking about it from an interpersonal perspective but thinking about institutions and how they uphold oppressive forces in our society.
Our last unit is social change. Where young people say, “Okay, I have a deeper understanding of myself and the social issues in the world around me. How can I now learn how to communicate authentically and persuasively about the issues that matter most to me?”
To answer your question about why that matters in this moment – there are so many reasons, but I'll share just two.
The first is that there's a huge opportunity in the education system right now to have more leadership development programming for young people of color who are not viewed as your high-achieving students who're already involved in leadership programs.
We focus so much on the core academic skills for those young people and how they're behind in terms of their reading and their mathematics, which is important. But we often overlook the leadership development we also want to do with those young people so that they speak up and it's against the issues that they're experiencing firsthand.
And the second big reason is that, when we do that leadership development work with those young people, it not only improves their individual life outcomes, but it also changes what our leadership looks like across all sectors.
So how amazing would it be if young people who experienced a lot of these hardships firsthand are now in corporations and the government and grassroots advocacy movements, speaking up authentically about their lived experiences and changing our perspectives about how we should think about these issues.
Zach: These are of course relatively early days for Vocal Justice. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned so far in doing this work?
Shawon: There's been so many lessons so for context, I began piloting Vocal Justice in summer 2019.
I’d just finished my first year of graduate school, I was in a Boston classroom at Jeremiah E. Burke High School, running the program as a summer school teacher. And I learned so much about what not to do and what to do with our curriculum.
The programmatic lesson that I learned here is that public speaking is incredibly scary and it's often associated with white forms of communication that can be off-putting for a lot of the young people of color that we work with.
So what was important, as we were designing our program, is that we don't just jump into the public speaking, one-on-one lessons, but that we instead ground ourselves in doing more identity building and community building exercises.
My students loved sharing their personal stories and hearing the personal stories of their classmates. Because they often didn't get a chance to do that. And they did not want to do the public speaking 101 curriculum at the start of the program.
So we've intentionally made sure that the identity-building and community-building is what we do first. And then, as we build community and rapport with each other, we transition to talking more about communication work.
The second big lesson is that this is a movement. It's something that we are able to not just influence our young people with but also our educators and school leaders.
Our initial model for the program was me going into schools, running the program. And I was going to have a small group of facilitators do that. But we learned that when we have this train- the-trainer model, we can reach so many more young people. And it was something that our educators were itching for.
When we started our teacher fellowship model in spring 2021, we heard from one of our teachers in Texas that it saved her teaching career. We heard from another teacher in New York that she made this an accredited course at her school because it's something that she wanted for her school community. And that they really loved being in community with each other as they're all delivering these programs in their respective sites
We have that model now where we can build a larger movement with our work, as opposed to just having smart people going into schools to facilitate our program.
Zach: You approach public speaking differently than your typical speech and debate program. Can you tell me more about how you're different and why that matters?
Shawon: This ties back to the first lesson that I was sharing about some of the assumptions that are rooted in traditional public speaking training.
It’s something I experienced firsthand as a speech team nerd in high school. And in college, going to lots of competitions and learning about the right way to do public speaking.
Reflecting on my own experience, I learned that form of communication can often be rigid and does not allow for the authentic expression that a lot of our young people have rooted in their cultural identities.
So some topics that we reflect on in our curriculum now are how we can really encourage authentic expression – and not have you conform to a traditional way of public speaking that isn't true to who you are.
For example, respectability politics – we talk about the idea that a lot of people think that they have to confirm the way they speak, the way that they dress, in order to be heard from their audience members.
We have an honest conversation to say, ‘yes, to some extent, you do need to think about how you're coming off to your audience, to make sure that your ideas can be heard.’ And at the same time, we don't want you to sell out or change parts of your true self. Because that does a disservice to yourself as a leader and to the larger movement, to say that different forms of expression cannot be valid.
Another big part of our public speaking training is how we talk about trauma-based narratives.
In a lot of communications work, we see the narratives of that sad story from a poor Black child in Chicago who really needs help. And that's used as a trope in order to get people to buy into different social justice movements.
And while in the short term, it might be effective to some degree, we know that in the long run, it actually paints an incomplete picture about an individual in their community that can not reveal the beauty and the power that they have.
So one of the elements of our curriculum, when it comes to communications, is to say, ‘let's talk about how we can speak with dignity about who we are, yes, acknowledging some of the hardships that we've experienced firsthand and also acknowledging the power and the strength that we have. So that we're not just promoting a trauma-based narrative which doesn't paint the full picture about who we are.’
That's really important with the communities that we work with because we are working with young people of color who have been marginalized in so many ways. We want them to know that they can highlight both the pain and the power of their narratives.
Zach: It seems like these topics around identity, social justice, equity, critical race theory – they're all in the news, and I've certainly heard some educators say, ‘Yes, these are really important but it's just too hot to touch right now…’ From your perspective, Shawon, how do you respond to that?
Shawon: It certainly is a hot topic now. And we’re seeing that feedback in multiple forms, from fellowship applicants and comments on social media.
I completely hear the concern from school leaders to say, ‘Maybe this is too political or too controversial to do in our schools.’
But my response is that schools are places of politicisation, whether we explicitly do it or not. And the status quo right now is that young people are being socialized through their schools and in their communities, and given that oppression seeps through all parts of our society that socialization, unfortunately, is going to promote oppressive ideologies, even for people who have identities that are marginalized.
So if we don't take an explicit and active measure to counteract that status quo form of socialization, we're going to maintain the status quo.
It's up to us as educators, where we have this opportunity to really inspire young people, to think differently about the topics in the world, to move the needle on that.
And we know that when we have a small group of people who start to make that change, it will start to encourage other school leaders to do the same. But someone has to be courageous, to make that first step, otherwise we won't see any change at all.
Zach: What strategies can educators do today to elevate the voices of our undervalued black and brown youth in our schools?
Shawon: Well aside from signing up for Vocal Justice and using TeachFX, two things come to my mind.
The first is creating space in your classrooms, or in your spaces wherever you are, for personal storytelling.
What's important here is not just asking your young people to share their personal stories, but for you also to model that.
What we found with Vocal Justice is that our young people respond so well when they see our facilitators being vulnerable, being honest about their own experiences, sharing the highs and the lows. It makes it easier for them to do the same.
And entering the space without a place of judgment. We have our young people speak candidly about their experiences, what they love, what they don't. Validating that is really powerful.
And the second piece that I'm a huge fan of is having young people actually inform what you do in the classroom.
At Vocal Justice, we administer regular exit surveys about – what do you want out of the curriculum and what do you enjoy, what do you not.
And when I was running the curriculum firsthand, I would let the students know what I was seeing on those surveys. And I’d talk about the changes that I was making, in real time, to the classroom.
Young people have lots of ideas, lots of good ideas, on how to make changes. So, asking them firsthand – what is something they love, what is something they would change. And then the following week saying – hey, this is how I’m going to change things differently, for you all. So that you're not just checking the box and getting their voice, but that you're actually using their input to inform some of the decisions being made.
Your opportunity for reflection and action
During our fireside chat, educators got to reflect on key questions with each other. Reflect on these questions yourself or with your colleagues now:
What steps have you taken to elevate the voices of your Black and Brown youth?
Are there places where you get stuck in your efforts?
What questions do you still have for Shawon or others in the full group?
If you, as a district leader or educator, would like to explore getting started with Vocal Justice, reach out to Shawon directly.
Across the country, when teachers use TeachFX to reflect on their instruction, they’re getting personalized, objective, and frequent feedback. And using that feedback to create more meaningful and engaging learning experiences with way more student talk in our classrooms.
If you’d like to learn more about how TeachFX partners with educators, schedule a time to talk with us. Or, try TeachFX for free right now.
