Raising Active Citizens

October 25, 2024
We believe that students learn best when they are allowed to generate burning questions, seek knowledge to answer their curiosities, and construct solutions based on thinking critically about what they have learned. This way of being in the world naturally reflects and scaffolds towards the work they will do in their adult lives, and it cultivates that sense of purposeful action that distinguishes all Parker graduates.  
Students at Parker understand that they have a responsibility as engaged and active citizens to contribute positively to shaping our community. They do this with their ideas, their choices, the relationships they build, and their actions. This fall, against the backdrop of our national election season, we are also exploring how they can do this with their voices.

Our education around voting began this fall with our middle school. Lynn Schuster, Director of Academics and DEI, teaches a weekly Current Events class to all 5th-8th graders. Over the course of the past two months, Lynn and her students have closely followed the news, examining the role of political parties and the issues at stake. Most recently, they have shifted to the logistics of voting, looking specifically at voter registration.
Lynn’s work also dovetails perfectly with the professional development of our middle school social studies teacher, Emma Wolfe. Over the summer, Emma participated in Project RISE, a weeklong training in coordination with NC State and Purdue University that aims to create a civics curriculum that uses engineering design principles to solve civics-based problems. With this foundation, Emma decided to have her 5th grade class do a deep dive into voting rights.
As Emma explains, “I wanted to do something focused on the upcoming election. Originally, I thought we would talk about this upcoming election, but there wasn’t a lot of content that I felt was appropriate or that they could engage with in a way that mattered personally to them. Instead, we decided to look at the issue of voter suppression, which led us directly to asking the question “What does it mean to have the right to vote?” That question really pivoted and propelled us into focusing on the right to vote and how that has evolved over time in our country.”
Using the book “Equality’s Call” by Deborah Diesen as a catalyst for their project, Parker 5th graders analyzed the content and meaning behind the history of voting rights in our country. From there, each 5th grader was assigned to become an expert on one event along the voting rights timeline. They wrote a paragraph about their event, summarizing it and including a sentence of importance about why their event matters to our right to vote. When they were finished, they drew a visual representation of their event. 
With this new knowledge of civic responsibility in hand, Parker 5th graders then took it upon themselves to educate others. Over the course of the past week, small groups of 5th graders have visited each lower school classroom, translating what they have learned to the younger students. As one 5th grader explained, “We connected the idea of democracy to the metaphor of a fire and asked, ‘How can democracy be fed or burned out?’ ‘How can it consume people or not be enough?’ We decided that people have to tend to democracy, just like they would a fire. Sticks are their opinions, and good sticks make a fire burn brighter, while bad sticks can make the fire burn out. You have to start with small sticks and move towards bigger sticks. Every person who votes is a small spark.” 
In the spirit of tending to that fire and putting this knowledge into action, Parker School will be having our own mock election to vote on a new emblem! As Lynn Schuster explains, “We are doing all this work to understand the importance of voting, so of course we needed to find an authentic and relevant way to show why voting matters. We plan to mirror the registration deadlines here in NY state by hosting a voter registration (TODAY!), and then we will also have an election day. We want the kids to be voting for something that they can see and receive immediate feedback about. Their input is going to have a result. Their participation is authentic and needed. We need their voice; we need to know where they stand on this issue.”
Emma adds, “I think it is important for all of our students to identify how they are voters. Seeing the work that has gone into voting, I think it really does give a responsibility at a young age to understand something so profound that we have the ability to do and understand why we get to do it.”

What emblem will Parker students choose?! Stay tuned for our school election on November 5th! We will share the results as soon as possible!