Transformative Education Lab

Scott Seider, Babatunde Alford, Sarah Fogelman

In many middle schools across the United States, advisory is one of the learning structures most explicitly aimed at children’s formation. While advisory looks different in different schools, it is typically a group of 7-10 students who meet together regularly with a teacher or staff member (their
“advisor”) in order to promote students’ social-emotional learning and strengthen their feelings of belonging and connectedness within the school community (Shulkind & Foote, 2009). Because of the importance of these non-academic goals for student development, the Association for Middle Level Education characterizes advisory as a best practice for successful middle schools.

Our research team wondered whether middle school advisory—with its emphasis on fostering close and trusting relationships between a small group of students and a teacher— might be a good space for engaging students in nurturing students’ civic character development and, in particular, their learning about how to recognize and respond to injustice1. Civic character refers to the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for people to fulfill their responsibilities to the various communities to which they belong. One key aspect of civic character is developing the skill and will to challenge injustice within one’s communities.

To explore the possibility of advisory as a promising space for this formative work, our research team established year-long professional learning communities with approximately 30 middle school teachers from five different middle schools located in several different regions of the United States (e.g. North Carolina, Ohio, Minnesota, California) and serving very different student bodies. We met monthly via Zoom with the teachers from each of these schools, and we worked together to develop lessons for them to share with their students in advisory that could deepen their students’ abilities to recognize, analyze, and challenge injustice.

One lesson that our team developed with middle school teachers in Ohio asked students to draw a picture of a scientist, and then the class looked together at the pictures that the entire class had drawn. When the students pointed out that the majority of the class had drawn pictures of older White men (with glasses and lab coat), their teacher engaged them in thinking through the ways in which societal stereotypes about who is and isn’t a scientist likely contributed to that pattern, who those stereotypes hurt, and what can be done to challenge these stereotypes.

Another lesson that our team developed with middle school teachers in Washington DC offered students an opportunity to think through the ways in which racial joking and teasing can be hurtful, and offered them some concrete strategies for disrupting these jokes within their own friend groups
(adapted from Umaña-Taylor & AERID Lab, 2020). A third lesson that our team developed with middle school teachers in California introduced students to three different approaches that individuals take toward being members of a community: personally responsible citizens, participatory
citizens, and justice-oriented citizens (adapted from Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). The lesson gave students an opportunity to think through what each of these different flavors of citizenship bring to a community, and which type (or types) they personally want to take up themselves. You can find all of
the lessons that we developed in partnership with these middle grades educators at http://www.bc.edu/4cs.

In addition to building these lessons, we also sat down to talk with more than 50 middle school students participating in these lessons in their respective advisories in their respective middle schools. Our goal was to get their perspective on whether advisory is a good setting for nurturing their civic
character and learning about how to recognize and respond to injustice. The short answer is that students told us advisory was a very promising setting for this type of learning and formation. A number of the students we talked to explained that the more informal relationship with their advisory teacher means that they feel more comfortable talking honestly in advisory about contemporary social issues because they’re not worried about their advisory teacher giving them a bad grade. As Lawrence, a middle schooler from Minnesota explained of his advisory teacher, “It feels safer to talk to them because they’re not necessarily teaching you.” Students also talked about feeling more comfortable sharing their honest thoughts and feelings in advisory because it’s a smaller group of students than a regular academic class, and also a group with whom they’ve worked to build trust over
one or more school years. As Chloe, a middle schooler from North Carolina, explained: “One thing about advisory is that it is a smaller group, and so it’s easier to be vulnerable.”

If formative education is ultimately about nurturing young people’s full selves, then their civic character development—and their skill and will to challenge injustice—is an essential element of our students’ formation. Unfortunately, the current political climate has contributed to more than three fourths of K-12 teachers reducing the opportunities they offer their students for civic learning and dialogue. But when we listen to our students, they tell us this civic work is essential and that advisory is one setting in which they are eager to engage in it.