.smallstones. Interview – .small stones.

SmallStones Interviews: Nada Djordjevich, Education Consultant

Public Education in Anxious Times and Hope in Everyday Actions

STEM.TeacherLearning — Teachers engage in STEM professional learning. Courtesy of Nada Djordjevich

Nada Djordjevich is a writer and consultant with more than fifteen years experience working to strengthen schools, communities, and arts organizations. As Executive Director of Gibson and Associates, she has secured more than $35 million in private, state, and federal funding for education initiatives and developed three-year plans for two of the ten largest school districts in California. As an educator, she taught history, English language development, and writing and served as an academic dean. She has worked in both public and private high schools as well as community college and non-profit settings. You can read more about Nada Djordjevich at nadadjordjevich.com and gibsonandassociates.com, or follow her on Twitter (@NadaDjordjev) or LinkedIn.

She spoke with Eva Kaye-Zwiebel on January 3, 2018. Their conversation has been edited for length. Updated information on the California budget and resource links were added for reference and context.

Small Stones (SS): Can you tell me, big picture, about your work, and then about the big issues that your clients are, collectively, encountering right now?

Nada Djordjevich (ND): I’ve been involved in all sorts of areas of school reform: creating school district plans, large-scale partnerships between school districts and institutes of higher education, and teacher pipeline programs. These are projects for which district administrators or schools usually need to hire somebody outside to get the work done. As a consultant, I’ve worked under Republican and Democrat administrations—in both California and the federal system. I’ve been involved with several initiatives at the federal and state level including No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top. With NCLB, for better or worse, because it was bipartisan people thought, “We don’t like it necessarily, but we know it’s here to stay.” There have been a lot of transitions recently, and that creates anxiety and a lack of traction.

NadaDjordjevichColorPhoto — Image courtesy of Nada Djordjevich

This happens with any administration, Democrat or Republican: you have an exodus of knowledge, when people who have been in departments for years and years leave. You see that at the local level, too, when you have a change of superintendents. Like I said, people could argue against the vision, but between 2000 and 2016, for the most part education vision was bipartisan. You might have Democrats, certainly at the local level, more willing to tax, but there wasn’t a sense that we are on completely different teams.

SS: Can you give some examples of areas where there’s less agreement than before?

ND: STEM and higher ed are two examples. A lot of my work is in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). I’ve written 12 grants in this area. The science and math emphasis actually came from the Bush administration, and then Obama took on the STEM initiative. There was a sense of, “It doesn’t matter who’s going to be in power; Republicans and Democrats both like science and technology and both are going to be advocating for it.” The Math and Science Partnership grants were wonderful partnerships and there were 13 years of them. The lack of support for STEM now, that’s been a real shift. A recent article from Fast Company describes how STEM budget cuts impact low-income youth’s access to science and technology.

Continue reading “SmallStones Interviews: Nada Djordjevich, Education Consultant”

Revisiting Charlottesville

“…and then some of them took a knee and got out their gas masks, and at this point I was telling some of the policemen, ‘This is not necessary! What are you doing?’”

Screen Shot 2017-07-13 at 8.00.07 PM — photograph courtesy of Ézé Amos

In our most recent interview with photographer Ézé Amos, we mentioned that Ézé would be out again on August 12th, the day of another planned right-wing, white-supremacist march. That march, and its aftermath, are currently taking place.

We’re reposting our interview with Ézé to do what we can to highlight the strong grassroots community response to this horrific Nazi march. (And yes, we’ll stick with the term ‘Nazi’ so long as participants are carrying swastikas.)

Stay safe out there, all. Thank you for your courage.

###

Here at Small Stones, we define education, and educators, broadly. So often, classrooms appear in the most unexpected places.

As we continue our own work of interviewing some of these educators, we wanted to share with you work from a friend of the blog. Photographer and photojournalist Eze Amos, a Charlottesville, Virginia local, has found himself in the middle of some of the larger protests and counter protests that have taken place since the 2016 election. We are featuring some of his images in this post; there are far more on his Instagram feed.

Screen Shot 2017-07-13 at 8.04.57 PM.png — Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.

The issue at hand? A statue of Robert E. Lee, erected in 1924, that the city voted to remove earlier this year. The removal, however, is being held up by legal challenges. In May, white supremacist groups marched on the city carrying torches. This past Saturday, July 8, the KKK arrived.

Screen Shot 2017-07-13 at 8.17.26 PM.png — Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.

We were fortunate to be able to talk with Eze about his experience at the counter-demonstration, and here’s what he had to say:

What I saw, after the KKK guys had left the city, is they drove off with police escort right in front of them, and there was a [police] car behind the convoy of KKK guys. I’ve been telling friends about this actually, they were definitely given—the only thing short of red carpet treatment was actual red carpets. What they give them that day, it was amazing. Anyhow, the police escorted the KKK out of the city. And of course, people were still agitated—KKK came to town—so there were still people out in the streets. Nobody was being violent.

The police, the state police that were all in riot gear, turned around as though they were leaving. [Then] they went back up to the park and then suddenly they turned around, and then some of them took a knee and got out their gas masks. And at this point I was telling some of the policemen, “This is not necessary! What are you doing?” But they just kept doing what they were doing, putting on their masks, so I immediately stepped a little bit away from them.

Moments later, I heard the first gas canister go off, which was without warning. They didn’t warn anybody. So of course some of the people saw that this was happening, that the police put on gas masks, so they wrapped cloaks around their faces, to prevent whatever gas they were going to deploy. Now they’re charging those people for covering their faces in a public place, which I think is ridiculous. So that was what I saw. The police deployed the gas after KKK had left. KKK had left, and twenty minutes after they had left, this whole gas thing happened, and they deployed three gas canisters.

And the craziest part of it was after they did this, the crowd, you know, people were still on the streets, and the police just turned around, got in their vans, and drove off. The state police. So they weren’t really deploying the gas to displace the people or get the people out of the street, they were just doing it for exercise, I think, because it doesn’t make sense that you’d deploy gas and then you’d turn around and just leave the people on the street and just drive off.

So basically, that is what happened. That’s what I saw. I got some photos to back that up. You can see [from] most of the photos, I didn’t get right to where the gas was deployed initially, because of course I was running away from getting the gas in my system, and I got some, I got pepper in my face and stuff, but, yeah. That is what I saw. That’s what happened.

Police ultimately used tear gas, and 23 counter-protestors were arrested. Local activists are currently preparing to oppose a planned Alt-Right March on Charlottesville. If you’re interested in helping out, you can contribute to Solidarity Cville Anti-Racist Legal Fund here. You can also use an ACLU-spearheaded form to register your thoughts with the Charlottesville City Council.

Unless the city revokes the permit for the August 12th march, we may, unfortunately, be featuring more images from the ensuing pushback.

Screen Shot 2017-07-13 at 8.32.13 PM.png — Resist! Protesting the Ku Klux Klan. Photo by Eze Amos.

Small Stones Interviews: Eze Amos, Photographer

“…and then some of them took a knee and got out their gas masks, and at this point I was telling some of the policemen, ‘This is not necessary! What are you doing?'”

Here at Small Stones, we define education, and educators, broadly. So often, classrooms appear in the most unexpected places.

Small Stones Interviews: Eva Kaye-Zwiebel

“Institutions are just habits. They’re nothing. When they’re broken, they’re broken.”

Eva Kaye-Zwiebel is a co-founder of Small Stones. In June she attended a Voice of Witness oral history workshop, where she talked about the 2016 presidential election against the background of her grandmother’s life. She told this story in an interview, which we’ve edited to create a first person narrative.

Eva on Nov. 8, 2016 after casting her vote.

My brother was at my house on Election Day, November 8, 2016, when a giant box arrived from my Cousin Nancy. I looked at it and thought, “What the heck is this?” As we were opening it, I remembered Nancy had told me she had the steamer trunk Manna used to move from Germany to the United States. I’d said Nancy could send it to me. Manna was my grandmother. Her name was Marianne, German for Mary Ann. When she was little she called herself ‘Manna’ because she couldn’t pronounce her own name, and that became the family variation on grandma.

Before the election my brother and I talked a little. My reputation is as the professional worrier in the family and I didn’t want to dump too much of that on him. He knew I was worried and that I had gone to Nevada to knock on doors because I didn’t have a good feeling about the election. I wanted to be able to say I’d done what I reasonably could.

The box was absolutely empty. It’s an empty wooden crate. I guess I expected a more finished trunk. The wood is raw, like, ‘be careful when you touch it, you might get a splinter.’ It has metal hinges and a place to put a lock on it. It’s maybe three feet by eighteen inches by twenty inches. It’s sturdy. It has Hamburg Line stickers on it and the address she was going to in Harrison, New York.

I laughed when we opened the box because it was too ‘neat’ for it to arrive the day of the election. Manna left Germany in 1935, and this is the trunk. If it happened in a story, you’d get mad and throw the book because it’s too neat.

Manna was a force of nature, and she was grumpy. I think she was like that before her country fell apart and the whole family left. But she left early; she was one of those people. She was in medical school in Switzerland and, if I remember my history right, the Nuremburg laws or some of Hitler’s legislation went into effect in Switzerland before it did in Germany. She had to leave school because she was Jewish. As a result, she looked around and said, “This is not the place for me. This is not going to go well.” And she up and left before the family. She ended up getting her US citizenship the week before Pearl Harbor. Of course then Germans couldn’t get it and my grandfather was an enemy alien in Los Angeles during World War II.

Continue reading “Small Stones Interviews: Eva Kaye-Zwiebel”

Small Stones Interviews Roundup

In which a teacher, a preacher, and a lawyer walk into a blog…

12019795_10153690645823833_5323333009454313080_n

c1c819be0f2948b99b76fbef09035842-780x470

In case you missed them, here’s a quick round up of our Small Stones Interviews so far. We are hard at work on bringing you the next round of stories from educators doing the work during these times. If you or someone you know would like to talk to us about your own experience, we are ready to listen!

Small Stones Interviews: LaQuisha Beckum:

As a teacher, I still bring into the learning space the same optimistic approach I always have, because I don’t feel less optimistic. I still talk with students about their responsibility to themselves to be their true self in the face of the messaging that’s horrific right now. No one can take care of their well-being better than they. So, I don’t feel an urgency or that it’s more difficult at all. Whether I’m working with the teens, or with the college students, I’m always trying to ensure they are kind to themselves in the process.

Small Stones Interviews: The Rev. Kat Banakis:

The religious left has been around as long as the religious right, but there’s a lot more thought now around how we are meaningful participants in what I think is really a nationwide civics education. How does a bill become a law, what does the FBI director do, how much can be decided through E.O. [executive order] vs. the courts vs. anything else, and as we’re educating ourselves on that, what, then, is the appropriate witness of people of faith? Because part of what happens in the US is that when you get the separation of church and state, you choose what that means. For me, it means that it is the job of the church to critique the state. That we have the necessary moral obligation to speak on behalf of the widow, and the orphan, and the refugee, and those who do not necessarily have power in any given administration, and to look for where that shadow side of things is. And that, I think, is the civic obligation of religious institutions.

Small Stones Interviews: An Anonymous Civil Rights Lawyer:

It does feel really weird to feel like we might be seeing the end of the political system as we knew it. I mean, yes and no?  I don’t think it’s hopeless. I think there is some chunk of people who will, well, die because of this administration, and a bunch more whose lives will be made much, much more difficult, but I think there are things we can do.  First, I think we can fight—and people are fighting—to protect as many people as we can right now. So, to me, that means lobbying, making calls, bringing civil rights lawsuits, and to some extent that’s working.

Small Stones Interviews: A Civil Rights Lawyer

“I’m definitely one of the people who didn’t realize how fragile everything really was…”

Our third Small Stones interviewee has requested anonymity. She is a civil rights lawyer actively working on what we non-legal minds like to call The Legal Resistance (hey, it sounds cool). We hope this interview will be just her first foray into educating laypeople about what’s going on in government and the implications it may have for our lives.

As you might expect, she’s experienced some pushback, and therefore we’ll be keeping her identity under wraps. Though we can’t tell you who she is, we’re happy to be able to publish our conversation in full below. Read on to find out what keeps her heading into work each morning, despite some very real misgivings about where the system is headed.

Small Stones (SS): How would you define what you do? I’ve been poking around your firm’s site, and it seems like you deal with a lot of good things!

A Lawyer (AL): I say I’m a civil rights lawyer, but I also do workers’ rights and consumer protection. I do a lot of “this looks important and interesting and like I could be useful. I’ll do that for a while.”

SS: That’s actually an excellent segue to my most pressing question. How are things different for you all, day to day, under this administration?

AL: A few ways, I think.  First, when everyone thought Hillary would be elected, we had all of these plans about how we would push forward and make the world better, and we still have those, and some of them are still viable. But a lot more of what we do now is trying to protect the status quo.

With Scalia’s death and the new appointment, we were gearing up to try to get a bunch of things before the Supreme Court , and now we’re on the defensive. And that’s true with everything.

SS: As a layperson, it’s been a bit disheartening to see how many governmental norms are really dependent on everyone agreeing that they are norms.

AL: Yeah, I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’m definitely one of the people who didn’t realize how fragile everything really was—and just how quickly it could change when everyone decides to just stop agreeing.

Continue reading “Small Stones Interviews: A Civil Rights Lawyer”

Small Stones Interviews: The Rev. Kat Banakis

Kat Banakis is the Theologian-in-Residence at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois.

The Rev. Kat Banakis is the Theologian-in-Residence at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois. Her writing, preaching, and teaching explore how to be people of faith in this time and place. She is host and producer of The Holy Holy Podcast, an interfaith program on life’s large questions bringing together secular leaders with Jewish, Muslim, and Christian voices. She is the author of Bubble Girl: An Irreverent Journey of Faith (Chalice, 2013), which puts Christian systematic theology into an accessible, narrative form for personal and group reflection on how our stories are wrapped up in God’s story. Outside of St. Luke’s, Kat works in fundraising consulting for large non-profit organizations. She and her husband live in Chicago. Full disclosure: Kat and the Small Stones editors were college classmates.

Small Stones: We are picking people to talk to who are engaged in education at all sorts of different levels and worlds, and part of why you came up is because of the podcast work you were doing in the second half of last year, and because so much of what that podcast is, at least from my perspective, is very educational. And not in a way that’s didactic or anything like that, but it seems like it was educational for the participants, and it was educational for the people listening. It was a really great interfaith, intergeneration dialogue… and that feels very last-administration.

I’m curious, given that you recently had that role, how do you look at what we have happening now, in the civic world, that’s really invoking a lot of notes of conservative religious positions, too?

Kat Banakis: So Karl Barth is a mid-20^th century theologian, and he talked about how when you preach, you always do so with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. And when I was putting together the first season of the podcast, I was really looking at, and to use a religious term, exegeting, my congregation, seeing that so many of the young families coming in had grown up in multi religious or non-religious households, and really for me to be a good pastor to my congregation, I needed to expand my aperture and purview of interfaith work. This was to be able to gain fluency, to be able to pastor to them, and also because I think that it is important in the public square to have interreligious dialogue.

But you also make a really good point that it was, to a certain extent, a situation of the time, in that there was this burgeoning—there’s always been interfaith work in the US, but particularly since 9/11, thinking about intra-Abrahamic initiatives has been very live. And so it was intentionally the sort of topics that bring people back to religion, broad topics, and then doing interfaith education around life issues, which as you point out, felt appropriate to the time, and creating a space for interfaith education around life topics.

Fast forward to the present, and—

Continue reading “Small Stones Interviews: The Rev. Kat Banakis”

Small Stones Interviews: LaQuisha Beckum

“Whether I’m working with the teens, or with the college students, I’m always trying to ensure they are kind to themselves in the process.”

We are thrilled to present the first in a series of Small Stones Interviews, a conversation with educator LaQuisha Beckum.

LaQuisha (they/them) is a community college Psychology/Child Development instructor, currently at American River College, and a Program Coordinator with the Sacramento Youth Commission. They are also the president of the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Generation Reformation. Full disclosure: LaQuisha and one of our editors, Emily, were colleagues for several years at De Anza College. We caught up with LaQuisha in April to find out what they’ve been up to since the election and how the new administration, and its policies, are impacting their students.

Small Stones: So, you are the first person we’re actually talking to–thanks so much! How did you get into education, if we can start from the very beginning?

LaQuisha Beckum: I began my career as a camp leader back in 1996. I worked my way up to assistant site director, then site director receiving certification to work with 5-9-year-olds and 10-14-year-olds. That work was with the YMCA and lasted 5 years. During this time, I was also working as a TA for a professor at SJSU. I spent one year working at a teen center after leaving the YMCA, then went into research. I didn’t start teaching college until winter 2006 at De Anza College.

SS: So what are things are like right now for you, as an educator? You’re at American River now? Teaching psychology?

LB: Yes, I’m at American River College now. Students are hanging in there. I think they feel similar to the rest of us, without them having the historical notes we have. They are feeling anxious, afraid at times, hopeful (one teen told me that he hopes this will be a phoenix phase…things crumble only to be reborn into something better). I work with youth ages fourteen to nineteen AND teach at the college. Nothing that either group has said is vastly different.

SS: What historical notes do you think are most important? Fourteen-year-olds in particular have only really known one administration…

LB: I think above everything, is understanding systems…that these things aren’t created by individuals, that it’s a group effort! We can talk about the idiocy of Drumpf all day, but it took a messed up system to even make it possible for him to reach this rank of government.

SS: I remember being afraid about what would come next if he weren’t elected, wondering what the system would spit at us the next time.

LB: Exactly…they are familiar with Obama, but they probably didn’t realize he dropped three bombs an hour on the Mid-East in 2016.

I have been quite numb since he [Trump] won.

SS: The optics were way better, but bombs are bombs.

LB: Precisely!

SS: How does it affect how you teach? I’ve been your student before in professional settings, so I know you connect with students well. Is that easier? Harder? More urgent? None of the above?

Continue reading “Small Stones Interviews: LaQuisha Beckum”