At Palo Alto High School, almost every student has heard of the Social Justice Pathway. Yet, the vast majority have little exposure to the key things the program provides. We were able to interview the teachers who greatly contribute to the program and community to get a deeper understanding of this program.
The first cohort started in 2014, and this year will be the 11th cohort for the SJP program. Erin Angell, the English teacher for Cohort 10 who also started the program, describes its early days.
“The district was offering an opportunity to develop curriculum and a program that wasn’t present in the district,” Angell said. It could be open to anything … so me and my co-teacher at the time, Mr. Eric Bloom, were thinking that project-based learning is something you can do an entire curriculum and an entire pedagogyaround in a classroom.”
After settling with the curriculum, one of the teachers who used to work at Paly, Heather Johansen, came up with the idea to have a themed pathway, Angell said. The curriculum is a cohorted program in which the same teachers are with the same group of students for three years of their high school experience, starting from sophomore year. Angell said the reason they chose social justice as a theme for this curriculum is to bring a new perspective on something that the students are already learning inside a classroom setting.
Austin Davis, SJP program social studies teacher and current partner with Angell, said he’s able to combine his professional studies with the program.
“SJP had a lot of elements of progressive ed [a child-centered approach to education],” Davis said, adding that the program offers an opportunity to build relationshipswith students and also get to know the parents better.
Ken Tinsley, SJP program social studies teacher, said he was drawn to the program because teachers would have room for creativity.
“You [SJP teachers] are given a lot more room to try creative teaching things and projects that you couldn’t do in the standard class,” Tinsley said. “There’s more opportunities to explore topics that you wouldn’t be able to do in a general class. So I think it’s between doing new ways of projects and ideas that you know makes it worth doing.”
Even though the SJP program provides a unique social justice lens through the normal curriculum, what draws the attention of Caitlin Drewes, the Cohort 11 social studies teacher, is the fact that SJP is a cohorted program.
“Actually, what turned me on to it is not the social justice piece,” Drewes said. “But the thing that really turned me on to it was the ability to be with kids for three years. I was really excited about the idea of looping and getting to know them really well.”
Marc Tolentino, who shared a similar opinion as Drewes, said he joined this program when he was still new to Paly because he heard that Angell and Bloom were in need of teachers to lead Cohort 2.
For the past several years, SJP teachers have had different opinions on the topics they enjoy teaching the most. Davis said that the C-span project that Cohort 10 did sophomore year had a lasting impact on him. The C-span project is a national video documentary competition that involves over 1,000 high schools.
“There were a lot of environment and climate things for the future, but also stuff related with school and mental health and things like that,” Davis said. “Our first prize in the Western Division last year … (was) really cool.”
SJP programs also have trips where teachers bring students to places for bonding and immersing in history.
Angell shared her memory of her cohort traveling to Alcatraz one year.
“The trip to Alcatraz was really cool,” Angell said. “Ai Weiwei had done [created seven large scale] installations across the island to focus on political dissonance and prisoners … people who are imprisoned as a result of their political viewpoints and their expression of those viewpoints. That was really powerful.”
Drewes shared an exceptional experience that she said was a “once in a lifetime” opportunity two years ago. Her group of SJP students were working extensively with the local Muwekma Ohlone tribe on a project to try to win their federal recognition as a tribe again. In the end, they created about 2,000 postcards to send out to the lawmakers. Drewes and her student’s efforts granted them a cherishable opportunity to be able to visit the lawmakers in Congress in Washington, D.C.
“The tribe actually invited me and five or four of our students to go to Washington D.C.,” Drewes said. “We walked all over Capitol Hill, and tried to convince lawmakers to help support the tribe, which was really an amazing experience.”
Drewes adds on why she love projet based classroom.
“I reached out and asked can we work on this project with them,” Drewes said. “It was, like this perfect relationship, which is one of the reasons I love project based learning, it’s really authentic.”
