Learning Curve

January 11, 2012

Reading time min

Glenn Matsumura

“Why didn't you listen to the doctor?” prosecutor Faviola Valencia wanted to know.

Gerardo Corona, portraying one of the police officers responsible for the 1977 murder of Steve Biko, leader of South Africa's Black Consciousness movement, didn't have an answer.

“What was Biko's appearance?” Valencia persisted. “What were the wounds on his body like?”

Corona still had no response, and hung his head. Then, for a few brief seconds, he peeked up, to see how the drama was playing out for family and friends in the back of the courtroom.

Tenth graders Valencia and Corona were facing off in the Hall of Justice and Records in Redwood City, two days before the end of the school year. Students at East Palo Alto Academy-High School, the charter school run by the nonprofit Stanford Schools Corporation since 2001, they were wrapping up a three-week unit about South Africa. The re-enactment covered the trials of police officers who sought amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for crimes committed under apartheid.

Valencia had only learned Biko's name several weeks earlier, but the circumstances of his death in police custody clearly shocked her. “I was surprised at the things people are doing in this world,” she said. “I would never think they would go to such an extreme, but learning these things just informs us more, and helps us think about how to solve future problems and prevent things happening.”

As Valencia talked with a reporter in the hallway of the courthouse, STEP graduate Dominique Revel jogged past with an armful of pencils and clipboards, en route to another “trial.” Revel, MA '04, has been teaching the humanities unit for four years. Each time through, she encounters an unexpected twist.

“You learn, 'Oh, they don't know how to write a note card,' and you have to teach them that,” she said. But overall, Revel couldn't be much prouder of her students, who come from low-income Latino, African-American and Pacific Islander families and are exposed to neighborhood gang activity. “We always want to end the year with them thinking of something peaceful, so we'll do a debrief when we get back to school and talk about the benefit of forgiving, how it can help. Then we'll send them off into the summer, hopefully with some inspiration.”

Education professor Linda Darling-Hammond calls this kind of experiential learning the soul of the teacher education program. “Students have the experience of researching this set of events deeply, and thinking through the meaning of social revolution, and how you bring society back together,” she says about Revel's unit on apartheid. “The notion of turning life experiences into truly educative experiences is part of the way we try to prepare teachers in STEP.”

Darling-Hammond, recruited in 1998, is widely credited with turning STEP into a model national program. Because faculty mentor students who teach in local classrooms, education dean Deborah Stipek says the scholars are better informed, on a day-to-day basis, about the reality of public school-ing. “They're engaging with [SUSE] students who are going out in the field and coming back and saying, 'You told me this, but I tried it out with my students, and here's what happened.'”

In a report published last fall, Educating School Teachers, Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, calls Darling-Hammond “one of the most important voices in teacher education research in America.” Levine's policy paper identifies STEP as one of four model programs in the nation.

The 12-month secondary teacher education program, which last year enrolled 71 students, leads to a master's degree in education, with a disciplinary concentration, as well as a California teaching credential. In 2005, a STEP elementary program was added as a coterminal master's degree for undergraduates.

Commitment to social justice is an underlying principle of STEP, and back in the Redwood City courthouse, the presiding judge constantly referred to that ideal. “What really happened during Biko's interrogation?” Allen Hammond, a professor of law at Santa Clara University and Darling-Hammond's husband, asked the attorneys arguing against granting amnesty to the police officers who had confessed to Biko's murder. “What is the difference between a political crime and an emotional crime? Were the police actions motivated by their own feelings about blacks?”

Valencia responded to each of Judge Hammond's questions with poise, and the mock-trial ruling reflected the real-life decision: the police officers were denied amnesty.

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