Diverse voices of ‘back to school’ from PBS Wisconsin

September 13, 2024 Sigrid Peterson Leave a Comment

Amid the concentrated enthusiasm of back to school, PBS Wisconsin proudly watches children, young adults and lifelong learners enter classrooms — some, for the very first time. We cheer them on as they adjust to new routines, instructors and friends. We get inspired by the dedication teachers and professors employ to fill their lessons with innovative approaches and new research.

Central to our work is the production of standards aligned and free classroom media for Wisconsin’s teachers and caregivers, created and curated by PBS Wisconsin Education.

But another role public media plays is as a witness to our educational institutions and their governance. PreK-12 and postsecondary institutions are places of learning, but they are also sites where our country collectively negotiates answers to big and complex questions about the purpose of education, what we teach in schools and why, and how to fund and support the wide ranging educational needs of large, diverse populations. Schools, colleges and universities reflect the broader social struggles, failures and triumphs of their surrounding society, and public media chronicles how these are made manifest in the classroom.

Explore series, documentaries, history programming, and news reporting below — found in our PBS Wisconsin Voices collection — that highlight how history, identity, race and ethnicity inform the experience of formal education.

Why Race Matters: Higher Education

In 2021, host of Why Race Matters, Angela Fitzgerald, sat down for an in-depth conversation with Tiffany Tardy, program director of All-In Milwaukee. They explored the myriad challenges faced by students of color navigating contemporary college environments, particularly first-generation students, and how the work of All-In emphasizes the importance of providing social-emotional support throughout the college experience and across the state.

Further, watch the Why Race Matters Season 1 episode on the School-to-Prison Pipeline, examining how school policies disproportionately impact Black and Brown students, leading to higher suspension and expulsion rates, which in turn funnel students into the criminal justice system. Learn about the effects of zero-tolerance policies and implicit bias, and the implementation of restorative justice as a solution.

School desegregation

The landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which technically reversed legalized segregation, left compliance with, and enforcement of public school desegregation undefined. It wasn’t until the October 29, 1969 Supreme Court ruling in Alexander v. Homes that the United States forced immediate compliance with desegregation of American schools. American Experience takes a close-up look at 1970s Boston in The Busing Battleground, exploring the class tensions and racial violence that ensued when Black and white students in Boston were bused for the first time between neighborhoods to comply with a federal desegregation order.

In The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools, American Experience offers another documentary on school integration, showing us what happened in Leland, Mississippi when it integrated its public schools in 1970. Told through testimonials of students, teachers and parents, the film shows how the town was a microcosm of the transformation of America.

Bilingual education

The Busing Battleground extends the narrative of school integration beyond race, to ethnicity and language, telling the little-known story of how Latino and Asian activists in 1970s Boston, many of them non-English speaking mothers, fought for bilingual education as their children were bused far from their neighborhoods to new schools. The Parents Committee for the Defense of Bilingual Education, along with boycotts by Chinese mothers preserved the learning opportunities and safety of entire communities of kids.

In a recent episode of The Express Way with Dulé Hill, Hill follows the Cara Mía Theatre, the largest Latinx theater in Dallas, staging performances of  “Crystal City 1969.” The play depicts an era of midcentury Texas when Latino students were punished, sometimes physically, for speaking Spanish in school, and how Chicano student activists mobilized to create new standards of education.

First Nations

Members of Wisconsin’s First Nations have engaged in long term advocacy to ensure our primary and secondary schools teach about Native American history, culture and tribal sovereignty, resulting in Wisconsin Act 31, passed in 1989, also known as “American Indian Studies in Wisconsin.” As part of this statewide commitment and with respect for the original occupants of our land, PBS Wisconsin created The Ways, a collection of language and culture stories from Native communities around the central Great Lakes “that explores traditional ways and those of today.”

Within this series —produced between 2012 and 2015 — meet Arlene Thunder Blackdeer, a Ho-Chunk language apprentice fighting Indigenous erasure by teaching Ho-Chunk in her Tomah, Wisconsin community.

The long history of American settler colonialism is one of forced assimilation of First Nations communities to white cultural norms, practices and politics. A major site of this project of assimilation was in Indian boarding schools of the 19th and 20th centuries sponsored by the U.S. government and Christian missionaries. Hundreds of thousands of Native American children were forcibly removed from their communities, and placed into military-inspired environments in which their hair was cut and they were forced to wear uniforms instead of traditional clothing. They were humiliated and punished for speaking their own languages and endured physical, sexual and psychological abuse. PBS Digital Studios’ Above the Noise examines the enduring impacts of Native American residential schools.

To learn even more about this history, watch the following installments of PBS News Hour, and Local, USA.

Muslim communities

The Wisconsin Muslim Project, a partnership between PBS Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition, and We Are Many — United Against Hate, connects with stories and the diverse identities of Wisconsin’s muslim communities.

In this segment of Wisconsin Life, meet UW-Madison Law Professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes, who shares her passion for education and civic engagement which permeates her constitutional and Islamic law classrooms. Growing up, her parents’ mixed, multifaith, activist-rooted background fostered a love for learning. Quraishi-Landes’ goal is to connect with young people to get them inspired by knowledge and channel it into being productive citizens.

Next, get to know Isaak Mohamed. He is the Somali district liaison for the Barron Area School District, he assists students and families with translations and anything else they need. His work doesn’t stop there. He organizes community programs like soccer leagues, provides information as a community health worker, and in 2022, he was elected as the first Somali on Barron’s City Council.

PBS Wisconsin News

The PBS Wisconsin News team reports on education throughout the year as a regular beat, and partners with publishers from the Wisconisn Center for Investigative Journalism, Pro Publica, and the Associated Press to republish wide ranging local education stories on our site that augment our staff reporting. Often, these stories report on the intersections between education and a range of identity categories.

Over 100 Wisconsin school districts fielded inquiries, challenges to books since 2020 | July 10, 2024
In July 2024, The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s Wisconsin Watch reported that 1 in 4 Wisconsin school districts fielded inquiries about books, or formal requests to remove them from Wisconsin school libraries since 2020. Many of these included books with coming of age books with themes of non-white ethnic and racial identity, and LGBTQ+ identity.

Teaching Hmong and Asian American histories required in Wisconsin Schools under new law | April 4, 2024
Read how, last April, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed into law a bipartisan bill requiring K-12 schools to teach Asian American and Hmong American histories.

Wisconsin in Black & White

Finally PBS Wisconsin’s Wisconsin in Black & White devoted an in-depth episode to the profound effects racial inequalities have on education across Wisconsin. Follow PBS Wisconsin Special Projects reporter Murv Seymour as he reports on how diminished access to education, economic hardship, and longstanding school segregation lead to substantial disparities in educational outcomes among Black, Hispanic and white students.

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The above represent only a fraction of what PBS Wisconsin curates in our PBS Wisconsin Voices collections to uplift diverse voices in public media storytelling and enrich our understanding of our state and our world, our past and present. Look for more PBS Wisconsin blog installments where are editors highlight new and topical Voices selections for you throughout the year.

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