The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Podcast Introduction
My name is Steve D’Agustino and my cohost Anne Fernald and I welcome you to the Twice Over podcast. Because to teach is to learn twice over. In this episode, The Stories We Tell Ourselves, we are joined by Monique Vogelsang, founder of Humanizing History who share her thoughts about social identity, teaching, learning and justice.
Anne Fernald: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the twice over podcast. And thank you so much for being here. I’m so thrilled that we have Monique Vogelsang here with us today. Monique Vogelsang is the founder of humanizing history, which is a nonprofit. She’s done incredible work around anti racist teaching and curriculum development all over the country and really cool.
Anne: Curriculum that she passed in Washington, D. C., which I hope we’ll get to talk about in addition to lots of other work. Monique, thank you so much for being our guest. Aw, thank you. Thank you for that. That was a great intro. Monique, can you tell us a little bit about Humanizing History? What is it and what is your work?
Monique Vogelsang: Can we start actually from my childhood, is that? … That’s where I like to begin. Let’s go back to the very beginning. Humanizing History is a new project, but it comes from over my 40 years of life experience, and identifies multiracial, My dad is a white American from the United States. My mother is an immigrant. She’s from a country that’s in [00:01:00] Central America that’s on the coast of the Caribbean, where English is actually the dominant language. Do you know what country that is?
Anne: Man, maybe. I don’t know.
Steven: I know, I don’t know. I’m a lifelong New Yorker. I have a sense of geography.
Monique: It’s right next to Guatemala.
Anne: I, British…I was gonna say British
Monique: Yeah, it used to be called British Honduras. It’s Belize. It’s been Belize since 1981. That’s when it became an independent country.
Anne: Oh, 1981.
Monique: Yeah. 40 years only 1981. And sorry, my mother moved to Los Angeles. Sorry. It’s okay. It’s, this is part of the work. Telling stories, I think and hearing about each other. So I grew up multiracial. My mom was one of 11 kids, and everybody in her family married people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. So growing up, my first cousins, who I’m genetically related to, which is important for this story would check off different U.S. census boxes. So I have first cousins that would be considered white, Black, Latino, or Hispanic, South Asian. So growing up, I had this sense [00:02:00] that Anybody could be my family, literally anybody on the street, a stranger. So I saw the familiar in strangers and I became extremely curious from a really young age.
Monique: And I can give you the resume after this, but the story of humanizing history and why and how we see ourselves in each other is really the root of everything that I do.
Anne: So many of my students who are white, and I’ve got a pretty multiracial classroom right now, have trouble imagining. Because if you come from an all white family, most of the people in your family have the same skin tone. But when you come from a multiracial family, Or a family that’s comprised of people of color. You’re more accustomed to thinking, just because your skin isn’t the same color as mine, I can see that you look like me. I can see that you could be related to me. [00:03:00] And so just knowing that from before you had words for it or before you recognized that was an unusual family must’ve been, I can see how formative that.
Monique: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t recognize it until I left my home and started going to school. And then when I went to school In my family, no one ever asked, what are you? But in school, classmates, teachers, I got the, what are you question before I got my people ask my name. So I, so it was definitely, I’m like, Hey, this is really interesting to people.
Monique: What is this? What is this all about? What about me is sticking out to other people? What is this story? And I wouldn’t call it sociological lens, but I started to develop an interest in things that I would later call identity or social identity or race, ethnicity, culture. So when I went to college, I went to UC Santa Barbara, I I couldn’t afford to go to orientation over the summer, so I was one of the last people to [00:04:00] register for my freshman year classes and what was available was like an econ 101 type class and a few others. When I was going down the list I saw black studies, and my sister actually went to the same school as me and I’m like, wow, you can study this in college. And so my first year of college, I took a black studies course, and that, that actually, I’m going to say literally changed my life. And so for the first time ever, I’m studying things that I didn’t learn in my grades K to 12. I’m learning names, the hidden histories, the framing, and it’s being done in a way that exposes the dehumanization so that we can also then actively rehumanize ourselves. And so that was the next big step on my journey. Should I keep going or? Yeah. Okay. And then I graduate and I’m a first generation college grad. I, I have student debt. I’m pretty concerned about all that. [00:05:00] And I come across Teach for America and Teach for America was a really great opportunity for me because it provided some teacher training, the ability to get a master’s degree. And I moved from California To New York. I had been to New York once before that. It wasn’t a kid. I got to travel. It’s a huge change from Santa Barbara. And I grew up in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. I grew up seeing sand and tumbleweed literally when I was a kid and there was less people living there in the 80s, I would see tumbleweed going down the street. Sunsets, purple mountains, a caricature of the
Anne: West, right?
Monique: Yes this stereotype. So moving to New York was a really big change that, that I embraced. And then I entered New York City public schools and I was a teacher. and a middle school, and then I was a teacher at an elementary school in Harlem. And then along the way, I worked at various nonprofits. I worked at an independent school in the Upper East [00:06:00] Side. And I started developing curricula. And from there, I started working with schools. And at this point, I’ve worked with over a hundred schools and thousands of teachers across the country. Really, I would say, focusing on how do we tell humanizing stories? And so Where did human, this is a long answer. So where did humanizing begin? It’s a great answer. It’s so
Anne: interesting.
Monique: Yeah, it begins there. And so now that’s, this is what I’m working on now.
Anne: So you think about little Monique in her class, who’s being asked these dehumanizing questions, what are you?
Monique: So it’s a what? Yeah. Yeah.
Anne: And now you’re writing these curricula that, that humanize these stories.
Monique: Yeah.
Anne: So one of the questions that I’m really curious about is how do you balance history as a discipline with child development, right? One of the things that I think gets people really agitated is people who are [00:07:00] skeptical of anti racist pedagogy, which is not me by any stretch, right? But, when you see on the news, people are like, I don’t want my children to feel bad about themselves, right? But there are real developmental challenges to teaching stories about people like Martin Luther King, who was assassinated, right? And, Maybe we don’t want to talk about assassination in kindergarten, but how do you figure out like the child development story as it maps on to the history that we need to convey so that we are titrating out the harm.
Monique: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of stories that circulate on what anti racist education is. is or can be or what its potential can be. And so I don’t think everybody approaches it the same way. I have a particular way that’s grounded in what I think is sound pedagogy that I do. And I’m really clear that what I’m recommending are recommendations. It’s not the only way. So I’m extremely open to being a lifelong [00:08:00] learner. So I just want to say that in general, the way that history enters the classroom is it’s really social studies when kids are younger. So nursery, pre K, kindergarten, first, second grade. That’s a lot of who am I, who are we. Who’s a part of my family, who’s a part of my neighborhood, the larger community. We, as a whole, don’t really get into history as, I’m saying like as a whole practice, right? Not every teacher is the same, not every classroom is the same, but you typically don’t start to see history until about third grade, I would say second grade, the youngest. And then when you start to teach them history, I do have some frameworks that I prefer, and one with really young kids is not to go into graphic levels of violence. So I think their introduction should be something where we’re learning people’s names, we’re learning things that they did, we’re learning that they overcame obstacles [00:09:00] and unfairness. And I think that’s where you start this conversation of what’s fair and what’s unfair. You can start tethering that to some laws were passed that were unfair. People work together. There are multiracial alliances. There were a lot of Black Americans that we can name and other people who work to literally expand. What we consider democracy in this country to learn their names and to, I don’t think you sugarcoat it, but I think everything should be rooted in facts with driving questions. And I could really take 30 minutes to answer this question. I could take 10 hours to answer this question.
Anne: I grew up in Seattle and I was in the second class to be voluntarily bused. In Seattle and Seattle was really at the time in the 70s, really doing a very intentional and good job of trying anti racist education or whatever they would have called it desegregation, we would have called it then And what I remember from being in the early years of [00:10:00] elementary school is that every year in music class, we watched the same movie, and I looked forward to it every year. You could say this is terrible because kindergarten, first and second grade, you’re watching the same movie, but I loved it, and we would make Little finger pianos. We’d make those little finger pianos and we would watch a documentary about Ghana, Mali and Songhai and the drums of West Africa and talking drums. And that was a huge part of the music curriculum every year. So it wasn’t. The big anthropological lesson, but it was a narrow disciplinary one about music was like music comes from Africa. And this is what’s important about music. And I love that lesson and then I talked to people and I realized that was an incredibly unusual unit to have in a first grade curriculum in 1970s.
Anne: Yes.
Monique: Yeah, the longest part of human history is in Africa, and people continue to live in Africa, obviously, and it’s the home of the greatest genetic [00:11:00] diversity and linguistic diversity on the planet. And yet, for a lot of kids, when they, the first time they ever learn about Africa in the United States is through the lens of slavery. I think that’s what I’m looking for is to create a pretty big paradigm shift on when do kids learn about Africa? When do they learn about race? Is it done in a way that’s affirming to them? Is it done in a way as they get older that is rooted in truth? Align with the mission of the schools or school districts or wherever they’re going to school. And done so in a way that actually encourages us to recognize similarities and celebrate differences. I, to me, to go back to that little girl, like this is what I grew up with and I think it’s possible to others. They may think this is extremely idealistic.
Steven: Anne used to do sessions on decolonizing the syllabus, ? You’re talking about anti racist pedagogy. I’m thinking a lot about [00:12:00] epistemological questions, like, how do you know when you know? If you want to know, what do you do? Do you Google it? Do you pray? Do you consult the spirits of your ancestors? Do you ask your grandmother? Do you Google it? Do you ask artificial intelligence? And there are knowledges, ? And we would do different things based on the kind of thing we want to know. And school looks at one sort of narrow and specific domain of knowing and ways to provide evidence for knowing, assessment and evaluation, say. And I’m wondering if in your work, how you’ve thought about demonstrations of knowledge and these different ways that certain kinds of knowledges are privileged or legitimated over others. Does that make sense?
Monique: Oh, a hundred percent. What enters the canon of [00:13:00] American history, U. S. history, what enters the canon of particular literatures, right? What enters the canon of what makes it to the U. S. history textbook is something that I’m actually quite fixated on. And the publishing companies and how, the state of Texas will get different books in the state of California, for instance, right? I think teaching is knowing my expertise is very much with younger kids. That’s my home. That’s where I enjoy spending a lot of time. And I think it’s not just knowing for that age, but elementary, but I think it’s also feeling. And I think it’s doing. And in this work there’s a lot of consideration on how does this information or knowledge land. And if it’s landing in a way that’s extremely negative, Are there other sets of knowledge that we can bring in and circling back to what I said earlier, because I don’t think I completely finished my [00:14:00] thought, I think starting with something like the human story begins in Africa is a great paradigm shift for children to realize that the whole system of slavery is actually quite absurd.
Monique: Otherwise, we continue to dehumanize people of color or Black Americans if we don’t question that whole system to begin with, right? So by humanizing our story, and the human story begins in Africa, then we create that thread for kids to, when they see things that are rooted in bias or racism or unfairness, they start to question that as absurd. So I think that’s a combination of knowing and feeling and doing and really cultivating your own critical thinking skills. which are so important now and for the future.
Anne: That’s great. So I’m really interested in what you said about loving working with little children. I love working with little children as well, but my spend my life working with traditional college age children, [00:15:00] women adults, traditional college age students. Yeah. And I’m wondering, I see so many parallels. In our society, when people talk about teaching, there is an assumption that there’s a gigantic difference between teaching college and teaching kindergarten, first grade, and leading a workshop of other adults. And one of the things that Steve and I have talked about all the time is, you know what, everybody likes to color, Everybody likes, everybody likes you to know their name. So I’m wondering what your reflections are on the similarities and differences between teaching teachers, which is, I imagine is a lot of what you do to members of the community and then talking to people who are seven.
Monique: Yeah. I wonder if that’s changing now in the post COVID world. I’ve heard a lot of changes in education in the post COVID world, but of there being big differences that people notice. They might be noticing a lot of similarities [00:16:00] right now, too, right? When our physiological needs aren’t being met we have similar reactions, right? Children and adults. I think good teaching is good teaching. And there’s content. And then there’s the culture and community that you create in a classroom, and I think by training elementary school teachers are very focused on all of that, obviously and I think it would behoove us to all be concentrated on that, that there’s content we’re trying to deliver, to use Stephen’s words, knowing and knowledge and information But then again, what are my students seeing, hearing, feeling, I think is an important consideration, and I think that’s what allows me to be really successful when I work with adults is because I don’t have a hierarchy around learning and around the age that I’m working with, and I think every individual is an individual, and, we all want the same thing at the end of [00:17:00] the day, which is You know, our brains are wired for social connection and social protection.
Monique: And if we’re not feeling social connection, then we’re not learning. And that goes for a five year old or, an 85 year old. We want to feel connected and then our brains will allow us to actually learn and process.
Steven: My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and we talk about teaching all the time, and it’s really informative what she does with, five year olds that, to me, seems like the essential form of teaching. It’s like learning how to learn. What’s a good question? She spends a lot of time in the beginning of the year talking about the difference between a question or a comment. And then students will present, and someone will raise their hand and say, I have a question and a comment. So it’s like teaching from no prior knowledge. I think that’s really [00:18:00] important to not make assumptions about people’s prior lives and experiences. You should know this. Why don’t they know this? that kind of thinking. The other thing I would say, too, would be the value of play, of imaginative play. And I think that’s, I would make the argument that’s what college students are doing. They’re engaged in imaginative play. So when I’m in Professor Fernald’s Virginia Woolf class, I am inhabiting the role of scholar.
Monique: Yes. Yeah.
Steven: She’s modeling what a scholar, like what does a person like the professor do? What does she see when she looks at the world? How does she choose to express that? And then I’m going to inhabit that role to the best of my ability. We don’t really understand that’s what they’re asking them to do. But I think maybe if we did, that would like lower the stakes. [00:19:00] try this on, right? Inhabit this role and see how that feels for you. Because I think that builds empathy, it’s perspective taking, which I think is really important. And I think it’s just, we have to accept that. Sometimes it’s just good to know it, it doesn’t have to have any utility other than that.And I think that’s, what’s so exciting when, Bettina comes home and talks about her day, how excited they were to learn this thing. And they just take such joy in demystifying their surroundings, which, they’re all like Frosty the Snowman, right? They just woke up and they’re here. .
Monique: I get emotional when I think about kindergarten classrooms and I’m lucky enough to be able to still participate in them somehow, sometimes. 50 years, they forget that magic, but people who teach younger kids conjure up magic every day. It’s sensational to, to see that, to watch that.[00:20:00]
Monique: They teach kids how to read. They teach kids how to be a part of a community. What numbers are, right? Who are you? They ask extremely big questions.
Anne: Can you talk a little bit more personally about how that affects your work, the clients that you take on, the districts you’re invited to and what the conversations are like when there’s a pressure against the project.
Monique: Yeah. It’s a great question. I find myself drinking water and adjusting my hair as you ask me that question. I’ll start with the more obvious part, which is in my work, I actually don’t bring in partisan speak. And that’s extremely intentional. One, the framers when, framing the United States really encouraged that this country not do bipartisan politics. Because they can be so polarizing so I actually don’t bring in that language when I do this work and I can keep talking about reasons why a lot of, I’ll say one example, a lot of [00:21:00] policies that we would consider racist, for instance, were passed by Democrats and Republicans, right? I do, and it’s the fastest way, I think, to get people, crossing their arms and wanting to leave the room. And when I enter a space, I’m very well aware that this is a diverse space, whichever group I’m in, right? No group is a monolith. If I’m working at a school in New York City, Connecticut, Texas, Florida, California, this is not a monolith. Not everybody is agreeing on 100 percent of everything. And I show up and I work with individuals. As individuals, and I’m pretty confident that I can find common ground. I’m pretty confident that you and I will have something that we agree on something. And if I’m in the room with a bunch of educators. I can start listing a few of those things that I think we have in common. I use a lot of bad humor, but I’m not that funny. [00:22:00] I do a lot of silly jokes to open. I usually, if I’m meeting a community for the first time, like I did with you all today, I share pictures of my family. I find that it humanizes myself very quickly to people. I think storytelling, modeling a little bit about who I am and what matters to me helps bridge that bridge those boundaries. Create those bridges between me and somebody that’s in a chair that I haven’t talked to yet. And if I’m at a smaller table, I like for everybody to share so that we can all get a sense of, who’s in the room. I think that’s really important. I don’t think the work I do is partisan. I think the work I do is communal and extremely humanizing. And so everything’s rooted in facts, like I said earlier, driving questions. And it’s really for kids to support. Their critical thinking skills. I don’t expect everyone to in common but like I said, we’re not going to agree on everything.
Anne: That’s great. That’s really beautiful and seems right to me. And [00:23:00] I spend a lot of time not being partisan in my classroom, but also talking about, compassion and empathy, right? And things that I think, if we’re in the shared project of being in a room together to learn, yeah, we have to care about these things.
Monique: Historically, the work has been done by people. I know people work in the government, but I think it would be a shame if we said things like, patriotism and democracy belong to one partisan group. I think it’d be a shame, the same way, even if, when it gets challenging, I’m not gonna lie and say this is easy for me to hold on to, these ideas, but the same way, No group is a monolith, right? If I’m going to say that there’s diversity in what we call a black community, there’s going to be diversity in what we call a white community. There’s going to be diversity in what we say are Republicans or Democrats. There’s going to be diversity in the state of Texas, right? And so when people see those electoral maps, there’s [00:24:00] this tendency to write off an entire state. But I’ve worked in many of these states, and I will tell you, I’ve had really wonderful and challenging experiences in all of these states. And so I have to really hold myself to that belief system that everyone’s an individual. It’s like you just said, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about other people, and that We can find something we have in common, especially if I’m working with educators. For me, that’s very easy to find something that I have in common with an educator.
Anne: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Can you talk to me a little, talk to us a little bit about the impact you see when you’ve worked with a district or a school on changing their curriculum? What’s the,
Monique: What difference does it make? I was literally just working with a teacher yesterday. [00:25:00] Who has done a lot of work on her curriculum. She’s a world language teacher. She teaches Spanish and I won’t name her though. I want to I don’t name names of teachers or schools and things like that. This is a practice I have. But anyway, she’s an incredible teacher, and she started to bring in she already had a curriculum. So to act I’m not really deleting things, we’re just enhancing things, or we’re expanding things. And or shifting our focus a little bit. And so she really wanted the students to learn more about Mesoamerican history. And she mapped out. Different lessons that she was going to do around the innovation around corn, around potatoes, around chocolate, and her chocolate unit was sensational, and the kids did so much research, and they did, they learned so much Spanish in the process, and she used, and she actually brought in cacao. And a mortar for them to, I forgot the actual word for it in Spanish where [00:26:00] they grind the actual cacao beans and they create a chocolate. So they went through, it took her weeks and weeks to plan this. So there’s a lot of work that’s involved in this. But it the photos that I saw and when she invited parents and families to come in that celebration, and she said a few words that really stuck with me and she said them again and again, it was connection and transformation and that unit in particular had so much connection for the kids that for kids that didn’t identify as Latino or Latina or Mexican or whatever. They made intercultural connection, and for kids that do identify like that they made. Deeper connection and transformation and her just describing their use of hands and how now part of that story is a part of them and their experience. I think that’s, I think that’s the transformation. Yeah. It’s
Anne: So beautiful. And it’s so funny because my older [00:27:00] daughter went to a bilingual Spanish and English pre K in kindergarten. And I remember so clearly that episode of Dora, where she was teaching people how to make chocolate. Mate, chocolate mate, chocolate. Yeah. I remember. Talking about that with her and her correcting my Spanish. My Spanish pronunciation is much less good than hers because she was learning it at age three, yeah.
Monique: But if I could add one more thing, I think that’s what makes this anti racist if we’re going to use that language is that when you look at the canon of what they’ll call, Latinx history, most textbooks include, there was a study by Johns Hopkins. Four to five sentences of history under that umbrella. And so when you have erasure, just like massive erasure and kids don’t learn about it and native Americans aren’t talked about in present tense, there’s a lot of there’s just so much that we’re missing. And so she also, even though she teaches Spanish, got to highlight scientific innovation. The [00:28:00] scientific innovation around the development of corn is, that’s what our newsletter was this week in humanizing history, the development of corn. And how that took thousands of years of innovation. So I think that’s what I mean by anti racist is that I’m, I don’t want a human hierarchy of intelligence.
Monique: I want us to recognize that all of us are capable of incredible technological, cultural innovation, and we just haven’t learned vast majority of it.
Anne: . The last question we ask, and Monique, I could talk to you forever. So this is great. I would love that. Let’s talk again. See Let’s talk again. I really appreciate your wisdom and your compassion. So thank you so much. The last question we always ask is an, is really not a question, but an invitation for you to tell us about a teacher that mattered in your life.
Monique: Wow. Okay. I’m going to do this without crying, but I might cry. Cause he passed away recently. Oh, he asked me hard for me. [00:29:00] His name was Dr. Reginald Daniel. He taught at UC Santa Barbara. And he was I’m going to say the pioneer or the premier voice of multiracial identity. And it was, this is the power representation. It was one of the first times I had an educator who identified as multiracial. Obviously I saw myself in him, but The way he approached the world I borrowed a lot from him and earlier I meant to quote him and I didn’t do that because I feel like I was talking fast and trying to get to my question. But every lecture he ended two undergrads that phrase recognize similarities and celebrate differences. And so that comes from him. And it’s something that has guided my over 20 year education journey. I think about him probably every day.
Anne: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Thank you. Wow. Professor Reginald Daniel. Yes. Yes. What a great thing. Oh, that was beautiful. I love it. Thank you. so much,
Steven: Monique, for joining us today.
Monique: Thank you. This [00:30:00] was, this went by so fast.
Outro
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