To celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, Judiana Moise, a senior at Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket, RI, shares her story of how her teacher, Stacy Joslin, has made an impact on her life. Stacy has been a Facing History and Ourselves teacher for nine years. She has taught Facing History lessons including Race and Membership, Identity, Choices in Little Rock, and Holocaust and Human Behavior. Stacy likes that Facing History gives her students the opportunity to wrestle with difficult and complex material. She says her favorite part of being a teacher is watching students find themselves through projects and discussions during the school year.

We are living in a time of deep political and social divisions. Here at Facing History, we’ve been noticing that the same dynamics of “us and them” that we explore through history and literature are a powerful force in our own world today. In the United States, we’re confronted with troubling news whenever we turn on the TV, open the paper, or use social media: verbal abuse and physical violence erupt at political rallies. Hateful graffiti defaces the interfaith chapel of a national university. Students trade antisemitic and homophobic taunts at a high school basketball game. Tensions around membership and belonging are also felt around the world.

When you use video in the classroom, are you asking your students to be passive or active?

I can certainly appreciate the leisurely watching of movies and television shows, even documentaries. But as a teacher, when I chose to use valuable class time to view videos, I wanted my students to be as engaged as possible.

“In conversation, we were all able to see and understand circumstances beyond our own..."

In 2011, when I was 13 years old, my family and I traveled to South Africa. My dad was born and raised in Cape Town. In 1976, the Soweto Uprising and corrupt Apartheid government prompted his parents to move their family to Toronto, Canada. During our trip, I spent time in Khayelitsha, Langa, and Gugulethu, black townships near Cape Town, with children close to my age who shared many of my interests. I was struck by their harsh living conditions and bleak educational futures relative to my own. The connections I made inspired my desire to make a positive difference. But, at the time, I was in middle school and I had no clue how.