Citizens — Not Spectators

Education must… emerge from the interests, experiences, goals, and needs of diverse constituents, fostering empathy, communication and collaboration across differences.

— by Suzanne Sutliff

During this time of separation, unanswerable questions and difficult realities, my class and I stayed connected through correspondence. Along with staying connected, my students needed to be empowered to know that they were a part of history and how they experienced these events mattered.

At first, this correspondence looked like any other journaling activity with prompts that guided responses. But as the weeks of quarantine passed, my students’ writing evolved into something more important. Students started using this time to process events as they were happening to them. They began to open up about the personal ways they were being affected by living during a pandemic. The familiarity and comfort of working in pajamas among favorite pets and memorabilia removed the barrier between home and academia and emboldened their writing in a unique way. Without any prompting from me, they were archiving these memories as participants in their own history.

Every week, through this quarantine, I sent a personal postcard to each student at their home. Later, parents told me that this was something their children looked forward to all week. How often do children today get “snail mail”? Students would show me their postcards on our daily zoom meetings and tell me where they were storing them for safekeeping.

It seemed to me that this back and forth correspondence between my students and myself was not unlike letters written by soldiers or refugees to loved ones in any country in the world during any time in history. We go to these primary resources to understand the events, the emotions and the very personal reflections by those who lived that history. Like those soldiers or refugees, my students were hungry for connections. They were seeking an affirming response that said, “I am listening, and I understand.”

Children and adults throughout history have had their lives interrupted by world events. By writing letters to loved ones and keeping records of events in journals, they were able to preserve these memories for

themselves and future generations. It is certainly possible that no one other than the authors will ever look at their writing, however, it is the awareness this experience awakens within them that matters.

I intend to implement this type of journaling with my new class in the fall. It may not be Covid-19, but history is happening all around us, all the time, every day. My students will have the opportunity to become historians, documenting their lives, connecting the dots between the past and the present as well as the future.

Now that summer is here, many students have started a back and forth correspondence with me through the mail. I believe they know the importance of staying connected in a personal, tangible way. Many of them told me they were going to continue journaling through the summer. I hope they do. I believe we started something that has the value and the power to help them realize that they are citizens of this world, not spectators. They have the power to use their words to, not only document history, but to change it as well.

This quarantine took away many things from our teaching and learning lives, but through the simplest act of correspondence, we found that we were still connected, we were still a community, we still had our individual voices, and it was powerful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Suzanne M. Sutliff teaches 5th grade at the Britton Norwich Learning Campus in Hilliard Ohio. She has previously taught in multiage and multigrade classrooms for the Hilliard and Columbus City School Districts.

suzanne_sutliff@hboe.org