Climate Conversations S3E10: From Learning to Teaching with Boston Latin School & YouthCAN Alumna Rebecca Park

Rebecca Park: [00:00:00] The power of youth advocacy is that if you make youth advocates really strong they're gonna continue to be advocates for the rest of their lives.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:00:11] This is Climate Conversations.

Curt Newton: [00:00:19] Before we get started, a quick note. If you haven't yet, please listen to episodes two through four in this season on Learning to Change where we tell the stories of three groups who have modeled our season theme. We had to cut so much good stuff out to create those stories, so now we're releasing extended cuts of the individual interviews. We hope you like them as much as we do and that they lead you to a richer appreciation for what it means to learn to change.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:00:46] So in this episode of season three we talk to Rebecca Park an alum of YouthCAN, currently a government and economics at a high school in New York.

Curt Newton: [00:00:58] You might hear our [00:01:00] producer Dave chiming in here.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:01:02] So today we are here for a fantastic new recording. We have Rebecca Park, a proud YouthCAN alumni and a public school educator, welcome Rebecca.

Rebecca Park: [00:01:15] Thank you.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:01:17] So glad that you're here with us.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:01:19] So, first question for you, Rebecca, what do you do?

Rebecca Park: [00:01:24] So I am currently about to start my third year as a public school teacher in Brooklyn, New York. I teach high school government.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:01:32] Fantastic.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:01:32] And you're from the Boston area originally, right?

Rebecca Park: [00:01:35] I am. I grew up in Jamaica Plain and went to Boston Latin School.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:01:40] And how was that?

Rebecca Park: [00:01:42] It was a very important experience. It's a very big school, has a long history. I think it's a great place to learn how to advocate for yourself and navigate systems of power.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:01:56] You learned how to navigate power. That's a pretty [00:02:00] important skill but now you're on the side of The Man aren't you?

Rebecca Park: [00:02:04] A little bit.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:02:07] How does that feel like? Does it feel like ultimate authority?

Rebecca Park: [00:02:11] I'm lucky to work at a school that really sees students and youth as equal partners and members of the school community. I also think having that experience as a student and trying to always refresh myself in having informal opportunities as students, that it's going to workshops or going to professional development and remembering all the ways it feels to be a student. I try to make that inform how I treat my students in turn.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:02:40] Fantastic. I'm sure your students are thrilled if they're willing to admit it.

Rebecca Park: [00:02:46] Yeah.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:02:48] Right, so you were a student at Boston Latin. I think you said you started 2008 as a ninth grader. Tell us the story about what led you to YouthCAN, Climate Action [00:03:00] Network in te first place.

Rebecca Park: [00:03:01] Sure. So I come from a pretty political family and I define that by meaning a family that discusses politics and what's going on in the world a lot, talks about history a lot, and especially has taught me that I have a greater civic responsibility than just voting, that there are major injustices in the world and especially as someone with a lot of privilege, that it's my responsibility to be involved in trying to combat those injustices. So that's the context.

 And I think coming out of middle school and going into high school where you feel like you're supposed to get to start doing bigger things, I wanted an outlet for that and I fell into YouthCAN. I had some neighbors who were a few years older than me who were involved who told me to come, and I immediately met Miss Arnold and was totally sucked in. She will make you feel immediately necessary in a really special way, and I just saw that this was a place where people were [00:04:00] really working hard, working together, asking lots of questions and it wasn't always clear about, okay, we've chosen this issue. It's a very multifaceted issue, climate justice. We weren't necessarily calling it that at the time but that's what it was. This is the place where I want to be with many people trying to spend their time making change.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:04:18] So you used the word climate justice and of course given your family background and your interest in justice issues more generally, what is climate justice for you?

Rebecca Park: [00:04:30] For me climate justice is an understanding that climate change is bad for our entire human community and entire planet but also has particularly adverse effects on communities that are already facing injustice. Low income communities, communities of color, countries around the world with less advanced technology and less access to resources that climate change is a further aggravating factor around systems that have already marginalized a lot of people.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:04:58] And how did that [00:05:00] play out in Boston Latin in Youth Climate Action Network. What would I notice if I saw you grappling with climate justice at BLS?

Rebecca Park: [00:05:09] Yeah, it's fun to think about this in retrospect because again, I definitely don't think I fully understood that all the time. But I think one of the ways it started to make sense, when I was in 10th grade we launched this project to try to get the state to incorporate sustainability into its teaching standards and the word we kept using was systems thinking and this idea that all these different systems that we're talking about are connected to each other which goes beyond just climate issues.

 But I think the issues that we're talking about, even if it's good things that we're talking about are not isolated things, that they're all connected to each other and contributing to each other. So I think that was the beginning.

 Also as a history nerd and with Miss Arnold being a history teacher, I think that allowed for conversations about the way things are connected.

 And then as we moved on, I came to understand that [00:06:00] especially Boston Latin has a very privileged role within Boston public schools for a variety of reasons. It's the oldest public school in the country and because of that has an alumni association, a lot of access to resource and connection that most other Boston public schools don't have, and I think we came to understand that and then greater see the role of YouthCAN helping to bring access to climate education and the things that we're starting to have access to that other schools in the Boston Public school system weren't necessarily going to be given the extra attention that we were.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:06:35] So given your interest in climate, it's common to imagine climate change work through either an environmentalist lens or a scientific lens, but you just said you're a history nerd and you're teaching government. So how do you bring climate work into this seemingly non-climate discipline.

Rebecca Park: [00:06:59] Yeah, in [00:07:00] high school I think it was that it was the ... I don't want to say the only because I don't feel like I have an exhaustive knowledge of the extracurricular opportunities at the time but definitely the most prominent option for someone who was interested in political advocacy in general and community organizing in general.

 Again I might not have known to use those terms at the time. (inaudible 00:07:20) building power with other stakeholders, raising awareness, etc. to try to move people in power. But I think the reason it's still important to me know or the ways I can access it now is by making sure those connections with other issues are there and also understanding that the environmental movement has played a really interesting role in American history and has evolved a lot and as always is connected to a lot of other things.

 One thing that comes to mind is thinking about Rachel Carson in the 60s. You can't understand her activism without understanding the fact that she was a woman scientist in the 1960s. People were able to discredit her for that and a lot of these things [00:08:00] are always all connected. It's just part of this longer story of things I feel we've made progress and then currently feel like they're being rolled back.

 And I think conversations on the left in general about how do we build inclusive movements of solidarity and not just all focus on our individual priorities?

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:08:21] So I'm wondering if you think back to your experience in Boston Latin and YouthCAN, was there a particular moment or turning point you said, "I'm in the mix, I'm doing something about what I care about."?

Rebecca Park: [00:08:34] Yeah, I think the serious moments that felt really special, because of the activism that YouthCAN has done when I was in ninth grade, the city at the time, Mayor Tom Menino was putting together a committee to put together an advisory report about how the city should respond to and also adapt to climate change, or I guess we called it mitigating and adapting to climate change, and they asked for a student representative or a youth [00:09:00] representative, and I had the amazing privilege and opportunity to be that student.

 So over the course of my 10th and 11th grade years, I went to committee meetings with professors and business leaders and other ... I think a city councilor was on the committee, and realizing that when you put the work in, you're going to have the opportunity to have a voice in those spaces and how important that is to not just assume you're not going to have that opportunity.

 And also figuring out when I was in those spaces, I'm sure it looked good for them to have a youth representative who's not supposed to be silent but they're not necessarily expecting me to say a lot of things, and it's also really hard to say a lot of things. I'm 15, 16, and these are all really important people. So I think that was a moment of understanding growth for me of how do you take advantage of these opportunities once you get your foot in the door, and also, there's a possibility of getting your foot in the door.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:09:57] And getting a food in the door [00:10:00] is of course so deeply tied to power, right?

Rebecca Park: [00:10:05] Yeah.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:10:06] Do you see a difference between what the students you're teaching now are capable of accessing and the students who were your peers when you were at Boston Latin?

Rebecca Park: [00:10:17] Yeah, certainly. Something that comes to mind is the gun control movement today and the ways the students in Parkland have been trying to also raise voices of students in Chicago and other cities with [inaudible 00:10:30]. I think that a lot of it has to do with the institutional privilege of Boston Latin and also the fact that BLS is not representative of the city population for a long variety of reasons.

 But I think that my colleagues and I work really hard to give our students access to some of these opportunities but it's something additional rather than something that happens. Not to say that people at BLS aren't working really hard to [00:11:00] maintain that access but I think that my students today, most of them are either first generation Americans themselves or children of immigrants, children of first generation Americans.

 So for me I already have the advantage of being someone whose parents were involved in American movements when they were growing up and had the privilege of not having to question my status as an American or not having other people question that status. So I think I was able to have that positive entitlement of both, this is a place that I have a right to say things about, and that I have a responsibility to say things about and I think a lot of my students either feel so disillusioned because they've experienced systems of injustice in a way that I never did and probably never will and also are not being welcomed to the conversation in an automatic way in a way that, for the most part, I was.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:11:57] So how do you try to include them in that conversation?

Rebecca Park: [00:11:59] Yeah. I think a lot of it [00:12:00] is about showing them role models of the past of people who have had a similar experience to them still claiming that right to speak. Representation is definitely a huge part of it, both people in the past and also people now. So we try to bring speakers in and take them on trips outside of school to make sure that they have opportunities to see the people and organizations that can make change that they can be part of.

 But it's tough. I mean I will never forget the day after the election last year when what really impressed me was that my students were angry but they weren't surprised because for them, it was just a continuation of the system not listening to them and that was a really big educational moment for me.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:12:46] Turning to climate in particular, are there ways that you bring climate into your classroom so that people can tell stories from their point of view.

Rebecca Park: [00:12:56] That's not something that I've gotten to a bunch yet. We have [00:13:00] current events Fridays for the government semester so we talked about climate change for part of that, and I think the biggest thing I learned is that ... And in a similar way to me, there's just a lot of lack of information. I think students learn about it in a science class maybe earlier in high school but if they haven't had to access that knowledge in three years, it's not going to still be there.

 So it was about making those connections to Hurricane Sandy. My students are mostly from South Brooklyn so many of their homes flooded or school flooded. They certainly remember the subway delays and all of that, and we had a debate about ... In our economics semester, we looked at a story from after Hurricane Sandy about, "Is it right for business owners to raise the price of things like water because they can?" So in the context of supply and demand, climate change offers a really interesting example of pure market the way it would work vs. "Well, do we correct that for [00:14:00] moral or just reasons?"

 So I thinking making sure the students have an opportunity to see that as a through line and I certainly have a lot of work to do there, that climate issues are very relevant to all these other persistent dilemmas that we're addressing.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:14:15] So lots of teaching moments are available.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:14:19] You said that your students are often disillusioned. Is that a structural thing? I mean these are very difficult issues that they're facing and disillusionment is in some ways counterproductive, right? So what do you do about it?

Rebecca Park: [00:14:36] Yeah, I'm definitely still learning what to do about it but I think it's particularly hard in this current moment when I feel disillusioned. But some of it's just maintaining a positive but not naïve mindset for lack of a better word and making sure that I'm not glossing over the obstacles and particularly the obstacles that they face that I might not [00:15:00] face but making sure we're showing examples of how things have changed.

 This year we spent a lot of time in immigration unit and a voting unit, and not to say that there's been a straight line of progress because that is not the course of American history but that things are different than they used to be and there's a reason for that, and the reason for that is because some people decided to be more than just be disillusioned.

 So a lot of times we would have, at those turning points, we talked about the march in Selma and having conversations in the classroom. "Okay, would you have participated in that march? Why or why not? Let's unpack why we feel that way. Are we scared? Do we think it's not going to make a difference?"

 And especially when you're looking at a historical moment, the advantage of saying, "Well, it did make a difference and there's things that have to be made different today. Are we going to be the ones to do that or are we going to leave it for other people and [00:16:00] what happens if everyone leaves it for other people?"

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:16:01] So one of the things I'm wondering about is going back to your expierence at Boston Latin, with Youth Climate Action Network, were there things that you learned or abilities or skills that you took on that you maybe never dreamed you would learn at Boston Latin?

Rebecca Park: [00:16:17] For sure. So some of the, I guess you can call them principles that I learned, that's an easier place to start. I learned how to write a professional email which can initially sound not the biggest deal but has certainly been a huge life skill as we enter an ever more digital age. How to communicate with adults when I was still in ninth grade and how to strategically communicate with a stakeholder is a massive skill and how to write a grant is not something I thought I was going to be doing in high school and (inaudible 00:16:48) word limits and specific questions and how to make your organization look valuable and all of that.

 I also really learned how to ... I mean that was where I first learned how to lead and [00:17:00] how to make people who are new to an organization or less confident, really give them opportunities to shine in the way that they're really capable so that they then start to believe in themselves. I think one of the biggest things I learned in YouthCAN was that leadership is very much not about you and all about how you help other people be successful.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:17:21] Wait, leadership is not about grabbing as much power as you can?

Rebecca Park: [00:17:26] So shocking. But also in high school, that is as shocking as you just said. I'm really grateful to Miss Arnold for that and she's the model of that. If she wanted to just do a bunch of things herself, first of all, she wouldn't accomplish as much but she is never the one to take the credit even though she's obviously played a huge role in all of this.

 Also YouthCAN and YouthCAN events were the first time I really spoke in public other than on the theatrical stage, and that was huge for me especially when there were [00:18:00] adults there to feel like I had something valuable to say and was capable of saying it in a calm and articulate manner. So yeah, we got to speak at events, we got to speak at a rally in Boston, we got to speak with Al Gore, lots of crazy opportunities, and also at the summit at MIT, having a really diverse set of opportunities to figure out who's my audience, what am I trying to say?

 Then in general, YouthCAN was the first opportunity I had to work on a campaign and see it be successful. So I think I'm so lucky that I got to learn at such an early age what I'm trying to teach my students now. If you work hard, if you build a coalition, it is possible to change things even if it's going to be incremental and not a straight line, it's worth it.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:18:52] So what is it that Miss Arnold brought to YouthCAN that made a difference for you or for others?

Rebecca Park: [00:18:59] I would say a couple [00:19:00] things. One, just unending faith in the possibility of young people to grow and to work hard and to be able to function in the ways that we associate with adults, whether that's speaking or writing or leading. Miss Arnold never stops believing in people and never stops raising her expectations ever higher.

 I could have gone to a place where I just stagnated and instead, she made sure that I have opportunities to keep pushing myself especially when it came to things like public speaking.

 I also think Miss Arnold is just absolutely incredibly hard working and dedicated and I can't say how many afternoons we spent until 6, 6:30 p.m. in her corner classroom in the basement going over emails, making plans, and also I think the other thing that she shows is that all change making including organizing is based on relationships. People are not going to get [00:20:00] involved if they don't feel like they have partners that they trust and that are going to support them, and that's what Miss Arnold makes you feel like right away.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:20:07] How are you bringing all of that to your students?

Rebecca Park: [00:20:10] Well, I think the relationships thing is the biggest thing, relationships and expectations which were also the themes of my teaching (inaudible 00:20:19) program, a whole other story. It's a really hard combination to show students that you love them but also that love doesn't mean letting them make excuses for themselves especially when students might not believe themselves that they're capable of reaching your expectations. So I think I've learned to be fairly explicit about that with them, that for me caring about them and supporting them is pushing them to what I know they're capable of and that's a long journey that doesn't happen in three class periods.

 But I think because I got to have teachers like Miss Arnold and personally benefit from that kind of mentorship, I try to bring that to my own students.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:20:58] And in terms [00:21:00] of the actual teaching that you do, this is after all a difficult or maybe interesting time in the annals of government. Let's put it that way, right?

Rebecca Park: [00:21:13] Ever more interesting every day.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:21:15] How do you bring that to your students?

Rebecca Park: [00:21:17] Oh, man. The age old question. I think that more than ever, we're living in a period that shows it's really important for students to understand some of the basic workings of government. Right now, some of the biggest debate is what is any congress's role in checking a president? What are the constitutional obligations? What are a president's constitutional powers?

 So even in the abstract of the specifics that are happening right now, if everyone in the country fully understood the specifics of how our federal government is supposed to operate, I think we would probably be in a different [inaudible 00:21:57].

 I think [00:22:00] also I'm lucky to work in a remarkably diverse school. Partly because of our location, we have a student body that's 35% Latino, 20% black, 20% Asian, and 25% white and also not super ideologically diverse ... or I should say is ideologically diverse, not necessarily even between. But I think the students in my class are more getting to have the kinds of difficult conversations that most Americans including myself don't have with people who are really different and really disagree on a lot of things.

 So if my classroom can be a space for people to start to learn how to have those conversations, again, very much including myself, then that's a drop in a good bucket.

Dave Lishansky: [00:22:45] So can you talk a little bit about what makes youth advocacy different from movements like Occupy or something that's really not youth involved in the same way?

Rebecca Park: [00:22:57] Yeah, I think that [00:23:00] when youth are able to show that they really understand something and are advocating for something, there's all kinds of power associated with that. One of them, for lack of a better word, is the innocence thing, but that kids are not trying to advance some ulterior motive hopefully.

 I think there's an understanding that we respect young people as being part of the future, as being idealistic because they haven't had to damper that idealism through life experience, and so it's much harder to ignore or shut down or dismiss a young person making an argument vs. someone who has maybe been involved in something for a long time and that is largely unfair but how our civic dialogue works.

 Of course there's also a lot of people who are able to say, "Well, you're young so you don't understand." But I think that mindset is [00:24:00] mostly stigamized. And I think also the power of youth advocacy is that if you make youth advocates really strong, they're going to continue to be advocates for the rest of their lives and so it's really a long term investment in change making.

 Fun story about a time in YouthCAN, when I was a senior, I was the environmental champion or something of Beth Israel Hospital and I had to give a 20-minute speech and I'm a horrible procrastinator and I had been on a school trip to Eastern Europe and wrote this speech on the plane ride back from the trip the night before I had to give it, but the whole metaphor I used because it was a hospital was when an ambulance is coming down the street, all the cars, despite the fact that it's inconvenient, go to the side of the road so the ambulance can go by.

 So if we all just make small sacrifices, things will be better.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:24:55] What a beautiful image.

Dave Lishansky: [00:24:57] Great.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:24:57] Great metaphor.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:24:58] Small [00:25:00] sacrifices, that's a good place to start. I would think that we need much bigger sacrifices too.

Rebecca Park: [00:25:06] Yeah. Another turning moment that I was thinking of before that I forgot to mention, I was traveling with my family and my mom and I got into this huge argument about unplugging, I think it was a phone charger. So I don't even know if that actually is one of the things that (inaudible 00:25:22) but it just was a moment that stuck with me that the most important and most difficult conversations about things like this are people that are closest to us and it's easy to go around being self-righteous in the abstract, but when you're actually having conversations with people in your life about things, figuring out how to acknowledge your own humility and lack of full understanding and meet people where they're at is difficult and supremely important.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:25:50] I'd like a few lessons in how to do that.

Rebecca Park: [00:25:54] Yes, also related to your previous question about how did I start to understand climate justice, [00:26:00] I think in ninth grade, we got a grant from National Grid about retrofitting our windows and our lights and we're really focused on energy efficiency and we're focused on things within the Boston Latin building, and then from there started to really try to advocate.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:26:17] So, probably think about winding down, are there things that you think we should cover that we haven't? And also any message that you would like to get across?

Rebecca Park: [00:26:30] I guess a couple things. One, to young people in high school, if you can find a group of people that care about something that you care about, don't doubt that you can change something even if it's going to take a while, even if the changes that you work on might not be made while you're there, especially when it comes to high school.

 I spent three years in high school working on this green roof for the school and it didn't happen while I was there, but that [00:27:00] wasn't the point. And trying to build something that other people will be able to continue, at least in the high school model where everyone was just going to be leaving after four years, which is part of what's so incredible about YouthCAN is that it didn't die after four years, and there's definitely been cycles of leadership. In every grade there's a cohort and however much they're invested, etc.

 Then that brings me to just we need to celebrate teachers like Miss Arnold who have gone so above and beyond what their contract says or even ... She's also an amazing US history teacher, sidebar, so the fact that she's poured so much of herself into advancing climate justice and advancing youth leadership is just really remarkable. I'm so grateful to her for that.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:27:52] It must give you a lot of hope for the future too.

Rebecca Park: [00:27:55] It does. I'm 100% positive that I would not [00:28:00] be where I am without what I learned and the opportunities I had in YouthCAN.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:28:05] And what you're saying really brings forth some of the most complex challenges that we have, right? You need an education system that empowers teachers like Miss Arnold who can then inspire their students. You need long term public investment and of course all of those are absolutely necessary for climate action too, right?

 So any thoughts on how to address both of these at the same time?

Rebecca Park: [00:28:35] Yeah. I would say a couple of things. I think what's happening, when you look at a group like YouthCAN, teachers and young people are both populations and constituencies that I think are often taken for granted or not seen as necessary voices in rooms of power. One reason I became a teacher was because I worked in Congress one summer and [00:29:00] noticed that a lot of the people working on education policy have not actually been teachers and I think it's really important for the people who actually get to that place of making policy that they either are intimately personally connected or making sure they're maintaining relationships for the folks that are actually facing the issues.

 So people making environmental policy need to include voices from communities that have higher rates of asthma and lower access to public transit, from communities in the islands in the South Pacific that are facing extinction. People that are being adversely affected by this, Diana Presley is someone who has said people closest to the pain should be closest to the power, and I think that applies to all policy making from environmental policy making to education policy to youth policy.

 I said this before, and you've highlighted this, it's about making sure the voices that need to be in the room are in the [00:30:00] room.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:30:00] Fantastic.

Dave Damm-Luhr: [00:30:01] Wonderful.

Rajesh Kasturirangen: [00:30:02] Thank you so much, Rebecca.

Curt Newton: [00:30:13] We hope you've enjoyed this extended interview cut. Please be sure to check it out in context and the prior episode four, Next Gen Learning to Change with Boston Latin School and YouthCAN.

 The Climate Conversations podcast is engineered and edited by Dave Lishansky. Project and media support is by my MIT Open Learning colleagues Laura Howells and Mikaela Joyce.

 Please subscribe and rate us wherever you find your podcasts. Join the community on climate.MIT.edu and be in touch with Twitter, ClimateX_MIT and Facebook, group name MIT Climate.

 For my cohosts Rajesh Kasturirangan and Dave Damm-Luhr, I'm Curt Newton. Thanks so much for [00:31:00] listening.