CU’s always there to inspire the youth

Although most of us don’t get out of the CU bubble nearly enough, the city is an integral part of our college experience. Generation Citizen, a relatively new club to campus, sends Columbia students out to high school and middle school classrooms across the five boroughs to improve how civics is taught to these students. Teacher’s pet Bwogger Lili Brown sat in on one of the club’s weekly meetings and also caught up with president Fabi Urdaneta.

Five brave teachers and three members of the club’s board met last Sunday evening to discuss the previous week’s teaching experience and the lesson plans for the week ahead of them. These students commit to teaching at a NYC high school or middle school two days a week, creating lesson plans for each session that collectively share the end goal of teaching civics to their students on a more relatable level and therefore empowering them to take action in their communities based on these skills by the end of the semester.

They went around, shared which number lesson they were at, and what focus issue they were leaning towards to use in their classrooms. Some ideas that were thrown around were gang violence, racial profiling, and police brutality. This somewhat naturally led into a lengthy discussion about the woes and struggles of teaching, and sharing per-expertise teaching techniques with each other. It is clear that the students in this club, though working independently in separate classrooms, respect each other and work together to make the most impact on their students and also on themselves.

The meeting continued with a board member advising the teachers on how to best craft this week’s lesson plans, and shared a sample lesson she used when she taught the previous year: a worksheet that uses the lyrics of Lupe Fiasco’s song “Little Weapons” to depict the easy access kids our/their age have to guns in this country. This was presented as a preliminary lesson that introduces the focus issue to the class.

That same board member ended the meeting with a good ole pep talk, ensuring that this volunteer commitment isn’t easy, but most definitely rewarding for everyone involved.

To get a better sense of what Generation Citizen is and its place at Columbia, Bwog also made sure to spend some time with the current president.

Bwog: What is Generation Citizen?

Fabi: Generation Citizen is a local and national non-profit that is committed to changing the way civics is taught at the high school and middle school level. The basic idea is that the way civics is taught right now is focused too much on textbooks; and when people think of helping this problems, they only think of doing community service, so there’s never this point where they reach and create self-sustaining program.

Bwog: How do Columbia students fit into that picture?

Fabi: Generation Citizen takes college kids who can maybe understand what high school kids are going through and try to help the high school students solve a problem they all care about. So you create a platform for them so that they can learn how to solve the problems around them – how to write surveys, attending town hall meetings, writing petitions. We really want them to have those skills so that they can use them for the future in solving problems in their communities, which makes GC more long-standing.

Bwog: So once a Columbia student joins, how they get from our campus to the classroom?

Fabi: The Columbia chapter works very closely with the national organization; it’s not that big of an organization so we’re able to have someone from Generation Citizen assigned to our school. That person actually places us into our classrooms at our respective schools.

Bwog: New York City is home to a ton of universities – is Columbia the only school in our area that has a GC chapter?

Fabi: The New York area schools are Fordham, Hunter, New School Wagner, NYU, Pace…where GC places our students is also related to where the students of these other universities are placed.

Bwog: During the meeting, there was some terminology thrown around, like curriculum and focus issue, that seemed to have some extra meaning in the context of Generation Citizen. Can you explain the GC meaning of these terms?

Fabi: GC has created this very specialized curriculum, where they’ve come up with these very technical terms for the different steps that you arrive at as you go along the curriculum. The focus issue is very specifically referring to what the student teacher is choosing as their project for the semester, and the students in the classroom choose it entirely – it’s supposed to arise organically. You have to probe a little bit, but you will see an issue or activity that is central to their lives. Instead of teaching about democracy or the democratic process, we as teachers use it when the students in one of the early lessons vote on what issue they want picked as their focus issue. There obviously isn’t consensus, but they get to see and participate in voting and taking the majority vote rather than reading about it in a textbook.

Bwog: There was also a relatively small group of teachers at the meeting this week. What do you see as the end goal for GC at Columbia?

Fabi: We’ve only been recognized as a club for a year, and right now whenever I tell someone about GC, their first reaction is, “wow, that’s really big time commitment!” My aim is to change the way that it’s seen; I do not want to go into teaching, but community service and giving back is always something I’ve done, and GC is one of the ways students at Columbia can give back. My hope is that more students join because they see it that way, instead of seeing it as something that doesn’t fit with their desired career path.

Bwog: What’s been your most redeeming moment when teaching with GC?

Fabi: One of the years I taught, a student at Teacher’s College was writing his thesis on whether or not organizations like GC actually work. We invited him to observe, and he actually took interviews of the students in my class before participation in the program and also after the program. There was one student in my class who would throw anything I gave him on the ground. During his interview at the end of the year, he said that he actually loved the program, but just gave me a hard time because that’s how he feels about figures of authority. He said he favored the period when GC was there to the ones where his regular teachers were there. It was awesome feeling like I actually did something that even the hard students loved.

To learn more about an opportunity to make yourself and other students in New York feel good, visit GC at Columbia and Barnard’s Facebook page.

Interview edited for brevity and clarity. 

You all look roughly the same age via Shutterstock