In September, Lake Effect reported on the sudden cancellation of federal funding for MKE Roots. The program trains Milwaukee-area teachers on how to make social studies relevant to students by connecting them to local history.
MKE Roots was recently notified that it would again receive federal funding. But the money came with the understanding that the program would be designed to "directly commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States."
Dr. Melissa Gibson is an associate professor at Marquette University and the faculty director of MKE Roots. Gibson says the new grant language led staff to "rethink" the programming, but core elements will remain the same.
"We are not changing our ethos. Our focus is still on Milwaukee's communities, particularly those who have been historically and contemporarily marginalized [from] the stories of Milwaukee," Gibson says.
Gibson spoke with Lake Effect’s Sam Woods about the changes to its federal grant funding, and how it will — and won’t —change what the program does.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Woods: For background, can you remind us what MKE Roots is and how you would describe its impact?
Dr. Melissa Gibson: MKE Roots is a project of the Center for Urban Research, Teaching and Outreach at Marquette University that is focused on place-based history and civics education in Milwaukee County classrooms. Based on what educational research has shown and what we know from our years working in classrooms, students are much more likely to be engaged and become civic agents if they understand the context in which they live and their place in the world. So we are working through teachers to try to improve history and civics education by having an explicit place-based focus. So for Milwaukee, what are Milwaukee's stories? Who are Milwaukee's communities? Who are the people in Milwaukee that are making change? We do that through professional development, direct work with classrooms and building of curricular resources.
We've reported on MKE roots starting last year and then again about a month ago. But in a nutshell, how would you describe its impact so far?
So in terms of numbers, we've had 50 teachers who teach at all variety of schools in Milwaukee County, from Vel R. Phillips Juvenile Justice Center to Rufus King International Baccalaureate to elementary schools, suburban schools and Catholic schools. They serve the full gamut of young people in Milwaukee. While we don't have an exact number of students that we reach, because it shifts every year in terms of teachers' course loads, it's in the thousands.
What we've seen so far in our data is 100% of participating teachers tell us that this is high quality professional development that's changing the way that they think about their teaching, and we have seen that happening in classrooms. You've run stories on some of the teachers and how they are changing the way that they teach and, in turn, changing the way students learn. A teacher at Marquette High School has entered a partnership with Forest Home Cemetery where students are doing service around grave cleanup and then uncovering stories of Milwaukeeans that are not necessarily known. We have teachers doing living wax museums of Milwaukee change makers. We have students working with artists around the city thinking about art, social activism. And when we look at student data, what we see is that civic attitudes are improving and that learning is improving in classrooms where teachers are actively engaged in MKE Roots.
As we discussed in a September piece for Lake Effect, the Department of Education canceled funding for MKE Roots and rewrote the grant to prioritize “commemorating” the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. MKE Roots was invited to reapply for funding under the new priorities. So what happened with that application?
We learned in September that we received funding through the new grant application. So we're very happy that we get to continue offering programming. It will be a slightly revised version.
In this new iteration of MKE Roots programming, we will have explicit attention on founding documents and principles. But what we said in our application and what we plan to do is put those founding principles in conversation with our local civic context. So, for example, how do everyday citizens in Milwaukee bring those democratic principles to life? How can we learn both from communities of the past in Milwaukee and also contemporary civic actors? How can we think with youth about what we want our city to be moving forward? How does engaging with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the founding debates around federalism and states, how can that shape the way that we engage here on a local level.
You mentioned bringing founding principles into the context of Milwaukee. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like?
Sure. I think one of the most accessible ways to think about that is that we often look at the language from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and “we the people.” So who is included in the “we” at that time and who is included in the “we” now. As one of our historians, Sergio González, always says, citizenship is really an active struggle over who the “we” is in the United States.
I mean, whatever you think of the people who wrote the documents and the contradictions in their own lives, they were beautiful poets and philosophers. They put some lovely words on paper that if we could live up to them, would be pretty astounding. So how can we use those words that have been imperfectly enacted throughout our history, but how might they serve as a guide for us today in terms of what we should still be moving and fighting towards? And I always come back to that question of the we. Who is the “we” in Milwaukee?
MKE Roots did receive funding, but one thing that stood out to me was that previously this grant had awarded a maximum of 25 programs with funding. This time around, 85 awards were given through this grant. That's a big jump, more than three times as many programs. What do you make of that?
It's especially interesting because they said they were only going to give out 10 to 15. I don't know where the money came from, the discontinuations are not enough to fund all 85 projects. It's clear just looking across other government funded initiatives like the NEA's Big Read that there is a push to really commemorate the 250th anniversary of 1776. I imagine that within the Department of Education and within the government overall that they really consider this a signature focus. So I don't know where the money came from, but certainly they found the funds to keep this a focus.
Do you receive the money that you're awarded up front or do you get it once a year and they can track progress?
Typically the federal government gives you money one fiscal year at a time. And you complete interim reports halfway through each fiscal year and then an end of year report. And they use that to determine if you should continue receiving funding. This year, they front loaded all three years of funding for us, and I'm assuming for all grantees. We are not supposed to use all three years during this fiscal year. You're only supposed to use the designated fiscal year funds in the current fiscal year, but they are in our federal account so that we would not go through the process again of finding out if our grant would be discontinued or continued.
We've talked a lot about how federal grant applications work and what MKE Roots is, but I want to talk about the future. You've received grant funding under an application that had some notable wording changed. We mentioned earlier the word “commemorate” the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What impact does this grant application and its new language have on MKE Roots programming?
At the most basic level, the grant’s impact is that we are able to continue offering professional development for teachers and to continue partnering with classrooms around the county at the scale that we've been working for the past two years. So we're really excited to have the funds to be able to do that.
The language around commemoration did force us to rethink a little bit the programming that we offer. We are not changing our ethos. Our focus is still on Milwaukee's communities, particularly those who have been historically and contemporarily marginalized from the stories of Milwaukee. They're outside the beer barons, right? And our teachers are continually telling us about more communities and groups that we need to think about and include in MKE Roots, and we are.
Our theory is still that if we can get students to be excited and proud of their city and their communities, that will shape them as community actors. What we're doing now is having a much more explicit focus on civic education and really pulling in traditional civic education around founding principles, documents, government structures, and putting that into our local context and trying to make that meaningful for students. It is important information. It's critical that American citizens understand how the courts work, what rights are guaranteed in the Constitution. These are things that a lot of people don't actually know. So it's critically important information that we're making a more explicit part of our place-based approach.
Earlier you mentioned Dr. Sergio González, who is involved in the program as a teacher of teachers, and a question that he asks: Who is the “we?” Can you talk more about why that kind of question is important when it comes to good civics education?
I'm going to start answering that by talking about what civics typically is inside of schools, which is a pretty stale subject that most students are not interested in. In Wisconsin, civics education is measured by having students take the same test that immigrants take to become U.S. citizens. It's a multiple-choice test about government facts, structures, people of the past. Typically, students memorize information about the three branches, about checks and balances, about the age that you can run for elected office, and that's civic education.
However, most students in schools are under the age of 18. They can't vote, which is often seen as the quintessential act of citizenship. Many of our students are not U.S. citizens, whether they're documented or not. Many of our students are immigrants. We have a large refugee community here in Milwaukee. Many students are from communities who that quintessential act of citizenship is actively being threatened, whether through repealing the voting elements of the Voting Rights Act, or through making it harder for women to vote. So even that fundamental act feels inaccessible to many of our students.
On top of that, political scientists, theorists, educators would tell you that citizenship is not just about your legal or political citizenship. It's about the web of connection in a community. It's about how we act in public to support one another in our communities, to build a common good, and to bring into reality the world that we want to live in. Government structures are important for understanding that, but that's not the day-to-day work that our young people are engaged in.
In fact, a lot of the things that people in Milwaukee lament about our young people, whether it's educational outcomes, involvement with the justice system, or others, I would argue are evidence of young people feeling disconnected from the common good and from the community. That those are not so much social ills as big warning signs to us, to the rest of the city, that our young people don't feel invested in the version of citizenship and community that we are currently circulating. So a good, meaningful civic education is going to educate young people in the official principles of legal and political citizenship and the government that oversees our country, our state, our city. But it's also going to help them understand, envision, and act how they are citizens right now. How they are members of communities right now, and how they are powerful agents toward making the world one that we want to live in.
