Social Studies Teacher Who Fosters Acceptance Wins State Award

By Jeff White

Jan Brookes, who has been teaching social studies at Newtown High School for the past 15 years, has been recognized by the Connecticut Council of Social Studies Teachers (CCSST) with an excellence in teaching award.

Mrs Brookes knew of her nomination for the award, which was made by her fellow teachers in the high school’s social studies department. “I told the department that their nomination was already my reward,” she recalls during a free period between classes.

It was a useful endeavor to apply for this reward, Mrs Brookes explains, because through the essay and supporting “data” that she had to supply to the CCSST she was forced to look at her own teaching over her 15 years in front of students. “I was writing to define my goals in teaching,” she explains. For Mrs Brookes, her teaching has always, and still does, center on creating an environment of understanding and acceptance within her classroom and throughout the school.

She points to a trip to Kenya in 1988, when she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to join other teachers from America and Europe to study in the African country. She recalls that this group was very diverse, and going into the program she says she hoped that everyone’s love of teaching would be strong enough to transcend racial lines. It wasn’t.

Mrs Brookes remembers how the group was split along racial lines while in Kenya, and when she returned to America, all she could think about was how to address the subject of racism and diversity in her everyday teaching. Since then, Mrs Brookes has been a fervent advocate for acceptance and a strong opponent of racism and discrimination throughout the high school.

“I ask my students to challenge their stereotypes,” she says. “You need to test them rather than just accept them.”

More than verbally defending diversity, Mrs Brookes and many of her students have taken action over the years. In 1991 Mrs Brookes began what is now an established annual program: The Bassick Exchange. Each year, Bassick High School students spend a day at Newtown High School, and NHS students spend a day at Bassick High. It is a program meant to open the eyes of the students involved to how different some schools can be compared to what they are familiar with, and how such differences can often be translated into strengths.

For the first time, Mrs Brookes established a tri-exchange between Bassick, Newtown, and Danbury high schools this year.

The subject of the controversial former school mascot, the Indian, was an issue that Mrs Brookes took on as early as 1990, when she helped organize a student sit-in in protest against the stereotypical school symbol. Although the mascot was still patched onto athletic jerseys and football helmets for the next five years, in 1996 she won a major victory as the high school’s administration chose to replace the Indian with the Nighthawk.

But for Mrs Brookes, taking on the big issues of racism and discrimination begins in the classroom with emphasizing the importance of listening. Sitting at her desk in the social studies department, Mrs Brookes agrees with the saying that listening is about emptying oneself and letting someone else in. She calls the act of listening “an underrated skill.”

Toward the end of teaching more comprehensive listening skills, each of her students completes six homework assignments during a given semester in which they are asked to reflect on how they listen throughout their everyday life. If nothing else, Mrs Brookes would say, the assignments bring awareness to students that productive listening is something each and every one of us needs to practice on a daily basis.

Mrs Brookes likes to think that there are two reasons why she received the award from her peers at the state level. First, she looks for ways to confront racism and discrimination not on a town level, or even a national or global level, but in the environment with which she interacts on a daily basis: her classroom and her school. “I’m looking at the racism issue here,” she says of her efforts, implying that it is more effective for people to look at the smaller worlds we inhabit every day.

Secondly, she tries to plant a simple idea in each of her students: it is important to see things from somebody else’s perspective. If people begin to look at things differently, she says, then they might not be so inclined to get caught up in such differences.