Kimberly Huffman’s students sometimes struggle to see themselves in “We the People.”
They come to the Wayne County Schools Career Center from 10 different school districts, sometimes after a lot of academic struggles. Many are missing credits or struggle with reading. Some are making their last attempt at graduating high school. Government feels either too far away — or too close for comfort.
But Huffman believes that if she can help them understand how government works, she can help them see they have a voice — and the power to change things.
Huffman is the 2023 high school teacher recipient of the American Civic Education Teacher Award. Since 2000, she’s taught American government, personal finance, and political science at the career center, which is in a rural area about an hour south of Cleveland.
Students get days off from school during hunting season and during the Wayne County Fair, which hosts one of the largest 4-H gatherings in the country. Many students are passionate about the Second Amendment, Huffman said, and “like all students, they are most concerned about their First Amendment rights.”
Huffman is a little embarrassed by her journey into education. She is not one of those teachers who always knew what they wanted to do. Growing up on public assistance, at first, she didn’t think she would go to college at all. Once in college, she switched from social work to education to avoid a dreaded foreign language requirement.
But when she did her student teaching, she knew she was where she belonged. And when she took her first political science course, she knew that’s what she wanted to teach.
“Growing up in my circumstances, I kind of felt situations happen to you, and you don’t feel empowered to do anything about them,” she said. “I never want my students to feel like a victim of their circumstances. And I think that’s the greatest part of civics for me, is to teach students the empowerment that they have if they know the process, if they know that they have a voice.”
Huffman spoke with Chalkbeat about how presidential election years energize her civics lessons, how she helps students with a range of reading abilities navigate dense primary sources, and why she loves teaching about the Electoral College.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When you’re teaching civics, do you start with the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, or do you start with things that are a bit more tangible?
The practical answer is we start with the Ohio state standards, and we have an end-of-course exam. That has to be the driving force because that is mandated. So I start out with citizenship and how we belong to a community. Our students might come in as juniors or seniors. Some students are still playing sports and playing in the band at their home schools. Some students come here, and they get a brand new, fresh start. That’s a great place to talk about where you belong and your sense of community, and then we use that to talk about citizenship and how that’s defined.
Then we get into the Constitution, and what those rights and responsibilities are.
What sort of ideas about government do your students bring to the classroom?
They don’t see themselves. And I think that’s what’s so valuable about that preamble [to the Constitution]. The first three words of our founding document are “We the People.” Oftentimes they will come with complaints about the government. “Who is the government?” I always push back on that complaint. “Who specifically are you referring to?”
It’s a mission of mine to make sure the House representative for our district comes into our school and meets with students because I want them to see them as people. U.S. Rep. Max Miller was here in the spring. He showed up in jeans, he had a Starbucks coffee. He was talking their language. He was so relatable to them, and they absolutely loved him, and it gave them a different kind of impression than, oh, he works in Congress in D.C.
Do you do different things during a presidential election year to connect what’s going on with what they’re learning in class?
I wouldn’t say anything extra or additional, but what’s exciting about election years is that there are things we talk about every year that may not resonate or connect with the students, and then during an election year, they can’t help but feel it because it’s every TV commercial, people are talking about it, it’s a buzz on social media.
It’s energizing because they’re telling me about things that they heard. Right now we’re talking about campaign promises. Why is this candidate saying this, when the president really only has this much power? Well, that’s how you get elected. You convince people you can make these changes. We talked about the difference between constitutional powers and things that they say that they’re going to do to earn your vote.
Elections allow me the opportunity to point right to the Constitution. I love teaching the Electoral College. It’s very hard for them to grasp. So when it’s happening in real time, that’s just all the better for me, because I can say, see, it’s really happening, and you need to know what’s going on.
What makes the Electoral College such a good topic?
I think there’s massive misunderstanding, and it is unlike anything that I know of in any other country. I think there’s something to be said about the founders knowing the difference in interest between the agricultural and urban areas. We live in a very rural area. People who live in the country don’t want to be bothered by government restrictions. We want to shoot off fireworks. We want to burn our trash. We want to have parties late at night because we’re not bothering the neighbors. But if you live in the city, you might be more accustomed to government services, public transportation, having the mail delivered right to your door.
So you are likely to develop different viewpoints about the government based on where you live, and there are a lot of people who live in the city and fewer people who live in large tracts of land. And so it’s not just big states and small states, it’s agricultural versus urban and that’s directly connected to your interest, and your interests are valid even though they’re different.
Surveys show that young people don’t necessarily think voting is very important. How do you talk to your students about voting?
A lot of school districts moved government to the junior year, which broke my teacher heart, because they are further removed from the voting age. Now my students are 15 and 16 instead of 17 or 18, and that has dramatically shifted how to stress why they should vote. My students feel like two years is a long way away, and they do feel this disengagement. One of the things I talk about is, even though they can’t vote, they have a voice.
In Ohio, we just had a new law about cell phone policies, and they were not happy. So what can they do about it? They can write letters to their representatives. They can march in the streets. They can post on social media and use their voice that way. They can do petitions. I think if you can convince them their voice does matter and count, you can connect it to how much more important the actual vote is for them when they’re 18.
How do you navigate different political opinions that students bring to the classroom?
The National Constitution Center has a lesson called Civil Dialogue. And the Michigan Center for Civic Education does Norms of Collaboration, talking about how to have conversations where you’re respectful, mindful, you think before you speak, and you allow everybody to have a voice. You have to set your classroom up for that at the beginning of the year, so that when you get into the issues of the politics of the day, you’ve established ground rules.
I do this thing at the beginning of the school year, do you like Coke or Pepsi? Do you want to be on a beach or in a desert? I put these pictures up, and they have to literally walk — because they should be moving around — to this side of the room if you want to go to the ocean or that side if you want to go to the desert. I always let them choose a “don’t like either.” They can be an independent or a third party. And I have them share the reason why.
And then, we talk about, does it affect you if that person thinks that? Is it okay that you think differently?
I did ask this year, how is that different when we talk about politics? And I had a student say, well, this person’s view about how the government operates is going to directly impact me. It’s not just a preference. I think that’s the first time I’ve had a student pick up on that.
In forums and on social media, I see some teachers feel cautious about talking about the election. What advice do you have for them?
I’m pretty confident in what I can do in the classroom. What I do fear is the rhetoric and the perception of what teachers are doing. And it’s coming from my own faith community. So the idea of indoctrination and that we somehow turn them into communists or socialists, I don’t know what to do about that. I come to work every day and give my all to be fair and unbiased, to look at constitutional issues, and to teach state standards. If I could indoctrinate, I would get these kids to show up on time and have their homework done.
On a lighter note, do you have a favorite lesson?
I love the Supreme Court. I’m a Supreme Court nerd. Street Law has wonderful resources. They have this activity where the students get to be a judge, and they get to decide whether to grant cert, whether the case is worthy to be taken. So they have to look at the lower courts, how they ruled. They have to look at the case, determine if it’s constitutional, if they have jurisdiction, if it’s appellate, original. So I think that’s very valuable, because they like playing the judge.
Primary source documents can be tough even for skilled readers, and some of your students struggle with reading. What do you do to make content accessible for all your students?
We’re really focused on MAX teaching strategies, on how to teach the students to read and provide them tools. One of my favorite things to teach about is free speech, student free speech. So I do all the Supreme Court cases that involve students, and the one we always end on is Morse v. Frederick [a free speech case involving a student who displayed a pro-drug message], which is just their absolute favorite. They love the banner. And that’s a great case to have them digest because they’re so invested in the outcome.
I divide it up into sections so you don’t have one student reading the whole document, and you have questions after each section. They share their answers with each other. But before we do that, we talk about crossing off the irrelevant information, anything that disrupts the flow of the sentence, like if it’s in parentheses, just cross it off. We want to know what the message is.
Oyez is a great site for giving a brief summary of the case, so they can get the big picture, and then you can also listen to the argument. I think students love to hear the judges do those rapid fire questions. They feel much more of a judge’s personality. And again, that goes to, these are people making these decisions.
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
