Sherry Franklin knows that more people like her are needed.
Franklin, an Educator Effectiveness specialist with the Chicago Public Schools and a part-time instructor at Malcolm X College, is Black.
And, for that reason, the doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction is happy to serve on the College of Education’s Student Academic Equity Committee.
Her motivation is clear.
“Education is a field in which minorities are a very small part of leadership,” Franklin says. “We’re not as widely represented in classrooms as teachers, principals and administrators, so it’s important that we build some capacity among the faculty and staff to understand that minority teachers and leaders are integral to creating classroom spaces that are welcoming for minority students.”
Julian McElroy considers membership on the committee on obligation.
“It parallels very well with my professional career and where I see myself going in the future,” says McElroy, a Special Education major who’s already teaching at DeKalb High School.
“When you’re looking at the world of education, there are a lot of different things that are changing – some for the better, some for the worse, depending on your personality – and I want to be a part of that change,” he adds, “not just from the educator-and-student standpoint but as the person who has a voice and who offers my opinion and my experiences. Hopefully, that can lead to someone else, or a lot of someones, having a positive experience and seeing some of that change down the line.”
To Erin Uhrine, a first-year Elementary Education major, the committee is a place to share her personal journey with learning accommodations and to use it as a springboard toward improving circumstances for others in similar places.
Diagnosed with short-term memory as a high school freshman, Uhrine draws career inspiration from a teacher “who pushed me to become who I am today” and plans “to make sure no one falls behind like I did.”
“I feel like this is a great space to talk about our experiences with diversity and inclusion and our challenges,” she says. “I had some ideas related to bringing more awareness of the Disability Resource Center: If you are struggling, and you had accommodations in high school, you can have accommodations here. They might not all transfer over, but there are options for you to get help in school.”
Amanda Haugk, a junior Early Childhood Education major, expects the committee’s discoveries and recommendations will “help make the college feel more like home to all students … (and) not just the majority groups.”
“What was most interesting to me is the fact that over half of the students who filled out the survey did not feel like they belonged,” Haugk says. “I personally love the College of Education, and feel like I belong perfectly, so knowing that over half of the students who attend the COE do not feel the same was shocking.”
But knowledge is power, she adds, and offers a compelling course of action for faculty.
“Professors should care about students’ sense of belonging because professors should always want their students to succeed,” she says, “and you cannot truly succeed if you do not feel like you belong.”
No matter their reasons, the members of the Student Academic Equity Committee are operationalizing the college’s strategic action priority regarding social justice.
“We are creating a community where students are empowered to advocate,” says Eric Junco, the college’s director for Equity.
“A student committee is a way to make sure students help set the agenda for what needs to happen within this college,” Junco adds. “We traditionally have had committees where our professors talk about things that we need to accomplish; adding student voice and student input is a crucial component to helping students and being responsive to their needs.”
Junco is encouraged by the early results coming from the “exceptionally diverse group of students invested in making some substantial changes to the college.”
Other members of the committee are Oliver Camacho, Darius Jackson, Genesis Miranda, Aye Myat Mon, Abdelrahman Osman, Kristen Walsh, Khaing Wai Wai Zaw and James Zucker.
“What’s most impressed me about these students is their deep-seated sense of empathy,” he says. “They’re all really compassionate, and I would say duty-bound, to this idea of helping everybody. They are committed to improving students’ experiences here, and they have all sorts of creative ideas.”
FORMED THIS SEMESTER, THE COMMITTEE has reviewed and analyzed data’ from the college’s “Belonging” survey and focus group sessions on the topic.
Questions prompt conversations.
What were your reactions to the belonging focus groups? What identities were represented? What surprised or interested you about students’ sense of belonging or what they considered to be threats to their belonging? What do you know about belonging and the student experience within the College of Education?
They’ve discussed broader questions, including their own mission: Where will this work lead?
They’re accessing Wakelet, a free platform for the curation and categorization of online content to save and share. Students now have populated 20 virtual folders with videos, podcasts, films, TikToks, Tweets, articles and images related to social justice.
Junco has also encouraged the students to set the direction moving forward: “What’s missing? This is your group! Choose a new path for us!”
“Our first few meetings were about learning how to code focus group transcripts. We then organized the codes into thematic categories,” Junco says. “After that, we asked ourselves ‘What’s the meaning of this? How are we understanding these themes in relation to student diversity, their needs, and what we can do to help students feel like they belong? What are the ways our institution, classes and relationships with professors also create instances of belonging?’ ”
Ideas flowed forth.
Professors could come to address current events regarding social justice issues. Students could gather to watch documentaries.
And, by the fall semester, the committee could begin disseminating their initial findings to the college’s six departments.
“We’ve noticed that students from different identities were experiencing the college differently,” Junco says, “and what we did next was to say, ‘Now that we know that our Latino students have different experiences than our LGBTQ students, or that our first-generation students are having different experiences than our international students, we can use themes from the research to help increase their sense of belonging.’ ”
Such lumping created case studies that show how different students, “feel supported in the college along with how they experience threats to their belonging.”
“Faculty will be able to do a deep dive and reflect on relational techniques to support students’ sense of belonging,” he says.
“We’re also developing a belonging toolkit that is going to frame our survey questions and student responses with what research before providing various solutions to improve relationships, classroom pedagogies and curriculum related to students’ sense of belonging.”
UHRINE’S PERSONAL JOURNEY provides an angle for some of her contributions.
She has proposed bringing a guest speaker with a disability – maybe a celebrity – to address students, faculty and staff.
Hearing that person’s story of challenges, as well as the resources that led to overcoming those obstacles, would help listeners “understand that, ‘It’s not just you. Everyone can have struggles and improve.’ ”
Meanwhile, Uhrine is grateful to learn from the eye-opening perspectives of others.
“There was a gentleman who talked about how people came up to him, saying that he spoke great and that he spoke eloquently, and he took that as a microaggression because he was a Black male,” she says. “I was blown away that people would actually do that to him.”
Yet this student hears comments like these frequently, Junco says – “almost daily, and it’s always a painful reminder that people don’t expect him to speak well because of the color of his skin.”
Uhrine, however, is optimistic that the Student Academic Equity Committee’s work will help to reduce moments like those in the future.
“I just want change. I want everyone to feel welcomed and to feel acknowledged,” Uhrine says.
“I know that people have felt degraded, pushed away out of their comfort zones and feeling like, ‘Oh, I can’t do this, or I can’t do that, because I felt this way in the classroom,’ ” she adds. “It should never be that way. Belonging means success. It means people feel like they can do anything.”
FOR McELROY, THAT FEELING CONTINUES to develop.
Joining DeKalb High School in 2015 as a paraprofessional educator, McElroy long had been interested in teaching.
“I went to school in Chicago, and it started with me working our school’s basketball camp. The amount of fun that we had was through the roof, and that’s when I knew,” McElroy says. “I’m 6’6” – that alone can hold a kid’s attention. It’s something that they can naturally respect. You know, ‘The Giant! Hey, Mr. Tall Guy!’ That was when I fell in love with the idea of being a leader of youth, and then I just had to figure out where I fell on that line.”
At first, he thought his destination was “elementary school, but I found out I don’t have that everyday joy that it maybe takes to run an elementary class.”
Working at DeKalb High School students with emotional and behavioral disorders did resonate with him, however. “After the first couple years, I recognized that I really love this, and it took COVID hitting for me to realize, ‘All right, dude, you’re wasting your time. Let’s go back. Let’s get that license. Let’s take this to the next level.’ I finally found my niche.”
McElroy, currently in his first year as a full-time teacher in the special education program, is finishing his bachelor’s degree via the NIU College of Education’s Licensed Educator Accelerated Pathway (LEAP) initiative.
His return to campus made membership on the Student Academic Equity Committee possible.
“It’s always great to hear about other people and their experiences in life, and seeing where we can find common ground to push forward toward maybe a better place for others,” he says.
“That can’t just come from the minds of the people in charge, right? You have to hear your people, which is the majority, and those people will let you know their experiences, and you can then alter what you need to alter,” he adds. “You just want to make things that will be a positive experience, and you want people to feel welcome.”
“Belonging is an interesting thing because it’s subjective. It’s in the eyes of the beholder. It depends on what’s there,” he says.
“For instance, we can go into a classroom, and we can have a multitude of students, and we can all belong from a different perspective,” he adds.
“Maybe ‘Student A’ belongs because they are, by far, the smartest student as far as the content. ‘Student B’ belongs because they may be the best at tying both the content and the personality together and being able to speak that back out to the group. ‘Student C’ belongs because they’re the person who really gets along with everyone, and they’re that person people look forward to seeing in class.”
When all contribute is when everyone can succeed, he says.
“Ultimately, it’s just knowing that no matter what you bring to the table – and as long as you’re not just taking something from the table – you belong,” he says. “That’s maybe unfair to those who only have the ability to take something from the table, but in my experience, especially at the college level, most people bring something to the table. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to find that.”
He counts himself among the beneficiaries.
“You can learn different things, meet different people and be a part of a community,” he says. “My experience with the Department of Special and Early Education has been amazing; I’ve never been a part of group of people that I felt wanted to see me succeed as much, minus the people I work with.”
That goes beyond the classroom to include office hours, response to emails and even, if necessary, midnight phone calls if they’re critical to fostering success.
“I appreciate people making themselves available to me and not making it seem like I’m a burden. That’s something that we all owe to the world,” McElroy says.
“We live in a very weird place where people think things are actually theirs – like, ‘That’s mine. That plot of land is mine.’ – but you know that we’re all on borrowed time,” he adds.
“So, the real question I have, and not to be too philosophical, is, ‘What is going to be remembered? The land – or our hearts and our minds? What’s going to be paid forward?’ I think that something I say or something I do will be paid forward tenfold over something I bought or owned, so I want to pay forward love, intellect, experience, opportunity, passion or any other noun you can think of like those.”
FRANKLIN’S PAY-IT-FORWARD gifts always have reflected her commitment to equity, inclusion and social justice.
During her time as a financial aid counselor at the University of Chicago, she felt the call to teach, and, at age 31, began a new career in front of a classroom.
Becoming an instructor at Malcolm X, where she teaches English as a Second Language or adult education classes for high school equivalency, showed her yet another way to make a positive impact.
“I just enjoyed teaching the adults so much, and now that I am in my doctoral program, I enjoy professional learning, so there’s that connection,” she says. “Long term, I hopefully end up in a post-secondary administrative role, and, hopefully, I still get to teach every now and again.”
For now, however, Franklin is excited to contribute to the college’s academic equity goals.
She was recommended to Junco by Michael Manderino, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and considered the opportunity “definitely in my lane.”
“With Northern being a predominantly white institution, and especially with education being a field still primarily dominated by white teachers, I thought it would be very advantageous for me to share my voice from the perspective of a minority student,” Franklin says, “and also to let the college know that there are strides that could be made in order to improve the experiences of other minorities.”
That starts with welcoming classrooms, she says.
“We want to make sure that students feel like they are a part of their programs and institutions,” she says, “and from that perspective, the work that’s being done right now in the College of Education with this student equity group is key to making sure students feel safe in their programs and that they persist. It’s difficult for a student to persist through an academic program when their social and emotional needs are not met.”
And, for someone who loves professional learning, Franklin is enjoying that side of committee membership.
“I’ve learned that there are so many facets of what it means to be a minority – even within the surface-level racial category. We hear Black, white and Latino, but we also have international and domestic,” she says. “We also have gender and sexuality, so opening our minds to the various minority groups that are present has been an eye-opener.”
Meanwhile, she’s learned that “so many people are interested in the advancement of this initiative.”
“We’ve had the department chair of my program present. Eric is present. There is an investment in this work. There are students from every level of the college. There are undergraduate students and graduate students,” she says. “There is an authentic desire to improve the experiences of minority students in the College of Education.”
Junco sees that same desire in the committee.
“This is voluntary, and they’re so passionate about supporting students that they’re willing to show up once or twice a week for multiple weeks in a row to start helping to make some change. To me, that’s inspirational,” he says.
His interactions have revealed “There’s a lot more diversity here than I had ever imagined, and that, to me, is exciting because part of my job is to make sure that all of our students’ voices are seen, heard and honored,” he adds, “and what I’m learning the most is that different identities require different solutions. Different student identities require us to consider a variety of lived experiences, perspectives, funds of knowledge and different levels of care.”
