The Origins of Woven Teaching
/By Jessica Bylo
Naïveté & idealism
When I first started teaching, the class I entered mid-year was apathetic to say the least. History for them had been worksheets, textbooks and multiple choice tests, with little else. One of my first lessons was about the Armenian Genocide, a requirement in the California History and Social Science Framework. I started the day proud of what I had prepared, certain that students would be interested; some were, but it was the other reactions that changed the path in my own professional development.
One of the first classes had a student who raised her hand in the middle of the presentation and said, “Ms. Bylo, some of us just don’t care about this”. In the same period, another couldn’t handle the pain and inhumanity of the subject and was brought to tears. The next class had a student recently moved from Turkey who pityingly laughed at me believing I had been taken in by Armenian propaganda. Later that semester when teaching the Holocaust, a student asked me if it was the worst thing any people had ever suffered. Another year a student asked me why we were spending time studying this “Jewish stuff”. Yet another student when talking about current events outside of class, essentially said that, if so many people have believed that homosexuality should be banned throughout history, it must be true.
The universal constraint of time
Most teachers having attempted the (required) teaching of difficult topics will recognize at least some of these responses. They can be demoralizing if as an educator you are unprepared to respond appropriately in the moment, but empowering and a truly meaningful learning experience if you do. Woven Teaching was my response to the experience of desperately wanting history education to be meaningful to all students beyond the academic arena.
When I stopped classroom teaching, I knew I wasn’t done with education. I had trained at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Teacher Fellow, and had traveled to Poland and Rwanda to learn about genocide and recovery. I believed that teachers needed easy access to curated sources of accurate and relevant information on the human rights aspects of history. Without those, students would only continue to think of history as trivia once they exited the high school classroom. That wasn’t why I had become a teacher. True, I was attracted by the fascinating stories and fun trivia that a well-studied historian knows, but I knew that a solid historical education was necessarily an education in critical thinking, exposition, human rights and citizenship.
The intersectionality of practicality & idealism
Thus, after three years as an online resource of hundreds of pages of curated historical links, bibliographies and filmographies for history teachers and students, I registered Woven Teaching as a legal non-profit in the autumn of 2012. After a slow start, we were gaining ground in 2015 as we added staff and joined with like-minded partners including the VIGLOJ/PEREX-CV of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Genocide Education Project of the United States, PeacEdu of Rwanda, and the global Educators’ Institute for Human Rights. We are now a staff of education, nonprofit and other professionals committed to helping teachers educate the next generation in the basic premise that all humans are equally deserving of universal rights, and that it is the duty of all to protect those rights.