Dr. Douglas Yacek on True Engagement in Learning

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia sits down with Dr. Douglas Yacek to explore what it takes to truly engage students in learning and democracy. From the “stimulation gap” facing young people in a digital world to the role of storytelling, teacher authenticity, and student voice in the classroom, this conversation offers a powerful reframe of civic education. Yacek makes the case that democratic learning starts not with abstract systems, but with everyday classroom experiences rooted in curiosity, humility, courage, and community.

Outline

• (0:00) Introduction & Ancient Grains
• (6:45) Teaching Across Contexts
• (11:39) The Stimulation Gap
• (17:36) The Hook, Pitch, Awakening & Strengthening Framework
• (28:14) Civics, Democracy & the Classroom
• (37:19) Civic Virtues & the Role of Schools

Mason Pashia: Hey, it’s Mason. One thing that I love about podcasts is that they’re one of the last content forms that are largely promoted and discovered without an algorithm. Because of that, they’re shared through ratings and word of mouth or word of hyperlink. Please consider sharing or reviewing the Getting Smart Podcast wherever you listen.

It really helps scale and spread these stories of what’s possible. Let’s jump in.

Introduction & Ancient Grains

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the “Getting Smart” podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Last summer, I attended an event on civic thriving, which was a big group of folks who are redefining civics and participation, primarily focused on America’s youth. The culminating resource from that event, a paper called “Civic Thriving From Silos to Synergy,” authored by Shereen El Mallah, Jenny Anderson and Fernande Raine, recently came out, and I recommend you check it out if you want a closer look at some of the organizations and the states that are driving this work forward.

As always, there will be this link and many more in the show notes. But as a ripple from that event, I was introduced to today’s guest, Dr. Douglas Yacek, an educational researcher and senior lecturer of ethics and multiculturalism at the University of Applied Sciences for Policing and Public Administration in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

He’s the author of multiple books that circle questions of engagement and participation, and in the latest book, “On The Edge of Their Seat,” he digs into what teachers specifically can do to address the stimulation gap. Doug, thank you so much for being here.

Douglas Yacek: Yeah, I’m excited to be here. Thanks, Mason.

Mason Pashia: All right, so first question today. I couldn’t resist. I’m sure if anybody who’s done a podcast has asked you this question in some way, but you are an avid baker of ancient grains, according to a page on the internet. What has this taught you about history or about civics and participation?

Douglas Yacek: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve never in my mind explicitly connected what I do in scholarship and research and teaching to this hobby of mine. I was sort of a victim of the pandemic.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: I just had a lot of time at home, not sure what to do with it, and I sort of started to realize I needed to do something with my hands, not just with my mind and with books laying around. And so I picked up bread baking. And I think, you know, at some point when you really dive into this art, your hands really get covered in this sticky material, and you start asking questions about what it is, this thing in your hands. What is this thing that magically rises when you put it in the oven that your family gets to enjoy with you?

And I think I started to realize that most of what I was putting in the bowl and mixing up and into the oven ultimately is created in a factory.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: With machines on a conveyor belt, shipped thousands and thousands of miles. That didn’t quite fit with the aesthetic of the loaf that I’m sharing with my family.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Very rustic, very homemade. Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: Yeah. And you’re forced to have this reflection because bread dough really does stick. It sticks. It stays there. When you’re getting it off, you have time to think about these things. And here where I live in Germany, there are actually… one of the beautiful things about Germany as a country is what they call the cultural landscape, the mixture between human community and agricultural existence.

And so it’s not so much that there are large swaths of land that are devoted to agriculture, and then there are big cities, but they’re really integrated. There was a mill just down the street that mills ancient grains. I just decided to give it a shot.

And I realized that this fits with my aesthetic much better, but my breads were much harder to make. And that is the lesson, ultimately, that you asked about, baking ancient grains. You know, ancient grains have their own character. They have their… you need to spend more time with them. They need to proof longer. You need to get to know them. And when you do that, they give you something much deeper, much more rewarding than the magical technology, which is the normal bread flour that we buy in the supermarket that works almost no matter what you do.

And I think that says something about how we live with history. I think we get impatient with history. Learning about history is hard. It requires time. It requires investment. It requires entering a whole new world that we don’t understand. And so maybe as a result, and of course as a result of the incredible developments in technology, we are a much more future-oriented people nowadays. I think we lose something.

We lose, I think, ultimately, something about developing a certain aspect of our personality, one that is more connected to the ground we live on, more connected to agriculture, more connected to community and that sort of thing. So that’s, I think, what I ultimately learned.

Mason Pashia: Okay, I want to stay at the high level for a couple more questions before really digging into this latest book. But one of them is, when I was poking around on the internet, I found that you teach courses for public officials and police officers, as well as writing some of this content on instruction and classroom engagement.

How do those exist as the same thing? Like, how much is teaching just teaching, and how is that different in some way? Teaching teachers versus teaching public officials. Have you noticed any differences in how that works or how to construct that lesson?

Teaching Across Contexts

Douglas Yacek: Absolutely. There are big differences. I did spend about 15 years in teacher education exclusively, so I was teaching future teachers. And my current position is a relatively new one, so I’ve been in it for a couple years now.

I’m still teaching sort of in teacher professional development and still interacting with that. But then in my university classes, I am teaching aspiring police officers and people who work in politics and public administration. And I think the commonality is a form of democratic education.

Teachers in schools, just as much as police officers and just as much as people who work in local government, are charged with contributing to a thriving, flourishing democracy in their various domains. Teachers in actually cultivating civic skills, competencies and virtues in the classroom, living democracy in the classroom, which is a really important topic to my heart. But then, of course, in this other context with aspiring police officers and people who work in public administration, they too are much connected to the nuts and bolts of how a democratic society actually functions. And if they don’t live the democratic ethos, which is to say believing truly in equality, believing truly that the people hold the power and that they are ultimately the people that we serve in government, then the whole project fails.

And so I see a lot of continuity in the two contexts. And, you know, in the best case, every public office has an educational dimension. The clients that we work with, in helping them, in providing resources for them, informing them of the laws that are relevant to them, what programs they can participate in in order to be supported. For police officers, it’s the same thing. Community policing, when it works, is a very beautiful thing, and it involves conversations with the people that they are serving, just as much as for teachers in the classroom who are really bringing up the next generation of democratic political actors who are going to create our society in a very real way. So…

Mason Pashia: Yeah, there’s something in that about… I took this course once on regenerative economics and how regenerative economic systems, like a core principle of them, is that if you deliver a service to someone, they should then know how to deliver the service to someone else. So it’s this train-the-trainer kind of model, and I think we model that sometimes in education where you say the best way to show that you learned something is to teach it, right?

There’s something in that. But I do love this idea that that actually ripples out into all sectors. You are teaching in really any role that you have, whether that be you’re the mechanic trying to tell someone what’s wrong with their car or whether that be something a little bit more like a baker who makes ancient grains and is trying to spread them across the world.

You’re teaching people inherently by doing it. So I think that’s a really interesting similarity just across all professions.

Douglas Yacek: Yeah. There’s something in that. But I do kind of love this idea that there is this horizontal value creation for our services and the way that they flow through the system. And if you do it with passion and a sense of commitment to this larger democratic cause, that’s very attractive to other people. They become curious about your role. And I just heard today about a beautiful program that’s going on in Münster here in Germany, just north of where I work, called Coppuccino. Police officers go out into under-resourced neighborhoods, and they bring with them a nice coffee truck that makes good coffee, and they stand around, and you can come drink coffee with them. And this is all in this ideal of community policing. But ultimately, if you’re there, that’s where this kind of person-to-person educational conversation can start to happen. People want to know actually what police officers are up to or public administrators are up to or teachers, whatever it might be.

Mason Pashia: Totally. I love cappuccino, and I especially love that puns are a universal language. I think that’s very important.

Douglas Yacek: That’s true.

Mason Pashia: Okay. So I want to get into some of the content that you spend a lot of your time thinking about. You’ve written extensively about this thing that you and some others call the stimulation gap, which is really this… and it’s kind of like a vying for attention. It’s just the classic thing we all feel where you’re pulled in a ton of directions based on devices or commitments or just the inability to control the mind, right?

Mason Pashia: I think some people define this more in terms of a disengagement crisis. Some people define this more in just low relevance of curriculum. What made you choose this specific framing of the stimulation gap? And if there’s anything I missed in that definition, please widen that understanding for us before we dig in today.

The Stimulation Gap

Douglas Yacek: Well, it’s a great place to start, I think, because it really focuses on student psychology. What is it actually like to experience learning in the classroom?

We need to be more honest with ourselves about what that experience looks like day to day for young people. And while we’ve made great strides in creating more engaging curricula, more engaging teaching methods that are then learned in education programs and then applied in the classroom, I mean, the classrooms of today are so much more exciting and engaging than they were 30 years ago, 40 years ago. Which is not to criticize necessarily the teachers of the past. It’s just that we have really made important strides in educational psychology and the understanding of young people and how they need to learn and the conditions that they need to really thrive.

However, at the same time as we’re making these important strides in education, young people, everybody, is being bombarded by a digital culture whose main actors have employed the world’s most renowned psychologists and neuroscientists to figure out how to create content that hooks us, how to create content that stimulates us so intensely that we have to click and scroll further and pick that phone up again and again and again. And we’re really up against a major force. Young people are up against a major force, and that force is inside of their minds.

That is, I just think, the reality. Once we recognize the gap, we can start to work on it. And I think there are two things ultimately that we recognize immediately when we admit that there is this gap.

The first thing is that we can ask ourselves, “Well, is there something about the way I teach and my own relationship to the subject matter in which I myself am stimulated and engaged and excited and visibly passionate about what I’m doing?” If I, as a teacher, am not any of these things, I can never expect that from my students.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Douglas Yacek: That’s the first thing.

The second thing is we can learn to a certain extent from the kinds of media that students are consuming. Not all of the media. There’s a lot out there that we can learn nothing from and that is maybe manipulative or something.

Mason Pashia: Right, right, right.

Douglas Yacek: But, you know, there is a lot of power in narratives and in stories and in the story form. And what I have done with some of my colleagues is to reconceive teaching and the construction of lessons with a logic, with a kind of arc, that resembles some of our most favorite narratives, our most engaging stories, to wrap students into this experience ultimately, in which they recognize themselves as a main character in this narrative.

Mason Pashia: I love that.

Douglas Yacek: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I think that’s super wise. There was… I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but we’ve had a former podcast guest, Chris Emdin. Are you familiar with him at all? He has a bunch of books around hip-hop education and always said this thing where he would take students to a hip-hop show and then say…

And then at the end he’d be like, you see how if they say to put your hands in the air, you don’t put them down until they say to? We need to bring that into the classroom. Like, it is a performative act. It is this thing. And so you just touched on kind of what my next question was, but that actually makes something more illuminated for me.

So I was going to ask about if you see… this framework you’ve put together, which we’re going to dig into, you have the hook, the pitch, the awakening and the strengthening is really beautiful. And my observation was it is super similar to how you write a story or make content. That’s kind of my domain.

In this episode, for example, in the hook you kind of focus on surprise and engagement. I asked you about ancient grains, something that maybe you’re passionate about, also something that’s going to maybe catch our listeners off guard a little bit, like, “That’s not what I was expecting.” Then we moved into the pitch where it’s really this…

That was probably the last question about the stimulation gap. It’s like what are we trying to solve, and then how do we focus our attention on that thing so that we can then move into the awakening, where now we reveal something that is relatable or actionable, which is basically going to be the framework.

It’s like this is a thing that you’ve probably seen in your life, and you just did this very thing where you’re like, “How do we bridge curriculum to individuals?” And then the rest of the episode is really the strengthening with a bunch of the small iterative versions of this loop tucked throughout the whole conversation.

Douglas Yacek: Absolutely.

Mason Pashia: We’re going to spend time actually making all these things known, making them familiar enough such that you can go into the world and use them. And so I love that you made that comparison. And I think something that’s really profound in your work that furthers my own thinking about this is this feels both like a storytelling device, communication, where you’re actually communicating a lesson or invitation to collaborate in a space, but it also echoes how we learn on our own.

Like, as a self-directed learner, you are going through these motions without naming them. The hook just happens to you, and then that leads you into the pitch, and then that… So talk a little bit about how the learning sciences maybe are reflected in this thing as well, because it’s a useful facilitation, and maybe formula, to distill it to something that is maybe unfair, but also it feels just true of learning beyond just communication.

The Hook, Pitch, Awakening & Strengthening Framework

Douglas Yacek: Yeah.

Perhaps the most important central finding of the learning sciences of the last 15 years that we try to embody in this framework that you just mentioned with these four steps is the fact that the No. 1 most important factor in the classroom for determining the quality and extent of student learning is the teacher, him or herself.

How excited, engaged, and passionate that teacher is. And in a sense, the four steps — hook, pitch, awakening and strengthening — are there first and foremost to give the teacher multiple opportunities to lay out clearly what it looks like to make a meaningful and ultimately enriching relationship to the subject matter and to show students what a human life looks like that is, in this way, sort of empowered and further developed.

And so that is our main hope. That’s where you start with this. A lot of people, if they’re asking themselves, “How can I improve learning in my classroom? How can I improve my connection to students? How can I deal with classroom management issues?” I mean, the first thing I always recommend to teachers is start with yourself.

Ask yourself, are you really excited to come to class today, tomorrow, whatever? Do you really have something in your subject matter that you are fascinated by? Are you watching… if you’re a physics teacher, are you checking the updates from CERN in Switzerland and looking at the new experiments that are coming out and wondering, “Are they going to find a supersymmetric particle or not?” You know, if it’s not that, find something there that really grabs your attention. And if you don’t have it, it’s completely OK. Most people don’t have it because they were never told in their teacher education programs, or after years and years of the daily grind of teaching, they’ve lost that spark.

They’ve lost the connection to their own subject matter. They’ve had to deal with a lot of classroom management issues or disciplinary issues or school administrative issues, and they also have a family alongside and a house and a dog and whatever it might be. So it’s easy to lose that connection, but that’s where I tell them to start.

And it’s easy because all they have to do is go to YouTube and find some YouTube nerd who’s excited about physics or 20th-century history, and watch how they do it. Watch how they’re excited by the material and just start there and start building from that little thing. And ultimately, the way that this four-step framework is different, though, than the kind of media that we consume is that the bigger story is that we are not doing this to entertain ourselves, but ultimately to develop a profound relationship to the subject matter that we really think we as individuals can grow by engaging with.

If I don’t ultimately think that what I’m learning in my math class is going to make me a better person, is going to make my life better, is going to make my experience more exciting or enriched or whatever it might be, then I’m not going to ultimately be engaged at the deepest level.

Mason Pashia: I think that there’s a few things that can be true at the same time here, which is kind of a tension we live in, right? One of the core critiques I hear of specifically high school, I think high school in the States and college are pretty distinct, where in high school a subject-matter expert who just loves this thing, like, telling other people about it, that oftentimes falls kind of flat because there’s this huge piece of knowing your audience.

They could be super excited about their thing, but they’re modeling content expertise, not curiosity, which I think is what you’re talking about. It’s like teaching in some ways is like being the chief curiosity officer of a classroom. It’s like, how do you model that you’re curious all the time?

Douglas Yacek: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Whereas if you go into the higher education spaces, people choose to be there. They’ve kind of selected the program that they’re interested in, and then you can kind of just be like, “I’m excited about this. In theory, you are too because you’re here. Let’s talk about it.” So there is this… I just want to acknowledge that kind of interesting tension, that you can overindex on expertise, excitement about something, if you do it in a way that is not invitational.

But if you make it invitational, it can completely change the dynamic within a classroom setting. So…

Douglas Yacek: Yeah. It’s an important comment. It’s true. You can alienate students ultimately if there’s a sense in which that enthusiasm is an idiosyncrasy of your personality, or if it’s connected to some kind of strange sort of scholarly or scientific ambition that you might see in more of a university context, where there’s almost like an obsession with the discipline, and it’s not as much this… yeah, you’re not sending this message that, “No, I have engaged with this material because it just makes my life better. I see more of the world. When I go out into the forest, I just feel more alive.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: And I understand the adaptive strategies of the animals that surround me, and that enchants my experience somehow.” That’s ultimately the message we want to send. Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Right, right. And I want to maybe model this by just dwelling on the hook a little bit more, because I think that that’s something that is… it can really often become something that’s super gimmicky, super superficial. It doesn’t land. It doesn’t feel authentic. And I think so much of what you talk about in this book, which I think is so core to making this more than the sum of its parts, is doing something authentically from the perspective of the educator in the room, but also cultivating the sense of belonging in the classroom such that everybody feels like they can bring that level of authenticity.

So how can you go about creating an authentic hook beyond just you being personally excited about it? Like, what kind of relational work do you have to do to really prime the environment for an authentic hook to take hold of folks rather than just fall kind of like an AI-generated hook for you and you just ran with it? Which can work, but you’re shooting in the dark a little bit there.

Douglas Yacek: Well, what we can do as teachers is, first of all, have the courage to at first seem a little quirky or eccentric, strange and a bit pitiful in the sense of like, oh wow. We have to have the courage to kind of weird our students out a little bit. You know, at first, when we first meet them, they don’t know us.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: We don’t have that basis of trust that I think you’re alluding to. And that’s OK. And, you know, that is sort of the first answer I would give to the question, is that I think it’s probably inevitable that there’s never a full one-to-one perfect coalescence of student and teacher interests at first.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Douglas Yacek: And it’s in that tension that curiosity can be awakened or sparked. And so I would say at first it’s completely OK if that hook is not fully landing or fully convincing students. As a really nice example, I’m sure you’ve seen the movie Dead Poets Society.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: We should be careful about using this movie as an example of good teaching. There’s definitely some things we should look at with skepticism.

Mason Pashia: Not all desks can support a human.

Douglas Yacek: Right. Exactly. But what’s actually quite interesting is that first-day hook that is often celebrated, where he whistles through the classroom and then walks out into the hallways and calls them outside of the classroom. The students, when they walk away from that first lesson, they look at each other and say, “Well, that was a little weird. Spooky, huh?” So it’s a failure.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Douglas Yacek: But there’s enough of a kind of curiosity or a suspension that the students come back the next class a little bit off balance.

They’re not quite sure what to expect. And ultimately what comes out in the movie, but more importantly for us in the classroom, the most important thing is that ultimately we’re building a bridge to this notion of intrinsic value in our subjects. This idea that there’s really something deeply worthwhile in studying math, physics, social studies, English literature, whatever it might be, and that when we engage with it, it’s really fascinating.

It really makes our lives better, our experience richer. And so the hook is always a foreshadowing of that more difficult task, ultimately, as teachers, to convince students that there really is something there that they’re going to have to work really hard to find in that subject matter. And so I think that’s where the authenticity ultimately comes in.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: Oh, this isn’t just a gimmick. This isn’t just trying to sort of get my attention or provoke me. Ultimately every hook is leading me in deeper to see something in the material that I didn’t even know existed.

Mason Pashia: Mm. Yeah, I think that’s astute. So, what does this have to do with civics? Aside from the idea that education is a democratic act, how does civic thriving, civics participation, all of that stuff really start to bubble up in your work? Because I think you’ve got a really distilled diagnosis of the culpability for educators and what they can do about that.

But you also have such a rich pool of resources on agency and youth voice and all these other pieces. So kind of walk me through how civics shows up in this, and let’s start to talk about the youth a little bit more.

Shorts Content

Civics, Democracy & the Classroom

Douglas Yacek: Democratic life is itself something that has intrinsic value, that is just good for human beings. It’s something in which we thrive and flourish. We often fall into a very externalist sort of understanding of democracy in which we understand democracy to be ultimately a characteristic of political systems and procedures, something we do on election day. And we often equate democracy with politics, which is another big mistake.

And so what I encourage when I’m doing my own work in democratic education, when I’m writing on these topics, is just to remind us to recommit to a much more substantive understanding of democracy as a way of life, ultimately. What that way of life ultimately means is that we recognize our own limitedness, our own neediness for other people, for connection, for community, for learning and understanding. Our perspectives are always blind to various other viewpoints. Our value framework is incomplete, and this is why we need the other.

This is why we need dialogue in order to ultimately live a good life. I will never know if I’m being a good husband to my wife unless I ask her. I will never know if I’m being a good father to my kids unless I ask them. I never know if I’m going to be a good teacher unless I ask my students in honest conversation on their level, walking with them, next to them, eating lunch with them, whatever it might be.

Democracy starts… if you want to teach democracy and civics, then the first place to start is creating a democratic community in your classroom. And that doesn’t mean every single day, and it doesn’t mean completely relinquishing all of your pedagogical authority, but it does mean getting on your students’ level, creating a little adviser group, three or four students, and saying, “Hey, let’s take a walk around the school building three times, and you’re going to give me feedback on my class.” Or, “We’re going to meet once a month, and you’re going to plan one lesson, and you’re going to teach the class.” Or, “Hey, look, you know what? I don’t know whether to teach this topic or that topic. What do you guys think? What would be more interesting to you? What do you think would be better for us?” I am convinced that that is the most important way to learn democracy and to engage in civic learning, and it’s the one that’s most often overlooked.

Mason Pashia: Powerful. Yeah, that’s a really powerful recommendation. So for anyone listening, that’s a really good one to go ahead and just try if you aren’t doing something like that already. In the States we have a… I don’t actually know if this is big in Germany or Europe right now, but, like, Portrait of a Graduate, these new kind of outcome frameworks as defined by communities, whether the school, the state, the district, whatever.

A lot of the Portraits of a Graduate out there have civic readiness as an outcome for a graduate, right? But the thing that we keep seeing time and time again is that this becomes a poster, this kind of dies on the wall, and is just a pretty five-wedge pie chart or something.

You just talked about how you can model democracy and start to actually kind of build those experiences and those skills, but how do you think about it from an outcomes perspective? And what advice would you have for leaders who are thinking about civics as an important outcome, but maybe have that pretty narrow, I guess capital-D Democratic approach rather than the more lowercase-d democratic, which is just kind of like what we all live and do by being good people in the world? Say more about that.

Douglas Yacek: For me, the most important skill, capacity, virtue that we can observe in a graduate would be a kind of epistemic humility. And what that means is ultimately that our students appreciate how limited their understanding of the world is, and particularly on the topics they care about the most.

That’s where it counts, because we human beings have a tendency to show the opposite vice to this virtue, and that is, you know, a kind of pride, ultimately. We get really excited about this topic or that topic. We learn about it, we read about it, and we want to impress other people with our knowledge. And I think it’s particularly on these issues that we want to practice this.

I think ultimately epistemic humility is a quality that we show mostly in dialogue with one another. This ability to listen to others, a real authentic desire to listen to others, and ultimately just this sense that we need to learn from one another in order to grow. If we kind of strike out on our own from an epistemic standpoint, this idea that we somehow have a privileged perspective on the world on all matters that we’re concerned with, we’re missing something. The basis of democratic community is ultimately this recognition of needing the other person to enrich our perspective and our way of life.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. I really like that idea of humility as core to both civics and democracy, and it makes me wonder both how we can reframe humility from a passive to an active trait. I think in a lot of ways, empathy also feels like something where it’s just kind of happening to you.

You’re like, “Oh, I’m just listening well. I’m not passing judgment.” And that is active, but so much of the work that has to be done is going to take actual work. And so if you’re navigating the world from this constant humility stance, it can be kind of paralyzing to just be like, “Oh, I’m just learning all the time, and I’m wrong, and I can’t make a decision there, and I can’t make a decision there.”

And I think in some ways we actually see this manifest as bureaucracy, right? This has become sort of a problem in the States with, like, we’re terrible at building because every time you go to build on anything of land, there’s like 15 parties that show up saying, “I love that tree. I grew up there. I…” Like, whatever. And while those things are all beautiful, it is really hard to move from humility to action.

And I think that also is part of becoming a graduate, right? It is taking those steps of learning how you learn, learning how to navigate, learning how to communicate and then also learning how to act with precision after taking all those inputs. So I’m just curious how that fits into either your definition of civic thriving or democracy, or if that’s separate but parallel, just kind of how you think about that.

Douglas Yacek: Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. I mean, if you set aside any quality as important, you don’t want to, at the same time, claim that the other qualities and competencies and virtues are less important. And so, for example, a kind of complement to epistemic humility would be a kind of courage, courage of a real good-faith attempt to find the best arguments for one’s position, for one’s perspective, a kind of empathetic but committed articulation of what one believes and sees and observes and thinks. That has to be in the boat with epistemic humility, or else it is maybe kind of debilitating in some way if you lose that.

Mason Pashia: That’s really… I mean, I like both of… this is just purely my perspective right now, but I like those words of humility and courage so much more than any of the skill frameworks I’ve seen, which are like empathy or critical thinking or these other things that maybe feel more like a linear progression, but they don’t feel like an actual human value in the way that you can navigate the world.

It feels like a box to check rather than an actual call to being. And how do you think about some of that, where those almost feel like a spiritual foundation of how a person should be compared to this is what we’ve learned in schools is important for core skills. Should they live alongside each other? Are we overly narrowing to kind of create a replicable individual? How do you think about that?

Civic Virtues & the Role of Schools

Douglas Yacek: Yeah, those terms that you mentioned — critical thinking, the competency framework that you see in the European space actually quite a bit, even this notion of readiness, the idea that civic education is about providing students with various resources — this is all connected to a certain way of thinking about human beings that is connected to human capital theory. And the way I think about civic learning, democratic education is much more a kind of spirit of civic virtue.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: The qualities that I would want to cultivate in young people are connected to a very long philosophical conversation beginning in ancient Greece surrounding moral virtues like courage, justice, temperance, moderation and generosity. And so the idea is that these qualities are connected to what it means to be a good and flourishing human being. And so if we want to see that goodness and flourishing in the civic space, we would want to think about how can we translate some of these moral virtues into civic virtues.

And so that’s the gap or the tension that you’re seeing between my vocabulary and what has become more common in American education. American education is dominated much more by this sort of technicist human-capital framework. It can garner consensus across political ideological divides, and so it has its place, potentially. I mean, who’s going to argue with critical thinking, I guess?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: But at the same time, it empties it of a real substantive understanding of flourishing. The main foundation of the virtue-ethics tradition is that we flourish when we are cultivating these robust moral and civic virtues. I mean, another one that is hardly ever talked about in the civic space that’s so important is civic friendship.

This is a nice example because it seems to go just a bit further than we normally would go in thinking about the kinds of relationships we want to encourage with people in our democratic space or in public spaces. And yet, if you’re borrowing from this virtue-ethics tradition, the idea is just that human beings need civic political friendships in order to build the right kinds of committed communities that really believe in shared fate and that ultimately feel responsible for one another, even though that makes us slightly uncomfortable.

What would that look like, to cultivate real friendship in schools today? Like, that seems to go into the private. Like, well, no, friendships are what students handle. But they shouldn’t. Maybe we should really think about how do we cultivate robust social community at that level.

Mason Pashia: First of all, I love that idea of civic friendship. I think that’s really important.

A lot of parents specifically think that it’s actually their role to develop courage and these more civic virtues in folks. And they’re like, “That’s not the role of the school. The school is for literacies, math and you just kind of teach them the stuff, fill them up, they get out, and then we can help shape them as a human on the side.”

And what you’re saying is sort of the opposite of that. It is really like, actually it’s all of our job as human beings to be constantly in this conversation with everyone around us. If that’s true, though, is school still a useful construct in your mind? Is that actually a place that exists within this worldview, a place where people go, there’s an educator, there’s kind of planned curriculum? Or are you supposing that there might actually just be a new model that’s more emergent, more communal, more kind of everywhere all at once that could actually help kind of raise the floor of what it means to be a human being?

Small question, so…

Douglas Yacek: Mason, I have to say I am so enamored with school as an institution. I think even though our schools, the schools that exist, fail so often, we fail students so often in schools, I really do believe in the ideal of a meeting place of young people from different walks of life, with different cultural backgrounds, different races, different religions coming together trying to learn together.

Even if we have to admit that we cannot actually cultivate civic virtues in the robust sense in spaces like that because there are 25, 30 students in a classroom. We see them four hours a week, maybe something like that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: We’re in these very tight spaces with not a lot of resources. But school is an inspirational institution, an institution that works with families, ultimately works closely with families, because it’s really the family space, I think, that does the habituation work, really getting young people practicing acts of generosity and courage and kindness and moderation and all of these good things.

In the best case, this is what’s happening in homes, I think. But then when they come to school we have counterparts that have to do with the democratic public sphere. So we have civic courage, and we have civic generosity, we have civic friendships, various counterparts that have to do more with public life. But then ultimately, we’re not doing the same kind of repetitive… how many times have I told my daughters, “Hey, if you want something, just say please”? You know, I have to say that 400 times until they finally have it in their minds. We can’t expect teachers to do stuff like that.

But what we can do is we can say, “Look, we only have a little bit of time. We don’t have all the resources we need. There are too many kids in our classrooms. We’re not getting paid enough. We don’t have enough professional autonomy. We don’t have enough support from the administration. But we have 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning in a biology class where we are alone with those students, and we are sitting there at the front of class, and they’re mostly listening.”

And we can do something with that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Douglas Yacek: We can spark something. And because, you know, we talked about the book recently and this framework, we didn’t just make this up on our own.

We talked to individuals who were transformed by teachers in classrooms like that one. Classrooms that were not ideal, schools that were not ideal, and still they made a real difference. They were able to spark something. And every person I’ve talked to, in fact in my career, can point to at least one teacher that had that kind of effect on them.

And so that’s what gives me hope. That’s what makes me love school nonetheless, in spite of all the ways that it can be improved. And as long as we just recognize that we can’t accomplish everything we might want to put on our list of readiness or civic readiness or the graduate at the end of the school career, but maybe we spark something that the students will take with them in their hearts, something that they will remember a couple of years down the road and will take seriously.

Mason Pashia: I think that’s a beautiful way to bring us to a close today. So Dr. Douglas Yacek, the new book is “On The Edge Of Their Seats.” It’s great. I recommend everyone pick it up. There’ll be a link in the show notes. A few quick things I want to recap.

One is really this idea of delivering content and teaching as fundamentally an act of storytelling and creating content. And so you can look in nontraditional places to learn how to do that well. And those formats are going to change over time, and we have to also. I think that there’s something about the adaptability of media that is tucked in here, or the adaptability of language and communication.

Number two is I just really appreciate the way you’re complicating this idea of what civics is and what democracy is and who is involved in that and when you’re involved in that. And so I think that anybody who listens to this, I hope that it similarly has complicated your own version of what that is.

And then just hearkening back to what you said with your one challenge, I really love this idea of building an adviser group with students in your classroom, where you take them on a walk and they give you feedback on your practice. We’re surveying some students right now asking if they would be confident and comfortable to actually do that work. Like, would you be able to show up honestly if a teacher asked for feedback? Why or why not? And I think that that’s a really fascinating question and is a really excellent way to start modeling democracy in a setting where otherwise you may not attribute it typically.

So, this has been really great. Again, Dr. Douglas Yacek, thanks so much for being here today and for spending your Tuesday evening with me.

Douglas Yacek: Thank you, Mason. It was a great conversation.

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Guest Bio

Dr. Douglas Yacek is an educational researcher and senior lecturer of ethics and multiculturalism at the University of Applied Sciences for Policing and Public Administration in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. At the heart of his research and teaching is the question: How can teachers make education transformative? How can they awaken a fascination for their subjects, inspire a love of learning and help young people in schools lead morally good, politically engaged and personally meaningful lives? He also explores what methods work — and don’t work — in K-12 and college classrooms.

Yacek regularly leads professional development workshops for teachers on these topics and teaches courses for public officials and police officers. In his broader work, he engages with key issues in the ethics of education, democratic and moral education, teacher education and the history of educational thought. Outside of professional life, he is a father of two rambunctious girls and an avid baker of ancient-grain breads.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• Dr. Douglas Yacek
• LinkedIn
• Civic Thriving Report
• On the Edge of Their Seats