How did people respond when American education experienced the disruption of COVID? Interviews with Dr. Jeff Kim and Pastor Jorge Molina demonstrate how responses rooted in love and wisdom flourished even in the midst of reactions based on fear and anger.
During the COVID pandemic, scenes like this one played out in school board meetings across the nation:
[News Clip Audio] Unmasked parents packed into the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or Bessey, meeting Wednesday morning in Baton Rouge, ready to fight over mandatory masks for kids in schools. But the board didn't get that far. Masks are required in this meeting. Most of the crowd refused to follow the statewide mandate and put on their masks. Failure to comply will result in removal from this room. (Parent exclaiming “I can’t hear you with these masks on!”)
Board members left the room, leaving audience members to voice their frustrations to each other. “I guess we're going to have our own board meeting” … “You have the opportunity to stand up for America!”
Baton Rouge Pastor Tony Spell led group chants...
This school board meeting was in Louisiana, but it could have been anywhere. At the same time, another scene also played out in communities everywhere. This one driven not by fear and anger, but by love and wisdom.
[News Clip Audio] The impact of the nation's economic crisis is bearing down on a lot of families. CBS News Candace Krohn is in Anaheim with a look at how some community leaders are stepping in to help prop up food pantries like this one at Savannah High School in Anaheim have been bustling across the Southland for months as people hit hard by the coronavirus crisis struggle to make ends meet. It will be in my less in my budget to spend for some needs in my house, and it will help a lot, especially for my kids. Members of Saddleback Church teamed up with three local churches to hand out boxes of food and other essentials to some 800 families in need. It's been incredible how much the need has escalated. And we are actually giving out seven times more food and more locations and serving more families than we were before the crisis. Since the pandemic started, volunteers have handed out more than 700,000 pounds of food to some 20,000 families, and they say they'll keep it up for as long as people are in need.
One crisis, two very different responses in this episode, love and wisdom. During the time of covid, we'll look at ways in which fear and anger showed up in educational settings during the time of covid. But we'll focus on the ways in which so many people showed up with love and wisdom and made a profound difference in the lives of students and families.
Welcome to Education for Love and Wisdom. My name is Jeff Hittenberger and I serve as director of the Graduate Education Program at Vanguard University of Southern California. During the past few years, I've seen lots of fear and anger dominate conversations about American education.
But I've also seen lots of love and wisdom from students, teachers, families and community members.
That's what we'll concentrate on in this podcast. Thank you for joining us.
Dr. H: Two people who brought love and wisdom to education and civic engagement during covid are Dr. Jeff Kim and Pastor George Molina, one as a teacher and the other as a community partner. I had a chance to interview each of them. Here's Dr. Kim.
Dr. Kim: Let me go ahead and introduce myself. My full title is Dr. Jeff Kim, national board certified teacher, a teacher, an instructional coach, a civic lead, and also a teacher educator as well at Cal State University, Fullerton and Vanguard University as well starting this fall.
Dr. H: So thinking about your experiences as a teacher, a professional developer and administrator in K-12 settings, where have you seen love show up?
Dr. Kim: You know, I think there's so much opportunity in our field to show love and what we do, it begins oftentimes in ourselves. I know for myself, I just feel very loved. And from that place, I feel like I'm able to love others. So the self-love, the self -compassion, I think is very, very important. So when I go into the classroom, because I'm feeling so loved, I can also then express that love to others, other students, other colleagues, because oftentimes many folks are coming from a place of pain. And if I'm in a place of need, it's very difficult to be loving to another. So whether it's the check ins, when I connect with students or the way I design lessons or the way I listen to the stories of my students, even listening is a very powerful act of love. When we give our time and listen to one another, the way I partner with my staff, the way I partner with other teachers, this is these are all places to show love.
Dr. H: I'm wondering what you have seen in terms of the stresses that teachers and others in education have been under during this time of COVID.
Dr. Kim: I think when you look at the media and we look at educators, oftentimes they'll talk about learning loss, something that the students lost something during the season, not focusing as much on the heroic work of educators during the season who pivoted so quickly to meet the needs of our students. I know we really honored our medical professionals, and rightly so, but I feel like five years from now, even 10 years from now, we're going to look back and remember our educators who pivoted very quickly to meet the needs of our students when we felt like we couldn't meet the needs of our students. And once again, the world couldn't meet the needs of what was happening. It distressed us deeply, and we constantly wanted to do more and more and more to meet the needs of our kids and oftentimes neglected that care for ourselves.
So we put those margins aside. We did not focus on that as much as we should. And it wasn't until later during the pandemic that we realized, you know what, we need to remember this space. We need to remember to give ourselves self-care. That became a lot more important later down the line. When you're in front of your students, you want to give them the best. So imagine just completely different curriculum, completely different platform for delivery, like you might be in a room, but you don't see any of their faces because their cameras are not on. You're asking questions, but no responses. The same assignments that you gave in class that were amazing—now you're not getting the same kind of feedback. You're not able to deliver the feedback in the same way. And then, of course, the pain that we could see from the students. Sometimes we hear our students crying. We'd hear students crying about how their family members were sick. We hear our students crying when their grandparents were passing away. It was very painful to hear that and how they couldn't even hug their parents because during this time, if someone were sick we’d quarantine in different rooms. Teachers bore the brunt of all hearing all these stories, listening to their students, but not even able to give a side hug, not even able to just comfort in any kind of way except just listen and be present in that way. And that just was—it was difficult. It was very, very difficult.
Dr. H: What comes to mind if I ask the question, where did you see love show up in school during COVID?
Dr. Kim: I'm thinking about right before the stay at home, there was actually the surge in anti-Asian racism. In fact in 2020 OC Human Relations reports a 1,800% increase in incidents toward Asian-Americans. Not some faraway place, here in Orange County. A lot of people don't know this, but eighteen hundred percent! And since 2020 it's only gone up. And once again, that's an example of fear and anger. So how do you respond when this is happening in our community, in our County? I'll tell you, there are some students that came to me fearful, fearful of being attacked. And then that filled me then with great compassion, just hearing their stories, hearing their fear. And as I share these stories also among students, I think one of the greatest places of compassion was in responding with love and wisdom. There was a campaign, an opportunity to “know hate”—on this topic and ask the students, would you like to work on the Civic Action Project to combat this? And they were interested. And so they created pieces and graphics and posters and t-shirt designs to bring awareness and talk about this surge in anti-Asian racism to respond to that hate with love in a compassionate and in a wise way, and many of these students got elevated where they even presented at the California Council for Social Studies.
Dr. H: Your comments remind me that during a period of crisis, like the one we've been living through with COVID, oftentimes people are tempted to and even engage in behaviors that are based on blaming someone else for the way I'm feeling right now, rather than dealing with what it is I'm experiencing and finding practices or ways of navigating that that allow me to grow. The example you gave is a heartbreaking one in terms of the experience that students and others in Orange County were having. But the response was beautiful. Any other examples come to mind of where sort of fear and anger were boiling up and you could see a response that was grounded in love and wisdom?
Dr. Kim: So another example was we have something called soapbox competitions, and it's kind of comes from the, I guess, early nineteen hundreds when people used to stand on a soapbox and give a short speech on a topic that they're passionate about. Very valuable skill for students to have to be able to talk about the issue that they care about and then to express it in a very thoughtful and civil way. And so we saw this happening and even during distance learning, we were able to continue these soapbox competitions and soapbox speech locations. In fact, that year we had the chance to have our soapbox competition where students had the chance to share about issues that matter to them. And once again, these are controversial issues where I saw some adults struggling. The students, though, were so thoughtful, so civil in the way that they were expressing their opinions, cultivating these kinds of skills and being able to utilize these skills, even when we're feeling some pain, frustration and anger in a public school setting and in our civic life, in a pluralistic society like the United States, lots of different people draw on lots of different ethical, moral, religious traditions. And as as people of faith, we participate, drawing on our own ethical, moral and religious and spiritual traditions.
Dr. H: Could you talk just a little bit about how your experience and how your philosophy of education around love and wisdom is informed by that life that you lead?
Dr. Kim: Because I feel so loved and I more specifically because I feel so loved by God, that is the source from which I'm able to love others and also love myself. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love others as you love yourself. So sometimes we forget ourselves in that. But loving ourselves and loving others comes from this place of being loved by God. And so I just need to remind myself of this and actually have that. Your first purpose, Jeff, today is to be loved. I put this on my door. And so before I go out before just before you do anything today, just remember this is your main job today—just to be loved. That's all you've got to do, Jeff. But from that place of being loved, I can overflow and show compassion to others.
Dr. Jeff Kim reminds us that some of the most compassionate responses to COVID were those of the teachers and other educators who continue to serve their students every day during one of the most disrupted seasons in the history of American schools. Partnering with those educators where families and community members, including many from communities of faith.
This is Pastor Jorge Molina from Mariners' Church, one of those communities of faith that showed up to serve educators, students, and families.
Dr. H: Thank you so much for joining us to talk about love and wisdom in education and civic life.
Pastor Molina: I'm excited. I'm honored for this privilege, really am.
Dr. H: I wondering if you'd talk a little bit about how Mariners' Church chose to respond to COVID, especially in terms of providing support to our schools and educators.
Pastor Molina: I think, you know, as you talk about fear and anger, it's to the default that I think we as humans have when we are confronted with the unknown. And so the pandemic is coming. There's not enough answers. The automatic default is to have fead—fear for our family, fear for everything, and then also be angry that we don't know what's coming. Part of what we did back in—So I've been here for three years—back with what we did back in Miami was we did a lot of hurricane relief. And this was something [where] the same emotions that we were faced a lot. When these hurricanes are coming to our city, to our area, we have no clue what type of damage it's going to do. We know the damage, but we don't know how far. And there is a lot of fear in the minds of a lot of families. You can see it.
Do you remember like in the grocery stores? I mean, I remember walking to Vons and there was nothing, you know, and there was this fear of where. To run that of everything, even toilet paper. The experiences that I have had back in Miami, bringing it here and seeing almost the same type of impact in the community made us realize that we do have something. You know, we do have hope and that hope that we have in Christ produces this love and wisdom for our city. And it's through our actions that I think our cities, our communities can actually see that hope, you know? So there's no longer just a proclamation of the gospel, but also there's a demonstration of what it does.
This is—and we're not the first to start this, you know. Centuries back, centuries way back, Christians were the ones who began this when the pandemics hit in the early century in Rome. You see everybody evacuating Rome except the Christians. And they were the ones who stayed back. And they're the ones who took care of the sick, made sure that the city, the neighbors, the community knew that ‘death has no sting.’ Right? And they were the ones who stayed and loved their neighbors, loved their community. And also at the same time, they were the ones who demonstrated the love of Christ through that.
And so, when the pandemic hit, you know, we're talking about spring of 2020. You know, we were hit with a lot of insecurities. I guess that's the right word, right? And then all of a sudden we get to that place of going, what do we as a church, what do we as a community of believers have a responsibility to do? Right? And we felt that our next step that God was calling us to do was to show our community love, to show our community that we were not leaving, that we were here to serve and to show them God's love.
Dr. H: How did that translate then into action, especially with regard to education, schools, family, students?
Pastor Molina: You know, to be honest with you, it wasn't it was a very simple thing for us. I remember we were all meeting, you know, we were moping and going, “Woe is us! What's going on?!” And then all of a sudden somebody goes, you know what? I'm I'm just so disappointed in? And somebody goes,” What is that?” And they said, “What about all the seniors we have in our community that will not be able to celebrate and not be able to walk, not be able to come together with their families and friends and celebrate this huge milestone in their life?” And then that was the spark of, wait a minute, no, no, no, hang on. I think we can do something because then we started the ball rolling of asking different principals, asking leaders in our community, saying, what if we were to do a drive-through graduation? Our church has a huge parking lot. Well, what would it look like if we were to rent some big screens and do a parking lot graduation? You know, all this crisis, this pandemic, not only were we driven to show and demonstrate the love of Christ or the love and wisdom in this, but we were also trying to remind people to keep going and not to stop, you know, because I think it motivated them to “OK, all right. Things are somewhat normal,” you know. I talked to a couple of these families, a few of these families, and they just they're going to remember these graduations probably more than, you know, than the normal one. It just changes everything, you know.
Dr. H: And I was able to attend a few of those graduations that you hosted here with huge numbers of cars filling the parking lot, looking at the big screens and the students in caps and gowns in the cars with their moms and dads, their siblings, their family members and loved ones. And some of them said to me afterwards, “That was the best graduation I can imagine because we got to be all together.” So in the height of covid, there was so much hope that came out of the way. You supported families through that. And there was also an element of meeting some of the needs that families had who had lost jobs. And what else did you guys do at those graduates?
Pastor Molina: Yeah, so one of the things that we realized was, one, there was job loss. There was also food insecurities that were there. It was during the hardship of realizing some of these families who depended on this food, on this income, did not have that. So, we as a church came together. And this was such a wonderful opportunity to see some of our members come in and say, hey, I want to donate specifically for food for these families. All the families that came, we were able to prepare a box full of food and then be able to tell them and say, hey, if ever you need more, you feel free to come back. So as a church during the height of the pandemic, I mean, we were feeding approximately about nine hundred to nine hundred and fifty families a month.
Dr. H: One of the things I've seen in you as a spiritual leader is a deep care about educators, about education, about the importance of schools. Where did that come from?
Pastor Molina: First of all, it started with my mom's an educator. So, my mom would take me to her classroom when I was a little kid. And then when I got older, I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be a middle school teacher, history teacher, to be specific. And then the Lord called me into being a pastor. And I was a pastor in Miami and man during the recession and the schools began to have issues. I remember our kids started receiving notes saying, hey, the schools cannot afford paper. Can you bring reams of paper? And we as a church said, wait a minute, how is this possible? So we went to a paper company, but I think we bought like 2,500 reams of paper and we looked at where our church was, what schools were close by, and we literally just grabbed the wagon, put reams of paper and went delivered. That was the start of realizing it's not really overly complicated to love these schools. And let me tell you that within the next few years, we had the Vice Chair of the Board of Education standing in front of all the principals, all the vice principals and saying, if you need anything, anything, you need to call this church because they will come and do it. No strings attached. Well, that opened up a floodgate of different doors that opened. It was amazing. But, it all started with those reams of paper.
Dr. H: Well, Pastor Molina, thank you so much for your leadership in this community and the love and wisdom that you've shown in supporting educators and schools during some of the most difficult times American education has ever experienced. So, thank you.
Pastor Molina: Thank you. It was an honor.
Mariners offered a huge parking lot and big screen so families could have a graduation experience during the time of COVID communities of faith and community organizations of all kinds offered groceries and other resources to families in need. Orange County United Way organized a mentoring program for hundreds of seniors in the class of 2021 and the class of 2022. These are just a few of so many examples of community members responding with love and wisdom during the time of COVID. Note the contrast between this response and the angry reactions at the beginning of the episode. The point here is not that service is good and advocacy is bad. Both have their place in a democratic society. The question is this what is the spirit in which we show up in our educational and civic engagements? Do we show up as people driven by fear and anger, or do we show up as people of love and wisdom? Every semester at
Vanguard University, I ask my students to reflect on the pedagogy of Jesus, what he taught and how he treated people. Here's a quote from Jesus you might be familiar with:
Bible Reading: Do to others, as you would have them do to you.
That's sometimes referred to as the Golden Rule. Remember the bracelets people used to wear that said W.W.J.D. (What Would Jesus Do)? Where did those go? Did we stop believing at some point that we should treat others the way we want to be treated? Some might say “Yes, but I'm being mistreated,” and sometimes that's true. How does Jesus respond?
Bible Reading: You have heard that it was said love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
Dr. H: It's a tall order, isn't it? But for those of us who claim to be followers of Christ, the implications are clear. We are called to treat others with love and wisdom, whether we agree with their views or not. And that is especially true during a time of crisis. Thanks for listening to Education for Love and Wisdom.
Let's wrap up this episode with a final word of encouragement from Dr. Jeff Kim.
Dr. Kim: I encourage you to really think about where can you be the greatest light and blessing for others, and just go for it. And as you give your five loaves and two fish, great things will happen.
Dr. H: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Dr. Jeff Kim. So great to have you on the podcast and at Vanguard University, Dr. Jeff.
Dr. Kim: My pleasure. And I feel like I finally made it. [I’m] on love and wisdom. I feel like I made it up.
Dr. H: Thank you so much.
Education for Love and Wisdom is produced by the Graduate Education Program at Vanguard University of Southern California. My name is Nathan Brais and I serve as Program Coordinator. If you have thoughts to share or are interested in learning more about education programs at Vanguard University, email us at LoveandWisdom@Vanguard.edu. That's love and wisdom with no spaces at Vanguard.edu. And leave us a message special thanks to Bonnie's Stachowiak, Trevor Van Winkle, Dr. Jeff Kim, and Pastor Jorge Molina for their contributions to this episode. See you next time on Education for Love and Wisdom.