Sarah Cannon-Straight - Inspiring Active Participation
Education, Culture, and Society, M.S.Ed., 2014
For Civics and AP Government teacher Sarah Cannon-Straight, GED’14, a passion for teaching civics began at Penn GSE in the Education, Culture, and Society program. Initially interested in U.S. history, she shifted her focus while researching her master’s thesis about the decreased role of social studies in school curricula, particularly in districts in low-income areas. She learned that an emphasis on preparing students for standardized testing often squeezes out civics, which is not assessed. For her it was an eye-opener.
“If you lose the civics component of social studies, when students become adults, they don’t know how to vote and they don’t know how to engage,” says Cannon-Straight. “We were creating this generation of students who were not educated on how the government works and how they can participate.”
As cultural studies department head at the New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School (SciHigh), an open-admission public charter school in Louisiana, Cannon-Straight has developed creative curricula for her Civics and AP Government classes. Her focus is on hands-on exercises and connecting course content to students’ lives, with the ultimate goal of encouraging them to participate and seek change. “Civics is a ‘doing’ subject,” she says. “You learn a skill. Then you go vote. You go protest. You write your senators.” On alternate days, and in a virtual classroom during the pandemic, Cannon-Straight begins class with the day’s news. Recently, clips about the power grid crisis in Texas provided an opportunity to discuss how state and national authority are divided in the United States. “None of that was on the lesson plan for that day,” she says. “But it’s worth spending fifteen minutes on current events. You’ve got to make class time relevant.”
“If you lose the civics component of social studies, when students become adults, they don’t know how to vote and they don’t know how to engage.” — Sarah Cannon-Straight, GED’14
With that aim of relevance, Cannon-Straight brings in guest speakers (a city court clerk, a local candidate running for office) and prepares simulations in which students act out court or foreign policy procedures. She also has students pick a city woe, such as potholed roads, and investigate solutions, from the source of infrastructure money, to how resources are allocated, to the role of voting and local representatives. She encourages her students, many of whom turn eighteen while she’s teaching them, to register to vote.
“It’s about giving them skills, teaching them how to engage,” says Cannon-Straight, who was named the school’s 2020-2021 Teacher of the Year. “How are we ever going to enact change if we don’t have people who understand how the system works?” she asks. The payoff comes in the moments when graduates message her that they voted, show curiosity about what a jungle primary means, or work to get out the vote with a nonprofit. “Those are the connections that bring me a lot of joy,” she says. “I just need one of them to run for office.”
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